One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad. Jimmy Lai should not have been allowed to this quietly.
> One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad.
"City-upon-a-hill" is marketing and has never been grounded in fact. It’s hubris and arrogance. The US is viewed as that place if you get on the wrong side of, it will bomb you or replace your government through coercion. It outspends every country on "defense" to ensure this.
History is littered with plenty of examples where the US favored a more authoritarian or "evil" government over less, sometimes even installing them. Arab Spring is a recent example where you saw governments replaced with the US' help, while leaving some notable monarchies alone.
In reality, the US employs its foreign policy for its own interests. It’s always been like that.
The Arab Spring is a bad example if you're trying to say that the US is installing governments... South America's history provides far better examples.
That said, the US doesn't need to be perfect to still be an example of providing freedom for its own citizens.
There’s a lot of examples, yes in South America too, but the US helped replace or tried to help replace some governments during the Arab Spring. Libya being the biggest example, where the US and its allies imposed a no fly zone to help topple a dictator it didn’t like [0]. It could have done that in other places, but you didn’t hear a peep from the US when those protests were crushed by their governments during the Arab Spring.
Libya is a super super bad example if you're looking for bad US behavior. This is literally the very first sentence of your own source:
> On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition began a military intervention into the ongoing Libyan Civil War to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973).
Compared to the South America stuff, this is saintly and angelic behavior helping out the world in every way. It's not the US alone, it's a coalition that expands beyond NATO, there's a UN resolution...
In fact bringing this up as a "bad behavior" example proves just how much of a shining city on a hill the US has been around the world. It's been bad, but it's also done lots of good stuff.
I don't think you're understanding what OP actually said. They didn't cite the Libya example as an example of bad behaviour; there wasn't any value statement on it at all. They were saying the fact that they intervened in Libya but not elsewhere was an example of the US intervening when it suits them.
I'm not an expert in US foreign policy so I'll refrain from entering the debate itself, I just think you're not arguing against what the OP is actually saying.
In what way does cutting off the sentence create a contradiction? You'll need to at least point out some words that are a contradiction, or address some of the words in my comment.
for its own citizens that were fortunate enough to be born at the right place at the right time. how should the rest of the world feel about the US if they get all the freedoms, comforts and opportunities and the rest of the world doesn’t?
Is that a country to be admired by all others or resented.
Quite the opposite. Actually states don't have interests - interest groups do - and those of them who are friends with the state get to install theirs as the state's.
> states don't have interests - interest groups do
People have interests. To promote those interests, they organise. Sometimes as interest groups within states. Sometimes as business corporations. Sometimes as states.
US probably never was
"the good guy" and just acted on its own interests, but that's not the point. People believed that it's true. Or probably just internalized that as a part of a "country stereotype", like how Germans are hard-working and brits are polite. So it was OK and sometimes even expected for the US to scold the evildoers.
Now that changed, at least in my social circle, and US being moralistic is seen as hypocrisy.
lol, not really. First of all, the kind of "heavy lifting" the Soviet Union did was agreeing with Nazi Germany to partition Poland and subsequently raiding it together from both sides (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) – never forget they were allies until Hitler turned on them.
The "heave lifting" you refer to was mostly paid for and organized by the Lend-Lease Act. There would have been no eastern front without it.
Go back a couple more years, and the UK is probably more relevant to bring up (especially considering the context), they used to have similar aspirations before they learned better.
I would like to remind you that HK was a British colony for more than 100 years, and there was no democracy or freedom then. They only allowed the first partly free elections two years before they gave it back to China, in 1995. And not because they suddenly wanted freedom and democracy for HK, but because it would be harder for China and better for their own interests. Hypocrisy all the way.
That's kind of misleading. HK had a lot of civil freedoms (rule of law, independent judiciary, freedom of speech). China explicitly blocked earlier democratization. The vote only managed to get through after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown made HK panic.
> No freedoms are ever unlimited, so that's not an interesting point.
Of course no freedoms are unlimited, so I'm not sure why are you reading this literally?
> The question is, were they useful?
Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about the lack of freedom under British rule, and you ask if it was useful for HKers? While there are a lot of people in HK who are not happy about what China is doing now, there is almost no one who would take British rule over that. I actually talked with people about it in person when I was in HK.
I've heard of loads of people who would prefer British rule over Chinese rule. The reasons are obvious: free press, free speech, fair trials. These things have gone far, far backwards under China.
They didn't run out of money just because they fought two wars. For some bizarre reason the UK has simply chosen to be (relatively) poor instead of embracing a growth policy. Despite all their potential advantages their GDP per capita is about equal to the poorest US state.
It's actually a fun demo, that shows a fairly common difference between Europeans and Americans. The demo is mostly about comparing GDP, while HDI or something else more "human" is left as an exercise to the reader. If someone was doubting Americans only care about money, now you have some more evidence :)
This comment feels in bad faith. There are ~340 million Americans and you draw evidence about all of them from this one thing? It's not even an insight into its single American author. It was a quick weekend hack.
The purpose of the thing is to try to put things into perspective, like "Portugal is about the size of Indiana", or "California's economy is about the size of Germany". It compares three numbers, two of which are not money!
I'm not drawing evidence or making an argument in some parliament, it's an offhand comment about a common behavior I keep seeing repeated, basically me sharing a pattern I seem to notice every now and then.
I'm not trying to claim every American only care about money, only that when Americans compare countries, they tend to compare monetary values like GDP, gross salaries or other similar values, and your weekend hack (cool at it is) fitted that pattern I've seen before.
Again, obviously not all Americans are the same as each other, then elections wouldn't be needed for starters, and I'm sorry if my comment came off as dismissive or harsh, it really wasn't my intention, I just aimed to share a reoccurring pattern I come across.
Yeah, money machine go brrrr is a great sign of "footprint", lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony. Texas GDP was $x millions last year, clearly larger footprint on the world :)
It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.
> After the war ended, Cecil Powell, a British physicist, continued the research in England using similar methods with more sensitive plates, detecting a new particle and winning him the Nobel Prize in 1950. Chowdhury and Bose’s work was acknowledged in his book, but their recognition quickly faded.
This is actually the reason why I'm a proponent of the US Federal government doing far _far_ less. Things like Healthcare and other safety net things (along with most other things) should be done at the state level, and the the fact that European nations, which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things, are the proof that this would work.
