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> Julia Lovell, a British historian, makes a similar point. In her book “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China”, she says the move into opium by

by ptx 9y ago

> Julia Lovell, a British historian, makes a similar point. In her book “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China”, she says the move into opium by British traders was not, as claimed by many Chinese historians, a deliberate conspiracy to make narcotic slaves of the Chinese. “It was a greedy, pragmatic response to a decline in sales of other British imports,” she writes. Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems to come up a lot. I.e., when someone takes an action that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, they then argue along the lines that "I was motivated by my gain, not by your loss (even though I knew it would result from my action), so you have no right to complain!" In this case, it can be both a "deliberate conspiracy" and a "pragmatic response". They deliberately conspired to hurt the Chinese for profit, judging their suffering to be a less important consideration than their own profits.

Spooky23 9y ago
I call it nationalist denial. Or deliberate ignorance. This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways. The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.
- awakeasleep 9y ago
  Another example is the opium poppy used as a symbol of Remembrance Day. It's a silly coincidence and was chosen because of the poem "in Flanders Fields". Never mind that a third of the population in some areas of India was literally starved to death to grow that exact, or what it did to China, or how it was the foundation of the British empire.
  - cgmg 9y ago
    It's not a "silly coincidence." "Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. Poppies used as emblems on tombstones symbolize eternal sleep. This symbolism was evoked in the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a magical poppy field threatened to make the protagonists sleep forever. A second interpretation of poppies in Classical mythology is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death." "The remembrance poppy was inspired by the World War I poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, a region of Belgium."
  - DonaldFisk 9y ago
    The field poppy (Papaver rhoeas), not the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), is used as a symbol on Remembrance Day.
    - gerdesj 9y ago
      You beat me to it: The red poppy is not the white poppy.
- diego_moita 9y ago
  It bothers me that almost every nation in the world has a "big shame" but probably the only people that faces, admits and owns their "big shame" are the Germans. Belgium still keeps statues of King Leopold, Spain keeps statues of Cortez and Pisarro, Portugal of Vasco da Gama, the US is only now arguing about the statues for Confederate soldiers; Italy, Poland and France never did a real "mea culpa" on how they actually helped and collaborated with the Nazis, Brazil and most of Latin America keep ignoring the ongoing extermination of their natives, most Japanese try to avoid knowing what their country did in Manchuria during WWII, Turkey keeps denying the Armenian genocide,...
  - vorg 9y ago
    Yes, every nation in the world has a "big shame", but none of them really face it. They might play "good cop, bad cop" by dividing into several "nations", each with a different policy. Remember, "the Germans" comprise many "nations", i.e. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Germany was even 2 nations for half the 20th century, and Switzerland was virtually all German-speaking until 1815. Have the Switz Germans really faced up to financing the Nazis? Or a nation might face up to a big shame as cover so they can nurture many "little shames", like modern Germany's treatment of its Turk residents.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults. I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia, the biggest issue is probably the triangle trade in slaves. This is not something we stand behind as far as I know, though we still harken back to the times of the VOC as good because it was a 'golden age'.
    - sangnoir 9y ago
      > Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults. I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia I respectfully disagree. I've always thought of Dutchies as open-minded but I remember reading a plaque at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) that left my jaw on the floor by being overly euphemistic. It was an exhibit of about 2-dozen weapons symbolically surrendered by Indonesian leaders; the text was worded as if it was a voluntary gift of their own volution. I thought a little self-honesty would go a long way.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  That doesn't seem like an accurate re-telling of the Irish famine. The British government engaged in many kinds of relief effort. They bought food from America to import it, albeit screwed it up because Ireland didn't have sufficiently advanced mills to process the imported grain. They repealed import tariffs (the Corn Laws). Large public works programmes were created to employ the devastated farmers. This was all made more complicated by an Irish attitude that to ask for charity from the English was weakness and should never be done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity William Smith O'Brien—speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association in February 1845—applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity. Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it. Despite this large sums were donated by the English through private charities anyway. What you're referring to is a later stage of the famine whereby a new Whig government came into power, and it did indeed feel that the market should be left to sort things out. So it stopped intervening against food exports, believing that would make things worse instead of better (i.e. people who were successfully growing food despite the blight would have to sell it below cost and would go bankrupt). Even so, it still organised a public jobs programme so huge it became impossible to administer (over 500,000 people employed). That state lasted all of six months before the government of the day realised it had failed and changed tack again, switching to a mix of direct relief through soup kitchens and the like. So your claim that there was "deliberate inaction" is hardly true. There was lots of action at all times and the debate focuses on to what extent the action was incompetent or not. Food exports from poor countries are a tricky subject even today. African countries export food to Europe and would export far more if it weren't for the CAP, even though Africa has famines, hunger and disease. Should they be prevented from doing so, or will trade enrich them and ultimately end their poverty?
