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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

It’s absurd that a British citizen, or a citizen of any democratic county, is living and studying in a repressive, corrupt and violent regime like the United Arab Emirates. These countries and their kleptocratic Sheikhs throw wealth derived from oil and blood at western universities, and bribe their officials into setting up “campuses” in their states. Then they get upset when arriving students don’t conform to the apathetic conformity drilled into their own citizens.

The Cold War is over. Yet somehow western democracies are still clinging on to alliances with barbarous regimes like Saudi Arabia and UAE. And now we see the fruits of it: Yemeni citivilians murdered during an unending war, a British citizen imprisoned for life for offending his hosts, and an agent of the Saudi royalty installed as president of the USA. What an utterly pathetic state of affairs.

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> The Cold War is over. Yet somehow western democracies are still clinging on to alliances with barbarous regimes like Saudi Arabia and UAE.

That's because those in power are the moderate ones, who are able to keep the most extreme elements of Islamic fundamentalism at bay. You want to topple Saudi Arabia and UAE? Great, now it's run by ISIS. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser evil.

Lmao okay. They're moderate only if you're a privileged European. Have you seen how they treat south and south-east Asians?

The governments of these countries are in no sense “moderate”, and it is absurd to suggest that the only choice they face is between their incumbent autocratic regimes and fundamentalism Islamic ones. Extremists both secular and religious have prospered in the Middle East precisely because western backing for unrepresentative regimes has snuffed out moderate and democratic opposition.

This geopolitical calculus might have made sense when there was a real danger of such countries being swallowed up into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. But it would be much better now to disengage as much as possible with the governments of countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Saudi Arabia is the ISIS that made it so I don't see your point? The beheaded even less so.

If only US and NATO applied that logic to Lybia and Syria

They did for a long time.

Yep. It was easy for us to topple Libya, and we almost succeeded with Syria as well, if Russia hadn't stepped in. A secular government is easy to stir up the fundamentalists against, to use them as foot soldiers in your regime change operation.

They won't have as much luck with Iran, since it's government is so strongly aligned with the fundamentalists, the pool of willing cannon fodder will be smaller.

I hope, at some point, these illegal regime change operations that the US and other western countries have been involved in for so many decades, will eventually stop.

Lybia and Syria had their own rebellions to deal with. Without a popular uprising, it’s very doubtful that the USA would intervene at all like they did before in Iraq and Afghanistan. Say what you will, but the people of a country should have a right to change its government.

Also, when chaos is set into motion, the west has to decide if the costs of not getting involved are greater than getting involved. Often doing nothing isn’t viable either.

It’s not so absurd if he is infact a spy

Why are you acting like these western democracies aren't just as barbarous and cruel?

Because they aren’t “just” as barbarous and cruel.

Violations of civil liberties occur in every country, but If you really believe that the rate and intensity of such is exactly the same in the UK as it is in Saudi Arabia or UAE, then you’re monumentally deluded.

On the intensity you certainly have a point, but on rate, I was recently surprised to see that between 2016 and 2017 there were 970 recorded offenses in England and Wales relating to a 2009 law criminalizing production or possession of a category of Japanese hentai manga. Agree with the law or not, that's a huge number, especially for a topic which is, to the say the least, vigorously debated. For comparison, a similar law in the U.S. was stricken down as unconstitutional (to my knowledge) in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Alliance.

Maybe not to our own people.

Did the UK/US not invade Iraq/Afghanistan, are we not still there? How many governments have we overthrown? How many people have we unjustly imprisoned/killed?

It's not a 1 to 1 type comparison but in my mind it's hard to imagine the US wasn't the most cruel or barbarous civilization in the past 80 years or so.

Noam Chomsky: “Remember the worst terrorist campaign in the world by far is the one that’s being orchestrated in Washington. That’s the global assassination campaign. There’s never been a terrorist campaign of that scale.”

Just because the West is not 100% perfect doesn't mean that both are the same.

You have tons of appeals in US, UK and other Western countries and judges are (at least in USA) super educated and independent. You can be SCREWED if you're poor, the state is hellbent of jailing you and no one takes up your cause but odds of something like the above happening in US or UK are close to zero.

Federal judges, at least in USA, love to keep their independence and to hold the state's feet at the fire. They are a third and SEPARATE branch, in 99% of cases taking a pay reduction to serve.

I agree that there are very unpleasant aspects of western democracies. But to say that, for example, the UK is as cruel and barbaric as Saudi Arabia is overheated rhetoric.

It wasn't very different 70ish years ago. I don't get why folks think that the West is a stellar beacon of freedom; it is quite possible for conditions to relapse to the period of the British Empire, for example.

You're looking for an argument that I don't want to have by taking what I said and twisting it to include historical aspects of those democracies when that clearly wasn't what was being talked about. I'm aware of the horrific histories of many Western democracies, including the UK (empire), Belgium (Congo), Germany (Holocaust) etc. The parent comment was comparing present-day nation states, which is overheated.

I agree. I wonder how many of the people that disagree are people of color who do not come from high ses. our prison industry (3 strikes for non violent crimes, people spending years in jail for minor crimes, arrest quotas) and police homocides against unarmed black and disabled people puts us right up there with them.

Most likely none; this is hacker news, a site targeted towards people in tech, a mostly white/Asian industry.

Russian trolls and their "useful idiots" agree. That's about it.

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