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Comment by cjbenedikt | Hacker News Reader

Sick and tired of constant war mongering. First it was Russia, then "war on terror", now China. Does the US always need an enemy to pick a fight with to feel " validated"? Everything China is being accused of is and has been done by the US as well. Does it make anyone feel better if one can accuse someone else of the same actions?

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>Everything China is being accused of is and has been done by the US as well.

Alright I'll bite. What is the US equivalent of the panopticon that is in xinjiang?

edit: by "the panopticon in xinjiang", I'm referring to articles like

https://www.engadget.com/2018-02-22-china-xinjiang-surveilla...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xgame/at-chinese-border-tou...

The NSA's worldwide surveillance collection used by the CIA to kill someone without any approval from any other organization and without concern for civilian casualties.

The US doesn't have an active separatist movement within its borders. The last time an ethnic group of US residents was suspected of disloyalty (without any terrorist acts actually being committed) they were all arrested on the basis of ethnicity alone.

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

> The US doesn't have an active separatist movement within its borders.

This is absolutely wrong[1]. In fact, we have ethnic variety in our separatist movements: neo-Confederate/white supremacist, African American, and Native American.

All of these groups are allowed to organize peaceful public rallies against the US and will be protected by police if they choose to do so[2].

> The last time an ethnic group of US residents was suspected of disloyalty (without any terrorist acts actually being committed) they were all arrested on the basis of ethnicity alone.

You can find great evil in the history of any country. That's an apples-to-oranges comparison, and you had to go back to a World War to find it.

The relevant question is whether the CCP is currently a greater threat to human rights than the US is.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_move...

2. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/10/17/league-south-...

>All of these groups are allowed to organize peaceful public rallies against the US and will be protected by police if they choose to do so

Which means separatists are free to discuss leaving, but any actual attempt would require government approval or no longer be considered peaceful making it illegal.

You're moving the goalposts. This was about the CCP disallowing separatist speech and punishing it by death.

While the treatment of the Uyghurs is completely unacceptable, the separatist movement there advanced beyond just speech. There have been numerous terrorist attacks carried out, and a similar separatist movement in the US would not be tolerated either.

I'm not defending the internment camps but they're not morally comparable. The Japanese were treated relatively well (compared to the Uyghurs who get tortured), were released afterwards, and the US has since apologized for that incident.

The closest equivalent is probably the War on Terror, insofar as both purport to be a reaction to actual terrorist attacks and to be aimed at preventing future terrorism. We may then compare them in terms of (crudely) total actual suffering caused (less crudely, we need to take into account total potential suffering prevented - recall how Hiroshima was justified - but evaluating counterfactuals is a tricky matter so I will set that aside here). Even assuming the worst version of what's said to be happening in Xinjiang, there is no equivalence (in terms of actual suffering caused) with the War on Terror, which is estimated in 2009 to have resulted in 3.1 million direct or indirect deaths [1]. From a crude utilitarian point of view, there is simply no comparison: any clear-headed utilitarian given the choice to prevent exactly one of two will not feel that there is even a decision to be made.

Of course a natural reaction is to say that the Uyghurs have a legitimate cause, and the 911 attackers didn't. However, the official US theory of the motives behind the 911 attacks is "they hated us for our freedom". [2] According to this theory (as I understand it), the terrorists saw how free Americans were, saw how unfree they themselves were, became jealous, and attacked us. Now, there is no doubt that IF this theory is true, then the attackers indeed had no legitimate cause. But the theory (as I trust you will agree) is hardly believable, as it simply does not accord with our ordinary conception of how the human mind works. A more plausible theory of the motives is needed in order to make any assessment of whether the terrorists had a legitimate cause.

[1] https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/15/headlines/analysis_f...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11...

Credit scores + Facebook and ad networks but they're under checks and balances by Congress depending on the administration while funded and siphoned by CIA, together making things muddy.

>Credit scores

...which is based on your credit report, which in turn is mostly a record of what lines of credit you have taken out (credit cards, car/student loans, mortgages) and whether you have repaid them. meanwhile in china, they track that and also various subversive behavior like "spreading false rumors" and "walking a dog without a leash"[1].

>Facebook and ad networks

You can opt out of all of those. Unless the DHS is forcing visitors to install facebook (or similar surveillance app), it's not really comparable to what they have in xinjiang[2]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/9d43f4b74260411797043ddd391c13d8

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xgame/at-chinese-border-tou...

Amusingly, most reporting on the Chinese "social credit system" is based on uncritically repeating Chinese government propaganda about how capable it's going to be. It was originally planned to launch in 2020, but that hasn't happened so far. If it ever does launch, you shouldn't be surprised if it is not nearly as powerful as people have claimed it to be.

The current U.S. President has been doing a lot of peace mongering.

Maybe that helps explain the demand for ejection.

He did try pretty hard to start a war with Iran.

And he seemed to be gunning for one with North Korea there for a while.

> Everything China is being accused of is and has been done by the US as well.

Is that a confession?

> Does the US always need an enemy to pick a fight with to feel " validated"?

So what exactly are you asking for? Do you want the US to be totally apathetic? Never to comment on the erosion of democracy in China and Russia?

The US certainly doesn't have moral high-ground on many issues, but I still want our officials to recognize and speak out against human rights abuses and authoritarianism.

If there are always authoritarians in power, then, yes, the US should always have an enemy regime to speak out against.

> Everything China is being accused of is and has been done by the US as well

I'm so sick of this "both sides are equally guilty" nonsense. It's not always easy to say one country's regime has done worse things than another, but this isn't one of those times.

It is absolutely inarguable that US has never done the worst things that Xi has been credibly accused of.

The CCP's treatment of Uyghur's is, even at its mildest, much worse than anything the US has done since slavery ended in 1865. Even the Vietnam War is unlikely to have killed more innocent civilians than China's Uyghur concentration camps are likely to have killed.

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