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The Xinjiang Police Files

xinjiangpolicefiles.org

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Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#191

Post by ashwagary »

rayiner wrote: post #155
shellfishgene wrote: post #33

I'm always surprised how little interest there seems to be from the international muslim community in the Xinjiang situation, given that at least parts of it really blow up over even minor anti-Islam actions by single individuals quite regularly. The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region, which would seem far worse than some person drawing a cartoon. But maybe…

My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups. Pakistan and Bangladesh, for example, are happy to suck up to China for the business opportunities. Similarly, the gulf states took few Syrian refugees during the recent crises: https://www.lejournalinternational.fr/Syrian-refugees-why-wo... . More generally, Arabs regard non-Arab Muslims as barely human—e.g. holding Bangladesh…

>My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups.

It's the same reason most "Muslims" don't "care" about Al Qaeda and ISIS. Many Muslim populations, just like the Chinese, are negatively affected by Uighur terrorist and extremist groups.

"Southeast Asia is witnessing evolving security risks from Chinese Uyghurs' involvement in military activities in the region."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26351495.pdf

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#192

Post by glenstein »

refurb wrote: post #157
cies wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right, I think GP still has a point. Those responsible for the MOVE massacre walked from it. The broader point I think GP tries to make is: the west should not be so quick to point fingers, especially not while it's own fingers are covered in blood. The US likes to same "human rights violations" about other nations, but then commits many themselves every year, and claims to be above the The Hague court.…

So you're suggesting that the US, since it's guilty of human rights violations, should just be silent when it sees others countries commit human rights violations? I think that's absurd. There isn't a country on this planet who hasn't committed some human rights violation in its past. By your logic, nobody should ever call out human rights violations...ever. A far better approach is to judge a country by its actions…

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 categorically disagrees with the idea that China has ever done anything wrong, you would hope that such a person wouldn't try to use the one topic to derail the other.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#193

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #159
dr_faustus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find that interesting in contrast to the constant outrage about the situation of Palestinians in Israel which certainly has many highly problematic aspects but to me still seems to be a far cry from the situation of Muslims in China or the treatment of the predominantly Muslim Chechnians by Russia. It seems to be quite hypocritical by the governments of Muslim countries.

In my experience the constant outrage over Palestine is driven more by hatred of Israel than concern about Palestinians. Antisemitism is universal in the Muslim world,[1] not so with anti-Sino sentiment. Note that the wealthy Arab states surrounding Palestine aren’t leaping to admit refugees from Palestine. [1] I think my home country of Bangladesh is thousands of miles away from any significant population of Jews. Y…

[deleted]

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#194

Post by Sporktacular »

ashwagary wrote: post #191
rayiner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups. Pakistan and Bangladesh, for example, are happy to suck up to China for the business opportunities. Similarly, the gulf states took few Syrian refugees during the recent crises: https://www.lejournalinternational.fr/Syrian-refugees-why-wo... . More generally, Arabs regard non-Arab Muslims as barely human—e.g. holding Bangladesh…

>My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups. It's the same reason most "Muslims" don't "care" about Al Qaeda and ISIS. Many Muslim populations, just like the Chinese, are negatively affected by Uighur terrorist and extremist groups. "Southeast Asia is witnessing evolving security risks from Chinese Uyghurs' involvement in military activities in the region." https://www.j…

Yet more muslims have died fighting AQ and ISIS than any other religious group. Weird right?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#195

Post by throwaway290 »

berdario wrote: post #185
shellfishgene wrote: post #33

I'm always surprised how little interest there seems to be from the international muslim community in the Xinjiang situation, given that at least parts of it really blow up over even minor anti-Islam actions by single individuals quite regularly. The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region, which would seem far worse than some person drawing a cartoon. But maybe…

Part of the problem is that it's difficult to trust any of these documents. It seems that in this latest dump there are some that are blatantly forged. Even if the others are genuine, this calls into question the veracity of the others https://twitter.com/Cinqscories/status/1529035490032340993

"Western lie debunkers" will absolutely jump at any chance to say this is a fake, but that particular take is pathetic and indicative of problems with CJK literacy.

Unicode points and font glyphs are not the same thing, leading to situations where one Unicode character can be rendered as a different one (but similar) depending on OS and setup* -- and people enter and read characters by how they look, not by their Unicode points.

So the document can easily end up with 置's Unicode entity in the source without anyone finding out, even the person who entered it, if it always renders as a simplified version (without the left-bottom vertical line). And it will always render as a simplified version, because everyone involved is obviously using a simplified setup.

(If you have a Big Sur set up the same way as mine, you can observe for yourself by opening the same doc, such as the "Response Plan and Procedure for Escape and Disturbance Prevention During Class Times", in Quick Look and Pages and looking at the end of text following the first Arabic numeral "1" on the first page. Quick Look will show you a traditional/Japanese character at the end, while Pages will have a much better layout and consistently show simplified characters.)

The sad thing is that this initial stalling tactic is effective. Some will be swayed by his simple tweets and not have patience for the subsequent "debunking of the debunk" let alone their own research. This takes away the initial impact of the release.

* Software chooses a different glyph, the font provides a different glyph than required by Unicode standard, and so on. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54212157/. There was an in-depth article on CJK posted on HN some time ago, can't remember what it was called.

