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Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


People in many parts of the world will have the exact opposite impression. So far, Chinese domination looks like new roads, while US domination looks like coups and war. Of course, this reflects the current relative advantages of both and I have no illusions about the risks of being dominated by any imperialistic power.


Which just blows my mind. At a total US development aid of $34 billion in 2019, China is the only country that even comes close. The US's giving in the last fifty years (including massive sums to China) has been unparalleled in recorded history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...

Of course, that's just development aid. US blows away all other countries in humanitarian aid too: https://www.statista.com/statistics/275597/largers-donor-cou...


> US blows away all other countries in humanitarian aid too

The problem is that they often do blow stuff away, quite literally. People aren't going to sing your praise for the new well you've dug after you've bombed their wedding and killed all their friends and family.


Such a cynical position. I predict there will be domestic calls in the near future to significantly curtail the US's extraordinary benevolence -- nobody seems to appreciate it anyway. And that will benefit nobody other than maybe China, which has its own history with killing innocents.


If you reduced the development aid but also stopped bombing people, regime changes and all that good stuff that brings instability to a region, I'm sure everyone would be fine with that.

If you want to do some good, take some refugees. Like, a significant number, not a homeopathic amount.


As they drop bombs on innocent people across the Middle East. smh


I think the majority of countries have dropped or shot bombs at somepoint in the last 100 years.

Is that the only reason you do not think they are civilized? Any countries that have dropped bombs are not civilized?


> I think the majority of countries have dropped or shot bombs at somepoint in the last 100 years.

195 countries in the world... Only have to find ~100 countries that have bombed another country in the last century. Only thing I can see that is going to save that assumption is going to be ww2.


Without declared wars... I don't think majority of countries have done that ones... Unless they were imperialist ones...


...really?


[flagged]


This is a very narrow view of the problem at hand. Let me show you another narrow view that illustrates why it's not enough:

- How many governments has the US toppled in an undemocratic process ?

- How many governments has China toppled in an undemocratic process ?

We could go on and on about this, to make a clear opinion on the subject requires far more than a single question.


[flagged]


> The US was killing more central asians than China every year of the last 20 years straight. Hopefully no longer true going forward.

That's absolutely a fallacious comparison.

1. We don't have accurate data from China on the number imprisoned and killed by them, so no one can make absolutely comparisons like you did.

2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.

I dont agree with a lot of what happened in the middle east, but you can't in good fairh stretch that as a comparison to fit your own narrative.


There's those qualifications and spin I was asking for.

China is bringing economic development, secular institutions and women's rights, in a heavy handed way, whether the residents want it or not, with minimal regard for costs to those residents. It's the exact same thing as we've been doing, minus a fig leaf of democracy.

In neither case is the word genocide or ethnic cleansing appropriate, body counts don't support it. But it's especially rich to level the accusation 5 seconds after our 20 year war ended.


Note the word "war". They killed us as well. Again, this is not comprable to the situation in China with the Uighur Muslims. Unless you're one of those running these camps, you don't have an accurate body count, so you don't know what word is or is not appropriate. Based on the perceived scale of the operation, genocide seems very much correct, but I have no more information than you.

I don't understand how you can sit here and compare a war in the middle east to literal concentration camps. Stop performing mental gymnastics to fit your own narrative.


Because dead is dead. If you can't read, who cares what the declaration of war said.

It's counterinsurgency in both cases, attempting to modernize a tribal Muslim society in hopes of improving security from terror attacks.

You are aware there were terror attacks in Urumqi?

There are differences between their style and ours, the re-education camps vs the drone bombs. Maybe there's an argument about freedoms vs deaths. But Americans clearly do not actually give a shit about Muslim lives, it's just a political talking point. 300k dead in Yemen with our weapons doesn't even make the news, Afghanistan barely cracked the news for a decade, etc etc.

How many Americans were baying at the moon to invade Iraq and now they're the world's greatest humanitarians about Xinjiang?


>2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.

This kind of whitewashing is what allows us as Americans to ignore the mass scale death we inflict while pointing fingers at other kettles. You don't even have the cause of events correct - we invaded afghanistan first, America were the aggressors. Do you think we invaded Afghanistan to preserve women's rights? Do you know that American soldiers were told to turn a blind eye to the afghan national army raping little boys? You mention that we don't have accurate numbers about china's tyranny, but under Trump, we repealed the rule that the USG had to report drone strike casualties. I'm not surprised other countries don't see a functional difference between the US and China, after all only one of those countries has a solid track record of overturning democratically conducted elections because they didn't like the outcome.




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