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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism China is irrelevant to the average western internet user, to whom the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism China is irrelevant to the average western internet user, to whom the US govt is indeed an oppressive presence.

walrus01 8y ago
The internet is a globally interconnected system, one nation-state messing with a part of it is not whataboutism. Civil rights violations and abuses in other parts of the world are also an issue that nobody should ignore. China publishes a report every year on human rights abuses in the USA that has a number of valid criticisms (incarceration rate of black males, police shootings, etc), but that doesn't make the US Department of State's report on Chinese human rights abuses any less valid.
- markdown 8y ago
  Everything you've said may be true, and yet your comment is still a perfect example of whataboutism. I mean, just read it: > I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. Why do you feel the need to bring up China when someone talks about the US govt spying on their online activities?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    I think the distinction is that the United States treats "spying on online activities" as a signals intelligence/passive gathering system and methodology. The US government doesn't arbitrarily regulate BGP4 tables and IX points, run a GFW like system on all international submarine cables (though traffic may be passively tapped by the NSA), require licenses for http daemons, or forcibly install spyware on citizens' phones. The active measures taken by the Chinese government are pretty much the opposite of the US/Five Eyes' SIGINT approach to things. I do not agree with either, and think that both should be highly publicized, and awareness raised. However I think that the Chinese method of police state social control is on a whole other magnitude of "fucking with the Internet" than what is possible in the US with constitutionally/bill of rights protected freedoms.
    - markdown 8y ago
      Again, everything you've said may be true.. is true, and yet your comment is still a perfect example of whataboutism. I mean, just read it: > I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. Why do you feel the need to bring up China when someone talks about the US govt spying on their online activities? China is an order of magnitude times worse than the US. I'm not sure why you feel the need to keep arguing that point when I already agreed. But none of that is relevant when someone is complaining that they don't like their own US govt spying on them, "passive" or otherwise. For you to bring up China in that context is whataboutism.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "Everything you've said may be true, and yet your comment is still a perfect example of whataboutism." The initial topic of this thread is China, not the US, so it seems to me that criticizing China cannot, by definition, be whataboutism in this particular context. I'm not personally inclined to dismiss things as "whataboutism" as though it were an automatic debate ender, but if you do, then you have to restrict your discussion to China's sins in this thread.
    - markdown 8y ago
      I'm not talking about this thread or the discussion in this thread, I'm talking about this: > I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. In January, the US Senate passed a bill to renew the NSA’s warrantless internet surveillance program for six years with minimal changes. If walrus01's friends had brought up that topic at the time, it sounds like he'd have defended the program because China is worse. Whataboutism.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        Maybe? Calling out hypothetical whataboutism of someone else is like whataboutism squared on your part, though. Hyper-whataboutism. Meta-whataboutism. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
bitwize 8y ago
The average Hackernews now seems to believe that Chinese goods are "safe" because China doesn't have surveillance treaties with the U.S. You know, because China would NEVER attempt to spy on, influence, or blackmail foreign programmers, business people, scientists, or other professionals.
- bdamm 8y ago
  The sarcasm is noted, but don't ignore the fact that an increasingly powerful collection of voices view China as safe and the US as an oligarchy bordering on fascism. While I personally don't agree, if we ignore those voices, they'll keep getting louder until it's all anyone hears.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Yeah, back in the 70s an increasingly powerful collection of voices thought Pol Pot's killing fields were fabrications of American propaganda, and that if genocide happened in Cambodia, it was at American hands. They had to backpedal hard when the truth came out.
cuboidGoat 8y ago
Unless any of us on here are personally representing nation states at a diplomatic level with roughly similar levels of violent shenanigans as each other, whataboutism really does not apply. I've seen it referred to as the hypocrites favourite meme, and I am inclined to agree. Also, China is hardly irrelevant, least of all here, a discussion thread about the technical issues surrounding state surveillance in China.
iainmerrick 8y ago
I’ve published apps on the Play Store. There seem to be multiple people who rip off these apps, stuff them with adware and who knows what else, and upload them to dubious third-party stores. As far as I can tell (but I admit I haven’t investigated deeply) this mostly originates in Russia and China. So China is very relevant to me as an app developer, and to my users, as a significant threat.
- iliketosleep 8y ago
  I am curious, does people uploading pirated versions of your app to third party stores really impact you? I imagine most of your users would only be on the Play Store. From my understanding, piracy isn't a much of a problem so long as it's not happening on main platform. Is there something I am missing?
  - natch 8y ago
    For one thing, the fact that the pirated versions might be malware or otherwise harmful could impact his/her reputation or brand.
    - iainmerrick 8y ago
      Right -- I gave up trying to fix the problem, for example via some kind of copy protection, as I can’t think of a good non-risky solution and figured the sales impact was small. But I hate that potential users are put at risk just by googling for free copies. I guess adding “legit” mobile ads might help, but I don’t like that as I think mobile ads are a completely miserable experience. And people would probably still rip it off and install their own ads anyway. You simply can’t trust any APKs you find by googling. (Obvious to most people on HN, of course.)
      - iliketosleep 8y ago
        Brand damage is a good point, but I believe that most genuine customers will not go to strange websites or obscure app stores to download your app, and those who do probably aren't the sort of "customers" you'd want. Hence, I couldn't see why it's much of a problem. The genuine user will more than likely just download it on Google Play. If there were people ripping off your app and putting it on Google Play, that would be different and worth worrying about. I'm curious why my original question was downvoted. I thought it was a valid question.
rdtsc 8y ago
Meta-whataboutism - use "whataboutism" in a discussion to block others from pointing hypocrisy :-) It's a nifty trick, I use it once in a while as well. But to be serious, I don't see how China is irrelevant to the average Westerner. They manufacture a lot of the products consumed in the West. They are also responsible for a lot of the plastic floating in the water http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tons-of-plastic-trash-in-oceans-20150213-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tons-of-... From a US perspective: They are responsible for the most damaging intelligence breach in US history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management.... Google, a US company, is starting to head toward China and play in that market after getting tired of not being evil. US senator heading the Intelligence Committee had a Chinese spy right under her nose for almost 2 decades: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/explain-the-chinese-spy-sen-feinstein/2018/08/09/0560ca60-9bfd-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/explain-the-chinese-... Even for the rest of the world with China and US clashing over spheres of influence and doing their power-play everyone is affected.
dang 8y ago
Please keep the tedious cliché that 'whataboutism' has turned into off HN. I don't know how it started but it's now nothing but a flamewar trope. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061698 and marked it off-topic.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Some things are cliche because they’re so often repeated, and sometimes they’re repeated so often because they’re often apt. Are we really not allowed to call a spade a spade? I can understand that just saying, “whataboutism” and nothing more would be low effort shitppsting, but in the context of a reasoned argument pointing out how something truly is just whataboutism, we’re not supposed to point that out? The comment that set this all off was short and made a single point that can be accurately described by a cliche. There was nothing else to it. I an understand not wanting people to dismiss real arguments with cliches, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. When someone brags about using a straw man to deflect reasonable criticism, it merits a response.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    > When someone brags about using a straw man to deflect reasonable criticism, it merits a response. Maybe, but that response shouldn't just classify the argument as an instance of the cliche, since that would be low-effort shitposting, as you point out. HN already has the downvote arrow to express that kind of disagreement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism China is irrelevant to the average western internet user, to whom the US govt is indeed an oppressive presence.

