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Comment by stego-tech

19 hours ago

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Just last year the USA de-banked (from EU banks) EU citizens who are International Criminal Court officials for "opening preliminary investigations against Israeli personnel". The USA wields incredible power over financial interactions.

  • THANK YOU, I knew I was overlooking a recent example in favor of historical ones!

    • Trump is making it worse, but there had been examples of bad behavior. Now the US is completely uncontrolled. I can't say we wouldn't do something like happened here (trying to stop a foreign company from selling stuff or developing stuff) if it was doing something significant about weapons or ai.

While I don’t agree with your tone, and I’m sure an unbiased reading of history also wouldn’t agree with your tone…

Who would you rather be world police? One or more of Cuba, Iran, China, Russia?

I don't think anyone is holding the US as blameless or perfect, but it gets exhausting to see Chinese propaganda every single time anything like this happens.

When the US does something reprehensible, people rarely come up in droves going on and about China's enablement of the North Korean regime or the many abuses enacted on its population, but every single time the US does anything we had to read a whole lot on how "at least China doesn't invade countries" as if the prime reason as to why China doesn't tend to involve itself militarily isn't precisely American hegemony. The rate at which the country is portrayed as some paragon of human rights, equality and peacefulness is either insane, deluded, or paid for.

  • You have to be joking.

    The media is almost daily full of China scares. Also, the comments here are not talking about who started this war, with the GPU sanctions and the arrest of the daughter of Huawei's founder.

    Does it mean the Chinese are the good guys? No, because there are not good guys, but there is certainly a side that is extremely aggressive an can't conceive that others can have their own interests. And it's not the Chinese.

    • > The media is almost daily full of China scares

      That gets repeated a lot. Is there any source?

      > there is certainly a side that is extremely aggressive an can't conceive that others can have their own interests. And it's not the Chinese.

      Ask the Taiwanese about it. Or most countries dealing with border disputes with the PRC.

      4 replies →

    • >but there is certainly a side that is extremely aggressive an can't conceive that others can have their own interests. And it's not the Chinese.

      It's not the Chinese? You sure? There's probably nobody more economically aggressive in the planet and they just threw a hissy fit at the EU the other day for doing something they've been doing since forever.

      I care not for "the media", I care that I don't have enough fingers to count the amount of people trying to justify this in this very comment section. I'm sure western media is not favorable to Chinese interests, I'd be utterly baffled if Chinese media was favorable to western interests. I do not expect public sentiment to follow a party line because we are better than that, but I do expect a certain reticence to go all out and justify opposition in intellectually rotten ways.

> have military bases scattered around the world to invade anyone at a moment's notice

I wonder how that came about?

What’s that fence analogy called?

Chester-what?

I think people are frustrated with the firehose of whataboutism rather than disagreeing with you with the idea that things are not perfect.

  • I mean, the whataboutism is a critical tool in negating propaganda. Rather than focus on the reprehensibility of anyone using threats of violence like this to force specific outcomes favorable to domestic policy, everyone is instead hung up on the fact China did this.

    Whataboutism, used effectively, is meant to draw parallels rather than excuse behavior. Fuck China for what it's doing here, but also fuck the countries and entities who have used similar tactics in the past to great effect. Don't just conveniently put on blinders for what's happening/happened at home all because the government-labelled "baddie" did it too.

    • Whataboutism, used effectively, is designed to change the subject and stop detailed exploration of the topic at hand. Which is what you're doing in this thread. We don't need to turn a news-relevant thread specifically about the CCP into a thread relitigating decades of American government and business behavior. You can make a separate submission to discuss the US if you'd like.

> The details change, but the fundamental playbook - using state violence to coerce outcomes favorable to said state - is far from new. Hell,

There is a massive difference in degree and kind here. Mixing them up at this level is spherical cow territory.