| ▲ | glenstein 2 days ago | ||||||||||||||||
One party authoritarian dictatorship with no free speech or democratic elections and no civil rights movement seems pretty bad to me. No amount of whataboutism is ever going to compete with that. It also seems like clashes with India, every southeast asian country with internationally recognized territory rights in the South China sea, the forcible takeover of Hong Kong, arming and economically supporting Russia, Pakistan and Iran are bad, and the increasing probability of a hot war to take over Taiwan should count as bad, perhaps the most urgently dangerous threat to global peace in the 21st century. The United States track record post WW2 is a complicated combination of monstrously immoral Kissenger and Bush style overthrows of democracies and genuinely valuable maintenance of a post WW2 democratic order focused on things like free speech and human rights. I stay with full sincerity that in the decade plus that I've been here on hn seeing whataboutism as a strategy for defending China, I'm yet to encounter anything that feels like a sincere engagement with United States role in the world as a combination of positives and negatives, it's always flatly one-sided messaging that feels like it's aimed at a favorable audience that already agree rather than like it's sincerely attempting to persuade. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | Hardwired8976 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Cool that you completely ignore the US economically and militarily supporting Isreal | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | shimman 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Your first sentence describes the US for the last 40 years. One corporate party that passes legislation to benefit the elites while there are no counter civil rights movements where US citizens are literally less free than they were 10 years ago. The US was birthed as a white ethno-national colonial state. It required 20% of the population to be held in bondage while denying suffrage to 80% of the population. It took 100 years + a civil war before slavery was ended, and it took nearly another 100 years before every American could truly vote. Not because it was the "right time" either, go look at how the women's suffrage movement started. They were fire bombing factories and capitalists. The propaganda surely runs deep, but something tells me you're too rich to really suffer so congrats I guess. I'm sure many wish they could trade places with your privilege. I bet those that will suffer from needless starvation or lack of medical care due to US imperialism would really like to trade places too. Sorry but these boogey man acts fall flat when you look at how hostile and anti-human the US government has become over the recent decades. You can't blame this on one person, the system was always rotten and a course correction will happen. You just better pray it's the right people directing the ship. | |||||||||||||||||
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