[Edit] Sorry for the snark. In a market economy, the only way companies like Apple might act in the same way that compassionate human beings would, is if it were in the interests of their bottom line. Perhaps articles like this will hit critical mass, and Apple will put out a statement, carefully composed to ensure that China doesn't lose face. Perhaps they'll do something tangible.
Come back 12 months later and nothing will have changed.
This is a false dilemma. There are plenty of publicly listed companies that also engage in moral behaviors. Pretending it's an either/or situation only serves to excuse the behavior and derail the discussion.
We should support companies that act morally, and punish others by not buying their products and criticizing them.
But expecting them to act morally out of their own volition seems foolish to me. Note also that I explicitly said publicly traded companies. Large ones always have a diverse ownership structure with institutional investors. A CEO that hurts profits by acting in the public interest will probably be replaced pretty soon, forced to fall in line, or have to otherwise do enough to offset.
The only way to motivate them is external pressure or benefits.
Eg Apple has probably decided to focus on user privacy to provide a contrast with Google and the Android ecosystem and maintain a good relationship with customers, not because privacy is "good".
The situation is somewhat different with private companies, where there are few owners that can actually have an impact.
Care to share some hard evidence to support that? Privately held companies certainly have some more freedom in their actions, but public corpos are a slave to the shareholder.
Public corpos only incentive is to create value for their shareholders.
Your elected government is illegally recording my calls, unless you believe the post-Snowden claim that they stopped (and there isn't any reason to). Why should I expect ethical behavior from this entity? I'd rather choose which software I route my data through than have the government "regulate" all of my options to include Clipper chips. I don't want the government to have any say about what I do with my data.
China's behavior is a good illustration of the fact that if Nazi Germany had kept the Holocaust restricted to its own borders and not invaded other countries we would have happily sat back and let them do it.
At least during Nazi Germany there was some interest in helping Jews escape. Yes, instances when ships of Jewish refugees were turned away from e.g. the USA have gone down in infamy, but there were still things like the Kindertransport. When it comes to the plight of the Uighurs, even fellow Muslim countries are loathe to provide any big public help due to the fear of alienating China.
It’s not a competition, we’ll probably look back at prisons in the future and be like “wtf were they thinking?” the same way our generation looks at previous generations and the normalization of slavery.
However, the vitriolic response that people have to the very idea that we could possibly be doing the same things is worthy of some introspection today.
There's hard labor and then there's "Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs."
Which rate are you using on gulags? Both the Gulag Archipelago and Black Book of Communism have been disregarded by modern historians due to blatant inaccuracies.
If you look at Table 8, the death rate for 45-54 year olds in state prisons in 2014 was 342 per 100,000. For the 45-54 age group as a whole, the mortality rate was about 400 per 100,000. Note that the figure for prisons is mostly men, while the figures for the whole population is both men and women.
Accounting for the gender difference, the prison population has a lower death rate than the general population at the same age group. The difference is especially noticeable among younger prisoners. In the 25-35 demographic, the death rate in prison is 1/4 the general population. This is not surprising. Prisoners eat a controlled diet, they don’t drive, they have limited exposure to occupational hazards, etc.
I realize this might be wrong and based on not reading enough history about it, but I’ve always understood that the Holocaust was not well documented until after the war.
Obviously many people fleeing Germany and the occupied countries during that period, knew something bad was happening, but overall, it’s my understanding that before and during the war, the rest of the world really wasn’t aware, or at least not aware about how bad it was.
It was the invasion of other countries that was cause to fight Germany. It was much less of a humanitarian act, though after the war it’s easy to paint it as one.
We knew. FDR is even on record making statements about how we weren't there to save the Jews. The US had opportunities to bomb the train system being used to transport the Jews and didn't. I can't provide links right now (I'll try to circle back later), but we absolutely knew what was going on. We just didn't want to believe it.
It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the UN, and covered in major newspapers:
The catch, of course, is that governments don’t act with a single voice: during war time intelligence agencies would be loathe to confirm anything if it revealed information about their sources, and there were enough anti-semites and Nazi sympathizers that all but the most conclusive evidence might be downplayed or lead to consequences (reportedly, concern losing support in Hungary was a factor in not leading with what was happening to the Jews).
There were rumours of the atrocities, but probably the first public testimonies were the Auschwitz Protocols, based on first-hand experiences of a few concentration camp escapees. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Protocols)
Read the document which was the subject of my first link and ask whether rumor was an appropriate word to describe an official report to the UN with eyewitness accounts:
Thanks, I was not aware of this document. However, its wikipedia page mentions that it was not widely believed at the time. Heck, even Auschwitz Protocols after it did not seem to have much success in reaching the audience (western world) for quite a while.
> It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the UN, and covered in major newspapers:
I had no idea that the "United Nations" was a thing during WWII (though it appears to be more of a synonym for the allies than the body we're familiar with today).
As do plenty of non-elite countries. What's your point? The Aztecs, for example, were practising human sacrifice until the Europeans pitched up. And in Papua New Guinea they were still eating people within living memory. I could also mention Cambodia, Rwanda - but I suppose that's all the West's fault as well.
The documents reveal how every aspect of a detainee's life is monitored and controlled: "The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed.
"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth."
Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?
That kind of harsh routine along with sleep deprivation, repetition, and calorie restriction are bog standard cult mind control techniques, and yes they do work. All appear to be present in these camps.
Yes indeed, practically worldwide. As Larken Rose writes in "The most dangerous superstition":
"The purported purpose of schools is to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and other academic fields of thought. But the message that institutions of “education” actually teach, far more effectively than any useful knowledge or skills, is the idea that subservience and blind obedience to “authority” are virtues.
The “grades” the student receives, the way he is treated, the signals he is sent — written, verbal, and otherwise — all depend upon one factor: his ability and willingness to unquestioningly subvert his own desires, judgment and decisions to those of “authority.” If he does that, he is deemed “good.” If he does not, he is deemed “bad.” This method of indoctrination was not accidental. Schooling in the United States, and in fact in much of the world, was deliberately modeled after the Prussian system of “education,” which was designed with the express purpose of training people to be obedient tools of the ruling class, easy to manage and quick to unthinkingly obey, especially for military purposes. As it was explained by Johann Fichte, one of the designers of the Prussian system, the goal of this method was to “fashion” the student in such a way that he “simply cannot will otherwise” than what those in “authority” want him to will. At the time, the system was openly admitted to be a means of psychologically enslaving the general populace to the will of the ruling class. And it continues to accomplish exactly that, all over the world, including in the United States."
