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China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

bbc.com

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Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#331

Post by mmooss »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #319
jknoepfler wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we restricting this to businesses, or is the genocide of the Uyghurs fair game?

They ran a rolling internment program for a few years, holding people against their will in mandatory patriotism camp for months at a time. That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda on this topic, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.

You're omitting so much, such as torture and ethnic cleansing and massive levels of abuse. Any genocidal concentration camp could be called 'an internment camp'. Anyone reading this, just look up coverage in credible sources.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#332

Post by saxonww »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #319
jknoepfler wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we restricting this to businesses, or is the genocide of the Uyghurs fair game?

They ran a rolling internment program for a few years, holding people against their will in mandatory patriotism camp for months at a time. That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda on this topic, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.

> you need to be killing people to call it genocide

No, you don't.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

See Article 2.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#333

Post by nkmnz »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #319
jknoepfler wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we restricting this to businesses, or is the genocide of the Uyghurs fair game?

They ran a rolling internment program for a few years, holding people against their will in mandatory patriotism camp for months at a time. That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda on this topic, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.

"Killing people" is not required for committing a genocide:

Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:

1. A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and

2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:

2.1 Killing members of the group

2.2 Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

2.3 Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

2.4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

2.5 Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#334

Post by mmooss »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #324
Danox wrote: post #115

The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant that was one of the largest industrial catastrophes in the world let alone China. If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do…

In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right. When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but t…

I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but

> China is demanding more.

I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#335

Post by nixon_why69 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #257
blaufuchs wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s pretty funny how worked up the CCP get when they’re called out. “How dare you accuse us of launching a spy balloon?”. Whereas Russia hits you with the “oh those aren’t FSB agents, just lovers on vacation ;)”

Well I given that it wasn’t a spy balloon in the end, perhaps they had a point

I mean, the entire concept of "spy balloon over the continental US in the 21st century" could be considered a litmus test for critical thinking.

A country with satellites is running a Wile E. Coyote tier balloon plot?

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#336

Post by nixon_why69 »

nkmnz wrote: post #333
nixon_why69 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ran a rolling internment program for a few years, holding people against their will in mandatory patriotism camp for months at a time. That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda on this topic, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.

"Killing people" is not required for committing a genocide: Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements: 1. A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and 2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively: 2.1 Killing memb…

Brother, I eat at a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan pretty regularly. Nobody destroyed any groups.

There was a big overreaction that violated people's rights but the people still exist and are fine.

If we contrast with how the West have reacted to terror attacks, its quite rich to see them throwing UN definitions at China.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#337

Post by reinitctxoffset »

mmooss wrote: post #334
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right. When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but t…

I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but > China is demanding more. I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry.

Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects.

They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off.

Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change?

Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits.

Real wages are going up.

The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people.

It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#338

Post by DaedalusII »

Danox wrote: post #115

The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant that was one of the largest industrial catastrophes in the world let alone China. If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do…

if trump ordered someone to be shot for accepting bribes we would find this idea a lot less appealing

anyone who spent a lot of time in that part of the world will tell you this stuff can basically be made up

the western method to do this is to plant csa material on a person and then publicly announce they've been caught with it. not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car

your entire family and social network will immediately cut you off and very few consider these things can be fabricated

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#339

Post by vkou »

guywithahat wrote: post #277
vkou wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only one person opened fire. He got 100 years. (I agree that he shouldn't have gotten a slap on the wrist for what he did, but I'll happily point out that killers serve less, if at all.) The rest got 70. None of them had guns. The guy who got 30 years wasn't even at the protest. --- There is no universe where this is not completely batshit insane, but it's interesting to see you use the exact same logic[1] the CCP ha…

I think your confusion comes from the fact this wasn't a protest gone awry, it was an organized domestic terrorist attack. It was a small group of armed people in body armor who privately organized a domestic terrorist attack intending to cause damage and hurt/kill federal officers in an ambush. The only reason the officer lived was because Song's gun jammed before he could kill people and get away. Certainly if this…

> it was an organized domestic terrorist attack

A guy deliberately drove his car through a street full of scattering protesters in my neighbourhood a few years ago, and when people tried to pull him out of it, he shot one of them, and then ran off, waving his gun (with a jungle-taped pair of mags inserted into it).

Was he a (disorganized) political terrorist? If these guys got 70 years for being at the protest, how many hundreds of years in prison do you think were warranted for him?

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#340

Post by mmooss »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #337
mmooss wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but > China is demanding more. I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry. Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects. They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but…

As I said, I have yet to see evidence.

That's a bunch of words, but if we didn't know before LLMs and before the Internet, we know now: words are cheap and valueless without other properties. What distinguishes those words from propaganda? Why should someone believe it's true?

Throwing insults at people who disagree or question you makes it less likely there is substance to the words.

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