Live data from Hacker News

The Xinjiang Police Files

xinjiangpolicefiles.org

261–270 of 338 posts

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a "no true scotsman" fallacy. You blame Russia for not doing things that also have not been done anywhere in the world in the same time frame. And then you blame Russia for doing things that have also been done elsewhere on a grand scale. Where are all of those Muslim countries which were turned around by courts and institutions ex machina? Even Dubai struggles with essentially the same problems as mod…

Liberal reforms have been implemented by central governments al over the world. England -> Hong Kong, EU -> Poland, US -> Mississippi. That's just more whataboutism. Where other countries fail to do that, I'll fault them just as strongly too. Not that it's relevant, since the Russian government isn't Muslim but Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran have all had governments that at some point implemented liberal reforms…

Ok, let's take a look at the examples.

Lebanon - a country torn apart by religious conflicts which could not even solve the physical security problem, as well as recognize the existence of its most important neighbour. Had plenty of run time mostly wasted. Worse than Chechnya.

Tunisia. Had a mild democratization which did not backfire to this point. Looks OK. Probably better outcome than Chechnya.

Egypt. Had a pointless coup which removed existing corrupt autocratic government and installed a new corrupt autocratic government, with a spark of terrorism in between. Large country which is punching under its weight. Worse outcome than Chechnya.

Iraq. I'm not really sure what to say. Let's pretend you didn't suggest it.

Iran. Had a lot of time to normalize relations with the West and failed to do so. In some respects a worse theocracy than Chechnya. Unlike Chechnya, which enjoys freedom of movement within Russia, you have nowhere to hide from the deeply islamist regime of Iran short of emigration. The largest outcast state (at least before Feb 24, 2022). Worse than Chechnya.

So let's see, it looks that from your list, Chechnya gets silver medal. I think that's quite good. You think that's not enough. Do you agree on the analysis?

"Russia is ultimately in charge of Chechnya" sounds like you expect imperialism to not have any alternatives. So you are saying that Russia can override whatever pre-existing culture there is and "install" liberal democracy? Did it work for you in Iraq?

I'm not even sure what's your central argument.

Speaking of which, let's return to the original form: "treatment of the predominantly Muslim Chechnians by Russia". I think that being the virtual #2 of our successful Muslim states list an OK-ish "treatment". But it works a different way for you:

> pro-Putin

We don't like Putin -> We don't like Russia -> Let's say something mean about it.

This is something I would expect from YouTube comments section, but on HN it's pure disappointment.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of what's going on in that tweet you cited is hard to decipher without stepping back and taking stock of the context. For instance, I don't know what to make of the significance of a cursor being visible in a document that is dumped (it might be a big deal, or it might not be at all) and I don't know how motivated the party is here to use that to prove a particular argument, or what it should or shouldn't prove…

"I don't believe it because I'm missing context" is a weak argument to make. The tweets read like the author isn't a native English speaker. The traditional vs. simplified characters accusation should be relatively easy to confirm if you want to put in at least a little effort. Looking up characters as someone who isn't familiar with them at all might be cumbersome but is absolutely possible. But then again you wonde…

>"I don't believe it because I'm missing context"

I genuinely don't understand where the mistake is, even in in your paraphrased version which is intended to caricature. Yes, I really do think that missing context is a good reason to refrain from believing something, and you should too. I find it bizarre that that is disputed.

I actually went into a fair amount of detail about what specifically was contextually inadequate here, all of which you didn't engage with.

It's hard to understand what the tweet is suggesting unless you read the entire thread, one related twitter thread, and chase down an implied history of allegedly questionable BBC reportage the UN is complicit in, and join the author in making assumptions about what it all means. I stated all of this already.

And in additional to all the previous stuff I said, it's not obvious that a difference between traditional and simplified characters prove what you're asked to believe it proves, that it must have come from Taiwan. I'm assuming there's another thread somewhere that goes into detail about how Taiwan uses different characters in other documents, which is the basis for believing different characters here prove that its a forgery?

