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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

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Are you suggesting the President of the United States and his administration are perpetrating Russian and Chinese psyops against the American people, because it's his and his administration's actions that everyone is reacting to.

If the media you’re consuming paints Trump in a worse light than Putin and Jianping, you really need to rethink the sources you’re reading. The Western media is ridiculously partisan and polarised.

Or maybe it's just that all three of them are bad.

While I agree to a certain extent, Americans aren't exactly helping the case against them.

What is a critique of Russia or China in this context that isn't true of the US?

China - authoritarian communist dictatorship, killing its own protesting students, concentration camps imprisoning 1M+ Muslims, forced sterilisation, forced labour, organised re-education of its own population, every company an arm of the intelligence agencies (by law), social credit system, biological weapons production (Wuhan), institutionalised IP theft from other countries

https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/china/ch...

Russia - the most corrupt major dictatorship in Europe, military invasions of its peaceful neighbours, hybrid warfare against European countries, nerve agent assassination of political rivals both within and outside Russia. Indiscriminate killing of civilians in Ukraine with no remorse.

US - a constitutional democracy that has alternated leadership in the last decade in the same familiar way it always has. Attacked Iranian regime assets because Iran threatened it with nuclear weapons and fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at US ally Israel (a pluralist democracy that should be defended IMO). Widespread support for the US intervention from ordinary Iranians who has been oppressed by their Islamist dictator for decades; Removed a ruthless dictator in Venezuela due to massive human rights abuses and state narco trafficking, widespread US support from ordinary Venezuelans who have been oppressed by their dictator.

I don’t see all of the US actions as favorably as that description, I think a lot of recent actions are especially egregious and the US has a history of doing pretty terrible things.

But the scale really is completely different. I think the US is still overall good, and we do still have real elections, limits on government power, and genuine turnover in government where power can shift.

And even as the US govt is trying to scare people away from protesting and they’re building a corporate-government surveillance state, personal freedoms are still very high compared to China and Russia.

The US is unfortunately in the fortunate position of being the worlds active super power. This puts them in a bit of an "IT dept dilemma", where when things are going smoothly they are invisible, and when things are falling apart, it's their fault.

Migrate to a new mail server that is 30% faster? Ah, thats nice.

Migrate to a new mail server and things go awry? Fire that entire fucking department they are seriously incompetent and only ever fuck things up.

Don't go easy on China here! They also has the Invade Neighbouring Country card on hand and is slowly pushing it across the table.

--signed, the guy who owns a chinese car and thinks china is winning

this makes a lot of sense if you are living under a rock sponsored by sinclair broadcast group and aipac.

So when Trump threatened to annex Greenland, that was a Russian and Chinese psyop?

Maybe it's more simple. Maybe Trump is precisely the erratic, narcissistic, authoritarian dictator wannabe he appears to be.

America is responsible for its own reputation, and at the moment America appears to be intent on trashing it.

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