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Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

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Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#151

Post by blueflow »

adventured wrote: post #146
blueflow wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also racist to make people held accountable for their ancestors. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews, and the US teached germany the hard way that it is not right. How comes you didn't learn that lesson? Germany got the Nürnberger Trials, the US (clarification: politicians) was never held accountable for anything.

> Its also racist to make people held accountable for their ancestors. That's incorrect. It's collectivist. Racism is a specific subset of collectivism. German isn't a race, despite what Hitler & Co wanted to believe.

"Abstammung" nach Article 3 Paragraph 3 des Grundgesetzes: https://dejure.org/gesetze/GG/3.html

Find a better translation if you don't like "racism". IMHO anything inheritance-based qualifies as racism.

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#152

Post by [deleted] »

blueflow wrote: post #48
mlindner wrote: post #14

I do wonder who pays to have all these comments put on hacker news. This happens a lot on Russia-related threads as well. Or is it just some nationality who learned incorrect history. On the Russia-related threads I would've put it to people from India as there's a big tech group there and they speak English and their country is cozy with Russia, but they wouldn't be defending China.

I'm from Germany, and i don't feel like the US is seeing itself as "equal" as to other countries. The US is one of the most militarily aggressive states, just within my lifetime, they invaded Afghanistan, Iraq and had several weird operations in Syria and Libya. "Normal" values would be zero. I long for the day when US war crimes are treated the same way as war crimes by non-western countries. Instead they pull off s…

[deleted]

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#153

Post by wickedsickeune »

naoqj wrote: post #17
zthrowaway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I think it’s normal to ask questions: if nothing has ever happened to the US for similar abuses, why should something happen to any other countries?

I wonder why you would think that it's normal. If something is unjust it should be prosecuted, regardless of the past.

There will always be criminals who get away with crimes, this doesn't mean that we should give up.

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#154

Post by Zababa »

jxjabzb wrote: post #71
lr4444lr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation. Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. That's not the same as putting people into prison because their religious beliefs make them enemies of the state.

> Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. A “few signature cases”?? I completely agree that what China is doing is completely wrong, immoral and bordering on genocide but let’s not swing too far the other way here. The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of s…

> The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences.

Do you mean the absolute difference between rates (black people in prison for 1000, white people in prison for 1000) or relative to the crimes that people commit (X people getting a longer sentence on average than Y people for the same crime)?

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#155

Post by adventured »

cabirum wrote: post #141
adventured wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insanity of an emotionally out of control mob of people pretending it's not a radically greater moral crime to torture millions of innocent people, than it is to torture a thousand people. It's the scale difference between the US blowing up a wedding party by accident as a moral crime and Russia raping and murdering their way through Bucha or Mariupol. The emotionalist mob would proclaim they're the same thing.

As if the wedding party incident was a single, isolated case. True, the scale of destruction in Iraq, Afganistan and dozen other countries is nothing like Ukraine military shelled and shot their own civilians then staged a photo-op.

> True, the scale of destruction in Iraq, Afganistan and dozen other countries is nothing like Ukraine military shelled and shot their own civilians then staged a photo-op.

Now we know what you are. I reference the on-going vast war crimes of Russia in Ukraine, and you talk about it being a self-inflicted, pretend photo-op.

The scale of destruction in Afghanistan? This is how I know you're flailing. The US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan. The US paid for more schools and hospitals to be built in Afghanistan than the rest of the world combined fifty times over throughout all of Afghanistan's history.

Now Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, which was their situation before the US went in. The Taliban are promptly tearing down civilization, instead of trying to build it up.

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#156

Post by RalfWausE »

lr4444lr wrote: post #42
ATsch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation. Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. That's not the same as putting people into prison because their religious beliefs make them enemies of the state.

coughinternment of japanesecough

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#157

Post by zthrowaway »

cabirum wrote: post #109
zthrowaway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story about how bad China treats its people, “there’s definitely going to be a ‘But the west!’ ridiculous whataboutism. And here we are. I feel like I can predict comments on HN threads these days and it’s pretty sad.

No one have ever said that human rights abuses of any kind are okay. Still, since "the west" uses tools such as illegal detention camps, blacksite prisons, etc to its advantage -- NOT using the same tools by everyone else would put them in a disadvantage.

Stay on topic, this is about China’s abuses right now.

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#158

Post by danielheath »

adventured wrote: post #129
danielheath wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a refutation. You aren't replying to an attempt to refute something. You're replying to an expression of shock at the behavior on display (specifically, people claiming - in a thread about Chinese torture camps - that we should not talk about them, because we weren't talking about American torture camps, so it would be hypocritical to talk about the Chinese ones). I'm generally in agreement that this isn't g…

The insanity of an emotionally out of control mob of people pretending it's not a radically greater moral crime to torture millions of innocent people, than it is to torture a thousand people. It's the scale difference between the US blowing up a wedding party by accident as a moral crime and Russia raping and murdering their way through Bucha or Mariupol. The emotionalist mob would proclaim they're the same thing.

Describing the US attacks on wedding parties as "a one time accident" rather than "our targets often spent years in hiding before finally coming into the open for a wedding, so we ended up bombing hundreds of weddings and calling them legitimate operations" is... ahistorical, to put it kindly.

No, it's not the same scale of evil as wiping out a city, but... pretending it's less than it was is an ugly look.

Re: Former Xinjiang prisoner arrives in U.S. as key witness to abuses

#160

Post by joshuahedlund »

adventured wrote: post #138
fps_doug wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you deliberately placed the goal posts as such that they exactly put the US on the moral high ground.

The US did have the moral high ground, which is a remarkable thing given what we're talking about: that's how horrific what China is doing is. Were the Japanese released from that internment? Yes. Were they genocided? No. Were they stripped of their culture, heritage, social lives, and tortured for decades due to their beliefs? No. Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes. That last o…

> Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes.

Not only is it recognized as a moral crime, but the US government passed a law to give restitution to interned people. Does that clean the slate? No. Does that make it ok? No, of course not.

The point is not that the US is perfect or even good. The point is that the US system allows open discussion, criticism, protest, legislating, etc. It has built-in mechanisms to improve itself which it has done and continues to do.

China has none of that.

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