Teach them that they live in a society, and so they have certain responsibilities, limits, and roles, as opposed to being mere individuals that can do whatever they please, others be damned?
Sorry, but the Chinese have camps for ethnic (or religious) targeted detention and/or brainwashing.
This is nothing like "what we do" in education, American or otherwise, and the similarities (the students having a specific desk, queues to eat, etc) are irrelevant and superficial...
I do think that GP made a gross overstatement, but I don't think the similarities are irrelevant and/or superficial. These are the same tactics being used (to a lesser extent and in a different context) towards a similar behavioral end. Reflecting on that might be worthwhile. Even if you decide that they are worth using to some extent to bring about whatever ends you desire, you should at least know the devil you're dancing with.
Nonsense. It's like saying "arguments in favor of industrial production have always been the justification for the horrors of labour camps". Or "arguments in favor of the rule of law have always been the justification for the horrors of police abuse". There's a superficial similarity, but totally different scopes, methods, and outcomes.
In this case, I'm against things like the e.g. Native American re-education camps, because I believe that they have the right to their own culture (plus, they were there first).
But I'm in favor of mere education camps, also known as schools.
And guess what? Populations that was sent to "re-education camps" also are in favor of such things. They also have schools (or similar processes and teachings for their youth).
There's a whole lot of difference between a society teaching its children (which is how we're not animals merely grazing grass but have culture, technology, science, etc), and to be taken from your family for forced re-education to a different culture you don't belong to (and who is even adversarial to your people).
> The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed
My school was like that when I was growing up.
I'm not justifying what China is doing, and I didn't like it myself. But I find it weird to find it quoted here like that.
You really don’t have an option to leave without being disciplined. Both systems are using similar tactics to create obedient factory workers; which is exactly the point. The work camp will use just more of that.
For a kid, their parents are often unaware or unsympathetic to their struggles. And just to be clear, the same tactics are applied to Han Chinese (well, the high schools are more harsh, but the Chinese work camp model was already well developed before they decided to do this en masse in Xinjiang). It is horrible, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to defend it, but I also hope it instills a bit more awareness in our own shortcomings (as well as that of China in general).
> For a kid, their parents are often unaware or unsympathetic to their struggles
So you're just going to generalize on all parents like that? Believe it or not, there are actually some parents out there who are interested in their child's well-being and involved in their life.
> I’m not going to defend it
It seems to me like you're grasping at straws to do precisely that.
I like how mentioned this fact. K12 education, church, prison, and re-education through labor are all systems that hold certain people 'captive'.
I've always felt arguments like "the parents can choose not to send their kid to their" or "the captor's intention was good" to be insufficient. No matter how that changes, the information/data flows from the captors to the 'captive' person's mind does not change much.
At the same time, it might not be possible to eliminate 'captive' information systems, especially if we loosen the definition of 'captive'. For example, you can pretty much only consume news in the language you know so you are held captive. However if you consume only English news, then you're worldview will be biased. English news only covers the more sensational international stories and journalists, who mostly have good intentions, are biased as well.
I ended up rambling a bit, but the main point is that axiomatic arguments don't solve the problem and the lines between good/bad are too 'fuzzy'. Practical solutions around info/data flow and a good understanding of how it makes the lives of 'captives' and others in the world might have more potential
Boot camp would be another example, when they want to rebuild recruits as soldiers. There is actually a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable brain washing techniques, I’m not sure what it is.
Also, it's a known (but apparently not widely discussed) "security measure" for schools to chain exits shut, in blatant violation of fire code requirements [1] [2].
But you chose to only select a portion of the text. The second sentence is useful, too:
"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth"
My school was like that when I was growing up.
Your school proscribed when you go to the toilet and how to close a door?
Grew up in rural Midwest US in the 80s. We walked in lines on a schedule for bio breaks.
We had to “shut a door respectfully” basically library rules for the sake of others.
Our school had 25-30 kids per class. How else does one manage that? If you really needed to go you could and this article does not say that’s explicitly disallowed.
I think you’re losing the forest for a tree here. The problem is the whole kidnapping & cultural cleansing.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Our school had 25-30 kids per class. How else does one manage that?
Dunno. The teachers (nuns, priests, and monks) in my East Coast elementary school had 30-45 students per class, and somehow we didn't run amok.
(Yes, 45 was not an uncommon number. When your performance in class is publicly ranked weekly you become acutely aware of how many students are in the class.)
Although it is true that China would make propaganda posts, there is a much simpler explanation here. Let's go with the simple explanation. People are creating fresh accounts to avoid the wrath of people who support Muslims.
You don't have to be generally pro-China to be fully in support of what China is doing. You can hate the Uighers (Muslims) even if you also hate China. When you see your enemies fighting, you can pick the side you find to be less-bad or you can just cheer the fight in the hope that both suffer.
I have no idea what this conversation is even about.
Suspect it’s something like someone online came to an iron clad position about my political positions given the 9 seconds worth of information exposure available in my comment history and age of account.
The political world has people paranoid in ways I haven’t felt since the 80s Cold War.
Glad I grew up isolated in rural America. Despite the Jesus freaks waggling their pious peen in our faces, growing up removed from the contemporary American meme of raging about our exceptionalism has provided me a unique view and capacity for manipulating American ego.
Of course I’m a commie cause I don’t talk right online. Even though it’s just cause I didn’t have the emotional framework of “Murcia #1!” rammed down my throat as a kid.
Don’t a lot of schools have classes that big? There was no standing in line for the bathroom as some regular thing. I know it’s not just my memory lying to me. I have a tape where my whole day was recorded. I watch it every once in a while. There’s no standing in line for the bathroom as a class.
> But you chose to only select a portion of the text. The second sentence is useful, too:
Then what's the point of quoting the the first portion?
