The Xinjiang Police Files • Hacker News Board

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#301

Post by trasz » Wed, May 25, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #281

trasz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>China denies the event. It never ceases to amaze me how people still believe things like this. https://www.quora.com/What-do-Chinese-citizens-particularly-... > Are you seriously arguing that response is better than the US? Are you seriously not realising that you're making a huge assumption here? But please, tell me how putting the prime minister in house arrest for the rest of his life is a worse response than ign…

China just tore down a statue in HK commemorating the massacre. But your telling me your quora link tells me all is fine? Come on, your spending an awful lot of time defending a brutal dictatorship.

>China just tore down a statue in HK commemorating the massacre.

How is that different from Eastern Europe countries removing Soviet statues?

>Come on, your spending an awful lot of time defending a brutal dictatorship.

Do you know the political preferences of the people who actually live there? And if you do, why do you believe you know better?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#302

Post by fennecfoxy » Wed, May 25, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #158

aasasd wrote: post #106

As we saw after the invasion of Ukraine, the West can mount a swift, concerted and effective response, that deals a lot of damage to the offending country's economy. I'm sure that evidence of Xinjiang crimes will invoke the same kind of decisive action.

Ukrainians are white. Don't underestimate the impact of that.

Ukraine is a part of Europe, Europe responded. The US has heavy ties/trade relationships with Europe and so they responded, too.

I imagine if it was Taiwan that US/Europe would've sent aid to them all the same.

When it comes to Israel/Palestine and other conflicts the situation there is a lot more complicated when it comes to international relations/obligations as well as the duration and the history of the conflict.

That isn't to say, however, that any conflict isn't a tragedy and that hoomans shouldn't just stop it with the tribal, evolutionary-path inspired antics already.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#303

Post by fennecfoxy » Wed, May 25, 2022, 10:30 AM UTC

pvg wrote: post #276

chitowneats wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an observation about a group of people is not "xenophobia". Quite the opposite in fact. If you read the comment more closely, it's not "muslims don't care about muslims", it's, "arabs don't care about southeast asians", which... well, there's a ton of evidence for this unfortunately.

Neither form of that kind of sweeping generalization is ok on HN with piles of moderator commentary about it.

Easily solved by just adding Some* in front of everything, then ;)

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#304

Post by throwaway290 » Wed, May 25, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

fps_doug wrote: post #298

throwaway290 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 belie…

> In html, you can add the lang attribute to a tag to tell the browser what language the contained glyphs belong to.

Well, you can visit probably any official Chinese government department website right now and see traditional Japanese characters instead of their simplified equivalents, if your machine happens to be configured that way. (Or at least the first one I stumbled across was like that, I pasted link somewhere in another comment. And I most certainly have Chinese fonts installed; in fact I see only simplified characters when I open the tweeted document in Pages.)

So they clearly do not make that effort even with documents actually crafted with foreign readers in mind. Presumably things can't be expected to be better if we are discussing secret documents intended for internal CCP consumption.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#305

Post by glenstein » Wed, May 25, 2022, 11:12 AM UTC

trasz wrote: post #269

glenstein wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand, but I like to think I was actually making a full-fledged point about the fallacy of covering for abuses by ignoring them and pointing to other abuses. Do you disagree? How can I state that point to your satisfaction without you labeling it as American exceptionalism?

Except nobody was suggesting to ignore them and point to other abuses - we are talking about the idea of how this kind of problems cannot occur in Western societies, because society can do things. They do, society can't do anything, and I provided an example.

If that were the case, you've still misdiagnosed my point, which was still not a point about American Exceptionalism. That is, even if I was wrong to suggest this was an instance of ignore X, because what about Y, pointing out that such a thing is fallacious would not be an instance of imploring people to indulge in American Exceptionalism.

But, I don't believe I was wrong, I believe you're just confidently incorrect. You entered a thread about one subject, changed the subject to something else, and unless you were offering it as a complete non-sequitur (which you should be clear about), you were suggesting an appropriate response to criticism of China was to ask people follow you on an academic detour to a vague and largely nonresponsive point that left behind most of the previous subject, presumably because you believed that such an exercise represented forward motion in the conversation. So I do think you really are doing the "ignore that, what about this" exercise, and that is what people mean by whataboutism.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#306

Post by glenstein » Wed, May 25, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

fps_doug wrote: post #299

glenstein wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

Again "I don't believe it because I'm missing context" is a perfectly legitimate way to engage with something that's missing context. You appear to have abandoned that point to instead emphasize that there is indeed sufficient context (so I guess having enough context does matter to you, after all.)

