To be charitable to TFA, there are a dearth of accurate and well-understood labels for the kind of X versus Y they want to make between national economies.
Even "First/Third world" has been fraying at the edges for decades since it was originally about political alignment.
Not in the UK but in Sweden. Smoking is already banned in restaurants, on train platforms, mostly all in public.
With health care being tax funded in regions, I dont want to pay for smokers bad health.
"oh but do you want to tax or prohibit unhealthy foods!!??"
Yes, first remove all drinks with sugar or heavily tax them. Not needed. Zero sugar drinks only.
2nd - price hike on snacks, chips, nuts, chocolate, "pick n mix" candy, sugar candy
3rd - BMI based health. Want any help for pain, surgery, whatever and your BMI is over 25? Lower it and you get it. Do you smoke? Stop. Do nicotine? Stop. Any hard drugs? Stop.
Nuts have good fats and are somewhat okay in a VERY moderate amount.
But they have a crazy amount of calories. Nuts are not a thing to snack on, if you eat more than one handful, but it is easy to eat an entire bag and at that point just eat chips.
"A small 1.5-ounce serving often contains 240–300 calories, while larger bags (e.g., 100g) can range from 570 to 750 calories."
I assume you are american, must be very blackpilling to visit Sweden. Imagine living in a functional democracy and society where things work like public transport and holidays.
I am American and I visited Stockholm for a week last year. It was nice and pretty but boy oh boy was it stifling. Copenhagen was way more relaxed by comparison.
I am American, I have never visited Sweden but I have visited Norway. The taxes on normal everyday things like food were as high as 25% and everyone I talked to expressed interest in America, either visiting or living there. I only know one person who moved from America to a Nordic country (Denmark) and she complained that everyone was racist and that it took several months to get an appointment for a root canal, during that time she just had to live with severe pain. I have zero desire to live in any Nordic country.
I assume you are american, must be very blackpilling to visit Sweden. Imagine living in a functional democracy and society where things work like public transport and holidays.
Not OP, but I'm not American, have been to Sweden (and lived most of my life in countries with better public healthcare than Sweden), and I also think yours is an aggressively conformist take. I'm not sure what value it is meant to be adding to the overall conversation. Save it for Reddit next time.
I'm permabanned on Reddit unfortunately so I cannot participate in that site :(
I make a new account and it is immediately shadowbanned + real banned for evading in 24h. Even with a VPN. They are crafty.
Anyway Reddit is leftie infested too, so they don't like me ether but I liked some specific hobby and work subreddits.
As below said we have that hardcore protestant work ethic, not suitable for everyone. Only Germans do it better.
My point is we have a functional society, healthcare, public transport, schooling and world leading companies, one of the highest HDI in the world etc. We are just the best :)
So you're a religiously-tinged nationalist. I'm happy that you're happy, but is that really meant to be particularly unique or interesting? Or even germane to the topic at hand?
mrbukkake said it was a very Swedish response and from there it went, the germane topic at hand, and I'm like, yea?
We banned smoking in public in 2005 and have had a special government alcohol store since 1955.
Nationalist is a bad word nowadays but then people cannot deny where people want to live is in the north or western Europe or USA/Canada. Maybe Japan and SK also.
I live in none of those places. I enjoy a (free) public healthcare system consistently ranked much higher than Sweden's, and smoking has been banned virtually everywhere except for designated areas for several decades. (There is much more public smoking in Europe than here.) Our HDI is equivalent to Sweden's, our household wealth and incomes are significantly higher; lower crime, more nature, much better weather. There are over two millions European migrants living here. Many are economic migrants - nurses and doctors, for example, since our public healthcare system pays better, and offers better work-life balance, than those in Europe.
The thing is, I still don't see how any of that matters. This is a pointless nationalist dick measuring contest that leads nowhere. You're not going to convince anyone of the superiority of Sweden, nor are you likely to be convinced of the superiority of other places, so what is the point of the discussion?
Communism is the cool thing now for young people. China propaganda on TikTok is huge. Huge. And I notice the third world eating it up due to resentement. And young people in my country of Sweden.
But mention how Poland, Baltics, Eastern EU never ever ever would go back to communism and they have 0 arguments.