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  Sounds simliar to the US dustbowl where people were starving but entire crops were allowed to rot to protect commodity prices.
csours 9y ago
I posit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_correlative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_correlative - tries to redefine a correlative (one of two mutually exclusive options) so that one alternative encompasses the other, i.e. making one alternative impossible
booleandilemma 9y ago
I can’t think of a succinctly named fallacy, but the phrase “you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” comes to mind. If no one comes up with anything let’s call it “omelette making”.
eecc 9y ago
I don’t think it’s a fallacy nor is the quoted person trying to downplay and somehow minimize an ethical judgement. She did use “greedy” and “pragmatic”, maybe “callous” would have been even cleared but I wonder if it’s in some other passage from the book from which this quote has been extracted. ;)
debt 9y ago
False dilemma “A false dilemma is a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
saint_fiasco 9y ago
I don't think it is a fallacy. At most it is pedantic. She makes a good point about the difference between banal evil born from apathy and active evil born from hate. The difference is important not because one is morally better than the other, but because the strategy to prevent them is different in each case. Active hateful evil is relatively easy to prevent, just don't be a dick. But preventing the banal apathetic kind takes more active effort.
- mcguire 9y ago
  If you think all bad things are done by someone acting like Snidely Whiplash, you don't notice the bad things that are being done around you by "normal" folks.
gumby 9y ago
I think her use of "pragmatic" is more prosaic than its use in the united United States. She's saying that there's no immoral drugs conspiracy, or necessarily a conspiracy at all. On one hand that's irrelevant, and I think that's the point you're making: that war was the first nail in the coffin (which had been a-building for over a century) for the Qing dynasty, and regardless of the cause that was the action's effect. However if you agree with her analysis there are another couple of important lessons: not everything requires a conspiracy (in fact the whole British Empire has been described as being "created in a fit of absent-mindedness") -- in other words the collective local actions of many can have a malign global effect. This should influence any of us when designing systems: do they misuse user data? Exploit or make our customers susceptible to attack? This very issue comes up in another HN submission today, on the privacy implications of self-driving cars. And her analysis points out another important feature: though not everything requires a conspiracy, adding one post facto can be very useful. Consider both sides' propaganda battle after Al Qaida attacked NY&DC: both benefited (at least in the short term) by portraying it as a massive clash of cilizations rather as a publicity stunt by a bunch of asshole gangsters. The same was true by using the term "opium war" and its continued value today on the Chinese side.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scythe 9y ago
>that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, [italics mine] How much did the British know about the addictive effects of opium? This seems like a rather crucial part of the story. Several decades after the Opium War, opium became popular in Europe and led to various social maladies, which culminated in its ban and the initiation of the drug wars. It seems to me that if the British had really known how destructive opium is, they would have banned it at home during the war. >The opium trade incurred intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.[65] As a member of Parliament, Gladstone called it "most infamous and atrocious" referring to the opium trade between China and British India in particular.[66] Gladstone was fiercely against both of the Opium Wars Britain waged in China in the First Opium War initiated in 1840 and the Second Opium War initiated in 1857, denounced British violence against Chinese, and was ardently opposed to the British trade in opium to China.[67] Gladstone lambasted it as "Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840.[68] A famous speech was made by Gladstone in Parliament against the First Opium War.[69][70] Gladstone criticized it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace".[71] His hostility to opium stemmed from the effects of opium brought upon his sister Helen.[72] Due to the First Opium war brought on by Palmerston, there was initial reluctance to join the government of Peel on part of Gladstone before 1841. It's easy in hindsight to suggest that the British should have listened to Mr. Gladstone, but who can say for themselves that they certainly would have, in a time and place when almost nobody knew anything about opium?
HIPisTheAnswer 9y ago
It isn't a fallacy. Opium can potentially be one of the most beneficial medicine that one can introduce in this diet. Those who misuse it seem to draw most of the attention, so outsiders are often unaware of the overwhelming benefits. I know people who buy opium and are extremely grateful to their suppliers, who are providing them with a plant that has in some case rescued them from their incapacity to sleep well or feel joy or, or has regulated their pulse to prevent heart attacks, or has allowed them to survive poisoning, or has liberated them from unstable digestion problems.

