Comment by SeanLuke
12 years ago
Tu quoque is basically the "but everyone does it" argument. I agree that'd be specious -- but I'm not saying that. Rather, I'm the poster's claims ("arrogant, self-righteous, disrespectful, ignorant, mendacious") -- particularly "arrogant" -- imply that he thought the US was doing something unique that other countries are above, and thus the US was deserving of special disdain. This implication is simply wrong. But he's building his whole argument on it.
> imply that he thought the US was doing something unique
But the US is doing something unique. No other country has the global reach and the sheer military budget that the US has. It's debatable that other countries are "above" it in moral terms, but the US certainly has taken it to a whole new level.
Edit: I also don't see where "But he's building his whole argument on ... US was deserving of special disdain". Despite the larger scope of the US's transgressions, you are saying "but they do it too". I think that the Tu Quoque fallacy absolutely applies. Nowhere is it said that other countries would not be worthy of equal disdain under equal circumstances. And if it were to be said, it would be wrong.
> It's debatable that other countries are "above" it in moral terms
It's really not, since many of the releases of information about what the US is doing -- including the current one -- have other countries also neck deep in it. I mean, the actual spying in the article that this comment thread is attached to is done by the UK's GCHQ, NSA is just a consumer of the data.
As pointed out above, misconduct of other countries does not justify the own behavior. There is really no big difference between collecting the information on your own or letting someone else do the dirty work and then just crabbing the results. I should have pointed out more clearly that I am not especially against the behavior of the USA but against behavior like this in general but I did so in some other comments.
Besides that the US are doing (almost) unique things among to most developed countries, for example I can not even imagine any EU country doing something like Guantanamo or having the death penalty. To make it clear again, I am not primarily angry because of the spying on its own but the sentiment as to human rights beyond it.
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"5 eyes alliance" countries are neck deep in domestic spying, it appears they are their own independent spy service, accountable to no country and all collaborating to avoid each other's laws. Impossible for any of those countries to have free elections anymore with this kind of surveillance. Everybody being watched all the time makes for easy political blackmail to avoid any serious attempts to dismantle the global Stasi state they've been busy making under our noses for the last decade
Countries like Russia and China and Syria and Iran claim that they're spying on whatever they can and control their citizens online expression because (a) they say they need it / national security, (b) they are allowed to do it / sovereignity.
On the other hand, USA had earlier openly claimed in essence something like 'why we'd never, we don't spy on americans (Clapper), we don't record all communications, we're for the open net and transparency, we need to safeguard the internet from China and censorship, and we have 4th/1st amendment, so we're different'.
Everybody else who did that, didn't do it while hypocritically claiming that they're different - so I believe that US really did something unique in this particular instance and deserves special extra disdain for that.
The position of others is that doing all those things is okay, so they do it without moral problems. However, USA had claimed (and apparently still claims, at least for US-citizens) that it's not okay.... and do it anyway.