to the contrary, it's wild that you keep grasping at straws to make China seem worse than the USA.
China isn't waging war all over the world, so America is the worst case scenario right now.
-16 karma · joined May 16, 2019
China isn't waging war all over the world, so America is the worst case scenario right now.
And the disciplined way in which people here rationalize that status quo.
RationalWiki covers a lot of claims, and the counter-claims. It's overall not very compelling, very "I swear I heard about incubator smashing", with retracted claims and whatnot.
See Amnesty International's seal of approval for the fraudulent Nayirah testimony:
I'm hardly the first Canadian to notice the insane ramp-up in anti-China sentiment from our American neighbours, especially given the stark contrast with the royal treatment given to the genocidal regime in Saudi Arabia.
Dismembered journalists, decapitated feminists and democratic activist teenagers, famine in Yemen, Senate voted to stop the war and Trump vetoed it... and yet HN is all China every day.
China isn't the only country that looks a lot like 1984 from the outside peering in.
unfortunately the Falun Gong is an insane cult and not a very reliable source of information
RationalWiki has a big citations-packed section on their claims of organ harvesting in China:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Victims_of_Organ_Ha...
I hope after the Iraq "incubator smashing" fiasco, and "WMD"s, Americans apply some skepticism towards claims that their geopolitical adversaries act like fantastical TV show villains.
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edit, bc can't reply because I'm massively getting flagged and downvoted across all my posts
here's me addressing claims that nobody has challenged the Matas report:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgour–Matas_report
> The report, based on circumstantial evidence, concluded that "there has been, and continues today to be, large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners."[2] China has consistently denied the allegations.[3][4]
then
> The initial report received a mixed reception. In the US, a Congressional Research Service report by Thomas Lum stated that the Kilgour–Matas report relied largely on logical inference, without bringing forth new or independently obtained testimony; the credibility of much of the key evidence was said to be questionable.[5]
1) routinely bomb muslims to death, destroying entire nations, I guess gesturing towards vague notions that being murdered is better than being brainwashed
2) have their own immigrant concentration camps, going as far as to reuse the same infrastructure for japanese internment camps (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/migrant-...)
the main difference is that the victims of abuse in China are Chinese citizens, whereas americans draw their borders in such a way that their victims live in their "backyard" and not america proper.
American exceptionalism is alive and well!
edit: lol I'm a lily-white Canadian, for all of those claiming China is somehow "my side".
also, the completely reflexive, kneejerk way in which posters deploy accusations of "whataboutism" to avoid any critical assessment of what they're witnessing, is truly spectacular.
Why are "victims of communism" allowed to generalize from their experience, while "victims of capitalism" are not?
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aad3e1a7e3c3aab4ab40...
Any "national socialist" that tried to couple free healthcare with racist ideas about who gets it would be making a mockery of "universal", for example.
There's probably a good reason why health care/women's rights/pacifism/environmentalism all go hand in hand, something to do with compassion and one's idea of where hierarchies come from.
- AOC/Sanders
- Obama/Clinton
- Bush/Trump
? I'm not american but it's no contest I'm "authoritarian left", I guess. If "universal health care" is authoritarian, sign me up.
site doesn't let me reply but I can't believe you're seriously saying Chomsky and Zizek are the left equivalents of Crowder and Prisonpaul, lol
Let's narrow it down to those two. Who's the left Crowder/Prisonpaul if not Hbomb? And if it's Hbomb, how can you deny he's better than those two?
I was comparing hard to hard. "Hard left" youtube seem to be great people, whereas "hard right" youtube is utter trash.
One has to stretch "both sides are bad" to great extremes to pretend that the problem is intractable.
famous right wing youtubers are people like Prisonplanet (white genocide propaganda, Brexit)
there's no comparison between the two outside of rise in popularity
I've heard that line from people raking in several hundred thousand a year, while they still callously heap ads on their audiences.
If you have no target, neither for your site nor for your personal ambition, it seems like the veneer of "I tried to avoid them but couldn't" is really quite thin.
I don't think this advice of "if you haven't done it you can't criticize or ask questions about it" is very good. It would bar me from commenting on and criticizing Michael Bay movies, so no thank you.