by ptx 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

I call it nationalist denial. Or deliberate ignorance. This type of nonsense is embedded in English accounts of the British Empire. Variants of the “white man’s burden” and the sacred principles of the market can be spun in all sorts of interesting ways. The most galling example of this that I’m familiar with is the Irish famine. Millions died of starvation in the midst of a record bumper crop for export. The British justification for deliberate inaction was and for many still is a mixture of denial, high minded debate about the role of government, and a deep concern for keeping Irish wretches out of a cycle of dependency.

awakeasleep 9y ago
Another example is the opium poppy used as a symbol of Remembrance Day. It's a silly coincidence and was chosen because of the poem "in Flanders Fields". Never mind that a third of the population in some areas of India was literally starved to death to grow that exact, or what it did to China, or how it was the foundation of the British empire.
- cgmg 9y ago
  It's not a "silly coincidence." "Poppies have long been used as a symbol of sleep, peace, and death: Sleep because the opium extracted from them is a sedative, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. In Greek and Roman myths, poppies were used as offerings to the dead. Poppies used as emblems on tombstones symbolize eternal sleep. This symbolism was evoked in the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a magical poppy field threatened to make the protagonists sleep forever. A second interpretation of poppies in Classical mythology is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death." "The remembrance poppy was inspired by the World War I poem "In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, a region of Belgium."
- DonaldFisk 9y ago
  The field poppy (Papaver rhoeas), not the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), is used as a symbol on Remembrance Day.
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    You beat me to it: The red poppy is not the white poppy.
diego_moita 9y ago
It bothers me that almost every nation in the world has a "big shame" but probably the only people that faces, admits and owns their "big shame" are the Germans. Belgium still keeps statues of King Leopold, Spain keeps statues of Cortez and Pisarro, Portugal of Vasco da Gama, the US is only now arguing about the statues for Confederate soldiers; Italy, Poland and France never did a real "mea culpa" on how they actually helped and collaborated with the Nazis, Brazil and most of Latin America keep ignoring the ongoing extermination of their natives, most Japanese try to avoid knowing what their country did in Manchuria during WWII, Turkey keeps denying the Armenian genocide,...
- vorg 9y ago
  Yes, every nation in the world has a "big shame", but none of them really face it. They might play "good cop, bad cop" by dividing into several "nations", each with a different policy. Remember, "the Germans" comprise many "nations", i.e. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Germany was even 2 nations for half the 20th century, and Switzerland was virtually all German-speaking until 1815. Have the Switz Germans really faced up to financing the Nazis? Or a nation might face up to a big shame as cover so they can nurture many "little shames", like modern Germany's treatment of its Turk residents.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults. I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia, the biggest issue is probably the triangle trade in slaves. This is not something we stand behind as far as I know, though we still harken back to the times of the VOC as good because it was a 'golden age'.
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    > Us dutchies are decent on admitting our faults. I think we are pretty clear about our mistakes in Indonesia I respectfully disagree. I've always thought of Dutchies as open-minded but I remember reading a plaque at the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) that left my jaw on the floor by being overly euphemistic. It was an exhibit of about 2-dozen weapons symbolically surrendered by Indonesian leaders; the text was worded as if it was a voluntary gift of their own volution. I thought a little self-honesty would go a long way.
peoplewindow 9y ago
That doesn't seem like an accurate re-telling of the Irish famine. The British government engaged in many kinds of relief effort. They bought food from America to import it, albeit screwed it up because Ireland didn't have sufficiently advanced mills to process the imported grain. They repealed import tariffs (the Corn Laws). Large public works programmes were created to employ the devastated farmers. This was all made more complicated by an Irish attitude that to ask for charity from the English was weakness and should never be done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity William Smith O'Brien—speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association in February 1845—applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity. Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it. Despite this large sums were donated by the English through private charities anyway. What you're referring to is a later stage of the famine whereby a new Whig government came into power, and it did indeed feel that the market should be left to sort things out. So it stopped intervening against food exports, believing that would make things worse instead of better (i.e. people who were successfully growing food despite the blight would have to sell it below cost and would go bankrupt). Even so, it still organised a public jobs programme so huge it became impossible to administer (over 500,000 people employed). That state lasted all of six months before the government of the day realised it had failed and changed tack again, switching to a mix of direct relief through soup kitchens and the like. So your claim that there was "deliberate inaction" is hardly true. There was lots of action at all times and the debate focuses on to what extent the action was incompetent or not. Food exports from poor countries are a tricky subject even today. African countries export food to Europe and would export far more if it weren't for the CAP, even though Africa has famines, hunger and disease. Should they be prevented from doing so, or will trade enrich them and ultimately end their poverty?
verylittlemeat 9y ago
Sounds simliar to the US dustbowl where people were starving but entire crops were allowed to rot to protect commodity prices.