I'm convinced that the federal government doing more and more things is the root cause if the increasing toxicity of American politics. The further removed a populace is from their representatives the less control they have and the worse they feel. Everything should always be done at the most local level that it is possible to do it. Some things have to be done at a relatively high level, but Americans have increasingly been jumping straight to "this is a job for the federal government" when very often state, or even city governments in some cases, would be perfectly capable.
> which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things
What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?
The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.
I know you've made a handful of comments all to this effect throughout the thread, but it's really not helpful in this particular comment chain. Yes, we know your quality of life in Europe is great. Yes, we know life is more than just GDP. "What we mean that the countries are poorer" is obviously GDP in this comment chain, and this comment chain is not disputing your quality of life, it's pointing out that we (collectively) have the money to have that quality of life here in the US, too.
But thats a flawed metric. How much cash do you need saved to send 2 kids to university in US vs typical Europe, without burdening them for their best years of life with crushing debt? How much is left afterwards? How much after acquiring some long term illness with expensive treatment or being in bad accident? Don't think that due to being young this ain't your concern, all elders have messed up health in many ways. Retirement. And so on. These are direct costs and its all about money. Ie US couple with teens just about to go to college with say 500k are same or poorer than similar family in Europe having say 200k savings, or will be after few years. Or maybe not, depends.
I'd say its uncomparable directly, or very, very hard. You can say visit both places and walk around and see the general state of the country and its people, compare capitals. This is where money is spent (or not).
Not going into happiness, stress levels, depression/anxiety and meds consumption, obesity levels or longevity, that would be too easy I agree. Although this is also money related, more than anything else.
80% of US college grads have debt under 30k. Despite the bleak picture painted, servicing that interest at say 7% is $175 a month, or about 3.5% the average salary of a new grad.
This pales in comparison to some of the elephant in the room ways most common ways to go broke, which is to say get something like a child support judgement against you (20% pretax, like 26+% post-tax in middle income brackets) or have an alimony payment (these conveniently don't generally show up in bankruptcy statistics because they are not dischargeable). Medical debt can at least be discharged in bankruptcy.
The federal government has no constitutional authority to provide universal health care, per the 10th amendment which leaves an extremely narrow constraint of enumerated powers to the federal government and the rest left to the people and the states.
However, the feds already siphon about as much tax as the populace can bear just on accomplishing what it is allowed to do, so there is basically nothing left for the states to implement these kind of measures.
Yes, if the states were to take over many of these things, obviously federal taxes would need to dramatically decrease (luckily, the vast majority of federal spending is doing the things that I think states should do anyways, so you'd be simultaneously dramatically decreasing federal taxes and federal spending).
You couldn't just have the states take over these responsibilities and have nothing else change. My suggestion is in fact a pretty radical change in how the US federal government works. I'm not under any illusion that this is likely to happen. The ratchet of power unfortunately only goes in one direction.
Our GDP would drop several percent if we fixed our healthcare system. Part of why we look richer on paper is that we light a lot of money on fire for exactly nothing.
Ah, there’s always zero-sum competition for housing to eat up any excess that might otherwise go to savings. That’s true. Money gets freed up across the board, you spend it on housing or lose ground in the housing competition. Good ol’ red queen’s race.
We already do have universal health care for the most expensive groups to insure (lower income households and the elderly), and technically have it for everyone in that hospitals aren't allowed to deny life saving care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay (which is expensive, short sighted, and quite inadequate overall).
Adding the rest of the population to the existing public insurance system would not cost much financially, but it would be a political catastrophe for whatever party implemented it if it didn't go well.
In short, I don't think anyone seriously argues the US can't afford universal health care, but the real and perceived risk of change is seen as too great politically.
The American government spends an incredible amount on healthcare already. If it were competently administered, it would already be enough money to cover universal healthcare.
Which buyer are you referring to? Consumers paying cash can negotiate as much as they want, and often secure large discounts. Commercial health plans also negotiate hard with their network providers, although some of them play unethical tricks with PBMs to artificially inflate prescription drug prices. Medicare and Medicaid don't really negotiate with providers, they just set rates by arbitrary fiat and providers can take it or leave it. Medicare does have some statutory limitations on how they can negotiate drug prices, though.
Which doctors? Some specialists do quite well but many primary care physicians earn less than software developers, especially once you account for education expenses and ongoing mandatory professional expenses. What is the correct amount for them to earn anyway?
Who is fetishizing GDP? I've never seen public policy be set based on the goal of maximizing GDP to the exclusion of all else. You're arguing against a strawman.
It's worth pointing out this happened entirely post 2008. This is not some "decision" people took, or some long term loss of empire. The US recoevered from the 2008 crisis way better than everyone else, and nobody really understands why yet.
A country with a business friendly, low regulatory environment, coupled with a high work ethic and poor work/life balance, if nothing else, is not going to be a country that falls behind.
Americans complain a lot, and the system isn't that comfortable or respectful, but they aren't facing existential economic irrelevance.
Quite the opposite. The US quickly recovered from 2008 thanks to tech. Tech that the rest of the world wasn't able to keep up with thanks to it being a heavily regulated environment (patents, copyright, etc.).
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims the EU has a "Tech Friendly" environment.
Every techie with skill and an idea in the EU said "F-this, I'm going to the US to start my company" which lead to others saying "F-this, I'm going to the US for tech work". There is no one to point the finger at, because even today, this is exactly what Europeans want. They just haven't put the pieces together to link "heavy regulation and very worker/consumer friendly environment" with "Nobody wants to plant their seeds here". Instead it seems the EUs plan is to just continually fine foreign tech companies to make up for the barren infertile business lands they cultivated.
Germany is a borderline shrinking economy with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts. And this is celebrated like it's some kind of triumph. Everyday I wish I could violently shake Europeans and beg them to open their eyes. Economic strain will fracture all of Europe.
The only hope the EU has is that Trump fucks up the US enough in the next 3 years that we aren't able to continue to attract the vast majority of the people worldwide who actually want to work and reap the rewards of their efforts.
The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.
> with workers averaging 400 hours less time at work per year than their American counterparts
If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.
Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
> If true (seems dubious to me), that's a ~20% difference. The difference in wages is a lot larger than that though, at least for tech workers. So that doesn't really explain why German tech can't compete against US tech.
