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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone. If China ever feels emboldened enough to go for Taiwan and the US descends into complete chaos, the rest of the world running on AI will be at the mercy of authoritarian regimes. At the very least you can be sure noone is in this for the good of the people anymore. This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow. And China has officially thrown their hat in the ring.

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I always find it an illuminating experience about the power of mass propaganda every time I see an American believe they somewhat have the moral high ground over China, despite starting a new war somewhere around the globe either for petrol or on behalf of Israel every six months.

Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.

And China may have changed in some ways but there have been no signals it would not repeat that event if it thought circumstances warranted.

Also, many of us have lived in countries actually freed thanks to the west’s (mustly us) intervention, and we felt the support during the Russian occupation pre 1989

Many of us have lived or live in countries that are constantly affected and destabilized by past and even modern interventions from the U.S. (the only blame the rest of the "West" bears here is just watching without ever acknowledging the harm done). Just look at Latin America.

edit: Not trying to say "US bad, China good." Just there is perspective to everything.

This is important.

Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico: https://www.infobae.com/mexico/2026/04/22/no-eran-dos-eran-c...

It has been knokwn that US government operatives provide weapons to Mexican cartels ( https://grothman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Document... ).

So, yeah, the US is no "blanca palomita" at all. And those of us suffering from their actions have learned that all powerful nations have good and bad things. Here in Mexico, we've got BYD cars, and they are AMAZING. Also being able to use DeepSeek is so cool.

If your government refuses to stop the flow of drugs into the US by addressing cartels don't be surprised if the US delivers weapons to said cartels so they can have some infighting going on.

If the mexican government would actually make work of dismantling the organized trade, there would be no incentive to deliver them weapons to shoot each other.

Demand, markets are always driven by demand.

That’s your understanding of why Intelligence backs/works with cartels?!

Oh honey. Black budgets. Cashflow, flow of power.

The “Mexican government” was headed by CIA assets multiple times in recent history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34903090

https://jacobin.com/2023/06/mexico-jose-lopez-portillo-decla...

What are you expecting Mexico to do, again?

supply is never an issue, USA would supply poison to entire planet if the demand was there. blaming Mexico for the sickness of our society is very rich (but often repeated)

My Spanish isn't great, but it seems like the CIA agents were going on missions with Mexican authorities. Is that an issue?

They were declared cia officers with black diplomatic passports.

> Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico

was that a surprise? i'd be more surprised if it were only 4.

They were actually 10 haha, according to the article.

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.

The only instance of false equivalence I see is the mention of lower back pain vs cancer.

You cant compare qualia of suffering. At least not with our current technology. Thats the point - they both involve suffering but that doesn’t mean one is inherently worse than the other. The details and experience matter which got glossed over in these stupid debates- hence loss of perspective.

Honestly I had to read the wiki page of false equivalence and you’re not asserting the fallacy correctly.

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.

The Chinese government regularly kidnaps its own citizens, who have no due process rights, and is currently engaged in a mass genocide of a racial group they consider “inferior.”

Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine, and just install leaders for life.

I’m confused how you think the US is worse. I say this as an Afroindigenous person who is very clear about the harms white supremacy has inflicted upon the cultures I am a part of.

tell us your story

Us? wow, tell us your story

And which countries are those?

How many not-so-smart and not-so-intelligent people can claim Russia occupied you? Never mind, your liberation by the West will come back to haunt you, mark my words... and very soon! You'll remember how well you lived during the years of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact!

those countries were liberated 35 years ago, GDP and other essential metrics increased significantly. How longer they should wait to start feeling remorse?

I remember constant grocery deficits, no meat, no cheese, etc in groceries. and all other kind of deficits. But there were rotten potatoes, and 2 types of bread! Glory to our leaders! fun times, you say.

Whether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!

You sincerely think a country that massacres its own people is better than the relatively good conduct of the US during war (or the treatment of foreigners on its soil)?

Why do we keep on getting into these wars in the first place?

"Good conduct during offensive warfare" is one of those contradictory expressions like "clean coal".

This is a really, really messed up opinion.

Who cares if a country installs a panopticon to monitor their citizens and runs them over with tanks, look at this other thing over here.

Yeah that "other thing over here" is totally irrelevant. It's not like it's the actions of the second country in the comparison or anything like that.

Suppose country A kills 1000 people and country B kills 1000000 people and people are criticizing country A for murder while calling country B a better alternative. What is relevant here?

How could you think those two, massacring your own people and buying plane tickets home for people illegally here are on the same scale at all. We are not ideal here at all but we don’t do that and I think if it were tried there would be an uprising against whoever was calling that unimaginable shot.

You might be omitting the foreigners that are not in the United States that are being treated rather badly by the United States. I suspect that's what GP was referring to.

How about the US massacring more civilians around the world than any empire since Ghengis Khan?

Nazis? Soviets? CCP? Spanish Empire? How are you doing the math?

You only need the Native Americans, the US share of transatlantic slave trade, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Iraq for the US to be well clear of the Nazis.

This doesn’t even touch the Guatemalan genocide, US backing of the Rwandan genocide perpetrators, the white terror, Pinochet, the Khmer Rouge, Afghanistan, or Israel.

I'd like to see the numbers please, how that gets close to 50 million dead by the CCP, and I can't fathom how do you attribute the Khmer Rouge genocide committed by a communist party to the USA or others on the list

If I did not know better, I would assume you did not know about the government murdering its own citizens and/or buying plane tickets for citizens to countries that have never been their homes.

Did I miss the uprising?

How about bombing a school?

There are plenty of people who are here legally being shackled in chains and deported too.

Also, nice try propagandizing chained deportation as “free plane tickets”

Are you implying China treats foreigners well?

How many schools has it bombed recently?

In it's entire existence? I believe it shot up a couple tens of thousands of schools during the cultural revolution, and not by mistake. But yeah, I guess that's not bombing. China clearly prefers shooting the students, keeping the building.

Why are you changing the subject?

Am I changing the subject? I thought we were discussing treatment of foreigners and I am detailing a very recent example of how the US treated foreigners.

Yes, the question was if you want to claim China treats foreignors well, and was a reference to that China

1) conquers places, e.g. Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjang, ...

2) kills, "disappears", ... the people there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSypV2ixjE

3) China's CCP has been pushing out immigrants, and fostering racist sentiment

Tiananmen Square was obviously horrible but not even 10% as bad as the current war against Iran or 1% bad as the Second Gulf War, and those are both very recent conflicts.

The US has massacred millions of people of other countries, is that better?

You dont even have to look abroad, the USA kills its own citizens all the time. Police brutality is a huge issue here, we had some large protests here and the country ended those with the realization that nothing can be done about it. Kids get shot in school all the time in the US and once again, nothing gets done about it ever. The USA has a gigantic prison population and you guessed it: nothing gets done about it.

China is a peaceful country. They don't interfere with other countries politics. They look more trustworthy than countries that kidnapped chiefs of state they don't like.

> They don't interfere with other countries politics. They look more trustworthy than countries that kidnapped chiefs of state they don't like.

On the one hand, anyone who believes this is the sort of person who buys bridges from shady individuals in backstreets. On the other, China will literally sell people quality bridges at good prices. I feel lost for a metaphor.

I like the Chinese military policy a lot more than the US one (China's policy is actually making them more prosperous which makes it stand out). But as a nation they're not trustworthy and they're absolutely going to interfere with other people's politics. The network of spies and influencers they manage is actually pretty sophisticated once you look at things like the Confucius institute and their international web of spies/law enforcement tracking people down.