We had things from the second part too, we were also forced to pray and sing the national anthem (otherwise we'd be disciplined and punished), but the first quoted part was exactly like that.
The difference is that you got to go home every day. Take a look at the full leaked document for details, the BBC quotes make it sound like a smaller deal than it really is.
I think you're reading too much into my commentary.
I'm not talking about China or comparing myself to them. There are much bigger issues than what was quoted.
But I just find it funny that someone would say "Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?" about something that happened to me, in a western school.
I guess it's an interesting question to wonder how broken elementary students are ending up. We wouldn't probably notice anything wrong because everyone would be broken.
My schooling was very similar and I didn’t get to go home. Australian private boarding school. Toilet time was scheduled, you had your designated bed, designated desk, designated table at mealtimes. Timetables handed out at the beginning of each fortnight telling you which building to be in at which time. Alarm for waking up, showering, chapel service, national anthem, first session, cleaning duty, etc same time each day. Didn’t leave the school grounds for two years.
You weren’t tortured for trying to sleep on your left side. Nor we’re you forcefully sterilized. Nor were your organs ever in danger of being harvested. Nor did you have cameras on you when you were peeing. Nor was there a giant crematorium right next to your school for disposing of students.
There’s a lot of whataboutism in the comments here, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be really concerned about what’s happening in China.
Regarding the shade thrown on the US in the comments here, the US has and will continue to have some crummy practices, especially on the fringes. We also have the right to discuss, protest, and totally change our elected officials. Our flaws, current and past, should not be used as a means of silencing voices that are expressing legitimate outrage.
But the purpose of your school was education in standard subjects, not ideological transformation. Your teachers did not assume the students were all followers of a dangerous radical ideology.
Not if you live economically comfortably. There are definitely products that are same but made elsewhere. Even reducing usage from 100% Chinese products to 50% Chinese products makes a difference.
I wonder if there are any organizations that can certify products and brands. From inhumane conditions to poor quality to scammy marketing and outright fraud (especially on Amazon), I want to avoid Chinese products as much as possible. It’s difficult to avoid completely, but there’s certainly a lot of low hanging fruit.
In fact, any organization can do this. In the vegan/vegetarian/organic/non-GMO food space there are multiple competing certification programs. The LSD Avengers used to fulfill this role on the old Silk Road. It seems there is at least one NGO that specifically certifies goods as made in the USA, though I have no idea how legit they are: https://madeinusacertified.wordpress.com/
I agree that any organization can, but I don't know of any. I'm vaguely aware of orgs that certify organic/non-GMO/etc and presumably someone certifies kosher food and conflict free diamonds and the like, but I'm not sure of any that certify labor conditions or that a given company operates with some baseline of ethics and is subject to accountability.
Aaah, I thought you were going for a made-in-America production certification, not a generally-good-people production certification. The term you're looking for is "fair trade." Here's one example of such an organization: https://www.fairtradecertified.org/
Thanks for pointing me to fair trade; I'll have a look. There are a lot of things I'm interested in, but mostly they fall into one of a few groups. For any given product, I want to know:
1. If (or to what degree) the product was made via exploitative labor conditions
2. How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)
3. Does the product benefit from subsidies? (e.g., is a foreign product cheaper only because shipping is heavily subsidized relative to a local alternative)
4. Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised. If the product is fraudulent, can I trust that the company (including investors and leadership) will be held to account or will they simply rebrand and continue their scheme? This concern spans the gamut from Walmart selling name-brand merchandise from low-quality OEMs to companies paying for fraudulent Amazon reviews.
There are probably other concerns as well. In my experience, these concerns seem to be highly bimodal. On average, products which are not Chinese (i.e., not sold/manufactured/etc by Chinese companies) score very highly while Chinese products score very poorly. So while it would be great to have some certification provided for each of those concerns, I would settle for some certification with respect to whether the product is Chinese or not (of course, if that certification took off, there would be all sorts of issues with enforcing it--Chinese companies could operate shell companies and so on).
Could you please not post flamebait or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We ban accounts that do those things. You're welcome to participate here, but please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and contribute to curious conversation.
The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Considering what a certain religion does to every.single.country.where.it.spreads. it is understandable that china does this. Actually it’s pretty mild compared to what some parts of the world have turned into, and considering the dangers it brought to western europe. Let them deal with the problem there own way, for everyone’s sake!
China wants the Uighur‘s gone, period. I don’t think anything short of military action is going to stop that.
And frankly I don’t think that is ever going to happen, because of the world powers that would be capable, they too hold resentment for Islamic religions.
Children for radicalised families, yes. Like they're literally dealing with a Taliban like problem. Tons of Uighurs trained with the Taliban as Xinjiang borders eastern Afghanistan.
This is a lie, and I hope you’re banned for spreading Chinese state propaganda. There is nothing here that justifies the internment of hundreds of thousands of people, including children. The Chinese communist party is a disease.
You’re defending the internment of hundreds of thousands of people including children because some Uhigurs were picked up by the US in Northern Alliance training camps?
You can't attack another user like that here, regardless of how wrong they are. As for "eradicated", obviously we ban accounts that post like that. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? We've had to ask you this before, and yet the bulk of your posts to HN are just fine, so I don't want to ban you.
I know this thread is a wretched flamewar in which nearly every comment deserves some sort of moderation, but amid all that, this post really stands out. If you're going to walk into the flames like this, please be better than them, not worse. There's no substantive point that can't be made within the site guidelines.
The Chinese government must have done a truly terrible job these last few decades, if they have so many radicals. One wonders why people tolerate such abysmal leadership.
If you don't want me thinking China's leadership has done a poor job, don't insist on a story that requires it.
I don't know if the West would succeed, but other countries have certainly dealt with terrorism problems without building giant camps and tossing much of the population inside.
> The Chinese government must have done a truly terrible job these last few decades, if they have so many radicals. One wonders why people tolerate such abysmal leadership.
The answer is pretty simple.
Prosperity.
The living standard of the average Chinese person has improved dramatically over the last several decades.
As long as that level of prosperity continues, most Chinese people will tolerate quite a bit from their government.
