https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...state-1754558/

we can do the same exact thing we're doing with china in this thread here and china pick and exaggerate stats to make the US seem like a dystopian nightmare without personal freedom as well

i'm not pro china by any means, but if you honestly care about this issue you'll try to understand it rather than caricaturize it into a strawman

This is more a response to your initial post.

The Chinese government (most likely) currently sanctions organ harvesting of political prisoners. At a minimum, by CCP’s own admission, the CCP used to sanction organ harvesting of political prisoners.

The CCP is a dystopian nightmare for a big chunk of its citizens. Tibetans and Uighurs for example definitely aren’t fans of CCP.

The CCP is pretty much Ingsoc in its early days. You got Big Brother Xi, Ministry of Propaganda Truths, Grandiose Doublespeak (Just tutor a native speaker or ask a Chinese professor why newscasters’ Chinese is so hard to understand), ubiquitous video surveillance (soon to be backed by AI), and they even got “social credit” to stratify class divisions.

The most terrifying part of all this is most of the Chinese expats I have met seem pretty okay with it all.

Thank you for sharing. What you said echoes pretty much with a lot of what I've heard from my family and their friends who live in China.

China has de facto limits on speech and criticism of the party can very much get you sent to jail. Sure, the constitution allegedly guarantees free speech, but subversion is illegal and gets interpreted broadly. The same goes for matters of national security.

To quote from Amnesty International: "Sweeping national security-related laws and regulations continued to be drafted and enacted, giving greater powers to the authorities to silence dissent, censor information and harass and prosecute human rights defenders."

Amnesty also lists specific cases of human rights champions being detained and tortured.

Nor does it have free press, it is consistently ranked "Not free" on Freedom House's index. To quote from their report on China: "Although the total of 38 journalists behind bars at year’s end represented a slight decrease compared with 2015, at least 111 journalists, bloggers, online writers, activists, and members of religious or ethnic minorities were sentenced during 2016 to prison terms of up to 19 years for alleged offenses related to freedom of expression or access to information."

For your reply to me to be correct Amnesty International and Freedom House would have to be lying. These reports of arrests, torture and prison for human rights champions and journalists would have to be false.

So it boils down to that very simple question, are you denying that these things take place?

Because that is pretty much the only way I could possibly be "not even remotely accurate".

On phone now but highly suggest getting the actual files and reading as they were declassified a few decades ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program

We trained them to say certain keywords and funded them to travel around universities to win the heads and minds of our youth - this is why we associate Buddhism today with pacifism despite that we were also arming and training them for guerilla campaigns at the same time

Furthermore, a cursory glance at history of any Buddhist population shows nothing about the religion is more peaceful etc etc

Especially Tibetans were an especially warlike people who had fight fiercely for Independence for centuries and at the time were armed by the British with modern artillery or rifles - on the narrative we focus on local militias that were farmers using their matchlocks normally used for hunting vs an army with machine guns but that was far from the norm

Most notably, there's a scene in 7 years in Tibet with the Dalai Lama asking bread Pitt what rifle he recommends and Brad is like oh dear you poor naive simpletons don't know what's coming - stuff like this written by people who had monks visit while in college was exactly what the CIA had hoped for

I'm not at all defending Chinese occupation of Tibet but it's pretty irreversible by this point, be like handing back the East coast to native tribes or new york to the Dutch - it's a done deal, it's over now

One thing for dead certain, the average Tibetan was far, far worse before they got annexed

It was feudalism run by a theocratic oligarchy that had slavery, basically no social institutions so no healthcare, no education, it was religion and pastoralists if we're fortunate to not be a slave but that wasn't too bad either because at least you'd live on after your master carved a bowl out of your skull (literally... people have no ffing idea what Tibetans were like) but it was all good that's average lifespan was like 30 but you know heavily influenced by crazy high rake on infant mortality because you know, no roads or even hospitals to go to if there had been one but you you it's just lol outliers amirite?

Simply put being a Tibetan has always sucked and your perception is literally shaped by CIA cold war propaganda that was wildly effective

Not defending the occupancy, not pro China in the slightest but Tibet has always been hell

Way more compelling argument for Xinjiang though... Those guys have a very good argument for independence and not too late for them - will still never happen though

Stockholm syndrome is a condition which causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.

