I'm American. If the choice is between the current US direction or China, then no, I don't think the word "healthy" should be anywhere near this discussion.
We need to accept that being too close to America is harming us and start funding projects to protect our assets e.g talent leaking out to American entities.
america is a continent. let’s take back our vocabulary (fellow european here).
the little orange man shows very well what i mean when he started giving names to the gulf of mexico.
"In English, North America is its own continent as is South America. The two can be collectively labeled the Americas or the Western hemisphere. Canadians frequently refer to themselves as North Americans and never as Americans. To insist this change is to demand the entire world’s lingua franca redefine words and thereby cause mass confusion for its speakers simply because doing so would be consistent with an arbitrary definition found in a foreign language."
I doubt many Spanish or Portuguese speakers refer to themselves in English.
Regardless, sure South Americans can absolutely call themselves Americano in the continental sense. But I know in Brazil for example "Americano" is casually understood to mean from the US, and in general South Americans are more likely to identify as argentino, brasileiro, chileno, colombiano, etc., or as sul-americano/sudamericano.
Most importantly, when speaking English, virtually all will avoid American for themselves because they know in English it means estadounidense.
People in China live under totalitarian rule, that much is true.
But how free is the average North American, where getting sick can bring you and your family financial ruin? Where the "free press" is controlled by corporations who are also the main source of campaign funding for politicians? Where their urban spaces are designed to require you to have a car and promote complete atomized individuals?
All these things are from the private sector and may be left behind if you like (do younger generations even listen to corporate news?)
The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.
We can talk about all this stuff on an American form, but good luck talking about any of China's issues on a Chinese Forum. Lets not talk about how China regularly kills Catholic priests and bishops. Anyone who tries to glaze China is a propagandized fool.
..you forgot to mention that any technology in China, foreign or domestic, can and will be used for and to the benefit of the -military- party.. But like someone posted: "not perfect" fits the bill.
Check out the Sean Ryan Show with Palmer Luckey on China and military tech.
tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.
Is your contention that Hong Kong is also a totalitarian society? Have you been to Hong Kong in the last 5 years? I feel like people saying these sorts of things are just completely divorced from reality.
> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.
No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.
Trump's smarter than he lets on. He plays the buffoon in public, but he's smart enough to have gotten elected twice. Which is two times more than I've managed to.
You don't have to be smart to be elected. You have to be a good liar. And it's really easy to be a good liar when you have gotten so deep into bullshitting that you believe your own lies.
Also, being useful to the right people helps. Because they will dump their own money and time into bolstering your campaign.
Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent. US is heavily heterogenous and despite that you segregated like a third of society at the time.
Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.
During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.
My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.
As a different Brit I do not accept such moral relativism.
China’s governments actions are on a completely different level - for example:
“””
Since 2014, the government of the People's Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide.
Why do we ignore all the human right abuses the US perform abroad? Iraq, Afghanistan, now Iran, Gaza and Lebanon through Israel, support to Saudi Arabia (which would not exist without the US), El Salvador... And inside it's also horrible with its treatment to immigrant.
That should be at least comparable (if not worse) than what China is doing.
El Salvador is blessed by evil criminals put away from the streets. It took thousands of those who you defend for a whole country to be free to enjoy tranquility and security. I was born there and I know better than you calling us evil
I am not telling that imprisoning the criminals is a bad things, but the conditions in which this has been done and how they're treated in prison is against human rights by any measure.
This is how china tried to justify its genocide against uighers. Was theboutrage against that just politically motivated? Or do americans only care about ethnic cleansing when theyre not the ones doing it
The US supports the genocide in Gaza, it supports the bombing of Lebanon. The US itself has now started (another) war and bombed Iran.
China is repressing the Uyghur and threatening Taiwan. I don't agree with these actions but is really "orders of magnitude" worse than the destruction the US facilitates in the Middle East?
With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.
It's a little insane to me people comparing negatives of US and China. I mean, the simple fact we're allowed to say just about anything we want that is critical of the administration on this forum, in English and nothing happens is clear there is no comparison.
You have no idea the full breadth of the Chinese government because information is closed so quickly, in America it's all on display right in front.
