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weekforweeks

There’s no greater of destroyer of world than Chinese CCP right now.

- greatest polluter of air via coal

- greatest polluter of water via plastics

- greatest polluter of disease via swine flu, pig flu, and now recently, contagious Black Death

- greatest supporter of dictatorships around the world. Umbrella for Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc

- greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan

- greatest tech surveillance exporter to the dictatorships around the world

We need to decouple from this evil regime as soon as possible.

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Most of these are a function of China's population than "evilness". Support for dictatorships is bad -- but even Europe burns more coal per capita.

> greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan

Oh come on. You are basically saying a poor country doesn't have a right to get rich. This is hardly evil - in fact a net good thing for the world if you valued a Chinese citizen the same as one in a developed country.

China is also the largest country in terms of population.

This is like saying California is bad because it has the most crime and most poor people, ignoring the fact that it is the most populous state.

The CPC could definitely be better, but you would have these problems regardless, and if China ever cleans up its act, there is always India whose problems are probably going to be much worse.

Does not look like, that management of western companies would share your opinion. Latest and notable example (I am robotics enthusiast): https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20962688/adidas-robotic-... Just to save few pennies factories are relocated to Asia. I barely possess things not made in China.

The goals of the private sector sometimes don't align with the goals of human freedom. But we can nudge the private sector in a better direction.

Consider tariffs on Chinese goods. There are other countries in Asia that could serve as manufacturing bases for international companies which are not led by brutal dictatorships and better align with Western ideals. Tariffs can be effective in convincing companies to move out of China into these other more appropriate countries.

Oh please do. Why don't you start from the laptop or cell phone that you used to post this knee-jerk piece of gibberish?

Hey let's just circle-jerk about how evil China is instead of trying to fix problems in our own country.

> - greatest polluter of water via plastics

Which totally isn't in large parts due to the whole West exporting their trash there for years for "recycling", fully aware of the fact they just dump it in the ocean or burn it under the bare sky. But why blame the ones in charge on our side that made that happen and kept doing it for years? It takes effort! and what if they actually stop? There'd be one thing less to shit on China about!

> - greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan

Yeah same thing, why blame the companies that actively move production and jobs over to China? Much easier to just go "took our jobs", like some evil Chinese came here with big suitcases, stuffed all our jobs in there and left.

This is flat out false.

> Which totally isn't in large parts due to the whole West exporting their trash there for years for "recycling", fully aware of the fact they just dump it in the ocean or burn it under the bare sky

There was /not/ much awareness about this in the West. People would not be so good about recycling if there was, as people generally thought they were doing a good thing by recycling and wouldn’t have bothered otherwise(at least in my experience). And nothing excuses fraud, which is what it’s called when you lie about what you are doing. China committed fraud in the recycling business and that’s not okay, no buts about it.

The Chinese “took our jobs” by not following the rules we have about how those jobs should be done. We should have tariffed them for not living up to our Environmental and Occupational Safety standards, if our government was principled in its ethics. It’s not the corporation’s fault the US government is cool with externalities in other countries.

I wholeheartedly agree with you on almost every point and a couple you haven't mentioned.

> greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan

But isn't this just the nature of globalization? And aren't the corporations in the countries you mentioned complicit in choosing to cut costs by moving production to cheap countries? And aren't we as consumers complicit in continuing to buy cheap goods like it's going out of fashion (wishful thinking lol).

No, it isn't just globalization. It's globalization done poorly. A level playing field wrt human rights of workers across wherever companies do business should be part of a just (in a humanitarian sense) globalization.

When we[1] were drafting trade policies back in the 90s and the 00s, we made zero effort to do globalization 'well'.

We made a lot of effort to make sure that it was done in a way that was great for the bottom line of multinationals, though.

[1] Or, more specifically, our politicians.

Precisely this. Trade negotiations by their nature are written by the winners, and until the voters wise up to this, we are doomed to repeat these mistakes.

I would argue that it was done well because of that, not in spite of that.

The bottom line was the only thing that ever mattered.

Absolutely, but there don’t have to be human rights violations in order for a country with lower costs of living to be a more attractive host for manufacturing than one with a higher cost of living.

Maybe globalization is a failed experiment.

Upskilling of a workforce isn't a bad thing.

In theory, yes. But millions of middle aged blue collar workers aren't going to learn to code, so to speak.

Yes. Yes (and govs, not just corps). Yes. Hence it contributing to the worldwide rise in populism.

If you think Russia needs an umbrella, I have my doubts about your understanding of politics. North Korea is the only country getting meaningful amounts of support from it.

As for the greatest exporter of tech surveillance, I believe that would be Israel, followed by Silicon Valley, the greatest supporter of dictatorships (by number) would probably be the US, while the greatest destroyer of blue collar jobs would be the computer, through automation. The greatest per-capita polluter in the world is left an an exercise to the reader, but it should be noted that China isn't even in the running for that one.

As for pollution, it must feel good to have offshored all of our polluting industry, and then blaming the developing world both for polluting, and stealing all the jobs. I don't think China was driving the pro-globalization rhetoric that lead us to this point...

But its easier to blame the foreign boogiemen for all of those things... Attacking China, is free karma, after all.

how would this happen? Would it require military intervention? Covert operations to corrupt the party and make it unstable? It seems quite impossible. I think humans may colonize the moon before this happens.

Sanctions.

greatest polluter of air via coal

Cue the usual apologists saying “but per capita...” as if that makes the slightest difference

Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries, per capita is in fact the correct way to measure when trying to decide whether a given country is contributing more or less than its fair share of the world's total for any kind of atmospheric pollution.

One simple way to see this is to consider what would happen if China were to split up into 100 separate smaller countries, each with the same per capita emissions as before.

Under a per country measurement, you get the absurd result that emissions have massively improved, even though the amount actually emitted into the atmosphere has not changed at all.

One simple way to see this is to consider what would happen if China were to split up into 100 separate smaller countries

Again, irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the emissions under control of any one government. There is no realistic probability of China breaking up so that is a complete red herring.

China’s government has made the policy decision to increase its emissions and I wonder if everyone will be happy when “per capita” they match much less populated countries. It isn’t required under the Paris treaty to take any action for 10 more years by which time “per capita” it will vastly outstrip any Western country, both in absolute terms and “per capita”.

Looking at it “per capita” is just the politically correct version of climate denial.

"The only thing that matters is the emissions under control of any one government."

Why is this the case? Global warming does not care about the number of governments in the world.

Because governments are able to cajole or compel behaviour in ways no other entity can.

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