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China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

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Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#231
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you took a poll, "do you give a rats @ss that 1 Million Iraqis were killed by USA" and most people didn't care? The war had bipartisan support and the leader that started it was re-elected in the ultimate poll, so I'd say the majority are fine with it.

Not necessarily, as you know elections are about several major issues.

He got re-elected on a bigger margin, if just a few thousand people had said "this war is wrong and we shouldn't massacre Iraqis" he would have been voted out.

If they had issues bigger than killing hundreds of thousands of people then...

And I'm saying this as an Australian, we weren't much better.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#232
Not sure how people can sit outside China for 3 days and gather enough evidence to believe "beyond doubt" that the organ harvesting thing is true.

Also, if you look at what Falun Gong teaches, the credibility of the believers should be at question. Per Wikipedia, the grandmaster of the cult believes that homosexuality is a sin, democracy and science are both bad things, and aliens are constantly interfering with Earth affairs.[1] If Falun Gong is not against China, but against, say Thailand, how many of you will blindly believe their accusations? What about Canada?

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

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#233
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another way to look at this. These are people who are already subject to execution. They get to stay alive a bit longer in order to preserve the organs. So rather than causing death, the possibility of organ transplants is what keeps these people alive.

Supposedly the prisoners were alive and conscious while they were cut open and their organs removed (no anesthesic). If I’m going to die, I think I’d rather face the firing squad and get it over with. And then there’s the extraordinarily perverse profit motive to arrest more dissidents for organ harvesting.

Why would they do that? That has to be unpleasant for the doctors and damaging to the organs themselves... or is this “fake news”

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ridiculous. It merely conflates (as do most statements in this thread) two orthogonal aspects - how repressive a society happens to be internally and how much of a threat it poses abroad. Historically, there doesn't seem to be any perceptible correlation between those two factors. The U.S. is indeed by most metrics one of the freest societies on the planet in terms of the state repression imposed on the aver…

What metrics are those? The US has the biggest prison population in the world by a big margin, 655 per 100k people (El Salvador is in second place with 604/100k and China is at 118/100k). I'd call that state repression. In other measures it does better, like the so-called democracy index, where it ranks #21 (flawed democracy), which is better than China at #139 (authoritarian). In the reporters without borders press…

Within the scope of my comment I was using a far narrower definition of internal repression than you are. That being said, I don't disagree with you to any significant degree, although I would not count obesity or tropical disease. The only aspect in which the U.S. is somewhat exceptional (in the good sense) still is its legal support for free speech, which is still arguably the best in the world.

I would also note that even including all of the damning things you list, the U.S. on average falls behind most rich democracies in the world, but is still far ahead of most other states, except in the incarceration rate [1]. Rich democracies are an outlier.

[1] I'm not sure that's quite true any more if you count in all the Chinese internment camps and other non-disclosed facilities - the U.S. never had secret prisons at scale, other states do.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#235
post #34

When I was younger, maybe five years ago or so, I was living in Boston and I'd consistently see a pack of Chinese protestors outside the public library at Copley (very popular area) holding up signs, looking to gain attention for this very issue. They spoke to me as best as they could, handed me a pamphlet with hard-to-parse English but nonetheless gruesome descriptions, and asked for my signature along with any othe…

I regularly go to a restaurant run by some Falun Gong refugees, and I've spent a fair bit of time, while waiting, perusing their pamphlets and books. To be honest, my feeling has been exactly the same as yours - while, from my very first interaction, I was aware that Falun Gong were persecuted in China, and while I don't really have a rosy picture of what that entails, their political writing and pampletting is just…

FLG runs a propaganda machine in English, you’d have to read their Chinese pamphlets to see the crazy stuff. If you do more research, it’s the scientology of China, not exactly the stuff of credibility. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falun_Gong

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#236

Why do people fall for this sort of stuff so easily? There is a pattern of western governments regularly organizing subversive, extremist, headline grabbing testimonies to further foreign policy objectives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony I don't think the Chinese government is great either, but I'm pretty cognizant that the level of anti-China FUD is directly proportional to the accelerating economic…

This probably isn't even organized by Western governments - most likely this is meant to support the Falun Gong. I've seen a noticeable uptick in Falun Gong's efforts to highlight the organ harvesting issue over the last few months.

It’s depressing how many people take their claims at face value. Falun Gong is Chinese Scientology https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falun_Gong

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly the prisoners were alive and conscious while they were cut open and their organs removed (no anesthesic). If I’m going to die, I think I’d rather face the firing squad and get it over with. And then there’s the extraordinarily perverse profit motive to arrest more dissidents for organ harvesting.

