this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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I notice a certain slight tendency in your comments to talk about China, implication that aid for Taiwan was "bought" from the US congress by someone, tendency to delve into the details of tariffs and suchlike.
Quick question for you: If I protest in China against a Chinese policy I don't agree with, what happens to me?
(This isn't a whataboutism -- China doing something doesn't excuse the US police from doing a much milder version of the same thing. I don't think they should be beating or arresting protestors here either. I'm just curious how universally you apply this concern for protestors who had their asses beat.)
Quick Answer: You can just google "site:scmp.com (or any other english language chinese news site) protestors"
You could probably find much better data if you googled the chinese word for protestors, but then you'd have to translate the results.
Even when the government wants to shut down protests, such as in HK, it's 100x more gentle than the US is. Think of how many people getting run over by cops we saw in 2020. I didn't see a single child get domed with a pepperball in Hong Kong.
Faaaaascinating
Also, look at all the happy Uyghurs leaving their re-education camps after the Chinese government helped boost their job opportunities. Sounds great.
Yes, that is 100x more gentle than how the US deals with terrorism. Abu Garib was not giving people job training and setting them up with careers.
Bro, it's not a fuckin contest
I'm not in favor of Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or the Uyghur detention camps, or the genocide in Gaza. From my point of view as a person who likes human rights, it's actually not really that complicated to say that I'm not in favor of any of those things. It wouldn't even occur to me to bring up one of them as a defense for any of the others, because I would have no reason to want to defend any of them.
This is exactly why I wanted to ask you that seemingly unrelated question. I was curious whether you were an overall pro-human-rights person who came organically to your viewpoint about not wanting to vote for the Democrats, or whether that "of course I hate that Palestine protestors in the US are being abused" -- a pretty sensible view, tbh -- came alongside some other views which were incongruous and surprising, and wouldn't commonly be encountered in a person who has strong feelings about human rights as they pertain to domestic US politics.
Sounds like I got my answer.
(Edit: Oh, not that this is the point, because (1) as I said it's not a contest (2) it is actually a little unfair to compare Hong Kong's mini-insurrection against peaceful US Palestine protests -- but Hong Kong protestors absolutely were shot in the head with nonlethal rounds, shot with live ammunition, given brain injuries and broken bones, sexually assaulted, and in some cases had their eyes shot out. Maybe they can get together with the BLM people who had eyes shot out and the lot of them could start working out how we can get these assholes out of power please.)
My take on any enemies of the US is uncritical support; the only impact the US will have on those people is further immiseration, thus to criticize them as an American living in America is to carry water for imperialism.
It's why you see people get more worked up about Iranian oppression than Saudi oppression, despite Saudi Arabia being dependent on US military aid to oppress it's people. The context of you, and American, hearing about gay rights in Palestine is to support further oppression of the Palestinian people.
So if a third party won the presidency someday, and the US turned against Israel, you'd uncritically support Israel?
If the US stopped being the core of imperialism, of course I'd have to reevaluate.
No, no, if they were still the core of imperialism. I don't think that's likely to change any time soon. But if voter sentiment in the US turned so aggressively and permanently against Israel that cutting off military aid to Israel became a huge campaign issue, and then it happened, and Israel went absolutely on a tear of anti-US realignment and made an alliance of survival with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Or something like that. It's a lot more plausible than other things that people are talking about, like legalizing weed or abolishing the FBI and DOJ.
If that happened and the US still had a mostly-unchanged-otherwise foreign policy, would you uncritically support Israel because they'd become an avowed enemy of the US?
Saudi Arabia and Egypt are also US puppets though.
But yes, I would support the US decolonizing its own puppets.
The uncritical support is right 99% of the time, there's been a handful of weird historical flukes where the US accidentally ends up on the right side of history, such as WWII and briefly supporting Rojava against ISIS (which is really a wash, since they created the context that lead to ISIS, then supplied ISIS with trucks and weapons).
That wasn't the question.
Would you uncritically support Israel, if they had a falling out with the US and started criticizing the US? Getting no military funding from us anymore, and getting up at the UN and calling out the US and giving criticism and making friends with countries that were avowed enemies of the US (while still killing Palestinians exactly like at present)?
I feel like you're saying you would, but I want to make sure I'm hearing you right.
It gets more complicated when US is on both sides or the same side as one of its enemies; eg, China supplying weapons to US puppets Indonesia and Philippians against their maoist guerillas.
But yes, in such a world where the US was openly taking action against one of their puppets, I'd have to support it, and be critical of whoever is supporting them.
It would be one hell of a historical fluke though.
They kinda have been, historically, in the late 40s, the USSR sent them some weapons, and more recently, they had warm relations with Russia and China.
Also, I want to circle back to this for a second. Doesn't this mean that we maybe shouldn't take your advice on how as voters to approach the presidential election?
Or does your "enemies of the US get uncritical support" stance come in conjunction with a "the US election is very important to me and I have some criticisms of the Democrats but they're purely meant from a constructive helping-the-country-get-better point of view" viewpoint on electoral politics?
Yeah, there is a discrepancy, I should be voting for the candidate that would lead to the quickest and least violent destruction of the US, but I live here and I can't give up the admittedly absurd hope that despite all evidence, the US will just you know, stop it, without a revolution or anything.
There is a difference in what libs and I consider "helping-the-country-get-better" is; I feel helping the country get better at imperialism is a bad thing, they don't.
Conversely, I feel helping the country get better at improving material conditions for the working class at the expense of the capitalist class to be good, where libs do not.
Hey, thanks for being honest. I wish all of you guys would lead with that.
Have you seen literally every single military action the US has taken since WWII?
If you assume the US is on the wrong side, you'll end up with the right answer every time. They supported the fucking Khmer Rouge until 1993.
North Korea good because US bad? Seems a bit reductive.
It's not a fight between good and bad nations in my mind, it's more about the struggle of people everywhere for liberation, justice, and equality. I'm pretty skeptical of most military actions since WW2 around the world. Such a destructive waste of human potential.
No, US's opposition to North Korea is bad. It doesn't make North Korea good, but I'm not going to criticize within the context of America, since the only use of that criticism is to support further sanctions or military actions against the people of North Korea.
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