Can you cite real examples not based in American propaganda?

> children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.

Ask that question of the American Indians the USA genocided.

I do not see why USAnians killing Iranians is better than being killed by other Iranians. Dead is dead

The bombs that implemented the genocide in Gaza were dropped by the IDF but supplied, paid for and profited from USAnians

Not really so clear

> no signals it would not repeat that event

Of course there is, there's anti riot gear now when there wasn't before.

> Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.

Wasn't the US bombing its own children just 4 years earlier in Philadelphia?

And the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration).

I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt.

Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us.

I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.

Don’t you think that it’s a signal that the last major event you can point to is decades old?

Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression.

In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it).

The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.

There is no such thing as individual rights. In our universe, there are only privileges. What a government gives, a government can take.

Oh, sure, putting a million or more Uyghurs in internment camps, sterilizing people, and trying to systematically erase a culture and a religion is "just as repressive" as the what is happening in Europe, as long you one is willing to ignore nearly everything relevant about the scale, recourse, and consequence of the PRCs atrocities.

Also, reducing Germany’s complex, decade-long process of grappling with the Holocaust as "self-shame" is... a choice.

Hypocrisy meter just exploded after being fed the message

> China massacre thousands of its own

> China massacre thousands

Is the first one worse to you?

> massacre thousands

Does the second automatically seem worse than the third?

The one not called China has shot and killed multiple of its own citizens on the street recently. Perhaps that triggers your morality.

Which one of them has killed thousands of civilians just in the last month or so including hundreds of school aged girls (confirmed)? And can they even articulate a reason for doing so?

Which one decided, made the choice, to kill hundreds of thousands of children by dismantling USAID? And the reason for that was?

I mean, they both have concentration camps where they detain their own citizens without due process. So, I guess a tie there.

And, they both enabled Russia after Russia stole tens of thousands of children from their parents.

So, ya, maybe no clear winner. Neither are the good guys. But China is losing the death count battle in 2026 at least.

If you are trying to say that China is worse because of an event 37 years ago, I am not sure I agree.

Just to add some perspective to this comparison: the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration).

I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.

Can you share the video where thousands of children were massacred in Tiananmen Square? I haven’t seen it yet and am very curious!

Make your claim directly, without weasel language. This is a tiresome way to communicate.

That doesn’t seem to be a valid URL?

I'm not who you were originally talking to, champ.

Still not a resolvable URL, sadly. Thanks for your input, little buddy.

Bush sacrificed a few thousand Americans on 9/11 so that they could get away with killing a million or so Muslims.

Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.

Of course not, but that's never how Americans act. 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.

It's a small difference, but important. Especially because that person is far more likely to be responsible (voting) for and profiting from USAs bad stuff.

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

That's literally what the comment said:

> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.

I.e. it would be preferable if, for example, Europe was in control of the alternative, but having China and the US is better than just the US.

He said "At the very least you can be sure noone is in this for the good of the people anymore. This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.".

I.e. he doesn't see the US as "the good guys" either.

Pointing out the war threat from China isn't hypocritical just because you don't list all the war threats from the US at the same time.

In fact, unless the comment is from someone living in China: understands the politics, it would only be fair to critique the authoritarian aspects of the government they actually know.

The issue is propagandists are typically brainwashed already.

Plenty of people around the world know about the authoritarian aspects of the US way better than the Americans, as they suffer their consequences.

Which ones do you like to mention?

Hyper presidentialist state that allows one administration (and realistically one person) to start a war against another nation without having authorization from congress.

This happened a few weeks ago, actually.

Iran, Gaza, Cuba, Irak, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon... These people do not only suffer their tyrannical governments, but they must suffer also the war actions of the US and its allies.

Do you believe only Americans should be allowed to critique the American government?

I'm an American and I don't believe that.

The issue is that the way you're expected to criticize America from what I observed is along the lines of 'they mean well but...'

With China, you can say 'yeah, this is good, but they eat babies for fun' and it would mostly pass with people nodding along.

Criticising America is nothing new or subversive. Hunter s Thompson was doing it all these years ago and much more interestingly and on point than anyone on here could.

Day every day the same unoriginal whining because it is hard to call it something as sophisticated as critique, can be heard all over the reddit.

While at the same time no one bothers to critique CCP to the same extent because we simply are not paid for doing this. No one is interested in non profit repeating the same facts about china every single day.

We are just content knowing that china is not some sort of “saviour” or alternative. It is an enemy of the free world. I try to not use things produced by my adversary to not fund my own doom.

Ask people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, and Greenland if they think America is their saviour and in general do-gooder of the free world.

> is not some sort of “saviour” or alternative. It is an enemy of the free world. I try to not use things produced by my adversary to not fund my own doom.

Are you aware that this is how America is increasingly perceived around the world?

It's not a 'free world' when America dictates and the others are supposed to just take orders.

May be you're fine with that, feeling on top of the food chain, but everyone needs friends at some point.

What does the 'free' in 'free world' even mean any more? You're not allowed to express your opinion on college campuses anymore, (lack of domestic freedom), and if you're a country, you're increasingly facing trade barriers from the US, (lack of freedom in commerce).

I'm not saying that as a sovereign country you don't have a right to impose these restrictions. I simply wish the US would treat other countries as sovereign.

>The issue is that the way you're expected to criticize America from what I observed is along the lines of 'they mean well but...'

Hard to think of any critique of the US I've seen on HN recently which acknowledges the possibility that we might mean well.

Even during the Biden administration, right after we allocated billions of dollars to Ukraine, huge numbers of Europeans expressed an unfavorable view of the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...

They call us warmongers and then wonder why we don't want to help them fight their war. Now they say they want to be buddies with China which has been actively helping Russia with arms. I don't think there is any point in the US trying to please Europe.

And then you've got the Australians who express their burning hatred of the US for not giving more aid to Ukraine, while Australia's aid as a fraction of GDP is still sitting around 10-15% of that provided by the US.

I find western obsession with "being able to critique X" very weird because it stops at just that. There's very little attention paid to whether the critique produces useful outcomes. While cost of living, energy scarcity, employment, education, wars, etc are all getting worse, people focus on being able to insult the president as the ultimate freedom, even when that achieves nothing.

Meanwhile in China, you can't change the ruling party but you can change policies. They restrict media and speech freedom, but they also work tirelessly to improve the livelihoods of the people.

If the west chooses the value empty talk over outcomes, fine, you have the right to choose that. But no need to force that value on other societies. China and Chinese society at large has the right value unity and livelihood over speech. They have the right to prefer what westerners call an "authoritarian" government that delivers on those values, without getting demonized. They're not forcing their way on you, no need for you to force your way on them.

> they also work tirelessly to improve the livelihoods of the people.

They work to improve the livelihood of people with the same background and ideology, you mean.

In china they imprison priests for existing. And sure, they have the right to prefer that, but I can demonize them all I want. If you are the type of person to say the government, made up of people like you, should be able to tell you what to do without voting on if they should be in government at all you are foolish. There is one ethical form of government and it is democracy. Also, they regularly attempt to force their inferior ways onto others. Look at North Korea's obsession with South Korea. China's obsession with Taiwan. Russia's obsession with Ukraine (not really too much of a democracy there though o algo). There is no such thing as a country of that type having freedom to vote and freedom to speak because as soon as you give people those freedoms they choose a different system. It is no different than slavery.

