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Comment by throw-ru-938 | Hacker News Reader

Being a Russian post-invasion, I feel this is awfully familiar.

This may not be entirely fair but citizens of a country which is being shit to others feeling negative consequences due to their countries shitty actions is generally a good thing. It's up to Russians to fix their government and its up to Chinese to fix theirs - unless you are advocating for foreign invasion, which will probably make things a lot worse for you no matter where you currently live.

Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war and/or their government. The same goes for the Chinese and for corona specifically you had a lot of them travelling the world while the virus spread was heating up.

Ultimately, humans are pattern seeking animals and if you fit into a pattern of shitty people you better make sure that you make it clear you are not one of them. It would be better if people could be more discerning but I'd rather take this than not having any pushback for countries and other groups of people misbehaving.

What would you do to make it clear you are not one of a shitty group of people?

Agreed, like the cold shoulder shown to white South Africans during Apartheid. Overall, it helped to change national sentiment and led to the end of Apartheid even though it might've harmed some people living abroad who were opposed to the system.

I don't think we've worked out a better way to deal with this yet, and it will always be a factor of the way populations are broadly responsible for their governments in democracies and even semi-democracies.

This kinda just seems like an argument in favour of bigotry. I find it odd that you are so casual in your justification of it. This reminds me to always be mindful of the social norms of my current environment, because we could very easily be the oppressors/bigots/racists etc., and not even realize it until decades later...

> Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war

There are many white people being racist towards white people, should I give all white people the cold shoulder so one day it will end racism?

I think it is unkind to treat people in a punitive manner for something that is beyond that individual person.

> you fit into a pattern of shitty people

What an awful thing to say to another person

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