Every time I read about what China is doing to Uighurs, my heart sinks. Putting people in camps, monitoring their every move, coating it all with bureaucracy and lies. This is what genocide looks like.
And nobody has the courage to stand up to China. Not even to publicly denounce them.
Isn't this what the UN is for? To impose economic sanctions on flagrant human rights abusers?
(Please, no whataboutism replies, what any other country is doing does not justify what China is doing.)
> The US is actually trying to raise some noise about this, but few are willing to join the fray.
'Soft power' such as https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equit... might help explain US/global unwillingness to be too noisy. tldr: "In short, the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers."
Unfortunately, international norms or UN sanctions don't have any teeth against world powers. It's just the unfortunate aspect of realpolitik that we all have to deal with.
Why should someone stood up to China in the first place ? The UN is not a world government nor a international court, and Human Rights are a series of agreements between states. China is not compelled to agree to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Are you suggesting China's official position today is that it is no longer bound by its previous agreement? They could officially withdraw if that were the case. Articles like this from 2008 don't give any indication that they feel that way: https://web.archive.org/web/20160729200250/http://news.xinhu...
The UN is for avoiding wars. It has a secondary objective of providing mutual economical gains.
It has a much less preponderant mission of incentivizing the adoption of human rights and democracy, but none of the tools for that. Any effective structure with this goal would be opposed by most of its members (or maybe even nearly all). Strong countries can impose some human rights on weaker ones, and they do use the UN as a forum for that, but China is strong enough for nobody to mess with them.
That’s not the sort of whataboutism you called out in your comment, because the parent isn’t justifying Chinese actions, but pointing out that the U.N. hasn’t acted in similar cases and so it’s not unreasonable to think that they wouldn’t act here.
Please keep the tired trope of "whataboutism" off HN. It has become a cliché, used to cordon off discussion to what the original speaker wants to talk about—as if speaking first conferred some right to decide what is admissible. That's not how conversation works.
Comparables are often relevant, and looking for contradictions in what people argue or believe is a tool for shedding light on a situation. Somehow the word "whataboutism" became catchy enough that people started to believe in the right to exclude unwanted examples this way, but that's clearly a fallacy. If you can show how I'm applying a principle selectively in different cases, you've taught me something valuable. We need to stay open to that.
There's a subtler fallacy worth pointing out too: it doesn't follow that you're justifying the thing I'm against. That is, if you point out an inconsistency or some comparable example on my side of the argument, it doesn't follow that you're a communist or whatnot. Maybe you are, maybe not. Maybe we actually agree. All that follows is that you've found an inconsistency in me, and that's information I need.
When someone brings up an example that they think is relevant and you don't, the way to refute that is not with a garlic word, but to explain what the significant difference is. If there isn't a significant difference, maybe it's not irrelevant.
People do bring up irrelevancies, but that's rarer than it seems. More likely it's that they have a different perspective on what's relevant, as part of the original disagreement that needs hashing out in the first place. Cordoning off discussion doesn't help with that, and no party to a dispute gets the power to draw the lines of what's in and out for everybody. Indeed, that would amount to the power to impose one's view on the entire dispute.
And I wonder: if we could agree on what's relevant, perhaps by including everything we both really care about, how close that might get us to resolving our conflict itself.
Did 'whataboutism' key your car or something?[1] It's a reasonably well-defined term but it is seeing a bit of popularity and mildly tedious abuse. At the same time, we've lived with the tedium of much more common forum verbal tics - 'straw man', 'ad hominem', 'argument from authority' and this hasn't (I think quite sensibly) merited multiple lengthy moderator encyclicals.
[1] Obviously, if that's what happened, I'm with you completely. Whataboutism should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
You asked Dan and not me but let me take this opportunity to cheerlead intrusive moderation of "ad hominem" and "argument from authority" as well, both of which are also invariably markers of dumb, polluting arguments.
Well since we're all here, can you expand on what you mean by ad hominem? It's a classical term of course and I know the literal meaning, but at times find it slippery to pin down, and (same thing) people have subtly different interpretations.
