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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

"gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" So the Chinese government is acting like any other government?

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err, no? This kind of (typically self-loathing) moral equivalence really bothers me. It's so entitled to think that govts leading countries like the UK and US which are nice to live in and have so many incredible freedoms and benefits which so many seem entitled and utterly unappreciative of.

China are literally harvesting organs, disappearing political dissidents and covered up the outbreak of a pandemic (to say the least you could about that), and their govt is responsible for 10's of millions of deaths of their own people.

Some nebulous Chomsky-ish nonsense doesn't rank against that, sorry.

Is that the cause of the riots in the US? Nice living and freedom? Or are you comparing apples and oranges and ignore the true costs? How is the living for the lower classes? They get exploited, imprisoned, killed. Not for the communist party but for the market. Same same but different. And that are only their own people. What happens to other nations is worse. Strange enough that the victims of the US war on drugs and war on terror aren't attributed to the US government although they are the consequences of government actions and lies. The Shah in Iran, the killing of Kurds by Saddam, the lies about WMD in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iraq wars, Guantanamo, the emergence of ISIS, etc. And that's only the middle east. Is that cognitive dissonance or ignorance? You probably enjoy the benefits of the "free world", that puts you in the top 10%, as it does me. I bet the top 10% of China are satisfied with the government too. Do you have as much sympathy for the Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc as you do for the Uyghrs in China? Or are they just terrorists or savages for you? Do you even know any of the names of the corresponding ethnic groups in these countries, or are they uninteresting because they are just collateral damage of the good guys? And don't start with whataboutism, the West has the longer history in this respect.

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