frisbird

Literally the only thing that matters is sales. Sales people make money regardless of whether the product is good or sometimes regardless of it even exists.

Programmers think the game is to make something good. It's not. It's telling people to pay you.

Spend all of your time talking to people about what problems they have and then ask them which problems cost them money or whether they would spend money to solve a problem.

Most of the time, if you tell people your idea, they will lie to you about the idea being good, but they will never spend money on it. So don't try to find the idea that people like. Find the problem that costs people money.

And that's how you make a business

Jitsi

What an amazing article. I can't do it justice. Just read it. The quotations are just amazing

The US isn't behaving defensively, it's behaving offensively. Maybe that's why you're confused about my position.

Let's take your example. Criminals on the street.

Let's say you're a black person in America living in a predominantly black neighborhood. Some neo-Nazis have been roving the streets for the last couple of years, robbing people, beating them up, breaking into homes, vandalizing homes, killing people, kidnapping and torturing people, etc.

But those neo-Nazis also own the newspapers and TV stations and they produce media saying that the black neighborhood you live in is a terrible place and needs to be cleaned up.

You and your neighbors beseech the police to protect you, but they do nothing.

So you and your neighbors take it on yourself to blockade the street to protect yourselves.

And then the neonazi news media says you're violating the law and then people on Lemmy argue that violating laws like this is terrible no matter what.

Do you get it now?

The topic was actually the US violating international law. Your comment was, paraphrased "but what about China violating international law?!", which is literally exactly the context under which the word whataboutism was coined - when the US accused the USSR of doing bad things and the USSR called out the hypocrisy of the US, the anglosphere coined the term whataboutism.

It's literally the definition.

There are much better ironies than China causing the US of violating international law, chief among them is the US accusing China of violating international law, because the US has been doing for far longer and in far more brutal ways than China ever has.

Yes, pointing out hypocrisy is literally whataboutism when you are using is to distract from the crimes of the empire. The reality is that everyone, including countries that have violated international law, should be condemning the US for what it's doing and whether or not the condemners have violated international law is irrelevant and serves to minimize the topic at hand, which is the US seizing oil, and to advance sinophobic narratives, and to draw false equivalencies between horrible acts of murder, war crimes, piracy on the one hand and mild harassment on the other.

Ultimately, the greatest irony here is Westoids like you believing your opinions are well informed and not subject to foreign manipulation while being the most propagandized people in the planet.

Right, so your position is that everyone has to follow the rules even if doing so puts them in a weaker position that could be exploited by the USA, because defending against potential violations of international law by the USA which pose existential threats to your nation is not valid and instead the rights of fishermen trump the right to national self defense because we say so.

Oh, now they suddenly care about international law?

This is your original comment. The point you were making is LITERALLY whataboutism.

The US is factually violating international law. China called them out. You said "but what about China violating international law".

It doesn't get much more whataboutism than that. So let me continue you the trend here.

You think the commenter you were replying to is doing a whataboutism? What about your whataboutism?!

Has it been double tapping Filipino fishing boats?

Violating law is not inherently bad, no. We all know this. Laws do not have moral/ethical value. So what China is doing is in violation of international law, but that does not mean it's bad.

What the US does, as the world's most violent empire, is bad - not because it violates international law but because it is acting in the interest of total domination and subjugation of the world's people.

What China is doing in the SCS is very clearly in the interest of establishing its own national security against exactly the immoral behavior of the USA. Sure, harassment of fisherman feels like a terrible thing, but when we look at it in the full context, China is asserting its willingness to control a region of the waters and apply a consistent rule in those waters (no one has access) in an attempt to create conditions under which it can stop war ships from the US, UK, Japan, and other anti-Chinese powers from operating with impunity in those waters. And the reason it wants to be able to do that is because these countries have all raped and pillaged not only China but many of the countries that have coastlines on the SCS.

What the US is doing is, having successfully raped and pillaged multiple countries with shorelines on the SCS, attempting to say it has the right to peacefully move war ships including nuclear-capable submarines into the SCS because it's international waters and it doesn't matter if strategically that means China will have a gaping security hole in its national defense.

Again, it's like saying cryptography is illegal, and now that we've made it illegal, it is actually immoral to protect your home computers from hackers and then saying someone installing cryptography is just as wrong as the hackers stealing their data. It's total bullshit and you and people like you totally understand the concept of immoral laws and laws with immoral consequences when it involves concepts in your own ideology but you discard it immediately when it comes to the national defense of the West's military targets. You have to see how disingenuous this is.

It's not the work I need, but it's the work I deserve

China's not good for ignoring it. China is violating international law in its attempt to establish its national security against the constant threats by the US and its allies.

The US violates international law to steal oil, traffick human slave, drugs, and weapons, train and arm terrorists, dump toxic waste in poor countries that can't defend themselves, and bomb whoever the fuck even thinks about running their own country.

These are not the same violations of international law.

It's like saying that guy violated the law when he pulled an illegal uturn while you're standing there with a rifle and 12 bodies at your feet.

I'm sorry. Is intellectual property theft a tankie thing now? Like, roll the tanks and take those patents!!

Do you think Mao stole intellectual property in order to end the biannual cycle of famines China had for a century before they finally figured out how to address it?

Is stealing intellectual property, which itself is a total monopolist regime of capitalist exploitation with zero public benefit, does that nullify what China did? Consider that China had to steal that IP from some country, mostly the US, and the US has had a falling economy for 50 years. What's the US doing with all that original IP it has? And since the US has the IP first, before China has it, and since China can only steal some at a time, you'd think the US would be way ahead of China, wouldn't you? Why is that not the case?

Xi Xinping is personally keeping everyone in China down because he personally doesn't think they deserve nice things? Can you source that for me? Seems strange considering the average purchasing power of Chinese citizens keeps going up and the poverty alleviation campaigns continue to rack up the successes.

And finally, being court martialled for refusing orders is something every country does, even when the orders are illegal. In fact, it is the process of the court marshall that helps to identify the illegal orders, in accordance with the military court system. The US also does this, as evidenced by the fact that the US is currently threatening to re-enlist a sitting elected official specifically to court marshall them for even speaking out loud about the military's responsibility to refuse illegal orders. Unfortunately, the US has not procesuted it's own soldiers and officers for systematic torture, extrajudicial murder, weaponizing sexual violence, and stealing millions. Nor has it ever prosecuted anyone for lying about the reasons for war and then going to war and killing millions. Nor has it ever prosecuted anyone for planning and executing genocides, like Kissinger did.

So yeah, good leak. Nice insight into that event. Appreciate it. But what happened in China pales in comparison to what the US does literally every single year and has been doing for the past 70 years. From napalming entire countries of millions of people for months to dropping over 2 millions tons of bombs on countries it wasn't even at war with to building international torture sites to avoid its own laws to training, arming, coordinating, and deploying literal death squads across an entire continent.

If I"m a tankie, what does that make you? A dronie? You want to claim China has no place defending itself from the US, so clearly it should just isolate itself, do nothing in response to constant US provocation, and eventually watch as the drones obliterate the entire country?