oh come on. we criticise China because it’s whole political system, that was set up very recently btw, fights against basic rights we take for granted in the West. not because of what the romans or european empires did hundreds of years ago, but because of what China is doing right now.
What I'm saying is that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism — its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
I don't think you are having a positive influence here.
I finally understood that your example related to self-consistency and that Boris' binges are not the definition of colonialism, so my suggestion about influence should be discarded.
in reality, humanity has been at war for millennia. the chinese have been at war with all their neighbours for centuries. slavery has been the status-quo until 200 years ago.
you are also assuming just because some politician is immoral than people will also be immoral. this is false.
does this have anything to do with how the chinese government treats its citizens in the present? not at all
But I think you are completely missing my point.
I don't believe the West actually wants to improve the world. It wants so much power that it can avoid looking at its own past, and present for that matter.
Well yeah, isn't that precisely what's being criticised?
Also not all the evil in the world was created by the West.
Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.
I think that generally western news have a tendency to misrepresent countries that are culturally different.
E.g. as a Russian, reading western news about Russia makes me think that journalist play a broken telephone game, misrepresenting marginal stuff as some kind of insane norm, in a completely unnuanced way, without any context.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same was for China. Probably even worse, as verification is even less accessible.
Dramatic news get clicks and there is no accountability for spicing them up. I guess, in the age of AI-delivered clickbait media, the old saying "Don't believe everything you read in the papers" was never as true.
What? Why? How? Where does this extreme binary logic come from? When have I said that he should "trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government"? When have I said that "I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government"?
You don't need any "propaganda" to leave the house and live a life. I have all the empirical evidence I need to competently state "well, that's not how it works IRL" when I see some weird journalism full of factual errors and false assumptions.
Why are you acting as there is no personal experience?
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
The CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! And lying about it! Why is it even worth discussing the context of Western colonialism when there's a true and honest legal genocide being performed at the hands of the government? This argument is no different than saying that if we just understood the context of Germany's situation in the 1930s better, perhaps we wouldn't criticize the Nazi regime as strongly. There are some acts which transcend cultural context because of how barbaric they are, and in my opinion, what's happening with the Uighur peoples is beyond forgiveness.
Yes, the CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! But also yes, the entirety of the Americas and Australia are already ethnically cleansed. The West has set the precedent. We simply have no power to, as much as it's the ethically correct thing to do, admonish China.
Perhaps when dictators start doing things like rounding up undesirables into camps and pushing ideological uniformity at the point of a gun the reasonable response is to condemn the behavior? It doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboots, it's despicable to appease, condone, or enable the ones stepping on the throats of human beings.
The problem isn't about who did what, the problem is the idea that horrors can only possibly happen outside the borders of the nation to which I belong.
Why stop abstraction there? You should continue on with all humans, then all life... that would be logical; this isn't.
In general history as it is taught is almost a total loss for how biased it is, meaning that since we dropped the ball on writing it down we are doomed to repeat it until we do. So far we have only been playing at historical account, because the truth undermines national borders. But this is a global issue.
The series of high resolution pictures of me throughout the streets, hotels, places I was during my time there - these all appeared on the screens used by the guards as I was being scanned to leave the country.
So yes, I have been to China, I can place China on a map, and it is the most terrifying reincarnation of Nazi Germany - being defended by people who will say "we didn't know any better" after the concentration camps are freed.
Oh, good to know that. I didn't know prisoners could left Nazi Germany just like that, only getting a scan. I had a completely different idea of that regime.
The prisoners in the Xinjiang labor camps sure can't leave. You're making a false comparison, intentionally or not.
Why do you say this is historically unprecedented? China has been imperialist since its beginning, and continues its imperialism with Hong Kong, South china sea, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Myanmar ...
What 'historically unprecedented imperial past' are you referring to that isn't preceded by China's?
BTW, not to dismiss the other countries from your list, but you should really understand the history of Hong Kong, specifically the Opium Wars. The British took it when the Chinese refused to continue buying their opium.
No, it doesn't, unless by “ruler” you mean the metropolitan state.
I am criticising her because I want her to be effective at her job. Not because I disagree with her about our team's laziness.
Human life has value. It's not effective value or an estimate of value. It is absolute.
I do agree with your point and I am not a believer in the law of the excluded middle.
But you _are_ being paid by the CCP?
HN may be one of the best places for discussion on the internet, with some of the best moderators, but even here, you get people who aren't interested in having civil discussions.