I see kind of a silver lining here, in that it has the potential to get US-based lawmakers to care about mass data-harvesting enough to make some laws about it. I imagine that privacy laws are easier to get through congress if the perceived threat is a foreign government rather than a home-grown tech giant
They'll just slap sanctions on that company / government to prevent gathering of the info from the US population. Also if such data offers verified massive advantage as they say the US might be more inclined to instead repeal / weaken privacy laws to keep up with China.
> BGI said in a statement it “has never been asked to provide – nor provided – data from its NIFTY tests to Chinese authorities for national security or national defense security purposes.”
...as if those two very specific use cases are the only possible "reasons" authorities can ever come up with when they want the data.
Find and replace China with US and reality still makes sense.
Then the US expects the rest of the world to follow their rule based order, where no one knows what the freaking rules are except rules for thee but for me(US).
And they have a special rule that they’ll invade The Hague if US war criminals are ever tried there. All those presidents and generals and spooks are safe from justice.
Just a note, the US doesn't need permission from the Netherlands to invade them, of course. However, as I understand it, usually the US president needs permission from Congress before deciding to invade another country. In this case, Congress has given permission in advance to invade the Netherlands if the ICC tries a US citizen.
Didn’t U.S pharma companies used to sell drugs overseas that is banned on U.S soil? I don’t know if that is still the case.
While collecting data like fingerprints etc is bad, collecting DNA is on whole another level. Imagine using it for immigration purposes for example. Or the govt makes you get a license to have kids (like marriage license today) based on DNA traits. These things might sound comical today, but the social score thing sounded comical too, until it became a reality
"No one knows the rules." What? The US legal system is incredibly strictly codified. It's literally the main draw for foreign investment. If you ask any investor on the planet what the largest difference between the US and China is for investments, it's regulatory risk.
This is one of the most wildly off base things I've seen people say with regard to US vs China.
What rules did Uber break? I was under the impression that the startup model was to do things there are no rules for yet, and grow fast enough that you get to influence them when they're made.
Almost every city had strict rules about passenger transportation, Uber obviously knew this and ignore them all. That's another reason they raised $25.2B in funding over 30 rounds, to become so big even big cities became small compared to them and they could use the "See you in court" tactic, by that point yeah they lose many cases, so what? They are so big cities and governments were pressured to change the laws to suit Uber.
Nothing is black and white, before Uber the business wasn't exactly fair and clean but Uber applied the scumbag business tactic to a whole new level and it was amplified by the billions of dollars in funding.
"LMGT(FY)" is a disrespectful, counter-productive, and weaselly response. Please don't use it. If you make a claim, it's your responsibility to provide evidence (including links) to back it up, and anyone who has actually used Google extensively knows that (1) search results vary per user due to search bubbling and (2) search result quality (and precision) can vary wildly depending on the exact query used.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case, BobbyJo absolutely asked for it. It would have taken ten seconds to find a huge amount of material on Uber's law-breaking, and to pretend that one never even heard of such a thing and that Uber is totally law-abiding? Bullshit; it's like asking for citations that water is wet. BobbyJo even came back to snark about downvotes. BobbyJo chose to be a passive-aggressive dickhead, and deserved to get exactly the same back.
You'll note I did actually then provide some actual references.
In conclusion, BobbyJo deserved it and it was a right thing to do. Disrespectful? Yes, that's the point.
> In conclusion, BobbyJo deserved it and it was a right thing to do. Disrespectful? Yes, that's the point.
This is absolutely against HN guidelines, general common decency, and just pure logic. You do not get to decide who "deserves it" and who doesn't.
Even in cases where the information is easily found, there are polite ways to say that, and you appear to have intentionally chosen an impolite manner.
you appear to have intentionally chosen an impolite manner.
Yes, EXACTLY so. Choosing to be polite or not is part of expression. Active choice of politeness (or not) adds layers to meaning and communication. In this case, part of choosing to be impolite is expressing that BobbyJo didn't deserve politeness here. Conversely, sometimes being polite is itself brutally insulting. In this case, it would have been passive-aggressively treating BobbyJo like a child; far more insulting.
You do not get to decide who "deserves it" and who doesn't.
Of course I can make that decision. Just did. You might subscribe to a set of rules in which I don't get to make that decision; I clearly do not subscribe to that. I note that I certainly won't be telling you who you should and should not be polite to, though.
HNs rules aren't tailored toward maximizing expression. They are tailored toward maximizing discussion and information exchange. Impoliteness, while certainly a form of expression, is detrimental to discussion, hence it being frowned upon here. If your goal is simply self expression for its own sake, visual arts likely would provide a better medium than internet discussion boards.
Asking for a citation is asking for bad manners? Normally, if you posit something, it's on you to back it up, or admit it's pure anecdote or impression. I don't see how asking for a piece of information that's claimed to exist somewhere in the world is disrespectful.
Also, I did look it up. None of the articles I saw specifically called out laws Uber was guilty of breaking as a corporate entity, instead they all reference grey area behavior and use words like 'skirting' or 'undermining.'
I looked over both of those linked posts as well as the the links provided by a Google search and still couldn't find a single statute that Uber was unambiguously violating.
Uber took advantage of a grey area in the rules. They knew passenger transport was regulated, but didn’t physically transport any passengers. They didn’t break the rules as much as they had a (then) untested interpretation.
The US isn't actively committing genocide against a specific ethnic group right now... I understand the US has done a ton of awful things, but comparing the actions of a democratic country that promotes rule of law globally (although I am well aware sometimes realpolitik and worse happens) versus a country that has no regard for a rules based order or anything other than increasing their own power seems like a false comparison
> comparing the actions of a democratic country that promotes rule of law globally (although I am well aware sometimes realpolitik and worse happens) versus a country that has no regard for a rules based order or anything other than increasing their own power seems like a false comparison
Are you aware that most of the world sees the US not as a country that promotes the rule of law but the one country that's the biggest risk to world peace? It has been like that for many years.
The US completely ignores and shits on every single rule it claims to uphold the very moment it becomes inconvenient to keep following it.
Your point is valid but it's a question of degree rather than category. The Uyghur camps are about as evil as you can get, no question, but how much cumulative death and suffering has been caused by decades of destabilizing, bombing and invading the middle east? As just one example.
From an outside perspective, no one is buying the US propaganda around the oil wars any more than people are buying Chinese propaganda about their camps.
China being arguably worse doesn't evict the US from the category of destructive superpowers.
I have no argument in favor of the war on terror, it was based on a false premise and a total moral failure. I don't think any Americans buy the propaganda around it either.
I just disagree as to whether the US is truly a 'destructive superpower' - I personally believe that the country has been a net good for the world, even if sometimes its actions had negative consequences. Under American leadership post WWII the world has gotten richer, lives longer, and has fewer conflicts as a whole. Would this have happened without US leadership and instead under Soviet rule? Maybe, but I'm pretty skeptical.
Except for the poor souls killed thanks to US weapons, or taken into planes and interrogated in unknown locations, imprisioned without trial for years and then dropped again into a random location.
Every country has done immoral things. Nobody is denying that. What we are saying is the US is leagues above China. Any bad action done by the US has a similar action by China. Bombings, wars, false arrests, etc. The difference is the US is trying to move on and better itself while China is continuing with this behavior.
It is pointless to compare the misdeeds of one superpower with another. Nobody becomes a superpower without doing shitty things, both at home and abroad. If we debate which superpower is least shitty, we’d be here all day.
Also, we are well past the stage where the misdeeds of countries/groups don’t affect the broader world. A virus that originated in a small town has affected much of the world for the last 18 months. A single ship that got stuck in a canal for 10 days has the power to affect global commerce, Etc etc
Nationalism and jingoism don’t hold as much meaning as they used to.
Really, most of the world and the biggest risk to world peace? I have been lucky enough not only to live and work abroad on 4 continents now including working directly for a non-American government and I think that claim is totally bunk.
As for the US completely ignoring rules that it claims to uphold, I strongly disagree as you can see by WTO rulings that are unfavorable to the US. If you want to argue that the US set these organizations up post-WWII and they're unfairly supportive of the US I can agree with that but a blanket statement like yours is just incorrect.
Sweden checking in, and no, not the biggest. At least not since the orange baboon left office.
I'd personally rate the US as somewhere around third or fourth, behind Russia, China and possibly Israel.
But surely more liability than world police.
And don't tell me the last X wars the US has engaged in were entirely motivated by financial gain, cause I won't believe it!
(It's ok though, our nation also went through a phase of plunder and rape, your country is younger, it's only natural you should have that phase a bit later than the rest of us)
Weird, I've lived in plenty of countries and I've met plenty of people from all over the world with valid criticisms of the U.S. government and yet I've maybe met a handful of people who esposed the opinion you claim is essentially de facto.
> The US isn't actively committing genocide against a specific ethnic group right now
Is this the bar to pass in order to be allowed to collect any kind of data from any person around the world?
On top of that I really doubt this is a topic you're ready to defend beyond massively downplaying what one side has done. Just between the US global spying revelations, their treatment of black citizens, and the civilian casualties of their "war on terror" it should be very clear that there's no moral argument that the US can make in front of most of the world. And indeed, believe it or not, for the majority of the world the US is to them what China is to the US.
Let's not lie to ourselves, both US and China engage in the same kind of "superpower tactics", and both are past the point where they can point fingers at each other or anyone else. You're defending one because the other is worse. Does this really matter when you have the choice of "both are plain wrong"? Somewhere in China there's a regular citizen insisting the opposite, and looking from afar both are equally biased and wrong.
I will 100% die on the hill arguing that the US is a better global actor than China. Should the committing of genocide be the bar? No, of course not, but it's the most egregious example I could think of that demonstrates what a bad actor the CCP is.
RE global spying - everyone does it, this is the age we live in and I don't really care. EDIT (I responded too strongly here. I do care somewhat but not as strongly as I expect most in the HN audience do)
RE treatment of black citizens (I'll extend this to basically everyone except white and some model minorities: Of course, this is awful and the US has a terrible track record. But again, if you take the worse the US is doing (say basically government officials killing black people with little reason or repercussion) it still pales in comparison to what China is doing to Uyghurs.
