Your comment, and similar cliche arguments on HN are tiring to refute over and over and over.
Before you put US on the same pedestal of morality as China, you must equate them on apples to apples basis. Picking and choosing horrible things US has done in the past is very convenient.
I immigrated to US and I’ve travelled extensively over the world. If you’re picking and choosing Guantanamo, Iraq war, etc. then I can do the same about Tianman square.
Let’s objectively assess the situation without picking and choosing - I can do the same about positive aspects of US: functioning justice system, representative democracy, cultural diversity and acceptance, LGBT rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, right to run for public office, ... we could go on and on about this with no end.
I have a humble request: When arguing about A, please do not talk about B to escape the reality and scrutiny that A deserves. It’s distracting and tiring.
> Before you put US on the same pedestal of morality as China, you must equate them on apples to apples basis.
I think the mistake you make here is that we're talking about China's interaction vs the rest of the world and comparing that to U.S. interaction vs the rest of the world, which is more important to many than what is done domestically, because most of the people on here aren't in China, but the U.S. interference affects them even if they're not in the U.S., which is mostly not true for China.
How many coups has China been involved in as compared to the U.S. for example? Because these affect people on the other end of the globe from the U.S.
Why was there a military-style raid on Kim Dotcom in NZ, for something that is possibly a crime in the U.S.?
Why was there pressure put on Sweden to prosecute TPB from the U.S. side?
How come the U.S. claims to believe in the free market, but when a Chinese firm gets competitive there, they try to block them?
How come U.S. feels entitled to bomb in foreign territory, where they were not invited by the local government? Without UN approval at that?
How come U.S. feels entitled to bully other nations at the UN to vote their way on Palestine?
How come is it OK for the U.S. to attack a country that did not attack them?
How is it OK to go to war on a completely false pretext?
How is it OK for the U.S. to use chemical weapons?
How is it legal for the U.S. to commit terrorist acts in other countries?
How is it OK for the U.S. to tell other countries that they can't have nuclear weapons even as the U.S. is the only country to ever use the in war?
How is it moral for the U.S. to block civilian and medical goods, starve a country and help commit war crimes?
There are plenty of more local issues too, like the War on Drugs, the targeting of minority communities, the infiltration of civil rights groups, the jailing of whistleblowers and intimidation of journalists etc. but the above affects much of the world in some way or another.
This is why U.S. behavior is seen as such a problem outside its own borders. China has nowhere near the worldwide reach the U.S. does.
Yes, thank you for putting it so clearly. I’m concerned about how US/China affect the REST OF US (WE EXIST, THERE ARE 5 BILLION OF US, HELLO THERE!), so arguments about how well the US treats its own people or how poorly China treats theirs are completely immaterial to me. Its about how those countries operate outside their own borders.
Digital espionage/cyberintelligence/hacking is a boring standard part of intelligence for ANY country that has the capability.
I brought up the Snowden stuff only as evidence that the US does it too. The point is not to criticize the US, the point is any country that can do digital espionage, China included, is doing it, simply because no one wants to fall behind in a global arms race. I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man.
And I don’t appreciate the straw manning and condescension. I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.
> I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man.
> And I don’t appreciate the straw manning
If you have to turn "scrutiny" into "makes it the evil boogie man", that's kind of a giveaway. I would call this the compiler error of online comments, and static typing can catch errors without having to run the program every time. Which doesn't only save you time, but the readers too; starting the program, getting bogus results, freeing memory and writing a bug report takes much more time.
> I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.
I don't know what you tried, but going by what's written here, you responded to the criticism of nonchalance with "the problem is that $random_stuff_about_the_US_nobody_denies", as if that refutes said criticism.
When there is an article about a disease, wouldn't it make sense to talk about all sorts of other diseases instead, so nobody thinks that disease is "the evil boogie man"? Are comments about US spook stuff also riddled with comments about China or Israel or any other the hundreds of nations, just so nobody gets the impression that "the US is the only country doing this"?
Why not simply assume everybody knows these very basic things? It's not like any comments (I saw) imply that they don't, unless you read that into them.
Before you put US on the same pedestal of morality as China, you must equate them on apples to apples basis. Picking and choosing horrible things US has done in the past is very convenient.
I immigrated to US and I’ve travelled extensively over the world. If you’re picking and choosing Guantanamo, Iraq war, etc. then I can do the same about Tianman square.
Let’s objectively assess the situation without picking and choosing - I can do the same about positive aspects of US: functioning justice system, representative democracy, cultural diversity and acceptance, LGBT rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, right to run for public office, ... we could go on and on about this with no end.
I have a humble request: When arguing about A, please do not talk about B to escape the reality and scrutiny that A deserves. It’s distracting and tiring.