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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

#131

Post by IncRnd »

ATsch wrote: post #121
IncRnd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in. It's not a military occupation in the sense you imply. It is a perpetual lease made between the US and Cuba. [1] [1] https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/ns_gua...

See, it's not an occupation, it's a "perpetual lease". That I happen to enforce with my army. And we didn't steal that land, they kindly gave it to us. When we held a gun up to their heads and made them sign a document they did not understand. Oh, and these aren't slaves, they're workers. Who happen to be on an unbreakable contract. (and also, how could I forget, "these Uighurs aren't prisoners, they're just people w…

Please quit trolling. Your comment is disconnected from anything I wrote.

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

#132

Post by cabirum »

danielheath wrote: post #102
cabirum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Whataboutism" is not a valid refutation in most contexts. It's more of a chant, a mantra, a trigger word you are conditioned to bring up when some kind of obvious hypocrisy or double standard is being pointed out that you cannot otherwise refute. [edit] Also, "whataboutism" the word, sounds like from 2ndgrader vocabulary

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…

A post about Chinese torture camps makes an impression that torture camps are exclusively a Chinese thing. It would be fair to mention other countries involved in similar behavior.

The post could have been "torture camps are bad" piece. It is instead focuses on "China is bad" propaganda

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

#134

Post by xtian »

plouffy wrote: post #8

Holly molly, the whatsaboutism in these comments.

You can call it “whataboutism”, but the only practical outcome of this performative caring in my lifetime has been the justification of endless wars, increased arms dealing, and brutal economic sanctions, which help no one but the US elite.

I am an American, not a “global citizen”. My responsibility is to America. Let the people of other countries take moral responsibility for their governments. To pretend that America has some unique moral insights that need to be imposed on the rest of the world is both deeply racist and contradicted by history.

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

#135

Post by blueflow »

IncRnd wrote: post #131
ATsch wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, it's not an occupation, it's a "perpetual lease". That I happen to enforce with my army. And we didn't steal that land, they kindly gave it to us. When we held a gun up to their heads and made them sign a document they did not understand. Oh, and these aren't slaves, they're workers. Who happen to be on an unbreakable contract. (and also, how could I forget, "these Uighurs aren't prisoners, they're just people w…

Please quit trolling. Your comment is disconnected from anything I wrote.

Please quit your US newspeak.

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

#136

Post by adventured »

grumbel wrote: post #59
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.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The incarceration rate is around 5 times that of China

You have no idea what the incarceration rate is in China in fact - part the charm of the zero human rights modern China, which is itself an authoritarian prison state - and their supposed official figure does not include millions of Uyghurs.

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

#137

Post by dundarious »

NmAmDa wrote: post #67

It is clear that many people (sometimes with good intentions) would bring this logic to any discussion about this matter. . China is having their Muslim population put into camps and they live in a horrible injustice situation. They are targeted because of their religion /ethnicity. Chinese government saying that US is being hypocrite because they did so and so in Iraq and whatever happened after 9/11 from abuses..et…

I think a major resentment people have when they see these "moral stands" by the US, is that in its literal present day actions, neither US nor China "stand up against oppression in general not just when you can benefit", but also, China does not rhetorically claim to do so -- the US does make that false claim.

The easy present day case to back up this claim that the US does not "stand up against oppression..." is Yemen: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113852. With various slight modifications, and given enough time to explain, you can add a host of other countries to that list: Afghanistan, Syria, Israel+Palestine, etc. Go back 20-30 years and you can add Iraq. Go back a little further and add Indonesia+East Timor, Iran, most of South and Central America. It's more complicated to make the case, and there are still too many uncertainties about what actually happened, but you could probably even add "nice, Western" countries like Italy to that list.

The point is, China often uses this false talk of "moral stands" as a (mostly sarcastic) retort to the US, because the US sincerely engages in the same false talk in 90% of its communications and more importantly, in material actions that affect actual lives on the ground.

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

#138

Post by adventured »

fps_doug wrote: post #127
lr4444lr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I didn't pick "70" randomly.

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 one is a critical difference between cultures.

In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang.

You are of course lambasting the US, on a US website. Nothing bad will happen to you because of that. And in this thread you won't find thousands of bots attempting to say that the Japanese internment is ok, or otherwise justify that it should have happened; instead, most of the replies are fully agreeing that it was atrocious. Try that in China, see what happens.

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

#139

Post by grapeskin »

golergka wrote: post #126
VictorPath wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Have there been at least one verified report about american comment far, BTW? There's been dozens about Russian and Chinese over the last 15 years.

There has, yes. Straight from the Senate. [1]

There's a 300 million dollar budget to counter "chinese influence" and "promote transparency." Where does that money go? Who knows. But traditionally this goes to paying for media narratives, and in the 21st century, online comments are definitely a good bang for your buck. And star witnesses are also a good way to counter the influence of a country and demand transparency. They've done it before. [2]

I don't think we'll know the reality of this until 20 years down the road.

[1] https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/FY21%20B...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

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

#140

Post by dwater »

lr4444lr wrote: post #46
erdos4d wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Didn't they each get a trial by their peers at state expense? Can you say the same about uighurs in indefinite detention?

No, the legal system in the US absolutely does not have the resources to give a jury trial to everyone charged with a crime.

"According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005), in 2003 there were 75,573 cases disposed of in federal district court by trial or plea. Of these, about 95 percent were disposed of by a guilty plea (Pastore and Maguire, 2003). While there are no exact estimates of the proportion of cases that are resolved through plea bargaining, scholars estimate that about 90 to 95 percent of both federal and state court cases are resolved through this process (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005; Flanagan and Maguire, 1990)."

"...Plea bargaining results in disparate treatment concerning both legal and extralegal characteristics, especially regarding those who are more likely to be granted lenient sentences."

https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/docu...

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