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by bepotts 2790 days ago
It's popular to hate the US government and US tech companies, but the US government and US tech companies are far more ethical than the Chinese.

It's ridiculous to assert otherwise.

2 comments

Are they though?

Did the Chinese government spend the last century toppling democratically elected governments and subjecting the populations to the horrors that followed purely for economic gain?

I guess not.

Lets not mention the torture program, which the current head of CIA took part.

Or the "humanitarian" invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia and Syria without UN Security Council mandate. Especially Lybya, which is much more democratic now with it's slave markets.

Or the protectionism that goes against the WTO treaties.

Or by weaponizing the dollar, which is supposed to be the world's reserve currency, by the means of sanctions.

Should I mentions the use of nuclear weapons and napalm against targets with dense civilian population close by?

China, Russia and the US are all draconian regimes. Some target it's own people, other target people overseas and others target both.

The difference is that one has holywood at it's side to show them saving the world time and time again from aliens, metheors and vile russians / nazis. And people just treat the US government as the good heart kid that makes a few mistakes.

Now, honestly, would you rather live in Russia, China or the US?
If I had to move to one the 3 would be the US for sure.

I find China a bit chaotic and Russia too conservative for me (although St. Petersbourg seemed a really cool place).

I'm very critic of the US government, especially regarding foreign policy, but that does not mean I have a problem with regular Americans at all.

On the contrary there are lots o very important initiatives started by Americans. I just wish the focus of the government would shift to them.

Hello whataboutism!
Calling other peoples argument whataboutism is the get out of jail free card for double standards.
Depends who is defining what is ethical of course. The fact that ethics is cultural will mean that each side will probably think they are the most ethical.

To disprove that claim: try to come up with an ethical framework which makes no mention of a higher power as justification, and tell us why it is better than all others. Most land on some variant of utilitarianism and then disagree what the objective function should be.

We can dance around the idea of ethics or we can actually look at historical actions taken by both. Putting the Chinese & US government interventionism on the same plain for objective ethics judgements is a joke (regardless of whos cultural ethical standards you use).
Serious question, are you just hand waving the Cultural Revolution away or have you never heard of it?

Maybe it's like a C and a program stack, they just don't teach it in college anymore, because it's not important and you don't need to know about it.

All of his/her comments in this post are seemingly only there to stir up people. There's no evidence behind the things they're saying other than a hand-waving attempt at minimizing China's bad faith actions by saying others do similar things. When arguing that someone who is 10/10 bad is equal to someone that is 4/10 bad you have to really reach to equate the two and not see the nuance.
There is no evidence? Too funny, I was hoping the work required was just reminding this (expected educated) audience of history, rather than teaching a full course myself.

There is a reason the statue of Lin Zexu is in Chatham Square, NYC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Zexu

Your posts in this thread have continually grown more and more incivil and arrogant in defense of Chinese spying. Stating that you thought this audience HN was smart but now you realize you have to teach this audience on HN is incredibly condescending. What do you get out of taking this stance towards this audience?