It is possible (and in fact, expected) of companies that take these kinds of pledges to have a baseline set of human rights that most people (or at least most people on Apple's board) will agree on, even if there is ambiguity around the edges.
The alternative is saying, "we'll stand for this thing that we refuse to define in even vague terms, and as a result it will be impossible for anyone to evaluate whether or not we're succeeding, or even making progress."
If Apple can't determine even in broad terms what is and isn't a rights violation, then their declaration is meaningless. They don't need to decide for everyone, and not everyone needs to agree with them -- it's fine for other people and companies to come up with their own criteria. But Apple has to at least some internal idea of what they mean when they say they stand for something, otherwise it will be impossible for them to build real policies around the declaration.
And some of this honestly isn't that controversial among scholars. As an analogy, if I commit to avoiding stocking unhealthy products in my store, I don't need to know for certain whether or not coffee is healthy in order to say Cadbury Eggs are not -- pretty much everyone agrees on that. In the same way, we don't really need to debate whether or not healthcare is a human right to understand that forced abortions, forced monitoring and 'reeducation', and concentration camps for Uighurs are violations of their human rights.
When I first went to China I read up on my wife’s home town online and found out about a native book store trying to preserve their culture so I though I’d check it out. When I visited it had been raided by the police ‘to prevent copyright violations’ and closed down. The shops everywhere were chock full of ripped off CDs and movies, but here this one time they decide to enforce that?
My wife is native Han but about a third of her relatives are officially minorities. None of them speak the minority language or read the script or have anything to do with minority culture. Minority script is used all over the place, but I talked to a university lecturer that’s a friend of the family, he told me most of the signs are gibberish, and told me how to spot ones that had been put up upside down. It’s a farce.
Thanks for this. I know there are benefits of living with awareness of death (like practicing your values more), but I cannot reap them as long as I avoid thinking about death.
The Five Eyes countries, Germany, Poland, and Japan have overwhelmingly negative views (easy to explain for historical reasons).
But you see overwhelmingly positive views of Russia in China, India, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia; and ambivalent views elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean.
I think lumping everyone together is the least biased group of outsiders.
“It found that Russia was the least popular G-8 country globally. ... Overall, the percentage of respondents with a positive view of Russia was only 31%.“
That supports the wider point quite well. Though Russia has very positive relations with a small number of countries. For example providing China with massive aid in living memory.
Dumping Apple isn't the best example, since Apple is a luxury product that is more about signaling status than about a great computing power-vs-cost value proposition.
>since Apple is a luxury product that is more about signaling status than about a great computing power-vs-cost value proposition
this isn't a universal phenomenon, funnily enough in China the brand appears to have the opposite effect[1]. It's more seen like a vanity purchase akin to I guess something like a Gucci bag.
"Apple iPhone users in China are generally less educated, hard-up and with few valuable assets, compared to users of other mobile phone brands such as Huawei Technologies or Xiaomi, according to a report by research agency MobData.
The Shanghai-based firm also found that most iPhone users are unmarried females aged between 18 and 34, who graduated with just a high-school certificate and earn a monthly income of below 3,000 yuan (HK$3,800). They are perceived to be part of a group known as the “invisible poor” – those who do not look as poor as their financial circumstances."
I agree with the sibling comments about technical superiority, however, I see a flaw in your logic. If people are buying apple for signalling, then it would make sense for them to similarly ditch it in favor of another signal which better fits their identity.
Not everybody buys lates ridiculously overpriced iPhones. Some of us buys Apple because Android has unbearable UX. Older models or SE models are perfectly fine.
Yeah, the tea and herbs part is the first part, near the middle and end you start to see things like heavy industry.
There's a Marxist concept called "commanding heights of the economy" which refers to things like public utilities and transportation.
Theoretically a socialist government can retain control of this limited set of industries while letting foreign capital develop the others, so that the capital can't totally control the government.
"Collapse" is a bit too passive to describe what happened to the USSR. Gorbachev was a pro-American advocate of Social Democracy (aka the Denmark-style state that Bernie likes).
He thought that Russia would become prosperous by adopting capitalism. Instead, GDP shrank by 50% and Russia went from a global superpower to being encircled in its own backyard.
Sure, but the fruit was pretty rotten at that point after 18 years of Brezhnev. Maybe if Gorbachev had followed Kruschev, it could've been done without a chaotic mass selloff to gangsters.
The fruit was rotten under Kruschev too, the difference between him and Brezhnwv is that his administration picked a lot of low-hanging fruit that the public approved of (Apartments, and a relaxation of absolutely insane Stalinist repression.)
The economy didn't work well under either of them, but Kruschev is credited for leaving things much better than he found them.
China did manage such a turnaround, though. Of course, they had the contemporaneous USSR collapse to point to as well as maoism in living memory, so that probably made it more politically possible.
GDP dropped 50% when honestly reporting facts stopped becoming a criminal offense.
Gorbachev liked social democracy, but the Communist Party warlords like Putin didn't disappear in the revolution, they hung back and then took over again.
WeChat isn't some app for government leaders. Its userbase in America are ordinary people in the Chinese diaspora who use it to stay in contact with family and friends worldwide. Like banning Kakaotalk for Koreans or Line for Japanese.
Also, if "all companies in China are really extensions of the government", then what do you call this relationship where Trump forces Bytedance to sell Tiktok to Microsoft and give the U.S. government a share of the profit?
What is this comment trying to say, by putting China outside of the "rest of the world tribe"? Does this mean that Chinese people are a different species, or what?
It is countering OPs assertion that this is US vs China. They are arguing China is drawing a line around themselves (to keep competition out), and the US is merely recognizing it (by keeping competition in) and still participating with the rest of the world economy.
Does China really identify as "a country that views the US as its enemy (politically, economically, philosophically)" or is that just a projection of how the US feels about China?
Absolutely. China does not recognize even the idea of Human Rights, let alone their implementation. What do you think the Great Chinese Firewall is for? Shutting out all those ideas from the rest of the world that are deemed hostile to the ruling party's ideology.
> America is a fundamentally revolutionary nation fighting for global democracy.
I've studied the history of the US enough to know that this is brazen propaganda with no firm basis in reality. The US has no problem propping up brutal tyrants when it's convenient.
Correct, the US doesn't only support totalitarians. However, it does support them. The US support for democracy isn't based on principles is my point, it's based on convenience, and the US will merrily crush a democracy and install a dictator if it's in US interests.
> Ah, this is your mistake. The US support for democracy is absolutely based on principles. It is the exceptions that you're focusing on and trying to use to create some essentialist caricature of the US.
I honestly don't have to try to make the US into some caricature. The US isn't good or evil, it's a self-interested nation like any other nation and it practices realpolitik like any other nation. I'm simply not putting it on a pedestal and pretending that the actions of the country are anything other than pure self-interest.
For example, is healthcare a right? Is food a right? Is education a right? Is there a "right to development"?