If you can’t distinguish between the Vietnamese War and the Axis Concentration Camps on a scale of atrocity, I’m doubtful there’s any intellectual exercise that’s going to clarify that for you.
Absolutely, there's no intellectual process to get there. [0] Rather it requires a lifelong immersion in "news" media
committed to minimizing USA war crimes, coupled with an aggressively jingoistic ignorance of history.
[0] that is, one brutally murdered innocent child of innocent parents is not really different than some other brutally murdered innocent child of innocent parents.
I didn't see this as a problem solved by war, honestly.
We need to weane ourself off a dependency on China for cheap goods. We need to decide that we value human life over a cheap phone.
China gets away with what it does because it feeds our need for shiney new trinkets. Frankly, it's disgusting. The world could stand up to China and say it doesn't want it as a trading partner. Maybe that wouldn't even help, but do we really want to be doing trade with a country that operates like China does?
With all due respect - from a systems perspective, that's not a solution; it's a wish for a pony, no less so than complaining "where are China's values"? Solutions are required because people are selfish and shortsighted - merely pointing this out accomplishes little.
It's like saying that police aren't a solution to murder - what we really need is to stop killing each other.
The current president isn't wishing for a pony. He has aggressively, unilaterally changed USA trade policy with respect to China. One might suspect his goals in this exercise. Still, if he can do this in pursuit of his idea of "fairness", then some other president, perhaps with the cooperation of Congress, could have done similar with the idea of penalizing some of the more odious behavior of the Chinese state.
That hypothetical president who cared about e.g. Tibet or the Uighurs couldn't have expected any popular intellectual support for that effort, however, since our popular intellectuals act largely to feather their own nests with Panglossian tributes to how wonderful TPP could have been.
All kinds of bad things are happening in the world. This thread is discussing a bad thing being done by the Chinese government. That doesn't suggest that other bad things are any better or worse.