I don’t know if we’re ahead of the curve but that tired feeling has started turning into hate here in the EU. I guess being threatened with invasion does that to you.
The next decade is going to look very different with America Alone.
I grew up in the states when I was younger, always feeling some closeness to Americans even after I moved back to Europe.
With all that goes on it has changed. Recently I sat on a plane near some Americans discussing their holidays here, and I noticed I felt contempt. Sitting their with insane privilege as their government torches the world.
Individuals remain individuals, and one really ought not to be prejudice. However the lack of resistance I see in in the “land of the free” as their “democratic” institutions collapse just makes me believe they never cared at all. In France cars are torched if the pension age is raised. In America the rise facism apparently doesnt matter to them.
>However the lack of resistance I see in in the “land of the free” as their “democratic” institutions collapse just makes me believe they never cared at all.
Largest protests in US history just in the past year:
My sister and brother recently graduated from college, have been searching for jobs for over 6 months, they can't find anything. They're politically liberal Californians.
Where are you? Are you doing anything at all? Is commenting on Hacker News and taking a paycheck and maybe donating to some politicians all you're willing to do?
Every single no kings protest led to zero results and were a mockery of what protest is even supposed to accomplish. These single day protests where everybody just goes home the same night are doing nothing.
Us as Americans have forgotten what a protest and resistance against the political elite even is. Its not a fucking dance party for already well off people to pretend they're actually doing something meaningful which is what usually gets the most publicity from these.
This provides a pretext to murder people and lock shit down. Violent behavior maked the general public prone to accept and even welcome authoritarian behaviour and policies.
We need to fight it on the streets non violently with actions that disrupt not destroy and resist in the courts and ultimately in the ballot box where we can win.
zero _immediate_ results. hate is a powerful motivator and hard to overcome, and the political machinations also don’t really allow for immediate feedback. we will see what happens this midterm cycle. polls show repudiation of the current administration across all dimensions.
It's just that mobility is still too easy. Anyone with slightly above-average intelligence and a bit of drive can join the oppressors, their arms are wide open. Fraud/corruption is rampant and accepted, all you have to do is open a daycare or homeless shelter and "bend the knee" by claiming some sort of disabled/minority/veteran/woman status. CA has raised over $80 billion for "homeless" and the money is getting spent but very little on the homeless.
Breaking shit is the path of most resistance. Do not do this unless you're young and poor.
The way to win is economic resistance. Stop spending and stop paying taxes. Crash the fucking economy so deep into the ground that the country self-immolates.
From my small bubble it's not that. I'm Dutch, married to an American who now knows enough Dutch such that we can treat it as a secret language when we're in the US.
My family in law seems to swing slightly republican. As a Dutchie, I could get some answers because I'm too naive not to talk about politics. So I got to probe a bit. What I simply found was that they'd say "I can't trust the news, none of it. Not CNN, not Fox News, nothing". Then I'd say "well in the Netherlands, I'd argue that while news outlets have their bias, you can trust them on basic factual reporting". She looked at me with a stare that I could only describe as "oh but honey, you're too young and naive to understand". To which I thought "you don't know the Netherlands. We're not perfect but we're nowhere near as deranged as what I'm seeing here".
I think that explains a lot of it for some people. The trust in the media, all media, is completely broken. Trump has how many fellonies now? Can't trust it. Kamala is doing what now? All talk. DOGE is fixing the government? I fucking hope so! But can't trust the damn news. Whether they do or don't, they are always burning money, god damn bureaucrats.
I feel that's the mindset that my family in law has.
> I can't trust the news, none of it. Not CNN, not Fox News, nothing
This view gets echoed here on HN a lot. I find it very strange to be honest, because I tune in to CNN and I see lots of bias in the commentary and editorial, but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth. It seems to me that the real issue is people don't seem to distinguish between reporting and editorial content / commentary. Stop watching that garbage and actually consume the factual content and analysis. Yeah it's dry and boring but if that isn't enough for you then it just shows you never cared about facts in the first place.
