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China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

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Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most of us don't know about?

Firebombing of Japan

Bombing the shit out of Laos

Massive numbers killed in the CIA operations overthrowing governments in South America

The duplicitous and two-faced foreign policies which fund genocides and killings all over the globe while we try to put on some good face about making the world a better more democratic place

Selling arms to murderous regimes who torture and kill as we turn a blind eye to profits

Repatriating Nazis responsible for the war crimes we decry in order to get their tech/medical advancements

The extent at which Native Americans were murdered

Lots and lots of things get rose-colored glasses because the populous lives rather comfortable now...

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#92
post #87
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the OP wrong? Is the point irrelevant to the discussion? In what way is the observation of an admittedly uncomfortable fact "ideological rhetoric"?

People apply the word 'fact' loosely when it comes to topics they feel strongly about. The point is contentious and disputable in a bunch of ways. That's not necessarily bad, but it is when combined with a declamatory style. Just to be clear though: I'm not making a point about China. I'm making a point about how terrible Hacker News threads become when people allow themselves to post this way. This problem is gettin…

You're doing a lot of damage control on China stuff since that partnership thing was announced.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most of us don't know about?

• The CIA's experiments on American and Canadian citizens [0][1].

• Plans to nuke the Moon [2].

are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Not sure if they count as "that most of us don't know about."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean TS 1989? Taylor Swift’s most recent album right? Suffice it to say, those T-shirts did not go down well in China. People know it happened, the government says the west overblew the casualty figure, but they otherwise don’t want it talked about publicly at all. For them, bringing in PLA to kill Chinese (again) was pretty traumatic, especially since many of the soldiers actually said no. So they think it was “…

Strange, how come there's no mention of the name's allusion to the protests on Wikipedia, if it was deliberate? (genuinely curious.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor_Swift_album) Edit: Oh, never mind. I didn't see the sarcasm.

It wasn’t deliberate! Taylor Swift’s initials are TS and she was born in 1989, so she is just unharmonious by coincidence.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most of us don't know about?

Being the first nation on the globe to bring in eugenics based compulsory sterilisation laws, which influenced Nazi ideas. Some survived surprisingly long after the war, the last until the 1970s.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

In 2007 or so, I was having a conversation in a bar with a bunch of student friends, one of whom was newly arrived from Beijing to start her graduate studies in the US. For reasons I don't recall, someone made a Tienanmen Square joke. She flat out didn't get it. Had _no_ idea what we were talking about. This was mostly pre-smartphone, so one of us dug out a laptop and showed her the wikipedia page. The look of utter…

My very limited experience with Chinese "commoners" outside China is that they view Xi Jinping as an adored celebrity, if not a god figure. "Very very great man!"

Same with some Filipinos' opinions of Rodrigo Duterte, who said all the bad news being posted about him were "American propaganda."

Have other people here asked a Chinese expat what they thought about their government back home? What kind of answers did they give?

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange, how come there's no mention of the name's allusion to the protests on Wikipedia, if it was deliberate? (genuinely curious.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_(Taylor_Swift_album) Edit: Oh, never mind. I didn't see the sarcasm.

It wasn’t deliberate! Taylor Swift’s initials are TS and she was born in 1989, so she is just unharmonious by coincidence.

[deleted]

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#98
post #82

The sinophobia in these comments always makes me uncomfortable because it’s usually underlied with overall anti-Asian sentiment. It reminds me that I don’t belong in America, we still live in a white world.

This is really the main goal of these threads. It's your standard Two Minute Hate [1]: everybody gets together and signals their own virtue by spewing fact-free nonsense (apparently China's entire 11T is run by bribes and no foreign company ever made money there). There are two goals here: signal the ingroup but more importantly signal the outgroup. It's a concerted effort to drive away Asian programmers and, as I've pointed out before, it's working.

Note that despite these highly coordinated, anti-China circlejerks (seriously look at the other thread [2], just two down, all the same people and new accounts spouting the same exact nonsense, virtually all of it baseless propaganda) the moderators are to pounce on any "meta-commentary" that tries to pushback or highlight the stupidity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820157

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! It's an oligarchy! Not a dictatorship! But they're not near-equivalent. Group vs individual. Politics are entirely different. Both deemphasize citizen rights but that doesn't make them the same! Why are people so offended that this distinction exists?

> But they're not near-equivalent. > Group vs individual. If the organizational operation isn't transparent, it's observably the same top-down dictatorship (worrying about one versus many is silly, insofar as no human governs alone).

The decision making process is different and the decisions are different. It's different. Perceived lack of transparency[1] does not change that.

[1]: There are vastly different levels of transparency for, in order: Foreigners, rural poor, non-party members (there are 90M party members), party members, people who are well-connected locally and/or nationally -- cynical people might say it's the same here in certain ways, with the biggest difference being party membership as a prestige badge to work for and benefit from.

Re: China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think China will look back at this in a generation and think, we did the right thing. Honest question: How many people in China currently know, care and/or feel regret about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

My question (as an American) is: what ugly thing happened in the US that most of us don't know about?

My go to for this is question is the `Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male` (aka. Tuskegee Experiments). Where government clinicians withheld the diagnose and treatment of syphilis from the 'participants'. The men were instead told they had 'bad blood'. This lasted into the 1970s. Only ending due to an upstanding epidemiologist, Peter Buxtun, going to the press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buxtun

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