I really don't understand this line of thinking.. if someone (whether it's a country, company, person) engage in evil behavior then of course we should do everything possible to dissuade others from supporting them until they change. It's possible for this site to serve intellectual curiosity without directly supporting an evil regime that put Muslims in concentration camps, engage in medical genocide (organ harvesting), and all sorts of human rights violations.
It gets simpler if you understand the purpose of this site: to gratify intellectual curiosity. If there's no new information, curiosity can't get gratified. People bashing each other with political sticks is the ultimate in no-new-information. Nationalistic arguments doubly so. And a comment like https://hackertimes.com/item?id=18627641 is a black hole of this kind of thing.
Here's another way to look at it: being right, such as when criticizing something evil or dumb, isn't enough. For a comment to be a good one here, it needs to lead to good conversation. A comment's value on HN is the sum of the expected values of the paths it leads to.
Did spectramax's comment contain any new information for you? Do you think it contained new information for anyone? Judging by the responses, that's not the case. Posting what can be summed up as "The government of country X is evil." predictably leads to comparisons with the US government, all of which is just noise. It's certainly not going to dissuade anyone from supporting them, since nobody thinks of their actions as supporting them. If you actually want to change someone's behavior, you're going to need a different kind of argument and make sure to avoid flame-baiting.
It doesn't need to contain new information in order to be relevant. Their behavior may not affect you but I can guarantee that it affects other people, such as myself. I believe doing what's the morally right thing to do is more important than earning a few extra bucks.
> Their behavior may not affect you but I can guarantee that it affects other people, such as myself.
Assuming "their behavior" means that of the Chinese government, then I can assure you that I have also been affected.
> I believe doing what's the morally right thing to do is more important than earning a few extra bucks.
And nobody is going to disagree with that. Nobody who earns a few bucks thinks that they're morally in the wrong, but does it anyway. And it's not because they think that the Chinese government isn't evil either. They simply don't see a connection between what they do and what the government does. So arguing that the government is evil doesn't change anyone's mind, because they already agree with you on that.
You'd do better by focusing on the direct consequences of specific actions. E.g. if a Western company storing user data on Chinese servers led to the arrest of an innocent person, that's a much stronger argument than saying that you shouldn't use Chinese servers because the government is known to arrest innocent people. Otherwise the connection just isn't there.
