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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

China following the socially regressive lead the USA has been setting in terms of free speech on university campuses.

Come on, do you seriously think that China is looking at student protests in the US and thinking "hmm yes censorship good"? I swear, every single time an article about China doing something contemptible comes up on HN, you idiots come out of the woodwork to assert that the US is doing the same thing and therefore we can't complain.

No. I don't seriously think China is following the US. They'd do it anyway. But with the US no longer standing as a working example of a country that values free speech there is less need for China to pretend on the world stage to save face and hide their nature. This lack of pretending has become very obvious in China in the last ~5 years. Maybe that's a good thing but the regression in the USA isn't.

Sorry if my original post was a bit glib. The point wasn't to say it's okay for China if the USA does it. My point was that it's an almost universal bad trend in nation states today.

You could've written the same comment without being so incendiary ;P

Yep. This was my fault and I apologize.

These people are unable to appreciate the distinction between two things both existing, but of drastically different magnitudes. In their mind simply comparing the existence of two things is sufficient to exclaim some level of equality.

> assert that the US is doing the same thing and therefore we can't complain.

Yeah that's the point. normal people don't want to feel like hypocrites and why whataboutism is effective. Narcists don't suffer from this and so are happy to pass blame.

It's not always even whataboutism, I've seen people apologize for IP theft on this site by saying that US industrialists did it two centuries ago.

Thats stupid, there nothing wrong with violating IP laws, regardless of who did it first.

Will future employers google your SN and see this? What would they think? While you may have a solid argument that many IP laws are poorly written, used, and enforced, brazenly dismissing all of them is not a better position, ethically or practically.

It absolutely is ethically better and practical though however. IP is just information and information is meant to be free. To restrict it behind artificial pay walls is repugnant.

Freedom of thought is different from freedom of speech. There is a little overlap, but freedom of speech is a broader concept.

It is completely possible to have freedom of thought without having the freedom to organise a protest or broadly disseminate an idea. Freedom of thought only requires enough freedom of speech to publish an objectionable academic paper in some quiet corner of the intellectual world.

It is a subtle distinction but freedom of speech implies a freedom to organise action based on speech. Freedom of thought doesn't have that implication. One can think without acting, but one can't organise mass action without speech.

In the US, students use their right to protest against what they see as morally abhorrent, and the government threatens to defund the universities for it.

In China… well, I guess it would not be that different? I'm glad to hear you're a supporter of the right to protest.

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