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I see a lot of this on this topic. It's the fallacy of false equivalence. For example, the United States clearly has dark stains in its history. Slavery obviou
by cletus 5y ago
I see a lot of this on this topic. It's the fallacy of false equivalence.
For example, the United States clearly has dark stains in its history. Slavery obviously, Japanese interment in WW2, the treatment of Native Americans (eg Trail of Tears), segregation, etc. And these are all raised as counterpoints when criticizing China for human rights abuses.
But here's the difference. You can't end up in prison of a "re-education" camp in the US for discussing any of these. Now compare that to China's treatment of political "dissidents", the treatment of the Uighurs, Tibet, the Tiannemen Square massacre and the censorship of these and other issues.
So no, they're not equivalent.
It's the same for "pressure" on US companies. It's a question of degree. The US has courts that can check the power of executive or legislative overreach. US companies can (and have) resisted the US governments efforts within these legal frameworks.
Twitter and Facebook, both US companies, removed a sitting US president from their platforms after excessive policy violations (and justifiably so) so whatever "geopolitical pressure" you imagine, it's simply less in the US.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y agoI don't think a contest of who is the worse human-rights abuser brings much, but recall that the US: * Occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, and its last act there was to drone strike an aid worker and his family. * Invaded Iraq based on false claims of WMD, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. * Helped overthrow the government of Libya, plunging the country into a decade of chaos. I'm not going to defend China's actions (though I would push back against some of the absurd exaggerations that are often made), but some perspective is needed here.
- kcb 5y agoBy making this post on a US based platform you have proved his point.
- fortuna86 5y agoHey it's you again, defending autocrats with endless whataboutisms. Again. You aren't providing "prospective" by desperately trying to shift the focus away from China onto the US, you are running interference for them. Oh, and Libya was a NATO operation in which the US largely took a back seat to the French, British, and Canadian Air Forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_... If you are going to propagandize, you might as well be accurate.
- soperj 5y ago>sitting US president Only once it was clear he was out the door.
- babesh 5y agoEdward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, how the FBI treated MLK, trying to get Black Panthers to kill each other.
- coliveira 5y ago> clearly has dark stains in its history No, it is not its shady history, is its present. The US still has policies against African Americans. It still has Guatanamo Bay. It is bombing innocent civilians in the middle east. It is still detaining children for the crime of crossing its borders and expelling people who came to ask for legal Asylum. It is still persecuting whistle blowers. It still has a world wide program of wiretapping. It is pure hypocrisy to talk about China as a human rights abuser when the list of US abuses is this long.
- selectodude 5y agoI think the big difference here is that you're allowed to talk about those things on Hacker News without getting your internet shut off or a talking to by the appropriate authorities.
- fortuna86 5y ago> It is pure hypocrisy to talk about China as a human rights abuser when the list of US abuses is this long. China is operating prison camps for somewhere between 1 and 3 million of its own citizens. Guantanamo Bay at it's height housed 143 people. The US treats whistleblowers harshly, China disappears people without so much as a legal case against them. My goodness does anyone have a sense of proportion of the scale criminally here?