I see young people advocating for socialism a lot in Canada, but rarely communism as in communist Russia and communist China. As others have said, old style communism isn't even around anymore. Russia is a fake democracy and China is a strange blend of one party rule and capitalism.
I don't think it does anyone any good to throw around naive and simple terms like communism. Focus on issues like public healthcare, breaking monopolies, basic incomes, and so on. We'll get along a lot better that way.
Because they'll make you worse off the more you scale them up. It's like pointing out that a drink of alcohol with a friend led to positive results so why not lean heavily into drinking? And the answer is because it is something that people enjoy that can be tolerated in small amounts but isn't much of a strategy if the goal is a happy, healthy outcome.
That's ridiculous. The countries with the highest quality of living all have strong social programs. If you want an analogy for alcoholism look at the US. Capitalism works here, so let's use it everywhere!
I'm tempted to copy what you wrote as a response without the "That's ridiculous" part. It isn't ridiculous, it is just a factual description of reality. The reason the US can afford the strong social programs is because of its heavy commitment to capitalism. If a country is poor and weak then it can't afford to endure the pain that a strong social program causes. Poor countries just can't sustain populations of people who consume resources and don't create anything especially valuable. If you scale up the social programs too far at some point the wealth destruction becomes intolerable; there's some optimal amount of damage that can be accepted and "lean in to socialism" isn't the best strategy to find that balance because by the time the pain becomes intolerable it has already happened.
China hasn't been communist for a really long time. It didn't truly stay communist for a long time either, it was more of an authoritarian autarky run by a nutjob.
What is is today is state sponsored capitalism. You have cronyism, nepotism, lobbying and rent seeking. All of which are also found in the US.
China's social spending is far lower than many other developed nations.
Yeah, there are some Eastern EU countries where populist parties still milk the older voters with Soviet nostalgia. Yet, as usual, the same politicians who suggest how good things were back then are usually very happy to enjoy Western goods, freedom of movement, private property and EU funds.
But generally, people still remember the Soviet concentration camps, censorship, shortages of basic goods and the inborn corruption that came with the Soviet implementation of communism.
Communism ideologies seem to thrive among the young in (pseudo) democratic societies. That’s a paradox for me, as communism seems to exist because of the wealth distribution that capitalism creates.
Now, what the EU is doing right now with all that bureaucratic machine and the leftist social agenda, is another topic.
Go to Shenzhen or Shanghai, if that's what communism looks like, then it has already won. A few weeks ago, when I was in Shanghai, I went for a walk and saw more McLarens and Ferraris in a few hours than I've seen in New York, Berlin, and Paris combined.
They're more capitalist than we (the West) ever were. Communism is basically only something that remains in the name of the party. Their version of capitalism just has a lot more state involvement and capital controls, which lets them plan over longer time horizons more successfully and pivot to new priorities much faster.
Very much. Try to start a union in China and see how communist that country is. China is essentially a right-wing hypercapitalist country run by a dictatorship.
>- it is just a beautiful thing to see it slowly fall apart.
I feel uneasy over China dominance as much as the US.
I trust US more still as Europe has a post WW2 relationship. I notice many comments being pro China but they seem to be from the third world (one mentioned a very low salary) I feel the opening of the internet was a mistake.
China is a totilitarian dictatorship. This is a fact.
Look into Mistral AI too :)
For context, I am Swedish.
Yes this is a new account, please focus on the content.
Are there distinct third world opinions in one direction or the other? I've tended to assume they are non-unitary rather than broadly converging on one side or the other.
When people from developing countries praise China and communism while criticizing the United States and claiming “Europe is the same,” I find it hard to take their views seriously.
I think their stance often comes from a strong anti-Western bias, and sometimes from feelings of resentment.
As someone coming from the Second world (Eastern Bloc), lived in the First world (Western Europe) and now living in the Third World (SEA Tropics), I'd say that in my opinion, a lot of the Westeners are so inherently arrogant that they don't even realize that. Some of these people would rather die from own arrogance, rather than imagining the other point of view.
