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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

Go to a prison in the Midwest and ask prisoners about their human rights. The US is full of abuse, but the wealthy are really good at pretending it doesn't exist and the poor are so busy fighting with the middle class that they don't have the time or money to do anything about it.

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Prison vs Forced labour camps that keep you alive just long enough to sell off your organs to the highest bidder.

China definiately has the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the natural human resources that would otherwise be thorns in the political landscape.

Many American prisons are forced labour camps.

All you've done is acknowledge that China has a bad record on human rights while saying that some prisoners in the US are also not treated well. So you have effectively conceded the issue with respect to China, while the rest is "but the US also does bad things".

I also think the comparison is wrong to begin with: I doubt you will find prisons in China that allow inmates to have a TV in their cell, or access to Xbox or other videogames.

Midwest prisons don’t typically harvest the organs of their prisoners.

This sort of whataboutism isn't an argument, but a concession to the person you're replying to. Instead of meeting an example with a counter, all you've done in this conversation is show that there are now TWO examples.

The OP explicitly claimed that US cares about human rights.

So no it is not "whataboutism", which a bs term anyway because it is almost always used in situations where someone implicitly claims that the US cares about human rights and that's why US atrocities must be brought up as counterargument.

No one's is claiming the US is anywhere near perfect, but the question is do we let China win or the US. And if that question doesn't have an obvious answer to you, you just haven't been paying attention. We have more freedom, more rights, and aren't actively genociding minority populations. We have our flaws, and we absolutely should strive to be better, but I would much rather be under American rule than China.

The US got off with 100 years of IP theft in the 19th century. Now the door should be closed to keep anyone else from doing the same?

Yes? Why perpetuate a bad thing?

The concept of "intellectual property" is a novel myth circulated by the industries that benefit from it, and it always has been. There was a time before copyrights, and I personally think we are already living in a post-copyright age (and, for all their complaining, the major copyright industries seem to agree -- why else pursue things like DRM?). Some future generation is going to be scratching their heads trying to figure out why this current generation wasted so much time, effort, and money trying to stop everyone from using the most effective copying machines ever conceived of to make copies of things.

Except for now when China is done stealing and has something to protect, they are all about it.

https://www.ft.com/content/c78b69e3-82bd-4f72-881c-12b2ca1ce...

Have you heard of Sam Slater, the father of the American factory system? He's a hero in America for stealing IP from Britain, where he was known as "Slater the Traitor"

Have you heard of Louis Pasteur? He discovered Germ Theory in 1861. This man or his legacy is of course is not what we're talking about, which is why I bring it up. To change the subject.

Large scale international IP Treaties weren't really a thing until the near the end of the the 19th century, so "theft" isn't really the correct term when there were no agreements or laws governing trans-national IP rights.

Those agreements really only got started with the Berne Convention-- mainly creative works-- and the Paris Convention-- basically industrial patents. (Yes there were some other smaller agreements before, but these brought things into much larger scale with many, many more signatories to the agreements)

Besides, your line of reasoning amounts to "Other people got away with bad things so it's not fair that I do to" As a parent, I spot that line of logic often in with my kids, and it doesn't hold together very well there either.

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