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On 2002-12-07 01:21, The Goldstandard wrote:
When you try to make comparisons between the USA and China, you are ignoring an important distinction. China is evil.
China is <b>evil</b>? Let us examine this for a moment, ignoring the fact that 'evil' can refer to anything if you want it to. What is China? It's a country. And like most countries that I know of, it has a government. That government is made up of people. People are in charge over there. No reasonably intelligent person would imply that a whole country is evil, because by doing so you imply that everything in and of that country is evil, and that's just silly. Think about it. "China is evil all right, from their evil government to their evil people right down to their evil rice and their evil mountains." You can use 'evil' as a blanket statement like that, but it just makes you look foolish. So when you say that China is evil, I think you really mean that the people in charge are evil.
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I know the USA isn't perfect, but we aren't a dictatorship. China is, and so is Iraq. Dictatorships are the most evil thing in the world, they were the cause of the deaths of tens of millions of people in the 20th century and they continue to murder to this day. Dictatorships have no right to exist, and they have no grounds to claim the right to be free from invasion. Evil is indefensible. Free nations, on the other hand, do have a right to defend themselves, and they can preemptively strike a dictatorship if it poses any threat to their security.
There's that 'evil' bit again. Evil is an arbitrary concept, and therefore doesn't stand up to logical analysis very well. I won't pursue that line of thought here, because it really needs its own debate thread.
That aside, dictatorships are not necessarily a bad form of government. It really depends on your criteria for judging governments. If you want efficiency, dictatorship is the way to go. A single person can make decisions far quicker than any senate in the world. If civil rights and liberties are your main concern, you need to look at something else. As for 'free' countries, I challenge you to name a single one. Any one in the world. Name it and I can use your own argument to prove that no country in the world is truly free. That's because freedom is an arbitrary concept, just like evil. In the US, We may be relatively more free than Iraq, but it's still only a matter of perspective.
Your claim that free nations can defend themselves preemtively against dictatorships is preposterous. Your whole argument is shakey, at best. Dictatorships are bad because they kill people? What do you call capital punishment? The US kills people just like dictatorships have done. Iraq is bad because Saddam kills his own people? So do we. We have known for decades that Saddam killed his own people. We supported him while he was doing it. <b>We gave him the weapons and technology that he used to do it with.</b> We have no moral high ground to stand upon, contrary to what you may have been told. 'Free' countries have always done the same things dictatorships have done.