I know of one person (my friend's mom) who literally got this procedure done: she needed a new kidney, and they waited till a death row convict came along who was a match. When she was matched, she got a phone call to come over to that particular city quickly, and she went there, and came back a few days later with a brand new pair of kidneys. It was almost like when you give your car in for repair, and when it's rea…
> this guy was going to die anyways, why not save someone's life in the process? because, like private "for profit" prisons, it incentivises bad things. Sci-fi short story on this topic, 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man
I'm not justifying it; this is what the mom said. I know it incentivizes wrong behavior, hence the discussion.
So China infringes on human rights, in other news "water is wet". Not really newsworthy. I would be shocked if it was Iceland or Norway doing that. As much as we hate hearing about it, only the Chinese people have the power to make changes to this regime. Having met many Chinese students abroad, I'd say they are OK with this happening. Either they are apathic, or supportive of their totalitarian regime.
> only the Chinese people have the power to make changes to this regime What makes you think they have any power at all? This is not what history teaches us about totalitarian regimes.
Well basic math, there's more than a billion of them. How do you think the Communist party displaced the old regime? If the people were to march on Beijing the government would cease to exist within one day, which is of course why it actually tries really hard to keep the people happy.
This is of course orthogonal to both the topic at hand and reality. The Chinese are quite content with their government and abuse of low-status criminals virtually never causes political turmoil. (not even in bleeding heart democracies)
Also as a sidenote, it's not a totalitarian but an autocratic country. As William Gibson once remarked about Singapore, it's on its path to be Disneyland with the death penalty.
The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.
Strategies that isolate hostile or naturally adversarial countries don't seem to work either. Just look at North Korea. Arguably, the North Korea situation has resulted in much worse net violence and human suffering per capita than, say, the West's fraught trade entanglement with China. > sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity The future is unwritten. Actors behave reflexively. Imagine how bad t…
Bad example because the only reason the communist dictatorship in North Korea still exists is that they are propped up by China, and the only reason Chinese dictatorship exists is because they are propped up by the West.
Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power. Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously f…
Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.
I'm not sure I would qualify any post-Soviet Eastern European country (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, ...) as a boradly successful. Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains, their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″ and ‶corrupted even more far-right guy sucking on Russia/China tits″, rights of women are openly contested and dimnished, and they are on the slippery slope to the actually worrying part of the far-right spectrum.
I don’t know anything about Rose Pak but your rumor post feels so vile like political propaganda. Your links have no substantiation whatsoever and you’re comfortable with that?
Literally the first result on google from a reputable source says she went to China to get a transplant: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rose-pak-20160919-... And China has an extremely well documented practice of doing exactly what OP said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
I'm not disputing anything said, but just a heads up since I also heard about the Fulan Gong organ harvesting thing years before I heard any thing else about what Fulan Gong even is: read up on it. It has its own weird nest of conspiracy around it.
Nope. Pioneered by the Japanese during World War II. Also no anesthesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 Edit: I would like to point out the reason why I said no based on this resource: "Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921371 The practices of Unit 731 are more well documented that some of the Nazi crimes.
No anesthesia by the Japanese, or by the current-day Chinese?
The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.
Would the west be as rich and Democratic without?
Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, your iPhone would cost 10,000 dollars.
Apple would be more like a Cartier or Tiffany...A few small exclusive shops around Monaco and the Cote de Azur.
Everyone in UK is an organ donor by default You might criticise that there is still a death penalty You might criticise the justice system is not good enough But taking the organs from prisoners that were sentenced to be executed that day doesn't sound that unreasonable, if that guarantees better organs to save someone else
But don’t you think for a second that may incentivise raising the number of executions to meet the high demand of organs? And having that justice in China is something that is not at all transparent it may as well turn any dissident into supply for organ banks. I find this extremely cynical and very hard to accept no matter how you look at it.
Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.
I'm not sure I would qualify any post-Soviet Eastern European country (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, ...) as a boradly successful. Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains, their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″ and ‶corrupted even more far-right guy sucking on Russia/Ch…
> Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains
These things have long been super typical of growing middle-income countries on their way to First-World country status. It's misleading to evaluate one by the standards of the other. Also, why no mention of comparative success stories like the Czech Republic?
China's death row is shrouded in secrecy. It keeps its figures on executions secret, but Amnesty International estimates that it killed thousands of prisoners from 2016 to 2020. The US government, conversely, killed 13 prisoners during that time period following a 17-year hiatus that former President Donald Trump ended. Inaccurate, of course; the US executed something more like 100 prisoners during that time period,…