People are free to say stupid things. Native Americans aren't a monolith -it was never 'their' land - there were hundreds of native nations who were variously at peace or at war with each other over the years.

I wonder how those Natives you know on twitter would carve up the land once they got it back - do Apaches need to go back to Canada, since they invaded the southwest only in the ~16th century and pushed out the Pueblo people?

moral relativism across space conjoined with moral absolutism across time is a silly combination

I don't actually have any idea what you are saying.

They're saying that your comment is irrelevant because you're comparing current issues between the USA and China with issues between the USA and Native Americans in a completely different time period. Today's morals aren't the same as they were hundreds of years ago, so it doesn't make sense to excuse current IP theft in China by pointing out historical theft of land by the USA.

If A criticizes B's behavior on moral grounds, with the hope of, say, "making the world a better place", then it would be logical mistake to respond to the criticism by pointing to bad behavior on A's own part.

If, however, A's criticism of B is not an attempt to "make the world a better place" but to prove one's own relative moral superiority, then not only is it highly pertinent to point out A's own moral failings, but also there need be nothing relativistic about it, since ex hypothesi the conversation no longer concerns the morality of this or that action but only whether one party has a legitimate claim to feel superior to the other.

It's not always easy to tell whether one is in the one or the other situation.

From what I gather, Natives don't see that theft as historical. They see it as still ongoing.

It makes sense when your view is that morals correlate to development which is time invariant. Developing nations steal IP to establish orphan industries, burn cheap and dirty coal to rapidly build industrial base, repress minorities to establish stable cultural hegemony. There are no other proven models to development, especially one on large country scales, and pretending it can be done ethically and insisting on those standards are possible when it has yet to be demonstrated is just ladder kicking hypocrisy. At some point we just have to accept that development is a dirty business full of hard moral calculus and judge progress and methods accordingly.

Translation: comparing apples and oranges.

Couldn't agree more. Well put.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad or wrong other comments are or you feel they are.

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

This is the weakest whataboutism I've ever seen

It's not whataboutism. So that might be why.

I fail to see how this anecdote about a Twitter comment is relevant to a comment about IP theft.

GP is correct - any older Cisco employee can count off a laundry list of things Huawei directly stole from them, and the Chinese state absolutely subsidizes them. GP is making the point that it isn't fair to compare Huawei prices to Apple prices given the amount of engineering Huawei stole from other companies and their government subsidies.

It's not an anecdote about a Twitter comment. It's a nutshell version of American history.

China also has lower labor costs generally. Lots of things cost less in other countries for the same reason.

It's rare for anyone to come up with something genuinely original. We depend on education and culture and many things to develop anything. Then we argue about things like intellectual property rights because such conventions are an attempt to sort out how to make society work given that ideas are easily "stolen" and if we don't allow for some means for originators of new things to profit, we actively discourage our best and brightest from contributing to forward progress.

But this forum skews American. Most people will argue "for" the American side and "against" the Chinese for that reason alone.

I'm only pointing out the hypocrisy and silliness of arguing this as if America has some absolute moral high ground.

I follow Natives on Twitter because, according to oral family tradition, I'm a small part Cherokee. I'm pretty sure most full-blooded Natives would happily ship me back to Europe along with the rest of the whites.

I don't know the right answer going forward. I just believe that you need actual facts to find it.

The implicit assumption that China is The Bad Guy and America is The Good Guy is unlikely to yield a real solution when there is so much low hanging fruit for saying "The two nations aren't all that different."

But it seems my thoughts are likely wholly unwelcome here, as is so often the case.