Agreed.

No I don't mean one needs to be American. The reciprocal isn't valid. I talked about China. Given the misinformation the "western emisphere" has been subject to, I would find it dubious to get the echoes of what mainstream media portrays it as, even though there are elements of truth in what most people believe.

The U.S politics are easier to understand from the outside. For one it's a democracy, a more transparent process despite a lot is happening behind curtains. I have no idea what North Koreans are able to make of the U.S scene, I know for sure people in U.S and Europe are hardly able to comment on N.K.

tldr: I'm with you non Americans (and Americans) are perfectly able to critique the U.S with some valuable accuracy.

Why do you assume that the information non-Americans believe about the US is accurate?

It seems to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation which gets spread about the US. For example, many non-Americans seem to believe that school shootings are a significant cause of death here.

Furthermore, your proposed scheme creates an incentive to be non-transparent and thus not vulnerable to critique. By closing off information about your country, you can say to any critic: "Your critique is incorrect, because you lack information." Thus creating a reputational advantage for countries which successfully clamp down on the flow of information.

Is that your desired outcome? You want a world where criticizing the US can no longer be done as soon as Trump kicks out all of the foreign journalists and stops the information flow?

They didn't say those exact words, but "I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone" is directly aimed at the US. They did say they don't like that the only two serious competitors are from the USA and China, they just used slightly different words.

>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.

> Of course not, but that's never how Americans act.

This is just false. I know many Americans and have never observed any of them acting like this, so categorical statements like this are false.

Your claims would be more credible if you didn't lead with something so obviously untrue.

> Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.

Of course not. When it comes to SOTA LLMs you have the choice between two bad options. For many, choosing the Chinese option is just choosing the lesser of two evils (and it's much cheaper).

Why people always dismiss the European option?

Mistral is right here, their models are in-between the cheap to run Chinese models and top of the line performances of US frontier models.

People are probably assuming that the trends from the last few decades continue. The EU fumbled semiconductors, production went to Asia. The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US. They fumbled the transition to smartphones despite the Nokia advantage. They missed tablets; seemed like they just didn't have the industrial vigour to make a serious attempt.

The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution. They did manage to force Apple to switch from using lightening connectors to USB though so their wins can't just be laughed off. Maybe they'll surprise us but it'd be a welcome change from their usual routine.

We're lucky the EU regulators moved so slowly that the industry had already consolidated around USB-C (a standard that Apple was a key participant of and would have eventually moved to eventually). When they were first deciding what to do back in 2209, they decided that Micro-USB was the best standard. Imagine a world where everyone was forced to use Micro-USB...

The obvious takeaway here is that a country / blok can't regulate their way to innovation... so I'm not exact sure why you included it in your list of paradigm shifts. If anything, when the next paradigm shift around charging drops, the EU will be once again on the back-foot due to these short-sighted USB-C regulations they enacted.

I do share your sentiment that EU will miss the train once again on AI.

> The EU fumbled semiconductors, production went to Asia

Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes. NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.

> The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US

Worldwide massive success, mostly yes. Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.

> The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution

Not really. Past performances, or lack thereof, are not indicative of future ones.

Mistral are pretty good and selling well in the enterprise space. Some of the best voice models are coming from France (Kyutai).

>Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes.

If you fall out of the state of the art then the claim of EU fumbling semiconductors is correct. The richest block in the world should settle for no less than being state of the art. Anything less is fumbling it.

>NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.

The EU semi companies you listed are absent from the state of the art and only make low margin commodity parts that don't have moats. ASML exists but is not enough for claiming EU superiority since the EUV light source is still US IP designed and manufactured. And one top company is too little.

>Worldwide massive success, mostly yes.

Worldwide success is where the big money is, and you need a lot of money for cutting edge research and experimentation to build the future successes. Hence the claim of EU fumbling software is correct.

>Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.

EU mom and pop shops aren't gonna make enough money to be able to afford risky ambitious ventures the likes of FAANGs have. Which is probably why you work for Hashicorp, a large global US company, and not some local EU company.

ASML, SAP, Airbus to say a few.

Past performance is extremely indicative of future results. It's not a guarantee, but it's definitely the way to bet.

> Why people always dismiss the European option?

Mistral is good for many tasks where you do not need SOTA or near SOTA performance. They cannot compete if you do.

It’s not top of the line and mostly not open source

Europe is always 10 years ahead in all theoretical aspects.

Then they need money.

So most of the talent flee or get bought, typical example in machine learning space is huggingface or fchollet.

Then European government plays catch-up and offer subventions, but at the same time makes rules to make sure companies don't threaten US dominance, or Asian manufacturing.

Mistral is typically playing catch the subsidy game.

Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.

>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.

Europe is constructed so you can take 60 days vacation, work 32 hours a week, get tons of social benefits, can't really lose your job, and retire when you are 65 with a full pension.

Which is excellent. Unless you need to be economically competitive.

>60 days vacation

Not a thing.

>work 32 hours a week

Not a common thing.

>get tons of social benefits

That you pay for in high taxes.

>can't really lose your job

Layoffs happen at the same rate as elsewhere.

>retire when you are 65 with a full pension

Unless the government decides to push back your retirement because it's insolvent.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_str...

>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.

Because they have no spine and no leverage/muscle on the international stage to throw their weight around and make sure they get what's best for themselves at the expense of everyone else the same way US, China, etc do.

They play the international nice guy that just ends up being the doormat everyone takes advantage of, being at the mercy of Russian and Azeri gas, at the mercy of US tech, energy and defence, and at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing after dismantling their own manufacturing, at the mercy of Turkey for migration enforcement, etc so they can't do anything radical that upsets their "partners", or that makes their virtue signaling policies look bad, or risk massive repercussions they aren't prepared for, so they just turtle, bury their head in the sand and pretend everything is going fine while falling further into obscurity.

EU flaunts its "moral values" as its strength, but their geopolitical adversaries have no such values and are dominating over them in the process exploiting their morals against them as their weakness. There's nothing virtuous in being/acting weak and letting others dominate you.

European Union construction happened after the second world war in the context of the Marshall Plan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan ) to help rebuild Europe that had been destroyed.

By design European laws are superior to national laws. Leaving the union is also instant bankruptcy because all countries have very high level of debt which are only guaranteed because they are in the union.

European population is getting old and replaced by a migration coming mainly from previous African colonies.

Future paying for the past.

>after dismantling their own manufacturing

Uhm, Europe is not the US. We still have a lot of manufacturing. It varies by country - the UK unfortunately had structural problems, finance supremacy and a Thatcher who hated unions so much that she'd rather destroy unionized industries than have unions. Central Europe still does a pretty large amount of manufacturing.

For a lot of people in the world Europe = USA

But this makes zero sense. Two different continents, values systems, law systems. Not to mention the current USA administration is openly hostile to Europe. So why would anyone confuse the two.

Europe is at the mercy of the USA. Any difference in posture is due to local politics which can swing local elections, but European leaders are willing and eager to do what the US wants.

Europe will not be independent as long as there are US military bases there. Saying otherwise would be kidding oneself.

Europe in general is a wide term. Like, UK is in Europe and is a surveillance state.

Yes, but the framing when America does bad is that they mostly do good.

When China does good, it's always that they do mostly bad.

