[kragen]

Usually it signals that the person is opposed to US foreign policy because they consider it imperialist, but in this case it seems to signal that the person favors an explicitly imperialist foreign policy for the US. Horseshoe theory, I suppose.

[dingnuts]

no, the commentator is simply proposing actually responding to the imperialism of China by protecting US assets and national security instead of rolling over and taking it because of misguided principles about free trade and intellectual property that the CCP has undermined for forty years to arrive in a position where they can undercut us on price through human rights abuses.

It is China that is imperialist and that has ruined the post cold war free trade world order. The US must respond or China will be the world hegemon. Would you prefer that?

[piva00]

> It is China that is imperialist and that has ruined the post cold war free trade world order. The US must respond or China will be the world hegemon.

The USA is the current imperial power, go ask us born in South America how it felt to listen to stories on dictatorships brought on by the imperialism of the USA; or societies having to bend for the spread of Reagan's economics cancer dismantling any semblance of social democracy to give into "The Third Way" which had to embrace the economic policies the USA wanted others to abide to.

At this exact moment, with the current American situation with a sick society electing a sick individual into power: yeah, I think I'd like to give a chance to China if Xi is out of power and someone like Deng Xiaoping or Hu Jintao is in control.

> intellectual property that the CCP has undermined for forty years to arrive in a position where they can undercut us on price through human rights abuses.

You should check out the stuff the USA outright stole to become the hegemony it is: jet propulsion, radar, atomic bomb developments, the Brits had to see it all get blatantly taken by the USA after needing help in WW2.

Edit: or even more relevant to contemporary times we live now, ask Canadians how they feel about the USA forcing their hand on Arrow Aviation, subsequently stealing their brains to build NASA Jet Propulsion Labs. Now they don't have a well developed Arrow to build jets when the USA turns over talking about annexation.

[_bin_]

Every nation tries to influence her neighbors to be more accommodating of her wants and needs. We just happen to be bigger and better at doing it. Speaking historically, and relative to other past and present world powers, y'all are far better off living near America.

It is completely reasonable that we wouldn't put up with leaders objectively hostile to our interests popping up in our backyard, not after the last one who did got within a hair's breadth of planting nuclear missiles a hundred miles off our coast.

I actually wouldn't care nearly as much about China were Deng in power. I'd worry a bit given that we don't want to be economically eclipsed, sure, but my present concerns are directly tied to the current leadership and posture of china.

Are you suggesting we were wrong to transfer technology out of Germany post-WWII? To me it seems like a hell of a lot better as some form of repayment than the onerous reparations regime we tried post-WWI. Vae victis; if all millions of American dead cost Germany were some scientists and patents, they should count themselves lucky.

Saying America "stole" JPL from Avro is also a crazy interpretation. The Arrow was an incredibly expensive project: canada had about 20 million people at the time and was in terrible economic shape. Diefenbaker's decision remains controversial, and most people agree that destroying the project so thoroughly was just stupid, but you can't support the idea that we "stole" something from Canada or somehow compelled her to kill the project.

[piva00]

> Every nation tries to influence her neighbors to be more accommodating of her wants and needs. We just happen to be bigger and better at doing it. Speaking historically, and relative to other past and present world powers, y'all are far better off living near America.

So... Imperialism is your God given right? No questions about what millions of people would have preferred to live under, in their sovereignty, in their freedom? Got it. Every action has a reaction.

> It is completely reasonable that we wouldn't put up with leaders objectively hostile to our interests popping up in our backyard, not after the last one who did got within a hair's breadth of planting nuclear missiles a hundred miles off our coast.

It's not reasonable you'd prop up dictatorships who went to kill thousands, destroy the democratic process for generations of millions of people which in turn created an environment where aftershocks of these dictatorships left whole nations with a fragile democracy, and populations with very little tradition in civics. Because you were scared of another ideology.

It might be reasonable for you, from your point of view as a citizen of an imperial power; for the ones subjugated by this it only created resentment.

> Are you suggesting we were wrong to transfer technology out of Germany post-WWII? To me it seems like a hell of a lot better as some form of repayment than the onerous reparations regime we tried post-WWI. Vae victis; if all millions of American dead cost Germany were some scientists and patents, they should count themselves lucky.

No, I'm saying you were wrong in fucking over the Brits, the Tizard Mission went to the USA to forge an alliance where advanced technology developed by the UK could be worked together between UK-USA, instead of being a partner the USA simply stole the technology for itself while the UK was being beaten down by Nazis, an opportunistic parasite move. Not only that but the USA also cut off British scientists and engineers from the Manhattan Project, after all the contributions done to bring your atomic weapons into play, the one thing that catapulted the USA's hegemony into power.

> Saying America "stole" JPL from Avro is also a crazy interpretation. The Arrow was an incredibly expensive project: canada had about 20 million people at the time and was in terrible economic shape. Diefenbaker's decision remains controversial, and most people agree that destroying the project so thoroughly was just stupid, but you can't support the idea that we "stole" something from Canada or somehow compelled her to kill the project.

America forced the dismantling of Avro, even if the Arrow project was expensive it was the USA forcing Canada to give up on Avro, in its downfall came the USA to steal brains to work on JPL, and take you to the moon.

Your country is great at stealing others' tech through economical pressure: stealing brains by promising money, stealing technology when it's convenient, and I'm tired of reading Americans complaining about China's IP theft because it's absurdly hypocritical. You gotta learn your own country's history.

As an imperial power I believe your time is coming to past, your ideology is not holding anymore as a force to propel humanity forward, it did make the world better for a while but for the past 40 years it's been only a slow downfall... If you travel around the USA you can feel it, how dated everything looks, how badly society actually doesn't work, the decay of it is quite palpable.

[_t9ow]

> kill thousands

Small nitpick: It would be more accurate to count these victims in figures of hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions. The Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966 alone, conducted under the imprimatur of the CIA, resulted in the deaths of 500,000-1,000,000 people, and perhaps even more. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

[kragen]

Yes, but here in America, where piva00 and I are, only tens of thousands of people were killed by US-backed dictatorships, not hundreds of thousands or millions.

[piva00]

I meant Avro in my edit but can't edit the message anymore.

[colechristensen]

Eh.

Nixon helped bring China into the global community and the economic ties help bring (hundreds of?) millions out of extreme poverty and built up a major trade partner. Now with China's success the very free trade policy between our countries needs to be adjusted and slowly dialed back towards fairness.

The problem being there are plenty of actors whose motivation isn't "balancing what's best for my country and the world" in a fair way but just "whatever is best for me right now", and the shortsighted selfishness (which in different actors both supports and opposed similar policies for different reasons) really gets in the way of arriving at an optimal outcome for everyone.

[RUnconcerned]

Imperialism is when you take all the resources capitalists poured into your country because you had horrendously low labor costs and use them to develop yourself into an economic superpower rather than meekly continuing to be the factory for cheap crap for western nations. Got it.