... and to say that most instances in which ad-hom is invoked on HN result in stupid debates about whether an argument is (a) actually ad-hom and (b) fallaciously ad-hom (a subtlety most invokers on HN don't really grok).
I think we already have a culture that rejects personalized arguments, and "ad hominem", which gets deployed because people have long ago pulled it out of one of those Internet "fallacy lists", virtually always just clouds discussions. It's certainly more corrosive than "whataboutism".
Honestly, I think it's possible that all "canned" fallacy arguments --- ad hom, whataboutism, argument from authority, straw-man --- basically contravene the "principle of charity" guideline, and that it'd be worth having the guidelines ask people not to deploy pre-canned responses to other people's arguments. You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
Sorry I didn't see this sooner, but thanks for the excellent reply. It's a really good point about canned responses, and this is gold:
You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
I may have been wrong to interpret this comment as whataboutism, but whataboutism isn't just some petty logical fallacy to invoke in internet arguments, but a well-established political tactic employed by governments of the world to justify their actions. It's on a different class of rhetoric than the others in this list.
Soviet Russia invoked it all the time to justify their actions, as does Trump and currently China. Whataboutism is a favourite tactic of oppressive regimes, "practically a national ideology".
Nobody is denying that these canned arguments don't refer back to real things; they're just saying that they devolve into canned arguments and superficial, thought-destroying comparisons that degrade the site.
On "whataboutism", there's no debate to have; if you follow Dan and Scott's moderation comments, appeals to "whataboutism" have been verboten on the site for awhile now.
What's a "garlic word"? I briefly tried looking it up. I can infer what you mean, I'm just curious if that was already an expression, drawn from somewhere else.
There are two things to discuss. One is China right in what it's doing.(which most people would agree is wrong)
The second is why isn't the UN doing something, and clearly whether the UN regularly engages in this behavior is relevant. And here are a bunch of cases of human rights abuses that the UN hasn't tried very hard to solve and therefore maybe this isn't what the UN consistently does is relevant.
These observations about increased security always fail to include information about past terrorist attacks and militant activity in the region. The reality of the situation is more nuanced than the depiction by western media.
In December 2016 in Xinjiang, Islamic militants drove a vehicle into a yard at the county Communist party offices and set off a bomb but were all shot dead. Three people were wounded and one other died.
In July 2011, At least 18 people died in a series of alleged terrorist attacks in the city of Kashgar. According to state-run media accounts, the violence began when two Uyghur men hijacked a truck, ran it into a crowded street, and started stabbing people, killing six. The attack ended when the assailants were overpowered by the crowd, which killed one attacker. On the second day, state media reported that a "group of armed terrorists" stormed a restaurant, killed the owner and a waiter, and set it ablaze. They then proceeded to indiscriminately kill four more civilians. Armed clashes then reportedly ensured, ending with police capturing or killing the attackers. The Turkistan Islamic Party later claimed responsibility for the attack. One of the suspects appeared in a TIP video training in Pakistan.
In March 2015 in Guangzhou, three ethnic Uyghur assailants with long knives attacked civilians at Guangzhou train station, 13 injured.
In November 2014 in Xinjian, militants with knives and explosives attacked civilians, 15 dead and 14 injured. 14 of the 15 deaths were attackers
In May 2014 in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, Two sport utility vehicles (SUVs) carrying five assailants were driven into a busy street market in Ürümqi. Up to a dozen explosives were thrown at shoppers from the windows of the SUVs. The SUVs crashed into shoppers then collided with each other and exploded. 43 people were killed, including 4 of the assailants, and more than 90 wounded.
I agree. I was referring to the US President's proposed ban on Muslim immigrants. I'm curious, what would be your solution to terrorist activity in western China?
As I'm neither an experienced state official nor a military commander, I can't pretend to have a solution. But I'd start by reversing any policies that are harming more people than the terrorism itself.
How would the Uighurs run a country where they were the majority? Sadly, we have two governments, one(the Uighurs) believes in a warlike state where religion is the authority and another warlike one (China) where the secular state is the authority and China is larger.