With China it's always pointed out how much power the state has over corporations there, but in the US out of control lobying is supposed to be 'concerned citizens expressing their opinions' or some shit. We're still supposed to take for granted that it is a representative democracy, if a flawed one.

I think a lot of us are blinded by our own propaganda. I would expect many Chinese geeks to have the same values as us for the greater good of humanity.

> I would expect many Chinese geeks to have the same values as us for the greater good of humanity.

Yes, they just can't talk about some of those values publically.

They certainly can.

please provide a link to a chinese geek publically posting in china that Xi Jinping needs to be replaced.

Equivalent, here look, us state-funded news agency posting discussions about how trump needs to be replaced:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-grow-bolder-...

Pick people at random from countries around the world. Ask them what bad things have happened to them or their country because of China or USA. What do you think the result is going to be?

I think people worry about monopolies, be it financial or otherwise

Yeah, idk this looks pretty good and they ain't bombing anyone nor trying to spread global communism USSRs style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7W20hdgWXY

I think I'll take the open AI models, innovative high quality EVs and cheap solar panels, please.

> Just because America is doing bad things doesn't mean China is good, or vice versa.

When someone points out hypocrisy, this is "the answer", it seems. But it is just a statement, not a rebuttal of the hypocrisy that was pointed out.

Hypocrisy is still hypocrisy.

And bad things are bad things. Yet no amount of propaganda (red scare, "eew dictatorship", Uyger-genocide, Taiwan threat) can convince me that the China is as evil (or more evil) than the US-Israel alliance of the the last 50 years.

Hypocrisy would be if the person only points out Chinese authoritarianism without acknowledging problems e.g. in US policy.

Not mentioning US problems every time they criticize CCP problems is not automatically hypocrisy, and this idea basically means you cannot criticize anything without criticizing everything someone considers just as bad or worse at the same time.

Calling a discussion on China hypocritical because it doesn't say "but US worse" is essentially trying to build in whataboutism into every discussion.

It's a symptom of increasing polarization and part of the problem.

There's US AI and China AI. Those are the two contenders. We are discussing the problems of using the Chinese AI because of the "evil" govt there. The evil at this point clearly is less evil than that of the US govt.

That's the hypocrisy: not seeing the block of wood in the eye of one while complaining about the speck of wood in the eye of the other.

By trying to be less hypocritical we create a more level playing field based on facts, instead of gut-feeling based hatred.

Whatabboutism is, IMHO, used a lot as a way to circumvent having to address the glaring hypocrisy: i see it's used to shut up those to point out hypocrisy.

There is also European AI and probably other places.

You may think only those two are relevant, and so every discussion of one party requires discussion of the other. I disagree with that fundamentally.

I'll be honest, I also disagree that one side is "clearly less evil than the other". For me, living in Taiwan and caring about democracy, the risk of Chinese authoritarian expansion and invasion is not a "speck of wood in the eye", frankly I find that framing disrespectful.

But that discussion is entirely beyond the question of hypocrisy. Again, the guy people accuse of hypocrisy said nothing of the sort that indicates that he doesn't see the problems of the US government. He merely didn't talk about them.

This isn't "shutting down talk about hypocrisy".

> Uyger-genocide

I'm gonna go out on a crazy limb here and say that this is on par with the genocide in Gaza? Mass sterilization, forced labor, sex, and torture on a larger scale than Gaza. Certainly we can argue about which is worse, but they're both incredible atrocities. The only thing that makes China less scary IMO is that they currently aren't the empire ruling the world and at the center of the global economy. If that changes, as seems likely, I don't see any reason to believe China would be a better or more compassionate world ruler than the US.

There are no scales to weigh 2 atrocities against one another. There is only a hole for the humanity we have all lost. North hell is no different from west, east, south or central hell.

The difference is that - at least in the last 50 years - the US starts wars with brutal dictatorships. Whereas China is threatening war against a thriving democracy.

These are not equivalent.

The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).

You can argue all day about whether A is slightly more rotten than B, but if they are both rotten then in the grand scheme they will both end up being the same thing if something doesn’t get fixed.

> like Taiwan and South Korea.

You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.

> they just often happen to be with dictatorships

No, they always happen to be with dictatorships. The motives of US politicians are not relevant to this fact (I personally think Trump is corrupt and incompetent); the US system is democratic enough, and Americans are moralistic enough, that even corrupt and incompetent politicians can't get away with military adventurism except with dictatorships. Thus the end of that Greenland nonsense.

> You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.

US allies in the entire middle east are literally all dictators or worse than dictators. For example, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, you just need 6 years education in school to understand that is worse than dictators when religion is also heavily involved at the same time.

Yeah I would refine that argument a bit and say the US will sometimes support (or rather, ally with) dictators when the only viable alternative is an arguably worse dictator. There aren't exactly a lot of democracies in the middle east we could be supporting instead.

Like supporting Al Qaeda to overthrow Assad.

Exactly. Unfortunately, "arguably better" doesn't always turn out to be "actually better" once you have the benefit of hindsight.

there weren't a lot of democracies in the world until recently. And even a good many of them are effectively oligarchies.

if you want a good path to true improvement in civil rights (not a useless piece of paper or declaration) just track the wealth of a country. Wealthy countries that didn't rely on natural resources to get wealthy tend to treat their citizens better because, well, they make up the fcking economy.

most western countries had a shortcut to that via colonialism and slavery. It's very rich to then point at countries that don't have that cushion and talk about being morally superior.

Nice theory, but it seems demonstrably untrue to me. Has China made any major strides in civil rights since their economic miracle? They seem as determined to stamp out the few remaining bastions of civil rights in their corner of the world as ever.

Democracy is a morally superior system of government, because it's fundamentally premised on a moral idea; that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". Dictatorships and aristocracies can make no such claim.

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.

People are literally talking about tiananmen square upthread like it's the biggest problem ever with China. Both Taiwan and South Korea had their own version of tiananmen square.

I don't think you realise that much of the world was under de facto dictatorships (eg. absolute monarchies) and it wasn't like people in the years before were living in democracies that then got taken away.

The US doesn't have a higher moral ground to stand on vis a vis many other countries in the world.

> You had to reach back 50 years to find US support for dictators.

More recently, Sadam and Noriega until America turned on them.

Or currently, the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, Egypt, and many others.

The US starts wars… they just often happen to be with dictatorships. The US definitely also supported dictatorships (like Taiwan and South Korea).

Lol...

I think I've typed up and then deleted my response to this comment about 10 times, but now I don't think I'm even going to give you reasoned response.

If you really think that the US has the moral authority to invade whoever it likes because they're "saving the local people from repressive regimes", I've got a bridge to sell you. Even Trump has dropped this pretext facade unlike all his predecessors, and now straight out says "we're going in to take their oil".

Not about moral high ground. Ones a democracy one isn’t.

Your democracy has consistently voted senile 75 year olds for 3-elections now

The current president - who Americans voted for twice - is heavily accused of being a pedophile and has reneged on every one of his poll promise

Really not the best advertisement for democracy

To be fair, it really has been the structurally anti-democratic elements in the American system that enabled Trump to come to power in the first place, and that have allowed the GOP to remain competitive nationally for quite a long time, despite being a minority party

The US badly needs to reform these elements, but it's those elements that really make reform nearly impossible at this point.

Electoral college reform, gerrymandering reform, increasing the size of the house or some kind of proportional representation, etc

The difference is that there was (at least an illusion of) choice. Nobody said that it is a perfect system. And Trump will be gone in 3 years, while Putin and Xi will stay in power until their death.