Completely off topic, but can someone provide a layman's pronunciation of "Uigher?" As someone who is not a linguist, the pronunciation squiggles in the Wikipedia entry are entirely unhelpful.
Yes, but in this particular case it is spot on. Kids are getting killed there. See, whataboutism is not a valid defense when it is your own country doing it, then it is whataboutyouism.
If my country were doing this I'd drop what I'm doing and protest until the cows came home or they fixed it. But America - and Americans - are very quick to point the finger at other countries for things they do themselves with abandon.
No it’s not and the false equivalency is incredibly destructive. It must be possible for countries to judge others without being perfect themselves. South Africa was forced to capitulate due to international pressure. They took the moral high ground, even though their race relations at home were deeply troubled. But they could do that because people understood that there was a hierarchy of wrongs and racial profiling in the justice system, while bad, wasn’t as bad as de jure segregation.
When you say, well if America does something bad it has no business judging others, you destroy the ability to objectively assess right and wrong, wrong and very wrong, and bad from worse. It’s like gouging one of your eyes out and losing your depth perception. There are billions of people whose lives would be immeasurably improved if their countries were more like America (even with its faults). America can help those people, by showing moral leadership and acting from the moral high ground. It is imperative to the prosperity of future generations that the world come to look more like America and not like communist China. The “America is just as bad” rhetoric maybe makes you seem cool at parties with other moral relativists, but it’s bad for the world.
One could easily quote some scripture, but since I'm an atheist I prefer logic: It helps tremendously in taking a moral stance if one is not culpable in the very same way.
What's bad for the world is that American also does this. It is imperative to future generations' well-being that the world comes to look more like countries that do this better than America, not that the world comes to look more like America.
Moral leadership starts in your own house, and then when you have a particular issue dealt with then you can go and point your little finger at others.
In the meantime, there is plenty that America does well, this particular subject is not one of those.
South Africa was not put under pressure by countries that themselves practiced Apartheid. It would have been farcical if it had been.
The idea that America is doing things “in the very same way” is just so utterly unbelievable that I don’t know what to say. There are serious problems with the US handling of the border. There are also serious problems with Denmark’s seizure of assets from refugees and Australia’s detention of migrants on an island processing center. None of that should be mentioned in the same breath as what’s happening in China.
It should be because the United States' stance on human rights, specifically those of children in detention camps would be a damn sight more powerful if they didn't violate them with abandon.
From the position of child in China or in the United States detention camps your finer points of morality don't matter one little bit, they are either scarred for life or end up dead.
And now we've crossed into what is actual whataboutism, the pointing at unrelated things in unrelated countries. For the present, the United States is the one country that just might have done something about this and due their own political choices they no longer have much power to speak in the fora where it would matter. You can thank Stephen Miller and his merry band of stooges for that.
Any modern society should be able to say that concentration camps are bad, or that rounding up or punishing children, families people in the basis of race, familial connections, etc is an affront to human dignity that should be condemned.
I’m not sure why this would make me cool at parties, but I would like for my government to be able to take a stand against this type of conduct.
You’re drawing a false equivalence both between the people detained and the condition of their detention.
> Any modern society should be able to say that concentration camps are bad, or that rounding up or punishing children, families people in the basis of race, familial connections, etc is an affront to human dignity that should be condemned.
Of course. And modern nations should condemn China on that basis. But what does that have to do with detaining people apprehended while illegally crossing a sovereign nation’s border?
Self determination is also a fundamental right. People have a right to have a country, and govern themselves according to their laws. Concomitant with that right is the right to enforce borders, because those dictate where one polity begins and another ends. People have a right to decide who comes into their country and in what terms.
There is a reason the UN Declaration of Human Rights reads:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
Of course it should be done as humanely as possible, but detention in enforcement of a border is fundamentally moral and legitimate, in the same way as detention pursuant to trial and investigation of a crime. It’s a necessary corollary of protecting other peoples’ rights. Saying that people can’t detain other people who trespass on their border strips people of their rights.
> But what does that have to do with detaining people apprehended while illegally crossing a sovereign nation’s border?
That this needs spelling out is pretty sad: that separating infants from their parents and sticking them in what to my eyes looks suspiciously like a concentration camp (a thing a Jewish observer btw agreed with) is the rough equivalent of what China is accused of here. And that's besides losing track of whose kids are which and the odd corpse as well as kids living in cages. Are we even on the same planet here?
> Of course it should be done as humanely as possible, but detention in enforcement of a border is fundamentally moral and legitimate, in the same way as detention pursuant to trial and investigation of a crime.
There is nothing humane about what is happening on the Southern United States border just like there is nothing humane about what the Chinese are doing.
> Saying that people can’t detain other people who trespass on their border strips people of their rights.
They can, it's the conditions under which it happens that we're debating here. So please don't go and whitewash this, it is absolutely horrific.
I don't know which planet do you come from, but on the one I live on, there is pretty big distinction between illegal border crossing vs reeducation camps based on your ethnicity.
In both cases parents were separated from their sometimes very young children. So yes, indeed, there should have been a distinction, given that the one is happening in a country that recurrently describes itself as 'the good guys' and the other one happens in a murderous dictatorship masquerading as a free country. I'll leave it up to you to sort out which is which.
A doctor can kill a person by an honest mistake or by using a person as lab mouse in a concentration camp. The person dies either way. My morality sensor says that these two deaths are not equal even though they are both dead.
Many of these families are people seeking asylum status in the United States. Detaining then like criminals and treating them like animals — there are documented cases of infants without identification being cared for by unrelated minors is grotesque.
That treatment is against the law, as is many aspects of how others apprehended crossing the border illegally are.
If some regulation of asylum process justifies the dishonorable conduct of our government to you, I’m sorry for you. Our humanity is worth more than some bullshit political dogma.
You're arguing with a fake Rayiner that you've conjured in your own head because you're angry about a current event and arguing against it is cathartic. In reality, nobody in this thread disagrees with you about family separation. What Rayiner is saying is that family separation is not the same kind of bad as the mass internment of Uighurs. That's not a controversial take.
"The core problem is that this rhetorical device precludes discussion of issues (ex: civil rights) by one country (ex: the United States) if that state lacks a perfect record." as a journalist wrote when Trump weaseled out of a discussion in a different context.