I'd also like to know if the guy shuts off the ads when he makes more than is needed for maintenance costs.
How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?
let's not act like this is unprecedented
> Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon) instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
This turns out to be much more of an interesting comment than you intend, insofar you do understand how his work is perfectly coherent with Steve Bannon's project, except with a "respectability" coat on.
The US is an empire comprising the mainland, as well as vassal and occupied states. China has a smaller periphery (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, etc.)
If you actually wanted to make this comparison, you would need to compare the treatment of people in the USA's occupied territories, such as Iraq or Palestine, to the worst in China, not the worst in China to the worst in the USA, that by default grants a huge arbitrary importance to national borders. (Although the worst within the USA is very bad). China's appalling assimilation of muslims should be criticized, but Americans rarely draw a baseline comparison to how they deal with large muslim populations (invading their countries, murdering their people, drone-bombing weddings, etc.)
Reminds me of a friend who said "Churchill may have been a belligerent racist, but I'd rather have lived under Churchill than under Stalin!". The assumption is that "soviets" lived "under Stalin", but "englishmen" lived "under Churchill". However, it turns out the victims of Irish and Indian human-made famines also lived "under Churchill". He automatically imagines himself as an english citizen, not an indian subject... and it's not clear why?
Or, to put it more simply, if the middle east or historical comparisons don't work for you, you can just look at the Monroe Doctrine that has been openly re-centered thanks to the efforts to realign Venezuela into American consensus.
If you compare all of China to all of the Americas, you get a much better comparable population + land mass, and you can really contrast how the USA treats peripheral regions: blockades, banana republics, coups, black sites, paramilitaries, etc.
Americans will tell themselves "we may be bad but we are better than the enemy" over and over again, and that is what we will eventually study as the core repeated mantra of American propaganda during its waning years.
I find them different ways of accomplishing the same thing: securing a business edge
Onavo, a VPN that secretly did device-wide spying, doesn't count as a "hack" because...?
For example, they become more savvy about how much stuff they own and what they carry around.
This is what you said. People have thoroughly proven you wrong.
You invoked "economics textbooks" like some kind of conversation-ender, and I showcased several things economists treat as hard natural law that end up being, at best, oddly amiss in key cases:
- Rent control (Montreal has it, best city in North America)
- Free trade (China doesn't do it, most reduction of poverty world-wide)
- Sweatshops are desired (Except in a controlled experiment where they are not imposed, they are rejected)
- Debt is bad (Incredibly damaging pro-austerity garbage study boosted in spite its flaws)
Feel free to make each subsequent case on its own merits and evidence as you understand it, but please don't point at economists and act like they possess an authority that they do not.
And preponderance of studies doesn't eclipse a key result. Montreal routinely ranks as the best city on the continent, so even if something "works in most places", it doesn't mean it's something you should pursue when you're trying to be the best, or when you're trying to do well by yourself and not trying to be the best. You surely know about the economics "Theory of the Second Best"?
I first encountered this when economists kept attacking rent control saying it destroyed cities, while Montreal remained the best place to live in all of North America.
Then I found this interesting essay about economists finally getting to try out an experiment about sweatshops in Africa, and concluding "Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong":
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lif... > > In the 1990s, Americans learned more about the appalling conditions at the factories where our sneakers and T-shirts were made, and opposition to sweatshops surged. But some economists pushed back. For them, the wages and conditions in sweatshops might be appalling, but they are an improvement on people’s less visible rural poverty. > >As the economist Joan Robinson said, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” > >Textbook economics offers two reasons factory jobs can be “an escalator out of poverty.” First, a booming industrial sector should raise wages over time. Second, boom or not, factory jobs might be better than the alternatives: Unlike agriculture or informal market selling, these factories pay a steady wage, and if workers gained skills valued by the market, they might earn higher wages. Factories may also have incentives to pay more than agricultural or informal market work to persuade workers to stay and be productive. > >Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and — working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute — performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.
Never blindly trust an "economics textbook" lol. When you disagree with them, economists say "read a textbook", and when you point out the models are bad, they pivot to "it's just a textbook, real models are much more complex than that" (they tend not to be).