Comment by ericmay
5 hours ago
Maybe Pakistan shouldn’t have been harboring Bin Laden and whatever ill effects happened here are the fault of Pakistan. Not my problem - Pakistan’s government and people needed to do better and whatever the human cost there was it was worth it to get Bin Laden. Actions have consequences.
Also stop trying to deprive other people and governments of their agency just because it fits a convenient western superiority complex you have. They’re not stupid.
> whatever the human cost there was it was worth it to get Bin Laden. Actions have consequences
blaming the ~260M citizens for the actions of Pakistani government is repulsive.
Blaming the 340 million citizens of the US for Trump’s actions is repulsive too, but plenty of people enjoy doing that on the Internet.
Sorry. People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.
Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions. Vaccine denial in the US? Same thing. You can’t say Americans are responsible for anti-vax sentiments, for example, and then say other people around the world aren’t.
Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible? I’ll happily take you admitting we’re the best if you want to go that route.
You know, even being about to talk this much about your own government or foreign governments takes a certain level of privilege. At least 1/5th of Pakistan is in poverty.
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Did anyone do that in this thread? You are only the person I see projecting like this
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> Sorry. People are responsible for the governments they have. Everyone is, or nobody is.
In a democracy, yes. Pakistan however is a democracy only in distant theory, pretty much everyone sane calls it an authoritarian regime [1].
And no, in the age of guns and nuclear weapons, we can't go and blame a country's people for its government. I don't blame Gazan civilians for Hamas, I don't blame Iranian civilians for the Mullahs, I don't blame Chinese peasants for the CCP and I don't blame ordinary Russians for Putin. These people do not have a choice - either openly (e.g. China) or in practice (Pakistan, Russia, Iran).
> Those 260 million Pakistanis can educate themselves on vaccines and make informed decisions.
Pakistanis, especially in rural areas, are barely literate [2], and we're talking basic literacy here. Informed decisions require the ability to both access and understand relevant information.
> Or are Americans smarter and better than everyone else and so they’re more responsible?
Americans (as a whole) are at least better suited. On average they are far more literate, they got actual schools, they have reasonably free elections. Yes, the US democracy is flawed (FPTP and gerrymandering basically rendering the votes of swaths of people irrelevant, billionaires manipulating media coverage, ICE and other government organisations being used for voter suppression), but the US still is miles ahead of Pakistan or virtually all "third world" countries.
[1] https://statbase.org/data/pak-democracy-index/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_Pakistan
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