I don't know if you're confusing me for somebody else, but I didn't link to any tweets. And as I've now said twice, which has been ignored twice, the thread alludes to numerous unmade arguments about the reliability of the BBC, the UN, Le Monde, and a reporter as background to motivate the inference that their reporting is unreliable.

And it makes an assumption about what is proved or not proved by traditional vs simplified characters (different = Taiwan), and that underlying assumption isn't backed up with an argument, and there's no reason to agree with that assumption without further context. A reader is supposed to already agree that that's how it works or else go scrolling through twitter timelines and searches to find where that argument is made.

Perhaps when you ignore all of this in your reply, and remind me that it's "directly started talking about [sic]" traditional vs. simplified characters, I can repeat this all again and hope the fourth time is the charm?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#307

Post by honkdaddy » Wed, May 25, 2022, 11:25 AM UTC

dirtyid wrote: post #260

honkdaddy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you'd ever wondered what pro-CIA astroturfing looks like, this is a pretty good example of the typical playbook. - Accuse someone of being a shill without addressing argument - Dismiss completely valid comparisons as whataboutism Repeat ad nauseum. It never ceases to blow my mind how deeply people are willing to shove their head in the sand in order to justify the misinformation funded by their government. US inte…

Yeah see this is essentially what I'm talking about. dirtyid isn't really willing to engage with the points I made about China itself, so instead they try to divert attention to the CIA (??) It's almost comical how underhanded and ineffective this type of debate is. It's as if you're trying to have a debate about the actions of Enron and your opponent insists on bringing up how what Bernie Madoff did was worse.

My friend, I'm a Canadian. I have nothing good to say about the CIA. But I have far, far worse to say about the most bloody and repressive totalitarian regime present in the world right now. You and every other ignorant pawn have blood on your hands, and I hope some day you feel rightfully ashamed.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#308

Post by glenstein » Wed, May 25, 2022, 11:32 AM UTC

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…

>and not about "making it sound like China is actually ok".

So can we set the other argument aside just for a moment and get clarity on whether you think people in this thread are right to express concern re Xinjiang? That would disabuse everyone reading your comments of the concern that you're just purposely derailing them, and should be easy to clarify. We can have both discussions, without using one to shut down the other, and surely you want that. Right?

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#309

Post by sva_ » Wed, May 25, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

sizzle wrote: post #282

sva_ wrote: post #101

Looking through some of those detainee pictures, it is almost all men, and some older women. Gruesome implication. But I only looked through some.

Did you see the same thing I saw? Cause you can filter by age by hitting the hamburger menu icon and there were 2000+ females returned under 30 years old that I didn’t have the heart to verify scrolling through the mugshots, it really gutted me and made it painful to see this blatant miscarriage of Justice. Everyone please go and try out the age filter, it is frightening and highly effective in humanizing the plight…

I didn't look too deeply, as I said.

Re: The Xinjiang Police Files

#310

Post by fps_doug » Wed, May 25, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

glenstein wrote: post #306

fps_doug wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Again "I don't believe it because I'm missing context" is a perfectly legitimate way to engage with something that's missing context. You appear to have abandoned that point to instead emphasize that there is indeed sufficient context (so I guess having enough context does matter to you, after all.) I don't know if you're confusing me for somebody else, but I didn't link to any tweets. And as I've now said twice, whi…

> I don't know if you're confusing me for somebody else, but I didn't link to any tweets.

sigh.. Correction: the link to the tweet form the guy you replied to that you seemed to refer to.

> And as I've now said twice, which has been ignored twice, the thread alludes to numerous unmade arguments about the reliability of the BBC, the UN, Le Monde, and a reporter as background to motivate the inference that their reporting is unreliable.

I clicked the link again. I don't see any of that. It starts with claims about 1) a cursor (which I ignored) and 2) the issue with the characters, which is further elaborated on in a couple follow-up tweets. Then your comment mentions all these news outlets and I don't understand how that connects to the claims about the characters, or makes them taken out of context. It looks like a pretty stand-alone claim/issue that should be something to quickly do research on if you care about the topic, nothing taken wildly out of context.

> I can repeat this all again and hope the fourth time is the charm?

Sure, if that makes you feel better.