RE "War on terror": Yeah, that it a total moral failure and debacle, no argument there.
> I will 100% die on the hill arguing that the US is a better global actor than China
You dodged the question. "Better" means nothing when we're talking about two really bad choices. There's a world of difference between good and better. If "better" was enough we'd all poke out one eye because it's objectively better than poking out both. But I think we can agree that they're both very bad options.
When someone says the US has been collecting DNA data for years justifying it by "China is doing bad stuff" adds nothing to the conversation. Neither should do it.
> this is the age we live in and I don't really care.
This is the product of a severely compromised education system. Opinions are fed to people rather than formed by careful analysis. And usually end with an "I don't care" when at a loss for words.
> Of course global spying is bad but [I don't really care]
> Of course the treatment of black people is awful but [I don't really care]
> Of course the war on terror is a moral failure but [I don't really care]
When your only moral benchmark is China do you actually have a defensible position when doing some things they also do?
What exactly is the question that you think I dodged? I guess I must have missed it because that wasn't my intention. However, I disagree that "better means nothing when we're talking about two really bad choices." We are talking about the two superpowers as they exist today, not a hypothetical reality.
I don't appreciate the personal attack about the education system and myself being affected by it. I said what I meant RE global spying, I can back up my reasoning with a much longer argument but I didn't think it was that important or necessary.
I don't understand your points about the last two (treatment of black people and war on terror). I thought it was pretty clear I thought those were awful... also not to get too personal but I am part black and grew up in a small rural area, don't think I don't understand what exactly racism is.
> What exactly is the question that you think I dodged?
It was the top of my comment but I'll help you out also with the background, although it leaves me with the strong impression that you neither read it, nor are willing to actually have a worthwhile conversation.
OP>>> this is exactly how the rest of the world feels about US-based companies harvesting dna data for years
YOU>> The US isn't actively committing genocide against a specific ethnic group right now
ME> Is this the bar to pass in order to be allowed to collect any kind of data from any person around the world?
You're justifying why everyone else should be OK with the US to collect DNA but not for China because "genocide". So tell me, is that the bar you have to pass to collect DNA data from around the world or any similar effort? So you tell me how either of these countries is entitled to do it. Is everyone else bound to lower the standards and necessarily use the lowest bar to judge a matter?
The problem is some people would justify eating a baby because China ate two. That's an easy way to make all the wrong choices and justify all the wrong things: China does even worse. Will you accept any abuse from US leadership as long as it's not outright genocide?
... My answer to that was literally in the first lines of my response. Here it is again.
"I will 100% die on the hill arguing that the US is a better global actor than China. Should the committing of genocide be the bar? No, of course not, but it's the most egregious example I could think of that demonstrates what a bad actor the CCP is."
> Should the committing of genocide be the bar? No, of course not
My friend, you read that "this is exactly how the rest of the world feels about US-based companies harvesting dna data for years" and came up with something that looked like a justification of why exactly it would be different for the US. You pointed out China's genocide. But if that isn't the bar (at least because both countries fail it) then why bring it up at all? For China to be compared to the US it's a step up. Not so much the other way.
If you analyze the world through a narrow slit you miss that whatever chasm you see when you look at China, most Europeans see when they look at the US. So collecting all that DNA data is unacceptable for any country, certainly not any of the superpowers.
I lived in Europe for years and even worked for a European government representing them in international fora like the United Nations (I also lived in China and studied econ there). I won't say I know how all Europeans feel, but I certainly have a wider perspective than the average person. I can see that this conversation is just us talking past one another so I'm going to quit wasting my time now but thanks for a stimulating debate.
> I certainly have a wider perspective than the average person
All the worse that with that background you decided to respond to OP's statement with "but here's a thing China does worse". Looking at what they do better would yield some insight, looking at what they do worse, especially in the context of justifying something bad, is like saying "because water is wet".
But since you brought it up, I have probably been strongly involved in high level policy making and international politics in multiple European states and institutions with quite some success for longer than all but a potential handful of people on HN. If it's one thing that I know it's that if it looks like the knee jerk reaction of the usual internet comment, it didn't come from people who've been too long, if ever, in that setting. It simply doesn't bring any value, it doesn't shift a perspective, it doesn't re-frame anything. Your choice of reference says a lot about where you see your starting position. That's like going into a negotiation by saying you don't know the value of your goal. Even if I'm sure you already thought of that, try to sit on it for a bit longer.
What country would you prefer to live in, and feel comfortable criticizing it’s government publicly while living within it? We all know the answer to this.
It’s incredible people are ready at the whistle to defend China on here and turn every article about China into a US vs China moral olympics.
> What country would you prefer to live in. [...] We all know the answer to this.
Neither. Did you know that answer? Even if you are incapable of seeing it now, the world has more than 2 choices. But if that's your entire horizon I can imagine why you'd think one is good. It's like making a top of your favorite books after reading just two.
> people are ready at the whistle to defend China on here
And if the previous view didn't make it painfully clear you're ill equipped to argue this point in a civilized or productive fashion, your followup is to accuse anyone who disagrees with you as "a dog to defend China".
Son, I've seen this bullshit tactic for many more decades than you've been alive. I've had to live under most of the scare tactics you can imagine. I've had to live with people trying to shut me up by calling me a "capitalist subversive" on one side of the map, or a "red" on the other side. While then just as now those people were invariably the uneducated, at least back then most had little choice in that matter. You have no such excuse.
> I understand the US has done a ton of awful things
I find it concerning that you simply brush aside the horrible mistakes the US has made in almost all the continents (except maybe EU). This bias makes it hard for the rest of us to consider you seriously.
>but comparing the actions of a democratic country that promotes rule of law globally...
No one appointed the US to be the world police. It doesn't need to promote it's flawed ideas of "rule" to rest of the world. The US on a basic level lacks the comprehension needed to understand a multipolar, multicultural world, and often ends us messing things for the worse in most of the cases. The mess in Afghanistan/Syria/Libya etc is just one of the recent examples.
What serious global power hasn't done awful things? Morality is a social construct and continually evolving. I'm not sure what you would want me to do that you would not consider 'brushing aside' - I certainly think many US actions have been horrendous. My comparison is what the situation would have been if there was another superpower (e.g. the Soviet Union post WWII or China now) or no superpower and I think the world would be less prosperous and more violent.
Indeed, there is no way to appoint someone to be the global police officer, the U.S. took that upon themselves sometimes to the benefit, sometimes the detriment of the rest of the world and itself (as you can see by just how much pushback there is on both the right and the left in America about America's role in the world). I just don't agree that it's been net negative.
> No one appointed the US to be the world police. It doesn't need to promote it's flawed ideas of "rule" to rest of the world
I think you can blame Europe's colonial empires for that. As well as the two world wars started from European in-fighting that left the USA mostly unscathed.
The gene data is the mildest thing the US hoovers up. They've been known to target missiles with phone GPS, and they've gathered big chunks of the world's social graph.
US companies have been harvesting DNA data for years without permission? Link? Companies like 23andme have people paying them to research their DNA with permission.
I don’t think most people understand what they are agreeing to with regards to data sharing or mining. Ethically, burying important aspects in a ToS or privacy policy that you know most people will never read seems pretty wrong, while it may be legal.
I don't know about DNA specifically, but blood that is donated to blood banks that ends up not being needed is sometimes used for research.
There's probably something about this somewhere in the fine print on something they signed without reading, but most donors aren't aware of it.
There has been some controversy over that because there have been lucrative commercial drugs derived from research using such blood, and some feel that the donors should be given a cut of the profits.
Donations are made with a purpose in mind. If I donate to a charity that promised to buy mosquito nets with my money, I’d be dismayed if it turned out all the money was spent on hookers and blackjack. So yes, while you might not expect to tell anyone how to use your donation, I do. Most people do.
Unless they managed to sneak the hooker clause into the fine print and I missed it. In which case, well done, carry on.
In California there is opt out genetic testing for newborns right after birth. Unless you opt out you get free testing for genetic disease but the samples are stored indefinitely and monetized by the state
EDIT: I remembered wrong, parents are charged for the test and then the state monetizes their baby’s DNA anyway.
It's all the same scam - you send them your dna to do some fun test, like see what % of neanderthals genes you have or how much Scottish you are (which is btw a total scam because error margins on these tests are usually huge and thus results are pretty meaningless) and your dna ends up in their database forever, and they can data-mine and cross-analyze and sell it as they wish. Of course they have good lawyers and EULAs and it's all legally covered, but it's just as immoral.
It is just to point the hypocrisies of the discussion tone in HN towards China when USA most times does just the same thing
As an example is Uighur camps in China. When USA is the country with most incarcerated in the world in absolute terms, even China with a fraction of the population! And mostly directed at black and poor communities
And the U.S. military has been collecting DNA of its enlisted since the 1990's. I stalled them long enough to avoid that, but my FOIA made it all the way to Al Gore and tumbled back down in the form of several boxes of generic vaguely worded reports.
A company based in a democratic country, which gets paid to harvest dna data is a completely different thing from the CCP which holds all the power over all of China and it's entities harvesting dna across the world, with no authorization.
'America's gene giant harvests data from millions of women worldwide' would be an interesting topic for discussion. As it is we know, as the Hong Kong protesters know, that the CCP runs every aspect of China's activities. So nothing of critical significance happens in China without the knowledge and say-so of the CCP. Clearly that's not analogous to the the situation in the US. Why do they want this data? What are they going to do with it? Maybe they just love collecting data. Is this exercise anymore significant than the similar operations carried out by other countries? And why?
> The women, who signed consent forms stating that their genetic data would be stored and used for research, said they did not realize their genetic information could end up in China.
How do people not see the bias?
23andme doesn't specify which countries can do research on their clients' data, and for one I don't mind whichever country it is since the data can't be linked to people's identities. The only way to link it is to collect the person's DNA, at which point there is no point in using the database.
> ...since the data can't be linked to people's identities.