I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

Why would Russians want democracy? Or the Chinese, for that matter? There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years.

The west needs to rest its democratizing mission and accept that every society is fundamentally different

My country (India) got a "thriving" democracy, but because there is no real democratic impulse in the society, everything on the ground has devolved into what the society was always like - quasi-feudal bureaucracy

> I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

They don't! The majority voted for the guy who wants to, admittedly (multiple times), be a dictator and is huge fan of other dictators. If he finds a way to stay for a 3rd term his most loyal followers along with all the republicans in Congress will be just fine with it.

>I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

Well, ideology. I believe my way is the only way for every population in the world too, and I fight for it to happen. Of course, each place adapts to their own condition, but I believe my core ideology is the way for humanity as a whole, and I believe it is the same for people who defend western american-style democracy.

What part of "defending western american-style democracy" involves imposing it on other countries and being mad when they don't adopt it?

> I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

It's not Americans, it's educated people who believe in personal liberties.

> Why would Russians want democracy

Because they would have a choice if they want to be robbed blind by a bunch of oligarchs, and if they want to be sanctioned off from the world because the supreme leader decided he wants to kill and maim a million Russians to achieve nothing more than killing Ukrainian civillians.

> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years

Absurdly bad historic revisionism. Russia had democratic impulses in 1917 and 1990, both hijacked and went nowhere. China's 1911 revolution was also overtly democratic in nature, but was also hijacked.

> It's not Americans, it's educated people who believe in personal liberties.

I find this attitude deeply parochial and colonial. Who are these so-called "educated people" (most of whom would be in western developed nations) to decide what sort of governance system a country should have?

The democratic revolution in America and France came from its own people. If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own

Western hand-wringing about the "lack of democracy" in foreign (usually poorer) countries is just concern-colonialism. I think most of these educated people should focus on their own countries and let the rest of the world be

> I find this attitude deeply parochial and colonial. Who are these so-called "educated people" (most of whom would be in western developed nations) to decide what sort of governance system a country should have?

Do you think only people in western countries want a democratic system of governenance for their country?

> If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own

Both of them tried it, but were denied.

> If the Russians or the Chinese want democracy, they'll get it on their own

There's literally a saying about USSR (which by proxy now applies to Russia) which roughly translates to: half the population in prison and another half as guards. You can't get it when army, police and whole government apparatus is aimed against it. Times have changed, people are not willing to die en masse for a change when one single cop can kill a crowd.

They literally killed 132 hostages during a saving operation [1], how many do you think will die when they start shooting the crowds?

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis

> Or the Chinese, for that matter?

The marched for it en masse in 1989?

Russians and Chinese are also people. They deserve to rule themselves.

An ideologically driven subset of urban educated youths that was proportionally a tiny subset of the entire Chinese population marched for it in 1989. FTFY.

They are ruling themselves in the sense that their governing systems are emergent consequences of their own cultures. All peoples ultimately deserve the governments they have.

You could say the exact same thing about the cultural revolution.

The Americans marched en masse to get rid of ICE, right?

Guess the Tiananmen square tank man is a victim, but Alex Pretti and Renee Good are just statistics

(The tank man wasn't even run down by the tank - Good was shot for merely turning the wheels in the wrong direction)

Americans really need to shut up about any democratic values or humans rights and clean up their own mess before preaching to the world

Because a government has no power to tell the people what to do if the people did not vote for it to be there. There is no alternative.

people might not be excited about democracy, but they are about individual rights and freedoms

people can tell when their rights are being unjustly infringed upon, even without the verbiage.

democracy is just a handy way of working with individual rights

> Why would Russians want democracy?

Could be something to do with almost 400 years under czar heel and then 70 years under commie repressions and mismanagement that yielded one of the worst crises in the history of the country that is still being mentioned with fear (90s, brrrr).

> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years.

> Russia

What the am I even reading. Educate yourself before making such claims. Decembrist movement, 1905 revolution, 1917 provisional government, constant unrest after the death of mustached cunt, perestroika. Navalny recently died in prison for fighting for democracy, ffs. The only reason why we're having current Russia is because the West royally fucked up by not economically supporting them in 90s and allowing oligarchs to usurp vast soviet empire resources.

Not to mention Novgorod Republic and its history.

both putin an xi maintain a convincing illusion of choice too. There's plenty of leadership selection process for both, that could remove them

orban even lost with a similar illusion of choice.

At some point I saw an analysis that looked at the policy/political differences between the different fractions of the Chinese communist party and compared them to the spread in a western parliament (I don't remember which one I think US or UK). They found that the spread was very similar. With that I'm not saying that the Chinese system is better, just that these statements are not as straight-forward as one things.

I think a much better metric is suppression of dissent, human rights records etc., not (the illusion of) choice at the poll booth once every 4 years.

The marketing pitch of Western "democracy" has always been that you can criticise your government freely and the government won't jail you or murder you.

Also, consumer goods.

The voting and multiple-branches-checks-and-balances elements are sidelines.

Currently none of those promises are true in the US. The government is murdering and jailing people for whimsical and self-indulgent reasons, the consumer economy is about to crash, and the only checks-and-balances are the checks going straight to the Emperor's private accounts.

To be fair, there's some judicial pushback, and some political friction.

But Senate and Congress are wholly captured, the opposition is flaccid and foreign-funded, media independence is a myth, and the last time The People had any real influence on policy was the 70s. Possibly.

I have no idea if China is "better". From a distance China seems to be doing much better at building useful things and making long term plans.

But ruling cliques always seem to end up being run by psychopaths, so my expectations for humanity from China's rulers aren't any higher than those for the US.

Despite being formally less democratic, the Chinese government is in practice more responsive to its constituency than the US government. I have to think that class character of the parties is the determining factor. The CPC is, despite everything, still a proletarian party. In the US, the two parties are both directed by the interests of the haute bourgeoisie, with the Republicans pulling votes from the petit bourgeoisie, and the Democrats pulling votes from the professional-managerial class.

I mean the American people who will cry about humans rights records in China will also watch masked government agents shoot down their own citizens just because they're suspected to be illegal immigrants

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad

It's not true that people just sat by and watched.

There was massive public backlash and real organized resistance, especially in the streets of Minneapolis. People literally put their lives on the line, communities banded together to help migrants who were afraid to go to work or leave their homes, and they ultimately forced the government to retreat and change tactics. And it resulted in the firing of a cabinet secretary and the border patrol commander that was the face of the whole thing. And plummeting public approval that has only declined further since

A somewhat similar campaign occurred in Hong Kong, but the resistance sadly was not able to fare as well against China tyranny

I'm going off democracy, at least how it is currently implemented. It is proving far too easy to pervert.

It turns out that the people will vote for some terrible things in order to get that one petty little thing a given candidate promises and they want, or because they don't like something specific about the other candidate(s). And of course many may later say “well, I didn't vote for that” when they quite demonstrably did.

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

The measure is the number of votes. "What shall we have for dinner" measures things, there's no target in a "curry vs pizza vs thai" poll, and it doesn't really matter, the target is a nice night in with a film.

However with politics, getting power is the goal, thus the number of votes is thus the target, and thus its not good at measuring what the country actually wants, just who can best get the most votes.

This isn't new, but modern brainwashing allows manipulation at a scale hitherto unseen.

Well, the politicians learned how to game the system well. Now people need to learn how to game the politicians. A formal verification process of pre-election promises would be a good start.

