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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

When people I know cry out and denounce China I say: yeah true, they’re not the paragon of democracy and there’s not much we can do about it now; especially when we’re blind to our own defections and we fail to address what is most certainly within our own jurisdiction

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This comment breaks the site guidelines badly. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

This sort of thing, compounded, amounts to the death of this forum as a place for curious conversation, so please take better care of the commons here.

First, it's good that the state this time allowed her to avoid a potential police shooting by letting her turn herself in rather entering a home armed with fingers on triggers.

Second, whataboutism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. This article wouldn't even be published in China... and arrests that happen in China wouldn't be published in China. So how does it help to not publish when police overreach due to political interference?

I posted this elsewhere but you are just incorrect.

Yeah because those countries often allow someone to be turn themselves in and then offer the accused freedom of movement for 250 dollars (10% bail).

Oh wait they just poison (Russia), disappear (China) or hang (Iran).

Are there problems in the US? Oh certainly. But don't belittle the activists in authoritarian countries by saying someone who was arrested for downloading PII is somehow equivalent to poisoning members of an opposition party.

Please stop feeding flamewars on HN. You've been doing way too much of this, unfortunately.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Aren't some death penalties in the US performed by injection of a lethal dose of ... poison ?

Except Li Wenliang in China was never jailed and completely exonerated by the state and never lost his job.

As likely flawed as this prosecution is, you are 100% playing into the hands of China's propaganda machine by making any whataboutism comparison whatsoever to the literal genocide China is sweeping under the rug.

They didn't say anything about genocides in China, simply state cover-ups. Right now you are doing whataboutism, actually - he was making a comparison. In any case, if you wanted to whatabout about genocides you'd pick cases when liberal democracies killed millions of people without any consequence, not about cover-ups, so I think you didn't interpret the comment reasonably.

I am not going to get into the semantics of the argument. If someone says "The US is not in a position to criticize China for <unspecified abuses> because of <specified abuses which are not genocide>, it is an attempt to draw moral equivalence between the two.

There is no equivalence to be drawn. There is bad, and there is evil. The two are not the same, and any sentence connecting the two is driven by bad faith or propaganda.

They aren't attempting to say that. They said that the US also does a lot of abuses that the US accuses China of doing. It certainly is not bad faith.

But here, I'll give you a nice fact that will help you be more rational : the US has killed more innocents in the Middle East over lies than China is even accused of imprisoning in Xinjiang. So if you want your measure of evil, there they are. Both are evil.

> ... the US has killed more innocents in the Middle East over lies than China is even accused of imprisoning in Xinjiang.

This confuses me. Isn't the # of people being imprisoned in Xinjiang in excess of a million? That seems like a higher number (that I'm aware of) have been killed in the Middle East by the US in their wars over the last few decades. (?)

The US has killed in excess of a million people in the Middle East. Around 650 000 people died as a result of the Iraq War, around 50 000 in Afghanistan, around 400 000 in Syria and around 20 000 in Lybia.

Of course, neither were purely by the US but rather by a Coalition, but none of them would have happened if it wasn't for the US.

I also include deaths from destruction of infrastructure and subsequent power vacuums, as is customary for crimes against humanity.

When China gets through sterilizing half of Xinjiang we’ll see what bears out in the population growth statistics

What western nation is actively engaged in genocide?

To be sure though, the CCP appreciates every bit of whataboutism they can get. They are also of the position that the west is worse than them, and that their genocide is entirely justified, just like every genocidal regime before them.

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

https://neveragainrightnow.com/

Arguably, the United States, both at home [0] and abroad (e.g., Yemen, where the US has been an active supporter of Saudi policy) as part of it's war with any entity seen as insufficiently hostile to Iran.) Of course, defenders will minimize, excuse, and rationalize each of the acts charged to be part of each of those genocides (and, in the latter case, claim that the US isn't responsible for the actions it actively supports but mostly doesn't carry out directly). But then, that's what people carrying out genocides tend to do (certainly, it's what China does with regard to the Uighur genocide), especially in the post-Nuremberg world, where there is a concrete international rejection of overt genocide.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/15/black-...

Yemen rings a bell...

When did Yemen become a western nation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...

Using proxies doesn't really make it any better.

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