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Comment by estearum

17 hours ago

Western liberal ideals are better than the opposite. It is misanthropic to build autocratic societies.

China's ideals make better public services and puts less pressure on environment. But China may not be the opposite you are referring to here.

  • > puts less pressure on environment

    China has been competing with India for decades for the most-polluted cities crown, and only slightly ranks below the US and Russia in CO2 emissions per capita. It's also the only large country where its emissions have been growing over the last decade. Where does the idea come from that China somehow puts less pressure on the environment? Less than what, exactly?

    • >and only slightly ranks below the US and Russia

      By slightly ranks below you mean ~50-60% per capital.

      >China somehow puts less pressure on the environment

      PRC renewables at staggering scale.

      Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to MORE than annual global consumption of oil. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. That's fucking obscene amount of carbon sink, and frankly at full productionm annual PRC solar + wind can on paper displace 100% of oil, 100% of lng, and good % of coal (again annual utilization) once storage figured out.

      This BTW functionally makes PRC emission negative, by massive margin, arguably the only country who is.

      It's only retarded emission accounting rules that says PRC should be penalized for manufacturing renewables, but buyers credited AND fossil producers like US not penalized for extraction, which US has only increased.

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Building autocratic societies is exactly what much of the West, including the US and UK, are doing right now.

  • And to the extent they're doing that, that's bad.

    • That makes your argument a true scotsman, though. Western liberal ideals are the supreme ones, you're just not doing it right!

      Much has been said about the purported superiority of western values, but as we've all seen the USA was very quick to get rid of even the slightest notion of these values when Trump promised them some money and a dominant vibe.

      The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

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western liberal democracies tend to use "autocratic" as an epithet (though, i guess, there are fewer countries that marker is used against for which it's false now than ~50 years ago). for the first sentence, "the opposite" of western liberal ideas will yield 10 answers from 9 people :-)