Why would they do that? That has to be unpleasant for the doctors and damaging to the organs themselves... or is this “fake news”

That was my first reaction too: it risks damaging the valuable organs that they’re going to extraordinary lengths to ‘acquire’.

The testimony came from an officer who stood guard while it happened.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What metrics are those? The US has the biggest prison population in the world by a big margin, 655 per 100k people (El Salvador is in second place with 604/100k and China is at 118/100k). I'd call that state repression. In other measures it does better, like the so-called democracy index, where it ranks #21 (flawed democracy), which is better than China at #139 (authoritarian). In the reporters without borders press…

Within the scope of my comment I was using a far narrower definition of internal repression than you are. That being said, I don't disagree with you to any significant degree, although I would not count obesity or tropical disease. The only aspect in which the U.S. is somewhat exceptional (in the good sense) still is its legal support for free speech, which is still arguably the best in the world. I would also note t…

Sure, rich democracies are outliers, but you did say "one of the freest societies on the planet", which I parsed as somewhat stronger than "one of the rich democracies" or "not third world".

I think you're wrong about the incarceration rate though, by a lot. China has an official prison pop. of about 1.5 million, to have a rate close to what the US does it'd need to have 7.5 million [1] people in the internment camps, which AFAICT is way higher than anyone estimates (I couldn't really find any good estimates, but for scale the total population of Uyghurs in China is 11 - 15 million)

[1]

(def us-pop 325719178)

(def us-prison 2121600)

(def china-pop 1403500365)

(def china-prison 1649804)

(defn rate [prison population] (float (* 100000 (/ prison population))))

(rate us-prison us-pop) ;=> ~651

(rate china-prison china-pop) ;=> ~117

(rate (+ china-prison 7.5e6) china-pop) ;=> ~651

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US talks about respecting human rights, but has no problem with 1 million dead Iraqi civilians. Individual Americans may respect human rights. Just like individual Chinese do as well. But when you challenge them as a nation, well, then the needs of the stong outweigh the needs of the weak.

> has no problem with 1 million dead Iraqi civilians And how many Kurds were killed by Saddam Hussein? How many Shias? I think the Iraq war was a terrible mistake but that doesn't mean that supporting it means you don't care about Iraqis.

We need to grow out of this culture of attributing any value to “caring”. The fact that Americans “care” that 1 million Iraqis died is not only meaningless, but also facetious.

We elected a government and enabled a system that led to this. How can we judge China as worse? More importantly why do these judgements fundamentally even matter?

The real question Americans should ask themselves is : what is our vision for the future? How can we regain our glory?

Anything else assumes authority without investment. A strategy that is destined for failure.

Re: China harvested organs from political prisoners, says tribunal

#240
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The judeo and christian are morally antithetical. The basis of christ and christianity is the fundamental shift from judeo values and morals to christian ones. I have Jewish friends, they are not morally antiethical to Christian values, they are moral people who I love. Everything I know about Judaism informs me that its practioners share my morals. Please state specifically where you believe the gap between Judaic…

I have jewish, atheist, christian, muslim, buddhist, hindu, etc friends also. They are all moral people. So is it judeo-atheist-muslim-christian-buddhist-etc values? There is no such thing as a judeo-christian morality or value. It is a political term invented a few decades ago for political reasons. I don't want to get into a religious debate. Those never end well and there can never be a conclusion because they all…

One could say that the texts of a religion, such as the Bible in Christianity, do provide a general "moral framework" expected of its adherents. Many religions prescribe some sort of framework like this, as vague or as contradictory as it may be.

The idea of "sin" is huge in Abrahamic religion, so the fact that their texts particularly describe what is "sinful and not" I think is a clear-cut sign there is some sort of set of "values" that religious adherents are expected to have.

Not that I agree with said frameworks or give any authority to the texts- and also understand that many forms of these religions interpret the texts different ways, which cause various splits in what is considered moral or not. Additionally, I understand that it is mostly futile to expect most religious people to follow the prescribed morals of their religion or denomination, as it always seems to end up that people have their own specific personal set of morals, and then they just try to rationalize or stretch it to fit whatever religion or worldview they adhere to

Or is your point more that while religions DO have expectations like this- the moral "rules" of these religions don't originate from the religion itself, but instead are general moral values adopted, altered, or shared by many religions? If so, then maybe we are in agreement and I am talking past you.

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