[CMay]

Certainly the world is full of actions and reactions, nothing is happening in a vacuum. You don't have to be from a country to take sides, but presumably you have some kind of moral compass, some kind of values around personal freedom or the worth of a human life.

There can be a very real cost, because one side comes from an ideology with a history that wants to conquer the entire Earth which caused World War 2 while the other side is trying to prune the planet like a bonsai to prevent it from descending into total chaos to preserve some sense of international order.

Europe was constantly at war, and we helped stabilize it. Middle East as been constantly at war, and if Iran can be sorted then it will be the closest to some sense of peace it's been in a long time.

We used to be in Japan, Philippines, Germany, Vietnam, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. How many are US territories? None. We aren't out there to conquer the globe and take land. We're usually fighting other people's wars for them, because they're up against better resourced opponents. Meanwhile China is over there building artificial islands, ramming other country's ships, creating ideological police stations in countries around the world to harass people and engaging in the most widespread international interference campaigns in human history.

They do not treat their people well and they do not have free speech. The internet is flooded with their propaganda now, because they have a human numbers advantage.

It's true that given time most advantages are temporary, but there's always that slim chance we could slow them down until the CCP collapses and they could become a more normal country.

[esarbe]

You sound like you've swallowed pro-US-propaganda hook, line and sinker.

The reason the middle-east is at constant war is because colonialist machinations. Same goes for south-Saharan Africa. And the US is a big colonialist player, just ask Vietnam, South-America, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. They all have been attacked by the US because of US colonial interests. If anything, one could make the argument that the PRC is treading much more lightly than the US.

That said - I'm not defending the PRC by any way; it's a state-capitalist hell hole that's suppressing workers by denying them any ability to organize and whose political class is purely focused on furthering their own interests and that of the moneyed elite, the common person be damned.

The thing is - so is the US.

[CMay]

If you think those were about colonization, you would be well served to examine history closer.

[frognumber]

Ah yes. The exceptionalism argument.

There's the good "us" and the bad "them."

[CMay]

I didn't make an exceptionalist argument, but if any country's behavior and values can be measured compared to others, you will always be able to make some kind of decision about where those fall in terms of goodness or badness. Do you not believe in good and bad?

[frognumber]

I believe in good and bad.

I don't believe in US good, non-US bad. I also don't believe the same about my religion or my political party, for that matter.

How you measure depends on weights you assign (cultural system of values) and what information you use (media bias).

You can rank in the extremes (e.g. North Korea as worse than Belgium), since they come out that way by almost any set of information and values. Comparing the US to most other countries, there isn't a clear ordering. If you believe the things you wrote, I think the other comment summed it up well: "You sound like you've swallowed pro-US-propaganda hook, line and sinker."

Most countries have similar propaganda, by the way.

[CMay]

Most countries have some kind of story they tell about themselves. New Zealand doesn't have any illusions that it is a superpower. It doesn't have the resources, the talent pool or any of that to even begin to dream of it. That is natural. If New Zealand was powerful, then it would find itself in a position of greater responsibility.

You cannot compare countries that barely have the option of ambition with something like the US and even begin to imagine that it is meaningful. You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US. You can rewind history to name other civilizations.

These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale. They have to answer about what the reasons were when things went wrong and whether they agree things went wrong. If people are even allowed to talk about it.

It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people. You can always find counter-examples, but how influential are they in the larger picture?

[frognumber]

> These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale.

This is an extreme claim, and incorrect. If you'd like to see counterexamples, you'll see many corrupt regimes in Africa, which did extreme harm to their own people. You'll see many regional powers.

One does not need to be a global superpower to be good or evil.

There's also nothing magical about Germany or Japan. Many countries had similar resources. Both chose to invest those resources into industrial militarism.

One can make the argument for a handful of countries which our outliers for land area or population, but in general, if any country chooses to invest in military and attack its neighbors, it has good odds of success.

> You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US

Germany was an outlier, on the evil end, but otherwise, it's a selection of which facts one picks.

A comparison would require deciding which facts to compare on. For the US, the "evil" argument comes back to things like slavery and the genocide of the native peoples.

One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...

The US does pretty nasty things, even if they don't always make US news or grade school textbooks.

> It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people

This is an ad hominem, and a poorly placed one. You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.

Many of us were where you are when we were younger.

[CMay]

It's largely correct, but you're missing the point. For many countries, it does not matter whether they are good or bad on a grander scale, because their power is so limited that they are largely confined. Countries that exist on the lower end of the intellectual development scale are expected to fall apart.

Not all countries are structured the same, are at the same stage of development, or resourced enough enough to arrive at a sense of responsibility.

That is why these countries are different. The US is the most different, because it is the only one of its kind. There is no other country you can compare the US to.

A lot of negative things about the US are being misrepresented or inflated by propaganda without sufficient context. It isn't all positive, but the US is a huge country and our history didn't begin 250 years ago.

> One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...

I could come up with way more examples than that, but for each example you have to ask the questions. You don't simply label an event and point at a face to say "bad, they did it and this is who they are". Is it true? Why did they do it. What were they thinking. Was it an accident, intentional, what was the context? What else was going on in the world, and what was the world like then? What were they up against? Was the choice easy or hard? Was the badness mitigated, or was it unmitigated badness?

> You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.

Your unbalanced schooling is not a compelling argument for why I am wrong as much as it is a piece of evidence for why you lost perspective when you got older.