csours 9y ago

I posit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_correlative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_correlative - tries to redefine a correlative (one of two mutually exclusive options) so that one alternative encompasses the other, i.e. making one alternative impossible

booleandilemma 9y ago

I can’t think of a succinctly named fallacy, but the phrase “you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” comes to mind. If no one comes up with anything let’s call it “omelette making”.

eecc 9y ago

I don’t think it’s a fallacy nor is the quoted person trying to downplay and somehow minimize an ethical judgement. She did use “greedy” and “pragmatic”, maybe “callous” would have been even cleared but I wonder if it’s in some other passage from the book from which this quote has been extracted. ;)

debt 9y ago

False dilemma “A false dilemma is a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

saint_fiasco 9y ago

I don't think it is a fallacy. At most it is pedantic. She makes a good point about the difference between banal evil born from apathy and active evil born from hate. The difference is important not because one is morally better than the other, but because the strategy to prevent them is different in each case. Active hateful evil is relatively easy to prevent, just don't be a dick. But preventing the banal apathetic kind takes more active effort.

mcguire 9y ago
If you think all bad things are done by someone acting like Snidely Whiplash, you don't notice the bad things that are being done around you by "normal" folks.

gumby 9y ago

I think her use of "pragmatic" is more prosaic than its use in the united United States. She's saying that there's no immoral drugs conspiracy, or necessarily a conspiracy at all. On one hand that's irrelevant, and I think that's the point you're making: that war was the first nail in the coffin (which had been a-building for over a century) for the Qing dynasty, and regardless of the cause that was the action's effect. However if you agree with her analysis there are another couple of important lessons: not everything requires a conspiracy (in fact the whole British Empire has been described as being "created in a fit of absent-mindedness") -- in other words the collective local actions of many can have a malign global effect. This should influence any of us when designing systems: do they misuse user data? Exploit or make our customers susceptible to attack? This very issue comes up in another HN submission today, on the privacy implications of self-driving cars. And her analysis points out another important feature: though not everything requires a conspiracy, adding one post facto can be very useful. Consider both sides' propaganda battle after Al Qaida attacked NY&DC: both benefited (at least in the short term) by portraying it as a massive clash of cilizations rather as a publicity stunt by a bunch of asshole gangsters. The same was true by using the term "opium war" and its continued value today on the Chinese side.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

scythe 9y ago

>that has enormous and predictable negative effects for someone else and a comparatively tiny positive effect for themselves, [italics mine] How much did the British know about the addictive effects of opium? This seems like a rather crucial part of the story. Several decades after the Opium War, opium became popular in Europe and led to various social maladies, which culminated in its ban and the initiation of the drug wars. It seems to me that if the British had really known how destructive opium is, they would have banned it at home during the war. >The opium trade incurred intense enmity from the later British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.[65] As a member of Parliament, Gladstone called it "most infamous and atrocious" referring to the opium trade between China and British India in particular.[66] Gladstone was fiercely against both of the Opium Wars Britain waged in China in the First Opium War initiated in 1840 and the Second Opium War initiated in 1857, denounced British violence against Chinese, and was ardently opposed to the British trade in opium to China.[67] Gladstone lambasted it as "Palmerston's Opium War" and said that he felt "in dread of the judgments of God upon England for our national iniquity towards China" in May 1840.[68] A famous speech was made by Gladstone in Parliament against the First Opium War.[69][70] Gladstone criticized it as "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace".[71] His hostility to opium stemmed from the effects of opium brought upon his sister Helen.[72] Due to the First Opium war brought on by Palmerston, there was initial reluctance to join the government of Peel on part of Gladstone before 1841. It's easy in hindsight to suggest that the British should have listened to Mr. Gladstone, but who can say for themselves that they certainly would have, in a time and place when almost nobody knew anything about opium?

HIPisTheAnswer 9y ago

It isn't a fallacy. Opium can potentially be one of the most beneficial medicine that one can introduce in this diet. Those who misuse it seem to draw most of the attention, so outsiders are often unaware of the overwhelming benefits. I know people who buy opium and are extremely grateful to their suppliers, who are providing them with a plant that has in some case rescued them from their incapacity to sleep well or feel joy or, or has regulated their pulse to prevent heart attacks, or has allowed them to survive poisoning, or has liberated them from unstable digestion problems.