Nobody cares that politicians don't keep pre-election promises. And in most cases they shouldn't, circumstances change. You can have no intention of doing something, then something else happens, and you change your mind.

The problem is that people put stock in pre-election promises, rather than voting for the character of the person they want to represent them.

How can there be democracy in an environment where freedom of thought is all but nullified due to social manipulation through mainstream media. Calling something ‘free’ doesn’t make it so.

The reality is that the term democracy in western society has essentially become meaningless due to the swathes of algorithmic manipulation which occurs every second of everyday through every possible digital medium.

It’s not the mainstream media that is primarily manipulating people in the US and has not been since the eighties. Extremely biased “conservative” (in reality anything but) propaganda has been dominant for a third of the population since Gordon Liddy and Limbaugh turned lying and fear mongering into a profession on the backs of the authoritarian paranoid personality segment of the population.

The moral weight of democracy is heavily overrated. Of course democracy is better than autocracy, all other things being equal. But I don't think a democracy that starts wars and bombs a new country every other year is morally superior to any relatively peaceful autocracy. Rather the opposite.

Try holding up a sign in the street anywhere in China that says anything remotely critical of the Chinese government. Or live in China and post something online remotely critical of China. You will be arrested, thrown in jail for years.

Democracy isn't just having an election every four years. We have rights that we shouldn't take for granted.

So that means the people are complicit in whatever wars the US started. Not sure if better or worse.

A lot of people voted for someone who was known to be an evil crook. It was very clear that he got into politics for praising his own ego. They voted against 'the good' in the hope for their own benefit and against that of the world. If they did not 'expect' the current state of affairs then they just refused to listen to their own heart.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Winston Churchill

Quoting a guy who is (in)directly responsible for murder of about 4 million people. Nice

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics had not been tried at that point :)

To be fair, Deng Xiaoping's reforms were based on the older New Economic Policy or NEP from the 1920s USSR, so it had been tried at that point. It was scrapped in the USSR for other reasons, not because it failed.

Ironically you can map China's progress over the last 30 years directly with their adoption of capitalistic policies.

The more capitalistic they become, the more growth they have seen.

Exactly, maybe we've got it all wrong :)

The word you're looking for is dictatorship, and it is not new.

> Ones a democracy one isn’t.

China characterizes itself as a democracy too, just not as a liberal democracy. There are democratic processes, although these are not free in the sense of liberalist ideology. The CCP justifies its control of the elections as a counterbalance to being corrupted by money, which starts to look like not an entirely unreasonable justification.

The CCP narrative also emphasizes "outcome orientation", i.e. that (democratic) legitimacy comes from people being happy about what the governance delivers, not about how it gets chosen. Which again starts to look not totally crazy, given western governments nowadays tend to have dismal approval ratings. And even after taking into account the likely biases in the polling, I do believe the majority of the Chinese truly approve of the CCP.

I'm not a fan of the Chinese system, but I think there are lessons we could take, and a binary "democratic or not" is not a very meaningful categorization.

Just a reminder that the DPRK is "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".

North Korea is a democratic republic!

This is utter nonsense.

Democracy is the idea that people should control their government. The CCP's (and Putin's) notion of "democracy" is something along the lines of "as long as the government controls the people, the people can decide".

Democracy may be a spectrum but China isn't on it, neither in practice nor in spirit. If you have to control the media and prevent free discussion, you aren't practicing democracy.

> Democracy is the idea that people should control their government.

who started the recent war with Iran and war in Vietnam? did those wars started by American people? did those wars got approved by the people of America or their elected representatives?

> their elected representatives

Yes? The US president is elected, and while you or I might the system would be better if presidents didn't have quite so much authority... we know the system works this way when we vote.

"The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War" -The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8.

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

Germany was (formally) a democracy when it fought the Soviets.

And why should anyone prefer a democracy over any other form of government? Doesn't it depend on the philosophy of each People?

As far as I'm aware most autocratic forms of government have to clamp down on dissent with some level of force, be it violence or imprisonment or seizing assets. It means people are afraid to criticise power.

Western democracies don't have that problem. Yes, they have other problems. Many problems which are hard to solve. But if you live in a western democracy you can freely criticise those in power without fear of retribution.

In a western democracy, you can, at least in theory, freely criticize those in power without fear of retribution, but also without any hope of your criticism changing anything. It's just a pressure release valve. When criticism starts taking a form that might force change, the mask and the gloves come off, as you can see in the violence against protesters once protests reach a critical mass.

You can't force change, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't be part of it. Individuals can and do join political parties and become influential within them. Political parties win elections and ultimately set policy which can start to change things.

None of those things happen quickly, and most people don't succeed in their attempt to do it. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'd argue that it's a feature of the system that the system makes it hard to change course - it averages out the extremes.

> created: 18 minutes ago

Right.

He didn't even say anything outrageous, he's just participating in the discussion. People can create accounts to be able to reply to a discussion, even throwaways.

Saying stupid things isn't outrageous indeed.

Questioning democracy unfortunately is a very common agenda by certain countries that don't want their own people to realize how much they are getting screwed by authoritarianism. But in the end it's like saying people have a "right" to get fucked over as long as it helps me. It's just a distraction. If you watch this sort of stuff closely, you'll find there has been a huge uptick online with pro-China content lately. Probably not a coincidence that Xi has told his army to be ready to invade Taiwan by next year. If Trump keeps chickening out and fumbling Iran so bad, they will probably seize the opportunity before the US or NATO have a chance to reorganize themselves into something that could actually rival China. They already have the largest navy in the world by now and they are not done building up their strength.

Can you clarify which is which?

Chinese propaganda seems to hit very hard these days. If you really don't know, you seriously need to check what media you are consuming. Yes, the US has huge problems, many old and some new, but on a serious technical level the answer is (at least for now) 100% clear.

> Chinese propaganda seems to hit very hard these days.

Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is a propagandized bot is a terrible way to live. You will not learn.

Assuming that China is not officially a 100% authoritarian dictatorship takes some serious mental gymnastics or hardcore brainwashing by propaganda channels. In fact forget media manipulation. A simple look at what they did to their constitution would already tell you everything you need to know. The US might be moving in this same direction under Trump, but it sure as hell isn't there yet. And if they do try to do the same, there is a good chance for another civil war. So while China is already lost, there is still some level of hope for the US.

"Not about moral high ground. One's an ideology my morals agree with, one isn't."

Is believing people should have a choice a moral high ground now?

You have a 2 party system where on many fronts both parties tow (almost) the same line and roughly behave like a oneparty system.

China has one proletarian party. The US has two bourgeois parties. One might think the ideal would be to have one bourgeois party, and one proletarian party, but that hasn't seemed to work out anywhere.

Well done! You're on your way to your Lounge Suite!

https://youtu.be/vZ9myHhpS9s?si=UkviDqG2NBQVd_IK&t=131

Except I don't know who won the 1972 English Football Cup.

The two parties couldn't be more different today. Republicans are basically an authoritarian party that would be more at home in a place like Russia - or China - today.

That being said, democracies are about generating consensus between factions with otherwise irreconcilable differences.

There should be overlap on many fronts - that's kind of a feature, not a bug - at least in many cases.

No, but believing our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems") is how you give people "a choice" is the moral high ground. That is your axiom, but it's often touted as a tautology.

The name says "demos" and "kratos" but names are names, not facts.

