Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get it. Each time somebody protests some injustice or evil happening somewhere, some people couldn't find anything better to do but chime in with "why you protest X but not Y? if you don't protest every single injustice I want you to protest, you must be a hypocrite!" Come on people, how it even makes sense to you? Who on earth could live up to this impossible standard of protesting every single injustice?

It makes it only worse that your other demands of condemnations are full of factual inaccuracies - Omahr Khadr is sitting in Gitmo not for "something he might've been involved" but for, among other terrorist activities, murdering an American - Sergeant Christopher James Speer, to which he admitted and plead guilty. Pussy Riot had nothing to do with vandalism and weren't accused of vandalism. Western world is not "equally unjust" as nobody is imprisoned for 2 years for protesting the head of state. The press is not "ignoring" any of the issues you raised - Wikileaks revelations, Gitmo prisoners and other events are extensively discussed in the press and nobody is being imprisoned for doing so.

It is a classical Russian propaganda defense: answer an accusation on human rights violations with "and you are lynching Negroes" or similar.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Kremlin is paying bloggers and commenters in Russia to post positive things about authorities:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/06/10/russia-networks-of-... , http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/07/hacked-emails-na...

Russian authorities may also be paying or employing some users of HN.

That's how I get it. I was expecting to find the "lynching Negroes" comment upvoted high by just seeing the title. It does not mean that the user who posted it is employed by Kremlin, but you know, the message will be upvoted...

In case of Pussy Riot there are no human rights violations, actually. They are jailed not for singing an anti-Pitin song, but for a 'hate speech' crime. They were screaming profanities in a church which scared, offended and upset some believers.

Would you believe that Pussy Riot would be allowed to sing an anti-Putin song in the Red Square and get away with it?

In fact, that's what they did on 20th January 2012. On the Red Square in broad daylight they played a nicely rousing song about 'KGB bitches' and 'Putin who is pissing his pants', and they have a very nice photos and videos to show: http://pussy-riot.livejournal.com.nyud.net/8459.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqcmldeC7Ec

After that Red Square performance they were briefly detained by the police and then released. No trial, no conviction, no world outrage... nothing.

So, next time their organisers have chosen another venue to make sure they would get arrested and there would be headlines "Jailed for singing an anti-Putin song"...

Ah busted! I'll have to go report to Putin that my cover has been compromised.

Not that I have to validate my objectivity to you, but I am typing this from a comfortable home in Toronto, Ontario and my paycheques are signed by a B2B publisher for my services rendered as a marketing specialist. It must be too shocking for you to accept that someone might actually have an opinion that doesn't perfectly align with the western media narrative.

Complaining that most people find interesting something that you see as banal, and demanding they protest what you deem significant is not having a contrarian opinion. It's just being innapropiate to this conversation. Posting about the Marinaka Mine Massacre on HN would be more constructive.

Now, blaming all of this on the "western media narrative", a mindset relic of the hawkest hawks of the Cold War, who exaggerate a simple incident of "vandalism" in order to discredit the democratic government of Putin... Yeah, that's a contrarian opinion. Which just happens to be false. Western media simply does not give that much of a fuck now about Rusia. Past protests in Russia about the legitimacy of the elections? Here covered, at most, in passing. The law banning reunions? Don't care. The Pussy Riot incident? It's only on HN's front page because Kasparov was arrested.

I am not demanding that anyone find my observations important or central to the discussion of the pussy riot events. If you want to express condemnation of the sentence or the Russian government in general there are plenty of places for you to do so (including in this HN thread). It just so happens that my post reached enough upvotes that it made it to the top of this thread (democracy and free speech at work, ironically) so it must be something that HN is interested in as well.

You replying to me by telling me that my opinion is inappropriate to the conversation (which I started by the way... there are other conversations below you can express your approval of) is an attempt to censor me. Calling my thought process a relic of the cold war is either an intentional distraction or just naivete on your part.

If you disagree with my opinion about the double standards with which western media handles events from countries whose regimes it approves of and those that it doesn't that's completely fine. But I'd like you to consider a hypothetical incident which I've mentioned below: a few guys walk into a Manhattan synagogue, put Balaklavas over their heads and scream out profanities against Israel and capitalism. Would you really be as outraged if they were carted off to jail and put on some terrorist watch-list.

>It is a classical Russian propaganda defense: answer an accusation on human rights violations with "and you are lynching Negroes" or similar.

Really? Because it's also called "pot calling the kettle black".

