[flyGuyOnTheSly]

I have hundreds of products in my house that say "Made in Hong Kong".

I don't have a single product in my house that says "Made in Iraq".

It's not strange that North America doesn't care much about Iraqi plight, as we have next to no relationship with them or their people.

Same as we all cannot afford to cry over every single other person's mother and father passing away, but we cry over our own parents passing.

[essenauta]

>occupy a sovereign country for 12 years

>Continue to keep soldiers there

>no relationship

flyGuyOnTheSly, I...

[heraclius]

Feeling sympathy based on economic importance seems bizarre. The economic impact of the HK protests on North America will be fairly minimal. The only reason to feel sympathy, then, is that governments are attacking their own people. That isn’t a reason to ignore Iraq.

Also it’s amusing that you’ve managed to elide the not insubstantial relationship of having started a war that killed at least a hundred thousand Iraqis and in all probability many more.

[flyGuyOnTheSly]

>Also it’s amusing that you’ve managed to elide the not insubstantial relationship of having started a war that killed at least a hundred thousand Iraqis and in all probability many more.

My government sending a few thousand troops over to Iraq decades ago does not bring me any closer to the people of Iraq.

If anything, it distances me from them.

I don't know anybody who served in Iraq.

I was always disgusted with Canada's involvement in the whole mess.

There are 10x as many People from Hong Kong living in Canada [0] as there are Iraqis [1].

So by that metric, Canadians in general should care approximately 10x as much about news from Hong Kong vs news from Iraq and I would say that's pretty accurate from what I have seen recently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Canadians

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Canadians

[zimbatm]

There are a lot more things at play.

Hong Kong is ideologically closer to American's values, and so having China take it over can be seen as a form of indirect threat. It also plays into the whole trade war going on at the moment. Financially, American companies have more ties with Hong Kong than Iraq. ...

People are also influenced by what the media gives them to think about this week.

[mlang23]

Your people invaded Iraq just 15 years ago. No matter what you say, I believe you have a rather large obligation when it comes to Iraq. It is easy to forget history, right?

[flyGuyOnTheSly]

I am a polish immigrant living in Canada. "My people" didn't do anything to Iraq.

[TeMPOraL]

FWIW, Polish army did help the US in Iraq, in the vain hope that if we kiss the US ass hard enough, we'll get visa requirements for Polish people removed...

[yohsii]

> It's not strange that North America doesn't care much about Iraqi plight, as we have next to no relationship with them or their people.

> I am Canadian.

> I am a polish immigrant living in Canada.

you're North American, Canadian then you're Polish. just pick one. in the first example, you were speaking as if you're an American and others are right to point out that America does have some responsibilities regarding Iraq given the recent history. Canada was involved too.

[catalogia]

North American != American.

For that matter, many in Central and South America take exception to the term "American" being applied to USA citizens. So the term "American" can in some contexts be ambiguous. However "North American" is unambiguously referring to residents of any country in North America. It's wholly reasonable for somebody living in Canada to speak of living in North America. Arguably Canadians and Alaskans have more of a right to the term than anybody else!

[ephemeralism]

well, you did invade them. Overthrew their government. but sure, other than that, next to no connection.

[serf]

>well, you did invade them. Overthrew their government.

A one-person invasion? And he even succeeded at overthrowing a government all by his lonesome self? That's impressive.

This mild sarcasm I used above is to draw attention to the ludicrous idea that any citizen, anywhere, is responsible for the actions of their government.

Hee and haw about how we citizens brought whoever to power. I don't care. Until the day that government corruption ends and elections become fair, the governments' actions are not my own.

Call me when that day occurs.

P.S. here's a bit from the comic Doug Stanhope that hits a similar topic. [1]

"‘Oh, was that us?’ Was that me and you, Tommy? We saved the French? Jesus. I know I blacked out a little after that fourth shot of Jägermeister last night, but I don’t remember… "

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKT4a-RMT5o

[vonseel]

He’s like Liam Neeson. He has skills. Very specific skills.

[flyGuyOnTheSly]

I am a Polish immigrant to Canada.

Canada very reluctantly helped the US with their air raid campaign over Afghanistan, but as far as I am aware we didn't have much say in Iraq.

And either way, I fail to see how that translates to having a closer relationship with their people.

If anything, it distances them from our psyche.

Obviously the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do. I am not arguing that it was right in any way whatsoever.

[freeflight]

Canada is part of FiveEyes, thus aid was offered [0] and very likely taken.

The lack of Canadian large scale military participation was due to practicality and not moral objections to the invasion [1]:

"The weakness of the Canadian military had been a factor in its very limited role in the 1991 Gulf War. While the military had been asked about the feasibility of sending 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (4 CMBG) from Germany to the Gulf to participate in direct combat operations, the Canadian Forces were forced to report that Operation "Broadsword", a theoretical deployment, would likely be a failure."