walrus01 8y ago

The internet is a globally interconnected system, one nation-state messing with a part of it is not whataboutism. Civil rights violations and abuses in other parts of the world are also an issue that nobody should ignore. China publishes a report every year on human rights abuses in the USA that has a number of valid criticisms (incarceration rate of black males, police shootings, etc), but that doesn't make the US Department of State's report on Chinese human rights abuses any less valid.

markdown 8y ago
Everything you've said may be true, and yet your comment is still a perfect example of whataboutism. I mean, just read it: > I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. Why do you feel the need to bring up China when someone talks about the US govt spying on their online activities?
- walrus01 8y ago
  I think the distinction is that the United States treats "spying on online activities" as a signals intelligence/passive gathering system and methodology. The US government doesn't arbitrarily regulate BGP4 tables and IX points, run a GFW like system on all international submarine cables (though traffic may be passively tapped by the NSA), require licenses for http daemons, or forcibly install spyware on citizens' phones. The active measures taken by the Chinese government are pretty much the opposite of the US/Five Eyes' SIGINT approach to things. I do not agree with either, and think that both should be highly publicized, and awareness raised. However I think that the Chinese method of police state social control is on a whole other magnitude of "fucking with the Internet" than what is possible in the US with constitutionally/bill of rights protected freedoms.
  - markdown 8y ago
    Again, everything you've said may be true.. is true, and yet your comment is still a perfect example of whataboutism. I mean, just read it: > I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. Why do you feel the need to bring up China when someone talks about the US govt spying on their online activities? China is an order of magnitude times worse than the US. I'm not sure why you feel the need to keep arguing that point when I already agreed. But none of that is relevant when someone is complaining that they don't like their own US govt spying on them, "passive" or otherwise. For you to bring up China in that context is whataboutism.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "Everything you've said may be true, and yet your comment is still a perfect example of whataboutism." The initial topic of this thread is China, not the US, so it seems to me that criticizing China cannot, by definition, be whataboutism in this particular context. I'm not personally inclined to dismiss things as "whataboutism" as though it were an automatic debate ender, but if you do, then you have to restrict your discussion to China's sins in this thread.
  - markdown 8y ago
    I'm not talking about this thread or the discussion in this thread, I'm talking about this: > I like to remind people of shit like this when they claim that the United States government is an "oppressive" presence on the Internet. In January, the US Senate passed a bill to renew the NSA’s warrantless internet surveillance program for six years with minimal changes. If walrus01's friends had brought up that topic at the time, it sounds like he'd have defended the program because China is worse. Whataboutism.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      Maybe? Calling out hypothetical whataboutism of someone else is like whataboutism squared on your part, though. Hyper-whataboutism. Meta-whataboutism. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

bitwize 8y ago

The average Hackernews now seems to believe that Chinese goods are "safe" because China doesn't have surveillance treaties with the U.S. You know, because China would NEVER attempt to spy on, influence, or blackmail foreign programmers, business people, scientists, or other professionals.

