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Whitewing424 t1_iybustq wrote

Reply to comment by BassmanBiff in Forced Uyghur labor is being used in China's solar panel supply chain, researchers say by chrisdh79

Except we can do nothing about the Chinese problem that isn't an act of war, but we can theoretically solve the problem at home without invading another country. Going to the UN or using economic sanctions isn't going to work, and could escalate into war anyway.

Further, it's hypocritical to complain about what China is or isn't doing when we aren't putting in any effort to talk about the problem at home.

Fix your own house, then worry about what someone else is doing in theirs. If we want to stop China from doing bad things, then maybe we should have a moral leg to stand on first, or it's just going to go nowhere.

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BassmanBiff t1_iye5zxh wrote

It's not either/or. Totally agreed that the best way to fix this is to fix it at home first, and we are trying to do that. But that goes both ways; we can use people yelling about China as leverage to encourage change at home, too.

I think it's self-defeating to only mention either of these problems when we're trying to call somebody a hypocrite for caring about the other one. It just shuts people down, it doesn't encourage them to actually do more. We should encourage people to shout about this stuff so we can redirect it, not simply shut it down because it feels righteous to call out "virtue signaling."

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Whitewing424 t1_iyeq6ud wrote

The trouble is that it's a very common propaganda tactic to draw attention to other nations in order to make it easier to hide what happens at home. People have a finite amount of energy, attention, and outrage. If it is channeled against China, then it isn't being channeled at home. Look at the sheer number of news articles about what China is doing compared to the US prison situation. I wouldn't be surprised if its more than 10:1.

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BassmanBiff t1_iyezslj wrote

Attention is limited, but also fragile. It comes from whatever people are passionate about, and shutting that down just makes people disengage, it doesn't get them fired up about something else -- least of all the thing that was important to whoever shut them down. So it's not a decision about "we have 10 attention, where do we put it," it's about "what generates more attention for us to use in the first place."

It's obviously selfish for people to disengage just because their feelings are hurt, but it's also just how people work whether we like it or not. I think it's important to acknowledge that, stoke whatever passions people have around this topic in general, and then encourage that passion to go further by redirecting it where it can do the most good.

Just policing which topics people get to feel passionate about, telling them to shut up and do better when they choose the wrong ones, doesn't really make anyone active for our preferred cause even if it's objectively more important. It does make us feel good to shout people down, though, by feeling like we're more aware than they are. I think it's very easy to convince ourselves that we're fighting the good fight when we're really just stoking our own ego.

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