Well, 23andMe does "know" the identity of each individual. They know their name, their relatives, a lot about their genetics, and if given consent, store actual dna (biobanking) so that in the future other tests can be run. That's a lot of sensitive information for one entity to own.
Can we assume that 23andMe is at least very competent with security and PII, that they've taken enough safeguards to prevent hackers from stealing the keys to the kingdom? ehh maybe. Can we assume that they won't simply bend over when acquired by another less scrupulous entity? Nope. Can we assume that a future authoritarian government won't simply commandeer data whenever it likes like the CCP already does with Chinese companies? Hell no.
More to the point, however, is that folks are limiting the discussion to information about "individuals". Everyone imagines the consequences of individuals being targeted using this data. But really, geopolitical concerns don't care about individuals (modulo a very small number of key people). They care about populations. So even if individual information is kept safe, there's still awful things a bad actor can do with genetic data from everyone even without identifying individuals. That's what the concern is here.
23andMe has the same ultimate risks as BGI. It's just that BGI has skipped a few steps and gone further along in the dystopian nightmare by virtue of the fact that they're a Chinese company and utterly at the service of the CCP.
When I wrote "since the data can't be linked to people's identities", I was talking about 23andme research partners. They don't get any PII, and I presume neither does BGI as there is no reason for them to have it, unless they offer tests directly to consumers.
The data can't be linked untill it is. With DNA, you can guess approximative physical appearance and some medical properties. Once your database is rich enough, you can build family tree.
Most people barely understand the impact of their choices, that includes realising that all their (DNA) data will be logged forever if they ever let it touch the US. It is not reasonable to take this stance when the US tech company playbook has been to as obtusely as possible gain "permission" to do whatever they want.
23andme made the headline here many, many times, going all the way back to its early days. Would you rather we keep silent when Chinese companies do it?
> the company is a pivotal player in a genomics race between China and the United States
The entire reason for this article. Surely if one were to use a similar US-based service, NSA and US military access to the data couldn't be ruled out.
>The HIPAA Privacy Rule provides a broad exception for national security purposes. Under the Rule, a covered entity may disclose any and all protected (identifiable) health information (PHI) for “lawful intelligence, counter-intelligence and national security purposes” (emphasis added). On its face, the Rule does not require a court order or any other enforceable or formal demand; disclosure may be completely voluntary and may be initiated by the covered entity even in the absence of a request from a government official
I feel like we are heading towards the world where the USA, EU, and China each form separate, isolated economies. Each economy would try to produce everything by themselves and import as little as possible. The flow of information and research would get limited.
Part of the lore of a series called Ghost in the Shell is that to cross certain region borders around the world you need to swap your cybernetic body, or whatever has been cyberized, to the local variety model, otherwise you don't get access to the local internet (which makes life really hard). How fitting.
nobody is going to mention the positive side of this? This is going to contribute to the gene data pool of Asians, which is relatively underrepresented compared to the West (due prevalent of DTC companies), and help a lot in mapping our roots.
> The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisors said.
Or genetically modified viruses that target specific populations. Forget the food supply.
Something like a Covid-19 with a bit more specificity and a little more lethality.
No wonder the military has their hands in this.
And in this context, this is interesting:
> and since 2015 it has restricted foreign researchers from accessing gene data on Chinese people
And this isn't a "tin foil hat" post or a conspiracy theory. It's food for thought.
> Reuters found no evidence BGI violated patient privacy agreements or regulations. However, the privacy policy on the NIFTY test’s website says data collected can be shared when it is “directly relevant to national security or national defense security” in China.
> Beijing made clear in a 2019 regulation that genetic data can be a national security matter, and since 2015 it has restricted foreign researchers from accessing gene data on Chinese people. In contrast, the United States and Britain give foreign researchers access to genetic data, as part of open science policies.
This not the privacy debacle people are making it out to be, since names are not collected, this is far less of a privacy invasion than 23andMe since that data base can extrapolate and identify you without your consent based on your relatives.
This is much more of either (which depends on your perspective):
I'm trying not to be inflammatory. China is a totalitarian regime, they have no check and balances keeping them from using all this power they've been amassing to accomplish any kind of goals they have. It's completely different from the US or any other democracy, which have these mechanisms in place to undermine themselves once they start to do evil stuff with their power, and I'm not saying that it's OK to democracies have this kind of power. There's no stop button for China and I wonder when will we (I'm not American) change our standing against this.
Sure, I clearly remember how Bush Jr. along Cheney, Powel and Rumsfeld went to court and were imprisoned for life for all the misery they inflicted. Oh, wait...
We also didn't put FDR in prison for the misery he caused the Germans or Japanese. I don't recall FDR asking their permission to invade or bomb them. And we didn't put Truman into prison for the misery he caused the Koreans. FDR's actions killed more innocent civilians than the Iraq War did. That's not whataboutism or misdirection, I plainly dislike Bush & Co., they're all monsters. The US should not have invaded Iraq, it wasn't in the US self-interest to do so, it was a wildly irrational choice. And yet the context is a lot more complex than you're suggesting.
Saddam is gone. Iraq is a fledgling democracy, which was unthinkable 25 years ago, and their oil output is persistently near record highs.
Iraq has a GDP per capita higher than Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, Egypt. And not far from South Africa or Paraguay. It's not a total disaster at present, they legitimately have a chance to build something there in the coming decades.
These two things are simultaneously true: Iraq's future prospects are better because the US invaded, and the US should not have invaded.
The Korean War involved dramatically more misery than Iraq did. Millions of people died in just a few years. Ask the South Koreans if they would prefer that the Kim family were ruling over them while they exist in absolute poverty today.
Isn't it just fascinating how today nobody dares to proclaim that the US should have left North Korea to conquer and rule South Korea, that that would have been the obvious better outcome vs the misery they went through for decades after the war. No, people wouldn't dare to say that, but they'll say it about Iraq, because it's a convenient stick to beat the US with. If Iraq's fortunes improve in the coming decades, those same people will go largely silent on the matter and the narrative will be modified (go back and read how the narrative on the Korean War changed across the decades as South Korea's situation radically improved).
The people of Iraq have a chance to chart their own course democratically. The US doesn't rule Iraq, we didn't take their oil, we didn't annex their territory. We lost two trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to stop them from killing eachother in a religious war. The situation in Iraq is very far from perfect, so what, the lack of perfection isn't a valid counter argument; the situation in South Korea after the Korean War was very very far from perfect for decades.
Even the US was a basketcase for decades after its founding. It was held together by a string, ultimately culminating in a very bloody civil war as well.
It took decades for South Korea to build up the structures necessary to sustain itself as a democracy and lift the standard of living of its people. They were still poor as recently as the early 1980s. Why is it that people think Iraq should have been instantly transformed into a mecca? That's a level of expectation nobody would dare apply to any other similar context. As though the end of Saddam's rule was somehow going to be soft and fluffy, rather than involving misery. There was no other scenario than to go through misery given the sectarian split in Iraq and the way Iraq was being ruled, it was always going to prompt a civil war.
The issue is that the US was involved. It's an easy point that can be used to hit the US with.
How can I be sure of that? Well, simple, consider the alternative. The opposite position is: condemn the people of Iraq to living under Saddam and his sadistic family (or the equivalent). I'll note that was a minority political group oppressing and torturing a far larger majority group through a brutal totalitarian system with zero human rights. Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that? I'd challenge someone to dare to say that right now and then back it up as the better alternative to the present (that's not what would happen of course; a person will instead proclaim a fantasy scenario of f...
The problem with the theme that the US went in to 'save' countries under a repressive state is that it's simply untrue. Why would the US just go in to save people? Given its war crimes exposed by Assange and its crimes against its own people by Snowden, it's clear the US doesn't operate with angelic purposes. There is always an economic and idealogical benefit to the US when the US invades or goes to war. Whether that's to benefit senator's private war industry, or to install a US-friendly puppet, history shows us it's definitely not due to pure altruism.
Why did we owe the Iraqis thousands of our soldiers lives and a couple trillion dollars? You morally justified all this by concluding we improved the situation of Iraqis? What currency is their oil sold in? What companies discover and drill for it? I bet most are subsidiaries of Western corps. I did a google, looks like it's Exxon and Schlumberger International getting 96 new wells as of June 2021 (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/exxonmobil-basrah-oil-ink-de...)
"Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that?"
I condemn them to figure out their own future, do what's necessary and proper to attain it - whether it be suffer under Saddam or overthrow him is for the Iraqi people to decide. Not American politicians and intelligence services you seem to be a sycophant for.
"I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better..."
False choice, get better at your moral justifications. Going to address the way the US public was lied into the Iraq Pillaging? You compare the Pillaging of Iraq with the Korean War - one had an aggressor (KPA crossed the line a thing that actually happened to instigate the war) and we had obligations to the First Republic of Korea. The US had and has no obligations to the Iraqi people, we just lied about Iraq and Saddam's relation to terrorists so the American ruling class could do it's thing.
I can't get passed this post boiling down to "we shouldn't have gone, but we did and Iraq is better for it" You completely fail to address the opportunity costs involved from the US side. Who are you trying to convince with this moral justification for invading Iraq, yourself?
I'll chop a hand off if Iraq becomes anything like South Korea before 2100.
What a laughable notion. Utter the words "national security" and all your checks and balances go right out the window. There are also no checks and balances for non-US citizens: it is free to violate my non-existent rights as much as it wants.
What a laughable notion. The United States has its problems, but they aren't sterilizing Muslims, taking over city states, disappearing political dissidents, creating debt traps for the developing world, or shutting down newspapers. The United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties, enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good, enforces rule of law, has free democratic elections, and generally upholds the rights and freedoms outlined in its constitution. If you would rather live in the orbit of any single other superpower or empire in world history, you're deluded.
The Supreme Court ruled in the 1920s that the sterilization of inmates was constitutional. The US forcibly sterilized minorities and people of color as recently as the 1970s.
While I would still prefer to live in the US, you would find by talking to Chinese citizens that they feel exactly the same way about their country. The same applies to Russians and other large nations. We are all being fed propaganda, it doesn’t matter what country you live in.
No stop it. Sure the US has problems. But what do you know, you can talk about them on this website hosted in the US.
