So... I guess we can expect some slaps on the wrist sanctions against a few government officials and call it a day soon. Our true north companies like Nike and Apple, etc., will, of course, announce pulling out too because there is no way they would want to be associated with doing business with such a regime either and Nike will hire Uyghurs for their ads in defiance.
The US government plainly said that they don't sanction high-level leaders when the Khashoggi Report identified Mohammed bin Salman's culpability in that murder.
The lesson we can take away from this is that if you want to murder someone, start climbing the ladder of elected (or monarchical) office. No wonder Trump could confidently say he could kill someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a voter.
see the sibling comment. The US is not afraid to face it's issues in daylight. Furthermore, to even compare the two (terrible) situations is disrespectful to the plight of the Ughyrs.
I can't be the only one disturbed by the fact we are using the word "genocide" for something that does not include Mass killings.
I know that legally it is valid and that the actions it describes are still despicable, but there is an important distinction between mass internment and mass killing.
As far as the most civil nations/governments of our world are concerned, what China is doing to Uyghers very much falls under the established conditions for being denoted as genocide.
>As far as the most civil nations/governments of our world are concerned.
Most of the world doesn't agree with these so called "civil nations" that have murdered more innocent Muslim civilians than anyone else over the last 2 decades.
Also notice what's going on in Palestine isn't called genocide because its not convenient for these "civil nations", even though what Israel is doing is more genocidal and violent than anything that has happened in Western China to Uighurs.
Reeks of double standards being set by western nations to suppress China's economy. At this point, any manufactured excuse will get adopted and mainstreamed.
> I can't be the only one disturbed by the fact we are using the word "genocide" for something that does not include Mass killings.
Mass killings is mass homicide.
Genocide is destruction of an ethnic/racial/cultural group by any means; the thing being killed isn't people, it's the a people as an entity (gens, from which the first part of genocide is derived, is the latin for “tribe”.) They are essentially orthogonal concepts, though genocide historically frequently includes mass homicide.
> I know that legally it is valid and that the actions it describes are still despicable, but there is an important distinction between mass internment and mass killing
Yes, murder and extermination are crimes against humanity distinct from, frequently accompanying, and in addition to genocide.
So the distinction you are looking for exists and is made quite clearly; there is no need to narrow the concept of genocide to make it.
Problem is, we have put genocide on such a high level of seriousness that denying it or even calling for it can get you banned in several places, because for most people it means "ethnic cleansing with mass killings"
There are some cultural group I want to see disappear. Like white supremacism or US southern slaver culture. I will even support governmental efforts to press on them as long as it does not involve violence.
My problem if that this definition of genocide is so broad that it includes a lot of process I see as natural evolution of a culture. Hell, under that definition, Algerian independence could be presented as a genocide against Pied-Noir! [1]
I know very well the legal definitions of genocide, but using that word to frame a moral debate is a dishonest manipulation in my opinion. What China is doing is akin to the Cultural Revolution and I suspect that the reason we use "genocide" for something so remote from the officially recognized genocides is because we (as a society, I am sure there are political scientists who have done the work) have never taken the time to have the moral debate about what this policy actually is and means and why it is bad.
Where is the actual report? On iOS Safari at least, the linked state.gov URL does not seem to link to the body of the report and only briefly mentions Uyghurs twice.
> Introducing the report, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said President Biden would put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.
> The report finds that more than one million mainly Muslim Uyghurs were held in detention camps in China’s Xinjiang region, with some subjected to forced sterilization, rape, forced labor and torture.
> He also acknowledged that the U.S. had work to do at home on human rights, including in combating systemic racism, but would face those challenges in the daylight, unlike autocratic countries.
The "million in detention" claim is based on Adrian Zenz' questionable work, where he took the percentage of people per village in camps from 8 Uyghur testimonies (totaling ~2000 in camps), and extrapolated out to the entire region.
I have no doubt the police state in Xinjiang is brutal to my Western conception, but given the recent history for the US in particular to compile dodgy dossiers filled with "encouraged" testimony from a handful of sources, I'm skeptical and would absolutely not take the million figure as fact.
> China Daily (simplified Chinese: 中国日报; traditional Chinese: 中國日報; pinyin: Zhōngguó Rìbào) is an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
Maybe this comment is a joke, but just in case, the user is advocating what is essentially just the writings of the Communist Party.
Because neither the BBC and VOA are produced by the publicity arm of a particular British or American political party.
