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China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

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Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#181
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we? A survery in The Lancet estimated that the Iraq invasion caused an excess of 650k deaths by October 2006. A simple extrapolation would surely put the excess deaths in the middle east into millions. It's different though. We're the good guys.

All the Muslim majority nations are silent on this matter. It shows how hypocritical they are.

Yes. The corrupt selfish elite regimes of countries like Pakistan with the majority of actual citizens struggling to live day by day..wait..

Which ones should be talking? The regimes that clearly don’t care or the struggling people, many of whom barely have adequate internet.

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actions of literally almost every group of elites and high-level government officials in the last 100 years? Are you not exposed to this behavior/news somehow?

The original comment said this was true of "almost all human beings", the vast majority of whom are neither elites nor high-level government officials.

Right, but....if we "all" didn't value these things, how did these people gain their power and status over us?

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor (a historian who studied Auschwitz) who used to argue the opposite. Germany was a modern, industrialized nation, with an educated population - and yet the majority of the population either actively committed genocide, or were complicit in some fashion. My professor thus argued that the conditions for the Holocaust are not unique, and there could easily be another one.

~50% of the population continues to support abortion, so I’d say we have a very long way to go.

If contraception worked 100%, or if we were able to disable the libido whenever we want and prevent all rape from happening, maybe i would agree with that.

Since we're not, until someone convince me the violinist argument is not receivable[0], i would continue to support women wanting early abortion.

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

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada, it’s due to the lack of proper or informed consent, and a class-action lawsuit is trying to correct that. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization-la... In China, “[t]he population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply”: https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c And Uyghurs have to flee China just to speak out aga…

Canada had sterilization laws up to 1972; and the link I provided was to an article about that class action lawsuit. ;)

I don’t think it’s fair to compare China today with Canada almost 50 years ago.

A lot of things have changed since then. Boston Marathon didn’t have women’s race until 1972.

Our expectations today should be higher.

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#185
post #117

I understand that China is extremely powerful both militarily and economically, but it just makes me so sad that such atrocities against humanity are occurring at the hands of a superpower, deep into the 21st century. Forgive my naiveté, but aren't we supposed to be past this type of thing as a species already? Wasn't that the whole point of the 20th century - to show us all the things we shouldn't be doing?

I don't think we really learned any lessons. Stalin and Mao were at least as bad as Hitler in terms of body count. Hitler just lost the war, while the other two were able to continue to invest in propaganda to whitewash their histories. If Nazi Germany had emerged from the war intact, they too would have been able to whitewash their history for decades after. I'm sure in time they would have "moderated" a bit, and th…

Fundamentally, civilization is about control. The control is codified and accepted only because there is a certain amount of inhumanity that is required for it. I would argue that killing comes naturally to humans, and other acts of similar cruelty.

Morality and ethics are learned behaviors that are distilled from societal mores. If "thou shall not kill" or some equivalent in another religion didn't exist, for example, I'd argue killing would be natural in society, and nobody would question it. That is why certain tribal and indigenous peoples performed human sacrifices and had various rituals involving bloodsport. To those tribesmen, killing is not something abnormal within the tribe. Why would killing someone from another tribe matter to them?

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "for almost all human beings on this planet, the goal of life continues to revolve around gaining wealth, recognition and power." The opposite could be true as well: the goal of a minority is to gain wealth, recognition and power and in doing so they hurt everyone else around them.

Maybe it's living in the Valley for 20Y, and DC for 20+ before that, but I think the original statement is correct. If anything, the well-educated people in the valley are even more obsessed with recognition of status than the people i knew in DC (who were in _politics_).

Aren't both groups still a minority (in the US for instance) though ?

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#187
post #53
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised trump doesn’t use this to place sanctions on China and up his base’s support.

Well, John Bolton in his new book alleges that Trump told Xi to keep locking up Uyghurs. > “According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Mr. Bolton wrote. On the other hand, he also signed the Uyghur Human Rights Act.

"alleges" "according to anonymous sources". Hardly any criticism towards Trump comes from reliable, confirmed sources. It's just throwing random conjectures, hoping something sticks.

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada had sterilization laws up to 1972; and the link I provided was to an article about that class action lawsuit. ;)

I don’t think it’s fair to compare China today with Canada almost 50 years ago. A lot of things have changed since then. Boston Marathon didn’t have women’s race until 1972. Our expectations today should be higher.

The last residential school didn't close until the 90s. There are far too many communities without clean drinking water, let alone access to quality education and health care. We still struggle to maintain obligations regarding indigenous land rights and safe guarding indigenous culture.

Our expectations today should be higher.

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that paper, at least in the abstract, talks about preventable deaths in China . The anti-communists talk about China being to blame for the deaths in other countries because those countries had no warning.

The paper was posted on March 13 [0], before Covid-19 peaked outside of China. Of course it didn’t focus on other places. The abstract shows the authors believe its findings have relevance elsewhere: > These findings improve our understanding of the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19, and will inform response efforts across the world [0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20029843…

But what does that have to do with countries having plenty of warning and doing next to nothing? I feel like you replied to the wrong poster.

Re: China suppression of Uighurs meets U.N. definition of genocide, report says

#190

Whataboutism seems to be the key feature linking many posts here. It's not a convincing argument

Is it just me or does this happen for every article about anything China-related?

I am trying my best to avoid it though I have my axe to grind. But it's hard because it all strikes me at least as preposterous: all these terrible news about China started to come out just when it suddenly turned from "super dynamic developing country we can make tons of money with" to "serious competitor to our economic and technological supremacy". And my personal axe tells me that when it's about friends, it's all fine anyway.

For the specific case, I know very little about what's happening to the Uighurs, though I tend to think that China doesn't practice tolerance and the Uighurs don't practice integration. I am afraid of moral outrage though, especially when it seems to affect majorities: it can become very dangerous.

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