alt Hacker News> America is becoming increasingly oligarchic and corrupt with decades of experience of companies profiting off harming people and lying through their teeth and Meta is like one of the worst offenders.
Isn't China a single-party state that is run by a corrupt autocrat, has literally enslaved people to build products, and disappears people for saying the wrong things? If America is becoming more like China, shouldn't you dislike China more than America?
> when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival
Well this isn't a sentiment that sprang out of nowhere. It is a sentiment that emerged based on real or perceived behavior.
> China is not starting any wars
Maybe not yet, but they certainly aren't behaving nicely toward Taiwan or other countries in and around the South China Sea, are they? The Philippines and Vietnam come to mind immediately, of course there are others.
> the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries
But if those cheap goods run your country's businesses out of business and you have lots of people without work, is that a good thing?
> The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war
The US didn't ask Iran to pursue building nuclear weapons, supply Russia for its ongoing war in Ukraine, or provide weapons and funding to groups in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine which have led to instability in the region. If oil prices are too high, the rest of the world should have worked to address American concerns about Iran. They failed to act, and so the US eventually just did what it thought was necessary.
> rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling
Before sports gambling was a thing in my state (Ohio) I seem to recall traveling to other countries and they had sports gambling too. Maybe I'm wrong?
> Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??
I can't speak for others but since I started this thread I'll chime in. I specifically disagree with the arguments put forth about AI strategy with respect to the US and China. I have no idea and frankly, aside from erroneously being accused of a bot once [1], have no interest in trying to guess if someone is a bot or not. Sometimes I just assume everyone is, because really what's the difference when it's all just text?
Others may feel differently and believe that there is a brigade of bots. I'd ask them for concrete evidence.
I say China is not starting any wars, you gesture at some vague "not behaving nicely" as if this is equivalent to a war or some damning proof that they will start a war - these are nowhere near the same thing. China has killed maybe 50 people outside it's borders since 2000. The US has killed 100,000-250,000 in that time period. There is no amount of rationalization that can reverse the deaths of those people or the cities turned to rubble.
The attitude towards Iran is also just arrogant. The US believes they have the unilateral authority to dictate who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't, and is morally in the right for bombing their cities and killing their citizens if they don't comply. Sovereignty be damned, we are gods, fuck you. Same thing with literally kidnapping the president of another country. Not to mention, the Iraq war was started on the exact same WMD excuse and it turned out they never had any real evidence of WMDs back then, they just said they did and it was really about oil. And the government now is 10x more corrupt and cruel and xenophobic than it was back then, and back to a huge focus on fossil fuels - don't you have to be a little naive to just trust them at face value now?
I can tell you the prevalence of sports gambling and betting is exploding in Canada now that Kalshi is directly tying up with banks to put gambling inside fucking banking apps. I'm sure it was prevalent in many countries, I'm also sure it will scale up to huge levels and enter new countries with the amount of marketing and money and influence these US companies will bring, who also happen to have DJT's son on their board. Making them markets also frees them to manipulate and trade against their users covertly in ways that cannot be detected and that a traditional sportsbook could not do.
People who actually visit China or talk to Chinese citizens are all quite optimistic about it. The tropes people keep throwing around about autocracy are very inaccurate to anyone who actually reads anything about day to day life there. I can't explain all of it here but you can try reading something from Arnaud Bertrand if you're interested [1]. There’s a comical level of propaganda against China since the west recognized them as rivals that does not match reality at all. Anyways, I always see incredible whataboutism these days when talking about the US' problems now. This is what I think your original post that I replied to does too - the parent was criticizing Meta, and you said but what about China? And the thing is, we're talking about Meta because we live in the West and the horrible shit they do impacts us much more directly than whatever China does! It's not really productive to say China Bad!! in that scenario, it's really just saying "yes we suck, but they suck more!" and that doesn't solve anything.. it channels what should be a focus about huge corruption and threats to democracy in western countries into a pissing match on some other country, and its very sad to see how many people are falling for that.
[1] https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/archive?sort=new