(“But”, you say, “the PRC is structured as a one party state, so there is no difference between party media and state media.” And that's true, but not in a way which elevates the credibility of party organs, just one that degrades that of state organs compared to ones in regimes where state institutions have some institutional protection against partisan patronage. Which is not to say that state institutions are ever neutral sources on the interests of their own state, just that even among structurally biased sources there are still different levels of unreliability.)
I don't know the internal of VOA or BBC or China Daily. I think you agree there may be bias in each media. When we analyze data with extreme values via programs, we use mean or median values and get rid of the extreme values. I think the genocide accusations are some extreme values and I don't trust them. I just post the different sources with different views on the topic. One of the source is from China Daily, and the other source is from a French author. I think hearing from different sources make us have a clearer view on the topic.
I wonder why Russia and China are enlisted. Is it because the gov wants to see this result or Blinken's team is doing the research with a high bias?
AFAIK, the main issue of China is the high price of housing, which Chinese gov is trying to control. And these researchers just turn a blind eye to it.
If only a fraction of what Blumethal claims in the video is correct then this is singularly unhelpful and definitely smells a bit.
I look forward to the call for sanctions on the USA by the USA, backed up by appropriate force to support the workers in the gig economy suffering in the same way as the ones in China cited at the end of the report:
Workers in the gig economy were considered contract workers and not under the protections of the labor law. There were reports of app delivery drivers injured or killed on the job. On September 9, the magazine Renwu exposed how online platform algorithms created dangerous conditions for delivery drivers, including by shortening delivery times and issuing penalties for delays. The report prompted two major delivery firms to extend delivery times and reduce penalties for late deliveries.
The Newlines report relies heavily on Adrian Zenz' questionable work, often directly, but also indirectly via quoting from news reporting that uses Zenz' work as its primary source. Zenz' analysis on suppressing births is questionable in particular, and is one of the central planks for the claim of genocide. And given Zenz seems to be the majority source on this topic in the Newlines report, I don't think it's too conspiratorial to doubt it also.
That being said, I haven't fully read either the State Dept.'s report, nor the Newlines report, nor all the primary documents (of course), and importantly, I do believe the treatment of the Uyghurs to be unjust. I think Saddam Hussein was an unjust ruler in Iraq also, but there was widespread misinformation and numerous lies put forth in order to justify the Iraq War (both actually, but it is perhaps more complicated to justify for the first Gulf War). We're probably not in danger of a war with China in the next decade, but if we're going to have a Cold War 2, I'd like it to be based on less questionable sources.
Of course that's not the kind of unjust treatment that tends to be highlighted in Western sources (I found this report via an article that focused more on "通过劳务输出的方式，既减少了维族在新疆地区的人口密度，也是感化、融化、同化少数维族人员的重要方法") but it's definitely unjust treatment.
There were acts of political violence against the state recently (within the last 5 years), and China in general is a surveillance and police state whose tactics are in general unjust (from an outsider's perspective), so I presume the state is focusing those tactics on the population of Xinjiang in particular.
> The Newlines report relies heavily on Adrian Zenz' questionable work, often directly, but also indirectly via quoting from news reporting that uses Zenz' work as its primary source
I randomly skim through the citations in the Newlines report. Most of them aren’t related to Adrian Zenz in anyway (random samples: [0][1][2][3][4]). How did you arrive at that this conclusion?
Also, Adrian Zenz has published in peer-reviewed journals about Xinjiang [5]. Can you point me to other peer-reviewed papers (as opposed to anonymous comments on Hacker News or random opinion pieces) that point out mistakes in his work?
And of course, you can watch victims’ testimonies yourself, so you don’t have to trust any other researcher https://shahit.biz/eng/
The mistakes called out in the tweets look like typos that are not critical to the major conclusions of the paper.
For instance, if the paper is about how IUD insertion changes over time, and consistently mislabels “per 100000” as “per capita” in one of the graphs, then the percentage change is unaffected by this typo.
But if the curve in the graph were altered, then that would be a significant mistake (and a fraud). But it doesn’t appear to be the case in Zenz’s work.
If major conclusions are affected, the papers will eventually be retracted. But if those are only typos, the papers will survive. So we will know.
Can you tell me how major conclusions in his papers are affected by these changes?
And also how most citations in the Newlines report are affected by Zenz’s work? I fail to see the connection of those citations to Zenz, like those I pointed out above.
> He then tried to cover it up by changing the revision date, an act which amounts to academic fraud.