You can protest the government. You can talk shit about the leaders. You aren't jailed or killed for any of these things in the US.
And 'as recently as 1970s' is half a century ago.
Can you provide some reading for me that argues that the United States has jailed or killed political dissidents on anything approaching the same scale as the Chinese Communist "Tiananmen" Party?
Since the comparison was with Russia and China I could also have added that you can run for office in the US on harsh criticism of the government and with a realistic chance of success without being poisoned or imprisoned.
You can "protest" sure for a given definition of the word but the US absolutely will go after any organisation or group that plan anything beyond ineffectual picket waving.
While they might not be going full Maoist China on it's dissedents, they exercise more subtle methods to control the narrative and compromising movements as well as outright assassinations of prominent figures.
This is absolutely not unique to the US of course and this goes on in Europe as well. They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.
>They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.
The powers that be always want to continue being.
But methods matter. How many politicians in the US or Europe have been poisoned by the state in the last decade? Don't you think there are politicians that the government would rather didn't exist? Yet they don't kill them or fabricate charges.
It is ridiculous to compare liberal democracies with autocratic regimes.
But it is true that we really need to keep our guard up to retain our liberal democracies, they are being attacked form within as well as outside.
While I cannot disconfirm the former (though there have certainly been some high profile cases with fishy circumstances- such as JFK), what about the Russiagate nonsense with Trump? I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it. He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last. It seems to be a bipartisan thing to simultaneously shift focus of the public from national level corruption in favour of a foreign bogeyman and simultaneously slander opponents.
In a so called representative democracy, you do not need to outright murder or imprison your opponents to enforce control, you simply either have to relegate them to irrelevance through skewed or absent corporate media coverage or buy them out. See Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, early Nancy Peloski, AOC, etc.
The tactics might differ from a transparently autocratic regime but the intentions are the same, and the end result is not really as different as liberals like to paint it. For all the unpopular politicians that are allowed to continue, there is police violence, surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and outright assasinations of prominent figures in activist groups. Then there is what they get up to outside the confines of US citizenship and borders.
Look at the state of Bolivia, Columbia, most of Central and Southern America actually. They have death squads from paramilitary groups backed by US multinational companies for the sole purpose of brutally putting down any attempts at collective bargaining or real democracy. Just because it's not visible in your backyard doesn't mean your country is not responsible for that mess.
> I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it.
The collusion allegations were not a Manchurian candidate theory and were never disproven by any investigation. (To the contrary, prior to being pardoned by Trump, several people either plead guilty or were convicted at trial for lies to investigators the key substance of which was falsely denying active actual ot attempted coordination with Russian state actors by Trump campaign officials.) The story that Trump was somehow exonerated is itself a propaganda story from the Trump camp that waa deliberately facilitated by AG Barr’s deliberate distortion of the Mueller investigation findings.
> He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last.
He's definitely not the first politician to actively seek foreign assistance against domestic political opposition, nor the first to be sloppy enough that it gets noticed in time for it to be used against him (see, e.g., Louis XVI of France.)
Mueller’s report did not exonerate Trump. That was a lie spun by Bill Barr.
Mueller specifically did not make a statement on it because he determined it to be Congress’ job and especially because he did not want to put up an appearance of political prosecution.
He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.
>He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.
This is the fallback excuse Democrats always play when they either don't really want to implement something (such as a $15 minimum wage) or they know they don't really have a leg to stand on - blame the Republicans. Same excuse made by Obama and the same excuse now being made by Biden.
When you have decades of experience dealing with a political opponent that has proven time and time again to be acting in bad faith, defering to their sense of decorem and morality is being complicit in their actions in my eyes.
And no, it did not exonerate Trump. He's obviously corrupt to the bone but the specific angle was significant Russian interference and Mueller completely failed to substantiate it. It's also worth noting that despite the media making a big song and dance around Trump meetings with Putin, the actual policies during his administration were significantly more adversarial towards Russian economic interests than Biden's administration has been so far.
Yes the United States sterilized people involuntarily up until 1981 (Oregon board of eugenics). That was 40 years ago, in Xi’s China it is still happening today. There has been some repetitions paid, and it is unlikely this would happen in the United States today.
The United States and China are nothing alike. Try flying a Winnie the Pooh blimp (makes fun of China’s leader) in China and see how long before that gets shut down. We can also freely talk about what is going on in China/HK/TW/wugiwers here, where such speech would be prohibited in China.
Thanks god, that will fill with joy the hearts of all the orphans in iraq and afghanistan. May god bless America forever. Greatest country in the earth by a gigantic margin.
What a weird example. That was just a shelter in place order. I went to pick up my grandmother across the city in the middle of it and nobody stopped me.
cough Julian Assange, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning
Yes, it's not "disappearing" as in "getting them killed", but nevertheless their treatment has been horrifying.
> creating debt traps for the developing world
The US has putsched against a lot of Southern American countries and keeps supplying their narco gangs with money and weaponry. That is just as bad as the Chinese debt trapping.
> The United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
Lots of police violence goes unpunished. Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio and soldiers convicted of war crimes.
> enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
Hard disagree. The amount of regulations torn down during the Trump term is massive.
> enforces rule of law
For those who can afford it, see my point about police violence above.
> If you would rather live in the orbit of any single other superpower or empire in world history, you're deluded.
Come to the European Union. I admit it, we are not perfect either (particularly on handling the refugee situation and member countries drifting towards authoritarianism and dictatorship), but generally we are a better society in a number of metrics.
No, but their lives have been ruined for... what? Think about this: we spent millions of dollars identifying the leak by Assange, then forcing Assange to sit in an embassy, on PR to discredit his character, and on convincing countries to hand him over.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets. Literally decades of abuse before authorities finally arrest them, and only because regular people came out and protested after they heard of the stories publicly. Like the gov had no idea ever... for decades on open secrets like that... until now?
The effort put into these scenarios are very skewed.
Assange chose to remain in an embassy for years rather than face questioning (not even a trial) for the offenses alleged against him. Snowden and Manning's leaks endangered the lives of US and foreign military and intelligence personnel, and a number of foreign intelligence personnel were killed after being identified in those leaks.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets.
Do you expect the police to just magically know that people are committing crime? The criminal investigation process usually begins with a police report (of someone reporting a crime). In the absence of a police report (as with the Epstein and Weinstein cases) the police have "no cause" to investigate absent some other mechanism that publicly reveals alleged crimes (like a news report). And on that note, in both of the cases you cited, prosecutors did try to investigate the rumors, but couldn't find anyone wiling to testify against those men until the scale of their crimes became public.
Epstein was arrested and awaiting trial once his crimes became publicly known, and before he committed suicide was expected to face charges in multiple states and countries. Epstein became so toxic that multiple men known to have gone to Epstein's parties have faced social and financial repercussions for it. Melinda Gates famously divorced Bill because of his friendship with Epstein. Similarly, Weinstein was also arrested once his crimes became public and is facing charges in multiple states, was kicked out of every industry group, and essentially banished from his former life.
> Snowden and Manning's leaks endangered the lives of US and foreign military and intelligence personnel, and a number of foreign intelligence personnel were killed after being identified in those leaks.
Nitpick, but wasn't that only true of Manning? Assange irresponsibly put Manning's cables out in unredacted form, which I believe revealed the names of sources who were put in danger. IIRC, Snowden only leaked to Greenwald and a few mainstream newspapers who were careful to make redactions on what they released to avoid such outcomes.
> Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets.
That's partially a product of the US justice system, which is among the more rigorous in the world, and tends to favor letting the guilty go free over punishing the innocent. This is a trade-off, not an objectively bad thing.
Now, I would attribute the rest of those scenarios to plain-old corruption - which is a problem for every system of government without checks and balances (that are actually used).
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it a lot. We ban that sort of account because we're trying for the opposite on this site.
Neither are perfect, so both are the same? Sorry, but that's just not the reality. For starters, one can say "F Trump" or "F Biden" without getting disappeared. There -are- systems to hold the powers-at-be accountable. The way issues are handled in these countries are completely different.
I'm tired of this whatboutism used to excuse completely appalling behavior with -zero- checks and balances at all. Country A doing bad thing doesn't excuse Country B from doing a much worse thing.
The big majority of the chinese prefer to live under their current system. The fact you are a white, american male in tech does not make your opinion worthier, more intelligent or the moral compass. For many people the US is a barbaric state who humiliates and kill their non-white population and it is a imperialistic juggernaut who stops at nothing (they can kill hundreds of thousand of children with no remose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8YQ8gKIV8U ) to get what they want. So I would stop with the moralizing, nobody with 2 cells will buy it.
This is not only whataboutism but also an ad hominem attack.
I don't know why you think I would excuse the USA's actions, both now and in the past. "Many people want to live in X" is not a strong argument- many people want to live in the US as well... now we've gotten nowhere.
My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.
> My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.
The US has killed their own citizen with drones, has imprisoned people who revealed government abuse and just last year arrested more than 100 journalists.
So I could easily same the same about you, you are repeating a pro-CIA propaganda point. I would suggest to ask around in Latin-America, in Africa in China and even in Europe and ask people who they consider more a threat to world peace and which behaves in an arrogant, "my way or the highway", imperialistic manner. You will be very surprised and the whole worldview you were taught in your perfectly designed educational system will come crash down.
Less swearing allegiance to the flag and more travelling. I hope that is not ad-hominem enough to try to ban me.
I think the most objective criteria to evaluate this is how many people would want to immigrate to the US and how many would want to immigrate to China.
The answer is MONEY, not "Freedom" or any other pablum you were taught. As economic conditions improve in China,India,even Mexico many educated people are returning. No one wants to live in a racist country when they will be treated as second-class citizens at best.
If you want to have a civilized conversation, the first thing is to stop assuming everyone only consumes propagandistic drivel if you disagree with them. Many people, like myself, have traveled and lived in various other countries. Nowhere in my comments have I ever said the US doesn't have issues; in fact I quite frequently discuss the enormous issues the US has and so do most of the people that I know...
