Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shadonototro | Hacker News Reader

AMERICA FIRST - good

CHINA FIRST - bad

keep going the west, keep going

Your post is obviously trying to fan flames, but I'll point out that many people in the US, including, I suspect, most Americans on HN, did not actually think "America first" rhetoric was good.

Pretty much zero mainstream politicians believe that economically "America First" is a bad thing. The only disagreement is in how to implement it, that is to say, in rhetoric and methods instead of in ends.

How is "Build Back Better" any different from "America First" other than the former is using more realpolitik and statecraft and the latter is more of a domestic paleo-con branding.

Build Back Better and America first have extremely different meanings. To 'build back better' doesn't imply a nationalist economic policy. One can build back better equally well with Chinese goods or American ones.

America first connotes a preference for American made things, not only for infrastructure purposes, but more generally.

Independent of any value judgement as to which one's better, it should be clear to anyone that they're different.

They're different slogans, but they ultimately have the same goal: to preserve global hegemony. They're both using the organs of the state and press to advance us toward a new cold war.

If Biden were serious about détente and global cooperation, he would have ended the Trump tariffs on day one.

The difference between "America First" and "Build Back Better" is merely rhetorical. Now it's okay for people on the other side of the isle to engage in sino-bashing for fun and profit without any of the political baggage it had 7 months ago. It's okay now since it's divorced from the hokey red hats and low status swine who just happen to make slightly different consumer choices than you.

> It's okay now since it's divorced from the hokey red hats and low status swine who just happen to make slightly different consumer choices than you.

I'm an unapologetic trump supporter, so I guess I'm the low status swine.

China is an evil country because it supports an evil ideology, communism. There is no redemption for it other than to end the CCP and establish new good governance.

American ideology resulted in million dead in Iraq alone. You don’t have a moral right to call other countries and ideologies evil.

> I'm an unapologetic trump supporter, so I guess I'm the low status swine.

Sure, if you say so. I was more mocking the classism of his position though, as if putting the same basic wine in a more ideologically appealing bottle with a better brand makes it more palatable.

> China is an evil country because it supports an evil ideology, communism. There is no redemption for it other than to end the CCP and establish new good governance.

What is the market place alternative to the dialectic? I don't see them as 'evil' since they have a system that addresses the material problems of their citizens. We have to hope and pray that the market interests align in the right way that more people end up helped than hurt. I don't think we'll ever figure out healthcare.

I mean, the one politician to make America first a point of his campaign (Donald Trump) faced intense domestic opposition and a media scrutiny beyond that of other presidents.

Believe it or not, I spent the last hour typing and re-deleting a response to your sarcastic comment that you probably casually typed in the span of 10 seconds. In the end I reduced a 1000 word paragraph into a short one, in hopes that people who share your views see this.

Reuters and AP, as news organizations, do not typically make value judgements. Any opinions stated in the article are the opinions of whoever Reuters is quoting, not of Reuters themselves. Next time, instead of posting such a reductive and frankly off-topic comment, I challenge you to find something in the article that you factually disagree with.

On whataboutism: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#China

Now to help you out a bit with an interesting factoid: In the process of putting their own interests above other countries, the USA has made many mistakes, such as aggressive farm subsidies that ended up impoverishing Mexican farmers who could not compete. So there is a kernel of truth to what you are saying - that nationalistic import/export policy was something that America engaged with in the past. You can try and engage some logical debate as to whether the trade barriers China is putting up are comparable here, but it's certainly not obvious at first glance that they are the same thing. The morality of it depends on the strategic purpose of the barriers, what agreements / social contracts were established beforehand, and such. Certainly not resolvable in an off-hand comment like "America - Good / China - Bad".

It's not true that Reuters do not do value judgments. They do, both in the content of their articles and in what they choose to publish or omit.

The US never ended nationalist economic policy. The debate was only ever which approach would provide the greatest benefit to the US, and this is indeed not a settled question.

> Believe it or not, I spent the last hour typing and re-deleting a response to your sarcastic comment

It wasn't sarcastic. Poignant.

> Reuters and AP, as news organizations, do not typically make value judgements.

Reuters and AP are state propagandists. Go read anything Israeli related or china related or russia related or venezuela related. Go read anything culture wars related. That they have "values" and an agenda is obvious. They are state operators.

> On whataboutism:

That is a propaganda term used by propagandists. It's a dead giveaway. It was so widely used and so heavily exposed that propagandists rarely use it anymore.

That you spent an hour trying to respond just shows your arguments have no merit. Think about it.

> AMERICA FIRST - good

Only someone completely unfamiliar with western media could honestly write this.

It took Hitler’s conquest of Europe, near-conquest of Britain and, finally, Pearl Harbor to convince a majority of Americans that America First was a mistake. - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/opinion/trump-foreign-pol...

Biden Issues Orders to Dismantle Trump’s ‘America First’ Immigration Agenda - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/us/politics/biden-immigra...

End of the American dream? The dark history of 'America first' [the article comes with a large picture of a KKK hood] - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/21/end-of-the-ame...

A Short History of 'America First'. The phrase used by President Trump has been linked to anti-Semitism during World War II. - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/trump-a...

By Western values, China is evil and America, despite it's many faults, is not. So there is no contradiction here.

For example, take the Western value of freedom of conscience. China does not believe in that and forces those who disagree with its regime to renounce their beliefs (for example, their religion). The West finds this abhorrent. In any western country, such things would be unheard of.

So again, by western values, China is evil. Thus, any policy that prioritizes china is a bad one, whereas policies that prioritize the United States can be evaluated on their other merits / demerits.

Agree or disagree, your attempt to point out hypocrisy relies on moral equivocations that are false by any world view.

By western values the country killing millions purely for financial reasons is not evil, but the peaceful one is? :-D

As for religion - anyone who knows even a bit of western history knows how much effort it took to take the oppressive religion back under control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com