It's not about the effort involved in comparing the characters, it's about the underlying logic for the argument, which is assumed to have been proven elsewhere but not referenced.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#263
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's classic whataboutism, and it uses an inch of U.S. abuses to sweep away a mile of abuses by China. Those things just don't exist in a logical relationship of justifying, absolving, or forbidding analysis of one another. Their relation, if there is one at all, would be an and relationship, not an or , and certainly not an xor . Even a person fully invested in talking about U.S. human rights abuses and cat…

This above has a name: "American Exceptionalism".

I'm not sure I understand, but I like to think I was actually making a full-fledged point about the fallacy of covering for abuses by ignoring them and pointing to other abuses. Do you disagree? How can I state that point to your satisfaction without you labeling it as American exceptionalism?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#264
post #226
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, right, they apologised. That changes everything :-> What matters is that nobody - not a single one of perpetrators of a bombing organised by police, which killed five random kids, and this is ignoring reports of police shooting at survivors fleeing the fire - got punished. "The city" paid some (public) money, that's all. It's not whataboutism, it's showing that the claim that "public condemnation against China wi…

China denies the event. They just removed a memorial statue in Hong Kong. Are you seriously arguing that response is better than the US? Never mind crushing a democratic protest and killing thousands is in no way comparable to police trying to execute an arrest of a small group.

>China denies the event.

It never ceases to amaze me how people still believe things like this.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-Chinese-citizens-particularly-...

> Are you seriously arguing that response is better than the US?

Are you seriously not realising that you're making a huge assumption here? But please, tell me how putting the prime minister in house arrest for the rest of his life is a worse response than ignoring the whole thing altogether and not even pretending to prosecute.

(Also: thousands? Estimates, eg Amnesty International, say few hundred up to a thousand; funny how those numbers somehow keep growing when it's about China and not US, isn't it?)

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#265
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And for most of History, the Church was the State. Would you agree that the "Party" in CCP is something entirely different from what this term means in the west, and that it's closer in its meaning to a secularised version of a centralised church?

Death Cult, is more like it. People wash away the misdeeds of the CCP during COVID because it suits their agenda, all the while their were was dissent fomenting during lockdowns. Han Chinese have been starved in Shanghai, those make shift hospitals were a joke and they under reported the deaths etc... No, I'm very open about my disdain about the CCP, it's a cancer on the World and it should be seen for what it is.

Thank you; we might disagree on moral judgement of CCP (I'm not sure if I even have any consistent opinion), but the reason I've asked is that knowing about that semantical difference - bordering on mistranslation - makes it much easier to make sense of the situation, and I found it non-obvious.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#266
post #237
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only shows that they happen. That part is pretty well documented, but the same thing happens in Western prisons. What it doesn't show is that they were officially sanctioned, as opposed to being committed by a guard against the law.

Sure, and the Wansee Protokoll didn't come out until 1947 (and, famously, was itself quite euphemistic). The entire topic of this thread is the disclosure of official documents which, like the Wansee Protokoll, expose the regime's real goals and practices. Of course, there are people who still disbelieve that the Holocaust happened. I try not to argue with them online, once they have shown their true motives.

>The entire topic of this thread is the disclosure of official documents which, like the Wansee Protokoll, expose the regime's real goals and practices.

