Interned prisoners in Xinjiang, China are detained with no due process without having ever committed a crime. They are systematically forced to abandon their religion, their culture, and their identity. They are tortured physically and mentally, with beatings, and electric shocks, and waterboarded. They are forcibly sterilized. They are brainwashed as a condition to even be fed, which they are often not. There is forced hard labor, and if they refuse, they are beaten or killed. Many of the workers are children in elementary school. They are medically experimented on. When they die from the torture, or the cold, or starvation, their organs are harvested and sold for profit. Journalism about what goes on in these camps is suppressed, and those who speak out about it are imprisoned. Dissent is illegal and those who do are imprisoned.
Prisoners in Xinjiang are systematically gang raped and sexually tortured, sometimes publicly. If you look in the wikipedia link you will find details on exactly what the sexual torture involves. Unless you have a thick stomach I would not recommend reading it.
This isn't even half of the crimes against humanity in that region. Men, women and children. All of these claims have been corroborated by multiple independent observers. One million people, none of which are convicted of a reasonable crime. Just...let's step back and realize what we're talking about here.
Knowing this, do you believe there is a valid moral equivalence between this and even the most steel-manned, critical interpretation of US-prison-labor? Do you believe that the existence of US prison labor, even with all its (far more nuanced than you may give it credit for) problems precludes or somehow invalidates boycott and criticism of products connected to atrocities in Xinjiang? If so, why?
>I'm not saying who's worse, I'm saying we need to do better before we critic others.
But you ARE saying they are morally equivalent. In your own words, "the pot calling the kettle black". And...one of them is so insanely worse than the other that to dance around the issue like that is absurd.
If Hitler rose from the dead tomorrow and started another Holocaust, would you be against critique or action against it because "we need to do better about our flawed prison policy at home before we criticize others"? "Hitler just killed another million people in the gas chambers, but sometimes innocent people get the death penalty in America too, we can't criticize their concentration camps until we fix our problems at home"?
We're talking about the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't try to stop a genocide because the US criminal justice system has some notable flaws and we need to fix them first? Am I understanding you correctly? Even after reading the part about the mass rape and sexual torture of an entire culture of people?
> The investigations sparked by her case, which is featured in the documentary Belly of the Beast, showed hundreds of inmates had been sterilized in prisons without proper consent as late as 2010, even though the practice was by then illegal.
This is still different - the article you post is a state acting in a way that is, by the quote you posted, illegal in the country it was performed. The actions in China are sanctioned and performed by the government, and are thereby legal.
In fact, the article you post is literally about the state offering monetary recompense for the act - hence, doing the very thing you asked for in your first post.
America is not as bad as China. These false equivalences are supporting genocide.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines repeatedly and egregiously. We ban accounts that do this, so we need you to stop that now. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
Bottom line: the simple explanation is that people have different views they do because they have very different backgrounds, and attacking others with this sort of internet poison because of that is not acceptable on this site. In fact, it leads to ugly mob behaviors that we don't want here. It's not the sort of community we want to be.
I have a really hard time understanding how we're supposed to stop this kind of thing, not just on the internet in general and not this comment in particular but on this site in particular.
HN has rules against accusations of bad faith, and they work 99% of the time, and I try hard not accuse an individual comment of being in bad faith even if I strongly suspect it. But it seems so obvious by looking at any thread about the Uyghur Genocide on Hacker News that there is a pattern when looking at the whole thread, the whole site, in aggregate. I'm not suggesting 50-cent-army-type astroturfing either -- I don't think it's 1 person with 100 accounts spreading FUD for malicious reasons, I think it's 100 people with 100 accounts spreading FUD about the Uyghur genocide because they are nationalistic and proud of their country for personal reasons.
I think this is bad, and needs to be stopped because the genocide in Xinjiang is too important, but I think that HN's policies about not accusing people of bad faith or astroturfing may actually make it harder to have honest discussions on the topic. It's a conspicuous failure case for a site where normally things don't get this bad. I'm not sure what a better policy would be either, which I suspect might be the reason why nothing has changed.
I apologize is this comment is considered rule-breaking, and I will remove it if it is. I just can't stand watching this kind of thing happen.
I mean anytime someone whataboutisms literal ongoing genocide, it's bad faith, period. Whether it's someone working directly on behalf of the CCP or an individual self-motivated nationalist or even a foreigner that's fallen for CCP global propaganda is irrelevant. It's bad faith, and in my opinion, outright malicious.
I think "bad faith" suggests you are not being honest, like you know you're wrong or making a fallacious argument but you're saying it anyways. In that sense, an individual nationalist, a foreigner who's fallen for the propaganda, both cases would not necessarily be "bad faith". I agree that denying or minimizing an ongoing genocide is pure evil.
Aren’t people in prison to get rehabilitated? They don’t really repay anything to society by working for pennies for a prison run by a private company.
In fact you could argue that prisoners are stealing job from others by working for next to nothing.
You also create strange perverse incentives to keep as many people in prison as possible.
And those people in prison working for pennies per day ,as you've alluded, take jobs from free people. If you want to see peak absurdity, California has legions of prisoner firefighters.
But you can be a firefighter with a felony on your record, so while the state of California is fine with paying them peanuts for risking their lives, it won't make them full-fledged firefighters once they're released.
If any other country was doing this, our various propaganda agencies would be crying foul.
What is a crime depends on local legislation. Being homosexual is a crime in many countries, hence there is still nothing wrong with 'criminals' performing forced labour?
