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Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of people who are extremely selective with regards to their outrage on each issue, though.

So? Most people's entire existence is predicated on unsustainable consumerism. There is literally too much to care about. If you require that people must care about all issues to care about any issue, then progress won't be made. Maybe that's your intention.

I don’t require everyone to care the same about all issues, that wasn’t my point.

My point was people who care about labor rights, shipping jobs offshore, etc are selective about those specific issues. Never said they had to care about other issues.

The same type of argument can be made about any specific issue. For instance, labor rights is incredibly broad. I don't think it's a realistic requirement for someone to care about every possible labor-rights issue. It's fine if people want to be selective.

I wasn’t specific enough.

My point was that people are inconsistent due to the intersection between their advocacy and their own sense of nationalism. The issues are amplified when they pertain to Americas enemies and lessened when it pertains to Americas Allies.

Maybe to help explain what I think you are getting at. A year or two ago, you had senators preaching about how we needed to stop china's slave labor of the uighyurs. Okay, fine, I agree with that. But what about the horrible labor practices American companies rely on in central Africa where there, slavery also exists? The people who say bad China about labor practices have their blinders up to our allies who use the same labor practices. The reality is, if you think a company should not use slave labor in China, you should also thing they shouldnt use slave labor in Africa or Vietnam or any other emerging country/economy/third world country.

For a specific example, I did a quick search and Malaysia is one. Malaysia has the same or worst labor practices then China, but no one complains about tech companies relying on Malaysia's poor labor practices.

A blog post that talks about it. https://medium.com/swlh/forced-labor-in-tech-c91daf979201

So your point is that you can’t call out an instance of slavery unless you call them all out? That doesn’t make sense to me. You should be able to highlight an issue without someone retorting “what about X?”, which is literal whataboutism.

Everybody is a hypocrite on almost every issue. Take a major issue like climate change. Almost every human in the U.S. and Europe has massively large carbon footprints. Does that mean Americans or Europeans can’t care about climate change? We’re not ideal beings working in an ideal system. We’re flawed being in a flawed system trying to make things a little better.

Again, the point was never that you have to be perfect, it’s that it’s shouldn’t just happen to perfectly align with Americas foreign policy agenda.

Why is it not ok to align with American foreign policy? I guess you’re implying that Americans are ok benefiting from other forms of labor exploitation? Why does that matter? Going back to the climate change example: everyone benefits from GHG emissions. Allowing arguments to be derailed by “NO U” is a quick way to stifle all discussion.

To me, your argument, fully constructed, is: “you can’t care that Uyghur’s are enslaved because America also uses slave labor and American foreign policy is anti-China.” How is that an argument?

Not necessarily. If someone only knows about the case of the uighurys, buts not the case of Malaysia, you can't hold someone against that. However, once the issue is raised and they are made aware, if they still only care about the uighurys, then it is targeted for a reason. We are all only as good as our information is and none of us know everything. The issue with the senators is, when they started that campaign, a bunch of information dropped about those same practices elsewhere they they definitely had access to and still refused to acknowledge it. Instead, they created an extremely target bill specifically at China. Maybe I am just an ass because I expect our representatives to be a little more thorough than the average citizen, especially when they are the ones drafting legislation. I and other average citizens don't have access to the wealth of information and resources our representatives to. So I expect them to use. I don't have the power to subpoena people to answer questions before congress, they do.

But no, Jim Bob isn't a hypocrite if the information was never brought before him. Jim Bob does become a hypocrite when the information is in front of him and refuses to acknowledge it.

>But what about the horrible labor practices American companies rely on in central Africa

Also the slave labor in US itself, https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...

That's the same thing. It's just an arbitrary line in the sand you have drawn where you say if care about these issues but not these you must be dishonest.

It’s not the same thing, if you only care about these issues when they are related to Americas enemies (eg China, Iran, etc), then you are inconsistent.

Welcome to humanity where everyone is inconsistent. It's part of the fallibility of humans.

Everybody is. Unless there is someone outraged all the time.

Our scarcest commodity is attention.

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