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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

It's not whatboutism when there's literally no proof that they are doing mass dragnet spying on western residents. And when we do have tons of proof of western governments doing exactly just that

Again, it's a trendy buzzword to use but it literally isn't a catch all shield to argue that it's fine when we do it. When there's no proof of something happening, maybe we should focus on the thing that we know is happening instead of chasing literal ghosts

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1) The activities of the US gov't have precisely nothing to do with the probability that a device from China has some backdoor or surveillance function. When someone raises this concern, the response "the USA has a history of surveiling its citizens" is not a rebuttal, it's irrelevant. Thus a whataboutism.

2) Your burden of proof might be different from mine, but one needs to be pretty naive to think that the CCP doesn't surveil western citizens. I doubt their intelligence apparatus is that bad at their job. In fact, I have plenty of reason to believe it's pretty great at it.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-chinese-communist-party-us...

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/27/china-ccp-spying-us-pol...

1) of course it does. This is an information cold war. If participant 1 is doing something then participant 2 is forced to do at least the same thing so as to ensure they don't fall behind. It's very naive to not expect the actions of one state to not affect the actions of the other.

you either intentionally or unintentionally phrased it in a way that blames unnamed participant 1. And given the context of this conversation, it seems that you blame US for CCP's inevitable spying. Seems weird given the kind of government CCP is(hint, the name).

In my opinion US is only at fault for spying on it's own citizens(im not citizen nor resident of the us), and in doing so it undermined its counter intelegence actions against state adversaries. Next time there is a good guy in the white house, All intelligence apparatus should be dismantled and replaced with something more transparent for the people, even though the reality where most of the world is despotic by design and there for hostile to a supposed to be free nation is still there.

I'm not blaming either party. I don't even know who first started it. I'm just pointing out the fallacy in the argument. That's why I explicitly used generic names instead of CCP and US Gov.

So, usa was "proven" (well.. data was leaked and believed by many to be true) to be spying on many people, both local to US and foreign... and for china, all you have is "you're naive, if you don't think they doo it too".

So, you don't mind being spied on by someone who was already caught spying on their own citizens, (assuming that you're from USA), has access to you, your finances, can lock you up, can suicide you in jail, etc., but you're afraid of china who has access to none of those powers?

How is "but they do it too" not whataboutism?

"Whataboutism" is trying to deflect to an utterly unrelated topic, like suddenly turning around, pointing at a tree an screaming "but what about the pine needle water content cartel?!".

It certainly isn't pointing out hypocrisy, establishing a common standard or a cureall in online discussions.

I've seen a proper "whataboutism" been used but only once (by a malfunctioning redditor from Eglin Airforce Base).

It's... flips through the list of officially recognized fallacies "tu quoque": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

It's not they do it too, it's "they are the ones who do it". There is no "too" in this context for the average western user. Unless there's proof indicating otherwise.

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