No, it hasn't got anything to do with that. It is simply that complaining about the same thing that another country does while your own country does it too is hypocritical.
You don't need to have a perfect record on everything else, but on that particular thing your statements are moot because your opponent (in this case China) will be able to simply ignore you because you do it yourself too. It would be about as effective as China calling the US to task for the same issue.
> No, it hasn't got anything to do with that. It is simply that complaining about the same thing that another country does while your own country does it too is hypocritical.
> You don't need to have a perfect record on everything else, but on that particular thing your statements are moot because your opponent (in this case China) will be able to simply ignore you because you do it yourself too. It would be about as effective as China calling the US to task for the same issue.
Neither the BBC nor I are American.
So maybe let's approach this in a more constructive manner: would you mind stating how you would discuss the topic of these chinese camps, taking into account both the scale of the problem and the severity of the events (without immediately derailing the discussion again)?
> how you would discuss the topic of these chinese camps
I would want to see international sanctions against the Chinese government enacted in some world body. I would like to see the very same sanctions enacted against the USA. In both cases we are talking about serious crimes against humanity. Fat chance this will ever happen, precisely because the most powerful parties in that forum are both guilty of the same transgression. If not for that this might have a (slim) chance of success.
America is rounding up kids and putting them in reeducation concentration camps based on which apps they have installed on their phones or for any other arbitrary reason for that matter? Do you really believe that?
No, it takes toddlers and other infants away from their parents causing huge trauma for the reason of wanting a better life. And yes, I really believe that. Don't put words in my mouth.
> No, it takes toddlers and other infants away from their parents causing huge trauma for the reason of wanting a better life.
You know that they do not separate them for wanting a better life. They separate them because their parents broke the law and are being processed. The same way child services take away children from parents when they go to prison. It's due process and not because you have the wrong skin color or set of beliefs. Americans are having a discussion about if separating children from parents is necessary and what to do about it, the Chinese are not.
And if you really believed what you wrote, you'd be protesting in front of your city's childhood protection services headquarters and you're not.
> They separate them because their parents broke the law and are being processed.
Funny how no other country seems to have this policy. Mostly because it is inhuman. It's not 'due process' when your head of state and his fascist minion has said it is to discourage people from attempting to flee. Whether or not they are illegal is immaterial (plenty of them are not).
If anybody is wondering about how a wealthy and otherwise orderly society can slide into fascism: this is it. To deny other people their humanity is a very important first step.
People have been denied humanity ever since throughout history. A doubt you know much about fascism otherwise you wouldn't be throwing it around so easily. For example were the ottomans fascist when they stole children away from parents in conquered lands, incorporated them in their army and then used them to plunder that same lands again? You have a very binary world view if you believe things are only absolutely good or absolutely bad.
It looks like improvement version of Soviet Russia camps. They also kidnapped kids from "bad" people, plus used mass hunger as weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
One might imagine China wants Xinjiang to remain Chinese, just as the US wants Texas to remain American.
Let us construct a hypothetical situation where our geopolitical adversaries (Russia, China, parts of South America) had spent the better part of the 20th century backing equally hypothetical Jihadist (or even Reconquista) separatists in Texas.
Perhaps the situation in Texas deteriorates when separatist Texans return from jihad in Syria, and some more violent fringes, armed and trained by Russia and China through proxies, begin widely-publicized attacks on civilians in California.
Perhaps the most ethical response by the US would be to deploy prisons and security services to Texas, and use technology to monitor potential separatist action within the state. Certainly there would be human rights abuses.
Now who is at fault, truly? The US? The separatists? No, of course not. One could place moral blame at the feet of our geopolitical enemies for encouraging this in the first place, but this is simply the reality of political action.
Just to be clear, what is happening to the Uighur people is horrific and inhumane and absolutely disgusting, but I will not allow this humanist sentiment to be perverted by propagandists to manipulate otherwise intelligent, compassionade liberals into nationalists and xenophobes in the name of maintaining the Western hegemon.
The anti-Chinese sentiment that has invaded the internet over the past several months has gone well beyond 'legitimate criticism of the Chinese government', and now sounds more like a racist, imperialist drumbeat for war. We should all be suspicious when fascists and libertarian capitalists find common ground and call it humanitarian.
I always get skeptical about stories that suddenly show up on scores of MSM websites, rather than the slower spread over a day or two or three that usually happens with 'real' news.
I've been fooled too many times by stories about 'weapons of mass destruction', 'gas attacks', 'Trump's pee tapes', 'Tonkin Gulf incidents', etc, etc that I withhold judgement for some time till the bulk of the back-story arrives.
Why did you include such a well documented false flag in your list of potentially fake news? [Edit: the document discussed in the following quote is from the NSA itself, so the government has admitted (39 years later) that this was a hoax.] From the NYT:
> The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.
> Based on the assertion that such an attack had occurred, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.
> The historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote the article in an internal publication and it was classified top secret despite the fact that it dealt with events in 1964. Word of Mr. Hanyok's findings leaked to historians outside the agency, who requested the article under the Freedom of Information Act in 2003.
I was looking at two items in the store today and trying to decide which one to buy. As soon as I saw one was not made in China, the decision was simple.
It's unfortunate that China is controlled by the CCP.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] thread[Edit] Sorry for the snark. In a market economy, the only way companies like Apple might act in the same way that compassionate human beings would, is if it were in the interests of their bottom line. Perhaps articles like this will hit critical mass, and Apple will put out a statement, carefully composed to ensure that China doesn't lose face. Perhaps they'll do something tangible.
Come back 12 months later and nothing will have changed.
They will naturally trend towards short to medium term profit maximization within the given legal constraints.
The boundaries for corporate behaviour have to be established by elected governments.
In the case of China that could mean customs duties, sanctions and stricter regulations for moving part of your supply chain there.
But expecting them to act morally out of their own volition seems foolish to me. Note also that I explicitly said publicly traded companies. Large ones always have a diverse ownership structure with institutional investors. A CEO that hurts profits by acting in the public interest will probably be replaced pretty soon, forced to fall in line, or have to otherwise do enough to offset.