1805 for the US (slightly more than the OECD average) vs. 1335 for Germany, which works the least.
Germany can't compete with US wages in tech because their companies don't generate as much revenue or profit, either per employee or in total.
> Also, there's quite a bit of evidence that a better work/life balance improves productivity.
There is, and the US is more productive per hour worked than the EU. Maybe that work/life balance in the US isn't as bad as reddit would have you believe.
> I think vacation time is a red herring. My guess is that the various forms of worker protection, making it impossible or very laborious+expensive to get rid of disfunctional team members, are a much larger factor.
An emphasis on regulation over productivity is the core issue IMO, including mandates for paid time off. By incentivizing leisure and bureaucracy designed to stifle change (both for the better and for the worse), you're effectively punishing highly productive individuals.
> But also, let's not forget that the major difference between the state of the economy in the US and the EU is Silicon Valley. Without its tech companies, the US doesn't amount to all that much anymore. This could also be explained as a historical fluke with lots of momentum.
It's not a fluke. Like every other organization, the EU is getting what it encourages, which is stagnation and a lack of productivity. They will have to adapt at some point, the only question is how painful that process will be.
> Germany can't compete with US wages in tech because their companies don't generate as much revenue or profit
Right, because, thanks to heavy regulation driven by the USA, it is illegal to compete on a direct basis. The only hope Germany could have is to compete on being more innovative, but how do you out-innovate when you don't have much of a revenue basis to use to fund innovation and are trying to challenge businesses in the USA that have secured the moat that gives an effectively unlimited money printer? Not going to happen.
Like was pointed out earlier, you cannot successfully operate in a highly regulated environment (well, except where those regulations are to your favour, as is the case for Silicon Valley tech). While Europe tends to want more balance in IP laws, what practical choice does Germany have but to comply to the USA's demands? There is no benefit to Germany in allowing Dinsey nearly endless copyright terms, but the USA has a lot of leverage that it isn't afraid to use and that is something everyone else does have to concern themselves with.
This is the second time you've just stated that the US is the source of "heavy regulation" in the tech sector without any explanation of what that means.
Given that virtually no one else on Earth agrees with that claim on its surface, do you care to explain what you mean, or are you just going to repeat it and move on each time?
And to be clear, pointing at copyright extensions for IP like Mickey Mouse is not a compelling argument, because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years, both because its irrelevant and because the companies responsible for those products also had to operate under the same regulatory regime you're talking about.
> This is the second time you've just stated that the US is the source of "heavy regulation" in the tech sector without any explanation of what that means.
So? I know what I mean.
> because it in no way prevents a German company from producing a product like Instagram, Claude, AWS, or virtually anything else that was launched in the US in the last 20+ years
Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.
In theory you can innovate to provide something that is actually better, not just the same, but can you actually when you are up against moat-ed money printers?
No one else who has responded to you does, so you'd think you'd care, but I guess that makes the chances of a meaningful dialogue very clear.
> Aside from all the patents, trademarks, copyright, etc. that would make it impossible to reproduce. You could create something that kind of like sort of the same to a squinting onlooker, but the users are going to know that they are nothing alike.
Again, what specifically are you talking about? Not only does all of that regulation exist in the EU (plus many others, which is what makes your claim about heavy regulation in the US so bizarre), but there are numerous alternatives to each product I mentioned in the US (I specifically picked ones that did not create a new product category for this reason).
What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?
> No one else who has responded to you does, so you'd think you'd care
For what reason? Not my problem. It makes no difference to me.
> What is it about the regulatory policies in the US that allows US competitors to exist, but not EU ones?
Where do you think these competitors are, even if based in the USA? I'd much rather support my neighbour, but I have no idea how to find the Instagram not owned by Zuckerberg and friends and, quite frankly, despite your insistence, I am quite certain it doesn't exist. There is really no chance of it existing as if anyone tried to complete on a direct basis, the law would see that they be shut down immediately.
I can find photo sharing services with different usage models, but you would be hard-pressed to think of those as being direct competitors. Perhaps that is where things break down here, though? Not noticing the usage of "direct" in the earlier comment?
While a direct competitor can just straight up copy other parties, indirect competition requires innovation. That brings us back to the question of how do you innovate when you don't have revenues to support investing in innovation?
Finance is a larger sector, but largely exists to support tech. If tech disappeared, as suggested in the earlier comment, the USA's finance sector would soon diminish to near-nothing and might even totally collapse under the weight of that loss.
For a more relatable example, it's kind of like how agriculture manufacturing (machinery, fertilizer, etc) is a larger sector of the economy than agriculture itself. All well and good when everything is functioning, but if agriculture collapsed, it becomes pretty obvious that said manufacturing would go down with it. It is no help that it is a larger sector.
In modern economies supporting sectors will almost always be larger than the "core" industries they support.
Please explain how US patent and copyright law prevents "the rest of the world" (which I assume really means the EU, because China seems to be doing just fine in their own sandbox) from developing a meaningful tech sector?
They have done very well in the manufacturing sector via IP theft starting in the 1970s.
I don't see how that's relevant to much post-2008 in the tech sector, which is primarily software driven and where China has very intentionally built their own walled garden.
The UK choosing to shut down most of its native financial sector is a good example. With RBS it was particularly mad because the government ended up being a massive shareholder and then they chose to shut down all the profitable parts of the business, and double-down on the worst parts. Natwest rates franchise was probably worth £5bn, they basically shut the unit down in entirety (and a lot of those people went to large hedge funds and just went back to generating hundreds in millions in revenue) meaning that the taxpayer lost tens of billions AND the economy was knee-capped for decades.
This is taken as an example to show that even when the incentives were there, the government took a decision for nakedly political reasons. In the opposite direction, they folded HBOS into Lloyds, this was done to protect Scotland (both the PM and the Chancellor had a large number of constituents who would have lost their job if these banks were shut down...they were bailed out) and the result was Lloyds needing a bailout about one year after the banking crisis ended in the US. Again, this was sold to the public as the result of "risky casino bankers on huge bonuses"...in reality, it was just poorly paid commercial bankers lending very large amounts of money to people who couldn't ever it pay back AND politicians then making terrible choices with other people's money to boost their chances in some byelection no-one remembers.
This attitude permeates almost everything the UK does. Schools, politics first. Healthcare, politics first. Electricity, politics first.