There are many ways to give people a choice and this one has proven to be quite ineffective at that, as it slowly devolved into a plutocracy/oligarchy. Iron law of oligarchy, yadda yadda.

What they are very effective at though: crushing dissent, calming the masses with a reassuring illusion of choice, and touting itself as the "one true way".

When I look at the outcomes I don't see any semblance of democracy, only a ritual dance/theatre show every 4 years. A farce as big as the "democratic" instruments on the PRC.

There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing. Those give actual power to the people (and with power comes choice). That's dangerous. People might start believing they can actually influence the outcomes.

"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"

> our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems")

Do not conflate the broken American political system, the semi-broken British one, and the whole rest of the "west". Each country has its own political system, and they are wildly different.

> crushing dissent

Democracies are good at crushing dissent? Compared to other political systems? That's just not true. All other political systems rely on universal truth and unwavering trust in a person / religion / clique of people, who can do no wrong and can never be criticised.

> There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing

What? You are probably talking about a specific democracy, and the most broken one at that.

> and they are wildly different

As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.

You can't escape the iron law of oligarchy.

> Democracies are good at crushing dissent?

They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.

If you manage to equate "democracy" (again, quotes intended) with democracy (lack of quotes intended), most of the work is already done.

"What are you, antidemocratic!?"

"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"

There's a reason my country's system trembled when the bipartisan system was challenged as new parties emerged... but it was curbed within two legislatures without a single shot fired and now we're back to an even stronger bipartisan representation. Quite the fine job, actually.

We even have a name for this: "the state's sewers". They're very effective. There's a reason the state's armed forces routinely infiltrate unions and other citizens participation platforms.

> As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.

Such as? There are countries such as Poland with a political duopoly, but in most European countries, there are multiple parties that work with or against each other. There are different coalitions with varying compromises between them.

> They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.

Nonsense, because autocracies do both, and the threat by violence is very real and makes sure that social manipulation is more effective.

Democracy is a stretch

As an American, I can conclusively say that we absolutely have no moral high ground whatsoever. But bringing the topic back to LLMs, I don't feel great about using an LLM that has a panic attack any time I ask about Tiananmen Square or Taiwanese sovereignty.

> I don't feel great about using an LLM that has a panic attack any time I ask about Tiananmen Square or Taiwanese sovereignty.

well American censored LLMs that usually willing to take extreme efforts to convince me that there is no genocide in Gaza.

the same American LLMs also insist that there are many human genders.

I don't know what American LLMs you're using. Just asked Claude, which gives nuanced answers on both, but amounts to "It's contested, but numerous authoritative bodies say yes" and "it depends on your definition of gender".

when it comes to topics like genders, "it depends on your definition" when it comes to topics like democracy and freedom, western definition is all you must depend on

you don't see the problem? lol

> I see an American believe they somewhat have the moral high ground over China

The elected government of the US has the moral highground of over the regime that killed the KMT in it's weakened state after the KMT defeated Japan, went on a rampage against the educated classes, mowed down its own people with machineguns and tanks when they demanded a say in their own governments, and kidnaps people advocating for democracy to this day, including Jack Ma.

> despite starting a new war... on behalf of Israel every six months.

The war started when Hamas, funded by Iran, went on a murder and rape rampage against Israeli civilians.

The origins of this war date back decades, arguably far longer.

Yes, they started with Islamic colonization of the Middle East and North Africa in 650.

There’s no organ harvesting of a religious subgroup in America.

No, there’s organ donor lists for which billionaires get to skip the line.

These are not equivalent.

The moral high ground claims here can be generalized:

Liberal democracies have moral high ground over authoritarian dictatorships (at least along that one dimension)

The US is backsliding tragically (and stupidly) and may lose that moral high ground, but the rest of the western democracies will still have it

What makes you think they’re American?

On the contrary, I find reading your own confused spin on morality here an interesting window into the effectiveness of propaganda. You're taking two oppressive authoritarian governments and elevating them above the US.

Chinese citizens will go to jail if they are too critical of their own government. How hard is it for you to wrap your head around those implications?

The U.S. is not the country conducting amoral behavior with terrorist regimes for oil, that’s China.

We conduct amoral behavior with terrorist regimes for dollars.

I always find the China glazing online getting worse and worse.

TikTok and Hasan has really turned the West against itself.

China having killed up to 50m of its own population in the 20th century through socialism, while America led the world in funding NATO, global scientific research, and global aid for decades buys America a lot of good grace.

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.

All empires are to some degree evil because their agenda is to dominate weaker peoples and nations. They almost all committed crimes against humanity and genocides if you look retrospectively from the todays point of view. Even our beloved Roman Empire that the Western civilization is built upon was genocidal empire.

Not sure if we can call it "beloved". For sure respected for what it did to build the base of modern civilization, but we are aware of its dark sides. And probably Nero would be an excellent example of what can happen to the empire and its people when a crazy person becomes its ruler.

One province of China has enough hellish nightmarish bullshit going on caused by the CCP that we maintain total moral superiority over them. It’s not even a question to anyone except “fellow travelers”.

is that you. Adrian Zenz?

thank god at least 1% of HN users aren't so heavily propagandized - makes me believe in the future a bit more.

The Uyghur say hi.

Talks about "mass propaganda."

Thinks America is starting wars on behalf of Israel.

LMAO

So you think the US should sit back and watch Iran develop nukes? Is that the “moral” thing to do?

The JCPOA was working fine. We discarded it for vanity and to create an opportunity for more war. That is obviously immoral.

If it was working “fine” then why was Iran able to reach 60% enriched uranium and enough for 10 nuclear weapons if they were able to enrich further?

That enrichment occurred after Trump voluntarily exited the JCPOA. The IAEA reported no enrichment over the 3.67% threshold through 2018, then reported over 400kg at 60% in 2025, all created in the period after Trump pulled out. You are describing a consequence of ending the JCPOA.

> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.

Fully agree. From a US perspective, that sucks. For everyone else it's pretty great.

At this point the world's opinions of China are better than those of the US in some polls. One country invests and helps build infrastructure on a massive scale globally, the other alienates allies, causes countless conflicts, and openly threatens to end civilizations.

Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.

> This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.

For this you'd need a technological moat. So far the forerunners have burned a lot of money with no moat in sight. Right now Europe is happy just contributing on research and doing the bare-minimum to maintain the know-how. Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.

> Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.

This is how I see it. The US has openly threatened multiple times to annex my country, and has repeatedly threatened every western nation. Letting the US have a monopoly on... well.. anything, is really bad for the world. The more countries that have their own production for various critical things like computer chips, medicine, etc, the better it is for the world at it distributes power.

People in the US don't seem to understand that with the current administration the US is seen as a potentially very hostile nation. While I don't think China is a friend to Canada or the west, at least it provides alternatives when the US tries to use it's monopolies against us. And vice versa too.

>Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.

Strong disagree here. Mistral does great work, in the long term being a few months or even a year behind is a non-issue. Also Cohere just merged with Aleph Alpha to continue producing foundational models. It's extremely important that the middle powers continue to do this.

Yeah it's confusing. I mean China has work camps for Uighurs and is very brutal on Tibetans etc. OTOH, their leader is not setting the world on fire every second week and compared to Trump seems like the paragon of reason on the surface. Of course we know it's a facade but man what crazy times to live in.

China can't project power globally because the US has them locked in place. There is a constellation of US allies and military bases surrounding China's coast.

