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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

You can't be sure, and that's a risk you'll always take when going to a country China can extradite you from. Singling China out is silly though, any country can do this, some just have more political clout to pull it off.

For instance, Thailand sought extradition of those insulting their king abroad.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/29/thailand-bhumi...

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This is mind-blowing and appalling. A 30-year prison sentence for posting on Facebook?

Every country has things the culture is sensitive of. That might be child pornography for the USA, or drugs for Malaysia, or comments about the king for Thailand.

They all have long prison sentences/death in their country, and light/no sentences in most of the rest of the world.

All countries have tried to go after people breaking their culturally sensitive thing abroad, with varying levels of success.

>Every country has things the culture is sensitive of. That might be child pornography for the USA, or drugs for Malaysia, or comments about the king for Thailand.

That doesn't make them morally equivalent. You can't defend 30 years in prison for being mean.

Morally equivalent? Who is the arbiter of moral valence?

This sense of moral superiority or having a better judgement than others, is exactly the property that blinds individuals and entire cultures to the absurdity of their own morals.

Claiming moral superiority is different from judging morality. As humans we judge morality through our reason. It is reasonable, irrespective of culture, to conclude that child pornography is worse than saying something mean about a king.

Have a peruse through Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish". It's impossible to take these moral absolutism claims seriously after spending any time studying the history of crime and morality.

Almost every culture at almost every point in history prevalently believes they have morals figured out and anything that came before them or from elsewhere is absurd.

I don't believe in strict moral relativism. Some things are self evident, e.g., child abuse is an objectively worse crime than is speaking out against one's government (the latter of which shouldn't be a crime at all.) If we can't agree on that then I don't think we'll ever agree on anything.

Insulting the royal family in the UAE or Saudi Arabia will also get you jailed.

In Thailand a lot of people jailed for Lèse-majesté get pardoned by the king. This king is new though so that might not continue.

Well a good comparison, is that the same amount of weed you have in Canada will get you arrested in non-weed US states.

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