CBS censors a ‘Good Fight’ segment whose topic was Chinese censorship

While many people have stopped believing this, it really is true that free economies outperform planned ones, and when the planned ones explode, they tend to explode spectacularly. The only mitigating counterpoint is that it's not clear how free the US and EU economies really are these days, as they've increasingly become dominated by large companies via market power, lobbying and regulatory capture.

Several odd examples fill out that list. A handful of individuals wrongfully incarcerated out a system of millions, when other states don't even have a semblance of due process.

The fire-bombing of Dresden was awful. But the alternative was, what, permit the holocaust? Acquiesce to an increasing tempo of rockets raining on London from an unchallenged Germany? It was an era where every state was engaged in total war and no one found a way to engage in that fight for survival with clean hands. If there was even a hundredth of a percent chance Dresden would have broken the will of Germany and halted the internal genocide and outward aggression, it could have easily been worth it.

Then that bit is accompanied by criticisms of more modern targeted strikes. By their very design, those are an attempt to limit civilian casualties, especially compared to past weapons that inflict devastation at scale. Concern about Dresden and Hiroshima produces the smart bomb and the drone, it is a straight line. So that leaves, what exactly as the moral recommendation here? Radical pacifism and turning a blind eye to genocides?

A useful question for gauging atrocities is intent. A thought experiment is, if there was a device with a button that could instantly kill every civilian in the territory you're at war with, would the government press it? If they had a separate magic button that would reduce the harms of their actions, would they press it?

Those are hypotheticals, but we actually have evidence to get at intent, and compare the US to other actors in similar situations.

The US has spent billions on technologies and plans to reduce the impact of conflict on civilian populations. It has stayed on when, without the US presence, that population is being indiscriminately murdered at a rate of thousands per month: https://www.statista.com/statistics/202861/number-of-deaths-... Or before involvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein...

In contrast, the Russian approach to war in the middle east featured total war in Afghanistan, killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians with the explicit goal of systematic depopulation. This included raping women, deploying chemical weapons, and scorched earth tactics to prevent the return of refugees, all to break the will of the people writ large, not just combatants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War#Atrocities

Terrorists, dictators, Russians. In contrast to that rogues gallery, actively trying to decimate civilian populations, the US seems like the only power that's ever been in the region with any interest in actually preserving civilian lives.

And this wasn't just the historical Soviet Union. Moscow continues to support these tactics by a Russian proxy in Syria and, to no one's surprise, have once again created one of the largest humanitarian / refugee crises the world has ever seen, one which is destablizing European politics (so a double win for Putin?). The impact of these different approaches to foreign policy and conflict is night and day. Go back to the statista chart. One approach reduces local casualties when there's a heightened presence. The other expands a conflict into a global humanitarian crisis.

If the Americans had a tool to reduce the harms while achieving their objectives, no doubt they would use it. Not a question.

Meanwhile, if the Chinese had a magic button that would promote human rights by allowing their citizens to actually, say, discuss politics with one another? They literally have that capacity right now and have chosen not to use it! They could turn off the great firewall tomorrow!

The most extreme authoritarian basket-cases of the world, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, China, all have the Soviets to thank for providing a model of inhumane totalitarian oppression. Some of those aligned with the US, like South Korea and Chile, went through some genuinely awful political dynamics in order to prevent becoming Communist themselves, but have emerged as some of the most stable, prosperous, and politically free countries in the world.

In the long run, do you want to tally individual incidents which had admittedly serious impacts on individuals, but were nontheless incidental as part of a system that reduced human rights violations overall? Or do you want to take a hard look at totalitarian states that support systemic deprivation of human rights as a core component of their being? No one is saying any state power is harmless, especially when it uses military power to confront inhumanity. But if you want to improve human rights, there's much lower hanging fruit than cherry picking examples taken out of context of larger geopolitical issues.

That's true right now, over the last century, and probably will be into the next.

So no, in my books that's just suicidal playing for time I have no patience for and will take no part in.

I'm 100% onboard with this notion.

Our opinions differ only with respect to where we think China is headed, which was the premise of my original comment. Yours is the pessimistic view, mine is the optimistic one.

I happen to believe that as China continues to modernize, it will reach a point where its government will no longer feel the need to resort to totalitarian policies to ensure the stability and prosperity of its society. You and many others will disagree.

The point is, we won't know until we're actually there.