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Note that China has a seat in the United Nations Human Rights Council, along with Saudi Arabia and others like that. It is the ultimate irony. They just don't g
by Kenji 10y ago
Note that China has a seat in the United Nations Human Rights Council, along with Saudi Arabia and others like that. It is the ultimate irony. They just don't give a fuck and we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals. Nobody stands up to China because we need the cheap goods. What is described in this article is one of the purest forms of fascism. It makes me sick.
- phozy1 10y agoI agree, the Irony is insane, but what can we do? Sometimes makes me wonder.
- freshhawk 10y agoI hope you aren't American, because then the talk of "our morals" is a bit rich when discussing imprisoning people for bad reasons. Or complaining about a seat for the Saudis that the US got for them while they fund their war crimes in Yemen.
- colanderman 10y agoThat's very nationalistic and disingenuous of you, to hold an individual citizen accountable for their country's political failings.
- freshhawk 10y agoDo you mean because I asked if they were American? That was to clarify who they meant by "our". If they meant "Norwegian morals" then the statement is much different than if they meant "American morals".
- colanderman 10y agoIt is nationalistic to conflate an individual's morality with actions of the state. Especially in the context of a post by said individual condemning actions of their state. That makes your response also disingenuous. Not to mention that your response is a classic example of the tu quoque fallacy [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
- freshhawk 10y agoI'm not conflating anyone's morality with actions of their state. I'm challenging the assumption of moral high ground that underlies the premise of the argument. As in: "Country X has these strong morals but isn't following them" and I reply "Country X doesn't have those strong morals". Please, please believe me that when I tell you what I'm trying to say, that I'm being truthful.
- colanderman 10y agoI believe you, I just think you're misreading, or reading too much into, the GP's statement. Morals are statements, not actions. The actions of China that GP is opposed to are clearly against (stated) western morals – hence all the outrage in the comments on this article, and in the GP's own comment. You are right that the US state habitually violates those morals. That doesn't change what the morals are, that just makes the state (and individuals who support the state's actions) hypocritical. To rephrase your summary: GP: "Country X has these strong morals but isn't following them." Your reply: "Country X hasn't followed those morals for a long time." Which are statements that are not incompatible with one another. To put it another way – I'm a US citizen. I share morality with many/most in my community. To support China's human rights abuses violates our (my community's) morals. (So does detaining individuals at Guantanamo Bay.) But my/our state is too blinded by greed/capitalism to do anything about these travesties (and has been for a long time, as you point out). That doesn't mean that my community has no morals. It just means our state is hypocritical, and my community is not sufficiently empowered to change that (possibly because of other communities which are hypocritical, or because of longstanding power structures).
- freshhawk 10y agoAh! I gotcha. I'm considering the morals of the state here rather than individuals and either way I disagree that morals are statements, rather than actions. I would term that "stated morals" or "claimed morals", to me actions are what count when trying to determine any actors actual morals. China, for example, has excellent claimed morals. As does the USA. The voting record and what prompts public outcry from American citizens has shown what stated morals they actually care about, for the Chinese citizens ... well we all wish they had the opportunity to make those same types of statements freely so we could see how they compare. So it's a subtle difference in ethical philosophy value judgements (totally fair point to disagree on) and a bit of talking past each other regarding who "we" refers to. As to the "which morals" issue, in this context the imprisoned or killed are/were surely more concerned with morality in practice.
- sunwooz 10y agoWestern nations aren't exactly standing on a moral high ground, either.
- Noseshine 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- coldtea 10y agoInvocation of Whataboutism is an easy cop-out to never have to look one's self in the mirror. It's used by people in glass houses who only want to throw stones at their neighbors. It's also not applicable here since the grandparent already did a relative comparison of China with the supposedly better "western track record", so this comparison warrants a response.
- jessaustin 10y agoHaha nothing is as sacred to HN as the enforcement of trendy rhetorical norms. How dare you question the validity of whataboutbobism, sir?
- pvg 10y agoThis argument is of the same quality as those made by people explaining how advocates of racial or gender equality are the real racists/misogynists.
- coldtea 10y agoNo, the argument is more like saying that Germans calling the allies as beasts for what happened to Dresden should also look at what happened to the Jews. The difference, in case you didn't notice, is that while racists are indeed racist and people against racism aren't, here the two sides are equally bad.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoMoral high ground itself is a fallacy.
- coldtea 10y ago>They just don't give a fuck and we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals. You really have some catching up to do with regards to the modern history of western nations... From enslaving billions of people in their colonies up to the 60s (and still in tens of still non freed nations) [1], to human zoos [2], to slavery [3], to gasing 6 million people to death [4], to 2 world wars [5], to nuking civilians [6], to killing democracies and supporting dictatorships [7][8][9][10][11], to mass killing people asking for their freedom [10], to off-law prisons [11], to record incarceration rates [12], to record open-season police shootings [13], to seggregation [14][15][16], and so on (and we barely scratched the surface, plus all these are the polished, generally accepted "official" stories: the reality on the ground, and the stories of the actual victims are much bleaker and morbid) -- western nations hardly place anything over greed and capitalism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_colonialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_colonialism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war, [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Chile#Allende_Presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_... [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 [11] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/01/indonesia.comment https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/01/indonesia.comm... [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp [12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/07/yes-u-s-locks-people-up-at-a-higher-rate-than-any-other-country/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/... [13] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit... [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
- alexro 10y agoChina, Russia, Turkey, Saudis do horrible things with their own hands, whereas the West has found a cleaner way to employ a middle man for that.