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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> If you believe the western media, the west no longer believes in or upholds its values, and watches while Russia pushes westward while China builds up a military and eyes Taiwan, both more than happy to destabilize the middle east in pursuit of their goals.

> The west needs to wake up, we're slowly sliding towards a world conflict. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

I think there's an essential connection there: The West's values and their power, and peace and freedom. The West's power comes from its values, not only because it captures the hearts and minds of others but because the power freedom and universal human rights gives to its own people.

As many in the West disparage or undermine those values, they are doing the work of Putin and Xi (at times, I'm sure, led by their disinformation campaigns).

No more time for games. It's time, as you say, to wake up and stand up for our values.

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>No more time for games. It's time, as you say, to wake up and stand up for our values.

This makes a nice tweet. But what does it actually mean in practice?

For starters, support the Ukraine.

And as a step toward that, stop supporting US politicians who want to play childish political games with aide to Ukraine.

Ah come on. The west is as hypocrite as any other country. Look at what they did in too many places in the world. Human rights my pents. The phone you are holding is probably created by some child hands. If there is one thing what the west could improve is this silly Disney like black and white thinking. There must be a good and a bad. Its nonsense. Bad a good goes hand in hand.

> The west is as hypocrite

Everyone and every institution is a hypocrite. If that's going to stop us, we might as well have submitted to the Nazis or Bolsheviks or someone long before that - after all, we were hypocrites then too!

But who am I to say that - I'm a hypocrite. No hypocrites allowed on HN!

Everyone makes mistakes, it's about learning from them and what you change to try to make things better in the future.

Generally speaking, the west has been significantly improving the living conditions and human rights protections for its citizens over the last several hundred years, many times in direct response to some horrible mistake that was made and then subsequently learned from (slavery, Vietnam, etc.)

The same cannot be said at all about Russia. All the intelligent, brave people who could see through the propaganda or who had the bravery to do something about it have largely either been killed off or emigrated away at this point. The country has been in a continuous cycle of totalitarian suffering for hundreds of years, with no end in sight.

> As many in the West disparage or undermine those values, they are doing the work of Putin and Xi (at times, I'm sure, led by their disinformation campaigns).

I don't have evidence, but my gut says that's not by accident. This slippery slope we've been heading down for the last few decades (no more right and wrong, all values are equal, anyone who says otherwise is a problem/oppressor/colonizer) look to me like a well funded / coordinated / long term political warfare campaign in order to build a country of "appeasers". People who refuse to stand up for anything -- we all know that's how bullies win.

I often wonder how much of what we're doing to ourselves is actually being funded by bad actors, fake patriots, etc.

I don't trust any free news. Someone is paying for a message to be delivered to my eyeballs, and I don't know who that is. Maybe 1% of stories are from bad actors, maybe it's 25%. Who knows? The answer matters -- a lot.

No one trusts anyone anymore. We've lost faith in our government and each other. No better way to conquer a nation than from within.

> no more right and wrong, all values are equal, anyone who says otherwise is a problem/oppressor/colonizer

But that whole view is self-contradictory. If all values are equal, what's wrong with being an oppressor or colonizer? By calling people oppressors and colonizers, they are saying that some things are wrong. Their position destroys itself.

Or you misunderstand their position. Taking someone's argument to a logical extreme and calling them hypocrites is about a rhetorical game, not about meaning and truth.

Strawmanning someone's position is about a rhetorical game. Fairly representing someone's position and pointing out that it is logically contradictory is exactly about truth. Self-contradictory positions cannot be right. (Now, you may be able to remove the contradiction without destroying the whole position. But it has to be flawed.)

You see this in formal philosophy. If the conclusions of an argument disprove the premise, then the premise is wrong.

In this case, we aren't dealing with a formal position. We aren't even dealing with the clearest-spoken advocates of a position. We're dealing with culture warriors whose specialty is yelling, not clear argument. Nevertheless, there are people out there who say that, if you say one culture is better than another, then you are a Nazi. This is not taking their argument to a logical extreme. This is listening to their words. And based on that, you can say that that position shows that they aren't thinking, because it's absurd.

But you're right, you can't go too far with it. The worst, most thoughtless advocates of a position only let you say that those advocates' position is flawed. They don't tell you anything about the steelman version of the position.

To each his own values. The western values are pretty evident with the way Assange is treated.

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