>I don't think anyone would disagree that she's a pawn in a geopolitical struggle, but it also sounds like she absolutely and intentionally violated US law
Someone that didn't visit the US was arrested for "breaking US law"...replace "US" with "China" and see how this sentence rings.
She provided false statements and evidence to the US Government (and US banking entities) in order export US products to a sanctioned regime. All for a tidy profit.
So, while you're correct that she didn't commit a crime within the USA, she did commit one directly against US businesses and the US government.
As a non-American, I do find the extraterritoriality of US law very concerning, but I don't think this serves as a good example of overreach. She'd have been fine if she didn't enter a country with an extradition treaty with the US. That wasn't the smartest move.
Why do you have to visit the country to commit crimes against that country? Isn't that how every sovereign nation state works?
The host country can choose not to extradite, but most countries generally accept this basic idea that sovereign nations can charge and warrant the arrest of individuals as pertinent.
There is a difference between China is 'uniquely evil' and 'China has an especially bad record on human rights and fair enforcement of the law.' Remember, in China there is pretty much no freedom of thought, including religion. And they are oppressing 3 large groups of people - Tibet, Xinjiang, and now Hong Kong. Of course it is not a binary good/bad thing, but some kind of false moral equivalence between China and Western countries is just as ridiculous and harmful.
The West has 100% done more "evil" if we're going by "oppression olympics". One can simply look at the violence exported by the respective groups. Also keep in mind how often America lies and sends agents to destabilize China (I'm sure vice-versa is also true yet Americans choose to blame Russians instead? Not sure why.). Now, I do not believe that is a fruitful or meaningful argument to have but your argument seems to come from a place of American exceptionalism over weighing both sides.
The US has been oppressing indigenous people, black people, and communists for decades and decades. And crackdown on protests against equal application of the law for mainland and a territory after letting the protests run on for a whole year is barely controversial. Everyone should compare China against the West without seeing China as some unique evil.
> If Assange leaked Chinese intelligence secrets, would he be free right now? I expect so.
Probably not, because he's made enemies of pretty much every country or nation state. Maybe Russia would take him in or something but the amount of geopolitical enemies he has is enormous.
> "China is uniquely evil"
I don't think anyone has expressed this. I think it's more, China is totalitarian with little respect for free speech, the rule of law and human rights, and often, arbitrary enforcement of laws. Before you say, "the US does this too!", it's true, but that's also a tu quoque" logical fallacy and is just gaslighting.
I really don't think the West has, currently, anything similar to their concentration camps or lack of religious freedoms.
Sounds like a surviving version of Victorian "blame the victim" thinking. It was a popular and heavily flawed idea that the people the British invaded and robbed (of food in many cases), if faced with food shortages, should have just "had less kids".
When a parasite finds a good host, the logic can get really warped.
I find people's lack of knowledge about what makes Bitcoin valuable interesting.
The reason Bitcoin is valuable is because the work required to create one is significantly harder than Fiat currencies and it is one of the only truly scarce assets in human history (hard cap).
How much equipment do you need to counterfeit any fiat currency? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $10k?
Yes, easy.
How much equipment do you need to counterfeit Bitcoin? Can you purchase the equipment for less than $1 billion?
No, not easy.
You may think this is a trivial distinction but it has tremendous value knowing you have hard uncounterfeitable money with a hard cap.
The US treasury spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year fighting fake bills, that's only 1 of the dozen or so problems bitcoin solves. The second is that all the verification and security is done by the most powerful supercomputer in human history.
These things gives it its value.
Garbage company stocks, you can throw those in the trash if the central banks aren't busy helping pump them.
Hard money wins, soft money gets snuffed in the night.
So China is publicly announcing that it's deploying what the Five Eyes have deployed in democratic countries under the cover of darkness across the world (while lying to their citizens, who have a constitutional right to know)?
IllogicalLogic, these discussions have more value when we focus on the topic at hand, not devolve into whataboutism. Your comparison is both a mischaracterization and off-topic.
Not whataboutism, if the case can be made that 350 million people need protection then the case can more easily be made for 1.3 billion people.
Wikileaks also showed us that US agencies were engaged in industrial espionage, stealing German/French industrial technology using the Five Eyes tools and giving it to GE & friends ...
The problem is, my more "reality-based" framing destroys the "China is uniquely evil" narrative that western media/gov is pushing everywhere for primarily economic reasons.
You may overestimate how valuable those billion viewers are, most of them don't have the money to buy anything.
Also, there are a great many cultural and economic reasons that foreign players generally avoid playing in China's existing professional sports league. Political oppression is just one of those reasons.
Well, one of the developments of the last six months has been to put a lot of pinpricks in the idea that China is an inevitably rising world superpower that will inevitably supplant the US in the near future. I wouldn't say that's off the table entirely, but it's looking a lot more evitable.
> Calling our rights "privilege" is throwing out the struggle and sacrifice of everyone that fought for those rights.
Next South Park should do an episode that shows how greedy western leaders running opium/heroin for the better part of now two centuries, turned the most populous country into a paranoid dictatorial hellhole for the Chinese people.
US introspection would be too on the nose?
You ever ask yourself what percentage of the heroin/opium supply would be pulled off the market if China could extradite people from HK? More than 50%... and who gets hurt by that?
It will be quite funny if the US inadvertently makes the traditional market system obsolete by becoming too "sanction happy". Kind of like how they triggered a de-dollarization push...
China already has a crypto Yuan, there is no reason they can't use a Binance style exchange for frictionless worldwide direct investment in their companies.
China: You want to boycott investing in our companies? We'll route around your whole financial system and help make it obsolete. See what happens to the US economy when banks can no longer collect 20% fees on a growing percentage of the world population's transactions.
Simple, just don't cooperate with western capitalists looking to plunder an area, a Cold War will be declared shortly after.