I genuinely do not understand how anyone can't look at the scale of political intervention into the economy in the UK and not understand why this might lead to lower growth than the US. In Scotland, the government is 60% of the economy, this higher than Communist states with no legal private sector, it is an incredible number. If you look at income distribution, after-tax income under £100k is as flat or flatter than Communist states too, again this is incredible.
What is surprising is that the UK's economy is growing so quickly. The supply-side in most sectors is almost completely gone, in some economically-significant sectors you have regulators effectively managing companies, very few workers have economically useful skills because of the strong incentives in place to acquire non-economic skills...and the economy is still growing faster than most of Europe. To be fair, almost all of that immigration of low-skilled labour into the UK which is going to be absolute time-bomb financially and the rapid growth in public-sector pay has also helped consumption (even more so, the UK is running a deficit of 5% of GDP with revenues growing 4%/year in an economy that is shrinking in per capita terms...obviously, this is not sustainable)...but growth is still way higher than reason would dictate.
Comparing this to the US is not serious in any way. You have a country that prioritises growth beyond reason and are comparing that with a country which is hostile to change beyond reason. There is no possible comparison. The decisions every government since 1997 has made have been intended to reduce growth, people happily voted for this, and are now upset that the economy is shit...why?
Decisions made in 2008 were also a huge part of this.
The UK had a framework to liquidate financial institutions that was similar to the US, and this was deployed in early 2008 with Northern Rock and B&B. The end result was a multi-billion pound profit to the government.
Gordon Brown then decided that he needed to lead the global economy (and he has written, at the last count, two books which explain in significant detail that he was a thought leader and economic visionary through this period) by bailing out banks that were large employers in his constituency. With RBS, this involved investing at a very high valuation and then shutting down all the profitable parts of the bank, the loss was £20-30bn. With HBOS, he forced the only safe bank to acquire them, this resulted in the safe bank going bankrupt a year after the financial crisis ended in the US, and another multi-billion pound loss.
The US benefitted massively from having one of the most successful financial executives of the period, Hank Paulson, running the economy rather than (essentially) a random man from Edinburgh who have never had a job in the private sector (apart from law, obv) but held a seat with a huge number of constituents working at the banks he should have been shutting down (Brown himself had never worked in the private sector at all, parachuted into a safe seat after his doctorate). Geithner nearly suffered from that same fault, but did well with TARP (again though, iirc, this was Paulson's plan).
Because everything in the US is inflated thanks to rampant printing of the USD. Healthcare? Inflated. Education? Inflated. Day-to-day stuff? Inflated. Property values? Inflated.
Most of Europe has lower GDP per capita than the poorest states of the US, yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans. American growth is built on the backs of piss-poor healthcare, shoddy education and an overinflated perception of the tech sector which holds the rest of the world hostage (but not for long).
I think you are making broad generalizations, so broad that the only statement it's clear you're trying to make is "The US is bad" and the broadness of your argument weakens it greatly.
Cost inflation isn't unique to the United States.
Europe isn't a single country.
> yet the lifestyle of European citizens in those countries is much better than the lifestyle of the poorest Americans
Does this include the Romani people? Does this include the Ukranians being attacked by Russia?
Greece's housing cost burden is higher than 30 US states. Not all regions in the USA have faced serious property cost pressures. [1] [2]
"Day to day stuff" is a very broad category, and that includes items that are flat or decreasing in cost. In that sense I will point out that VAT is much higher in the EU than sales tax in most US states, with VAT rates of >20% being very common while the highest combined sales tax in the USA is just over 10%. Sales tax/VAT is a very regressive tax that harms the poor the most. For someone on the poor end of the spectrum in Europe, buying something like a computer or television is a greater burden than someone in the US.
I'm reminded of the natural gas price spikes in 2022 in Europe, and of how the EU's average electricity price is about 2-3x higher than it is in the US. The US has an extremely stable supply of basic needs like energy and food.
Education costs have been flat or lower than the rate of inflation in the US since roughly 2016, so for the last 10 years the idea that education is becoming more expensive in the USA has been squarely false. [3]
Healthcare, I'll give you that one, the US is not faring well. But we can look at some systems in Europe having their own difficulties like the UK and Spain and it's not like healthcare isn't a challenge elsewhere. I will also point out that the US does have public healthcare for the poorest (Medicaid) and for all people over 65 years old (Medicare), and Medicare is a standout in quality among public healthcare systems in some outcome categories.
Nobody in their right mind is keen for a war. Nobody would fight in one unless they believed they really had no other choice. I don't blame the people who would runaway to relative safety if the option is available.
But. It's clearly a massive security issue.
> If you’re that keen, go join the reserves?
There is not currently a war, and if there was, there wouldn't be a choice but to join.
That's a valid statement that nobody in this comment chain was disputing. It is exactly why the person you're responding to is assuming anyone who can leave, will leave, in that event (and why "you should join the reserves if you're that keen" is an irrelevant comeback-- nobody was saying anyone's keen, only that people aren't keen and will leave to avoid it if able).
> They ran out of money, 2 world wars bankrupted them.
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home. This is a fundamental difference with the US. I don't blame the UK for focusing at home for a while to rebuild.
>
With the second war destroying a lot of the country and calling to rebuild at home.
WW2 did not 'destroy' the UK. It wasn't subjected to any of the horrors of ground warfare, and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it.
What WW2 did destroy was the UK government's ability and will to finance the sort of repression that was necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire. Churchill in his pigheaded hubris could scream from the rooftops about India forever remaining British, but Clement wasn't going to kill people over it.
(In contrast, France lost the ability, but not the will, which is why it fought a few wars in Vietnam and Algiers, instead of letting their colonial subjects have self-rule and independence sans bloodshed.)
France's role in future global affairs easily eclipses the UK's. France still has a future as a great power, whereas the UK's opportunity is already squandered.
40,000 dead[1] and two million houses damaged in a country of 40 million people (presiding over a global empire of a billion souls) over six years is not meaningful... Especially in the context of the largest and most destructive war the world has ever known.
> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,
Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.
Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?
This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.
---
[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.
They decided to stop being a world police, and correctly so. Now we're just waiting for US to understand the same thing, which is slowly happening, finally.