Because we know that 150 years ago where where poor as hell and now Scandinavia tops all lists in quality of life. That does not just happen. Yes, NORWAY have oil. The rest of us do not. So how can we successed yet we have to keep dumping money into the third world forever?
It's not nearly as true in the other direction, because American culture and media are everywhere. The fact that they know more about you than you do about them should give you hints that you're missing some substance.
Just for context on "laziness", do you work at a desk all day? Second question, how many animals have you personally killed prior to cleaning and cooking?
It truly depends on perspective. I can think of a lot of nations that are rightfully critical of American leadership, especially economically. Investment vehicles like data science and cryptocurrency has given the United States a reputation for spinning fake technology out of thin air. Chinese LLMs positively contribute to the market economy and incentivize American AI businesses to work harder.
I take these concerns seriously as a voting American. My 401k is worthless if the US continues to reward anticompetitive monopolies.
There is not such a thing. That's the point. Everyone is welcome on the internet, where information wants to be free. I still believe that, even if it is no longer fashionable.
FWIW, I am a lifelong American citizen and I exclusively use Chinese AI models for programming because I consider Claude and Codex to be highway robbery for the price.
Trust whoever you want, I just don't have the patience (or money) for American models.
The content we see here is that you are Swedish. I am not sure what sort of moral, technical, financial authority are we supposed to be deriving from this.
Dont get me wrong, Sweden is a cool country, but still my point stands.
Opening of the internet WAS a mistake. During times when whole countries (you know which ones) get geoblocked, the internet (especially online gaming) gets a lot better.
> I notice many comments being pro China but they seem to be from the third world (one mentioned a very low salary) I feel the opening of the internet was a mistake.
Yeah, I also really hate when poor people think they're allowed to talk.
China never threatened this: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.". Also China never announced that it was going to attack Europe. I trust them much more compared to a malignant narcissist that doesn't care if the whole world burns now that he doesn't have much left to live.
Honestly the China scare mongering is borderline hilarious. The US has literally attacked two countries this year in the span of weeks and is blockading another causing needless deaths. Not too mention the last 50 years of US imperialism making the world a worse place for everyone, except to benefit the few (doesn't benefit Americans, only capitalists).
The idea that China is worse than America is laughable. LMK when China invades 5 countries in a span of 20 years unimpeded by anyone else in the world and maybe I'll be scared.
Until then it's quite clear how consumers benefit from actual competition and it's not because of the US.
Also you saying you trust the US when they just threatened to invade Greenland (a threat so credible that Denmark was planning a full scale resistance against US troops).
Sorry but the curtains are truly coming down and the US will become one of the most hated nations in the world while 100s of millions will needlessly starve and die because of the actions of Americans that simply don't give a fuck.
FWIW, I'm not just talking about Trump either. Democratic politicians are just as much to blame, they champion corporatism and imperialism as much as Republicans and the only issues D leadership seems to have is that the "right process" wasn't being followed.
I say this as someone who is a literal democratic operative within the party.
One party authoritarian dictatorship with no free speech or democratic elections and no civil rights movement seems pretty bad to me. No amount of whataboutism is ever going to compete with that.
It also seems like clashes with India, every southeast asian country with internationally recognized territory rights in the South China sea, the forcible takeover of Hong Kong, arming and economically supporting Russia, Pakistan and Iran are bad, and the increasing probability of a hot war to take over Taiwan should count as bad, perhaps the most urgently dangerous threat to global peace in the 21st century.
The United States track record post WW2 is a complicated combination of monstrously immoral Kissenger and Bush style overthrows of democracies and genuinely valuable maintenance of a post WW2 democratic order focused on things like free speech and human rights. I stay with full sincerity that in the decade plus that I've been here on hn seeing whataboutism as a strategy for defending China, I'm yet to encounter anything that feels like a sincere engagement with United States role in the world as a combination of positives and negatives, it's always flatly one-sided messaging that feels like it's aimed at a favorable audience that already agree rather than like it's sincerely attempting to persuade.
Your first sentence describes the US for the last 40 years. One corporate party that passes legislation to benefit the elites while there are no counter civil rights movements where US citizens are literally less free than they were 10 years ago.
