[bildung]

> No, it's real, just not as real as we like to think. Between "imprison people of Japanese ancestry for the rest of the war, then free them" and "imprison people of Jewish ancestry, then kill them", there is a real moral difference. They are both wrong, but they are not equal.

Of course, but Germany belongs to the "West", too. I think GP alluded to e.g. human rights in China.

[lomnakkus]

I must be missing something, but China is actually doing "bad things" now. The Japanese internment happened ~75 years ago. I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then. (That's not say that everything's just fine and dandy, but there is a clear difference between the West and, say, China today.)

[RobertoG]

"I must be missing something, but China is actually doing "bad things" now. The Japanese internment happened ~75 years ago. I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then."

Well, I suppose you are missing all what happened after September 11 2001, including Guantanamo bay detention camp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp).

[hkt]

Don't forget the detention centers for "migrants" (often people fleeing war) and the fact that the UK has now legalised a surveillance state that the stasi would have had erotic dreams about.

[lomnakkus]

You both (parent + grand-parent poster) make good points.

I find it mildly interesting that you both should mention the two somewhat incestuous partners, the US and the UK. (I don't live in either, so I may be somewhat insulated from these things and it's pretty easy to forget this stuff when it's not part of your daily life.)

I'm not going to argue that the Guantanamo situation is in any way a good thing, but at least it's not affecting a billion+ people every day. Obviously it's affecting several thousand people (and their relatives) way worse (individually) than the billion+ people are being affected in China.

Regarding the UK: Yes, it's terrible, but then again the UK population hasn't really experienced any real strife wrt. the powers wielded by its state... yet. That is, the populace at large probably haven't had any hands-on experience of just how badly things can go (Stasi, FSB, etc.). I truly hope it doesn't come to a 1984-type situation in the UK. At least it doesn't exist right now (cf. China). (EDIT: I would say that, post-Snowden, anyone who didn't believe that every nation on earth was spying on their own citizens in whatever way they could was probably being naive... but there are a great deal of people who have no idea who Snowden is.)

Anyway... these are definitely interesting times.

[jlillyreed]

> I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then.

You might like to think so, but you'd be VERY VERY wrong. This year Trump surrogates began justifying their proposal to create a muslim registry by saying that the Japanese Internment gave precedence for their desired actions.

[sctb]

Yes, the no-politics experiment has ended (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), but this comment is not great for HN in any case. When discussing controversial topics, the bar is actually higher for civility and substantiveness, and we need to especially avoid introducing flamewar topics without anything new to say as the guidelines ask of us. We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139936.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: assuming the factual part of your comment is true, it isn't really off topic in an already-highly-politicized thread. I was reacting to what seemed like an injection of partisan politics, but there seems to be a reasonable connection between the two subjects, so we've put this back. The bit about making comments more civil when topics are divisive is still important, so please be mindful of that.

[jlillyreed]

> assuming the factual part of your comment is true, it isn't really off topic in an already-highly-politicized thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-inter...

Is that a good enough source?

[lomnakkus]

Key word: Proposal

I mean, yes, I agree that we're seeing some extremely worrying signaling from the coming US administration, but it's not actually happening right now... and it would hopefully be struck down by (at least) the Supreme Court. Notwithstanding that, it's extremely worrying that these things are actually popular ideas... which I suppose speaks towards "moral superiority", so point taken.

[YPCrumble]

Aren't we still in political moratorium week? How does one flag a comment?

[DanBC]

To flag a comment you click the timestamp, and then click the [flag] link. There's a small karma threshhold - you need about 30 karma to do so.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

It was ended.

[striking]

Clearly 'dang needs to remind people of this.

[dang]

We're looking through all the comments that mention this and replying to all of them when other users haven't already.