bdamm 8y ago
The sarcasm is noted, but don't ignore the fact that an increasingly powerful collection of voices view China as safe and the US as an oligarchy bordering on fascism. While I personally don't agree, if we ignore those voices, they'll keep getting louder until it's all anyone hears.
- bitwize 8y ago
  Yeah, back in the 70s an increasingly powerful collection of voices thought Pol Pot's killing fields were fabrications of American propaganda, and that if genocide happened in Cambodia, it was at American hands. They had to backpedal hard when the truth came out.

cuboidGoat 8y ago

Unless any of us on here are personally representing nation states at a diplomatic level with roughly similar levels of violent shenanigans as each other, whataboutism really does not apply. I've seen it referred to as the hypocrites favourite meme, and I am inclined to agree. Also, China is hardly irrelevant, least of all here, a discussion thread about the technical issues surrounding state surveillance in China.

iainmerrick 8y ago

I’ve published apps on the Play Store. There seem to be multiple people who rip off these apps, stuff them with adware and who knows what else, and upload them to dubious third-party stores. As far as I can tell (but I admit I haven’t investigated deeply) this mostly originates in Russia and China. So China is very relevant to me as an app developer, and to my users, as a significant threat.

iliketosleep 8y ago
I am curious, does people uploading pirated versions of your app to third party stores really impact you? I imagine most of your users would only be on the Play Store. From my understanding, piracy isn't a much of a problem so long as it's not happening on main platform. Is there something I am missing?
- natch 8y ago
  For one thing, the fact that the pirated versions might be malware or otherwise harmful could impact his/her reputation or brand.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    Right -- I gave up trying to fix the problem, for example via some kind of copy protection, as I can’t think of a good non-risky solution and figured the sales impact was small. But I hate that potential users are put at risk just by googling for free copies. I guess adding “legit” mobile ads might help, but I don’t like that as I think mobile ads are a completely miserable experience. And people would probably still rip it off and install their own ads anyway. You simply can’t trust any APKs you find by googling. (Obvious to most people on HN, of course.)
    - iliketosleep 8y ago
      Brand damage is a good point, but I believe that most genuine customers will not go to strange websites or obscure app stores to download your app, and those who do probably aren't the sort of "customers" you'd want. Hence, I couldn't see why it's much of a problem. The genuine user will more than likely just download it on Google Play. If there were people ripping off your app and putting it on Google Play, that would be different and worth worrying about. I'm curious why my original question was downvoted. I thought it was a valid question.

rdtsc 8y ago

Meta-whataboutism - use "whataboutism" in a discussion to block others from pointing hypocrisy :-) It's a nifty trick, I use it once in a while as well. But to be serious, I don't see how China is irrelevant to the average Westerner. They manufacture a lot of the products consumed in the West. They are also responsible for a lot of the plastic floating in the water http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tons-of-plastic-trash-in-oceans-20150213-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tons-of-... From a US perspective: They are responsible for the most damaging intelligence breach in US history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management.... Google, a US company, is starting to head toward China and play in that market after getting tired of not being evil. US senator heading the Intelligence Committee had a Chinese spy right under her nose for almost 2 decades: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/explain-the-chinese-spy-sen-feinstein/2018/08/09/0560ca60-9bfd-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/explain-the-chinese-... Even for the rest of the world with China and US clashing over spheres of influence and doing their power-play everyone is affected.

dang 8y ago

Please keep the tedious cliché that 'whataboutism' has turned into off HN. I don't know how it started but it's now nothing but a flamewar trope. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18061698 and marked it off-topic.

GW150914 8y ago
Some things are cliche because they’re so often repeated, and sometimes they’re repeated so often because they’re often apt. Are we really not allowed to call a spade a spade? I can understand that just saying, “whataboutism” and nothing more would be low effort shitppsting, but in the context of a reasoned argument pointing out how something truly is just whataboutism, we’re not supposed to point that out? The comment that set this all off was short and made a single point that can be accurately described by a cliche. There was nothing else to it. I an understand not wanting people to dismiss real arguments with cliches, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. When someone brags about using a straw man to deflect reasonable criticism, it merits a response.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > When someone brags about using a straw man to deflect reasonable criticism, it merits a response. Maybe, but that response shouldn't just classify the argument as an instance of the cliche, since that would be low-effort shitposting, as you point out. HN already has the downvote arrow to express that kind of disagreement.