The only way to motivate them is external pressure or benefits.
Eg Apple has probably decided to focus on user privacy to provide a contrast with Google and the Android ecosystem and maintain a good relationship with customers, not because privacy is "good".
The situation is somewhat different with private companies, where there are few owners that can actually have an impact.
Public corpos only incentive is to create value for their shareholders.
North Korea is doing exactly that as we speak.
Like, what metric do you want to use? I'll let you pick.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Conditions
In the gulags that effort was at least spent on public works projects, here it's to make rich people slightly richer with next to free labor.
How’s the death rate in the US prison system, then?
If you look at Table 8, the death rate for 45-54 year olds in state prisons in 2014 was 342 per 100,000. For the 45-54 age group as a whole, the mortality rate was about 400 per 100,000. Note that the figure for prisons is mostly men, while the figures for the whole population is both men and women.
Accounting for the gender difference, the prison population has a lower death rate than the general population at the same age group. The difference is especially noticeable among younger prisoners. In the 25-35 demographic, the death rate in prison is 1/4 the general population. This is not surprising. Prisoners eat a controlled diet, they don’t drive, they have limited exposure to occupational hazards, etc.
All causes mortality rate in US prisons is higher than Germany or France, but comparable to Sweden and Switzerland at around 27.5 per 10,000 (note difference in denominator). http://www.statewatch.org/news/2017/apr/coe-annual-prison-st... (table 13)
Obviously many people fleeing Germany and the occupied countries during that period, knew something bad was happening, but overall, it’s my understanding that before and during the war, the rest of the world really wasn’t aware, or at least not aware about how bad it was.
It was the invasion of other countries that was cause to fight Germany. It was much less of a humanitarian act, though after the war it’s easy to paint it as one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews...
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/02/13/852...
The catch, of course, is that governments don’t act with a single voice: during war time intelligence agencies would be loathe to confirm anything if it revealed information about their sources, and there were enough anti-semites and Nazi sympathizers that all but the most conclusive evidence might be downplayed or lead to consequences (reportedly, concern losing support in Hungary was a factor in not leading with what was happening to the Jews).
https://archive.org/details/TheMassExterminationOfJewsInGerm...
I had no idea that the "United Nations" was a thing during WWII (though it appears to be more of a synonym for the allies than the body we're familiar with today).
"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth."
Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?
"The purported purpose of schools is to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and other academic fields of thought. But the message that institutions of “education” actually teach, far more effectively than any useful knowledge or skills, is the idea that subservience and blind obedience to “authority” are virtues. The “grades” the student receives, the way he is treated, the signals he is sent — written, verbal, and otherwise — all depend upon one factor: his ability and willingness to unquestioningly subvert his own desires, judgment and decisions to those of “authority.” If he does that, he is deemed “good.” If he does not, he is deemed “bad.” This method of indoctrination was not accidental. Schooling in the United States, and in fact in much of the world, was deliberately modeled after the Prussian system of “education,” which was designed with the express purpose of training people to be obedient tools of the ruling class, easy to manage and quick to unthinkingly obey, especially for military purposes. As it was explained by Johann Fichte, one of the designers of the Prussian system, the goal of this method was to “fashion” the student in such a way that he “simply cannot will otherwise” than what those in “authority” want him to will. At the time, the system was openly admitted to be a means of psychologically enslaving the general populace to the will of the ruling class. And it continues to accomplish exactly that, all over the world, including in the United States."
Sorry, but the Chinese have camps for ethnic (or religious) targeted detention and/or brainwashing.
This is nothing like "what we do" in education, American or otherwise, and the similarities (the students having a specific desk, queues to eat, etc) are irrelevant and superficial...
In this case, I'm against things like the e.g. Native American re-education camps, because I believe that they have the right to their own culture (plus, they were there first).
But I'm in favor of mere education camps, also known as schools.
And guess what? Populations that was sent to "re-education camps" also are in favor of such things. They also have schools (or similar processes and teachings for their youth).
There's a whole lot of difference between a society teaching its children (which is how we're not animals merely grazing grass but have culture, technology, science, etc), and to be taken from your family for forced re-education to a different culture you don't belong to (and who is even adversarial to your people).
Which then “justifies” harsh, potentially fatal, punishment.
My school was like that when I was growing up.
I'm not justifying what China is doing, and I didn't like it myself. But I find it weird to find it quoted here like that.
So you're just going to generalize on all parents like that? Believe it or not, there are actually some parents out there who are interested in their child's well-being and involved in their life.
> I’m not going to defend it
It seems to me like you're grasping at straws to do precisely that.
Having spent 10 years in China and having actually visited Xinjiang before, I can assure you I’m not grasping at any straws.
I've always felt arguments like "the parents can choose not to send their kid to their" or "the captor's intention was good" to be insufficient. No matter how that changes, the information/data flows from the captors to the 'captive' person's mind does not change much.
At the same time, it might not be possible to eliminate 'captive' information systems, especially if we loosen the definition of 'captive'. For example, you can pretty much only consume news in the language you know so you are held captive. However if you consume only English news, then you're worldview will be biased. English news only covers the more sensational international stories and journalists, who mostly have good intentions, are biased as well.
I ended up rambling a bit, but the main point is that axiomatic arguments don't solve the problem and the lines between good/bad are too 'fuzzy'. Practical solutions around info/data flow and a good understanding of how it makes the lives of 'captives' and others in the world might have more potential
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_through_labor
[1] http://old.seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2002050731_startz01...
[2] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2010/02/23/chainin...
And the fact I survived while they might not has nothing to do with the things I quoted.
"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth"
My school was like that when I was growing up.
Your school proscribed when you go to the toilet and how to close a door?
Grew up in rural Midwest US in the 80s. We walked in lines on a schedule for bio breaks.
We had to “shut a door respectfully” basically library rules for the sake of others.
Our school had 25-30 kids per class. How else does one manage that? If you really needed to go you could and this article does not say that’s explicitly disallowed.
I think you’re losing the forest for a tree here. The problem is the whole kidnapping & cultural cleansing.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I keep noticing from other browsers that comments never show up so I start over.
Also apparently my home IP is on some list and so I hop on LTE.
