Comment on China says US broke international law by seizing oil tankers off Venezuela
frisbird@lemmy.ml 18 hours agoRight, 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.
Archangel1313@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Ok, so did you not actually read my comment? I have no idea what you’re even responding to here.
I literally said the US has no right to police international waters, no matter what their “justification”. Just like you can’t close the street in front of your house, just because you’re worried that criminals might use it. It doesn’t belong to you, and you can’t prevent other people from using it just because you feel threatened.
I’m starting to be a little confused by your argument here. Are you in favor of the US’s actions in the Caribbean? Because you seem to be making the argument that they have the right to “defend themselves” in this manner. Or is it just China that should be allowed to do stuff like this, and the US is still wrong?
frisbird@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
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?
Archangel1313@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
It’s funny that you think your opinion about their motives even matters here. It doesn’t. They can say whatever they want in defense of their crimes…just like China can. China is literally using the exact same defense of their actions in the SCS. What makes their excuses valid, while the US’s excuses are not?
Let’s look at your analogy, from a rational perspective…I assume the “neo Nazis” you’re talking about, represent the US? So, you’re suggesting that the US has been roving around in the South China Sea, randomly robbing and killing people recently, and that China is only trying to protect itself? When did these attacks happen? Because the US hasn’t been involved in any conflicts in that region since at least the end of the Vietnam war. That makes your entire analogy invalid. China isn’t “defending itself” against anyone. No one in that region is currently threatening China, in any way.
It’s just a bullshit excuse, no different than the one the US is trying to use in the Caribbean.
That’s why reasons like these are not valid justifications for breaking the law. You don’t just get to pick and choose what laws apply to you, based on your excuses. You either think they should apply to everyone equally…or you don’t. And if you don’t…then you can’t complain when other people ignore those laws, too.
frisbird@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Right, so as I suspected, you just won’t bring any of this into context. You have to twist yourself into pretzels to avoid stating the obvious.
Yes, it’s about the US and no it’s not about the US murdering people specifically in the SCS just as in the story the blockade is happening at the critical entrances to the block.
In case you haven’t noticed, the US has been roving around the world killing, raping, robbing, and torturing for decades. The Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Cuba, Libya, Somalia… And those are just the easy the ones to identify. The US has been non-stop beligerent all over the world. It has 700 foreign military bases. Domestically its intelligentsia and academics and news media and propagandists have been writing about winning nuclear war for decades, have been writing about defeating China in a war based on US preemptive strikes, have been constantly using their international diplomatic platform to war monger against China and others.
China is doing none of these things. China hasn’t dropped a bomb since 1989. Despite the US training terrorists and literally air dropping them into Tibet, China has never gone on a rampage the way the US did after 9/11. China doesn’t train death squads and send them all over South Anerica to kill farmers and families that might vote for social democrats.
Again, totally decontextualized and essentially saying that China has nothing to worry about despite the US demonstrating daily that China has everything to worry about.
The US has deep covert ties all over the area that stem from their drug running operations that they developed during the post war era. Under Obama, 2/3rds of US naval assets were repositioned to be in the Pacific in Obama’s very open and explicit “pivot to Asia”. It is an absolutely constant threat to China and China is doing everything it can to develop itself while avoiding war while also ensuring it is capable of defending itself if the US choose to continue to push towards war.
You have absolutely no problem critcizing the US for being a bad actor but the minute China does anything to assert itself on the world stage suddenly nothing the US did or does matters at all.
Again. You have to realize how disingenuous it is to say “sure the US has been talking about attacking China for 2 decades now and sure it killed 500k children in Iraq and sure it lies diplomatically to create false diplomatic pretenses for a meeting that it used to assassinate a top Iranian official via drone strike and sure it funds fanatical and violent proxies all over East Asia and sure it is destroying boats with its naval assets in the Caribbean and sure its constantly at war with anyone and everyone and sure it runs constant military exercises in the regiona surrounding China to ensure it has sufficient military capabilities for an invasion but China has absolutely nothing to fear in the SCS specifically because when was the last time the US killed anyone specifically in the SCS?!”
It’s very tiring.