This is a freedom that I, and the media, do have and can exercise without getting imprisoned. The reporter issue -is- quite serious and needs addressing, but is related to police abusing their power during the riots last year, not the federal or state government going to people's homes and arresting them for posting online criticism of the government or ruling party. We're free to message each other and post online about every single atrocity the US government has committed without repercussion. How can a bad situation be improved if criticizing the government is impossible?
> No one wants to live in a racist country when they will be treated as second-class citizens at best.
You mean like living in any homogeneous Asian country as any ethnicity except the primary one? You accuse me of not traveling, but my experience from living in S. Korea and Japan showed me that highly homogeneous countries can be wildly racist about everyone. The US is not the only country has serious racism issues, and it's a shame that I need to state that. It seems like you think the US is one entity, but depending on the city and state it can be extremely multicultural and diverse (like Chicago, my home town).
Plenty of people are moving to the US still; I don't really find it a useful metric for an argument either way because it doesn't consider the origin country or the immigrant's prior situation.
I know your type, "The US also has issues, but it is ruled by white people so they are manageable , it is not horrible like those 'here be dragons' lands of dark-skinned people', well no, the issues of the US are as a big as any other country, and even more,the US actively participates in creating havoc in the world. I know you think I am the lunatic here, well, see this for example:
So ask yourself, who is right? The world is 7+ billion people, not 330 MM. And who in their right mind can take seriously a criticism from an American? it is like being called a slut by the "madame" from the whorehouse.
> You mean like living in any homogeneous Asian country as any ethnicity except the primary one?
How many racial minorities were killed, abused and tortured by the police in South Korea and Japan last year? How many racial minorities there are going to jail at a 400% proportion of its population? How many racial minorities there are protesting torching the country because they are being called niggers, or spics and openly insulted by the president, called rapists, bad hombres, bad people?Or being patronized by Biden : " Poor Children can be as smart as white Children" "All black people are the same"(Notice a pattern here?) Let me tell you about a Japanese racial minority, the Okinawans, whose women have been raped constantly by American GIs who are not even judged. Ask the Okinawans what do they think about the Americans?
Another Pacific minority? The people in the Bikini Atolls, see how the rich, diverse, enlightened and multicultural vibrant country treated them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjqoiT-RS4A
> t seems like you think the US is one entity, but depending on the city and state it can be extremely multicultural and diverse (like Chicago, my home town).
So let me get this straight, you consider any Asian country as homogeneous (where more than half of the world lives and there are hundreds of ethnicities), yet Chicago is multicultural? I will tell you what the problem is: You think of American as the vanilla version of the world, so they can adapt themselves and be diverse and individual and the Asians, are the "Chinamen", the homogeneous,android-like, everybody the same. The world does not work like that. But this is a discussion that is worthless. You are a citizen of the modern Roman Empire, your world spin around "Rome" and all the roads led to it. Many more generations are needed to see a change on this hegemonic worldview.
I don't think this is really a good metric as these sorts of decisions aren't made in a vacuum.
I don't know what -would- be a good metric, but perhaps the expatriation rate, immigration rate to other countries, and brain drain rate would be good places to start.
The notion that the US is free from corruption and severe abuse of power is laughable.
The notion that it’s no different from China is absurdist propaganda. In China there is no such thing as abuse of power if it is sanctioned by the party.
> The notion that it’s no different from China is absurdist propaganda.
I was responding to the notion that it is completely different from China. It is not. The western nations are more totalitarian than they would like to admit.
Western governments are not controlled by a single party with an lifetime ruler and no democratic mechanisms at all for expressing dissent, let alone moderating power.
It’s not a matter of degree. Doing bad stuff is not the same as totalitarianism.
People like OP actually scares me, the fact they cannot understand that is "exactly the same" makes me think chauvinism has taken over the rational part of the brain and anything, no matter how horrible, could be justified if done by "the right people".
Can you name one person who has said the US is free from corruption or abuse of power? I don't think I have ever seen anybody on HN or anywhere else state otherwise. Nobody is saying the US or any country is perfect. All we are saying is the US and the West are better, by a large margin, than China. Trying to say they are comparable is what is actually laughable.
Yeah, especially on HN there's lots of whataboutism. As you can see from other responses you got, a lot of people get really defensive for China and are very eager to carry water for them - for apparently no reason. For them, the US has to be the worst offender, and if some other nation does equal or worse - they need to jump in as keyboard commandos to go to bat to make sure it's clear the US is public enemy #1. It was kind of true in 2003, of course, but the world has changed so much and their talking points haven't.
> Yeah, especially on HN there's lots of whataboutism. As you can see from other responses you got, a lot of people get really defensive for China and are very eager to carry water for them - for apparently no reason.
I was arguing with someone about a fringe website the other day, and I think I finally understand the thought process a lot of these people have. I think many are people who are strongly and habitually opposed to something (in this case, US injustices) have that opposition warp their perception of other things (especially things "opposed" to the US). Sometimes that means they see discussion of other injustices carried out by US adversaries as a distraction to be fought. Other times, that means denying and defending against accusations of injustice against a US opponent. In extreme cases, it means starting to explicitly support those opponents, even through they're arguably worse on almost every value axis these people started with.
tl;dr: anti-imperialists who oppose the US imperialism can sometimes become defenders of imperialism done by US adversaries.
> During the Vietnam War, opposition to the United States and support for national self-determination for the Vietnamese among young activists sometimes developed into support for the Vietnamese Communist Party and its leader. One often heard at the protest demonstrations, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Going to Win.” While this drift from opposition to the U.S. government to support for the Vietnamese government was understandable as a gut reaction to the horrors of the U.S. war, it was also very problematic. Most people chanted this slogan naively, but some gradually became supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist government, and of the Soviet Union that was backing it. Few in the movement pointed out that Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were Stalinists who had murdered their leftist competitors and strove to construct a Soviet-style state in Vietnam, which is eventually what happened.
Yeah, exactly. The viet cong and NVA we're utterly sadistic and depraved. Just reading about the ways they would torment and torture not just enemies - but poor civilians - scars one for life. Complete and utter callousness toward human life -- all while the leaders of the communist party's children were kept safe.
Should the US not have intervened to prop up RVN, disrupting millions of lives of young americans (and losing 50,000 of them), and killing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of others from carpet bombings, napalm, etc? No, and continuing escalation was criminal on the parts of Johnson, Nixon, and their henchmen.
But somehow people need to take that into somehow supporting and idolizing the exact horrific, militant, violent, racist traits they claim they are against. At the end of the day, they just don't like the US (or use opposition to the US as a virtual signal) - it has nothing to do with opposing unethical things.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] thread...as if those two very specific use cases are the only possible "reasons" authorities can ever come up with when they want the data.
Then the US expects the rest of the world to follow their rule based order, where no one knows what the freaking rules are except rules for thee but for me(US).
Eg they can spy on foreigners all they like.
Just a note, the US doesn't need permission from the Netherlands to invade them, of course. However, as I understand it, usually the US president needs permission from Congress before deciding to invade another country. In this case, Congress has given permission in advance to invade the Netherlands if the ICC tries a US citizen.
Only for declaration of war. The US hasn't declared war on anyone in since WWII.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...
While collecting data like fingerprints etc is bad, collecting DNA is on whole another level. Imagine using it for immigration purposes for example. Or the govt makes you get a license to have kids (like marriage license today) based on DNA traits. These things might sound comical today, but the social score thing sounded comical too, until it became a reality
Well everything that's not approved by the FDA (yet), but already approved somewhere else would fall into this category.
That's hardly a black mark against those companies.
This is one of the most wildly off base things I've seen people say with regard to US vs China.
Many and there's a long list.
Almost every city had strict rules about passenger transportation, Uber obviously knew this and ignore them all. That's another reason they raised $25.2B in funding over 30 rounds, to become so big even big cities became small compared to them and they could use the "See you in court" tactic, by that point yeah they lose many cases, so what? They are so big cities and governments were pressured to change the laws to suit Uber.
Nothing is black and white, before Uber the business wasn't exactly fair and clean but Uber applied the scumbag business tactic to a whole new level and it was amplified by the billions of dollars in funding.
Edit: I'll take the down as a 'No' :P
"Uber’s business model is predicated on lawbreaking" [0]
"That Uber regularly broke laws to cement its frontrunner status is not a controversial statement, it’s a fact." [1]
[0] https://hbr.org/2017/06/uber-cant-be-fixed-its-time-for-regu...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xwxyv/uber-became-big-by-ig...
You'll note I did actually then provide some actual references.
In conclusion, BobbyJo deserved it and it was a right thing to do. Disrespectful? Yes, that's the point.
This is absolutely against HN guidelines, general common decency, and just pure logic. You do not get to decide who "deserves it" and who doesn't.
Even in cases where the information is easily found, there are polite ways to say that, and you appear to have intentionally chosen an impolite manner.
Yes, EXACTLY so. Choosing to be polite or not is part of expression. Active choice of politeness (or not) adds layers to meaning and communication. In this case, part of choosing to be impolite is expressing that BobbyJo didn't deserve politeness here. Conversely, sometimes being polite is itself brutally insulting. In this case, it would have been passive-aggressively treating BobbyJo like a child; far more insulting.
You do not get to decide who "deserves it" and who doesn't.
Of course I can make that decision. Just did. You might subscribe to a set of rules in which I don't get to make that decision; I clearly do not subscribe to that. I note that I certainly won't be telling you who you should and should not be polite to, though.
Also, I did look it up. None of the articles I saw specifically called out laws Uber was guilty of breaking as a corporate entity, instead they all reference grey area behavior and use words like 'skirting' or 'undermining.'
Are you aware that most of the world sees the US not as a country that promotes the rule of law but the one country that's the biggest risk to world peace? It has been like that for many years.
The US completely ignores and shits on every single rule it claims to uphold the very moment it becomes inconvenient to keep following it.
The US is a mess but comparing them to a morally bankrupt genocidal China is disingenuous
From an outside perspective, no one is buying the US propaganda around the oil wars any more than people are buying Chinese propaganda about their camps.
China being arguably worse doesn't evict the US from the category of destructive superpowers.
