Holly molly, the whatsaboutism in these comments.
There needs to be a better response to pointing out hypocrisy. If you care about China's abuses but not ours and our allies, you do not have the moral high ground, and morality is a political tool to you.
It's more of a chant, a mantra, a trigger word you are conditioned to bring up when some kind of obvious hypocrisy or double standard is being pointed out that you cannot otherwise refute.
[edit] Also, "whataboutism" the word, sounds like from 2ndgrader vocabulary
You're replying to an expression of shock at the behavior on display (specifically, people claiming - in a thread about Chinese torture camps - that we should not talk about them, because we weren't talking about American torture camps, so it would be hypocritical to talk about the Chinese ones).
I'm generally in agreement that this isn't great behavior.
Complaining that a word sounds childish while displaying your ignorance of its meaning is not the slam dunk you think it is.
It's the scale difference between the US blowing up a wedding party by accident as a moral crime and Russia raping and murdering their way through Bucha or Mariupol. The emotionalist mob would proclaim they're the same thing.
Now we know what you are. I reference the on-going vast war crimes of Russia in Ukraine, and you talk about it being a self-inflicted, pretend photo-op.
The scale of destruction in Afghanistan? This is how I know you're flailing. The US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan. The US paid for more schools and hospitals to be built in Afghanistan than the rest of the world combined fifty times over throughout all of Afghanistan's history.
Now Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, which was their situation before the US went in. The Taliban are promptly tearing down civilization, instead of trying to build it up.
> US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan
I wonder where all this money end up, then.
It really shows how the US failed in the Afganistan -- when the Afgan people prefer the Taliban over US occupation.
Btw, did you know Taliban banned poppy cultivation and opium production promptly after the US evac? Why did drug trade flourished under the US rule? (dont bother, I know the "approved" answer is that there was nothing else for the population to do)
No, it's not the same scale of evil as wiping out a city, but... pretending it's less than it was is an ugly look.
The post could have been "torture camps are bad" piece. It is instead focuses on "China is bad" propaganda
Yes, to an audience who have read nothing else on the topic. The people here for this discussion are - by definition - people who read about and/or discuss these topics.
As a discussion thread for a news story (and not, say a textbook for an introduction to world powers and their deeds), discussing tangentially-related events draws diminishing returns.
"Torture camps are bad" is an essay you could ask a high-schooler to write. It's neither news nor informative.
"We are obtaining new evidence that the government of China is running torture camps" manages to be both news and informative.
"US government runs torture camps" is neither news (has something changed?) nor informative (it's been well known for years).
Publishing a comparative treatment of national misdeeds might also manage to be informative; statistical modeling of the harms done by various governments, for instance.
I don't think it does, and I don't think it's a good idea to attribute meaning when there is no one if you want to keep an open, good faith debate. At any point in time there are lots of terrible things being done in the world, to a various degree and to a various number of people. You can't talk about all of them every time you want to talk about one of them.
No it doesn't.
> It would be fair to mention other countries involved in similar behavior.
That would be exceedingly impractical. Must every discussion anything contain mention of every thing someone things is similar? No of course not, that's pure distraction.
How fair do you think it is to the Uyghurs that any discussion of their plight must turn into an obsessive digression about the US?
I am an American, not a “global citizen”. My responsibility is to America. Let the people of other countries take moral responsibility for their governments. To pretend that America has some unique moral insights that need to be imposed on the rest of the world is both deeply racist and contradicted by history.
A particularly egregious example of this was the US condemnation of Russia at the UN for using cluster bombs in Ukraine, when the US has directly used some cluster bombs in Yemen in the last few years, and continues to supply massive quantities to Saudi Arabia. This claim is often "disputed" by saying that the US stopped manufacturing these weapons years ago, but with stockpiles as high as the US has, that is no refutation at all.
Focusing primarily on these US failings is exactly what a US person should do.
The problem is that these allegations and institutions are not trustworthy.
Institutions that are controlled by the west and are applied only against the enemies of the west. Immigrants who speak out against their motherland under the promise of a better life in the west. Groups that once were terrorists, and killed by our military en masse, are now freedom fighters with a just cause.
Just ten years ago, the US was bombing Uyghurs in Afghanistan based on Chinese intelligence.
Now this issue is used to ban Chinese clothing and solar cells.
Do people realize that the British Empire was the thing that most opposed Hitler?
Seems like people know no history…