Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhoe | Hacker News Reader

Happy to learn otherwise, but everything I've seen follows the pattern of briefly paying lip service to the fact that some enemy of the US is not perfectly innocent, but well we're all human, and here's five pages on how the US is the worst.

View on HN

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2014/04/01/why-criticize-your-o...

Calling for introspection is all well and good, but there's nothing ethical about actively denying the reality of what is happening abroad.

In the end, it is just an attempt to shore up weak arguments with weaker falsehoods.

That's interesting, I'm a millenial aged leftist so I don't have the political baggage from the 70s-90s that older people have on Chomsky.

And so I find in a globalized, hegemonic world, Chomsky's first reason is just as important if not more so than the second: Seeing what the larger component is is crucial, as a prerequisite to doing something about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com