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Comment by yourbandsucks | Hacker News Reader

That's awfully cherrypicked if you're going to limit things to specifically political prisoners.

We have LOTS more prisoners, btw, 4x as many per capita, with a nasty racial bias. And that's before you get into all the dead Arabs and Latinos who dared to have a government that wasn't freedomy enough for us.

What's your exchange rate between those? Do you value the tiny number of people speaking out against the state's legitimacy that much, when were talking millions of other innocent lives?

Becoming suddenly sure that we MUST kneecap our rival for totally sound moral reasons is soooo American. I feel like I'm living in groundhog day and nobody else can tell.

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So because the US government isn’t perfect, US based companies and US citizens are not allowed to espouse opinions on policy?

I can’t change what my government has done, and I can’t really change what it’s doing besides voting, but I can have my own opinion.

You can have an opinion, of course.

A mob opinion that our chief rival must be kneecapped in the name of freedom and justice is super suspect, is what I'm saying.

Americans want American hegemony, and that's fine, but please don't preach about values while you're doing it.

> must be kneecapped in the name of freedom and justice

I think we can talk without hyperbole, no?

>Americans want American hegemony,

Sorry if that's what you think.

There's a pretty significant online mob who really want to split HK off of China. I'd call 'kneecap' reasonably apt.

As far as hegemony.. I'm sorry you don't believe that :) Why is specifically China the Big Bad Guy if it's not about hegemony? Why aren't we focused on cleaning our own house first if it's about justice and freedom?

Like, if this isn't about power, we could at least stop actively supporting the horrible regimes that are useful to us? That seems like a pretty easy thing to do. Why hasn't it happened?

> here's a pretty significant online mob who really want to split HK off of China

There are significant online mobs dedicated to anything. That's not really a convincing argument. People who are advocating independence don't understand the situation, nor do they even understand what the protestors actually want (it's not independence).

> Why aren't we focused on cleaning our own house first if it's about justice and freedom?

It's almost as if America isn't comprised solely of 1 person! Not to mention, why can't people focus on both? This argument is basically "america has issues, so it can't point fingers". Not only is this an unconvincing argument, it doesn't make sense because what is "america"? Is it me, a singular US citizen? Is it Gitlab, a company headquartered in America with ~50% American employees? Is it just the US govt?

> Why hasn't it happened? Because people aren't informed and don't vote based on that. That is another complex discussion in and of itself, but most people that I know are against it, so I don't really get what your argument is.

It is complex! You're right.

It's also complex over there, where Americans don't speak the language or understand anything about the culture or history. Our lack of understanding does not make them 1-dimensional movie villains in reality.

Why does this argument appear over and over?

1. I do not need to comprehensively understand a country's culture to know about security risks and totalitarian governments. In fact, both of my grandparents and parents lived in and fled from a communist country, so I know a thing or two about that. 2. I do not need to comprehensively understand a country's culture to understand when human rights abuses are happening.

This argument is a form of -gatekeeping-. "Only X people can really discuss this issue", except you can move the goalposts whenever necessary.

People often don't understand American culture or history (and sometimes don't English either) but that doesn't seem to phase them when discussing America, etc.

Of course they're not 1-dimensional movie villains. China quite literally doesn't allow that, and Hollywood cooperates with this demand.

Where you're wrong is that while both countries have skeletons in their closets, only one of them is blatant, espouses and has no qualms about kidnapping/murdering/torturing their own people, and is many factors more evil despite us not even knowing the full extent of their actions due to the opaqueness of their government. Hint, it's China. Last time I heard, the US doesn't have a Nazi-era concentration camp in 2019 enslaving 2,000,000 minorities, harvesting their organs, torturing them, erasing their culture, desecrating their graves, and forcing the women to marry into Han families. The irony is that you can only make these ignorant attacks on America because there is freedom of speech in the US while in China, you'd be silenced the moment you hit send.

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