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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Have a look here:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem

This number reports, basically, how good it is to live inside a country, while the comment that you are replying to is entirely a list of foreign policy complaints (regime changes, etc).

It's kinda like meeting someone on the street who's protesting about animal cruelty in slaughterhouses, slyly handing them a chart showing them the nutrition facts of beef, and then walking off without another word as though you've settled your case.

Like, I get the point you're trying to make, but I hope you're aware it's a non-sequitur in context?

> Like, I get the point you're trying to make, but I hope you're aware it's a non-sequitur in context?

Your hope should have been that amelius was not aware that it's a non-sequitur, because that is correctable. But then they kept posting and removed all doubt.

Why link to a number, which means roughly nothing, instead of the specific details on the countries you're trying to compare? I have no idea how to break down or make my own assessment of what 0.83 or 0.18 means. Does that 0.83 for the US include all of the people being shipped off without due process to El Salvador, or do they count that as part of El Salvador's Human Right Index?

People like to bring up the Uyghurs immediately, but never really have the same smoke for the US. Also, do we include the prison population in human rights? Do we include access to healthcare? What about systems perpetuating poverty like lack of access to public transportation?

To pre-emptively be clear on my stance or potential bias, I stand by no country in the world. I was born in Iran, and my parents left when I was young to the US because they believed in the American Dream. The irony being that the dominos of why they left were initiated by the US and UK. And long before Trump was elected, but certainly immediately afterwards, I decided to leave the US once I had the means. (Also because of the lack of public transit, the $100k medical bills after an accident, being punched by a homeless person, and having my possessions stolen repeatedly and the cops giving me a :shrug:). I moved to Japan, where I experienced blatant racism for the first time. I moved to Hong Kong (and tbh no real complaints so far), but I am technically subject to the freedom of speech constraints on China.

I have no allegiance to any country or specific people. My allegiance is to all living beings.

Sorry but you're arguing against a reputable institution here.

I'm not arguing against a reputable institution, I'm arguing against using that reputation + their final number alone without going through the process to verify the methodology myself, which you didn't link to. You only showed the conclusion, which to all of us, should mean very little until we look into how that number was arrived at.

And I don't care if they're reputable, I will look at the methodology and make my own conclusion either way. Appeals to authority are not a substitute for critical thinking.

We're not talking about a few % difference here. If you want to look into it then fine, but you have to come up with some really good evidence if you think you can debunk anything here.

There's absolutely nothing in those numbers to argue against. They are simply providing fluffy quantitative declarations in order for people who don't even claim any particular knowledge or even understanding of the details of the metric (such as yourself) to argue from authority.

If they actually said something, it would be much less effective.

> We're not talking about a few % difference here.

How may freedom percent is it again? Do you lose 1% or 20% for failing to allow foreign ownership of utilities? How many percent do you gain for stopping Russian misinformation?

The metric was carefully crafted by a group of experts as means of communicating a complicated topic.

I'm not going to discuss it further if you don't have anything substantial to bring to the table.

'experts' lmao. Your entire argument boils down to an appeal to authority fallacy.

That fallacy does not apply here as the authority is legitimate and relevant.

That's just your opinion, not fact.

Eric Cartman is that you?

I.e., an appeal to authority

That line of reasoning ... everyone in this thread is now dumber for having listened to it.

Seriously - appeal to authority is a fallacy, unless it's an appeal to an authority that I happen to agree with? It's hard to take you seriously.

Instead of repeating that they are legitimate, you would've gotten further by saying Human Rights Watch has been around for X years, has reported competently on Y matters even when suppression was attempted by Z country. Their membership is made of A, B, C and this is why you should trust in their data collection as a source that we can use in casual discussion.

Right now, you're basically asking people to trust Human Rights Watch because you trust them. But if people don't trust you, why would they trust your word on what sources are legitimized?

We're talking about the country that has tried multiple times to destroy their country, look up Mossadegh for the 1950s and check out the glorious bombing of a school for 2026.

No lessons to take from the US.

PS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...

I know the US thinks only its citizens are human, so "The United States has been involved in hundreds of interventions in foreign countries throughout its history, engaging in nearly 500 military interventions between 1776 and 2026, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period” is not probably part of the reputable storytelling

They're not arguing against the institution. They're arguing against the metric .

Yeah but the metric was invented by that reputable organization and given the enormous difference it's not worth any discussion unless they come up with something good in which case they should probably publish about it.

If you don't want to have a discussion don't post pointless metrics that you don't even understand.

They are arguing for you using your brain instead of tethering it to a number.

Yes! By all means, let us appeal to authority and use institutions' reputations to shut down any discussion, rather than thinking about what these figures actually mean, what criteria they're based on, or how well they reflect reality.

edit: wording

An institution mostly funded by the governments it happens to rank highly, and the open society foundation that's owned by George Soros, a man who's been obsessed with overthrowing China's government since the 80s. https://www.v-dem.net/about/funders/

No he's arguing against your arguments and winning.

have a look at everywhere at the human cost of what the orange man is doing depending on his morning coffee. much better to send data to china than to US right now.

oh please, the US economy literally runs on slavery

https://www.prisonstudies.org/world-prison-data/highest-lowe...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...

How much of the US economy is powered by prisoners?

Depends on the sector. For example, in California's large-scale wildfire responses, forced prison labor in firefighting acts as an important auxiliary force. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/los-angeles-firefighters-...

In Arkansas, agricultural work accounted for 17% of all prison labor assignments in 2021. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/Captive_L...

That doesn't answer at all.

17% of prison assignments might be 3 assignments for all I know.

I found a number in your document: "...1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, over 65 percent work."

That's 780,000.

And there's 163 million working folks in the USA.

Prisoners power .4% of the economy.

The original context here was human rights in China, and what we see is that the US both has far higher prison population per capita, and that it is being as slave labor which is a significant factor in certain sectors of the economy.

Your whole argument about the percentage overall economy is nonsensical because most of the US economy is not actual productive economy. It's ephemeral stuff like service industry, entertainment, and software development. Obviously, you're not going to force prisoners to go on Joe Rogan podcasts. But when it comes actually producing things, 17% of the industry being done by slave labor is obviously very significant.

The original context was this:

> oh please, the US economy literally runs on slavery

Also

> 17% of the industry being done by slave labor is obviously very significant.

That's not what the stat says. It says 17% of the prison labor did that job, not that 17% of the labor for that job was prisoners.

Here's the quote for ya:

"...agricultural work constitutes a greater percentage of work assignments, such as in Arkansas, where 17 percent of job assignments for incarcerated people were in agricultural work in 2021."

But tell me again how I'm nonsensical.

The amount of mental gymnastics you're doing to justify the amount of SLAVE LABOR in the US is truly incredible. And couple that with one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, that really tells us all we need to know about the state of human rights.

lol the US was a .60 in 1789 during slavery. this chart is useless.

The reason the US scores a 0.6 in 1789 comes down to how composite data is aggregated and the global baseline of the 18th century.

Yes, people have put thought into this. This is why I trust institutions and not random posters on the internet.

Is WHO a reputable institution? And was it reputable between 2019-2022?

Yes

The reason that US and its allies/friendlies always score high on these kinds of ratings while their enemies/adversaries always score low is because these institutions and 'experts' are directly funded by and beholden to these countries/interests.

Just look at Russia - it's score is highest in the 90s - the most corrupt and destitute time in its modern history, also happens to be when it was deemed somewhat friendly to US and friends.

If an institution told you to jump off a bridge...

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