Changes due to typos like this are not considered an academic fraud, unless these changes affects the major conclusions of the papers significantly.
In the area I work with, I frequently see similar typos in research papers. No profession researcher bothers to call out such minor mistakes in tweets. And mistakes on revision dates after correcting typos are not considered fraud.
That’s why I asked for peer-reviewed criticism of his work, not random tweets that nitpick on minor issues.
This situation points to an increasingly clear body of evidence that he misinterprets data - either due to his lack of speaking/reading Chinese or knowingly.
Thanks for your source.
Let me assess how much of his conclusions and the conclusions in the news reporting are affected, assuming the Grayzone article is correct.
One paragraph is affected: “there were almost 1,000 new IUD implants per 100,000 people in Xinjiang in 2018, or 80% of China's total for that year”. The rest of the CNN article seems correct and unrelated to Zenz’s work.
This CNN article also says “Chinese officials have officially acknowledged birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by almost a third in 2018, compared to the previous year […]”
There is still no satisfactory explanation for such a sudden drop in birth rate, other than a forcible suppression of birth since 2017. And there are other sources that corroborate the birth suppression claim, such as this teacher [0] and numerous detainees [1][2][3][4][5].
> “Budget documents obtained by Zenz show that […] While sterilization rates plunged in the rest of the country, they surged seven-fold in Xinjiang from 2016 to 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures”
This claim is not refuted by the Grayzone article.
Zenz may have made “local mistakes”, but not global ones that severely impact the major conclusions of his works or in news reporting.
Further, so far I have only seen one website (Grayzone) criticizing Zenz’s work, but not peer-reviewed papers or criticism from the larger research community.
I did not get that from Blumenthal's video at all. His most interesting points are that the most of the claims lead back to one person, Adrian Zenz, who appears to have made some serious errors in his published work. Blumenthal calls for a open, academic engagement with this work instead of a hysterical acceptance of it.
The fact that the US government has lied with very serious consequences about such things before make this something we should all take seriously.
This news let me believe that the westerns don't have common sense, brain washed and stupid. According to stats, the Uyghur has 10.17 millions in 2010. And after "genocide", the Uyghur population size has dramatic decreased to 12.71 millions.
I used to believe that the US is the lighthouse of human civilization, now I think the US are full of clowns, they don't like Muslim, they don't like Chinese, but they like Chinese Musilm.
I'm surprised by the number of comments here purporting to call this information fake, or attempting to redirect the blame toward the US. This has been well documented by multiple sources for nearly two years. The world has many problems but genocide is decidedly one of the worst.
These threads have all become the same hellish flamewar, endlessly repeated. That's automatically off topic on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of how important the underlying story is.
I don't see how this place has any obligation to host flamewars that destroy it, any more than a building has an obligation to let a fire burn it down. On the contrary, we have a duty not to burn down, and need to do more to prevent it. We've been tirelessly asking HN commenters to please not destroy the commons for years, but the users posting in these threads are doing it more, and worse. Tireless asking is clearly insufficient, and from my perspective we could use more flags, not fewer.
Going directly to internet failure mode doesn't help anyone, let alone oppressed peoples. Moreover, if you see as much of this as I do, it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion. In that sense they are an expression of the problem, not any step toward solution.
Fair enough. I was looking at this from a pure "fairness" POV in which a perfectly normal article is being flagged, with no way for users to say "hang on, this article isn't breaking any rules, so this shouldn't be flagged."
But if the purpose of allowing this is as another indirect method for keeping flamewars off HN, then I agree that it's an acceptable compromise.
Thanks for the kind reply. I would say that fairness comes into it this way: it applies to all threads and doesn't vary with the topic, but rather with the degree of flamewar.
> it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion
I agree in about 95% of cases. There are certainly lots of threads on HN lately that descend into nothing but unhelpful, petty emotional arguments. I try (with mixed success) to avoid most of those myself.
But with respect, this is not one of them. This isn't about iOS vs Android, or FP vs OOP, or regulation vs the free market. This is a cut-and-dry moral travesty, and I think the allegation in the GP (which of course we can't know for sure with our limited window into the HN metrics) was that the "flame war" in this case may only exist as a result of artificial and coordinated action by a third party. This type of thing is well-documented on other social sites; it's not hard to imagine it happening here.
If that didn't happen, I don't think anybody would continue to ask for intervention.