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/weston-canada-offered-to-ai...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_the_Iraq_War

[flyGuyOnTheSly]

Again, I was not in the military in the early 90s.

I have no connection to Iraq personally.

I do not collectively harbor guilt and constantly stress about the horrible things that the country I choose to reside in has done in their past.

I have Hong Kong products in my house, and I interact with people who were born in Hong Kong all the time.

The same cannot be said for Iraqi products or people.

That is the point I am trying to make.

[freeflight]

As a German, I consider that a very weird stance to have.

I try to keep up with the military involvement of my country, I'd guess other people in other countries would do the same.

Tho I guess in contrast to you I actually get to interact with a whole bunch of Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, and other nationalities out of the MENA region.

People out of HK are a rather non-existing sight at the local refugee reception center.

[monetus]

The responsibilties and attachments of a superorganism like a society differ too much from that of an individual's. It is so easy to let communcation break down when people discuss both of those things at the same time.

[vonseel]

What’s made in Hong Kong? iPhones and electronics? I feel like most of the stuff in my house that has a “made in X” tag says something like China, Bangladesh, or Taiwan.

[flyGuyOnTheSly]

I own a lot of old video game systems that were made in Hong Kong, for example.

[TeMPOraL]

The invasion did have a lot to do with shaping the oil market to the US liking, so if you're a western consumer of petroleum industry - which you are - then perhaps you might find some connection with the plight of Iraqi people after all.

[ndarwincorn]

Lol pretending like Harper wasn't at the front of the pack right next to Blair hopping on the coalition of the willing

[dang]

This comment breaks the site guidelines by being flamebait, by being snarky, by being unsubstantive, and probably other things too. Would you please not post like this to this site? We're trying for something a bit better than tedious internet ragewars, which is what posting like this leads to.

Your underlying point can of course be expressed substantively and I'm sure you can do that if you want to.

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

[ephemeralism]

Sure, I'll give it a shot. Since the post has been flagged I'd imagine no one's gonna read it, but what the hell.

Since the day I first found Hacker News, some years before I created my account, this site and it's comment section has always been on my daily reading list. I'm a very infrequent poster, but have since then read hundreds of comments, pretty much every single day. I guess my personality leans towards trying to understand rather than be understood.

I don't really have any connection to the Silicon Valley, but from the moment I first laid eyes on this site, it felt like an invaluable resource of insight on a huge variety of issues, not just tech.

Sadly, these days I mostly just hate-read it.

On geopolitical issues, there's almost zero understanding from the commentariat, and if there is any, to make matters worse, a lot of the time you have to squint your eyes to even read it. There's a huge part of the written english webosphere, dedicated to discussing and analysing this, the most important subject of them all, <i>war and peace and prosperity</i>, from a completely different viewpoint, but you'd never know by just reading HN. Luckily you can go elsewhere, and I suspect a sizable number of past commenters have, in frustration, done so.

Here, all you get is the same tired neoliberal corporate media viewpoint. Constant denigration of the long, long, list of the enemies of the American political blob. The glittering valley’s technocrats opinions are indistinguishable from those of the shining city upon a hill.

In this dojo, the opposing voice is almost nowhere to be found, always shut down with cries of robots and unfair comparing.

Russian, Chinese, Syrian, Iranian, Venzuelean viewpoints? Forget it. All these countries have news and opinion sites in english, but never to be linked on HN. Getting those opposing perspectives is not for the HN denizen, unless it has first been approved for reading by the NY Times. HN comments have not yet reached the complete unbearable insufferableness of r/worldpolitics, but to me it seems like just a matter of time.

Sorry, but it just really grinds my gears to read someone casually say that the North American people have no connection to the Iraqi people. The US “embassy” in Baghdad is larger than the Vatican. Like all these endless wars, bombings and sanctions against the Middle East is just a minor matter. At worst a small mistake, that in the grand scheme of things is of little importance.

NO.

The consequences of the West's relentless and cruel war of destruction and chaos against the core of the African and Eurasian landmass will be the defining cause of most of the problems the United States, Isreal, Saudi Arabia and Europe will face the rest of this century. A thousand years from now, all history books dealing with the early 21th century will have The Invasion of Iraq as the focal point, with most everything else a mere footnote.

The United States has tried over and over to prevent any even bigger and stronger entities to form on it's opposing, much larger landmass. It has decisively failed, inevitably so.

In the 2020’s, whether it wants to or not, America and it’s shrinking list of vassals will have to come to terms with what roles they can have in this new world order, our shared future of mankind. If these formerly dominant parts of the world can not imagine a role for themselves that is appropriate, the rest of the world will choose for us.