But hasn’t it been the same with US since the WWII? US has influenced the world through various ways sometimes even weaponising human rights to spread American superiority and its narrative?
In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down.
BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical.
OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.
I'm not sure if this is correct. It seems like every big US corporation is changing their policy based on the views of the administration in place. As an example during Biden's time the DEI was in full motion in every corporation and in current administration it's the other way around. Also I remember as soon as Biden won the election twitter and meta suspended the profile of Trump. So I hardly think that there is much room for autonomy. Also the latest export bans on Antropic and OpenAI models kind of make your argument weak, of course the company can sue the givernment, but the national security comes above all.
> BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly?
US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine.
The American says "I'm impressed by the propaganda you have in Russia."
"Oh it's very good, but it's nothing compared to the propaganda you have in America." replies the Russian.
"Huh? We don't have propaganda in America." says the American.
"Exactly." says the Russian.
Edit: recognising that there is propaganda != knowing what is and isn't propaganda. That's all I meant.
I mean, it took longer than the Great Patriotic War before Putin's popularity started visibly falling and people started questioning what the entire "SVO" is for.
I think Russians are used to knowing it's dangerous to disagree with dear leader and there's no advantage to disagreeing so they just go along with whatever he says
There is way too many mixed marriages etc. for any reasonable Russian to believe that their formerly-closest East Slavic neighbour has turned into a Fourth Reich.
The glorification of Russian military power after almost five years of static attritional war and dozens of burning refineries and ships is in a category of its own...
Exactly. The distortions in American public life are quite a bit more intricate and artful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...
please, keep going...
Already during the Biden administration, defections from the orthodoxy started and then multiplied - some businesses like Coinbase or IIRC Cloudflare refused the demands outright. Musk bought Twitter with an explicit task to make it less progressive.
And the White House did precisely nothing against this defection trend.
"US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine."
I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.
That's why I said that it was weaponized. In reality US doesn't care if there is a real human rights violation or not, they just use it as an excuse to get what they want.
In theory.
In practice, Trump picks up the phone and say "jump" and the CEO on the other end says "how high ?".
And if you say no, well, we saw what happened when Anthropic said no.
People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they make nonsensical comparisons with a straight face.
All I will say is that it should be perfectly apparent by now to any sane external observer that Trump does not play by any long-established rules or protocols.
An entire encyclopedia of examples could easily be provided, the most famous recent one being his phone call to FIFA about the red card suspension.
That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones.
This just does not happen in actual authoritarian countries, where no judicial remedy is available and the justice system is just another arm of the tyrant, rubberstamping punishments pre-determined by him.
Yes, I agree that vigilance about infringements of freedom is necessary, but the current US population is plenty vigilant. Trump is nowhere near as popular as, say, Erdogan is, and cannot simply raid offices of the Democrats and shut down oppositional media.
But he's doing the same culling, the same political demands, same everything.
Its just now in plain view rather than behind closed doors.
Is Trump a dictator with unilateral control? No.
Will you be celebrated for failing to recognize that? Yes.
Neither is a system worth fighting for. Swiss style democracy maybe but not autocracy and not oligarchy.
>OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.
Yeah, a bit like how Russia saved Edward Snowden.
The US will use human rights as a club to beat its imperial rivals with but when it has deemed torture and arbitrary execution in the interests of its imperial power it has adopted them enthusiastically.
When US allies use these tools and worse they are excused.
There is basically nothing which US rivals do which the US wouldn't also do under similar circumstances.
That's completely true. What happens is that you get hit with a wall of bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere, and usually for some unrelated matter. It's like a high level version of getting pulled over for not using your turn signal. Which is why if your company has good legal, they often act in a highly proactive manner about that kind of thing.
What constitutes sufficient rabble rousing to get put on the government's shitlist differs between both countries, but there are plenty of things that will send American politicians into having a conniption, and it's not a static criteria. McCarthyism is a pretty easy example. I'm no Muskboy, but we can point to the procedural harassment he recieved over hitting a blunt on the Joe Rogan podcast to be a related matter. Criticizing the genocide happening in the Levant is frequently saber rattled by politicians as something they're interested in making prosecutable, and there are examples of institutional authority targeting and attempting to punish people over it.
> bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere
You can challenge these in courts. There is a free press you can go to. You can go to social media and lay your case out there. You can challenge what the government is requesting of you. In China, you can not at all.
This is correct...because they just buy the government when they need to.