TL;DR yes, documents authored by CCP officials can easily have traditional Unicode points in them, because it is completely routine for software to be set up in a way that always renders those in simplified way.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#196

Post by ashwagary »

Sporktacular wrote: post #194
ashwagary wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My impression is that most Muslims don’t real care about Muslims from other ethnic groups. It's the same reason most "Muslims" don't "care" about Al Qaeda and ISIS. Many Muslim populations, just like the Chinese, are negatively affected by Uighur terrorist and extremist groups. "Southeast Asia is witnessing evolving security risks from Chinese Uyghurs' involvement in military activities in the region." https://www.j…

Yet more muslims have died fighting AQ and ISIS than any other religious group. Weird right?

>more muslims have died fighting AQ and ISIS than any other religious group

I think we are making the same point.

Some of the largest muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan) don't have sympathy for many Chinese Uyghur groups because once they leave China, they train with ISIS/Al Qaeda then plan and commit terrorist acts around Asia.

Many believe the Chinese are doing them a favor with their detention and deradicalization programs.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#197

Post by fps_doug »

glenstein wrote: post #190
berdario wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that it's difficult to trust any of these documents. It seems that in this latest dump there are some that are blatantly forged. Even if the others are genuine, this calls into question the veracity of the others https://twitter.com/Cinqscories/status/1529035490032340993

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 wonder why such blatant mistakes would be made in the first place, if this was done by someone at least halfway professional.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#198

Post by throwaway290 »

fps_doug wrote: post #197
glenstein wrote: post #190

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…

It's very simple:

1) software renders not Unicode characters but font glyphs

2) which font glyphs are chosen depends on many factors like installed fonts, OS, language/region settings, and so on

3) people author (and read) characters by how they look on their systems, what codepoints are used is not on anyone's mind

A differently configured system can uncover incorrect codepoint choices or rendering differences across machines, exactly what happened with the author of that tweet (supposedly living in Europe and not having the same old Windows machine as ones used in CCP apparat).

In fact, this happens all the time and is a routine headache for anyone building CJK sites viewed from different countries in the region (for example, I see some traditional Japanese characters, instead of their simplified Chinese versions, on http://cs.mfa.gov.cn/wgrlh/. Is there a hidden meaning? Is the site fake?). When it comes to MS Word and IME in old Windows versions, things are even wilder. I doubt the tweeter didn't know this, most likely it's a stall tactic.

CJK is a hot mess, but it is what it is.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#199

Post by wutbrodo »

dr_faustus wrote: post #40
shellfishgene wrote: post #33

I'm always surprised how little interest there seems to be from the international muslim community in the Xinjiang situation, given that at least parts of it really blow up over even minor anti-Islam actions by single individuals quite regularly. The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region, which would seem far worse than some person drawing a cartoon. But maybe…

I also find that interesting in contrast to the constant outrage about the situation of Palestinians in Israel which certainly has many highly problematic aspects but to me still seems to be a far cry from the situation of Muslims in China or the treatment of the predominantly Muslim Chechnians by Russia. It seems to be quite hypocritical by the governments of Muslim countries.

Is this surprising? Polities care about things happening in their backyard, and societies' goals tend to be much more pragmatic than what it says on the tin. The Palestinian situation is happening in their backyard, with people whose history is intertwined with theirs, and a refugee situation that affects them directly. There's not a country in the world that doesn't ultimately prioritize geopolitical concerns and a heaping dose of "people who look like me" prioritization.

For example, it's not "surprising hypocrisy" that Israel has a problem with racism towards some Jewish ethnic groups (Mizrahi, Ethiopian), despite Israel's supposedly deeply-held identity as a homeland where all Jews are welcome.

Note that this isn't a criticism of Israel! Just an acknowledgement that everywhere, people are people, and most people happen to be monsters. The fact that Arab countries care more about Arabs than a Muslim group halfway across the world seems almost tautological to me.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#200

Post by Sporktacular »

rayiner wrote: post #159
dr_faustus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find that interesting in contrast to the constant outrage about the situation of Palestinians in Israel which certainly has many highly problematic aspects but to me still seems to be a far cry from the situation of Muslims in China or the treatment of the predominantly Muslim Chechnians by Russia. It seems to be quite hypocritical by the governments of Muslim countries.

In my experience the constant outrage over Palestine is driven more by hatred of Israel than concern about Palestinians. Antisemitism is universal in the Muslim world,[1] not so with anti-Sino sentiment. Note that the wealthy Arab states surrounding Palestine aren’t leaping to admit refugees from Palestine. [1] I think my home country of Bangladesh is thousands of miles away from any significant population of Jews. Y…

The only wealthy state neighbouring the Palestinian territories is Israel (which is in some ways more of a suzerain than a neighbour).

Anti-semitism went through the roof when Zionists started taking large tracts of land for a new state that wasn't recognised by its neighbours. Pan-Arabists and muslim groups, knew their land could be next if the precedent went unchallenged and stirred up bigotry in response. The hatred was initially more of the idea of Israel than of Jews.

And they were prepared to throw Palestinians under a bus too, banishing them to a multi-generational life of homelessness and refugee status rather than allow full citizenship, so as to keep pressure on Israel and prevent normalisation of the situation. Of course they don't care about Palestinians either.

Now, in the Gulf states it's about business. Outside the Gulf States it's about domestic politics. But beneath the bigotry, the principled opposition to land annexation by foreign powers still remains.

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