One issue with factual reporting is what facts are getting reported, given that public attention is a very limited resource. People consistently extrapolate from data without knowing if that data is good or bad. So if I show you news with 100 stories of people doing awful things on channel A and 100 stories of people doing awesome things on channel B, both will be factual, but one will have you living more in fear of everyone while the other will inspire you. These are still biases.
One of the least (to the extent possible given the topic) political examples is stranger danger. Kids are safer than ever before, but due to the way stories are reported when bad things do happen to kids, parents are less trust of strangers than ever before (and this is despite the evidence it isn't the strangers who are the risk to kids). The sum total experience that media provides now leads to parents being far more fearful and restrictive of their children than past generations, all without needing to tell any lies.
If all the police reports and research into stranger danger being a false narrative can't combat it, how will ideas with far less evidence to the contrary be countered? Should parents trust the news when it comes to the topic of stranger danger?
> but when it comes to factual reporting they are pretty straightforward and down to earth.
No, not really. I mean for me, yea, sure, easy. But in the general case? It depends on who you are.
The reason I trust CNN is because when a Dutch news source reports more or less the same thing, I can easily see the reporting matches with that of CNN. Because of this, I personally have some built up trust with CNN. When I look at Fox News, oh deary... it's nothing like what I see on the Dutch news.
This is not something I do consciously, it's simply that I happen to watch Dutch news sometimes and I happen to see American news sometimes and it costs no effort for me to compare. Combine that then with that on HN I also sometimes see BBC and similar British venues (e.g. The Economist is also British I believe?), and now I suddenly have 3 countries worth of news sources.
Many Americans don't really know that the UK exists other than that they rebelled against it. Many Americans almost haven't left their 20 mile radius world (many also did of course). But it's these people that I tend to have a lot of in my in-law family or however you call it (schoonfamilie in Dutch). I'm quite exotic to them in that sense, and definitely foreign. Thank god they have some Dutch roots.
Point being: with that mindset, you're not checking out what the BBC has to say on a topic. You're checking American news, not because of patriotism but simply because of that's all you know and going outside of what you know costs effort. And you already have a job to do, come home late, just want to watch your shows in the evening and that's it.
I am by no means saying that this is representative for all Americans, it isn't. What I am saying is: I see this a lot in my slice of the US. The reason I'm sharing it is because what my in-law family is saying is definitely at a much more personal level than whatever conversation I've had with some random, but lovely, person from a hacker space or hacker house in San Francisco.
Yet, I don't see this view a lot on the news. Nor do I hear Dutchies talking about it, they are simply out of the loop when it comes to a view like this. I don't know how prevalent it is, but if many people of a family of 50 to 100 people is in a situation like this, then my bet is that they aren't the only family.
The core problem with the news is that they know how to lie by telling the truth.
You can string together true statements that lead to a false viewpoint very easily. _This_ is the bread and butter of this awful media empire we have nowadays.
Vaccines contain cancer causing agents. Vaccines have crippled people for life. Vaccines have lead to children dying. Do you still want to get a vaccine?
All of those are true statements. But the whole thing is a lie.
I think the biggest lever is just what they decide to give airtime to. It's known that humans are extremely moldable by anchoring- whoever they hear from first they are more likely to trust, and repetition- whatever they hear most they are more likely to trust. Key arguments are picked in some weird process I have yet to figure out, and then 90% of prime airtime is going towards whether <1% of the population people should be able to identify as another gender instead of all the real stuff going on that people should be hearing about.
My running hypothesis has been the trust breakdown arises from social-media overexposure driving lazy nihilism, which in turn gave free reign to a uniquely-corrupt class of politicians. But I'm not sure how to neutrally evaluate that.
I think the collapse of public trust was very intentional, and the result of a much longer term effort than social media.
The most famous examples are likely the tobacco industry spreading misinformation through self-funded studies and experts, and the fossil fuel industry doing the same to seed doubt about climate change. But of course we can think of countless examples of entire industries and individual large corporations pushing out misleading bullshit, threatening or outright killing journalists and activists to cover up their catastrophic fuckups and their chronic conscious excretion of negative externalities.
