This comment breaks the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There's a plausible (indeed obvious) interpretation of csallen's comment that doesn't say anything like that.
I know this is a highly charged topic, but that makes it more important to follow the guidelines, not less.
"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.
"It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
If it were so easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else, then you'd expect to have fewer people willing to stand by and cover up for Harvey Weinstein and all the similar cases. It seems more correct to say that it is easy to denounce the atrocities of someone you already dislike, or somehow see as 'other'.
People didn't stay quiet about HW because of some general difficulty of denouncing atrocities, they did so because he wielded significant influence and they didn't want their careers to suffer. This is sadly true of the victims as well: more than one of them has said that they wanted to go loud and public with it but were afraid that it would completely wreck their career through being blackballed, etc (and some of them have said that this _is_ what happened as a result of coming out with allegations).
That doesn't apply at all to the US failing to denounce e.g. Indonesia.
This misses the point, because the people standing up for Weinstein would be more like people in his own state in Chomsky's example. They were close enough to do something about it.
The quote directly addresses your point. What should U.S. citizens do about the crimes of other governments? By contrast, what should U.S. citizens do about crimes that are the doing of their own government, regardless of what proportion they are of the total state-level crimes in the world?
This is what he means by ethical value of these judgments.
You're arguing a different point from the one being discussed.
The argument from the beginning was not about where the U.S. ranks in goodness vs. evil compared with other countries.
Many people say Chomsky is full of it when he focuses his criticism on the U.S. for actions he believes to be state-level crimes because, these people say, other countries are the true evil ones.
Chomsky's response is that even if you think the U.S. government is responsible for only 2% of the crimes in the world, it is this 2% that falls on his shoulders (and yours, and mine) as a U.S. citizen. His efforts on that 2% can have meaningful impact that can't be had on the other 98%.
But I'd feel a lot better about saying that if I didn't expect that this isn't just a rhetorical gateway to turn around and ignore the high-body count crimes in favor of the politically-fashionable ones again, since "of course not" is the only dialectal response possible.
They should be understood in context. The US was engaged in a war against dictatorial USSR style communism for nearly 50 years. History has shown the US to be on the right side of that conflict.
Is people being killed ever a good thing? Almost never. Human life is inherently valuable. But is it at least more understandable when it is done in the name of trying to rid the world of a dangerous and destructive ideology? Yes it is.
>History has shown the US to be on the right side of that conflict.
That depends on who wrote the history book you're reading. By the accounts of the millions of innocents slaughtered by both sides, neither side was in "the right".
> But is it at least more understandable when it is done in the name of trying to rid the world of a dangerous and destructive ideology
This is factually wrong, the cold war was about imperialism and spheres of influence. The US was tearing down democracies and propping up dictators left and right to counter the Soviet Union.
Also Winston Churchill bragging about letting 2 million Indians starve. Stalin was trying to stop farmers from burning their own crops. It's interesting how one sided most of our "common knowledge" of the last century is.
Well constantly putting leaders who resulted in deaths into one basket, and naming one political ideology as an assimilated "source of evil" or "axis of evil" is one problem.
I mean by that logic people will believe Marx belongs to the realm of evil thinkers because history proves that a political theory is "dangerous".
History and politics is built on nuance and precise facts, not some broad idea of how to define an ideology. Ideology can be shaped in any form and is subject to interpretation, that's why it belongs to the realm of propaganda.
I'm not defending communism nor those leaders, but saying "communism is evil because mao and stalin were murderers" is just poor argumentation.
I don't think that's what he is implying. But it's also pretty clear that a lot of people died in questionable anti-communist conflicts like Vietnam or in Central America.
Don't delude yourself about Chomsky's objectivity. As late as 1969 in debate with William F. Buckley he refused to believe that the Chinese Communists were killing people with failed economic policies and authoritarian crackdowns.[0]
Right. It calls into question his intellectual honesty and the morality of his intellectual preoccupations. Not to mention the pension he pulls from the MIT endowment which is heavily invested in the military industrial complex he supposedly despises, but not to my knowledge has ever used his clout among the MIT faculty to protest in formal petition.
BUT those are what you just did. You are just as guilty of what you were excusing of others. You just made MAJOR hundreds of millions of people's deaths and called all of these little.
Ah, the other side was evil too- helping to get away with it ever since you hit Tommy with the shovel in the sandbox.
If Hitler murders 5 Million and Stalin murder 5 Million, we substract Hitler vom Stalin and End up with zero million. Nothing ever happened! So all we need, is enough crimes to substract from our owns, and we get away with clean hands.
And there i was muder was bad, when all i had to do, was get my muder victims family to shoot back in the general direction and hit somebody.
