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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

The US government has become much more authoritarian since 9/11 and nationalism is on the rise.

A few big tech companies have spent hundreds of millions keeping the state out of their databases, which probably gets billed to their PR budgets. Most tech companies do not put up such a big fight. Some court the state to get sweetheart deals, and the public has no basis for feeling confident that covert access wasn't an unpublicized provision of those deals.

The US federal government can quite easily throw me in prison or destroy my livelihood if the right person/corporation with enough institutional clout had a grudge against me (see Steven Donziger, US lawyer who has been imprisoned for trying to hold Chevron accountable for illegally polluting in ecuador).

Why should I, a US citizen who has no business need to travel to China currently, worry about the CCP's authoritarianism more than the US govts?

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>(see Steven Donziger, US lawyer who has been imprisoned for trying to hold Chevron accountable for illegally polluting in ecuador)

I'd never heard of him so I did.

>In 2014, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in Ecuador was invalid because Donziger had achieved it through offenses against legal ethics, including racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, judicial bribery, coercion, witness tampering, and arranging for expert's reports to be ghostwritten.

Your statement is correct but you left out that he tried to hold the accountable by many, many illegal means.

To compare him to a dissident in China who simply dissapears ome day with no explanation is beyond disengeneuos.

If the BLM protests happened in China, those protesters would all be in jail.

Read two paragraphs down in the wikipedia article you copied that from: " In 2015, Guerra testified to an international tribunal that he had lied and changed his story multiple times in the RICO trial. Guerra admitted that there was no evidence supporting the allegation that Donziger bribed him or paid him for delivering a ghostwritten judgment, and that large parts of Guerra's testimony in the RICO case were either exaggerated or untrue."

Kaplan is a very pro-corporate judge and the appeals court has ruled against his overreach already. I'd take his analysis with a large grain of salt, but there is certainly a lot of fog of war in this case.

I think Chevron paying their witness (Guerra) $12k/mo is quite suspicious and Kaplan did not object to that witness' testimony. Certainly encourage more people to follow this case - it's pretty interesting (and a bit scary IMO) to see how it is playing out.

Those aren't all of the allegations against.

It's not like there's never been an individual activist who's prevailed over a large corporation. It happens often enough that the "fog of war" is not the normal. He also was jailed for refusing to provide the other side access to evidence through the process of discovery. In this case, the unedited footage from the film he produced which already had evidence of questionable behavior edited out after it's debut.

The "fog of war" you're citing seems a lot to me like a guy who may be right but has used dishonest means to "prove" his case.

The charges were pursued by a private prosecutor who was hired by Chevron, after the real prosecutors passed on the case.

> Why should I, a US citizen who has no business need to travel to China currently, worry about the CCP's authoritarianism more than the US govts?

It's the long cultural game that is probably being played that might or should have you worried. It's been happening for 10-15 years to US social media companies by outside and inside forces and it seems to have become a detriment to society in certain ways. Now think of a Facebook or Instagram that's directed by a (more) authoritative government against a culture that it's in opposition to. What does that look like in 20 years?

Edit: And I think we should all be very worried about Google, Facebook, etc. These domestic corporations are too big to have any morals. The employees might but the machine is just a machine.

Why should I, a US citizen who has no business need to travel to China currently, worry about the CCP's authoritarianism more than the US govts?

If you ever run for office or hold a position of national security interest, your personal data will be a great source for blackmail or honeypot operations.

> If you ever run for office or hold a position of national security interest, your personal data will be a great source for blackmail or honeypot operations.

And obviously no US company would release such information to your political opponents, their ethics are pure. It takes a dastardly CCP plot.

One of these countries has rule of law and can prosecute such incidents, the other… not so much.

This is textbook “whataboutism” where instead of responding to the points being made you switch out to an attack on an opponent who has done something similar in the past.

If you are of the opinion that the US government’s past behaviour has been a bad thing then you should be absolutely horrified by the CCP’s track record.

I don't think I've ever seen the term "whataboutism" used except in cases where the accuser wants to dismiss an argument but can't refute the point.

Laziest logical fallacy accusation IMO.

> I don't think I've ever seen the term "whataboutism" used except in cases where the accuser wants to dismiss an argument but can't refute the point.

No you have that backwards, you’re the one dismissing the original argument by attempting to replace it with a different, inverse one.

Are you going to respond the the original points or just complain about me calling you out for using a conversation tactic favoured by Russian propaganda?

This prevailing argument on hackernews that "American and China are equally authoritarian regimes" is patently absurd.

One is used to hearing these types of nonsense points being made in high school by kids trying to be provocative and contrarian but it getting to a supposedly "rational" community makes me think the community has been infiltrated by Chinese agents or other special interest groups astroturfing.

There's no "prevailing argument"—these are divisive topics with people on every conceivable side—the community is large. Jumping to overgeneralization about it is a marker of a low-quality comment, so please avoid that.

Also, please don't break the site guideline which asks you "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

I've posted about this elsewhere in the thread if anyone wants more explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32904632.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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