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Are you trying to justify China putting a million Uighur people in concentration camps and the suppression of Hong Kong with the argument that other people have

Are you trying to justify China putting a million Uighur people in concentration camps and the suppression of Hong Kong with the argument that other people have done it in the past?

curiousgal 7y ago
No I am not. OP suggested that no one should deal with China because it is "evil". I'm saying the U.S. is also evil. I am not saying they're equally evil but still. Business is business.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7553127/Even-death-Uighurs-feel-long-reach-Chinese-state.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7553127/Even-death-... Compare that with American documentaries about American atrocities. Sure, people are mean and cruel. Under totalitarianism, they are also mean and cruel, they even get forced to be, but there's a whole lot more going on. Just like murder and compassion are not the same just because they both contain "non-zero amounts of suffering", and both end with the heat death of the universe. https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ > Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. Physical suffering and murder are older than history. Even animals can be dicks to each other, on a much smaller scale of course. But the industrial mass extermination of people, as well as the totalitarian attempt to control reality by rewriting history, the bid to control the whole planet, that is new. > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt Even though very few people seem to grok it, this is another category. This is about more than "just" millions of people murdered or in prison. > The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble. -- Hannah Arendt So saying "the US is evil" is about as useful as saying "China is evil". What matters is what deeds are evil, what thoughts are idiotic, what roads lead to hell -- and the responsibility of individuals to both judge these things and act and organize according to their judgements. Insofar our governments and the companies they enable are corrupt and evil, with us basically paying for both, one way or another, it's up to us to rectify that.

Are you trying to justify China putting a million Uighur people in concentration camps and the suppression of Hong Kong with the argument that other people have done it in the past?

curiousgal 7y ago

No I am not. OP suggested that no one should deal with China because it is "evil". I'm saying the U.S. is also evil. I am not saying they're equally evil but still. Business is business.

PavlovsCat 7y ago
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7553127/Even-death-Uighurs-feel-long-reach-Chinese-state.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7553127/Even-death-... Compare that with American documentaries about American atrocities. Sure, people are mean and cruel. Under totalitarianism, they are also mean and cruel, they even get forced to be, but there's a whole lot more going on. Just like murder and compassion are not the same just because they both contain "non-zero amounts of suffering", and both end with the heat death of the universe. https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ > Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. Physical suffering and murder are older than history. Even animals can be dicks to each other, on a much smaller scale of course. But the industrial mass extermination of people, as well as the totalitarian attempt to control reality by rewriting history, the bid to control the whole planet, that is new. > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt Even though very few people seem to grok it, this is another category. This is about more than "just" millions of people murdered or in prison. > The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble. -- Hannah Arendt So saying "the US is evil" is about as useful as saying "China is evil". What matters is what deeds are evil, what thoughts are idiotic, what roads lead to hell -- and the responsibility of individuals to both judge these things and act and organize according to their judgements. Insofar our governments and the companies they enable are corrupt and evil, with us basically paying for both, one way or another, it's up to us to rectify that.