The US was birthed as a white ethno-national colonial state. It required 20% of the population to be held in bondage while denying suffrage to 80% of the population. It took 100 years + a civil war before slavery was ended, and it took nearly another 100 years before every American could truly vote. Not because it was the "right time" either, go look at how the women's suffrage movement started. They were fire bombing factories and capitalists.
The propaganda surely runs deep, but something tells me you're too rich to really suffer so congrats I guess. I'm sure many wish they could trade places with your privilege. I bet those that will suffer from needless starvation or lack of medical care due to US imperialism would really like to trade places too.
Sorry but these boogey man acts fall flat when you look at how hostile and anti-human the US government has become over the recent decades. You can't blame this on one person, the system was always rotten and a course correction will happen. You just better pray it's the right people directing the ship.
Sorry that it makes you uncomfortable to realize that slavers built this nation and enforced their will on the majority of the country by creating a government where elites control the country through minority rule. I bet you think the 3/5's compromise was just good governance too right? That's pragmatic centrism we desperately need in modern times!
If it makes you feel better I'll also include this in the help text of my next neovim plugin.
Did you miss the part where Iran spent the past 50 years promising to develop nuclear weapons and then use them on both Israel and America, or do just choose to conveniently ignore that when you go on rants like this? In one of the last rounds of talks before the war Kushner and Witkoff offered Iran free nuclear fuel in perpetuity in exchange for the weapons grade uranium and got turned down, so clearly the Iranians weren’t just bluffing.
This war could have been handled much differently and better, but acting like America attacked Iran for no reason is laughable. It is in fact America’s inexplicable reticence to kill Iranian civilians that is the reason this is going on for this long. America could have ended this in a few days if it had stopped worrying about being criticised by the rest of the world that hates it anyway.
> Did you miss the part where Iran spent the past 50 years promising to develop nuclear weapons and then use them on both Israel and America
The Ayatollah had a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. You are just making things up.
> In one of the last rounds of talks before the war Kushner and Witkoff
No, they didn't. They lied and sabotaged the talks. The diplomacy, much like right now, was to misdirect Iran. Which is why they refuse to negotiate now.
> America could have ended this in a few days
Ahh, the fascist delusion. Violence overcomes all.
Not that you care, but for others that might, the nuclear fuel offer was reported by the NYT and other outlets, including The Economist, that can't in any way be accused of pandering to the Trump admin.
> At one point, they offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel for the life of their program — a test of whether Tehran’s insistence on enrichment was truly about civilian energy or about preserving the ability to build a bomb. The Iranians rejected the offer, calling it an assault on their dignity.
Yes, why would Iran reject an offer from a government that tore up previous agreements, had their leaders assassinated, had sanctions inflicted upon them for decades, and even had chemical weapons used against them provided by the same government that wants to make a deal with them now? Why would they reject such an offer from obviously good faith actors, are they stupid?
> Yes, why would Iran reject an offer from a government
Because they were trying to get nukes so they could use them against Israel and America, as they've promised to do for decades. I believe the Americans did what is called calling one's bluff.
The ayatollahs were never a serious government. FAFO, as they say.
Every country on this Earth will now seek nukes because of the actions we see on display. Nuclear proliferation is the only way to practice sovereignty, and nuclear proliferation will surely lead to the destruction of humanity as it becomes increasingly unlikely that a nuclear exchange won't happen sometime within the next 10,000 years.
FA and FO indeed. Oh and dedollarization is now something that may happen within 5 years and not like 50 years. Oh and 100s of millions will needlessly suffer and die because of these actions, but seeing how little you value human life in your other comments I'm going to stop myself here and wish you a good existence.
So you're good with the takeover of Hong Kong and what they're doing with the Uyghurs? I think you're getting a pretty biased feed of news. I'm not saying China is the devil, but the trite "USA bad because [overhyped recent news]" is a crazy take. There's plenty of bad stuff that has been done by Americans you could have called out.
Not really as I am a commoner and don't really benefit with whatever happens. I'm sure the executives at Walmart or Google care, but this will never impact the lives of 99% of the US population.