Great, so every country can just smoothly descend further into tyranny with no pushback from any other country. Thankfully we won't have any world police though!
The world police was never really there to stop tyrants, the evidence is that they'd conveniently look the other way whenever they benefitted from it, and they would even put tyrants in place when it suited them. They did stop some tyrants, for sure, but only when it was convenient.
The world saw it's greatest peace under US hegemony. It wasn't perfect and there were bloody avoidable wars on the behest of the US, but by and large things ran smoothly and US sponsored globalism brought prosperity and peace to many.
Too early to make what call? Pax Americana could end tomorrow and it wouldn't make the statement false (well, it would if whatever followed was even more peaceful).
The US provided lip service to the idea, but quickly became paranoid about the threat of world wide communism and changed its tune relatively quickly. In the places where this wasn't a factor, it wasn't altruism by any stretch, but economic interests. The US saw that a post-colonial world would be fantastic for business...
> If you think the US is the sole reason the entire world isn't all tyrants right now
It's a big part of it. Traveling changed some of my skepticism on how "good" the USA was for the world into it might be one of the best things that ever happened to it.
Pax Americana, to the extent that it was ever a real phenomenon, relates to a relative lack of hot wars. It says nothing about the prevalence of tyranny.
And the USA is at best neutral in terms of how many dictators it has taken down VS installed and propped up (especially if we count attempts and consequences as well). For every Saddam, you have an MBS.
I think it's more accurate to say there weren't many expansionist tyrants whilst the US was looking interested in world policing. The Soviet Union had to be very careful about what they did in Europe despite having their own nuclear umbrella, Saddam could tyrant all he wanted until he annexed a neighbouring state the US felt vaguely positively disposed towards, and whilst you could fight petty border wars or maybe fund a coup against a neighbour somewhere less strategic you didn't have the option of doing what 1939 German and Japan and Russia did or even what 2020s Russia is trying to do and China is probably thinking of.
The US didn't install MBS, he's the prince of a monarchy that predates American involvement by centuries. The same goes for any ruler in Saudi Arabia; we inherited that alliance, we didn't create the House of Saud. Maintaining our relationships with an existing government is not the same as overthrowing a democracy and installing a dictator like what happened in Iran or Chile.
What dictators has the US installed after the Cold War that balance against Saddam, Noriega or the Taliban regime change?
I said installed or propped up. They are certainly propping up the Saudi royal family, increasing their prominence on the world stage, even as they have killed American citizens and are conducting wars in the region. Also, the current Saudi royal family has been ruling at best since 1902, so nowhere close to "centuries" (though they do have ancestry going back to the 1700s to a royal family that briefly controlled a part of modern day Saudi Arabia).
In regards to other dictators, I'm not sure why you're only looking at post-Cold War history. What's most interesting about this period is the amount of failure by the USA to effect regime change, despite very clear evidence of such attempts, both against dictators and for them. We even have the interesting case of Haiti, where the USA supported a coup to get rid of president Aristide in 1994, then they led a UN-approved military action to re-instate him in 1998, then supported another coup to get rid of him in 2004. After the first coup, a military junta was installed, and the USA was one of few countries which traded with them. You also have US support against several islamic populist leaders in various Middle Eastern and North African countries, typically preferring secular military leaders instead - often leading to either protracted civil wars or to brief regimes that couldn't hold power. You also have a series of attempts at regime change in quasi-democratic countries, ostensibly for more democratic leaders, that failed - leaving uncertainty on whether those that they attempted to prop up would have been better or worse; the clearest example of this is the attempt to install Juan Guaido as the President of Venezuela after a deeply controversial vote.
You do realize that there are stable countries that still exist today, that haven't been run by tyrants for very long time, and also are older than US been a country? Or even created before the US was a little British colony looking for purpose in the world?
It seems like Americans forget how young their country is, it's barely a blimp in history so far, although recent written history makes it seem a lot older than it is.
> there are stable countries that still exist today, that haven't been run by tyrants for very long time, and also are older than US been a country?
Out of curiosity, who are you thinking of?
There aren’t that many countries that made it through colonization, industrialization, WWII and then decolonization and the Cold War intact. Very, very few virtually continuously. Fewer still as democracies.
I know you are using the definition of tyrant here to be "unjust ruler" as opposed to "absolute ruler". You can certainly have benevolent tyrants but I would argue that, without a constitution, you are by definition ruled by a tyrant. The USA has the oldest ratified constitution so that is a prime candidate for being considered the oldest stable non-tyrannical government. Of course, we are using different definitions of tyrant so you will not agree with my conclusion.
While I agree to some extent with your point, I think your definition is far too strict. For example, by your definition, the UK is currently and has always been a tyranny, since they don't have a formal constitution in the sense of any US-style state.
However, I do think you're generally right - even under a more relaxed definition of what does or doesn't constitute a tyranny, the USA is clearly one of the first non-tyrannical states, at least among those that still exist today. The UK had a mostly-democratic ruling system for even longer than that.
On the other hand, if we define tyranny to refer to any state in which elections are restricted to a relatively small subset of the population, then the USA or UK are not that early. Voting in the USA was largely restricted to male property owners until 1840. Many other countries had adopted at least universal male voting by this time. The UK was even later to pass this standard.
You do realize that there are stable countries that still exist today, that haven't been run by tyrants for very long time, and also are older than US been a country?
Shouldn't be hard to name just one, then, rather a bunch of handwaving.
The US managed the assemble an alliance of the... let's count them:
Based on military ranking:
#5 SK, #6 UK, #7 France, #8 Japan, #9 Turkey, #10 Italy, #11 Brazil, #12 Pakistan, #14 Germany, #15 Israel, #17 Spain, #18 Australia, and if it were allowed to, #20 Ukraine.
Based on economic power: I won't even bother, only China, India, Russia aren't US allies in the top 30 or so, by GDP.
The US was a world police but it wasn't alone. Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
What the US is doing now is a tragedy that will unfold over many decades.
> Yes, it was far bigger than all its allies taken separately, but those allies could more than double its power.
This breaks down as soon as you stop looking at abstract rankings and dive into the specific logistic realities of force projection. France and to a lesser extent the UK are reasonably capable, but there's no math that adds up to anything approaching America's capabilities.
Beyond that, if you do get into the specifics of force projection (and basically anything logistical to do with NATO), you see that the entire alliance was built on the assumption that the US would contribute the capabilities that kept the whole system viable.
