Can we please stop acting like the USA is somehow a "good guy" anymore? We have to realize that the authoritarian demons have the battering ram at the door and I really don't want to find out what happens when the USA turns into an authoritarian militaristic regime. We're way more than half way there already and people support it. Our very own government is a threat to us all, or at least those who will find themselves on the wrong site of the inner circle.
Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade):
- Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion
- Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine
- Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, disobeying their parents, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc. Or, more commonly in the "developed" world, failure to investigate or pursue family-based vigilante "justice" against same.
- Failure to acknowledge women as people and rape as a crime
- Committing violence against, or being complicit in violence against, children who dared to go to school
- Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly
- Outright censorship of any reporting that paints the state in a negative light
---
"Knowing things about citizens" is dangerous because it enables the state to be far more effective in pursuing policies like the above. We ought to limit the government's knowledge of the lives of its citizens because that makes it much harder to effectively implement policies like these.
HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.
Can somebody good with their logical fallacies let me know if this falls under "Fallacy of relative privation"?
This definition [1] even uses this very argument as an example:
"The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example, to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies but between America and the ideal of freedom."
I find it a scary way to look at the world and to me it always comes off as less an honest argument and more like somebody who understands fallacy using it to persuade the reader for their own benefit.
Like the sort of thing they'll tell you as they are locking up your cage. "Hey, you're lucky it's dry unlike the cages the bad guys use!" the voice under the helmet said.
> Can we please stop acting like the USA is somehow a "good guy" anymore?
I am arguing the specific assertion that surveillance makes America morally equivalent to or less than the countries we oppose. That does not seem to be true. Apologies if that's not what parent meant.
Of course this doesn't make America "good" or even okay, but it is entirely possible to have severe problems while still being a "good guy" relative to the likes of Iran.
Its not just surveillance. Its also the mass murder of millions of people in the middle east as a result of American-led aggression. Just because its done with death robots from the sky doesn't make it morally justifiable.
I see, I often make that mistake actually of ignoring the context of a response relative to the parent, perhaps a fallacy itself!
I just get spooked by those comparisons. I think I agree with you in the end that ultimately we the relative good guys and it's important to keep that in mind. In Fact it's our role as the relative good guys that makes it so damn important to make sure we exercise our rights to free speech and political freedom to make sure we stay the good guys.
1. The War in Iraq killed over a million people. We have death robots that kill people from the sky.
2. Snowden, Manning, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond
3. Don't know about this one. I think it's worth mentioning Racism, Islamophobia and Islam or race related violence here.
4. #opDeathEaters
5. I don't know about this one either, but school seems mostly like a tool to incur debt. So not necessarily a plus.
6. You watched the Healthcare debate, right?
7. Surveilled reading is more dangerous than censoring books, full stop. But if you're looking for censorship, there's plenty to go around. Try finding a copy of the Sony leaks these days. Look at what is happening to social media.
I won't address each individual issue, but this comes across as a bit unsubstantiated. Here are the first two, the rest slowly turn a little crazier down the list.
The Iraq war has not killed over a million people by almost any estimate. Actual body counts are around 100,000 and most estimates place it around 500,000 for all lives lost. This is not explicit in deaths caused by American troops.
Snowden, Manning and all are not always looked at in the same light as some see it. Not all state secrets are inherently bad.
>>HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.
Here's the thing: countries can transition into totalitarianism quickly.
1930 Germany was very, very different than 1940 Germany. Hitler's rise to power happened in the blink of an eye, before most people understood what was happening.
This is why "oh, being listed in a database is nowhere as bad as being summarily executed" should be consolation. Such mindsets breed complacency, whereas what we need is constant vigilance and an extreme intolerance for policies that grant the government more power without any oversight.
On the last point (edit), absolutely when you consider that the 'drug war' and cannabis prohibition are basically a for-profit collusion between many corporate entities and government which result in significant harm to the populace.
Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine
Al-Awlaki? He was not accused of killing anyone himself, but got drone striked for writing terrorist propaganda. So did his son (for having Al-Awlaki as a father, no less). That seems like a pretty close fit.
Corruption to a degree that renders the public health infrastructure so dysfunctional that tens of thousands of people die needlessly
That's a funny example. Most people in western non-US countries would say the US meets this definition handily.
All that said, your point stands. There are worse governments than the US government. But lots better too.
You don't get to perpetrate your crimes because others are doing worse things. All crimes are reprehensible some more than others but no perpetrator of any crime gets off (or should get off) by pointing to others that do worse things.
> Use of force against people who commit such crimes as selecting their own sexual partners, being seen in public with members of the opposite sex, texting members of the opposite sex, being homosexual, etc.
This happens but you tolerate it because it's consistent with your arbitrary local culture. Consider pedophilia (having "wrong" sexual feelings) which comes with chemical castration and an attempt to "cure" it along with imprisonment of course. You don't even have to abuse anyone to suffer some of these consequences. Sound familiar? Have you ever met any self-confessed pedophile who hadn't been arrested for a related crime? Until they're outed, they're forced to keep their feelings secret from everyone because it's a kind of western thought crime. This leads us to imagine that all pedophiles rape children. They don't any more than 60 years ago all homosexuals raped children.
I think it's also naive to think of the government as the "bad guy" as well. Classifying the government as bad or good is basically trying to assign a singular attribute to the aggregate actions of thousands of people in politics and government agencies. The truth is neither black or white, and extremely complicated.
It depends on whether you're classifying based on intentions or on results. When you're using the word "bad guy", it implied the intentions to be bad/evil. However, it's easy to see that a complex system can't (normally) be assigned an intention. But even if every actors within the system is acting in good faith, the emergent behaviour can still have bad result.
In the case of government, it's definitely not complicated to classify the aggregate behaviour as unqualified bad (in term of result), regardless of the intention of the individuals working within the systems.
Not just that, but they are conducting online propaganda by fake commenting, fake news and manipulation of ranking and news feeds. And not just USA - they do it on an even larger scale in China. (here's a wiki source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)
Search keyword: "wumao" which means paid internet commentator or "public opinion molder".
remember, it takes a magnitude more effort to refute bullshit than to create it. it is just tiring to see asinine comments like the OPs.
as if the US or any country ever was a beacon of light and justice. slavery? genocide against the natives? two unnecessary nuclear bomb attacks? anything that ever happened in latin america, in the last 100 years? guantanamo? iraq 2?
same for any other empire, they're all built on blood, racism and delusion. the brits, japan, china, the romans, the soviets. it does not matter. it is all the same bullshit.