I think there's value in being honest about that.
I just disagree as to whether the US is truly a 'destructive superpower' - I personally believe that the country has been a net good for the world, even if sometimes its actions had negative consequences. Under American leadership post WWII the world has gotten richer, lives longer, and has fewer conflicts as a whole. Would this have happened without US leadership and instead under Soviet rule? Maybe, but I'm pretty skeptical.
Very good example to look for, indeed.
Also, we are well past the stage where the misdeeds of countries/groups don’t affect the broader world. A virus that originated in a small town has affected much of the world for the last 18 months. A single ship that got stuck in a canal for 10 days has the power to affect global commerce, Etc etc
Nationalism and jingoism don’t hold as much meaning as they used to.
As for the US completely ignoring rules that it claims to uphold, I strongly disagree as you can see by WTO rulings that are unfavorable to the US. If you want to argue that the US set these organizations up post-WWII and they're unfairly supportive of the US I can agree with that but a blanket statement like yours is just incorrect.
I'd personally rate the US as somewhere around third or fourth, behind Russia, China and possibly Israel.
But surely more liability than world police.
And don't tell me the last X wars the US has engaged in were entirely motivated by financial gain, cause I won't believe it!
(It's ok though, our nation also went through a phase of plunder and rape, your country is younger, it's only natural you should have that phase a bit later than the rest of us)
What do you mean?
Is this the bar to pass in order to be allowed to collect any kind of data from any person around the world?
On top of that I really doubt this is a topic you're ready to defend beyond massively downplaying what one side has done. Just between the US global spying revelations, their treatment of black citizens, and the civilian casualties of their "war on terror" it should be very clear that there's no moral argument that the US can make in front of most of the world. And indeed, believe it or not, for the majority of the world the US is to them what China is to the US.
Let's not lie to ourselves, both US and China engage in the same kind of "superpower tactics", and both are past the point where they can point fingers at each other or anyone else. You're defending one because the other is worse. Does this really matter when you have the choice of "both are plain wrong"? Somewhere in China there's a regular citizen insisting the opposite, and looking from afar both are equally biased and wrong.
RE global spying - everyone does it, this is the age we live in and I don't really care. EDIT (I responded too strongly here. I do care somewhat but not as strongly as I expect most in the HN audience do)
RE treatment of black citizens (I'll extend this to basically everyone except white and some model minorities: Of course, this is awful and the US has a terrible track record. But again, if you take the worse the US is doing (say basically government officials killing black people with little reason or repercussion) it still pales in comparison to what China is doing to Uyghurs.
RE "War on terror": Yeah, that it a total moral failure and debacle, no argument there.
You dodged the question. "Better" means nothing when we're talking about two really bad choices. There's a world of difference between good and better. If "better" was enough we'd all poke out one eye because it's objectively better than poking out both. But I think we can agree that they're both very bad options.
When someone says the US has been collecting DNA data for years justifying it by "China is doing bad stuff" adds nothing to the conversation. Neither should do it.
> this is the age we live in and I don't really care.
This is the product of a severely compromised education system. Opinions are fed to people rather than formed by careful analysis. And usually end with an "I don't care" when at a loss for words.
> Of course global spying is bad but [I don't really care]
> Of course the treatment of black people is awful but [I don't really care]
> Of course the war on terror is a moral failure but [I don't really care]
When your only moral benchmark is China do you actually have a defensible position when doing some things they also do?
I don't appreciate the personal attack about the education system and myself being affected by it. I said what I meant RE global spying, I can back up my reasoning with a much longer argument but I didn't think it was that important or necessary.
I don't understand your points about the last two (treatment of black people and war on terror). I thought it was pretty clear I thought those were awful... also not to get too personal but I am part black and grew up in a small rural area, don't think I don't understand what exactly racism is.
It was the top of my comment but I'll help you out also with the background, although it leaves me with the strong impression that you neither read it, nor are willing to actually have a worthwhile conversation.
OP>>> this is exactly how the rest of the world feels about US-based companies harvesting dna data for years
YOU>> The US isn't actively committing genocide against a specific ethnic group right now
ME> Is this the bar to pass in order to be allowed to collect any kind of data from any person around the world?
You're justifying why everyone else should be OK with the US to collect DNA but not for China because "genocide". So tell me, is that the bar you have to pass to collect DNA data from around the world or any similar effort? So you tell me how either of these countries is entitled to do it. Is everyone else bound to lower the standards and necessarily use the lowest bar to judge a matter?
The problem is some people would justify eating a baby because China ate two. That's an easy way to make all the wrong choices and justify all the wrong things: China does even worse. Will you accept any abuse from US leadership as long as it's not outright genocide?
"I will 100% die on the hill arguing that the US is a better global actor than China. Should the committing of genocide be the bar? No, of course not, but it's the most egregious example I could think of that demonstrates what a bad actor the CCP is."
My friend, you read that "this is exactly how the rest of the world feels about US-based companies harvesting dna data for years" and came up with something that looked like a justification of why exactly it would be different for the US. You pointed out China's genocide. But if that isn't the bar (at least because both countries fail it) then why bring it up at all? For China to be compared to the US it's a step up. Not so much the other way.
If you analyze the world through a narrow slit you miss that whatever chasm you see when you look at China, most Europeans see when they look at the US. So collecting all that DNA data is unacceptable for any country, certainly not any of the superpowers.
All the worse that with that background you decided to respond to OP's statement with "but here's a thing China does worse". Looking at what they do better would yield some insight, looking at what they do worse, especially in the context of justifying something bad, is like saying "because water is wet".
But since you brought it up, I have probably been strongly involved in high level policy making and international politics in multiple European states and institutions with quite some success for longer than all but a potential handful of people on HN. If it's one thing that I know it's that if it looks like the knee jerk reaction of the usual internet comment, it didn't come from people who've been too long, if ever, in that setting. It simply doesn't bring any value, it doesn't shift a perspective, it doesn't re-frame anything. Your choice of reference says a lot about where you see your starting position. That's like going into a negotiation by saying you don't know the value of your goal. Even if I'm sure you already thought of that, try to sit on it for a bit longer.
It’s incredible people are ready at the whistle to defend China on here and turn every article about China into a US vs China moral olympics.
Neither. Did you know that answer? Even if you are incapable of seeing it now, the world has more than 2 choices. But if that's your entire horizon I can imagine why you'd think one is good. It's like making a top of your favorite books after reading just two.
> people are ready at the whistle to defend China on here
And if the previous view didn't make it painfully clear you're ill equipped to argue this point in a civilized or productive fashion, your followup is to accuse anyone who disagrees with you as "a dog to defend China".
Son, I've seen this bullshit tactic for many more decades than you've been alive. I've had to live under most of the scare tactics you can imagine. I've had to live with people trying to shut me up by calling me a "capitalist subversive" on one side of the map, or a "red" on the other side. While then just as now those people were invariably the uneducated, at least back then most had little choice in that matter. You have no such excuse.
I find it concerning that you simply brush aside the horrible mistakes the US has made in almost all the continents (except maybe EU). This bias makes it hard for the rest of us to consider you seriously.
>but comparing the actions of a democratic country that promotes rule of law globally...
No one appointed the US to be the world police. It doesn't need to promote it's flawed ideas of "rule" to rest of the world. The US on a basic level lacks the comprehension needed to understand a multipolar, multicultural world, and often ends us messing things for the worse in most of the cases. The mess in Afghanistan/Syria/Libya etc is just one of the recent examples.
Indeed, there is no way to appoint someone to be the global police officer, the U.S. took that upon themselves sometimes to the benefit, sometimes the detriment of the rest of the world and itself (as you can see by just how much pushback there is on both the right and the left in America about America's role in the world). I just don't agree that it's been net negative.
I think you can blame Europe's colonial empires for that. As well as the two world wars started from European in-fighting that left the USA mostly unscathed.
Isn't the Libya mess started by France?
In this case the data was actually collected and analyzed with consent (as stated in the article).
There's probably something about this somewhere in the fine print on something they signed without reading, but most donors aren't aware of it.
There has been some controversy over that because there have been lucrative commercial drugs derived from research using such blood, and some feel that the donors should be given a cut of the profits.
Unless they managed to sneak the hooker clause into the fine print and I missed it. In which case, well done, carry on.
EDIT: I remembered wrong, parents are charged for the test and then the state monetizes their baby’s DNA anyway.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-biobank-dna-babies-w...
The U.S. does it too (without giving any evidence).
It's OK China doing it now.
Or it's bad that both does it...
As an example is Uighur camps in China. When USA is the country with most incarcerated in the world in absolute terms, even China with a fraction of the population! And mostly directed at black and poor communities
If China doesn’t do it for the money, then why? Bio weapons maybe, in any case pain, suffering, and death.
I prefer the first, thank you.
This comment is a rather egregious example of how surreal the false equivalences drawn between these two countries can be.
How do people not see the bias?
23andme doesn't specify which countries can do research on their clients' data, and for one I don't mind whichever country it is since the data can't be linked to people's identities. The only way to link it is to collect the person's DNA, at which point there is no point in using the database.
Well, 23andMe does "know" the identity of each individual. They know their name, their relatives, a lot about their genetics, and if given consent, store actual dna (biobanking) so that in the future other tests can be run. That's a lot of sensitive information for one entity to own.
Can we assume that 23andMe is at least very competent with security and PII, that they've taken enough safeguards to prevent hackers from stealing the keys to the kingdom? ehh maybe. Can we assume that they won't simply bend over when acquired by another less scrupulous entity? Nope. Can we assume that a future authoritarian government won't simply commandeer data whenever it likes like the CCP already does with Chinese companies? Hell no.
More to the point, however, is that folks are limiting the discussion to information about "individuals". Everyone imagines the consequences of individuals being targeted using this data. But really, geopolitical concerns don't care about individuals (modulo a very small number of key people). They care about populations. So even if individual information is kept safe, there's still awful things a bad actor can do with genetic data from everyone even without identifying individuals. That's what the concern is here.
23andMe has the same ultimate risks as BGI. It's just that BGI has skipped a few steps and gone further along in the dystopian nightmare by virtue of the fact that they're a Chinese company and utterly at the service of the CCP.
