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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

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I will also defend a coal plant operator who is protesting against animal cruelty in the meat industry while I'd object to and protest their pollution separately.

China having mask requirements, what kind of mental stretch is it that I must therefore also support everything their government does? Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

The protests are related to covid restrictions. I think they are saying that we suddenly support anti-lockdown protesters now, when they used to be absolutely reviled barely a year ago when the same protests happened in the west.

> The protests are related to covid restrictions.

Oh crap, I didn't realise that. So you're saying we should sometimes open the article instead of only debating the comments o.O (/s; self-irony)

Maybe this is too false of an equivalency for me to comprehend, but I genuinely do not see any connection between the two scenarios you mention.

They are connected because the protests are about Covid restrictions.

Oh, there's a vague connection then. The Chinese protests aren't just about Covid restrictions though.

I don't recall the anywhere in the US where entire cities were shut down like in Shanghai, or where people had their doors welded shut. Can we have a modicum of perspective here?

I don't remember my government welding shut my apartment building and starving me off, in fact, I'd wager most of the people in tech jobs on this website probably had an alright time during covid

Heh, everyone is hypocritical some of the time, so it doesn't bother me as much. Its just online posturing on HN/Twitter/Facebook. The people shouting the loudest about vaccines or whatever other hot topic often do not have expertise or knowledge on that topic. But I get it, people like to complain a lot about everything. Its not really a political thing, its universal in all countries.

To me, what is annoying is that US citizens elect monsters who drone bomb innocent people for decades[1] - like 300,000 bombs since 2001 (that we know of) - but think they have the moral high ground to criticize other governments for their actions. I mean even now the US is profiteering off the war in Ukraine. The US wants constant war everywhere to feed its military industrial complex, but but .. Uyghurs!! China's government is horrible/oppressive, but I'm drawing a blank on which country they most recently bombed.

[1] https://progressive.org/latest/usa-bombs-drop-benjamin-davie...

The US doesn't purposeful target innocent people. Russia is raping and torturing Children[1]. US citizens have all the ability to criticize others - saying that because other bad things happened they're unable to ever point out anything bad happened is foolish.

Saying that the US is profiteering by providing billions in weapons and aid to Ukraine, which it will never get back, betrays your lack of objectivity or reasonability. Ukraine fights for it's very existence against a genocidal war of aggression by it's neighbor. The systematic torture, targeting of civilians by Russia along with open calls for the destruction of the Ukrainian people by Russian media makes it clear what Russia's objective is.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-troops-raped-tort...

>Saying that the US is profiteering by providing billions in weapons and aid to Ukraine, which it will never get back, betrays your lack of objectivity or reasonability.

Or maybe, you've missed recent developments?

https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/1505946734345994241

https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-europe-uk...

> https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/1505946734345994241

This is a very weird source, of course US defence manufactures stocks go up when the US buys a lot weapons for other countries, its a huge investment in the company and any publicly traded company would see a stock movement with that kind of investment.

At the risk of stating the obvious - that is what the military industrial complex is. Once you "donate" weapons - who is going to service them? Who gets the contracts for maintenance, ammunition, training, etc, etc? For the US, war is big business. This "donation" isn't altruistic or an accident.

I dare say the people servicing the weapons in a war zone in Ukraine are going to be the Ukrainians.

Ammo is coming from everywhere, either stock piles or other countries when appropriate.

And to the Ukrainians this is altruistic, the Americans are handing over advanced weapons for free to help fight off an invading army. It doesn’t get much more altruistic than that.

No, the Ukrainians are not going to service radars, helicopters, drones, tanks that they have no idea about and were just given. Nothing is for free - and that is the point, it feeds the US war machine.

Except all of it was given for free. The tanks that the Ukrainians received were Soviet era ones which they can maintain themselves. The drone's maintenance costs are tiny compared to the acquisitions costs, and the mere dozen of HIMARS are cheap compared to the incredible amount of munitions they were given to fire them. Nothing you have stated has any relation to reality. The US will never make even a single percentage point in income from the maintenance from the tens of billions in weapons given - many of which were literal munitions.

> No, the Ukrainians are not going to service radars, helicopters, drones, tanks that they have no idea about and were just given.

They are also given training including maintenance training on the weapon systems they are using. It's one of the reasons they haven't been given planes or their heavier systems (such as tanks).

> Nothing is for free - and that is the point, it feeds the US war machine.

