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Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

chinadaily.com.cn

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Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#61

Post by narcissus »

arethuza wrote: post #53
adventured wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US rate of violent crime is half that of Canada, and 75% lower than Britain. It's lower than France, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and so on. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-...

Worth noting a couple of points made in an article in Telegraph (which is of a similar political view to the Mail) that covers the same ground: "Researchers admit that comparisons of crime data between countries must be viewed with caution because of differing criminal justice systems and how crimes are reported and measured." "A Home Office spokesperson said: “These figures are misleading. Levels of police recorded…

To extend that: according to my understanding of a discussion I had with my cousin (a police officer in Australia), threats of a violent crime are recorded as a violent crime, as far as statistics are concerned there.

That is to say, "I have a knife... give me the money" is the same as stabbing someone, even if there was no knife.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#62

Post by adventured »

arethuza wrote: post #53
adventured wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US rate of violent crime is half that of Canada, and 75% lower than Britain. It's lower than France, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and so on. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-...

Worth noting a couple of points made in an article in Telegraph (which is of a similar political view to the Mail) that covers the same ground: "Researchers admit that comparisons of crime data between countries must be viewed with caution because of differing criminal justice systems and how crimes are reported and measured." "A Home Office spokesperson said: “These figures are misleading. Levels of police recorded…

I agree, there's little question it changes quite a bit based on definition of violent crime. However, it's a sizable margin of difference. For example it notes that Canada is roughly twice the US on violent crime, if you doubled the US number to match the variance in definition (if that's the case), it'd still be a distinctly interesting data point.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#63

Post by loevborg »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #55
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting to see the availability of firearms to citizens presented as a violation of human rights. The U.S. is an outlier among liberal democracies in its constitutional insistence that access to firearms is a human right. It's also, significantly, an outlier in its rate of firearm-related deaths, with a rate of over 10 per 100,000, similar to Panama and the Philippines and three times higher than the next…

The US never had communism, nazism, tyrants governing the country. Try to pull off concentration camps against your own people like Hitler or Stalin did when they are heavily armed. There is no way people wouldn't defend their families from going to concentration camps if they were armed. History shows that this holds true. The Government is afraid of armed people as it should be. That is a good thing. Not bad.

I'm not sure if you are being facetious. However, on the assumption that you are serious, there is no reason to think that more arms would have helped the minorities in Germany persecuted by the masses. The groups targeted by the Nazis were small (by comparison) and would never have had any chance of successfully defending themselves against the aggressions of the state and its citizens, no matter how well armed.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#64

Post by desas »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #55
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting to see the availability of firearms to citizens presented as a violation of human rights. The U.S. is an outlier among liberal democracies in its constitutional insistence that access to firearms is a human right. It's also, significantly, an outlier in its rate of firearm-related deaths, with a rate of over 10 per 100,000, similar to Panama and the Philippines and three times higher than the next…

The US never had communism, nazism, tyrants governing the country. Try to pull off concentration camps against your own people like Hitler or Stalin did when they are heavily armed. There is no way people wouldn't defend their families from going to concentration camps if they were armed. History shows that this holds true. The Government is afraid of armed people as it should be. That is a good thing. Not bad.

While the US didn't treat people in concentration camps as poorly as Stalin or Hitler did, there were 110,000 Japanese Americans put in concentration camps in 1942. Were they just not heavily armed enough?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#65

Post by peterkelly »

spitx wrote: post #30

This is utter balderdash. A nation that executes thousands of its citizens yearly, while also arranging sham trials and allowing affluent perpetrators to have body doubles serve lengthy prison sentences, should be the last to point fingers at any judiciary, elsewhere. At least, Middle Eastern states follow Shariah, a religious code (however harsh or barbaric) that dictates the severity of the punishment. These Chines…

I think the point of the article was to point out the hypocrisy of the western media which paint countries such as China as "bad" and the US as "good", highlighting the problems in the former and under-reporting problems in the latter.

The article never made any claims about China having a better human rights record than the US. It simply illustrates the sort of reporting you'd get from a western media source about the US if they weren't so fundamentally biased.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#66

Post by adventured »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #37
adventured wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for seven billion people are you? The first thing fascist or communist countries do is strictly control who has access to guns. Supporters of the regime, in the case of Nazi Germany, were allowed to keep their guns, but other people were stripped of their weapons.

Liberal democracies also strictly control who has access to guns, and they go right on being liberal democracies, albeit with much lower rates of death by firearms. What's your point?

The point is you're wrong in the conclusion you're drawing.

Switzerland is a liberal democracy, and every person has a gun basically. Meanwhile they have effectively zero gun crime.

Britain has strict gun laws, and that has not dented their violent crime rate.

Mexico has strict gun laws, and their gun homicide rate is higher than in the US. Why? The drug trade + poverty.

America has a poverty + drug law problem. That's easy to prove by looking at the gun homicide rate from the 19th century, before alcohol prohibition invented organized crime, and before the modern drug wave + prohibition drug laws. Americans were heavily armed in the 19th century, without the rampant homicides by gun we see today in poor urban areas.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#67

Post by peterkelly »

est wrote: post #11

This is strictly r/worldnews material.

