But killing tens of thousands of people is Whataboutism?

Liberalism in a nutshell.

Whataboutism

You’re accusing China of invading Taiwan, a thing it categorically hasn’t done.

I’m arguing against the premise

I’m discussing the actual material facts in these two countries.

I’m listening to someone point to LBJ’s Great Society and calling it a Holocaust. You sound like one of those homeschool libertarians, screaming about how truancy laws are unconstitutional.

what people/ the West take issue with is the rounding up of dissidents, sending them to reeducation camps, and forcibly sterilizing some of them

Not when their friends in The Philippines or Israel are doing it. Not when they’re doing it to refugees in US prisons or UK detention camps.

What Westerners object to isn’t Chinese policing. It’s Chinese sovereignty, Chinese technology, and Chinese trade they’re freaked out about.

As far as the Chinese government goes, this part refers to taking Taiwan by force.

What blockade are they running against Cuba Taiwan? How many military bases are they squatting on in defiance of the national government? How many times have they attempted to assassinate a Cuban Venezuelan Iranian Afghani Taiwanese head of state?

How many homes have they bulldozed? How many citizens have they butchered? How many fishing boats have double-tapped?

But just because the United States is creating/ allowing internment camps and death camps doesn’t mean it’s okay for the Chinese to do it to the Uygurs

China is building schools and factors in Xinjiang, extending their massive rail network into the country, developing new high density urban centers, and - as a consequence - importing a great deal of the neighboring territory language, culture, and economic practices.

The US is defunding education across the Southwest, gutting low-cost public transit, criminalizing the development of property in migrant neighborhoods, and conducting mass arrests of legal residents based on the social media posts of grifters and fanatics.

How are these two policies equivalent?

Is your premise that suppression of minorities and military adventurism is par for the course so there’s no use criticizing it?

On what planet is policing your own sovereign territory against domestic insurgency “military adventurism”?

Hey, it’s the Internet. You can aim higher.

Say you’re the CEO next time.

i dont have them so they can’t

“Please provide any social media as part of your application”

“Haha. Well, guess what, dipshits. I don’t have any. Checkmate!”

Sound of resume hitting the bottom of the trash can

In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing.

…

Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”

So, I am not going to dive into the raw numbers, but I’m already a little turned around at

• relatively satisfied

• highly satisfied

• very satisfied

I’ll simply note that local governments are also run by Communist Party officials. So claiming the CCP has 99.5% approval (even considering how this is a decade out of date and how “relatively” and “highly” satisfied suggest a bit of a gulf in opinion) is a serious fudge of the real public view.

That said, yeah. Much higher domestic view of the state than in the US/EU block. Definitely a problem for all those NAFO-heads who pine for Regime Change in Beijing.

And why should it need to suppress its own citizens, anyways?

The goal of the modern CCP is largely understood to be economic growth and steadily improving quality of life for domestic citizenry as a means of discouraging domestic upheavels (Tianamen and the Falun Gong lead movements being two classic examples).

That’s going to come with some level of suppression due to friction between what any subset of the population believes/wants and what the central government believes/wants.

But this isn’t - at it’s root - a Socialist policy. It is a Confucian policy, with Socialist Characteristics.

The CCP has a 95.5% approval rate.

I hope you’re joking.

There’s no shortage of dissatisfaction with the CCP from within the Chinese polity. There’s no shortage from within the CCP.

But what westerners don’t like to talk about is the Mass Line approach employed by Chinese political leadership, which legitimately seeks to minimize conflict in pursuit of maximum economic benefits.

You don’t have gonzo gunmen storming Beijing in hopes of winging President Xi, right now, because you don’t have a public openly at odds with the mission of the chief executive.

“The era of fossil fuels must come to an end. We should embrace solar, wind, and nukular energ- why is everyone laughing?”

I definitely want Chinese tucker Carlson and Alex jones

I heard in America that the government will allow your father to shoot you until you die if you disagree with him politically but ask to see his gun.

