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Comment by ecdouvhr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, just like how we started boycotting China when we found out about the human rights violations against their own majority population, and outright atrocities against their own people.

At worst, these sattellite images will cause an outrage on Twitter until the mob finds something else to be angry about. People are too dependent on their product to do something that would actually hurt these businesses.

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Or how we started boycotting the United States when we found out about the war crimes where they put and tortured prisoners of war in 'dark sites' and concentration camps in no man's land (gitmo) without trial or basic human rights and dignity for two decades.

Or where they separated refugee parents from their children and put them in concentration camps where they had to sleep on concrete floors and beg for basic supplies, then 'lost' these children.

The whataboutism is right on cue today as always. Surely you're not suggesting a moral equivalency between Guantanamo Bay and the Uhygur concentration camps in Xinjiang?

Why do they have to be the same? Both are vile, just in differing/varying ways. "Don't judge a man for a spec in his eye while you have a plank in yours", "those in glass houses..." etc etc.

I'm not saying that condemnation isn't deserved in either direction, I'm agreeing that it is deserved in both directions simultaneously. For country A to tell country B they shouldn't do anything, they should absolutely expect country B to say what about X that you country A are doing.

It's ironic the cliche you use is contextually moral equivalency, the plank being more morally evil than the spec. Why do you absolutely think no one should be a recipient of moral condemnation given that no one is an angel? Do you think we should never hold people accountable?

The whole point of the parable is that if you aren't faultless yourself, don't go pointing out faults in others. That's why I used it. It seems self-evident that it's making fun of those that acuse others of doing the very things (or similar) themselves. The man was making fun of gaslighting 2000 years ago.

Where do you get that I'm suggesting otherwise?

Because there are differences in scale and severity. As an analogy, let's say I'm arguing with my neighbor over the loud parties he throw every night. My neighbor counters with the fact that he can hear my dog barking every morning when I take him out for a walk. My neighbor might be correct here. But he isn't engaging in good faith whatsoever -- instead, he's trying to conflate issues of very different scale to purposefully muddle the conversation. This is the problem of "whataboutism" and it's more complicated than just throwing stones in glass houses.

Part of the issue is that it's a problem that only exists in context. If I'm playing golf with my neighbor and he brings up my dog barking first, it's different than if he brings it up as a counterargument to my complaint about his loud parties. e.g. if someone on hacker news is bringing up criticisms of the US (e.g. Guantanamo Bay) in an unrelated topic, there's nothing wrong with that.

Whenever there is discussion of Guantanamo online, Xinjiang is almost never brought up. Here's a few (I promise not cherry picked, they're the first 3 results on google search for "hacker news Guantanamo" with more than a handful of replies) hacker news threads on Guantanamo to show this point: [0], [1], [2]. Not one mention of Chinese war crimes. There are debates over how bad they are, sure, but no whataboutism saying "Guantanamo is bad, but what about X issue in Y country?"

In contrast, there's not a single large thread about the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang on hacker news (or any other major site) that isn't filled with comparisons to the United States of America and its current and historical problems (and thankfully people calling them out for whataboutism). It's a pattern, and it's a real problem, and I won't hesitate to call it out when I see it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500597

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195746

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986757

>Because there are differences in scale and severity.

Is what has been said at the start of every slippery slope. "What I'm doing is okay because it's not nearly as bad as what someone else is doing."

It's a weak person's answer. Call it what it is, and it's just wrong regardless of "level" or reason.

Ok either I've slipped into an alternate reality or you have no idea what a slippery slope argument is, because it literally has nothing to do with any of what you said...

But furthermore, I never claimed that "what we're doing is ok" (it's not, Guantanamo is still bad obviously), rather I claimed that whataboutism is about CONTEXT. Bringing up tangentially related US issues in a debate about greater Chinese war crimes is a bad faith argument specifically because its purpose is to muddle discussion, confuse scale (less than 40 Gauntanamo prisoners vs 1,000,000+ prisoners in Xinjiang). The time and place for an argument makes a difference -- if you're talking about how bad the Germans are for the Holocaust, and I interject by talking about an event where an English Jew was murdered in 1935 by an anti-semite, are you not allowed to criticize me for derailing the conversation? I could say "anti-semitism is wrong at any level" or "the English do bad things to, why won't you acknowledge that", and I would be totally out of line because of the context of the discussion of the holocaust, because comparing some Englishman getting murdered to millions dying in death camps is dishonest.

It's not really whataboutism; plenty of countries and businesses commit terrible crimes without ever facing actual concequences. The Twitter mob won't actually do anything, and in the real world business goes on as usual.

This is a pretty low value comment. The fact that we can do something about gas leaks has nothing to do with China.

Also: the party owning the pipeline has a pretty strong incentive to stop those leaks, it costs them money.

Depending on the specifics, companies often don’t fix things because it would be more expensive, perceived or real, to fix the issue(a) than just dealing with the consequences of whatever it is being broken. Companies don’t operate on morals or principles outside of what makes them more money or what they think makes them more money.

Gas leaks have the potential of resulting in serious damage to the pipes, besides the losses.

According to the article most “leaks” are intentional venting.

Yes, those are problematic. This tends to happen when a pipeline changes payloads. I know a little bit about this: typically what they try to do is to shuttle the 'interface' to a segment long enough to contain it completely, then vent that section by opening a valve at the end of the section, then push new material in until the mixture reaches a certain level of purity.

Unfortunately, the mixture is useless and vented into the atmosphere. There ought to be a burden of responsibility to deal with that in a more ecological way on the pipeline operators, but these tend to be in bed with the nation states that are home to the pipes.

A pipeline carrying a single substance or single mixture of substances can still vent, usually that is to deal with pressure excursions and is a safety measure.

That word right there "potential" is the culprit here. As long as that potential is within "acceptable" ranges of unlikely to happen, nothing will be done.

We should check their tax filings to see if they use these leaks as losses on the balance sheets. Maybe the leaks are actually a benefit to the company?

China was the most blatant example I could think of, and it's a very current issue considering the ongoing Olympic games and the fact that much of the Western World outsources its production to China. There are plenty of other examples. Most equally valid.

We have evidence from the past that pointing out these leaks does lead to them being fixed. Financially, and environmentally, they are bad. That makes bad PR for the company.

Did you know California does a "Methane survey"?

https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/8/4383/2015/

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/11/18/2129

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7b99/...

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2020/EGU2020-9923...

Yeah or a country taking over part of another country and shooting down a passenger plane and no-one gave a crap. I am surprised there is so much hub-hub about the UA this time around, happily surprised for sure, but I kind of gave up.

> Yeah or a country taking over part of another country and shooting down a passenger plane and no-one gave a crap.

Is this about MH-17 shot down over Ukraine? There's arrest warrants out for the people responsible at the moment; they know what happened and who was responsible.

I think that’s the point. It was 2014, a long time ago, and those people are still free. Russia is spoiling for a war in the region and clearly doesn’t care about the part they played.

>At worst, these sattellite images will cause an outrage on Twitter until the mob finds something else to be angry about.

Before the mob finds something else a small guy is gonna be made a scapegoat out of, like that one small-ish bank that got prosecuted over subprime lending. What message does that send to the real offenders?

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