It's extremely (read: extremely) naive to think that China keeps to itself because they don't have global power ambitions.

Look at the South China Sea, the one playground that the US stranghold allows them to play in...they don't give a fuck about anyone else's territory there.

If Trump acted more like Xi with regards to public speaking, but the actions were still the same, thing would be a lot different.

My point is that Trump could sign/execute/order all the same exact things he's done, but if I just never spoke about it, or kept hidden like Chinese do, he would be compared MUCH differently.

If someone like Trump could talk smarter, he would be smarter and would do things smarter.

That would also make him a lot more dangerous. After all in his first presidency he was still the man behind the biggest military on the planet but he knew shit on how to leverage this. In his second term he is even more loose but loose is tempertantrums and simple short sighted strategies. Easy to read, hard to accept.

You do realize that the US has a greater percentage of it's citizens in prison than any other country, including China?

In the US its not the Uighurs or Tibetans who are being oppressed - it's the blacks and immigrants. The US elected a president who characterizes immigrants as rapists and murderers (while he himself is a convicted rapist, suspected pedophile, and wants to commit war crimes in Iran).

The facade, believed by many Americans, is that USA is the land of the free, a democracy (despite no popular vote) one of the good guys, but actions say otherwise.

In the U.S. we don’t ethically cleanse in the name of political stability - we ethically cleanse in the name of economic growth.

You got me in the second half!

I don't see the issue. China hosts the alternatives or the only game in town for lots of technologies. China has every interest and right to create products. Not everything that comes out of China is some devious plan to do terrible things. It's people trying to make money just like you and me.

I am not washing away the authoritarianism, but take a look at other economic super powers directionality. Or that of tech ceos as well. At least Chinese tech companies aren't going around praising wwii Germany, writing manifestos, and bombing children at school or fisherman on whims. It is difficult not to see more countries regardless of leadership putting their hat in the ring as a net positive. Especially if it increases sustainability and lowers the price, which this very clearly does. It's even open source...

Moral stances aside, I'd argue it's healthy that the US gets competition from abroad. I appreciate the boost that the world is getting from China - infrastructure and construction projects are a huge benefit to economies. Their focus on green energy has caused a huge influx of affordable solar panels, home batteries, EVs, etcetera, helping reduce the dependency on fossil fuels - while the US and especially the other big money spenders in the middle east would rather the world remain fully dependent on them. But for the past years Europe and now Asia are feeling the pain from being overly reliant on that.

China's policies and government aren't morally defensible and I do fear that they will become more aggressive in spreading their influence and policies onto other countries, but from an economic standpoint what they're doing is super effective. While the previous world power (the US) is stuck in infighting and going through cycles of fixing/undoing the previous administration's damages, instead of planning ahead.

Competition with the Soviet Union gave all the workers in the world better conditions, also advances in science and technology... (And risk of mutual destruction ;)), even if the USSR wasn't good.

China doesn't even care about Taiwan anymore, their saber-rattling about it is a convenient distraction while they quietly make it completely irrelevant in the next few years.

It does seem the idea is to get the Taiwanese people to want to choose to rejoin China by making China far better for people to live than Taiwan. Maybe that will be via democracy (i.e. China manipulates the people of Taiwan), or perhaps it will be genuine (i.e. China provides a far better lifestyle for the average person than Taiwan)

I have seen first hand how Chinese nationals behave when visiting Taiwan - it’s not pretty.

Shared language and history aside, these two cultures are not in the same solar system when it comes to social norms and curtesies.

More so than say Afghanistan and Sweden?

china is gonna care about taiwan as a means of ocean access til the end of time, or til the tectonic plates move to make different opportunities.

the people and industry arent what matter there

The important thing is that LLMs are well-dispersed and the technology is relative open, much more open than it could have been. Alternative worthwhile LLMs will emerge from Europe and other non-US western countries once the economic incentives are there.

> mercy of authoritarian regimes.

Yet, it's the democratic regime which is causing all the chaos around the world and disrespecting the leadership of other jurisdictions, just to keep pushing the petrol dollar going up.

Do we ever think there's any subtle difference between authoritarian and democratic? Where democracy ultimately makes the world a better place?

Thankfully, DeepSeek is the most open of the model providers.

And in the hardware side, RISC-V is gaining a lot of traction in China. So the dependency on a single supplier is lower with the Chinese tech stack than with most western options.

> If China ever feels emboldened enough to go for Taiwan and the US descends into complete chaos, the rest of the world running on AI will be at the mercy of authoritarian regimes.

Alternative being the current reality and world being dominated by US. Let's ask people in Middle East/Asia/South America about how they feel about that. In this current day and age, how is this statement even relevant?

Mistral (a French company) shouldn’t be discounted.

bold to think half the comments here arent from deepseek itself :)

I personally love the bit "us initiated tech war" lol. thats right, they started making AI its their fault! bad imperialist US !

yeah, v5 will do better

You’re right… but that’s on the rest of the world not getting their shit together.

It’s this sort of example (and not properly supporting Ukraine, and not agreeing how to collectively deal with migrants, and not agreeing how to coordinate defence, and myriad other examples) that highlights what a pointless mess the EU is. It’s not a unified block - it’s 27 self-interested entities squabbling and playing petty power games, while totally failing to plan for the future with vision.

The EU could/should have ensured that a European equivalent to OpenAI or Anthropic could thrive, and had competitive frontier models already; instead, they’re years and countless billions behind.

The EU pouring even more billions in this would just have meant pouring billions on US tech. China is winning on all fronts at this game because of the embargo, they end up even more vertically integrated as a result of it.

So China innovated around GPU supply issues (because they had to) but Europe couldn't/wouldn't?

Hard to not see this as another sign of European stagnation...

In no specific order:

- Europe was first to dig up its fossil sources of energy, the bulk of it is long gone

- Europeans got used to roughly clean air, soil and water, heavy industries are polluting

- the embargo is forcing China to vertically integrate, the Chinese have no alternative, Europeans (think they) do

> The EU pouring even more billions in this would just have meant pouring billions on US tech.

Which is crazy given that ASML is European.

So is Zeiss, and probably a lot of others in TSMC's supply chain. It still looks like the bulk of the money is made by companies higher in the stack like NVidia and AWS.

ASML is basically american though.

american tech operationalized in europe

How so? No American shareholder with a majority afaik and everything else about it is very European

Isn’t Mistral close in the ballpark?

Mistral has a different focus. They aren't taking on trillions in debt risking their entire economy to produce useful products.

I think they are leaders in the democratization of LLMs. Almost everyone has a computer right now that can run a useful variant of a Mistral model. I hope they keep their focus because what they are aiming for likely has the biggest impact on the average person and would be the best case scenario for the technology in general.

AFAIK: Current Mistral models are not competitive with SOTA-models that come out of the USA or China. They are "good enough" for enterprise usage when you don't need SOTA performance.

Their main selling point is: They are neither US-American nor Chinese. That's a real moat in today's world. I think at the moment they feel quite comfortable.

There are no European models that come close. It's Korean models, then a UAE model K2, then Mistral.

They arent. Benchmark wise they are quite apart.

Come on... I was hoping that Mistral would do something and man that would be great as european but I hear NOTHING from them ever.

I don't know what the problem is. Are we europeans to stupid? Do we just not have enough money / VC money? Are we not proud enough?

Not worse than having our stuff built there. Is it great to be relying on them? No, but at least more stable than US under Trump.

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