I think this is a great illustration of the kind of propaganda we see online wrt any “Evil Foreign Country”. In this case, it was the British Press reporting hysterically about a father hosting his daughter’s family for Thanksgiving, bragging about being a Trump supporter, bragging about owning a gun, and then accidentally shooting his daughter (literally a room away from the rest of the family) because he’s the exact kind of dipshit that doesn’t know how to handle a firearm professionally. Grand Jury threw the charges out precisely because it was so obvious that he’d been negligent rather than willful. The rest of the family confirms it. But the Brits report it like it was an Honor Killing that the local government endorsed and facilitated.

We see this kind of manipulation of events in US media - wrt China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, France, Mexico, Antifa, Immigrants, Brown People, you name it - any time national news organizations decide they need to flog a particular government or demographic group.

Hardly unique to the US. But when you’re getting the full Clockwork Orange, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be an outsider looking in.

Falun Gong have allied with foreign intelligence services, but they weren’t created by those services. Originally, the organization was allied with the Communist Party and on generally good terms. They only ran afoul of the Chinese Communists when Falun Gong leaders became embroiled in increasingly noxious financial and abuse scandals. Not unlike how the Catholic Church’s status soured across Europe and the US East Coast following the slew of child sex abuse allegations.

That’s when Falun Gong officials started fleeing to the NATO block and issuing increasingly hysterical allegations about the conduct of the CCP towards its members.

if you look towards northern Europe instead of the US

The UK has some of the most repressive speech laws on Earth. Germany isn’t far behind. Given the groundswell of fascist tendency across the Scandinavian bloc, I would not bank on them serving as a model much longer. An uptick in Muslim immigration has kicked off a tidal wave of Islamophobia, which now dominates their domestic politics.

There are so many speech restrictions and humans rights violations in China that scare the hell out of me

I hear an earful about how horrible and repressive the Chinese state government is to its citizens from the outside, largely by national media talking heads and Big Data surveillance company flaks. Meanwhile, the consequences of talking shit on the Chinese internet - account suspension/deactivation, getting in trouble with your employer/school possibly with the threat of firing/expulsion, periodic investigation by state police for threats of violence, possible restrictions on business/travel because you’ve been added to a “watch list”, potential for arrest on some bullshit charge - seem to be all the same kinds of consequences periodically doled out to western citizens.

I’m told Americans have “free speech”. But then the Supreme Court lays so many caveats down that even a silly toothless joke is strictly prohibited under US laws. I’m told Chinese officials are brutal and draconian and mean-spirited, but they don’t have anything approaching our prison population. I haven’t seen evidence of any kind of mob-rule social media gang dedicated to doxing Chinese dissidents, either. So they manage to stay ahead of Canary Mission and Project Veritas in that regard.

I hope one day there is more free speech for people in China who deserve to be able to say what they want.

I want to know what that’s supposed to look like in practice. Where can I find the Free Speech that the Evil Foreign Country is supposed to one day get?

Because if the dream is an American style system of free expression… What are we pinning for, really? Chinese Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson? Uyghurs given the Palestine Action treatment? An independent Taiwan that enjoys all the diplomatic kindness we afford to our neighbors down in Haiti and Cuba?

What are we even asking for?

It’s a race to the bottom in either case. What comes of living under a fascist regime crippled by it’s fealty to an even bigger fascist regime.

Industrialized nations are experiencing significant population decline driven by fertility rates falling below the replacement level of 2.1, caused by increased urbanization, female education, and high costs of living. Over 90 countries face shrinking populations, with major economies like Japan and Italy projected to halve by 2100.

Yes, but primarily in countries with little to no internet.

Probably just tied up with global population decline, or maybe infrastructure failure of ISPs, at this point. Facebook has the digital market super-saturated. Nowhere to go but down.

“Pspspspsps”

“Sorry, sir, we can’t do that here. But if you join me in the milk tea room…”

I think one of the reasons the critics came at it so harshly was that it was sort of this meme-movie. Lots of quotable lines. Lots of memorable scenes. But the overarching story kinda sucked. The villains were silly and lame. The heroes were uninspired. The movie parked itself on Irish Dude-Bro demographics and just kinda catapulted itself into cult classic material by casting Willem Dafoe a bit before he went mainstream.

I think it’s better than a 26%. But not all that much better.