nednobbins

joined 1 year ago
[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago

The original post claimed that anyone who doesn't believe in a Uyghur genocide is a fascist. That's a very specific and extreme position. Even just redefining it as, "ethnogenocide" or "cultural genocide" is shifting the goalposts. They're not even clearly defined terms. If I accuse someone of murder without evidence, it's pretty sketchy of me to then say, "Well, can you at least admit that you've committed some crimes?"

If we're going to discuss a new claim that claim should also be supported by evidence. There's extensive literature on the importance of primary sources when analyzing history or current events. Wikipedia and various media outlets can be excellent resources for initial overviews on a topic but they're not primary sources. It's often difficult to find primary sources, particularly for current and recent events and that just means that claims on the topic aren't supported by evidence. These are all great first approximations but when there's any doubt, primary sources are what ultimately count.

So what do we actually know about the Xinjiang and the Uyghurs?

We can start with the easy ones.

China includes Uyghur text on its currency. That's a pretty cheap thing to do but it's a pretty strange decision if you're trying to suppress a culture. It's easy to verify though.

China has a staggering number of mosques. They're all over the country and it's easy to find Halal food. Xinjiang itself has more mosques than all of Europe and North America combined. There is some controversy here. There are a lot of claims that China is actively reducing the number of mosques. China claims that it's just doing renovations and demolishing unsafe structures. We've all seen what satellite pictures of destroyed buildings look like. We often get them of locations in active war zones. Why don't we have those for Xinjiang? Mosques are also easy to see from space so we can see that they're still there. It doesn't prove lack of intent but it's strange to leave all those religious centers for a culture they're trying to erase.

Xinjian has experience multiple terrorist attacks per year for decades. This is also easily verified. It obviously doesn't justify human rights abuses but it clearly warrants some preventative action. Every nation responds to terrorists in some way, so a critique of a particular response really should provide at least a suggestion for a better one.

China mandates quality of life protocols for inmates who are incarcerated as part of their terrorism prevention practices. We know this because it says so in the "Xinjiang Cables" which Adrian Zenz published as part of his claims about a Uyghur Genocide.

China is making massive infrastructure investments in Xinjiang. It's a key location for the belt and road initiative. If we had any doubt we could just look at all the new construction on satellite images. The effects are harder to verify. China claims that GDP growth in Xinjiang actually exceeds that of the rest of China and independent estimates agree. It's even harder to know how to interpret this. The negative interpretations are either that the wealth is primarily accruing to non-Uyghurs, ie Han, or that the increase wealth itself is a form of cultural genocide. The second seems patently ridiculous. A large wealth increase will obviously change a culture but not in the "genocide" direction." We don't really know how much of that wealth is going to Uyghurs vs Han in Xinjiang but we certainly don't have any evidence that Uyghurs are being economically harmed.

China has mandated that classes be taught in Mandarin. This isn't disputed. It's often cited as evidence of cultural genocide but it's a fairly standard practice. The US is a bit unusual in that it's one of 9 countries that don't have an official language. While language can be an important part of cultural identity it's also an important tool for social interaction. The reason there are so many people who speak English as a second language (or primary language in lieu of their mother tongue) is that it provides significant economic advantages. The same holds true for Mandarin, particularly for people living in China. That's not the same as suppressing Uyghur though. You can find numerous images of publicly displayed Uyghur writing in Xinjiang.

The strongest evidence in support of human rights abuses is from eyewitness testimony. The problem is that we can't generally verify any of it. The explanation is generally that we need to protect their anonymity for the safety of family members who are still in China. That might be true or it might not be. We can't tell. We do have numerous Muslim leaders who have visited Xinjiang and then provided positive and public assessments of the treatment of Uyghurs. The value of confidential informants is in breaking a story, not in supporting it. That requires verifiable sources and the vast majority of the verifiable reporting supports China's version of the situation. In this case I'm using "verifiable" simply to mean that we can check who made the claim and that they actually made the claim, not the stronger requirement of being able to verify that the claim was true.

So in light of all this, what exactly is the "ethnocide" or "cultural genocide" that China is supposedly conducting? What can we confidently point at and say, "We're sure this is happening and it's clear evidence of human rights abuses."

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Could be.

A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn't think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn't care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.

Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you've never heard of and then someone comes along and says, "We're going to make it and we're pulling out all the stops on the graphics."

If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago

No idea.

It's hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.

Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago

That seems to be highly dependent on where they are.

In some cities, everyone on public transport behaves themselves. They're clean and there's no fear that they'll be harassed or assaulted. Some people really like that and get afraid or skeeved when they think about some public transport systems.

In other cities public transportation riders are expected to "live and let live". Officials won't stop you from doing anything unless it presents an imminent danger. Some people love the freedom from that sort of system and hate the idea of someone forcing them to behave a certain way.

There are, of course, many reasons why certain public transport systems are more like one than the other; money, age, geography, preferences, etc. While there are great arguments for public transportation and I'm a huge fan of improving the infrastructure around it, I can also recognize that a lot of people's actual experience of public transport doesn't paint it in a good light.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago

But it's so satisfying.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

No one needs a monopoly on evil. That would absolutely be silly. I'm also not making any claims that it's good to kill civilians. It's bad whoever does it.

What I am arguing against is blatant hypocrisy. If there's some standard to which we want to hold China then we should be clear what that standard is, what level of evidence we require to establish a violation of the standards and hold everyone to those same levels.

It's ridiculous to claim that China is conducting a genocide on hearsay and circumstantial evidence when that's not the norm. It's absurd to advocate for the isolation of some nations when we're perfectly happy to deal with other nations that do worse, especially when the US does worse itself. It's just dumb to assume that everyone who doesn't buy a paper thin body of evidence is a fascist.

It's not aggression, it's anger. I'll tell you exactly where it's coming from. All my life I've been taught that racism is evil. I've been taught that we should require primary sources when making claim. I've been taught that when people consistently jump to conclusions about a group of people it's almost certainly a form of latent racism.

I see these posts as a new flavor of Yellow Peril. I see the same BS that people use to excuse the mistreatment of other minorities in the US.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 0 points 2 weeks ago

If it’s a bad way to find evidence maybe you have a better way. If you have some evidence, I’d love to see it.

Not all killings are genocide but I’m not aware of any definition of genocide that doesn’t involve it. What definition of genocide are you using?

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Genocide isn't about killing.
Photos aren't evidence.

What's next?
War is peace?
Freedom is slavery?

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago

So you love the free press of Israel, Darfur and Turkey?

I also love how people think that China has some magical censorship technology that's so effective that people can't manage to sneak out a single shred of evidence but somehow every racist has some magical means of finding the actual facts (they just can't show them to us).

Nobody can smuggle out a USB stick out of the country. None of the millions of VPN users can figure out how to send some video out of the country. None of our satellites can take a photo with any evidence. That's an amazing coincidence.

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Yes, it is.

Your claim of looking for common ground is bullshit. According to the Rome statue, crimes against humanity consist of systemic cases of:

  • Murder
  • Extermination [including "the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population"]
  • Enslavement Deportation or forcible transfer of population
  • Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law
  • Torture
  • Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity
  • Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court
  • Enforced disappearance of persons
  • The crime of apartheid
  • Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health

There are plenty of claims that China is practicing these but a glaring lack of evidence.

If you actually wanted to find common ground on that list we could start looking at the biggest perpetrators. A few that stand out is that "enslavement" has a specific exception in the US constitution. It's conveniently tied to prisoners, of which we have the largest number in the world. Or you might look at our allies, who continue to practice both apartheid and murder.

No. You want to stake an other unsupported claim as "common ground."

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