Comment by spitx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spitx | Hacker News Reader

This is utter balderdash.

A nation that executes thousands of its citizens yearly, while also arranging sham trials and allowing affluent perpetrators to have body doubles serve lengthy prison sentences, should be the last to point fingers at any judiciary, elsewhere.

At least, Middle Eastern states follow Shariah, a religious code (however harsh or barbaric) that dictates the severity of the punishment.

These Chinese wastrels have no such consistency nor do they have the moral rectitude to hold every one, high-born or low-born, to the same rigor of enforcement.

Muslim theocracies often get a bad rap for their macabre laws and punishments.

The Chinese are the true compassion-less brutes. No country comes close to the way in which China "cleanses" its lower classes using a medieval "correctional" apparatus.

So take that state rag and shove it up Wen Jiabao's rear.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Global_distr...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19357107

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00pqhxk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEd17taOrmA

Not to mention the complete lack of freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, and almost completely non-existent property rights.

We're not talking marginal variances (in which case people reply by saying that the US isn't perfect on x y or z either), we're talking the wholesale lack of.

I can Google "gulf of tonkin" or look up the spraying of black communities with zinc cadmium sulfide by the military in St. Louis in the 1950s and 1960s. I can read all about the bad things our government has done. In China they have to hide everything via censorship. The US is a basketcase right now, compared to the past, but it's approximately a million times more transparent than the Chinese system of government.

I am not in the slightest defending China's human rights record.

But hopefully you realise that none of the above refutes the article in the slightest. You have not addressed a single point in it.

Hogwash.

On a scale of measurement of worthiness of a certain quality - any quality - if you fare so many orders in the negative that you barely register on the scale at all, it is generally held that you nary have a claim to call into question the measure of others.

You are not in that league.

You do not get to even raise your hand.

That's the privilege of similarly positioned peers who have earned the right to dispute or criticize owing to their own stellar record in that virtue.

Make sense?

Not to me. It seems the most directly adhominem argument possible. I think you should address the argument, not the arguer.

If Chinese do human rights violations, this doesnt mean USA is not doing it. If we are talking about violations dome by americans, lets stick to that. I am sure much positive can come from that discussion than finding faults with the messenger.

The US deserves criticism. Hefty doses of it. Particularly because our government is betraying the very principles the country is supposed to represent.

But faults? Mao killed tens of millions through forced famine alone, and he's practically worshiped as a god in China. There are no countries without bad marks on their records, but on the scale of recent bad marks, it's pretty twisted for China to criticize anybody.

True, We (also others) used to look towards US for liberty, equality and democracy. Now there is no reason to believe that. Us now presents itself what not to do when you get developed.

Mostly agree, but, nitpick: I've only lived in China for about two years, but I don't think it's exactly right to say Mao is practically worshipped. I think it's better to say most Chinese people are thankful to him for various things he did, while accepting he also made terrible mistakes.

If the Chinese do human rights violations...

I'm not even sure how to respond to that.

Chinese are one of the worst. But does US even wishes to get into that category. Ranking doesn't matter here, but belonging to that category is.

I think the point of the article was to point out the hypocrisy of the western media which paint countries such as China as "bad" and the US as "good", highlighting the problems in the former and under-reporting problems in the latter.

The article never made any claims about China having a better human rights record than the US. It simply illustrates the sort of reporting you'd get from a western media source about the US if they weren't so fundamentally biased.

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