Being a "classic defence" doesn't make it wrong.

Even if both sides are equally bad, the accuser is hypocritical on top of that.

>Kremlin is paying bloggers and commenters in Russia to post positive things about authorities:

Do they now?

"There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level." -- William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy

(it goes far back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird )

Noam Chomsky, had a rather simple and brilliant method of calculating how much coverage particular topics got. It's used in manufacturing consent. He or some grad students, collected all column inches related to East Timor and compared against the Khmer Rouge atrocities coverage in Cambodia. They found that the coverage of the atrocities far far outweighed the coverage of the "US supported Indonesian invasion and subjugation of East Timor".

It is this point I feel the parent is making, that the amount of coverage a topic receives is rooted in the propaganda aims of the powers that be and in the biases they wish to instill or are already instilled in the media consuming public.

I am merely commenting on the scale and spin of the reactions to news stories like Pussy Riot and the execution of miners in South Africa (or Gitmo, or US choppers in Iraq indiscriminately gunning down civilians). Instead of joining the chorus of rambling about the corruption of the evil Putin regime based on one out-of-context news story which is clearly being used for PR purposes, I just find it much more interesting to look at the larger narrative which might give me a more complete and more informed picture of the global political landscape. In the same vein I refuse to blindly focus on Obama's birth certificate or the issue of Romney's income taxes. No I am not being paid by the KGB to do this, as someone suggested. It's just critical thinking.

Edit: also by doing this I am not choosing to ignore corruption in Russia. It's clearly there as it is in any country, but there are more serious and more glaring examples of that corruption, albeit not as glamorous or news friendly and digestable.

Edit2: also you need to acquire some more information on that Omahr Khadr case.. it is definitely not as cut-and-dry as you've been led to believe.

From the Wikipedia article on Pussy Riot:

"Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich participated in some Voina performances. Tolokonnikova was part of a performance in which a number of couples were filmed having sex in the Biology Museum in Moscow in 2008."

You can easily find footage of them participating in this orgy. How would you handle such "protesters" that constantly show this kind of behaviour for many years? I guess they would be imprisoned in the US as well.

I would not "handle" them in any way. Why should I "handle" them? There are a lot of people having sex, some of them film that, so what? Who cares about it and how it is related to anything?

If you think people that have sex or film it (provided, of course, we're talking about consenting adults) are imprisoned in the US, you obviously do not know much about US. In the US, to be imprisoned, one has to actually commit a crime and be judged and sentenced, and this happens in independent court which does not jump when the government says "jump!". So please do not guess, because your guess is wrong.

So it is legal to have a public sex orgy in a museum in the US? I honestly didn't know that.

It is not legal, but perpetrators of such acts would be unlikely to receive 3 years in jail.

For example, a NY DJ was caught having public gay sex. He was arrested and sentenced to 12 sessions of counseling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Cee

Fines and short jail sentences are the typical result of such incidents.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-16/news/32272544_1_t...

Nor did Pussy Riot receive 3 years in jail for that.

This was something they did 4 years ago, and since then they repeatedly broke the law. (other examples: "Samutsevich took part in actions which involved releasing live cockroaches in a court room and kissing policewomen in the Moscow metro and on the streets (which in some cases was seen as attempted assault)")

The sentence for the DJ was perfectly resonable after this misstep, and I hope he didn't have trouble with the police any more after counseling. But imagine what the sentence would look like for him after repeatedly showing such behaviour.

Edit: Actually he did have sex in his car .. doesn't even look like if it was his intent to get caught. Thats a whole different thing and not comparable to having such a performance in a museum in front of 20 news reporters.

In the UK indecent exposure 'with the intent to shock' is punishable up to 2 years imprisonment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_exposure

US courts would deny every witness and every question from the defense in the trial for it. A large portion of the outrage is not from the fact that a law was punished, it was the show-trial nature of the proceeds.

They weren't charged for other incidents.

Yes, that is true. What I wanted to give you with my comment is an insight that this harsh sentence didn't come unexpectedly out of the blue.

Those girls have a long history of such "actions" and what in most civilized countries happens is that you first get fined, then you are maybe arrested and set free on probation, and if you still refuse to conform to a socially (and legally) more acceptable behaviour, you eventually end up in jail.

The same goes for Kasparov. He's been arrested so many times for willfully committing minor offenses, that if he is found to be guilty of biting that officer he'll probably get a sentence near the maximum of 5 years in prison.

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