You mean to, in supposed good faith, suggest that USA influence in Europe is similar and/or equivalent to Chinese influence and interference in the USA?
You are simply wrong on so many levels. NATO is the reason why the iron curtain stayed where it was and why the Russian federation hasn't steam-rolled Western Europe.
If you believe the US is the only actor that benefitted from this development, you're somehow ignoring about 800 million people and over two dozen countries who remained free and independent thanks to NATO.
> You are simply wrong on so many levels. NATO is the reason why the iron curtain stayed where it was and why the Russian federation hasn't steam-rolled Western Europe.
There are no historical artifacts claiming that USSR ever had a serious plan to "steamroll" Western Europe. If anything, they were deathly terrified of NATO incursion into Russia and almost pathologically attached to creating a buffer zone of Warszaw Pact states.
Please do not mix up US cold war propaganda with historic facts, those are not quite the same.
This whole thread is based on whataboutism! It’s supposed to be about Chinese influence, and then someone derailed it into talking about American influence, and now the whole thread is 90% comments about America and 10% comments about China.
Note: this also happens in pretty much every other thread about a country that isn’t America. God forbid anyone ever discuss anything else, Americans want to relitigate the same old tired “why my country sucks” debates!
And for what? Is any useful information being conveyed? No, it’s mostly just some kind of social status signalling — Americans of certain insecure social class feel the need to complain about America at every opportunity to distinguish themselves from people of a lower social class because patriotism is coded as a low-class activity.
Yes you’re all very sophisticated and I’m sure you like high speed trains and such. Can we please stop talking about the same thing all the time?
The 2 scenarios are not mutually exclusive - the threat from communism could have been averted without overthrowing democracies, arming terrorists etc.
Something like 200k people died in the civil war that ensued in Guatamala after the US-backed coup. And that is but one example. It could be argued that a lot of the violence and instability in Latin America is as a result of US intervetion.
"red danger"? Like when Cuban intervened in Angola and murdered 10's of thousands or dozens of others horrors around the globe?
Hell, just think of how many excessive deaths have been caused around the globe by the USSR's push of socialism, retarding growth by decades everywhere it won.
You'd have to be a hard core ideologue to not look at the 20th century and think the "red danger" wasn't the most evil thing to ever happen to humanity.
> Hell, just think of how many excessive deaths have been caused around the globe by the USSR's push of socialism, retarding growth by decades everywhere it won.
Hell, just think of the violence, misery and excessive deaths that have occurred across Latin America and the Middle East because of the USA's interventions.
My point is that just because the USSR did worse, doesn't excuse the USA's actions, which still have an impact to this day.
Are you conveniently forgetting the forceful seizure of an entire continent, displacement of native populations, importing millions of human beings to be used as slaves, colonization and plunder of natural resources across the globe, and deliberate destabilization of regions for profit?
You need to check out the rose glasses you're wearing yourself
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic or ideological flamewar. Also, please be careful not to cross into personal attack, which is a force multiplier on all things bad here.
Quite. I think I'll stop responding to this thread because we're not going to see eye-to-eye here. Despite the current US President's love for despots and totalitarianism, that doesn't describe the USA.
Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime (born in 1993). Don't know what you mean on hypocrisy on nudity, but I only became comfortable with it when I visited Scandinavia when I was 22; seems like Canada has a similar issue.
I'll maybe give you medical care, but this is an incredibly complex topic. To think that public health care isn't monetized is a naïve point of view.
Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US. That's my honest opinion.
Violence: We have very different gun control laws, and general perception towards guns and violence. In my kid's primary school, they weren't even allowed to pretend-shoot at each other. Whereas I have to remind my US friends to leave their gun at home if driving to Canada (and yes, one of them had their gun confiscated at the border).
Medical care monetisation: sure there is a big private industry, but it's scales different than in the US. And it did not say that it does not exist, only that we tend to disagree on the trend (ex: pharma insurance, now deployed in some provinces, and likely to become federal).
Nudity: granted, I'm from Quebec, it might be different, but things like nipples, breastfeeding, nudity in art, being naked in locker rooms, seeing friends naked (non-sexually), etc. people tend to be much more indifferent about nudity and more comfortable with their body. Obviously, that's a huge generalization and perhaps anecdotal, but I heard this often.
Ah, and I guess with regards to violence, is our difference in free speech: hate speech is not permitted (with exclusions for religious groups, because of LGBT issues, iirc).
Again, these are what I think are non-aligned trends, and topics that have an impact on moderation/algorithms online, not a hard truth. Obviously not everyone agrees on these topics, some regions are more divided than others, and these views tend to evolve in time.
> Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime (born in 1993).
Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
> Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US.
Canada did not suffer a financial crisis to the extent that the US did in 2008 because banks here are regulated very differently than in the US. Also, the likelihood of medical bills causing financial ruin is much lower here.
> Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
That's what is reported. I highly suspect JTF2 was involved since the beginning. This directly proving my point of the government misleading the people.
> Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime
Since the US is Canada's largest trading partner, this will always be the case, but there are huge and important differences in the level of involvement. Famously the level of involvement in the Iraq war was almost non-existent. Canada's involvement consisted of patrolling surrounding waters, and approximately 100 Canadian soldiers who were embedded in American forces as a sort of culteral military exchange[1].
Major US trends, but are people shilling on Reddit to support them? That's an honest question, I don't really read Reddit. I know there are a lot of people in the US who honestly believe in, say, private healthcare, so a lot of the comments in support of it could be explained as coming from Americans expressing their opinions, as opposed to government or corporate agents pushing an agenda.
I guess there can be a lot of influence in a discussion based on how comments are upvoted, how algorithms will favour one type of content over another? (especially when advertising is guiding it all, and lobbies are big advertisers)
I also rarely visit Reddit, but for Facebook and Twitter, I guess there has been plenty of research on how people can manipulate public opinion by sharing/voting, and also the impact of their respective algorithms for promoting content?
Of course, Tik Tok is no different, and we should be worried. They do the same thing, only it's not 'our' lobbies and we have little control on them.
As an eastern european i feel the same just from the opposite perspective.
Western European push for values that fundamentally cannot work in my country.
While i agree with you on the first two as US movies and culture to propagate those values, third you could argue that europe and canada are pushing more privacy onto america due to GDPR and PIPEDA and companies having to follow them, but the last one i entirely have to disagree with you on the last one.
I don't see the US trying to export or push that idea/policy and i can't see it ever gaining traction in canada or the EU.
