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This is used constantly here as well. When I ask for evidence I'm naive, stupid, etc.
"If the US' worst is your best, what's your point!?"
This seems unlikely, as we all know that the more education a person receives, the more informed they are, the more capable of rational assessment of the world around them.
In fact there may be a slightly negative correlation because some experts spend so much time on their pet-topic that they end up rationalizing why their preferred evidence is better than the contradicting evidence (basically boosted confirmation bias)
I don't know how to say this without sounding glib, but I honestly cannot tell if your comment is sarcasm. Poe's law [1] applies.
There are tons of college-educated people who are utterly incapable of critical thinking. They parrot what their radical professors told them. They don't know anything about statistics or philosophy or how to rationally criticize an argument. They just repeat talking anti-Western talking points. For them, the grass is greener on the other side of the world. They've never actually tried to live there, let alone talk to people from the authoritarian countries they idolize.
"Why are people fleeing from your alleged paradise to an alleged criminal state? Why not the other way around? Get back to me when large numbers of Americans are fleeing to China to escape tyranny at home, search for new and better opportunities, etc."
This is actually happening here in the states:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/19/transg...
Depending on how the next few elections swing these families might not be safe anywhere in the continental US. They wouldn't be any safer in China, but this kind of tyranny can and does happen here at home.
Bit like the cliche joke about HN: Computer science makes people think they are an expert in all fields. Only without the civility.
Of course China does spook shit. What are they supposed to do: refuse to do intelligence out of some misguided sense of morality so the CIA has free rein to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want? You might as well just assert that China's bad because they refuse to get owned by US intelligence - it's an equivalent sentiment.
Only after Deng's market based reforms in the 1980s.
What do you have to say for their campaign of ethnic cleansing?
I'm surprised it worked, in the sense that they were able to harness market economics and capital accumulation without turning into a capitalist dictatorship like happened in the West. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I'm not sure how they managed to avoid that (there is still time for it to happen though!) but I'm happy for their success.
> What do you have to say for their campaign of ethnic cleansing?
Pretty much what most of the rest of the world has to say about it, I suppose.
> Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accused the Justice Department on Friday of “slanders and smears,” adding that transnational repression “is an allegation that best matches the U.S.’s own practices.”
Looks like the official response from the Chinese government is whataboutism.
Why not?
The game doesn’t end. There’s no table to leave. Everything you have is always up for grabs. Not playing is just forfeiting.
There are so many awful things going on in the world that you must provide a convincing reason for telling me, "Look over here... China is doing X!" If I can say, "USA also does X," or "USA does similar thing Y," then I think it's fairly clear you need a convincing argument to try and make me care about this instance of China doing it.
Same thing applies when Democrats do X or Republicans do X. It applies across the board, but this is with the caveat that I mostly do not care about things that happen in the news, and I require sound reasoning for why I am supposed to care. If I point out [I don't care because] X happens all the time, and your only response is "whataboutism," then all you're doing is attempting to make me look stupid on the internet, another thing I don't care about. I walk away feeling like I still don't care. You walk away feeling like you somehow proved me wrong because (China | USA | Democrats | Republicans) are still bad because whataboutism somehow makes me wrong.
Basically, anyone who sincerely argues "whataboutism" on the internet should probably have their keyboard taken away.
China is "winning" and will continue to win, not because they are more virtuous, but because they can move on to the next thing while we're stuck with end-stage capitalism and all the rentierism that comes with it, apparently forever.
Your comment would have been much better without the first and last sentences.