Your own enforcement efforts seem to at least partly responsible for pushing me into this behavior.
Dunno. The teachers (nuns, priests, and monks) in my East Coast elementary school had 30-45 students per class, and somehow we didn't run amok.
(Yes, 45 was not an uncommon number. When your performance in class is publicly ranked weekly you become acutely aware of how many students are in the class.)
To highlight the relative nature of local custom? Is this supposed to be some validation of one or the other?
What do you suppose the odds are you’re not entirely remembering every time you got in a line with the entire class for a bathroom trip?
We weren’t as organized as the article suggests the kids in question are. You only asked about trips to the bathroom.
You don't have to be generally pro-China to be fully in support of what China is doing. You can hate the Uighers (Muslims) even if you also hate China. When you see your enemies fighting, you can pick the side you find to be less-bad or you can just cheer the fight in the hope that both suffer.
Suspect it’s something like someone online came to an iron clad position about my political positions given the 9 seconds worth of information exposure available in my comment history and age of account.
The political world has people paranoid in ways I haven’t felt since the 80s Cold War.
Glad I grew up isolated in rural America. Despite the Jesus freaks waggling their pious peen in our faces, growing up removed from the contemporary American meme of raging about our exceptionalism has provided me a unique view and capacity for manipulating American ego.
Of course I’m a commie cause I don’t talk right online. Even though it’s just cause I didn’t have the emotional framework of “Murcia #1!” rammed down my throat as a kid.
Then what's the point of quoting the the first portion?
We had things from the second part too, we were also forced to pray and sing the national anthem (otherwise we'd be disciplined and punished), but the first quoted part was exactly like that.
I'm not talking about China or comparing myself to them. There are much bigger issues than what was quoted.
But I just find it funny that someone would say "Is it even possible to not be broken by something like this?" about something that happened to me, in a western school.
There’s a lot of whataboutism in the comments here, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be really concerned about what’s happening in China.
Regarding the shade thrown on the US in the comments here, the US has and will continue to have some crummy practices, especially on the fringes. We also have the right to discuss, protest, and totally change our elected officials. Our flaws, current and past, should not be used as a means of silencing voices that are expressing legitimate outrage.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/holocaust-survivor-yes-the-bor...
> Nor we’re you forcefully sterilized.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9keaev/indigenous-women-i...
1. If (or to what degree) the product was made via exploitative labor conditions
2. How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)
3. Does the product benefit from subsidies? (e.g., is a foreign product cheaper only because shipping is heavily subsidized relative to a local alternative)
4. Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised. If the product is fraudulent, can I trust that the company (including investors and leadership) will be held to account or will they simply rebrand and continue their scheme? This concern spans the gamut from Walmart selling name-brand merchandise from low-quality OEMs to companies paying for fraudulent Amazon reviews.
There are probably other concerns as well. In my experience, these concerns seem to be highly bimodal. On average, products which are not Chinese (i.e., not sold/manufactured/etc by Chinese companies) score very highly while Chinese products score very poorly. So while it would be great to have some certification provided for each of those concerns, I would settle for some certification with respect to whether the product is Chinese or not (of course, if that certification took off, there would be all sorts of issues with enforcing it--Chinese companies could operate shell companies and so on).
> How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)
This one is more in line with Cradle 2 Cradle: https://www.c2ccertified.org/
> Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised.
I'm unfamiliar with this organization, but a search popped up the Trustworthy Accountability Group: https://www.tagtoday.net/certified-against-fraud-program/
I didn't find anything on my first page of results for certificates of non-subsidisation.
EDIT: TAG seems to focus on eliminating fraudulent Internet advertising; it's a much narrower scope than I had in mind.
The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
There, they are subjected to CCP brainwashing[2].
[1] https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1791
[2] https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ?t=1826
And frankly I don’t think that is ever going to happen, because of the world powers that would be capable, they too hold resentment for Islamic religions.
Mutually assured destruction is a powerful force.
Like the governor of the region was a Uighur last time I checked.
I know this thread is a wretched flamewar in which nearly every comment deserves some sort of moderation, but amid all that, this post really stands out. If you're going to walk into the flames like this, please be better than them, not worse. There's no substantive point that can't be made within the site guidelines.
I don't know if the West would succeed, but other countries have certainly dealt with terrorism problems without building giant camps and tossing much of the population inside.
The answer is pretty simple.
Prosperity.
The living standard of the average Chinese person has improved dramatically over the last several decades.
As long as that level of prosperity continues, most Chinese people will tolerate quite a bit from their government.
https://forvo.com/word/uyghur/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
If my country were doing this I'd drop what I'm doing and protest until the cows came home or they fixed it. But America - and Americans - are very quick to point the finger at other countries for things they do themselves with abandon.
When you say, well if America does something bad it has no business judging others, you destroy the ability to objectively assess right and wrong, wrong and very wrong, and bad from worse. It’s like gouging one of your eyes out and losing your depth perception. There are billions of people whose lives would be immeasurably improved if their countries were more like America (even with its faults). America can help those people, by showing moral leadership and acting from the moral high ground. It is imperative to the prosperity of future generations that the world come to look more like America and not like communist China. The “America is just as bad” rhetoric maybe makes you seem cool at parties with other moral relativists, but it’s bad for the world.
What's bad for the world is that American also does this. It is imperative to future generations' well-being that the world comes to look more like countries that do this better than America, not that the world comes to look more like America.
Moral leadership starts in your own house, and then when you have a particular issue dealt with then you can go and point your little finger at others.
In the meantime, there is plenty that America does well, this particular subject is not one of those.
South Africa was not put under pressure by countries that themselves practiced Apartheid. It would have been farcical if it had been.
From the position of child in China or in the United States detention camps your finer points of morality don't matter one little bit, they are either scarred for life or end up dead.
And now we've crossed into what is actual whataboutism, the pointing at unrelated things in unrelated countries. For the present, the United States is the one country that just might have done something about this and due their own political choices they no longer have much power to speak in the fora where it would matter. You can thank Stephen Miller and his merry band of stooges for that.
Any modern society should be able to say that concentration camps are bad, or that rounding up or punishing children, families people in the basis of race, familial connections, etc is an affront to human dignity that should be condemned.