It's against the HN guidelines to post insinuations of third-party manipulation, astroturfing, etc., without evidence, because internet users are overwhelmingly (I mean pick as many orders of magnitude as you want, it's still probably true) too likely to just imagine this stuff out of whole cloth. If we're going to look at such abuses in a sane frame of mind, there needs to be something objective to go on. People holding differing, strongly-felt views about China (or any hot $topic) is no evidence at all. It's evidence of something else altogether: that many people have different views than we do.
The core problem is that because we're tribal creatures it's difficult for us to acknowledge that other human beings have different backgrounds and different views than we do. It gets even harder when they're right beside us (albeit virtually) arguing fiercely for views which seem monstrous to us [1]. That's why we're prone to invent explanations of bad faith. The majority invents one sort of explanation (spies and agents are among us) while the minority invents a different sort (you just hate people like me), but both are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/politics/biden-administration...
The lesson we can take away from this is that if you want to murder someone, start climbing the ladder of elected (or monarchical) office. No wonder Trump could confidently say he could kill someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a voter.
It is also true that the US currently has quiet a lot of young children being held in practically prison cells near our Southern Border
It is also true that China has been committing genocide by definition for quite some time now.
I know that legally it is valid and that the actions it describes are still despicable, but there is an important distinction between mass internment and mass killing.
It's very much been hashed out already.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_definitions
As far as the most civil nations/governments of our world are concerned, what China is doing to Uyghers very much falls under the established conditions for being denoted as genocide.
Most of the world doesn't agree with these so called "civil nations" that have murdered more innocent Muslim civilians than anyone else over the last 2 decades.
Also notice what's going on in Palestine isn't called genocide because its not convenient for these "civil nations", even though what Israel is doing is more genocidal and violent than anything that has happened in Western China to Uighurs.
Reeks of double standards being set by western nations to suppress China's economy. At this point, any manufactured excuse will get adopted and mainstreamed.
Mass killings is mass homicide.
Genocide is destruction of an ethnic/racial/cultural group by any means; the thing being killed isn't people, it's the a people as an entity (gens, from which the first part of genocide is derived, is the latin for “tribe”.) They are essentially orthogonal concepts, though genocide historically frequently includes mass homicide.
> I know that legally it is valid and that the actions it describes are still despicable, but there is an important distinction between mass internment and mass killing
Yes, murder and extermination are crimes against humanity distinct from, frequently accompanying, and in addition to genocide.
So the distinction you are looking for exists and is made quite clearly; there is no need to narrow the concept of genocide to make it.
See, e.g.,
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
And:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-huma...
There are some cultural group I want to see disappear. Like white supremacism or US southern slaver culture. I will even support governmental efforts to press on them as long as it does not involve violence.
My problem if that this definition of genocide is so broad that it includes a lot of process I see as natural evolution of a culture. Hell, under that definition, Algerian independence could be presented as a genocide against Pied-Noir! [1]
I know very well the legal definitions of genocide, but using that word to frame a moral debate is a dishonest manipulation in my opinion. What China is doing is akin to the Cultural Revolution and I suspect that the reason we use "genocide" for something so remote from the officially recognized genocides is because we (as a society, I am sure there are political scientists who have done the work) have never taken the time to have the moral debate about what this policy actually is and means and why it is bad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied-Noir
https://www.state.gov/reports/2020-country-reports-on-human-...
> Introducing the report, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said President Biden would put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.
> The report finds that more than one million mainly Muslim Uyghurs were held in detention camps in China’s Xinjiang region, with some subjected to forced sterilization, rape, forced labor and torture.
> He also acknowledged that the U.S. had work to do at home on human rights, including in combating systemic racism, but would face those challenges in the daylight, unlike autocratic countries.
I have no doubt the police state in Xinjiang is brutal to my Western conception, but given the recent history for the US in particular to compile dodgy dossiers filled with "encouraged" testimony from a handful of sources, I'm skeptical and would absolutely not take the million figure as fact.
Maybe this comment is a joke, but just in case, the user is advocating what is essentially just the writings of the Communist Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily
(“But”, you say, “the PRC is structured as a one party state, so there is no difference between party media and state media.” And that's true, but not in a way which elevates the credibility of party organs, just one that degrades that of state organs compared to ones in regimes where state institutions have some institutional protection against partisan patronage. Which is not to say that state institutions are ever neutral sources on the interests of their own state, just that even among structurally biased sources there are still different levels of unreliability.)