This has all of course been going on since the dawn of time, but to focus on the last century in the US, we've seen all sorts of corporations and coalitions of rich and powerful people push misinformation into nearly every sector of our society - universities, science, journalism, politics, etc. in order to undermine confidence in shared facts, corrupt people's ability to discern whether or not something is fundamentally true, and sow confusion so that they can continue to operate in perpetuity in this chaotic maelstrom of doubt.
Lots of capture of government towards these ends as well, we can look at the concomitant constant cuts to education in order to weaken people's understanding of the world and ability to think critically. The revocation of the Fairness Doctrine was probably a step change, and Trump represents the sharpest recent escalation of all this.
From day one, he's done everything he can to shred any collective notion of shared objective truth. Anything he doesn't like is fake news, and the idea that the media is lying, scientists are lying, experts are lying, and institutions are lying, he has spread so fucking successfully through society, to the point where Americans no longer have anything like a shared sense of reality.
It seems like we're being reduced to tribes who are organized primarily around faith in various charismatic individuals.
I think this is fundamentally the worst thing he's done, because it lays the foundation for virtually every other conceivable and inconceivable abuse. If people can't even agree on what is happening, we're fucked. People and institutions in power can do anything they want to whoever they want, because the public has lost their ability to even recognize the danger posed to them collectively and thus mount any resistance based on a shared sense of reality.
Social media has definitely famously accelerated aspects of this like the fragmentation and the spread/magnification of fringe worldviews through echo chambers, but I think it's just one (and maybe this is controversial, but I'd be willing to be generous enough to think the 20something year old creators were too stupid to conceive of these long term consequences at first, but who knows, maybe not) element in a much longer and more intentional, malicious war against the many for the benefit of the few.
Not only that, but in tandem the collapse of social capital in the US has been the result of a very intentional process (on top of the multidecade undercurrent of declining social capital). This according to Robert Putnam himself (sorry, don’t have time to find the source now but will add it later).
Trump got so much support because people knew for a long time that the Establishment of mainstream media was switching a lot more towards promoting narratives rather than unbiased journalism. It became worse as paper and TV news was getting replaced by ad-driven clickbait. He called out the previously unquestionable Institutions, and then a lot of people just accepted what he said after that (very simplified).
This is quite interesting. I'm not sure what can to be done to reverse this?
When you've reached a level of untrust where you deem trust itself naive, how can you recover?
Teach Americans to look at news sources in other countries?
Shooting from the hip here. Feels like a duct tape hack on first thought.
I mean that's what I do, subconsciously. I think a lot of Europeans do this because a lot of Europeans tend to speak English and then their actual native language, or something similar (e.g. I wonder how Swiss people experience this).
> In France cars are torched if the pension age is raised.
This is not something to be proud of. You guys are giving yourself loaned freebies, retiring 5+ (!) years earlier than countries like BeNeLux and Germany, and are pretty much expecting the EU to eventually pick up the pieces which will drag us all down.
Other countries don't directly pay for the pensions, but France is staring into a giant fiscal abyss because of their low retirement age (and other generous social benefits). Any attempt to change those results in the country being taken hostage by rioters, thus nothing changes.
At some point France will be in too deep shit and will look to the EU to cover for them. We will all pay for that. And it is deeply unfair because other countries their citizens have accepted later retirement and more frugal benefits to keep their countries fiscally healthy.
France could cover the fiscal hole in other ways, but taxing corporations and wealth at a higher rate also consistently ends up being blocked. And each year the hole gets deeper.
> Any attempt to change those results in the country being taken hostage by rioters, thus nothing changes.
Your theory doesn't actually match with reality, given that Macron's retirement reform was passed into law despite protests. As currently enacted, the age of retirement in France will progressively increase from 62 until reaching 64 in 2030.
It’s not bs. France is lobbying for “Eurobonds”, debt they can take at German interest rates and with Germans etc holding the bag, for about two decades now.
I a European who spent the last decade in America and I'm not sure I'd call Americans privileged compared to Europe. With money being the one means you have to be treated well in society, comparing it to Europe, America feels like the hunger games. Want healthcare (ie surviving)? Healthy food? To own your house? Welcome to the games
As a middle-class American, I don't feel like I have much input into the Iran war. I've voted, I've signed a few petitions, and I'm open to more suggestions for how I can stop the war, but I don't really think I can do much else- protest somewhere I suppose and hope that's helpful somehow
As a European, how do you influence your government?
