yourbandsucks

Don't forget the part where they all have access to running water and penicillin now. They're responsible for the greatest humanitarian success story in world history over the last 40 years.

Overlay that with how the US spent our cold war dividend over the same period..

Every big country has got some skeletons attached to it, especially including the US.

If you're primed to see the foreign country as monstrous and evil, you'll see it that way, whatever the balance of the facts for people who live there may be.

For example, social credit. Do you know what it is? Do you know specifically what's being proposed and implemented right now? Or are you going off of some breathless reporting?

(super briefly, there's no consumer credit system in China. Currently there are 2 corporate credit systems evolving in response to need (alipay, wepay), and something like 15 different government-sponsored pilot programs testing different ideas in different provinces, because having consumer credit scores is in fact important for finance. This gets reported as some Big Brother Social Credit Program With A Big Dystopian Plan by western media).

Think of it as a scissor statement.

Either it's the most mild, milquetoast statement possible or it's a declaration of war against Human Rights, Mom and Apple Pie.

Eh. I commented that "Chinese people are people too" the other day and got pretty heavily downvoted.

Are those downvoters expressing a reasoned belief that Chinese people aren't people? Or are they just reduced to a set of tribal motor reflexes with up and down arrows?

I'm actually kinda hoping it's the 2nd one rather than the first.

I mean.. politics ought not to be an exercise in demanding conformity and punishing any non-standard thought.

Without LBJ, we wouldn't have had the Space Program, the various civil rights bills of the 60s, or Medicare. He also escalated Vietnam from a minor conflict to a major disaster.

Most impactful President since FDR, easily, yet he doesn't get half the press of Reagan or Nixon.

Not really. Despots usually have politics to deal with. Not everything is possible.

The companies in question had a massive technological and force advantage over the local populace with free reign when it came to managing dissent with force. Their only political concerns were back in Europe.

Nazis are not in fact people for the purposes of discussion. They are movie extras who get shot as fast as possible.

You really had to go full Godwin dehumanization on a billion people right away?

Chinese people are people too, you know.

That's certainly the official US line on the matter.

How has the official US line held up, historically, when it comes to coups vs socialists in Latin America? Why should it be different this time?