One party authoritarian dictatorship with no free speech or democratic elections and no civil rights movement seems pretty bad to me. No amount of whataboutism is ever going to compete with that.

It also seems like clashes with India, every southeast asian country with internationally recognized territory rights in the South China sea, the forcible takeover of Hong Kong, arming and economically supporting Russia, Pakistan and Iran are bad, and the increasing probability of a hot war to take over Taiwan should count as bad, perhaps the most urgently dangerous threat to global peace in the 21st century.

The United States track record post WW2 is a complicated combination of monstrously immoral Kissenger and Bush style overthrows of democracies and genuinely valuable maintenance of a post WW2 democratic order focused on things like free speech and human rights. I stay with full sincerity that in the decade plus that I've been here on hn seeing whataboutism as a strategy for defending China, I'm yet to encounter anything that feels like a sincere engagement with United States role in the world as a combination of positives and negatives, it's always flatly one-sided messaging that feels like it's aimed at a favorable audience that already agree rather than like it's sincerely attempting to persuade.

Cool that you completely ignore the US economically and militarily supporting Isreal

Your first sentence describes the US for the last 40 years. One corporate party that passes legislation to benefit the elites while there are no counter civil rights movements where US citizens are literally less free than they were 10 years ago.

The US was birthed as a white ethno-national colonial state. It required 20% of the population to be held in bondage while denying suffrage to 80% of the population. It took 100 years + a civil war before slavery was ended, and it took nearly another 100 years before every American could truly vote. Not because it was the "right time" either, go look at how the women's suffrage movement started. They were fire bombing factories and capitalists.

The propaganda surely runs deep, but something tells me you're too rich to really suffer so congrats I guess. I'm sure many wish they could trade places with your privilege. I bet those that will suffer from needless starvation or lack of medical care due to US imperialism would really like to trade places too.

Sorry but these boogey man acts fall flat when you look at how hostile and anti-human the US government has become over the recent decades. You can't blame this on one person, the system was always rotten and a course correction will happen. You just better pray it's the right people directing the ship.

Please take your virtue signaling somewhere else. This is a tech forum, not a grandstand for your slogan-ridden, college freshman diatribes.

Sorry that it makes you uncomfortable to realize that slavers built this nation and enforced their will on the majority of the country by creating a government where elites control the country through minority rule. I bet you think the 3/5's compromise was just good governance too right? That's pragmatic centrism we desperately need in modern times!

If it makes you feel better I'll also include this in the help text of my next neovim plugin.

Are there distinct third world opinions in one direction or the other? I've tended to assume they are non-unitary rather than broadly converging on one side or the other.

Certainly, just as much is true in reverse, or in every direction for that matter, which is why we end up falling back to substance.

It's not nearly as true in the other direction, because American culture and media are everywhere. The fact that they know more about you than you do about them should give you hints that you're missing some substance.

Comments like this are why I go to the comments! I never would have thought to check.

And while I'm here I want to note that I feel there's a big misunderstanding of what is and isn't demonstrated by DeepSeek. So far as I can tell the major (and important!) innovation is reproducing near-frontier level capabilities at a fraction of the cost, but it may be the case that iterating forward at the frontier is the costly thing and is a cost borne by Western companies and that nuance seems to get lost with DeepSeek. Which is not to say that as a matter of principle that non Western companies aren't sometimes capable of jumping into the lead (Kimi has been super impressive) but if GPT/Claude/etc "only" lead at the frontier with more expensive models, that's still a moat.

If you can get something almost as capable for a fiftieth of the price, in most cases you'll do that. You might still send a few tokens to the more expensive option for the exceptional, difficult cases, but that's maybe 10% of the tokens at most. I don't see how it'll be possible to keep spending what anthropic, openai, google etc are spending if they're only going to see the trickiest 10% of tokens.

Missed the point award

Maybe I need to spell out the step that connects them - how will those companies afford to keep "iterating forward at the frontier" when they probably have a huge crash in their income coming from competition with good enough, but 1/50th the price cheaper and open models.

Iterating forward at the frontier doesn't seem like a sustainable approach if everyone else can catch up with you in 6 months.

>The commenter didn't say "I don't like that the only two serious competitors are from the USA and China", they ONLY called out China

What? They explicitly called out China in comparative terms with the US while also criticizing the US. Also, they're the other obvious major global power so it's not a question of singling out.

Right, and if distance from the present matters, probably the biggest risk to global peace (such as it is) comes from China's increasingly serious preparations for a military attack on Taiwan.

And some of us have a sore lower back after playing tennis, while some of us have terminal stage four cancer. Who is to say which is worse?

I think right now there's a kind of global propaganda competition playing out and the thing that does the most damage is false equivalences that encourage loss of perspective.

we don't need machinery or a mechanism to compare it, natural selection works just fine for 99% of all species on earth.

The US committed massive treaty violations and genocide, on top of huge imperialist destabilization of many sovereign nations. Tianmen square and the Uyghers are bad, but we're straight up evil.

Just on the genocide scorecard, it's us 0, China 1. Ask a native american what they think of the US govt.

And by contrast what I find stunning is the inability to engage in meaningful comparative analysis of relative harms. There's a lot of spectacularly insightful attention to detail in so far as it mobilizes what aboutism arguments and then that attention mysteriously falls away when we ask questions like the extent to which these sides allow free press or democratic elections with multiple parties or permit fair trials. You used to not have to explain these things.

They've been pretty creative in setting their sights on the likes of Tucker Carlson and others. There truly is no one like Alex, and so I think there is a very real possibility that the show as we know it could fundamentally change if Alex stops producing content.

But I think Dan and Jordan are interesting enough as personalities and bring really good analysis and there are plenty of other worthy targets. So I do think things would change in a significant way if they ever had to veer away from Alex Jones stuff, but I would believe in their ability to reinvent themselves and train their fire on new targets.

Presumably in terms of a conventional colloquial sense that's an amalgam of those among other things.