Okay, maybe it'll sanction the Chairman of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region - Shohrat Zakir[1]? Again, nope.
I'm curious, how does an Uyghur genocide his own people?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shohrat_Zakir#:~:text=Shohrat%....
AFAIK, the main issue of China is the high price of housing, which Chinese gov is trying to control. And these researchers just turn a blind eye to it.
After looking at the Grayzone/ModerateRebels video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkxaEC1xjY about the very odd and weak claims about China's behavior in this regard I was hoping that some more diverse, specific and accurate sources would be present in e.g. https://www.state.gov/reports/2020-country-reports-on-human-...
If only a fraction of what Blumethal claims in the video is correct then this is singularly unhelpful and definitely smells a bit.
I look forward to the call for sanctions on the USA by the USA, backed up by appropriate force to support the workers in the gig economy suffering in the same way as the ones in China cited at the end of the report:
Workers in the gig economy were considered contract workers and not under the protections of the labor law. There were reports of app delivery drivers injured or killed on the job. On September 9, the magazine Renwu exposed how online platform algorithms created dangerous conditions for delivery drivers, including by shortening delivery times and issuing penalties for delays. The report prompted two major delivery firms to extend delivery times and reduce penalties for late deliveries.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/10/twitter-remove...
Or this report [0] by more than 50 global experts in international law, genocide, and China?
[0] https://newlinesinstitute.org/uyghurs/the-uyghur-genocide-an...
That being said, I haven't fully read either the State Dept.'s report, nor the Newlines report, nor all the primary documents (of course), and importantly, I do believe the treatment of the Uyghurs to be unjust. I think Saddam Hussein was an unjust ruler in Iraq also, but there was widespread misinformation and numerous lies put forth in order to justify the Iraq War (both actually, but it is perhaps more complicated to justify for the first Gulf War). We're probably not in danger of a war with China in the next decade, but if we're going to have a Cold War 2, I'd like it to be based on less questionable sources.
They especially criticize situations like the following
有多次新疆劳务人员在组团干部的带领下，在接近到达目的地的火车上接到当地公安部门不允许下车的命令，结果导致很多令人尴尬、懊丧、失败的现象发生。有几次经过解说后被允许下了火车但又不允许出站台，出了站台又不允许进厂，进厂后却不允许上班工作，已经工作几天的甚至勒令必须立即回新疆老家，否则公安部门经常以各种理由到企业上门检查、询问、调查，致其根本无法正常上班干活，而企业不得不委屈地找各种理由解雇本已经适应工作岗位的工人。这些情况已经发生在几个省市区，当然有的省市区干脆压根儿就不允许任何新疆籍人员进入。所有这些，都是在冠冕堂皇的以地区安全稳定为由、为幌子下进行的。
Of course that's not the kind of unjust treatment that tends to be highlighted in Western sources (I found this report via an article that focused more on "通过劳务输出的方式，既减少了维族在新疆地区的人口密度，也是感化、融化、同化少数维族人员的重要方法") but it's definitely unjust treatment.
I randomly skim through the citations in the Newlines report. Most of them aren’t related to Adrian Zenz in anyway (random samples: [0][1][2][3][4]). How did you arrive at that this conclusion?
Also, Adrian Zenz has published in peer-reviewed journals about Xinjiang [5]. Can you point me to other peer-reviewed papers (as opposed to anonymous comments on Hacker News or random opinion pieces) that point out mistakes in his work?
And of course, you can watch victims’ testimonies yourself, so you don’t have to trust any other researcher https://shahit.biz/eng/
[0] https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/explainers/exploring-xinjiangs-dete...
[1] https://supchina.com/2019/08/07/uyghur-love-in-a-time-of-int...
[2] https://www.afp.com/en/inside-chinas-internment-camps-tear-g...
[3] https://bitterwinter.org/sexual-abuse-of-uyghur-women-by-ccp...
[4] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/13/china-visiting-officials...
[5] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ALWIr18AAAAJ&hl=en
He then tried to cover it up by changing the revision date, an act which amounts to academic fraud.
The mistakes called out in the tweets look like typos that are not critical to the major conclusions of the paper.
For instance, if the paper is about how IUD insertion changes over time, and consistently mislabels “per 100000” as “per capita” in one of the graphs, then the percentage change is unaffected by this typo.
But if the curve in the graph were altered, then that would be a significant mistake (and a fraud). But it doesn’t appear to be the case in Zenz’s work.