It's free for the Ukrainians they are literally not paying, the Americans are getting great PR, and also free battle testing against real Russian targets.

Additionally the Americans are getting to heavily deplete the Russian army without even having to use any of their own soldiers.

It's a heaps good deal.

Well, I've failed at getting my point across so I'll just stop here. Bye!

Not to justify anything done by russia, but your comment is veering well into American war crime denialism. You can criticize russia without whitewashing the horrific actions of the US in their own wars of aggression.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings

This is just bad faith, I did no such whitewashing. The actions carried out in your source clearly is not US policy and the soldiers involved were not only brought to justice but the prosecutors attempted but failed to get the death penalty for the perpetrators.

There is a very clear difference between systematically targeting innocents as policy, waging a war of terror to bomb a people into submission that is happening in Ukraine, and the targeted drone strikes carried out as part of the GWT.

When you cause hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, to say it's not a matter of policy is a complete cop out. Russia also ostensibly does not have a policy of murder and rape, not publicly and not officially at least. It is through their actions that we can infer such a thing, just like we can do the same for the actions (and not "official policy") of the americans. Hundreds of thousands of people still died directly because of American imperialism, so it does not matter what was publicly said.

(Also, my comment on denialism was related to "The US does not purposefully target innocent people", when there are multiple examples of American soldiers doing just that. To separate the US from the actions of its soldiers is asinine, because you dont extend the same separation to the russians. Which only makes sense because you are defending "your" side.)

The only cop out is you pretending that every civilian who had died was at the hands of the US, when the civilian casualties of the GWT was overwhelmingly caused by sectarian violence and mass casualty terror attacks on civilians.

> separate the US from the actions of its soldiers is asinine, because you dont extend the same separation to the russians. Which only makes sense because you are defending "your" side.

I make the distinction because as your own source had stated the soldiers responsible were prosecuted and punished. Show me the Russian Federation prosecuting and punishing Russian soldiers for the thousands of cases of rape, torture, and executions that had happened in occupied Ukraine. If that were to occur then it would make sense to make such a distinction. The reason why it doesn't is the overwhelming scale over a very short period of time, with no signs of any sort of punishments to those carrying out the crimes.

Maybe you could have a point if there were a good alternative theory as to why Russia is using their limited supplies of expensive precision guided munitions on clearly civilian targets deep in Ukraine which are far from front lines and uninvolved in military industry. There have been none because it is overwhelmingly clear Russia's inability to win militarily has shifted their tactics to that of terror bombing in hopes of destroying the will of the Ukrainian people.

There's a really, really big difference between accidentally killing civilians while attacking military targets, and intentionally killing civilians.

1 million dead civilians caused directly by US imperialism is still a lot of accidental deaths. To the point where intentions are completely irrelevant

It is amazing how easily you wipe away agency and blood off those who actually actually carried out the overwhelming majority of the violence which killed those civilians.

If America didn't decide to invade a country that it had absolutely no business invading, exactly like Russia did, how many would have died? The US knew exactly what it was doing when it took advantage of very old sectarian conflicts and reignited them so that it could more easily occupy the country.

I'm not wiping away the responsibility of the insurgeants who killed civilians (the US directly killed tens of thousands too), but I'm also not handwaving away America's responsibility like you seem to be doing just because you can't seem to accept that the US military destroyed an the lives of an entire generation of people, and the region they live in.

>how many would have died?

This is literally unknowable. Iraq in all likely would have become another Syria during the Arab Spring under Saddam.

> The US knew exactly what it was doing when it took advantage of very old sectarian conflicts and reignited them so that it could more easily occupy the country.

Have you resorted to just make things up now?

Are you saying that they did not play the sunni and shia divide?

Again your first point is a complete cop out. Ukraine could've spiraled into a civil war anyways, so russia isn't really responsible for the deaths happening now. Right?

Intent matters, yes. But tell me - If your home was bombed, and your family was dead, would you care?

It's not hypocritical at all.

There's a drastic difference to wearing a mask and getting a vaccination vs: being forcibly quarantine, having your apartment door welded shut, all because of a relative small number of infections in your city.

But it's not like they're saying "sure, Western countries violated our rights too, but the rights violations in China are way worse, so we're only worrying about them for now." They're denying that the former was a violation of rights at all.

If not for the voices and politicians that resisted group think and sheep mentality the US could have very well been locked down like China. Let’s also not forget that lots of people lost their jobs and livelihoods in the US for not getting vaccinated or wearing masks.

Did they ever?

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