I’m not sure why this would make me cool at parties, but I would like for my government to be able to take a stand against this type of conduct.
> Any modern society should be able to say that concentration camps are bad, or that rounding up or punishing children, families people in the basis of race, familial connections, etc is an affront to human dignity that should be condemned.
Of course. And modern nations should condemn China on that basis. But what does that have to do with detaining people apprehended while illegally crossing a sovereign nation’s border?
Self determination is also a fundamental right. People have a right to have a country, and govern themselves according to their laws. Concomitant with that right is the right to enforce borders, because those dictate where one polity begins and another ends. People have a right to decide who comes into their country and in what terms.
There is a reason the UN Declaration of Human Rights reads:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
Of course it should be done as humanely as possible, but detention in enforcement of a border is fundamentally moral and legitimate, in the same way as detention pursuant to trial and investigation of a crime. It’s a necessary corollary of protecting other peoples’ rights. Saying that people can’t detain other people who trespass on their border strips people of their rights.
That this needs spelling out is pretty sad: that separating infants from their parents and sticking them in what to my eyes looks suspiciously like a concentration camp (a thing a Jewish observer btw agreed with) is the rough equivalent of what China is accused of here. And that's besides losing track of whose kids are which and the odd corpse as well as kids living in cages. Are we even on the same planet here?
> Of course it should be done as humanely as possible, but detention in enforcement of a border is fundamentally moral and legitimate, in the same way as detention pursuant to trial and investigation of a crime.
There is nothing humane about what is happening on the Southern United States border just like there is nothing humane about what the Chinese are doing.
> Saying that people can’t detain other people who trespass on their border strips people of their rights.
They can, it's the conditions under which it happens that we're debating here. So please don't go and whitewash this, it is absolutely horrific.
I don't know which planet do you come from, but on the one I live on, there is pretty big distinction between illegal border crossing vs reeducation camps based on your ethnicity.
That treatment is against the law, as is many aspects of how others apprehended crossing the border illegally are.
If some regulation of asylum process justifies the dishonorable conduct of our government to you, I’m sorry for you. Our humanity is worth more than some bullshit political dogma.
You don't need to have a perfect record on everything else, but on that particular thing your statements are moot because your opponent (in this case China) will be able to simply ignore you because you do it yourself too. It would be about as effective as China calling the US to task for the same issue.
> You don't need to have a perfect record on everything else, but on that particular thing your statements are moot because your opponent (in this case China) will be able to simply ignore you because you do it yourself too. It would be about as effective as China calling the US to task for the same issue.
Neither the BBC nor I are American.
So maybe let's approach this in a more constructive manner: would you mind stating how you would discuss the topic of these chinese camps, taking into account both the scale of the problem and the severity of the events (without immediately derailing the discussion again)?
Good, so no need for you to feel addressed then.
> how you would discuss the topic of these chinese camps
I would want to see international sanctions against the Chinese government enacted in some world body. I would like to see the very same sanctions enacted against the USA. In both cases we are talking about serious crimes against humanity. Fat chance this will ever happen, precisely because the most powerful parties in that forum are both guilty of the same transgression. If not for that this might have a (slim) chance of success.
You know that they do not separate them for wanting a better life. They separate them because their parents broke the law and are being processed. The same way child services take away children from parents when they go to prison. It's due process and not because you have the wrong skin color or set of beliefs. Americans are having a discussion about if separating children from parents is necessary and what to do about it, the Chinese are not. And if you really believed what you wrote, you'd be protesting in front of your city's childhood protection services headquarters and you're not.
Funny how no other country seems to have this policy. Mostly because it is inhuman. It's not 'due process' when your head of state and his fascist minion has said it is to discourage people from attempting to flee. Whether or not they are illegal is immaterial (plenty of them are not).
If anybody is wondering about how a wealthy and otherwise orderly society can slide into fascism: this is it. To deny other people their humanity is a very important first step.
Let us construct a hypothetical situation where our geopolitical adversaries (Russia, China, parts of South America) had spent the better part of the 20th century backing equally hypothetical Jihadist (or even Reconquista) separatists in Texas.
Perhaps the situation in Texas deteriorates when separatist Texans return from jihad in Syria, and some more violent fringes, armed and trained by Russia and China through proxies, begin widely-publicized attacks on civilians in California.
Perhaps the most ethical response by the US would be to deploy prisons and security services to Texas, and use technology to monitor potential separatist action within the state. Certainly there would be human rights abuses.
Now who is at fault, truly? The US? The separatists? No, of course not. One could place moral blame at the feet of our geopolitical enemies for encouraging this in the first place, but this is simply the reality of political action.
Just to be clear, what is happening to the Uighur people is horrific and inhumane and absolutely disgusting, but I will not allow this humanist sentiment to be perverted by propagandists to manipulate otherwise intelligent, compassionade liberals into nationalists and xenophobes in the name of maintaining the Western hegemon.
The anti-Chinese sentiment that has invaded the internet over the past several months has gone well beyond 'legitimate criticism of the Chinese government', and now sounds more like a racist, imperialist drumbeat for war. We should all be suspicious when fascists and libertarian capitalists find common ground and call it humanitarian.
I've been fooled too many times by stories about 'weapons of mass destruction', 'gas attacks', 'Trump's pee tapes', 'Tonkin Gulf incidents', etc, etc that I withhold judgement for some time till the bulk of the back-story arrives.
Why did you include such a well documented false flag in your list of potentially fake news? [Edit: the document discussed in the following quote is from the NSA itself, so the government has admitted (39 years later) that this was a hoax.] From the NYT:
> The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency's intelligence officers "deliberately skewed" the evidence passed on to policy makers and the public to falsely suggest that North Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964.
> Based on the assertion that such an attack had occurred, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered airstrikes on North Vietnam and Congress passed a broad resolution authorizing military action.
> The historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote the article in an internal publication and it was classified top secret despite the fact that it dealt with events in 1964. Word of Mr. Hanyok's findings leaked to historians outside the agency, who requested the article under the Freedom of Information Act in 2003.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081211090233/http://www.nytime...
It's unfortunate that China is controlled by the CCP.