I'm more concerned with police brutality, US born children suffering induced poverty by the elites, women that are forced to either die or be jailed for seeking medical treatment, the legalized torture of children that happen to be not straight, the suffering of 100s of millions of Americans failing to get medical treatment, the creation of concentration camps, a masked police force that isn't being held accountable, ignoring due process while torturing people into compliance. I'm concerned with how we let people that profit off of misery and mass death, because that is surely coming back to haunt us. 2025 proved how easily things can get worse, and humans in general do not have a good imagination when it comes to seeing how worse things can continue to get.
What I do care about is the rising authoritarianism inside the US. The US was literally birthed as a white colonial ethno-national state that could only exist because it held 20% of the population in bondage. A strand of evil this nation has never gotten rid of and has allowed to multiple and propagate around the world. The most evil sides of human existence all seem to find their way point back to the US constitution or US customers, a document written by slavers to uphold slavers and empower the elites over the population, from Apartheid South Africa to genocide by Israel + US leaders to the Nazi regime itself.
We are mired in a disgusting history and have never accounted for the horrors we wrought upon the world because the elites wanted to make more money. We never truly were held accountable to the death squads we support across South America or how we forced US marines to fight for corporate interests in the banana wars. We destabilized entire nations, 100s of millions of people, then act shock when it comes home to roost.
Do I really have to go over the history of the last 40 years too?
Sorry man, go read a book. Absolutely pathetic that Americans don't even know their own history. You should absolutely read it because a large portion of this earth are going to suffer massive consequences due to US imperialism and we're going to be on the receiving end of it for the rest of our short lives.
Sorry man but you have the crazy take. The US was only a consistent force of good when FDR was in-charge and the New Deal coalition held majorities in both houses of Congress for 60+ years; but we also see their follies in Vietnam + Cambodia (fun fact, children still born in those countries with birth defects due to the highly inventive American weapons (it's okay they had well paying jobs)).
---
People truly don't understand that US foreign politics is done to solely benefit the elite + rich, while everyone else suffers (yes even US civilians, we're the ones that will get violence inflicted upon us not the elites).
There is no morality at Country level. The talk about values, morality, just world is only a lip service and pretty much every smart person knows this. If you still want to hold a country for moral standards, our own dear USA's standards would be pathetically low. One example - we force and demand every other country to use USD as the reserve currency. If anyone considers the alternative, we follow the usual routines (bombing, hacking, kidnapping, Tarrifs, coercing, currency sabotage, etc). If two countries in some remote corner of world want to exchange goods and transact in their own local currency, what legal rights does the USA have to stop it and force them to use USD? and punish them if they do not listen? Just because we are aligned with Western Europe, do not assume moral high grounds.
> If two countries in some remote corner of world want to exchange goods and transact in their own local currency, what legal rights does the USA have to stop it and force them to use USD?
China and Russia trade in yuan and rubles. India and Russia do oil deals in rupees. China and Brazil trade in yuan. The US hasn't bombed any of them.
Yes, we have not' bombed them because they are too big. But, we tried every other option. Pressurize them, sanction them. US Treasury even targeted the ships used for their trade, blocked insurance companies from insuring the route, targeted banks/people/entities for sanctions and did all sort of underground dirty work. Because of all this, the India-Iran oil deal is only intermittent, not continuous. There are windows of time where India/Iran are permitted to trade oil. Similar stories involving Russia. Their Stablecoin exchanges get hacked, people disappear. If you dig deeper, you will know more about SWIFT, Plaza Accord and other ways of how USA bullies the world.
Can you tell any smaller/weaker neighboring countries trading in their own local currency? Can Vietnam trade with Cambodia skipping the USD? not just for denominations, but the actual trade itself.
I don't see any sense in trusting the US more than China. There are arguably as many arguments to say the US is horrible as the current dominant country as China would be. If anything, a multipolar world would be more positive, specially to the EU, as currently the EU is just US's bitch, and has to live by appeasing Mr. Donny, as done in the stupid trade deal signed by Von Der Leyen.
Also, feeling the opening of the internet as a mistake show the degree of your ignorance, people from third world countries also have the right to speak as much as you do, your opinion is not more valid than anyone else's.
For context, I am Italian-Brazilian, so I pretty much have been exposed to both sides (western and non-western, even though we can argue that Brazil is more west aligned).
reply