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Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

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Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#211

Post by free_rms »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #94
FooBarWidget wrote: post #68

There are various levels of reporting in about what's happening in Xinjiang. I'm curious which ones of the following people here on HN believe are true. A. There is forced re-education, forced de-radicalization, and forced political assimilation (to fight separatism). Some camps are indeed for voluntary vocational education, others are for forced re-education. The number of people who are forced into camps, are a lot…

Does anyone know why the above post gets downvoted, even though it's only inquiring people for opinions, and not even presenting its own opinion? What have I done wrong, and what should I have done differently?

A lot of very emotional people scan these threads, try to quickly put people on a 'side', and downvote accordingly.

Great post, don't sweat it.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#212

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ardy42 wrote: post #154
FooBarWidget wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think he’s spreading propaganda. Ok, fine. But I have issue with you saying “that which is reported widely”, as if the other side is entirely honest and truthful. In reality, both sides are distributing propaganda. I fear that, although you are skeptical of Chinese propaganda, you fail to recognize or be skeptical of Western propaganda at the same time.

> But I have issue with you saying “that which is reported widely”, as if the other side is entirely honest and truthful. In reality, both sides are distributing propaganda. I fear that, although you are skeptical of Chinese propaganda, you fail to recognize or be skeptical of Western propaganda at the same time. You're making a false equivalence by oversimplifying things into symmetrical "sides." The Chinese state-o…

> While Western media sometimes does get a story wrong or sometimes gets misled by their sources, they make a far greater effort to ensure objective accuracy, and are thus far more trustworthy.

I find this is too simplistic a view. The media often falls in with the government's foreign policy objectives, playing up foreign enemies, presenting their own government's interests as completely reasonable but "adversarial" countries' interests as illegitimate.

If you were to go by American media, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake based on faulty intelligence, while Russia's annexation of Crimea was a grave attack on the international order. Never mind that the invasion of Iraq caused an incomparable amount of human suffering, violated a central principle of international law (the illegality of wars of aggression), and was provably based on lies. The New York Times itself played a key role in pushing the WMD story and promoting the case for war.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#213

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

uptown wrote: post #2

You'd think going forward they'll fill in these blank voids with land that works with the surrounding landscape in order to mask these gaps.

Bulldoze the camps, cover it with dirt, plant grass and trees, nobody will ever know.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#214

Post by fqye »

partiallypro wrote: post #180

I'm still baffled that some people, even here, think this is all made up propaganda from the West. Despite tons and tons of evidence. Kind of reminds me of how it must have been with people in denial about the early Nazi concentration camps, and Holodomor. I'm not saying this is as brutal as what the Nazis did (at least as far as we know,) just drawing parallels to the pure denialism or marking it up as pure exaggera…

Because history told us that public consensus and official conclusion could be lies. Remember the reason that the US invaded Iraq?

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#215

Post by warbaker »

fqye wrote: post #214
partiallypro wrote: post #180

I'm still baffled that some people, even here, think this is all made up propaganda from the West. Despite tons and tons of evidence. Kind of reminds me of how it must have been with people in denial about the early Nazi concentration camps, and Holodomor. I'm not saying this is as brutal as what the Nazis did (at least as far as we know,) just drawing parallels to the pure denialism or marking it up as pure exaggera…

Because history told us that public consensus and official conclusion could be lies. Remember the reason that the US invaded Iraq?

Not sure how you can equate these two. Iraq invasion was driven by faulty intelligence gathered in secret by a spy organization. Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#217

Post by fqye »

warbaker wrote: post #215
fqye wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because history told us that public consensus and official conclusion could be lies. Remember the reason that the US invaded Iraq?

Not sure how you can equate these two. Iraq invasion was driven by faulty intelligence gathered in secret by a spy organization. Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence.

> Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence.

The fact that this report is up to questioning shows that it isn't true. If you read this report thoroughly, you can find out it just shows there are this sort of buildings in Xinjiang but no logic or proof that they are concentration camps and there is no evidence at least in the report that the buildings are in use.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#218

Post by free_rms »

James_Henry wrote: post #157
FooBarWidget wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think your comment is rude. It makes sense, even if I don’t agree with people who think the way you describe it. I made a best effort to describe the various possibilities that I think exist. I just think that it’s silly when so many people condemn China for being unfree, yet at the same time throw away their free society values of encouraging discussions and respecting each others’ opinions, when it comes to…

I'd like to ask, do you pretty much believe your option A? If so, what do you think of the Buzzfeed News investigation and reporting? Also, do you thing the re-education of Uighurs and others is the right thing for the Communist Party to be doing? I understand you may not want to comment publicly here, so if you want, feel free to email me (my profile has my email).

All of the reporting just indicates buildings exist. I'm not sure what to believe, lots of things are in range given the evidence, but I don't take "look, a building" to mean much of anything.

Re: Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

#220

Post by aluminum96 »

jandrese wrote: post #193
mzs wrote: post #128

Journalist's thread that explains a bit more of how they did this: https://twitter.com/alisonkilling/status/1298933918620672000 edit: was used in creating this two part story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...

China's social media army is out in force on that Twitter thread. Deflect, Deny, Discredit.

It is truly remarkable how many replies in that thread consist of bad analogies, denials of clear third party reporting, and whatabout-ism.
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