A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?

Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'

It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.

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Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.

> Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?

Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.

> I think it's something similar with China

China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.

> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it

This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.

> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber

Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?

> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging

Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.

> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.

Is your comment an example of this?