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Comment by ravingraven | Hacker News Reader

This is a joke. The "western world" created PRISM and Five Eyes and has been meddling in elections in the third world for almost a century. Additionally, what do you define as the "western world", because by some measures it includes some actually fascist governments like e.g. Saudi Arabia.

A) Having democracy does not correlate with having transparency and freedom, this has been de facto proven.

B) If the "western world" is the bar, the bar is low.

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Ah, people love to trivialize comparisons and disregard all context, especially intent.

By analogy you're basically equating tortute in order to prevent the detonation of a bomb to torture in order to detonate a bomb.

Yes, ethically all sides are compromised but as things stand they are by no means all the same.

Also, no one included SA as part of the West.

>By analogy you're basically equating tortute in order to prevent the detonation of a bomb to torture in order to detonate a bomb.

I really can not see how I am doing this. Care to illustrate?

>Also, no one included SA as part of the West.

Fair enough.

> refer handwaveingly as "western"

There is a reason why I used the word hadwaveingly.

>B) If the "western world" is the bar, the bar is low.

And yet China manages to fail this low bar stunningly. To the point that they are running actual concentration camps for Muslims. Something no Western government has done, and the last one to do finished paying reparations to the victims 4 years ago, 70 years after it happened.

Western governments literally have a history of slavery.

Right now, America is running actual concentration camps for African Americans.

Don’t think western governments are any better.

So does nearly every other country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

Slavery was first abolished by the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#Abolitionis...

Global abolition of slavery was led by the league of nations in 1926

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/1926_Slavery_Convention

>Don’t think western governments are any better.

You are welcome to move to China if you think they are better.

After all I moved to the West because I thought it was better.

Seriously not a bad idea. China doesn’t have millions of corona virus infections. And restaurant and bars are open.

But they are white and Anglos so it is OK.

> The "western world" created PRISM and Five Eyes

What do you think PRISM and Five Eyes are? It is my experience that people who bring them up as huge evils have no idea what they are. They typically think that PRISM allows the NSA to read anybody's email (as opposed to being an ingestion system for data collected by the FBI) and that Five Eyes allows governments to indirectly spy on their own citizens, both of which are ridiculous ideas that are legally impossible.

They are electronic surveillance projects which have components that can be used by western governments to conduct blanket surveillance on their own and foreign citizens as illustrated by Wiki Leaks.

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