These states that blend state and religious power all seem headed towards religious oligopolies - Iran comes to mind.
What happens when the states of Europe become majority Islamic? Will Islam undergo a gradual reformation or will the islamic governments insist on forced conversion?, as they have done in the past.
I do not know why they insist on control over others. Whatever end game follows, will be 100 years to fruition...
Attaching agreed-upon bad things like authoritarianism and terrorism and oppression onto arbitrary symbols like Islam and secularism is fallacious. Those superficial symbols make for terrible indicators of actual evil, and rhetoric like the above only serves to increase the injustice done to innocent people. See the recent Christchurch attack.
Most Christian denominations I've encountered claim the same, and often even narrow that claim to their specific denomination (many Evangelicals believing that Catholics won't make the cut when it comes to going to heaven, for example).
OP is right in observing that Islam is not compatible with political system in China. Islam has certain political goals built in. Chinese system requires political monopoly and keeping religion private matter. Hence the confrontation is logical and unavoidable.
...so I went and did a little research. It turns out that one of these mosques is a shrine to a certain Imam Asim, a charming fellow that played an important part in the purposeful destruction in the 10/11th centuries of the Buddhist Khotan kingdom that once occupied the area, during which destruction apparently 'there were years of battles where "blood flows like the Oxus", "heads litter the battlefield like stones" until the "infidels" were defeated'. Unsurprisingly this violence also included the razing of countless Buddhist temples in the area.
Thus the Guardian, apparently with a straight face, asks us to mourn the destruction of a shrine to a warlord when said warlord was part of a deliberate and concerted programme of ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction including destruction of the temples of an earlier culture. At this point my irony meter is off the scale.
So then we should bulldoze all Christian churches, too?
Numbers 31
"The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”
3 So Moses said to the people, “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them...7 They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man...9 The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10 They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. 11 They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, 12 and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar...14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."
That's irrelevant. What matters is this assumption that every detail of a person's religious tradition directly and literally translates into an indicator of their ideals and behavior. In reality the number of people who take their texts that literally is small, both in Islam and Christianity. And those are the circles that terrorists come from. And their evil has nothing to do with the name of their religion.
That's a goalpost shift from the original post commenting about how these specific mosques were shrines to a warlord who committed actual atrocities. This wasn't an "assumption", these were actual events orchestrated by a real person.
Many Christians take the bible to be a literal historical account. Which details of that we can or can't prove are irrelevant.
If you want something more concrete, the Catholic church committed atrocities during the crusades (which were conveniently also around the 10th and 11th centuries), and there are still statues and altars of historical saints and popes.
The Chinese government is destroying Christian churches too.
"Over the past year, local governments have shut hundreds of unofficial congregations or “house churches” that operate outside the government-approved church network, including Early Rain. A statement signed by 500 house church leaders in November says authorities have removed crosses from buildings, forced churches to hang the Chinese flag and sing patriotic songs, and barred minors from attending."
Exactly my point. Good and evil, in the real world, have no correlation with religious symbols. Both the oppressed and the oppressors are both Muslims and Christians.
You see no irony in us being asked to mourn the destruction of a religious shrine for a person that himself participated in the deliberate destruction of multiple shrines purely on the basis of differing religion. Okay then!
I'm saying the people who went to that shrine weren't necessarily endorsing one thing that happened a thousand years ago. Lots of people revere Moses without endorsing slaughter and rape. The shrine served a spiritual function for a group of people; that gives it meaning. Unless you can provide evidence that those who visited it spent their time advocating violence, its meaning in their lives, and therefore its value, isn't diminished.
Specifically concerning the camps in China, every single thread I've seen has a number of people defending it. It appears to be mostly commenters who greatly fear islam and/or Chinese individuals who support the current regime.
