As far as I know, enslaved citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan are not directly involved in making US goods.

Yeah, I'll give you that.

There's a reasonable argument to be made against the parent, but "what about" isn't it.

I find "whataboutism is not an argument" is a knee-jerk conditioned reaction against putting things in perspective.

It's almost a Pavlovian thought-stopping response by now - "sure, we have faults but we know them already, can we now concentrate on treating the enemy as some unique evil again?".

No, it's “uniqueness isn't the argument, stop beating that strawman”.

China is uniquely fixated on here on HN, there's a thread every few days painting them as a unique threat.

I would say that's all accurate and correctly characterized. Ofc, it's easy to paint something that's already a finished work.

What about all the other logical fallacies? I think we should address many other logical fallacies before having a conversation about whataboutism.

That wasn't whataboutism. There isn't any arguments there also. It was simply pointing out that if this man's torture is being added to your karma if you buy anything chines then that would mean that buying anything US made would add all those mentioned things to your karma.

Exactly. The problem is, the West gets a moral high ground and even if they get criticism for their actions, the highest repercussions they encounter is "a slap to the wrist".

West gets moral high ground not because it's blameless - it isn't - but because it's faults are smaller. It could be counterproductive to judge something on a boolean scale - "perfect" vs. "not perfect so perfectly bad".

West is much more transparent than non-West, so we have better chance to differentiate good parts from bad parts. If we don't have such opportunity, and we consistently get burned with bad parts, we're forced to assume the whole non-Westness is bad. Here "West" and "non-West" is somewhat similar to "USA" and "China".

If China would be more transparent, if West would see differences, and interactions between those differences, and could judge the parts by those interactions, the scope of blame can be refined. Similarly with more transparent West we can see evolution of society or its parts towards more or less cruelty towards each other and judge and act accordingly.

You can only say this because you've been brainwashed into thinking all the atrocities committed before, say, 1950 don't count anymore. That was a different time! Racism is solved too.

*edit, that should probably be 1975 because we pretend the Vietnam war never happened

Plus 4-5 government topplings, invasions, and occupations in the last 20 years. But that's "in the past" too.

Would you consider forced sterilization of women, 'acceptable'?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/914465793/ice-a-whistleblower...

Perhaps you should think about why, when faced with evidence of an atrocity, your reaction is not "this is horrible and should be stopped" but "look at all these hypocrites denouncing the horrible thing". It seems to me a serious moral miscalibration.

You can resort to name calling if you want but the fact remains that none of the countries we've sanctioned for human rights abuses have stopped them. Which becomes continued justification for maintaining sanctions. At what point do we admit that sanctions are pointless?

So... Then you do not believe that things that China is doing are bad, such as forced sterilization?

That should be a call to action to fight against America's abuses, not a reason to ignore other countries abuses.

And it' not a single call, it's a prolonged process. There is progressive movement in USA which claims to focus on those societal deficiencies. There is a lot of work to change things, but also a lot of promise to improve them.

Yes, if you buy new U.S. products, all those things are on your karma.