Comment by nix-zarathustra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nix-zarathustra | Hacker News Reader

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nix-zarathustra

I'll bite.

>China has around 1/5'th of the emissions per capita compared to western countries. It's western countries that are a threat to the environment. China is also the largest investor in green technology globally.

But western countries emissions have been gradually declining while China's has been increasing rapidly. China being the largest investor in green energy is a red herring because they are also the biggest investor in coal because of an expanding electricity grid.

>Are you aware of Snowden's leaks? Of Wikileaks? US military and intelligence is active and aggressive around the entire globe. China is not.

And I wouldn't doubt that China has it's own military and intelligence operations. And China is just as aggressive, did you forget about the recent Microsoft hacking scandal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881219

> Through direct action and funding of terrorist groups, the US is responsible for the death and displacement of tens of millions innocent people in the middle-east and Africa just for the past few decades. The US government is a much bigger threat than the rest of the world combined.

Versus China who supports autocratic regimes such as North Korea, Syria and the Taliban who repress their populations with death and suffering? I don't know of any death and displacement of people as a result of US military action in Africa, but the middle east is complicated because of geopolitics and most notably Arab Spring, which the US did not really have any direct action and was mainly Arab nation's citizens to topple their regimes.

>China managed the spread of Covid within their borders in an excellent manner. Many western countries had a catastrophically bad reaction to the pandemic with many millions dead. Only a handful dead compared to literally millions? Who's the biggest threat to human lives during pandemics?

I don't understand how western countries management of covid19 has got to do with anything. And at the end of the day, it was the Chinese government trying to cover up the disease from WHO and failure to contain the disease that allowed the disease to become a worldwide pandemic.

> But western countries emissions have been gradually declining while China's has been increasing rapidly.

This is a half-truth. Production based emissions have gone down in western countries and up in China. However, this doesn't take into account consumption based emissions, i.e. imported products, which are extremely high in western countries, and only going up. Western countries exporting production to developing countries does not absolve them of responsibility just because it looks nice on graphs. Unfortunately, the whole global emissions story only takes into account production based emissions, except for oil production, which AFAIK is measured as consumption based emissions (very convenient for some western countries, like the US).

> And China is just as aggressive, did you forget about the recent Microsoft hacking scandal?

The scope of US intelligence clandestine operations, including hacking, vastly exceed the entire worlds clandestine operations combined. Just as their military budget and activity does. We know this by Snowden's leaks. By Wikileaks. The US even regularly hacks western companies and governments (not to speak of non-western companies and governments), as well as forcing all US companies (by law) of handing them whatever information they demand. The entire US tech sector (including Google and Microsoft) is an enormous sink of information directly accessible to the US intelligence community. The scope of the crime of US intelligence is so enormous it can't even be compared to other nations.

> Versus China who supports autocratic regimes such as North Korea and Syria who repress their populations with death and suffering?

It's the US that keeps Syria in perpetual war. Whatever you think about the Syrian government, a country in war is way worse. It simply can't be compared in terms of human suffering.

> was mainly Arab nation's citizens to topple their regimes

NATO literally bombed Libya to dust, which resulted in creating the largest slave market in the world, and enormous human suffering. It's a terrible, awful situation for millions of people, who actually enjoyed peace and European-like material living conditions under Gaddafi. If we put this on a scale and compare, you'd have to be a pentagon war hawk or a totally ignorant person to prefer the former.

> And at the end of the day, it was the Chinese government trying to cover up the disease from WHO

Absolutely not, western corporate media certainly fronted that narrative, which actually triggered WHO researchers themselves to come out publicly and deny it, because it's simply a false narrative. The WHO leadership has literally praised China all along for their transparency and openness. As have the teams of WHO researchers who have visited China for investigations. The media narrative (as well as White House announcements) is the opposite, in direct conflict with the facts on the ground.

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