So,
$(US) + $(ALLIES) > $(US)
However,
$(ALLIES) - $(US) < $(ALLIES)
This has been true from the beginning, and I don't think was a nefarious plot, or even mistake, for most of the alliance's history. The further we get from the Cold War alignments within which NATO was created, however, the more difficult it has become to sustain.
The problem is, this looks so much like a rerun of post WW1 America.
Tariffs (check - Smoot Hawley), American isolationism (check - America First), I guess we won't be far from the economic crisis (not checked yet - Great Depression).
At best, the US will slowly turn into Qing China. Unrivalled in its sphere of influence, stagnant and complacent. The US has always had a very strong anti-scientific undercurrent and a lot of it was kept in check by importing foreign elites wholesale (fairly sure the US public school system up to university level is nothing to write home about, on average). If the US turns against foreigners, most of the good ones will stop coming.
Now? No. But West Germany alone had 5000 main battle tanks in 1989. Demographics have changed, the economy has changed, but Europe could definitely project force all over the area about 1000-1500km in its vicinity if it really wanted to.
But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
Shockingly, I don't believe the results will be anarchy and constant regional conflicts. But it's interesting that some people still seem to believe the US idyllic propaganda about how safe they're keeping the world.
Russia's population is falling and the current war is not helping it. Also the last resources of population import for Russia, Russians in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (+ Central Asians in Central Asia) are drying up. Nobody outside of the former Soviet sphere wants to move to Russia.
Yes, all the European-aligned states you mention should currently be opposed to USA [or at least the fascist regime ruling it], because of the threats to Denmark/Greenland. UK, Aus should be particularly aligned against USA because of the threats to Canada (as part of the UK royalty's commonwealth).
Trusting the post-democracy, post-constitutional USA we find ourselves with is major folly. We might as well climb in bed with Russia.
This is something that people don’t realize. America is no longer world police. If Europeans want to resolve intra-European disputes like Russia-Ukraine we should stay out of it.
Instead, by refusing to sell weapons to Ukraine -- and lying about Europe's support -- when it didn't suit Trump, you've firmly placed your flag. Not allies in any meaningful sense.
Lets see what happens when the invasion of Venezuela kicks off, either the world tries to prevent yet another authoritarian government from bullying those who are already on the ground, or we'll join in on the fun I suppose, if the US feels like it wanna share the future loot.
Maybe 'World mafia' is a better description? They're not enforcing law and/or morality (nor ever have been?), they're just pressing countries for bribes for Trump, or to shift World markets for insider trades, or probably still for oil, AFAICT.
Someone can be and asshole and still be right. It will be harder to convince other people to go along with you if you are an asshole, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't call out wrongdoing when you see it.
Which is a fair charge of ethical character, but not of truth. What makes whataboutism a fallacious rhetorical move is not that it fails to identify someone's ethical shortcomings, but that it tries to substitute them for subject matter.
The logic of whataboutism is fascinating, because as long as someone is deemed a bad enough actor, their statements have the effect of dynamically rewriting reality in real time to be the opposite of whatever Bad Actor says. Which, to my mind, gives them too much power. It's simpler to just believe in objective reality, believe that language works roughly according to a correspondence theory of truth and that statements are or are not legitimate on account of their corresponding to reality, which isn't something you can determine based on character alone.
But I admit on some level this might be a misunderstanding of whataboutism, because it's holding it to a standard of intellectual consistency that it's not aspiring to.
A "whataboutism" defense only works in an argument that goes like this:
A:"You should stop doing X because X is wrong and evil and you are wrong and evil if you continue doing X!"
B:"But you beat your wife."
Where X != "beating one's wife".
Here the B's argument is: "But you do X yourself!". This is not an attack on moral character but a direct refutation of A's argument. If A really thought X is wrong and evil then A would not be doing X. And if A really considers itself wrong and evil then it should be figuring a way to stop doing X first, or, at least, concurrently with demanding that from B. Either way, A is not very persuasive.
Something less effective about ass holes doing wrong things complaining about other assholes doing wrong things, a while insisting they're not assholes. Ultimately the "damage" isn't being called out as a hypocritic asshole, it's the world realize there's nothing wrong with said wrong things. Although to some that's not damage but nature healing.
The UK's having a hard enough time trying to preserve freedom in the UK.
Hold up... So you're saying that they're actually not trying to preserve freedom in the UK and have arrested hundreds of people over twitter memes?!
In all seriousness, you're approximately as free in HK as you are in the UK. In HK, don't promote democracy or insult the government in Beijing. In the UK, don't suggest that diversity isn't Our Greatest Strength.
Every society these days has an untouchable third rail. None are without beams in their own eyes.
The discussion has devolved to such a point that people from outside the UK keep parroting this (likely Kremlin originated) line that the UK is now a Muslim stronghold with no free speech when in reality it just continues to uphold the values it has influenced the world with, one of the few positives from its dark past, of protecting those unable to protect themselves. Hate speech and punching down. As if inciting violence is completely harmless and no bad ever comes of it.
Many freedom-focused people without direct experience of disability, bullying or discrimination have no way to relate to that concept, and the echo chamber amplifies the intellectually dishonest takes until they take hold. Which is exactly what the angry, seething, downtrodden richest people in the world seem to want right now. I wonder why. What a sorry, hopeless state we've allowed to happen. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, sure, but the ones who've worked hardest to develop theirs should be weighted the most. Now a Russian bot has the same value on a platform as a nuclear scientist or, dare I say it, a real journalist. Because it's entertaining and tickles some dangling dopamine receptors. I'm sure people will wind their necks in when the ultimate result has finally played out and we'll cycle back to cooler heads prevailing, but I fear we'll have to go there first before we get back.
Yes I took the bait, but no regrets, I'll die on this hill. Hate bullies and liars with a passion.
America was on the decline for a while already. Look at how forgotten Tibet is. Why would HK be any different when a treaty was signed to hand it over? It’s more official than Tibet which was just annexed through force. Although it’s worth remembering that China has violated the terms of the HK treaty as well.
Also as a reminder, back in 1993 Richard Gere was banned from the Oscars for 20 years for advocating for Tibet (https://www.foxnews.com/media/richard-gere-speaks-out-nearly...). American institutions have been declining/corrupted for a lot longer than the current administration.
