Hacker News Reader

Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

If this world order ends, you will instead see several local empires bomb and burn anyone within their sphere of influence.

Say what you will of the Americans, they will always do the right thing, having explored all other options. I don't have any such hopes of the other powers-to-be waiting in the wings.

View on HN

The Americans will always do the right thing? That has not been true in my lifetime.

Maybe you missed "having explored every other option". It's my tongue-in-cheek way of saying, as bad as the US can be, the difference against a Russian or Chinese lead world is so great, it's not even funny.

We sure wouldn't be having conversations like this. I'd be silent, in re-education or dead and maybe you'd be happy with that. But you'd talk about different things on different forums, for sure.

This relies on the assumption (possibly correct but I don't think definitively established) that a multi-polar world where e.g. China enjoys a similar status to the US would result in them imposing their own values on the world in a similar manner to how the US has done or deposing distant governments. So far China's interactions with the world outside its immediate vicinity (Taiwan, India, SCS countries) have largely been of an economic nature rather than the more bomb-dropping and CIA-flavoured approach the US has taken. So I don't think that the United States' relative loss of power necessarily means a worse world for those outside the US (again, excluding China's immediate neighbours).

> economic nature

plus coercion of Chinese people living abroad, plus a shitload of institutions that promote "Chinese culture" that happen to tow the party line, and so on

I am in my mid thirties in an east european country. I barely had any exposure to Chinese culture, without seeking it myself, even though their written history is some 3000 years old. What I grew up on is pure American propaganda and interventionism.

It would be ironic if you are from one of Eastern European country, where China financed a project, built by its own company and now the said country is facing a debt it can’t handle.

Yes, it relies on that assumption.

Any other assumption goes completely against the evidence.

Right, if we use your standard for China then America has only done diplomatic actions.

You are glossing over China threatening everyone of their neighbors with conflicts, border disputes and ofc exploiting other far reaching countries of their resources.

Right so the difference is logistics? The Chinese don’t have the logistics aircraft carriers / foreign bases yet to effectively bully people beyond their immediate neighbors?

Are you sure China wants to lead the world by force USA style? Wouldn't it need to first form a political bloc? Where's China's bloc?

We need to look at hard evidence of how many counties China invaded vs NATO. It’s fascinating.

I'm saying China wants to rule its sphere of influence.

This forum for conversation would not exist and talking like this would get both of us jailed or worse.

The US and China are not that different in terms of censorship. They just censor different things. I'm sure you can think of half a dozen comments that would get you thrown off this forum, and a couple of others that would earn you a visit from the FBI before the end of the week.

"just" is doing some Superman level heavy lifting there.

FBI won't imprison a million people in re-education camps.

Doesn’t the United States have to most people in prison?

Largely for violent crime, not thought crimes.

there are tens of thousands of people in prison in the United States for possession of weed alone.

Are you aware of the concentration camps in which the Japanese were 'interned' during WWII? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

I'll leave slavery, the Red Scare, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and all other atrocities out of it for now.

This exceptionalism thing is jarring.

What does the USA censor?

Start with Assange and Snowden.

Biden sucks and the FBI are clowns. Yeah go post the equivalent of that on a Chinese ISP to Chinese social media

That's token opposition - it doesn't contain anything remotely threatening. Now start talking about Burisma, the son's laptop, the daughter's diaries. That would get you shut down, around the time of the last election.

> they will always do the right thing

Hundreds of thousands dead Iraqis still waiting for that WMD proof.

They juts need a bit more time! They are looking for it in kitchens and family apartments!

> Say what you will of the Americans, they will always do the right thing

Are you living in some sort of bizzaro parallel dimension?

They most certainly haven't since the end of WWII

Top of a very, very long list : Irak.

They didn't explore anything. The two possible explanations for the decision to go to Irak are:

   1) sheer stupidity

   2) advancement of US interests at the expense of killing half a million people, so in other words: sheer evil

My money is on 2)

Just off the top of my head: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria.

The notion that the US does the right thing for the rest of the world, even after having done all the wrong things, is ridiculous on its face.

What's wrong with the US role in Korea, exactly?

Instated a military dictatorship in the south and helped it crush local worker councils and indigenous resistance. Then invaded the north and burned entire cities to the ground until almost no building was left standing and in the process killed a large proportion of the population.

I recommend Blowback Season 3 on the topic, it's very well done.

> advancement of US interests at the expense of killing half a million people

Half a million are only direct casualties of war. Excess deaths due to the war are over a million.

the phrase having explored all other options is clear, it means the Americans will do the right thing after they have done all the wrong things and tried to make them work. When they cannot make the wrong things work then the will finally, grudgingly, do the right thing. If they can make the wrong thing work they will stick with that.

The idea of the ironic viewpoint is of course that some other countries have a larger bag of wrong things they might be willing to try.

It's a pretty common comedic trope in English writing to say that someone will do right only after doing wrong.

So, the high dudgeon in response is rather missing the point.

Nice convoluted defense of an indefensible pov.

But Occam's razor applies here.

no it's more of a convoluted explanation of a complicated bit of English usage I assumed you were unfamiliar with given your comment and neglecting to quote the salient phrasing.

Occam's razor is that it was meant to be comedy, because it being serious is not really credible. The rest of the responses seem to agree that if it is taken seriously, this statement is ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com