If major conclusions are affected, the papers will eventually be retracted. But if those are only typos, the papers will survive. So we will know.
Can you tell me how major conclusions in his papers are affected by these changes?
And also how most citations in the Newlines report are affected by Zenz’s work? I fail to see the connection of those citations to Zenz, like those I pointed out above.
> He then tried to cover it up by changing the revision date, an act which amounts to academic fraud.
Changes due to typos like this are not considered an academic fraud, unless these changes affects the major conclusions of the papers significantly.
In the area I work with, I frequently see similar typos in research papers. No profession researcher bothers to call out such minor mistakes in tweets. And mistakes on revision dates after correcting typos are not considered fraud.
That’s why I asked for peer-reviewed criticism of his work, not random tweets that nitpick on minor issues.
If you are uncertain about minor/local and major/global mistakes, you can read Terry Tao’s post https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/on-l...
How not to get bogged down by minor mistakes in papers when reading them https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/on-c...
For example, check out the IUD section showing his sleight of hand here: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-...
I just take a random article from CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/21/asia/xinjiang-china-respo...
One paragraph is affected: “there were almost 1,000 new IUD implants per 100,000 people in Xinjiang in 2018, or 80% of China's total for that year”. The rest of the CNN article seems correct and unrelated to Zenz’s work.
This CNN article also says “Chinese officials have officially acknowledged birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by almost a third in 2018, compared to the previous year […]”
There is still no satisfactory explanation for such a sudden drop in birth rate, other than a forcible suppression of birth since 2017. And there are other sources that corroborate the birth suppression claim, such as this teacher [0] and numerous detainees [1][2][3][4][5].
Also, not every claim related to Zenz is in dispute. Consider this claim from a random APN News article: https://apnews.com/article/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
> “Budget documents obtained by Zenz show that […] While sterilization rates plunged in the rest of the country, they surged seven-fold in Xinjiang from 2016 to 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures”
This claim is not refuted by the Grayzone article.
Zenz may have made “local mistakes”, but not global ones that severely impact the major conclusions of his works or in news reporting.
Further, so far I have only seen one website (Grayzone) criticizing Zenz’s work, but not peer-reviewed papers or criticism from the larger research community.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/04/muslim-minorit... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uighur-muslim-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071 [3] https://www.dw.com/en/china-uighur-women-reportedly-steriliz... [4] https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Xinjiang-What-China-shows-w... [5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/abortions-...
The fact that the US government has lied with very serious consequences about such things before make this something we should all take seriously.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
If you'd like more explanation, there is plenty at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the links back from there.
I don't see how this place has any obligation to host flamewars that destroy it, any more than a building has an obligation to let a fire burn it down. On the contrary, we have a duty not to burn down, and need to do more to prevent it. We've been tirelessly asking HN commenters to please not destroy the commons for years, but the users posting in these threads are doing it more, and worse. Tireless asking is clearly insufficient, and from my perspective we could use more flags, not fewer.
Going directly to internet failure mode doesn't help anyone, let alone oppressed peoples. Moreover, if you see as much of this as I do, it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion. In that sense they are an expression of the problem, not any step toward solution.
I posted about this earlier today, if anyone wants more explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365
But if the purpose of allowing this is as another indirect method for keeping flamewars off HN, then I agree that it's an acceptable compromise.
I agree in about 95% of cases. There are certainly lots of threads on HN lately that descend into nothing but unhelpful, petty emotional arguments. I try (with mixed success) to avoid most of those myself.
But with respect, this is not one of them. This isn't about iOS vs Android, or FP vs OOP, or regulation vs the free market. This is a cut-and-dry moral travesty, and I think the allegation in the GP (which of course we can't know for sure with our limited window into the HN metrics) was that the "flame war" in this case may only exist as a result of artificial and coordinated action by a third party. This type of thing is well-documented on other social sites; it's not hard to imagine it happening here.
If that didn't happen, I don't think anybody would continue to ask for intervention.
The core problem is that because we're tribal creatures it's difficult for us to acknowledge that other human beings have different backgrounds and different views than we do. It gets even harder when they're right beside us (albeit virtually) arguing fiercely for views which seem monstrous to us [1]. That's why we're prone to invent explanations of bad faith. The majority invents one sort of explanation (spies and agents are among us) while the minority invents a different sort (you just hate people like me), but both are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance.
[1] I wrote a longer explanation of this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, and there are plenty more explanations at links like these:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...