It's more complex than that. Like any sufficiently large population sample (5M readers a month in HN's case), HN is divided on every topic where society is divided. Or rather, societies, because many countries are represented here. This story is embedded in the complicated and intensifying geopolitical controversy around China vis-à-vis the West, and can't be abstracted from it. This leaves people arguing with each other for all sorts of reasons, not all of which are obvious, and which opponents tend to view in too reductionist a way. The worst reductionist way is accusing each other of being shills or spies, which fortunately you didn't do!
From an HN point of view, how do we support intellectual curiosity while at the same time holding a place for the people—all people—whose lives are affected by this? I don't know. For the time being, the only thing I know to do is keep calling people back to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. According to the guidelines, saying things like "I can't believe you support concentration camps" is not ok on HN, regardless of how strongly one feels about the topic. That's not a direct quote of anyone, but it's the sentiment the most aggressive commenters are jumping to when this story comes up, which it has frequently lately.
66 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadAnd nobody has the courage to stand up to China. Not even to publicly denounce them.
Isn't this what the UN is for? To impose economic sanctions on flagrant human rights abusers?
(Please, no whataboutism replies, what any other country is doing does not justify what China is doing.)
But for now, forget UN and forget the West.
Even the Islamic World and it's biggest representative, the OIC, is reluctant to even make a comment about it! Totally appalling!
'Soft power' such as https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equit... might help explain US/global unwillingness to be too noisy. tldr: "In short, the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers."
Unfortunately, international norms or UN sanctions don't have any teeth against world powers. It's just the unfortunate aspect of realpolitik that we all have to deal with.
It has a much less preponderant mission of incentivizing the adoption of human rights and democracy, but none of the tools for that. Any effective structure with this goal would be opposed by most of its members (or maybe even nearly all). Strong countries can impose some human rights on weaker ones, and they do use the UN as a forum for that, but China is strong enough for nobody to mess with them.
Comparables are often relevant, and looking for contradictions in what people argue or believe is a tool for shedding light on a situation. Somehow the word "whataboutism" became catchy enough that people started to believe in the right to exclude unwanted examples this way, but that's clearly a fallacy. If you can show how I'm applying a principle selectively in different cases, you've taught me something valuable. We need to stay open to that.
There's a subtler fallacy worth pointing out too: it doesn't follow that you're justifying the thing I'm against. That is, if you point out an inconsistency or some comparable example on my side of the argument, it doesn't follow that you're a communist or whatnot. Maybe you are, maybe not. Maybe we actually agree. All that follows is that you've found an inconsistency in me, and that's information I need.
When someone brings up an example that they think is relevant and you don't, the way to refute that is not with a garlic word, but to explain what the significant difference is. If there isn't a significant difference, maybe it's not irrelevant.
People do bring up irrelevancies, but that's rarer than it seems. More likely it's that they have a different perspective on what's relevant, as part of the original disagreement that needs hashing out in the first place. Cordoning off discussion doesn't help with that, and no party to a dispute gets the power to draw the lines of what's in and out for everybody. Indeed, that would amount to the power to impose one's view on the entire dispute.
And I wonder: if we could agree on what's relevant, perhaps by including everything we both really care about, how close that might get us to resolving our conflict itself.
[1] Obviously, if that's what happened, I'm with you completely. Whataboutism should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
... and to say that most instances in which ad-hom is invoked on HN result in stupid debates about whether an argument is (a) actually ad-hom and (b) fallaciously ad-hom (a subtlety most invokers on HN don't really grok).
I think we already have a culture that rejects personalized arguments, and "ad hominem", which gets deployed because people have long ago pulled it out of one of those Internet "fallacy lists", virtually always just clouds discussions. It's certainly more corrosive than "whataboutism".
Honestly, I think it's possible that all "canned" fallacy arguments --- ad hom, whataboutism, argument from authority, straw-man --- basically contravene the "principle of charity" guideline, and that it'd be worth having the guidelines ask people not to deploy pre-canned responses to other people's arguments. You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
Optimize HN for better writing!
You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
Soviet Russia invoked it all the time to justify their actions, as does Trump and currently China. Whataboutism is a favourite tactic of oppressive regimes, "practically a national ideology".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
On "whataboutism", there's no debate to have; if you follow Dan and Scott's moderation comments, appeals to "whataboutism" have been verboten on the site for awhile now.