Tibet is clear-cut annexation of a sovereign country. HK / New Territories was only leased, and it wasn't going to be practical to keep it longer. The problem is that Beijing no longer needed HK as a gateway, the US/EU had already embraced going directly to the mainland to do deals by the early 2000s. The HK I knew was already gone by 2014.
A healthy reminder that Hawaii became a US state AFTER Tibet became a Chinese province.
An lest one suggest that it was the result of a peaceful referendum, know that the US congres apologised for the entire project, including the migration of mainland Americans who helped swing the referendum.
By “calling out” you mean invading, or what, exactly? And haven’t you guys had enough of fighting “evil” while causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians? See Iraq.
So then what use is any other approach than simply letting it happen? Words are just that. If violence is out, then the only other approach is escalating the trade war and Chinese isolation, at great cost.
Precisely, and I'm saying there is no other good plan. If the cost of defending democratic values worldwide is starting WW3, we simply can't defend democratic values worldwide anymore.
"Most of it is a lie that they tell their own citizens, though, as America and the West only want democracy and promote it for their own ends. They destroy any democracy that might not align with their worldview or serve their interests.
The current administration is overtly doing what was previously done covertly. Dictators are acceptable as long as it is politically convenient. One of the most recent cases is Pakistan, where the army has taken over, and EU and Commonwealth election monitors did not issue even election monitor report even after two years. Instead, they have facilitated the murder and killing of Pakistani civilians. But maybe Pakistanis are brown-skinned, so for them, democracy is not allowed.
Pakistan should be under sanctions, but it is not, as it is providing ammunition for Ukraine. That is the biggest problem of the West: their hypocrisy. They are calling for democracy in Hong Kong, as that serves their own agendas, but will say nothing about an apartheid state like Israel."
"Imran Khan, the former prime minister, has been jailed without trial for the last two-plus years and has been kept in solitary confinement for months out of those. How many newspapers mention it in the West or make it a news topic? But this Hong Kong (HK) Jimmy Lai conviction will be the headlines in most of the Western media a clear example of propaganda to rile up the population against China and socialism.
This is why I laugh when people here on Hacker News mention China's control of media and its propaganda, when the Western media is no better than them. At least many Chinese citizens know they are being propagandized against and can filter it out."
better is a continuum across many dimensions. Therefore when you say "no better than" you're saying "worse than".
I'm not saying Western media is good, but it's really hard to argue that it's worse than the Chinese media, given the headline story above and our freedom to discuss it here and elsewhere.
Both can be bad, but one is more bad than the other.
Sure but this was prompted by the absurdly self-congratulatory "city on a hill" comment which shows how out of touch the West is with critical thought from the global south.
As originally used, the city on a hill comment was about aspirations, not achievements. IOW, the US was aspiring to be the city on the hill, not that it was.
And then JumpCrissCross's comment says that the US has stopped even aspiring to be the city on the hill.
It's a comment saying the US has fallen. How is that absurdly self-congratulatory?
The human condition is hypocrisy. The weak want fairness. The powerful want their power unbridled. Only anomalous humans can be powerful without abusing that power.
This feels very dismissive. The comment you responded is about the very real killing of a lot of people and your response is "at least we can talk about it?"
Being free to talk about the horrible things happening doesn't appear to stop them from happening so what exactly is your point here?
Exactly right. And what's more, I think this is cynically exploited by apologists who want to defend evil by resorting to whataboutisms. State sponsored troll farms are real and the market for buying and selling, and mobilizing accounts is increasingly mature. And even, dare I say, strategically and intellectually sophisticated in some ways while simultaneously being intellectually and ethically bankrupt.
But I actually don't think it's that hard to understand that (1) the US has significantly compromised moral authority, but also (2) China bad and (3) there's important differences of scale of moral offense depending on what you are talking about. You can land a perfectly coherent point about, say, China's hostile takeover of Hong Kong being bad, it's military ramp up to seize Taiwan by 2027 being bad. But too often, I think bad faith actors will intentionally exploit the complexity to try and muddy the waters, and the only reason it seems like it's hard to articulate the distinction online is because of motivated performances.
Of course there Poe's law element too, which is that you should never underestimate the ability of people online becoming confused about politically charged topics, but in this case I think it's a bit of column a, a bit of column b synergistically amplifying one another.
"The colonial government used the Control of Publications Consolidation Ordinance (1951) to regulate publications and suppress freedom of the press. One notable case resulted in the suppression of the newspaper Ta Kung Pao for six months (later reduced to 12 days) for its criticism of the colonial government's deportation of the Federation of Trade Unions-backed fire relief organisation officials and use of live fire against protestors. Deportation was also used as a method to control politics in education. Lo Tong, a principal at a pro-Beijing, patriotic middle school, had been deported in 1950 for raising the People's Republic of China (PRC) flag and singing the national anthem at his school." [1]
Now of course we'd all prefer Western-style freedoms but the narrative on HK is highly skewed and hypocritical, with HK used as a pawn in the broader anti-China narrative.
Even Singapore isn't exactly rosy but it is a friend of the West so it's fine.
Why is this evil? Most countries draw the line at aiding and abetting foreign harm to your own country, no matter how justified. I would expect no different if it happened in America or Europe.
> Most countries draw the line at aiding and abetting foreign harm to your own country, no matter how justified
On the books maybe. But for instance, America defines treason so narrowly that nobody has been convicted of it since WW2. Americans are free to sing praise of China, Russia, North Korea, whoever they like no matter how unjustified. Unless Congress has declared a war, which hasn't happened since WW2, you can talk as much smack about America or praise opposing regimes as much as you like.
If you start a website that is too friendly to a foreign regime, it risks being shut down by the FBI. That’s what happened to the American Heritage Tribune.
The US power nexus absolutely suppresses dissident speech, whether through lawsuits, deplatforming, de-banking, or any of a variety of other means.
The Soviets would have developed the atomic bomb (and eventually the hydrogen bomb). This simply accelerated their development. And considering that for the first decade after the end of WW2 the US considered and threatened the USSR with nuclear annihilation frequently, this is probably a good development...
Soviet under Stalin was just as bad as Germany under Hitler.
The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2 and the post war world would have been a much better place, including a non communist China. That's my guess at least. Impossible to know, of course.