Again, can you show me where said document says so?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#267
post #114
post #87

[flagged]

A casual Google search will turn up evidence. Just one example of many: Uyghur workers, complete with police guards, are being supplied to factories throughout China. "Another new advertisement claimed to be able to supply 1,000 Uyghur workers aged 16 to 18 years. It reads: ‘The advantages of Xinjiang workers are: semi-military style management, can withstand hardship, no loss of personnel … Minimum order 100 workers…

Yeah a casual google search lead straight to US/AU funded ASPI propaganda and other western MSM that tries to portray CCP dickwaving publically about poverty alleviation via Rural Labour Transfer Programs that has employed tens millions in every province in PRC as forced labour. ASPI report was follow up by Zenz from Jamestown that this is coerce labour, laundered by MSM as slave labour, used by US gov to coordinate XJ sanctions. That's how the playook works. Pieces bury context that pay is above regional income, companies are subsidized or pressured by gov to take on these workers that no one wants, which uplifts them substantially above 600M rural Chinese in informal economy stuck on 1000rmb / month that already havel language skills to and better suited to be productive workers. PRC has no shortage of excess Han labourers.

All the current "mapping projects" consistently conflate schools and other facilities with detention camps to boost the numbers because security features found in schools all over PRC somehow = concentration camp in XJ. There's a reason for resorting to commercial satellite imaging with shit spatial resolution to weave narrative, because they can't get any compelling info on ground, but even lack of access doesn't explain the sheer inability to find any compelling photo/video evidence to support their genocide/slave labour narrative in ~10 years, nowhere in PRC is that opaque. The other component of data project tracks cultural erasure, whic is fair, rapidly developing Chinese regions with high YoY GDP growth that aggressives purges everything old does that with helping hand of state coordinated sinicization efforts. But TBF cultural assimilation has alwasy been permissible toolkit of state.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#268
post #238
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is literally just attempt to "since America has/did crimes, no one is allowed to criticize China/Israel/Russia". Not at all. Please read my comment in its context: it's a response to parent's claim that this can only happen in China, because in the West the public has the right to speak out and fix it - while in reality it happens too, and simply gets ignored, sometimes without even bothering to cover it up. Also…

The whole your thing is to distract from discussing China and making it sound like China is actually ok with what it does. No it is not and nothing that happens in USA makes China actions less grave or less genocidal. > it's a response to parent's claim that this can only happen in China, because in the West the public has the right to speak out and fix it Not true. The parent said that in the Western countries can b…

If you look at the context, it's obvious that this thread is about disproving the claim that in the West the pressure from the society on the government works better than in China, and not about "making it sound like China is actually ok".

So, in USA there are literally entire law chapters designed to eliminate specific racial group (and hippies, that's what delegalisation of drugs was about). Yet you don't consider this a genocide. Ever wondered why?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#269
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This above has a name: "American Exceptionalism".

I'm not sure I understand, but I like to think I was actually making a full-fledged point about the fallacy of covering for abuses by ignoring them and pointing to other abuses. Do you disagree? How can I state that point to your satisfaction without you labeling it as American exceptionalism?

Except nobody was suggesting to ignore them and point to other abuses - we are talking about the idea of how this kind of problems cannot occur in Western societies, because society can do things. They do, society can't do anything, and I provided an example.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#270
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a quora: https://www.quora.com/How-credible-are-Adrian-Zenz-one-of-th... and a quote: " Zenz’ academic qualifications, much touted, don’t stand up to much scrutiny. His h-index is 12, about a quarter of the 40 that a ‘good’ academic should have, especially a mid-career 47-year old. His roles are all with anti-China think tanks, not academic positions. He’s in a bubble of anti-Communism and anti-China funding a…

At the end of the day, if all the claims about Xinjiang are false and everything is really peachy and rosey as the CCP claims it to be, then they should allow 100% absolute freedom of the press to go in and check it out. That will however never happen because it's clearly obvious there is something to hide. So far all the CCP has done is allow some journalists to go to specific areas, are followed and controlled and…

I think you fundamentally understand the political difference between China and the US. The US has adopted an information free-for-all and China has specifically adopted a policy of tight control of information flow. “Letting press in” doesn’t necessarily mean the truth will be revealed either, as it merely allows opponents to build their own counter propaganda. But asking them to completely abandon their political ideals of information control is not realistic either. It’s hard to know who to believe if the sources are well funded, because there are ulterior motives on both sides.
Post reply on HN