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The Xinjiang Police Files

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Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#291

Post by Melting_Harps »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #272
Melting_Harps wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In some sense religion undermines the state. In the 21st century, especially under the CCP, they're just competing forces more than direct adversaries, they both strive to do the same thing. And for most of History, the Church was the State. It's parallels are quite visible, and now most wars are fought not for the deliberate imposition of deities, but rather for the new pantheon of self-declared god's: political l…

> And for most of History, the Church was the State. This is wildly false. The Church of England is about as close as things get. What historical periods are you thinking of in which the Church and the State were identified?

The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS. Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well. The Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire...

In short most of the impactful societies, specifically in the West have had hardcore religious zealotry.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#292

Post by watwut »

trasz wrote: post #268
watwut wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Yeah, because if there was bad-faith definition of genocide or bad faith argument, this is the one.

But, given that article is about genocide performed by China, lets focus on that, shall we? Surely Chinese victims deserve some attention, surely we don't need to make USA center of everything. I dont know whether this is "I am American and cant handle when they talk about somebody else" issue or "I am Chinese and cant handle my country is seen as bad here" issue, but it is absurd regardless.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#293

Post by watwut »

thriftwy wrote: post #175
watwut wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You win a war to get a stable Chechen political regime that sort-of works and turn a warzone into a reasonably peaceful region. Not starting that war in the first place would be even better. > Stopping the violence is a good thing. Not committing it in the first place is even better.

It is a region of Russia and it is practically landlocked from all sides by other Russia, and also it seems to have started the war by attacking Dagestan (also in Russia). So even comparing it to Xinjiang, which China could plausible give away, Russia could not get rid of Chechnya even of it wanted. What other outcome would you expect? But, that has ended 15 years ago, by now.

It is not region of Russia. Russia did not had to get rid of it, Chechnya was its own state. Russia had no business invading it first time in the first place. And it has no business to excuse own crimes in second round by the Chechnya being country previously invaded by Russia.

Russia should stop destroying everything around it.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#294

Post by thaumasiotes »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #291
thaumasiotes wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And for most of History, the Church was the State. This is wildly false. The Church of England is about as close as things get. What historical periods are you thinking of in which the Church and the State were identified?

The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS. Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well. The Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire... In short most of the impactful societies, specifically in the West have had hardcore religious zealotry.

> The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS.

It would be difficult for Isabella to be called the Catholic without being religiously subordinate to the Pope.

> Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well.

This is a bizarre claim. Pagan Greece and Rome didn't have organized religion at all, not in any sense we would understand. And both were riddled with mystery cults. The Church was unified with the classical Greek State only in the same sense that it was unified with the olive oil industry, or that the modern American Church is unified with the modern American State.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#295

Post by thaumasiotes »

alisonatwork wrote: post #186
thaumasiotes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the situation of Muslims in China Here's your problem; trying to talk about "the situation of Muslims in China" is incoherent. Islam has been an accepted (though small) part of Chinese culture for many centuries, and it still is. The Uyghurs are highly atypical Muslims in China who don't speak Chinese and don't participate in Chinese culture, instead preferring their own rival culture. That (and rebelliousness) is…

What does "participate in Chinese culture" mean, and why shouldn't the culture of China's Xinjiang province count as "Chinese culture", assuming we accept the official description of China as a 多民族國家 multi-ethnic country? I do get what you mean about language, insofar as most people of the Hui ethnic group do tend to speak the dominant Sinitic language of the region in which they live and not an entirely different la…

> assuming we accept the official description of China as a 多民族國家 multi-ethnic country?

Responding separately to this bit of inanity, if we're going to take Chinese official descriptions at face value, the Uyghurs aren't being oppressed in any way. They're in charge of their own 自治区.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#296

Post by thriftwy »

watwut wrote: post #293
thriftwy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a region of Russia and it is practically landlocked from all sides by other Russia, and also it seems to have started the war by attacking Dagestan (also in Russia). So even comparing it to Xinjiang, which China could plausible give away, Russia could not get rid of Chechnya even of it wanted. What other outcome would you expect? But, that has ended 15 years ago, by now.

It is not region of Russia. Russia did not had to get rid of it, Chechnya was its own state. Russia had no business invading it first time in the first place. And it has no business to excuse own crimes in second round by the Chechnya being country previously invaded by Russia. Russia should stop destroying everything around it.

It is absolutely a region of Russia, much like Idaho which is a region of the US.

Try to secede Idaho and see what happens.

Meanwhile, Abkhazia is absolutely a country, with a history of statehood and real state border, which you fail to recognize. Would you make Georgia stop ruining everything around it? When it recognizes Abkhazia, we can talk.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#297

Post by jum1p »

tptacek wrote: post #275
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 You can't write comments like this on HN. Choose better words. You're way off your game here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism#Gender_essentiali...

This is about Gender but it applies to people applying this on ethnic groups as well.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#298

Post by fps_doug »

throwaway290 wrote: post #231
fps_doug wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happens if you have no language hints, or the wrong one, e.g. posting in Simplified Chinese on a Taiwanese website. If this was written in something like MSWord by CCP officials, it should have the proper language hint, so render properly on any OS newer than XP.

I'm not sure what you mean by language hints. Setting aside all other assumptions you make about the soundness of their setup overall, consistency of their input methods, newness of their inventory, etc., do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for? Remember, this applies to the system as a whole. A character would be shown as simplified by the…

> I'm not sure what you mean by language hints.

Because of the han unification, you can tell the font renderer which language context you're in and want things to be rendered. MSWord shows you the language in the status bar at the bottom, which is not only used for spell checking. In html, you can add the lang attribute to a tag to tell the browser what language the contained glyphs belong to.

> do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for?

Because ever since Vista, these come pre-installed regardless of your locale.

> Do you seriously think CCP officials have a fleet of Macs to check document appearance in case they are leaked and/or scan documents for "enemy" Unicode points?

I don't believe anything in particular, just adding technical context. The documents could also have been leaked through Taiwan or Hong Kong and then mangled there resulting in this.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#299

Post by fps_doug »

glenstein wrote: post #262
fps_doug wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 inade…

> It's hard to understand what the tweet is suggesting unless you read the entire thread

You linked to one tweet, which directly started talking about the traditional vs simplified characters. I don't see how there is much context missing.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#300

Post by cloudfifty »

tptacek wrote: post #285
rayiner wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re reading in a subtext that isn’t there. Most people care mainly about what’s happening to their own nationality or ethnic group. Islam doesn’t create a unifying bond that overrides that in the same way Christianity doesn’t. It’s like how Americans don’t care especially about whats happening in France based on shared Christian identity.

Yes, we're asked, repeatedly and specifically, to avoid generalizing about large groups of people --- nationalities, religions, &c. I get that you may have a vantage on this that we don't have, but you still have to be careful about how you communicate it. Some things are tricky to communicate in a forum like this; some things may be so tricky that they aren't worth communicating. I don't know. I just did a double ta…

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