What Dan is saying is that the Chinese state has a track record of adopting policies and sticking to them for lengthy periods despite mountains of evidence that they're harmful, and their COVID response is only the latest example.
Democracies generally have a harder time doing this, because they have checks and balances that prevent going to extremes (welding people into their homes etc) and the governments responsible will eventually get voted out if public opinion turns against them.
> What Dan is saying is that the Chinese state has a track record of adopting policies and sticking to them for lengthy periods despite mountains of evidence that they're harmful, and their COVID response is only the latest example.
I know. But that's separate from my point. Dan is not wrong about China.
Additionally I would argue every government acts this way. It's human nature. When someone fucks up big time it takes them awhile to voluntary face that fuck up. Governments are no different.
I mentioned this somewhere else but the US one time threw the entire japanese population in the states into internment camps. It took them 10 years to apologize. The internment camp thing is an epic fuck up. Epic. And it took 10 years the government to admit they were wrong.
>Democracies generally have a harder time doing this, because they have checks and balances that prevent going to extremes (welding people into their homes etc) and the governments responsible will eventually get voted out if public opinion turns against them.
This is garbage. Democracies are no strangers to dark dark shit. Again as I mentioned in a sibling comment on this thread, the US recently blew up the nordstream oil pipelines. Literal act of terrorism against an allied country. Germany is clamming up because they don't want to start WW3.
Not to mention the CIA torture program or the CIA program of SELLING crack cocaine to americans to finance their foreign operations.
Literally throw a dart and it will land on some atrocity conducted by the US, there are tons and tons of shit you can dig up. It's no different for China. Just apples and oranges.
Humans aren't white knights, and operate in areas that are morally grey. This aspect of humanity is reflected in governments, independent of centralized or democratic organization.
Are you with a straight face arguing that autocracies are morally equivalent to democracies? Remind me again which democracies have let 15-50M of their own people willfully starve to death (Great Leap) or willfully destroyed nearly their entire cultural heritage while killing millions in the process (Cultural Revolution)?
It's no coincidence that the three bloodiest mass murderers of the 20th century -- Hitler, Stalin and Mao -- were all dictators, and while the US has done and continues to do a whole lot of repugnant shit, nothing comes close to any of these three.
>Remind me again which democracies have let 15-50M of their own people willfully starve to death
The US and other western countries blocked Chinese emergency imports of food that wouldve saved those people. I've never heard of China willfully allowing people to starve to death but the democratic US has done just that to it's own indigenous population, children in Iraq, and countless other countries.
>Are you with a straight face arguing that autocracies are morally equivalent to democracies?
I judge morals by actions not by labels. If a country dropped a nuclear bomb on hiroshima slaughtering millions of innocent civilians. I don't judge that country based off of a label of "democracy", I judge it based off of action.
If a country kills millions of people by letting them starve to death than that country is ALSO judged.
Not only do I not Judge a country based off of a label. But I don't hold any loyalties to ANY country. I don't join teams or take sides. I judge dispassionately with ZERO patriotism. Patriotism is bias. You should not hold it for a country or for a philosophy. If democracy has issues I judge it, it communism has issues I also judge it.
This idea of the ludicrousy of asking the question: "Are you with a straight face arguing that autocracies are morally equivalent to democracies" is raw garbage. I don't take sides. EVER. And I hold all things equal until I look at evidence and form conclusions from that ONLY.
>It's no coincidence that the three bloodiest mass murderers of the 20th century -- Hitler, Stalin and Mao -- were all dictators, and while the US has done and continues to do a whole lot of repugnant shit, nothing comes close to any of these three.
It's not a competition. The point for why I pointed out atrocities in America was to sort of tone down the bias against China. To help people see that there are negative aspects of both countries and to help eliminate this idea that a democratic country is some kind of paragon for moral goodness. It is not.
Many Americans are blinded by the current cold war rivalry that they are unable to see the things that China got right. China EXCELS and is SUPERIOR then the west in many areas. One of these areas is large scale response and organization to potential threats LIKE the pandemic.
That's an ahistoric claim. People standing up to the CIA, FBI, or othe parts of the US government that are a reasonable threat end up falsely arrested, assassinated, or tortured and killed in blacksite prisons.
But what does this have to do with the Chinese response to covid? My comment is specific to the example I quoted in the specific post.
I think there's a bit a team mentality going on here. Pick a team. Team China or Team USA and the opposing side is a villain.
What's really going on here is not a team situation. Just two different fruits: Apples and Oranges. Both can and Have gone rotten at times.