The second is why isn't the UN doing something, and clearly whether the UN regularly engages in this behavior is relevant. And here are a bunch of cases of human rights abuses that the UN hasn't tried very hard to solve and therefore maybe this isn't what the UN consistently does is relevant.
Your post here breaks the site guidelines. Would you please read them, and follow them when commenting here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China
In December 2016 in Xinjiang, Islamic militants drove a vehicle into a yard at the county Communist party offices and set off a bomb but were all shot dead. Three people were wounded and one other died.
In July 2011, At least 18 people died in a series of alleged terrorist attacks in the city of Kashgar. According to state-run media accounts, the violence began when two Uyghur men hijacked a truck, ran it into a crowded street, and started stabbing people, killing six. The attack ended when the assailants were overpowered by the crowd, which killed one attacker. On the second day, state media reported that a "group of armed terrorists" stormed a restaurant, killed the owner and a waiter, and set it ablaze. They then proceeded to indiscriminately kill four more civilians. Armed clashes then reportedly ensured, ending with police capturing or killing the attackers. The Turkistan Islamic Party later claimed responsibility for the attack. One of the suspects appeared in a TIP video training in Pakistan.
In March 2015 in Guangzhou, three ethnic Uyghur assailants with long knives attacked civilians at Guangzhou train station, 13 injured.
In November 2014 in Xinjian, militants with knives and explosives attacked civilians, 15 dead and 14 injured. 14 of the 15 deaths were attackers
In May 2014 in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, Two sport utility vehicles (SUVs) carrying five assailants were driven into a busy street market in Ürümqi. Up to a dozen explosives were thrown at shoppers from the windows of the SUVs. The SUVs crashed into shoppers then collided with each other and exploded. 43 people were killed, including 4 of the assailants, and more than 90 wounded.
There are many more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/podcasts/the-daily/china-...
Not that I am saying what is happening is right.
From looking at the texts, you could say this about most major religions. From looking at the people, things are much less simple.
Interesting question is why China have decided on such massive social engineering Kulturkampf[1] project in Xinjiang?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturkampf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Speculation_on_rati...
...so I went and did a little research. It turns out that one of these mosques is a shrine to a certain Imam Asim, a charming fellow that played an important part in the purposeful destruction in the 10/11th centuries of the Buddhist Khotan kingdom that once occupied the area, during which destruction apparently 'there were years of battles where "blood flows like the Oxus", "heads litter the battlefield like stones" until the "infidels" were defeated'. Unsurprisingly this violence also included the razing of countless Buddhist temples in the area.
Thus the Guardian, apparently with a straight face, asks us to mourn the destruction of a shrine to a warlord when said warlord was part of a deliberate and concerted programme of ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction including destruction of the temples of an earlier culture. At this point my irony meter is off the scale.
Numbers 31 "The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”
3 So Moses said to the people, “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them...7 They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man...9 The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10 They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. 11 They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, 12 and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar...14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."
If you want something more concrete, the Catholic church committed atrocities during the crusades (which were conveniently also around the 10th and 11th centuries), and there are still statues and altars of historical saints and popes.
"Over the past year, local governments have shut hundreds of unofficial congregations or “house churches” that operate outside the government-approved church network, including Early Rain. A statement signed by 500 house church leaders in November says authorities have removed crosses from buildings, forced churches to hang the Chinese flag and sing patriotic songs, and barred minors from attending."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christia...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This feels like a very unique HN thread. I can't recall seeing people actually attempting to defend something like this before on HN.
From an HN point of view, how do we support intellectual curiosity while at the same time holding a place for the people—all people—whose lives are affected by this? I don't know. For the time being, the only thing I know to do is keep calling people back to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. According to the guidelines, saying things like "I can't believe you support concentration camps" is not ok on HN, regardless of how strongly one feels about the topic. That's not a direct quote of anyone, but it's the sentiment the most aggressive commenters are jumping to when this story comes up, which it has frequently lately.