Most people barely understand the impact of their choices, that includes realising that all their (DNA) data will be logged forever if they ever let it touch the US. It is not reasonable to take this stance when the US tech company playbook has been to as obtusely as possible gain "permission" to do whatever they want.
The entire reason for this article. Surely if one were to use a similar US-based service, NSA and US military access to the data couldn't be ruled out.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/court-orders-subpo...
Sadly not true:
https://cdt.org/insights/law-enforcement-national-security-a...
>The HIPAA Privacy Rule provides a broad exception for national security purposes. Under the Rule, a covered entity may disclose any and all protected (identifiable) health information (PHI) for “lawful intelligence, counter-intelligence and national security purposes” (emphasis added). On its face, the Rule does not require a court order or any other enforceable or formal demand; disclosure may be completely voluntary and may be initiated by the covered entity even in the absence of a request from a government official
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon
Or to figure out the genes for intelligence, health etc. and to modify their population with them?
As such it’s probably less useful for any goal of expanding underrepresented DNA records for Asian women.
Do people actually care about this?
Or genetically modified viruses that target specific populations. Forget the food supply.
Something like a Covid-19 with a bit more specificity and a little more lethality.
No wonder the military has their hands in this.
And in this context, this is interesting:
> and since 2015 it has restricted foreign researchers from accessing gene data on Chinese people
And this isn't a "tin foil hat" post or a conspiracy theory. It's food for thought.
You can say that too when you bring up some 9/11 truther "questions". Doesn't make it less of a conspiracy theory.
> Beijing made clear in a 2019 regulation that genetic data can be a national security matter, and since 2015 it has restricted foreign researchers from accessing gene data on Chinese people. In contrast, the United States and Britain give foreign researchers access to genetic data, as part of open science policies.
This not the privacy debacle people are making it out to be, since names are not collected, this is far less of a privacy invasion than 23andMe since that data base can extrapolate and identify you without your consent based on your relatives.
This is much more of either (which depends on your perspective):
an open science and data access issue
or a national security issue
Saddam is gone. Iraq is a fledgling democracy, which was unthinkable 25 years ago, and their oil output is persistently near record highs.
Iraq has a GDP per capita higher than Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, Egypt. And not far from South Africa or Paraguay. It's not a total disaster at present, they legitimately have a chance to build something there in the coming decades.
These two things are simultaneously true: Iraq's future prospects are better because the US invaded, and the US should not have invaded.
The Korean War involved dramatically more misery than Iraq did. Millions of people died in just a few years. Ask the South Koreans if they would prefer that the Kim family were ruling over them while they exist in absolute poverty today.
Isn't it just fascinating how today nobody dares to proclaim that the US should have left North Korea to conquer and rule South Korea, that that would have been the obvious better outcome vs the misery they went through for decades after the war. No, people wouldn't dare to say that, but they'll say it about Iraq, because it's a convenient stick to beat the US with. If Iraq's fortunes improve in the coming decades, those same people will go largely silent on the matter and the narrative will be modified (go back and read how the narrative on the Korean War changed across the decades as South Korea's situation radically improved).
The people of Iraq have a chance to chart their own course democratically. The US doesn't rule Iraq, we didn't take their oil, we didn't annex their territory. We lost two trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to stop them from killing eachother in a religious war. The situation in Iraq is very far from perfect, so what, the lack of perfection isn't a valid counter argument; the situation in South Korea after the Korean War was very very far from perfect for decades.
Even the US was a basketcase for decades after its founding. It was held together by a string, ultimately culminating in a very bloody civil war as well.
It took decades for South Korea to build up the structures necessary to sustain itself as a democracy and lift the standard of living of its people. They were still poor as recently as the early 1980s. Why is it that people think Iraq should have been instantly transformed into a mecca? That's a level of expectation nobody would dare apply to any other similar context. As though the end of Saddam's rule was somehow going to be soft and fluffy, rather than involving misery. There was no other scenario than to go through misery given the sectarian split in Iraq and the way Iraq was being ruled, it was always going to prompt a civil war.
The issue is that the US was involved. It's an easy point that can be used to hit the US with.
How can I be sure of that? Well, simple, consider the alternative. The opposite position is: condemn the people of Iraq to living under Saddam and his sadistic family (or the equivalent). I'll note that was a minority political group oppressing and torturing a far larger majority group through a brutal totalitarian system with zero human rights. Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that? I'd challenge someone to dare to say that right now and then back it up as the better alternative to the present (that's not what would happen of course; a person will instead proclaim a fantasy scenario of f...
"Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that?" I condemn them to figure out their own future, do what's necessary and proper to attain it - whether it be suffer under Saddam or overthrow him is for the Iraqi people to decide. Not American politicians and intelligence services you seem to be a sycophant for.
"I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better..." False choice, get better at your moral justifications. Going to address the way the US public was lied into the Iraq Pillaging? You compare the Pillaging of Iraq with the Korean War - one had an aggressor (KPA crossed the line a thing that actually happened to instigate the war) and we had obligations to the First Republic of Korea. The US had and has no obligations to the Iraqi people, we just lied about Iraq and Saddam's relation to terrorists so the American ruling class could do it's thing.
I can't get passed this post boiling down to "we shouldn't have gone, but we did and Iraq is better for it" You completely fail to address the opportunity costs involved from the US side. Who are you trying to convince with this moral justification for invading Iraq, yourself?
I'll chop a hand off if Iraq becomes anything like South Korea before 2100.
What a laughable notion. Utter the words "national security" and all your checks and balances go right out the window. There are also no checks and balances for non-US citizens: it is free to violate my non-existent rights as much as it wants.
While I would still prefer to live in the US, you would find by talking to Chinese citizens that they feel exactly the same way about their country. The same applies to Russians and other large nations. We are all being fed propaganda, it doesn’t matter what country you live in.
You can protest the government. You can talk shit about the leaders. You aren't jailed or killed for any of these things in the US. And 'as recently as 1970s' is half a century ago.
I'm European btw.
Someone has some reading to do.......
Don't hurt yourself moving those goalposts.
While they might not be going full Maoist China on it's dissedents, they exercise more subtle methods to control the narrative and compromising movements as well as outright assassinations of prominent figures.
This is absolutely not unique to the US of course and this goes on in Europe as well. They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.
The powers that be always want to continue being. But methods matter. How many politicians in the US or Europe have been poisoned by the state in the last decade? Don't you think there are politicians that the government would rather didn't exist? Yet they don't kill them or fabricate charges.
It is ridiculous to compare liberal democracies with autocratic regimes.
But it is true that we really need to keep our guard up to retain our liberal democracies, they are being attacked form within as well as outside.
While I cannot disconfirm the former (though there have certainly been some high profile cases with fishy circumstances- such as JFK), what about the Russiagate nonsense with Trump? I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it. He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last. It seems to be a bipartisan thing to simultaneously shift focus of the public from national level corruption in favour of a foreign bogeyman and simultaneously slander opponents.
In a so called representative democracy, you do not need to outright murder or imprison your opponents to enforce control, you simply either have to relegate them to irrelevance through skewed or absent corporate media coverage or buy them out. See Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, early Nancy Peloski, AOC, etc.
The tactics might differ from a transparently autocratic regime but the intentions are the same, and the end result is not really as different as liberals like to paint it. For all the unpopular politicians that are allowed to continue, there is police violence, surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and outright assasinations of prominent figures in activist groups. Then there is what they get up to outside the confines of US citizenship and borders.
Look at the state of Bolivia, Columbia, most of Central and Southern America actually. They have death squads from paramilitary groups backed by US multinational companies for the sole purpose of brutally putting down any attempts at collective bargaining or real democracy. Just because it's not visible in your backyard doesn't mean your country is not responsible for that mess.
The collusion allegations were not a Manchurian candidate theory and were never disproven by any investigation. (To the contrary, prior to being pardoned by Trump, several people either plead guilty or were convicted at trial for lies to investigators the key substance of which was falsely denying active actual ot attempted coordination with Russian state actors by Trump campaign officials.) The story that Trump was somehow exonerated is itself a propaganda story from the Trump camp that waa deliberately facilitated by AG Barr’s deliberate distortion of the Mueller investigation findings.
> He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last.
He's definitely not the first politician to actively seek foreign assistance against domestic political opposition, nor the first to be sloppy enough that it gets noticed in time for it to be used against him (see, e.g., Louis XVI of France.)
Mueller specifically did not make a statement on it because he determined it to be Congress’ job and especially because he did not want to put up an appearance of political prosecution.
He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.
This is the fallback excuse Democrats always play when they either don't really want to implement something (such as a $15 minimum wage) or they know they don't really have a leg to stand on - blame the Republicans. Same excuse made by Obama and the same excuse now being made by Biden.
When you have decades of experience dealing with a political opponent that has proven time and time again to be acting in bad faith, defering to their sense of decorem and morality is being complicit in their actions in my eyes.
And no, it did not exonerate Trump. He's obviously corrupt to the bone but the specific angle was significant Russian interference and Mueller completely failed to substantiate it. It's also worth noting that despite the media making a big song and dance around Trump meetings with Putin, the actual policies during his administration were significantly more adversarial towards Russian economic interests than Biden's administration has been so far.
So, you're telling me the victims are still alive? 50 years is not a long time
The United States and China are nothing alike. Try flying a Winnie the Pooh blimp (makes fun of China’s leader) in China and see how long before that gets shut down. We can also freely talk about what is going on in China/HK/TW/wugiwers here, where such speech would be prohibited in China.
Did you miss the unconstitutional lockdowns for the "Boston Bomber"?
And...many other "emergencies", as decided by a single US politician?
https://nation.time.com/2013/04/19/was-boston-actually-on-lo...
There were accusations of forced sterilization at the Mexican border: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-54265571
> disappearing political dissidents
cough Julian Assange, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning
Yes, it's not "disappearing" as in "getting them killed", but nevertheless their treatment has been horrifying.
> creating debt traps for the developing world
The US has putsched against a lot of Southern American countries and keeps supplying their narco gangs with money and weaponry. That is just as bad as the Chinese debt trapping.
