If you are willing to bring up historical examples, than comparing like-for-like nothing the US does domestically is of comparable badness to the Great Leap Forward except maybe slavery (and that was a 1800s rather than a 1900s phenomenon). The US has also done other things that are quite bad over the last 100 years, eg. the Japanese internment camps, but they’re not in the same order of magnitude.
I think (tentatively) that making (even giant and insanely consequential) mistakes with positive intentions, like the great leap forward, is in a meaningful sense far less bad than mistakes that are more obviously aimed at cynical self benefit at the expense of others, like, say, most of US foreign policy in South America, or post-civil-war policy related to segregation.
Historically, I’d disagree. And I’m not confident the change away from that is persisting.
If you are willing to bring up historical examples, than comparing like-for-like nothing the US does domestically is of comparable badness to the Great Leap Forward except maybe slavery (and that was a 1800s rather than a 1900s phenomenon). The US has also done other things that are quite bad over the last 100 years, eg. the Japanese internment camps, but they’re not in the same order of magnitude.
I think (tentatively) that making (even giant and insanely consequential) mistakes with positive intentions, like the great leap forward, is in a meaningful sense far less bad than mistakes that are more obviously aimed at cynical self benefit at the expense of others, like, say, most of US foreign policy in South America, or post-civil-war policy related to segregation.
Factory farming?
Good point! Though my impression is that animal welfare is worse in China than the US, though I’m pretty unfamiliar with this topic.