PS: Mugabe, Pol-Pot, Mao, Stalin are all crimes, where the US did not intervene.
It's a moot point considering that in a slightly different world we'd be talking about the crimes of Raegan and some other US presidents in exactly the same way.
It's only a crime because a victor chose to label it so, a different victor would have labeled a different thing the crime, it's all quite arbitrary in the end.
Phillip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle is a very interesting thought experiment in that regard.
As enjoyable and gripping as the Amazon show might be, having the same show set in our reality would mean you'd be rooting for a couple of Neo-Nazis trying to revive the Third Reich. Would such a show still be as enjoyable to us? I doubt it.
No, they are not, they are only a matter of definition and framing. You defined who's worse by the number of people killed, that's one way to do it but not the only one, it also leaves a lot of wiggle room with "indirect people killed", that's where all objectivity breaks down.
Case in point: Your local hardcore communist would argue that the global capitalistic system is not just killing magnitudes of more people every year, it's keeping the remaining ones literally enslaved for life.
The moment you think it's as clear-cut like that, that's the moment you should question your position because the reality is never as clear-cut or convenient as that. It's naive to assume that the reality in which we live is the "good one" where always and only "the good guys" win and that's why we can talk about the bad guys being the bad guys, but that's exactly what you did there with your allusive "Raegen presided and encouraged the advance of human civilization and these other guys did just want to see the world burn".
Like it's something that could only happen because of Raegan and all alternative outcomes, not involving Raegan, are automatically assumed to be worse or not possible at all.
I for one can imagine a number of alternate realities where Raegan would never have been the president, where the US lost the cold war, and we'd still be sitting here arguing just like this but in a slightly different setting, but "human civilization" could have advanced nonetheless.
Some of these alternative realities could be "worse", others could be "better", but I'd say the vast majority of them would be rated as "normal" for people living in said realities because without being able to experience these alternative outcomes it's pretty much impossible to build a frame of reference which ones of them are actually the "best" or the "worst".
Yes, so any time you go there you can follow what is happening, eventually there will a consensus what happened according to Wikipedia and end of story. What do you think what is the real story of those pictures with the trams?
If, as this guy contends, the future economy won't adapt to automation as it has in the past, it will lead to massive unemployment and social instability.
When threatened with massive social instability, smart countries will regulate automation. Countries that fail to regulate will face rising social instability and eventually eat themselves alive, being taken over by countries that are more stable. Political elites will regulate automation purely out of the interest of keeping their jobs.
All of these technofatalist arguments (the technology is coming, so why fight it?) fail to take into account that Angloamerican laissez-faire politics are not a global inevitability.
the flaw in your reasoning i think is that there will be zero-sum fight to have the limited number of companies in your country so that you can tax those companies and support the massive number of unemployed people. there will be a race to the bottom in the automation regulation that you describe because companies will just move if they are not allowed to lower costs through more automation... thus i think the result is that some countries will have very high employment rates because all the high-skilled, unautomatable jobs are located there (e.g. the US) and some countries (e.g. spain?) will have really high unemployment... this will lead to extreme tensions internationally followed by god knows what..
Unfortunately (fortunately?) your rebuttal assumes that 1) companies can move easily from country to country and 2) companies are motivated entirely by profit.
As for 1, countries have many ways from persuasion to coercion to keep companies in their sphere of influence. There are plenty of business-unfriendly countries in this world that somehow retain businesses. In the real world, there's friction.
In my cursory research, I find 2 to be, once again, a liberal-democratic assumption which relies on our particular barrier between public and private. This barrier doesn't exist the same way everywhere: some corporations operate as extensions of nationalistic projects. Gazprom's relationship to Russia is different than Apple's relationship to the US. Samsung (and other Chaebol corporations) has a different relationship to the Korean nation than Google has with the US.
it is not just a function of companies moving after they are successful. just look at silicon valley where most of the best start-ups are founded. silicon valley is a classic global zero-sum game because the network effects are so strong... look at attempts in chile, dublin, london etc. to create startup hubs, they are struggle with the fact that silicon valley is taking all the best companies first...
re 2) that's a good point i didn't thikn of that and many countries may seek to nationalize big corporations to keep them based in the domestic country etc..
clearly i'm not arguing that there will be no companies in some countries and all the companies in other countries, but maybe just a more extreme version of what you already see now where most of the big technology companies are based in just two countries: usa and china... maybe you need only half of all the companies in the world to be global enough to serve the world from just one location/country to have extreme international inequality/differences in % unemployed etc.
Congrats! I feel like too much of what I read on here is about despair and how TPP is going to eat us and Ted Cruz is going to steal our lunch money. Good for you for taking a positive step.
"Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people. You will live in a world without kings, only princes in whom our faith is shattered"