Agreed.

I'm relieved to see that an article about a git command (the second today, on the same command) is #1 on HN right now, while an article reporting on human rights violations in the world's most powerful country is ranked #38.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#68

Post by adventured »

[deleted] wrote: post #59
adventured wrote: post #46

"Americans are the most heavily armed people in the world per capita. According to a CNN report on July 23, 2012, there were an estimated 270 million guns in the hands of civilians in the U.S. and more than 100,000 people were shot by guns each year. In 2010, there were more than 30,000 deaths caused by firearms." There are roughly 11,000 gun based murders each year in the US. The US doesn't first have a gun violence…

[deleted]

The US has a problem with black market guns, no doubt about it. The US Government is doing almost nothing about that in their attempts to further regulate legal gun ownership.

Your stats aren't quite accurate. Homicides by gun in the US is at least a 50% to 60% black poverty + drug law problem. And that doesn't count the substantial spillover effect of the violence that drug prohibition creates (along with the poverty it all creates by lifestyle impact, arrests that lead many to a life of crime, etc etc etc). There are a million black men in prison in the US that are often 'stuck' in a crime way of life after they get out (their lives are made far more difficult and a life of crime becomes 'easier' to follow), as their lives have been destroyed by the drug prohibition laws.

"In 2009, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 54% of all murders committed, overwhelmingly with guns, are murders of black people"

And that's mostly black on black crime. I don't mind providing further data if you like.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386960457836...

"Data for 2008 indicate that, of 16,277 murders, 10,568 were committed by males, 1,176 were by female, and 4,533 were committed in which the offenders sex was unknown. Likewise, 5,943 (36.5%) were committed by black/black Hispanic offenders, 5,334 (32.8%) murders were committed by white/white Hispanic offenders, 273 (1.7%) were committed by offenders of other races, and 4,727 (29%) murders were committed by offenders whose race is not known"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Viol...

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#69

Post by adventured »

narcissus wrote: post #61
arethuza wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting a couple of points made in an article in Telegraph (which is of a similar political view to the Mail) that covers the same ground: "Researchers admit that comparisons of crime data between countries must be viewed with caution because of differing criminal justice systems and how crimes are reported and measured." "A Home Office spokesperson said: “These figures are misleading. Levels of police recorded…

To extend that: according to my understanding of a discussion I had with my cousin (a police officer in Australia), threats of a violent crime are recorded as a violent crime, as far as statistics are concerned there. That is to say, "I have a knife... give me the money" is the same as stabbing someone, even if there was no knife.

In the US if you walk into a convenience store, say that you have a knife or gun, and take the money, that's recorded as a violent crime.

Re: Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

#70

Post by lifeisstillgood »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #55
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting to see the availability of firearms to citizens presented as a violation of human rights. The U.S. is an outlier among liberal democracies in its constitutional insistence that access to firearms is a human right. It's also, significantly, an outlier in its rate of firearm-related deaths, with a rate of over 10 per 100,000, similar to Panama and the Philippines and three times higher than the next…

The US never had communism, nazism, tyrants governing the country. Try to pull off concentration camps against your own people like Hitler or Stalin did when they are heavily armed. There is no way people wouldn't defend their families from going to concentration camps if they were armed. History shows that this holds true. The Government is afraid of armed people as it should be. That is a good thing. Not bad.

This is a foolish post - sorry to be so blunt.

Civilians standing alone do not stand a chance against the combined arms of a standing army. Does not matter if they all have guns or not. What counts is explosives, range, airpower - oh and the idea that one side has their families to worry about.

There was armed resistance to the rounding up - look at the warsaw ghetto. [1] This was armed civilians fighting an invading army, which took a huge German effort to subdue. But they did subdue it - in a way horrifically reminiscent of the US in Fallujah. (No I am not comparing US Army in Iraq to Nazis. But watch the footage on both events and then try to not worry)

If you think that the right to bear arms is there to stop tyranny, you should expand it to the right to bear Semtex, armoured vehicles and aircraft. That is why Afghanistan and Iraq were / are such a mess - the other side is fighting back with real weapons, not pop guns. Armies are frightened of other armies. Not armed civilians.

Oh, and the rise of UAVs is going to make the next insurgency a very different prospect.

Add in to this mix the basic human desire to think it is all going to go away, and no-one is that crazy. There is a story of a village running from the massacres in Rwanda, and they reach a river, and only one teenager crosses, the rest think they will be safe. The teenager is the only one left to tell the story.

Look at it this way - Hitler started small, targetting the criminals and the undesirables. Have you taken up arms to overthrown the White House now that Cuba is used for torture? What is your trigger point ? How do you find out that there are death camps? Warsaw happened because they rounded up Jews into one place before shipping them out. The Nazis learnt from that. Evil has analysts too.

What is the difference? It is not the grunts in the army. It is the need to have enlightened people in government. If we cant have that we will make do with sane politicans. The insane ones are harder to spot. You know Nixon used to end dinner chat at the white house with the line, "I could walk out of here and 45 minutes later, 500 million people would be dead?"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto

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