Started by Russia against Ukraine and without active participation of Europe. US literally attacked Iran to support Israel.
If we go by analogies, Ukraine should've waged genocidal war against Belarus and eventually started bombing Russia and then Europe joined and they bombed Russia together.
not all of us are just "sitting here with insane privilege." it's quite dangerous for some of us right now.
I'm trans. this Administration does not like us. after Charlie Kirk's murder, things got legitimately scary. Musk was retweeting people who called us "deranged bioweapons" who needed to be "forcibly institutionalized." NSPM-7 is surveilling and infiltrating trans organizations. the Heritage Foundation proposed labeling us as "ideological extremists," in the same category as neo-Nazis. if I'm arrested, I'll go to a men's prison where I'll likely be given to a violent inmate as his cellmate to "pacify" him (V-coding.)
so yeah, I keep my head down. a lot of Jews kept their heads down in Germany in the '30s, you know? and just like then, it doesn't seem like other countries are too keen on taking us in as refugees. I hope that changes if things get bleak.
I wish you well but your made up trans genocide is not comparable to jews in the '30's and unless you and your family are being rounded up and executed please stfu about it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Not like the 1930s, no. But there are similarities in the discourse to how jewish people were demonized in the decades (well, centuries, in that case) previous. Your comment seems to suggest that no one should speak up for themselves until they face literal genocide. Care to walk that back?
Not really the same at all. For a start, Jewish men didn't have laws passed to grant them unrestricted access to every space intended only for women. But men like the commenter upthread have had this done for them, at the request of allied activists. Can you see why this is such an unpopular policy? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole child-harming medical scandal on top of this.
you're right, I shouldn't compare the "eradication" rhetoric back then to the "eradication" rhetoric now. I shouldn't compare the concentration camp rhetoric then to the institutionalization rhetoric now. I shouldn't compare the systemic rape then to the prison rape now. I shouldn't compare the ambient risk of being arrested on the street then to the risk of being arrested in day to day life in unsafe States now. I shouldn't compare the ugly, antisemitic propaganda posters then to the ugly, transphobic propaganda posters now.
and I certainly shouldn't compare the moral panic then to the moral panic now.
I offer two hypotheses on why my original comment has been so heavily downvoted:
1. people think it's not that bad, or not going to get that bad, and/or
2. people think my people deserve it, while yours didn't.
yup. I was taught in school in Europe to admire Americans and their might. Only in the last few years I've come to understand they are maybe one of the worst western countries there is. Countless wars, even under Obama, so it's not a president x or y thing. It's culcture. I would go as far as to say I'd rather visit Russia than America at this point. America is great at hiding their true colors and we've been properly brainwashed in the West by this.
Russia is still whole other level of evil compared to America.
If nothing else, Americans at least put some value on the lives of their own troops - when the F15 got shot down in Iran, the launched a massive rescue operation. Back in the 70's public pressure over casualties pretty much ended Vietnam war. Meanwhile Russia in Ukraine is sending just meatwaves of young Russian men, one after another to die for nothing, far surpassing death toll of USA in Vietnam, and their government & most citizen seem to be okay with that. That is what I find most terrifying about Russia. The utter lack of compassion and care towards their fellow Russians that just happen to be poorer, or live in the provinces rather than rich cities. Don't get me even started on how they treat their troops, the culture of corruption and abuse in the armed forces...
Both countries are ruled by psychopaths, but Russia is way, way more rotten as a society.
Preventing the number one sponsor of terrorism from getting a nuke absolutely saves people. Even if you don't like the externalities of it. Or is the HN crowd still believing the "we just want nuclear energy (with highly enriched uranium)" story? I genuinely don't know. Humans have a near infinite ability to stare at the sun and insist it's dark, so long as it supports their world view.
Even US Intelligence didn't believe they were close to getting a nuke. And given that they were in negotiations about controlling their nuclear program before the US attacked, it's hard to credit US foreign policy on this front