There's an old Russian political joke where an American and a Soviet car salesmen are arguing about who makes better cars. The American asks: "How many decades does an average Soviet man need to work to save for your car?" The Soviet replies: "And you are lynching Negroes!"

When you're hypocritical, you lose credibility. Your words become meaningless. People stop believing what you say, even if what you are saying is true. When you claim that someone doing something wrong is bad, but don't agree that the same action is wrong when you do it, that makes you a hypocrite.

You could almost compare the back-and-forth accusations of both the US and China as two kids on the playground exchanging taunts of "I know you are but what am I?" Sadly, these children have guns which they use against innocent victims who suffer tremendously. Of course, China isn't in any position to criticize anyone for human rights violations, and the US is correct to make the world aware of human rights abuses. Atrocities like Tiananmen Square and the torture of Falun Gong practitioners are not defensible and tu quoque doesn't make your actions less wrong. But that's not really the point. It doesn't matter if China's intention is to draw away criticism of its own abuses - the question is whether or not their criticism of the US government is accurate. And, according to the examples in this article, the criticism is well-founded.

Do you think US violations of human rights encourages other countries to do the same? Do you think the US government really cares about human rights violations in other countries, or is this just playing politics with China? Does the US government have the moral authority to criticize? Is it becoming dangerous to speak out against government oppression? Should political freedoms differ depending on the population size of a country? What happens when a government loses credibility?

The US government consists of a bunch of hypocrites. I know, tell you something you don't know, right?

Recently, Hillary Clinton and her lackeys at the US State Department released the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010. Shockingly, it didn't include any of the human rights "practices" of the US - practices which have been said to "mirror the worst excesses of some dictatorships." Go figure.

The United States government - whose president wins the Nobel Peace Prize, yet can't seem to stop bombing other countries where hundreds of thousands of innocent victims die, and whose CIA runs a rendition and torture program openly around the world, and whose judiciary runs secret trials to convict people who were tortured, and whose highest court allows prosecutors to lie, fabricate, or withhold evidence against innocent victims who spend 14 years in jail on death row, and whose military murders and rapes children and women for sport and is so proud of its torture that it takes pictures with smiling, happy soldiers (and many more which Obama is trying to prevent from being released - thinks it has the moral authority to judge. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...

Said China: "The United States ignores its own severe human rights problems, ardently promoting its so-called 'human rights diplomacy', treating human rights as a political tool to vilify other countries and to advance its own strategic interests." In no way will I defend the human rights violations by the Chinese government. However, in this point, they are absolutely correct. And to prove that point, I took the opening paragraphs from the State Department's report on China and modified it to reflect US hypocrisy.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

DISCUSS!

Original posting by Braincrave Second Life staff on Apr 21, 2011 at http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=534