[vlovich123]

Whataboutism isn’t a useful game. The claim was that they don’t interfere with politics of external countries. They do.

The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now. Believing it’ll stay there is naive.

Playing the moral superiority game is uninteresting in either direction. Games of power inherently are devoid of morality.

[darkwater]

Ok, let's follow your rules then. If we remove morality, we are left with what? Pure numbers? If you want to be technically correct China foreign interventions are > 0, indeed. But the scale of US actions is, I would dare to say, at least one magnitude bigger. An empire should be judged for how they treat their own citizens, their allies and their enemies. And if we do that, maybe China and the US are not so different.

[vlovich123]

I’m confused. You start off like you’re going to disagree and then end with the same conclusion I was trying to suggest. Keep in mind I was replying to subvenir who said “eh China not bad - they’ve file nothing wrong to me”

[darkwater]

I read your previous message as implying "US is good", rather than "China is bad too". I'm glad I misunderstood you and that we agree then.

[randunel]

I'd like you to familiarise yourself with a legal and societal principle we use in civil law countries:

> de minimis non curat praetor

Which basically means judges are not interested in minor disputes. When you add the USA to the mix, China's actions pale in comparison to the point of being negligible, no point in discussing them given the scale of USA's warmongering, overseas and local crimes. "They never interfered in [...]" is an exaggeration which shows the lack of importance of China's crimes when compared to the USA's, that's all.

The "whataboutism" here isn't a deflection strategy, it shows the hypocrisy and correctly minimises the scale of China's actions in comparison to the hypocrites'.

[nswango]

Whataboutism is a very useful game to reveal whether people are being honest or not.

If someone is vocally complaining about country A doing some oppressive activity, while ignoring country B doing 100x the same activity, the comparison does not forgive or excuse country A, or make them right or admirable.

But it does allow us to conclude that the person complaining is biased. Either they don't care about the oppressive activity and want to attack country A for some other reason. Or they have a particular fondness for country B and will never accept that it does wrong. Or some variation on these.

[vlovich123]

Except it’s op posting whataboutism not me - their claim is that China has done nothing wrong to them with the implication that the USA has. I was highlighting that China indeed likely has done the things they’re complaining about.

[Cookingboy]

>The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now.

Come on, are you seriously equating hacking to literally bombing and killing people? That's just arguing in very bad faith.

Calling hacking "warfare" is just intellectually dishonest, if not downright disgusting toward the actual victims of American wars.