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alienist comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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I think that the quote means "petty things like who stepped out of the spaceship first don't matter", not "petty things like the difference between us and those capitalist pigs don't matter".
It's also true that the line between "American" and "Soviet" (or, for that matter, between "American" and "1940s German") is not drawn in remotely the same way as the line between "burns others in ovens" and "doesn't": it is mainly indicative of which part of the world you were born in. I have much greater sympathy for moral equivalency in the first case than in the second.
Ok, how about the difference between "sends people to the gulags on trumped up charges" and "doesn't", or "engineers famines" and "doesn't"?
That's (approximately) the difference between Stalin and not Stalin. I'm pretty sure most Soviet astronauts had never engineered a single famine.
The "participating in the system" argument given by Jiro is more reasonable, so see my cousin comment for my reply to that.
And most members of the Nazi rocket program never put anyone into an oven.