> The United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
Lots of police violence goes unpunished. Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio and soldiers convicted of war crimes.
> enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
Hard disagree. The amount of regulations torn down during the Trump term is massive.
> enforces rule of law
For those who can afford it, see my point about police violence above.
> has free democratic elections
The US is still considered a "flawed democracy" (https://thehill.com/homenews/news/537204-us-score-falls-in-e...), partially due to systematic voter discrimination (gerrymandering, voting access requirements).
> If you would rather live in the orbit of any single other superpower or empire in world history, you're deluded.
Come to the European Union. I admit it, we are not perfect either (particularly on handling the refugee situation and member countries drifting towards authoritarianism and dictatorship), but generally we are a better society in a number of metrics.
They haven’t been disappeared.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets. Literally decades of abuse before authorities finally arrest them, and only because regular people came out and protested after they heard of the stories publicly. Like the gov had no idea ever... for decades on open secrets like that... until now?
The effort put into these scenarios are very skewed.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets.
Do you expect the police to just magically know that people are committing crime? The criminal investigation process usually begins with a police report (of someone reporting a crime). In the absence of a police report (as with the Epstein and Weinstein cases) the police have "no cause" to investigate absent some other mechanism that publicly reveals alleged crimes (like a news report). And on that note, in both of the cases you cited, prosecutors did try to investigate the rumors, but couldn't find anyone wiling to testify against those men until the scale of their crimes became public.
Epstein was arrested and awaiting trial once his crimes became publicly known, and before he committed suicide was expected to face charges in multiple states and countries. Epstein became so toxic that multiple men known to have gone to Epstein's parties have faced social and financial repercussions for it. Melinda Gates famously divorced Bill because of his friendship with Epstein. Similarly, Weinstein was also arrested once his crimes became public and is facing charges in multiple states, was kicked out of every industry group, and essentially banished from his former life.
Nitpick, but wasn't that only true of Manning? Assange irresponsibly put Manning's cables out in unredacted form, which I believe revealed the names of sources who were put in danger. IIRC, Snowden only leaked to Greenwald and a few mainstream newspapers who were careful to make redactions on what they released to avoid such outcomes.
That's partially a product of the US justice system, which is among the more rigorous in the world, and tends to favor letting the guilty go free over punishing the innocent. This is a trade-off, not an objectively bad thing.
Now, I would attribute the rest of those scenarios to plain-old corruption - which is a problem for every system of government without checks and balances (that are actually used).
What are you talking about? Epstein died in jail, and Weinstein is currently in prison.
Read up on that story. It was malpractice by one outside doctor that served one detention center, it was not government policy.
https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-histo...
Shameless.
instead they just bomb them to smithereens
>taking over city states
you gotta think on the scale of countries with puppet governments
>disappearing political dissidents
south american leaders would disagree
>creating debt traps for the developing world
what is IMF?
>shutting down newspapers
NSA was just caught spying on Tucker Carlson
>United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
We investigated out selves and found out nothing wrong, and if you try to arrest our soldiers we'll bomb your country
>enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
regulations paid for by lobbyists on behalf of billionaire donors
> enforces rule of law
every country enforces rule of law
> has free democratic elections
press x to doubt
> and generally upholds the rights and freedoms outlined in its constitution
what is Patriot ACT?
I'm an American and I love my country, despite its flaws, but you are either a paid shill at Langley or brainwashed beyond disbelief
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm tired of this whatboutism used to excuse completely appalling behavior with -zero- checks and balances at all. Country A doing bad thing doesn't excuse Country B from doing a much worse thing.
I don't know why you think I would excuse the USA's actions, both now and in the past. "Many people want to live in X" is not a strong argument- many people want to live in the US as well... now we've gotten nowhere.
My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.
The US has killed their own citizen with drones, has imprisoned people who revealed government abuse and just last year arrested more than 100 journalists.
https://cpj.org/reports/2020/12/record-number-journalists-ja...
So I could easily same the same about you, you are repeating a pro-CIA propaganda point. I would suggest to ask around in Latin-America, in Africa in China and even in Europe and ask people who they consider more a threat to world peace and which behaves in an arrogant, "my way or the highway", imperialistic manner. You will be very surprised and the whole worldview you were taught in your perfectly designed educational system will come crash down.
Less swearing allegiance to the flag and more travelling. I hope that is not ad-hominem enough to try to ban me.
If you want to have a civilized conversation, the first thing is to stop assuming everyone only consumes propagandistic drivel if you disagree with them. Many people, like myself, have traveled and lived in various other countries. Nowhere in my comments have I ever said the US doesn't have issues; in fact I quite frequently discuss the enormous issues the US has and so do most of the people that I know...
This is a freedom that I, and the media, do have and can exercise without getting imprisoned. The reporter issue -is- quite serious and needs addressing, but is related to police abusing their power during the riots last year, not the federal or state government going to people's homes and arresting them for posting online criticism of the government or ruling party. We're free to message each other and post online about every single atrocity the US government has committed without repercussion. How can a bad situation be improved if criticizing the government is impossible?
> No one wants to live in a racist country when they will be treated as second-class citizens at best.
You mean like living in any homogeneous Asian country as any ethnicity except the primary one? You accuse me of not traveling, but my experience from living in S. Korea and Japan showed me that highly homogeneous countries can be wildly racist about everyone. The US is not the only country has serious racism issues, and it's a shame that I need to state that. It seems like you think the US is one entity, but depending on the city and state it can be extremely multicultural and diverse (like Chicago, my home town).
Plenty of people are moving to the US still; I don't really find it a useful metric for an argument either way because it doesn't consider the origin country or the immigrant's prior situation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/05/us-threat-demo...
So ask yourself, who is right? The world is 7+ billion people, not 330 MM. And who in their right mind can take seriously a criticism from an American? it is like being called a slut by the "madame" from the whorehouse.
> You mean like living in any homogeneous Asian country as any ethnicity except the primary one?
How many racial minorities were killed, abused and tortured by the police in South Korea and Japan last year? How many racial minorities there are going to jail at a 400% proportion of its population? How many racial minorities there are protesting torching the country because they are being called niggers, or spics and openly insulted by the president, called rapists, bad hombres, bad people?Or being patronized by Biden : " Poor Children can be as smart as white Children" "All black people are the same"(Notice a pattern here?) Let me tell you about a Japanese racial minority, the Okinawans, whose women have been raped constantly by American GIs who are not even judged. Ask the Okinawans what do they think about the Americans?
Another Pacific minority? The people in the Bikini Atolls, see how the rich, diverse, enlightened and multicultural vibrant country treated them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjqoiT-RS4A
> t seems like you think the US is one entity, but depending on the city and state it can be extremely multicultural and diverse (like Chicago, my home town).
So let me get this straight, you consider any Asian country as homogeneous (where more than half of the world lives and there are hundreds of ethnicities), yet Chicago is multicultural? I will tell you what the problem is: You think of American as the vanilla version of the world, so they can adapt themselves and be diverse and individual and the Asians, are the "Chinamen", the homogeneous,android-like, everybody the same. The world does not work like that. But this is a discussion that is worthless. You are a citizen of the modern Roman Empire, your world spin around "Rome" and all the roads led to it. Many more generations are needed to see a change on this hegemonic worldview.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't know what -would- be a good metric, but perhaps the expatriation rate, immigration rate to other countries, and brain drain rate would be good places to start.
And probably soon "public health"
The notion that it’s no different from China is absurdist propaganda. In China there is no such thing as abuse of power if it is sanctioned by the party.
I was responding to the notion that it is completely different from China. It is not. The western nations are more totalitarian than they would like to admit.
Western governments are not controlled by a single party with an lifetime ruler and no democratic mechanisms at all for expressing dissent, let alone moderating power.
It’s not a matter of degree. Doing bad stuff is not the same as totalitarianism.
What kind of false equivalency bullshit is this? In China, you utter the words "national security" and newspapers get shut down by the police: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-beijing-shu.... Publish the wrong kind of books and they'll kidnap you and put you in prison (even if you have a foreign citizenship, which you'll conveniently "voluntarily renounce" in custody): https://www.npr.org/2020/02/25/809163417/hong-kong-bookselle....
I was arguing with someone about a fringe website the other day, and I think I finally understand the thought process a lot of these people have. I think many are people who are strongly and habitually opposed to something (in this case, US injustices) have that opposition warp their perception of other things (especially things "opposed" to the US). Sometimes that means they see discussion of other injustices carried out by US adversaries as a distraction to be fought. Other times, that means denying and defending against accusations of injustice against a US opponent. In extreme cases, it means starting to explicitly support those opponents, even through they're arguably worse on almost every value axis these people started with.
tl;dr: anti-imperialists who oppose the US imperialism can sometimes become defenders of imperialism done by US adversaries.
This is article that helped me realize this:
https://newpol.org/against-the-grayzone-slanders/:
> During the Vietnam War, opposition to the United States and support for national self-determination for the Vietnamese among young activists sometimes developed into support for the Vietnamese Communist Party and its leader. One often heard at the protest demonstrations, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Going to Win.” While this drift from opposition to the U.S. government to support for the Vietnamese government was understandable as a gut reaction to the horrors of the U.S. war, it was also very problematic. Most people chanted this slogan naively, but some gradually became supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist government, and of the Soviet Union that was backing it. Few in the movement pointed out that Ho and the Vietnamese Communists were Stalinists who had murdered their leftist competitors and strove to construct a Soviet-style state in Vietnam, which is eventually what happened.
Should the US not have intervened to prop up RVN, disrupting millions of lives of young americans (and losing 50,000 of them), and killing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of others from carpet bombings, napalm, etc? No, and continuing escalation was criminal on the parts of Johnson, Nixon, and their henchmen.
But somehow people need to take that into somehow supporting and idolizing the exact horrific, militant, violent, racist traits they claim they are against. At the end of the day, they just don't like the US (or use opposition to the US as a virtual signal) - it has nothing to do with opposing unethical things.
by Brian Nelson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38642886-the-last-sword-...