no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.

not Americans.

They always need someone to blame.

Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence?

Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans?

Can we consider 9/11 an accident?

Would it be the same to you?

You know when really nobody talks about it?

When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance.

Are you aware of this?

Do they talk about it in USA?

They never apologized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

***

can we also talk about this?

I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes...

***

It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.

China handled it much better anyway.

It's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign.

It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention.

Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better.

After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.

This is probably the most egregious example of "whataboutism" I've seen on HN.

I think you're missing the point.

To me the post was answering to someone claiming that

- Americans suffered the consequences of COVID because of China, which is arguably not true, they have handled the pandemic badly because of their own faults, incompetence and hubris (and a President in denial).

- The Americans are at the first stage of grieving over this, because they are obviously victims, while truth is they are often perpetrators that just don't care of the consequences of what they do, because if some non American dies, it's probably because they deserve it. During COVID they proved that they also don't care very much if someone of their own dies, because FREE MARKET OH YEAH! FLY EAGLE OF FREEDOM! Which has honestly been embarrassing, watching from outside.

If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.

> If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.

I'm not American, nor do I live in America.

And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism:

> "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900. he first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China."

What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"?

How does this sound?

It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally. But if you really think things go that way because people do not understand who's their enemy (the Chinese who want to kill you by engineering a virus), what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

Should they cut the links too?

What about what the USA and UK did to Chinese people?

There's a reason why they made a cultural revolution and chose communism, and no, being a "democracy" doesn't make your country automatically better.

Spoiler alert: American people have lost many relatives because of their government.

So maybe it's toward them that they should be angry and ask for a change.

Even if it was a lab leak, the right solution would be cooperation, so that it doesn't happen again (because next time could happen to the US...)

> what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

As I said: literally whataboutism. And that is just a distraction tactic used to deflect attention from the issue at hand.

In some limited circumstances it may be a legitimate tactic, for example, when it is relevant to highlight that the person making the accusation has a bias. For the most part, however, even if the person making the accusation is a hypocrite or has double standards, this does not mean that their accusation is false.

https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-...

It's completely legitimate to have a discussion about US imperialism. But not to try to deflect a discussion about Chinese recalcitrance by deflecting it like this.