Countries with poor human rights records spend millions on public image (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Countries with poor human rights records spend millions on public image (2015)

publicintegrity.org

70 pointsdoener20 comments

PR firms seem to do a lot more than foreign lobbying and propaganda, and seem to be engaged in active manipulation of clients' populations.

In South Africa, UK PR firm Bell Pottinger was engaged by the Gupta family to promote their (widely reported to be corrupt) interests. Direct protests against the PR firm, including by South African expats in the UK, and SA-owned clients led to Bell Pottinger dropping the Guptas. Nonetheless its been widely reported that Bell Pottinger's strategy included fomenting racial division in order to divert attention from President Jacob Zuma and the Guptas. By many accounts, they have succeeded.

I'm sure that this sort of thing has been going on for decades, but it is notable that the victims of a PR firm (the South African public) were able to turn the tables and force a first-world PR firm into damage control mode.

Things like this make me wonder if we need a morality police now that poor morals have no social consequences anymore.

This exists in the form of the foreign and trade (and occasionally military) policies of other countries toward yours.

Apart from the other points, I feel that this would have the opposite of the intended effect. The existence of morality police would compromise other motivations to be moral, in the same way that offering small amounts of money for blood donations causes donations to decrease (because the social kudos from doing it for free is a larger reward than the money).

Interesting idea! How do you imagine that to work though? Especially given that we don't have good ethics fully defined?

Those are just the normal police. Add some more laws making it illegal to be immoral and you're done.

US spends millions on public image too, no?

It is just amazing that your comment gets downvoted. I am sure Americans don't want to be told that US is one of #1 human rights violator but how cares, right? Go ahead, downvote the dissident voices. US is a joke, anyways.

What does it mean to be "one of the #1" of something?

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

I would say that djcjr's comment actually is relevant - USA is doing a lot to limit human rights year after year and IMHO is likely to lose its reputation as a haven of democracy. Thus, I'd say it's not whataboutism.

Speaking of human rights - I wish there was a medium that aggregated reports of human rights violations, in a manner as broad as possible (multiple perspectives of many organizations, ability to compare countries, analysis of laws, published court decisions etc).

My impresssion is that we should have as much discussion about human rights in general as possible, raising the cost of changing the wrong public image of those who care about it. It might lead to a situation when it's just too expensive to violate the rights and the cheapest way to improve would be not to apply propaganda, but actually improve. What do you think - is this doable?

I think the point he's trying to make is that countries spend millions on public image regardless of their human rights records. There isn't a meaningful correlation until we have examples of countries with good human rights records which aren't spending millions on their public image.

Yes.

On the flipside, Americans use 'whataboutism' as a way to deflect from valid criticism about their double standards.

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

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy

Interestingly, whataboutism is specifically about cases of hypocrisy. The point is that the presence of that hypocrisy is irrelevant.

"It represents a case of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy), a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with that position, without directly refuting or disproving the opponent's initial argument." -Wikipedia

"..You know, one of the things that’s been really distressing to me, not even just recently, but over the years, over the last decade, is that poll after poll after poll shows that a clear majority of Americans supports the torture program. And, after everything we’ve learned about torture — that it’s illegal; it’s immoral; the United Nations considers it to be a crime against humanity; that it doesn’t work — Americans are still supportive.

“In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I was angry, too. I wanted to kill or capture as many members of Al Qaeda as I could — as a CIA officer. But we can’t lose sight of who we are as a people, as a country.”

John Kiriakou.

We can blame, in large part, the MSM for having on only generals and contractors and feeding us the bullshit line that torture works and is a good thing.

And Israel is notoriously omitted.

This article is from 2015.

The mentioned Qorvis/MSLGroup now runs e.g. http://www.arabianow.org/ (also in German: http://www.arabianow.de/) which promotes the brutal regime of Saudi Arabia:

"This content is distributed by Qorvis MSLGROUP on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. Additional information is available at the U.S. Department of Justice."

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