In reality, the Rosenberg documents wasn't very decisive. Stalin already had the Manhattan Project blueprints from Klaus Fuchs.
> The west could conceivably have liberated the Soviet block after WW2
This is dubious, for several reasons: Public sentiment, starting another major war immediately after they thought they'd catch a break from war for a while. The premise of America building enough nukes to actually get the Soviets on their knees instead of provoking them to steamroll the rest of Europe instead. The ability of American forces, in the late 40s and early 50s, to get nuclear armed bombers over the appropriate targets in Russia.
Japan was already defeated, and two bombs proved enough to make them admit it. That context doesn't hold true for the Soviets; they may well have tanked several bombs to major cities then proceeded to fight a conventional war instead of surrender.
It's fascinating to read how few nuclear bombs we actually had until the 1950's. There was real concern that we would need more than two for Japan, and really had none ready after Fat Man and Little Boy were expended.
Almost as fascinating is how often in the late 40's and early 50's we threatened the USSR with nuclear weapons. Don't leave Iran quickly enough? We'll blast you. Amazing and scary how the world has survived so far...
Stalin was undoubtedly evil with the blood of millions on his hands.
I don't think that the West had any chance to liberate the Soviet bloc (I'm assuming what you meant is the Warsaw Pact countries). The Red Army was simply too big, too powerful, and too experienced at the end of WW2. Even using the few atomic bombs available between 1945-1949 (when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon), the USSR was just too big a country, with too many people.
And if you look at the willingness to take casualties that the Red Army demonstrated while fighting the Nazis, trying to take on the USSR would have been folly.
The West was spent after WW2 (as were the Soviets), with no appetite for further conflict. Even the US was tired of war, and only the drumbeat against the Red Menace did much to motivate the populace.
Yeah, that's about it. General Patton, John von Neuman were among those advocating for it, and in hindsight I think it would have been a good thing to avoid the Cold War and the communist era, saving China from the horrific Mao era, etc.
But I agree that turning on an ally, sacrificing millions more of your soldiers etc at that point would have been a very hard sell. I'm sure I would have been opposed to it at the time.
As far as I can tell, the prosecution's entire case relies on an unfounded grand conspiracy argument. That by running a newspaper which supported democracy, Lai was implicitly calling on the US to impose sanctions on China.
Lai admitted to explicitly doing this - https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/32... - I believe he said he did this on multiple occasions. His arguments make no sense at all because, given his background, the only possible interpretation of that course of action would be to use sanctions to change the government.
Also, if Lai genuinely believed (as I think he must have done) that the US was going to help in any way then he was delusional. In almost every case, "freedom" fighters end up relying on the resources of hostile foreign governments to continue their activities. There is no way that the US was going to offer anything other than a publicity stunt.
Hard to address evidence that's behind the paywall of an organisation where there's concerns over editorial independence. I found an archived copy of the article you linked [0] only to find a nested link [1] for the meeting with Pence & Pompeo, which I could not find an archived copy of. As far as I can tell, the claim of admitting to lobbying could be massively overblown.
That this is the top comment says all you need to know about this board.
Being a city on the hill is a cudgel, not a halo. It’s always been used in a self-serving way, and always against enemies.
Who is someone who points out the flaws of their enemies but never the flaws of themselves or their friends, even though they are all equally likely to commit the same crimes?[1] That is a scoundrel. Not someone that anyone needs to wait to Call Out anyone on anything.
That it is (in this context) a self-admitted “aspiration” is the laughable part. No one else gets credit for “aspiring” (just words) to be a city on a hill. Except if it’s us.
every president who ever invoked the "city on a hill" metaphor was simultaneously responsible for acts of unprecedented evil in foreign countries; from JFK in southeast asia, to reagan in the middle east and central america, to obama's drone strikes in the middle east.
@ericmay, you are not wrong, its already doing a lot of evil, I am from one of those countries destroyed by the US.
its less evil when country economically destroyed (with sanctions), but its another thing when some of your relatives killed because some people wanted to play with their gun and shoot real people, for sport.
“As the HN poster proudly clicks on the reply button having delivered a blow to the vast ignorance of a stranger, a train arrives somewhere deep in rural China carrying Uyghurs ready for their re-education.”
I think painting an entire nation, whether it’s China or the United States, is a far greater evil. That’s the same sort of language being used against Palestinians right now.
People like to say that America is so evil. Look back through history at every major super power. Did they do no wrong? I think in the grand scheme of things we've tried to do good throughout the world. Have we been perfect? Absolutely not... but throughout history for having as much power as we've had, I think we've been good stewards with it. More so than any other power in history. That counts for something in my book.
You didn't define evil, which I think was on purpose. The United States does a lot of things with its military. But it does not jail elderly political opponents and sentence them to death for being a threat to the regime.
it is so convenient to downvote the comment because you haven't experienced it yourself and consider it as "yet another random weirdo complaining about the US" in the comments.
Before downvoting, think about what if person on the other side experienced how people they knew and loved know got killed by that "moral" superpower for sport, for oil, for land and to enrich couple of their billionaires even more.
US have no right to call out any kind of evil, anywhere, after destroying so many families. You just don't feel it, just try to imagine if half of your family got killed for fun, how do you feel?
Personally, I'm downvoting the comment because it is literally just restating the parent comment, but more generically. It does not contribute to the conversation.
And I'm downvoting you because you are breaking the site guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
It's the entrenchment of a particular kind of parasitic elite.
The logic that made them into "elites" has turned in on itself and is now self-cannibalizing.
The saving grace is only the capacity for the American people to see through this, but with the derangement of information pathways we're increasingly at the behest of these people and their narratives that only serve their aggrandizement.
All the talk about "saving the west" or "individualism" or the some other talk of spirit that these preachers sermon about, is only to serve themselves and no one else.
"Calling out evil" is another one of those victims to their self-serving motivations. Along with "climate change", "environmentalism", "democracy", "freedom", or a whole host of otherwise genuinely noble causes.
Oh yes, I'm sure we all can easily enumerate the times America has effectively called out the "evil abroad." And such instances have all indeed survived the scrutiny of history/retrospection no less!
Yep! It's meant to indicate the absurdity of the point. Probably not my best form, but for a state that murdered literally millions of people the first two decades of this millennium, I would of hoped the intent would have been more obvious here.