From conversations with my taiwanese friends, they are very anti censorship, anti the chinese government and considering trying to get their family out of that area as soon as possible.

re amnesty international etc

I never said they are lying, I'm saying we're taking things out of proper context to fit a narrative

One can just as easily use amnesty international to condemn America and yet nearly all Americans would find that laughable bs that's cherry picked and taken out of context... Which is exactly the same way the Chinese feel

Edit: Sorry for the mix up

I'll leave this though

Only 2% of taiwan are natives... What they did to Taiwan was 100x worse than anything to happen in the mainland and they were under a military junta until the last decade

"in china, you can basically do anything you want and outside of violent crime or actively trying to overthrow the regime, there's zero chance anyhing bad would ever happen to you"

Not sure if this rickroll guy is working for the chinese government or what LOL

im calling him out for being full of **** though

in america, you can get banned from hearthstone for standing with protestors of china. you can get fired for making a tweet in our country, from them. the chinese government, used money to influence what you can and cant say... if they are trying to control your speech, how can you say "you can basically do anything you want"

uhhhh ok, hope you enjoy licking those commie dictatorship boots


one question, is president xi or president trump better or worst?

thats not a character assassination, im describing what your post is saying, you are saying the chinese people have dealt with so much ****, they have just given up and accept this regime, cause eh its not thatttt bad

Whoops, my bad, you'll see from what the next guy said why I interpreted it that way

Truly sorry

no worries dude, im sorry too, i feel like maybe i did insult you, but well named edited my post and i legit just forgot lol

ahhh nah ok, in the next post i did call you a bootlicker lol, ok, i was confused, ya, i take that back, you seem like a reasonable guy, i just have heard fear from my friends about these developments. we have been considering going to an NBA game to chant free hong kong and wear shirts.. and kind of see whta happens.. i imagine some other people will do the same thing

I'm very unclear on how you take detaining and torturing people "out of context"? Especially when by all accounts most of them were protesting peacefully or writing blogs / news articles.

And cherry-picking? It would seem to me that pointing to these incidents is exactly what you should do if you are debating the merits of free speech and human rights in China.

100+ arrested journalists per year is not a blip and pointing out that it happens is not making anything "fit a narrative".

It's the bloody point.

No worries, for the record I'm not saying Hong Kong should suck it or anything, if that's what they want then I have no beef with that

Would definitely be interesting, if you do that please do a trip report, would be very curious to see how it goes

this is what i mean

you raise 100 journalists, I 3b! 2,000 children

which country is that?



so you call? I'll cbet with another country that endangers pregant women

what absolutely awful terrible country attacks pregnant women and jails babies?



like i said, nobody here is worried their child is going to be detained nor that their wife is going to be arrested for being preggers - these are real reports and real data but lacking context as just a pure number spew it's just meaningless

i'm not defending the actions, i'm just saying your perception is results oriented and not objective, you aren't going around the Las Vegas thread and quoting amnesty international and questioning if reproductive rights being trampled are why there are so few female poker players in vegas

for the last time, i'm not defending china, i just can't sit by and watch a river of ignorance babbling away and keep on walking - you guys are talking about straw men while pretending you actually care about real issues

Pretty sure that goes on in all threads fwiw
Although I definitely appreciate your posts here.

Thousands of detained human rights champions and journalists, many subjected to torture. That is not "a straw-man". It is not "fitting a narrative". It is not "out of context". It is systematic oppression and exact evidence of the claims made.

And while I am not very interested in whataboutism, you're free to go into the very thread on this forum that debates detainment camps in the US and check out my views on them.

I don't excuse human rights abuses. You do.

please quote me on this... i don't think you'd find anyone here that would agree with this construct

i could say the same for you because you are content living in a country that jails babies and pregnant women

My best friend in Hs and college studied and worked for years in China. When he would come back home he was a much more happy free spirited person. I got the felling it was a wild west fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, and good food. The people are upwardly mobile and genuinely seem happy to have a system that benefits them. We never anticipated a competing system could make us look underdeveloped in comparison and they are god forbid communist in spirit and reality - propelled by capitalism.

Thing about it is, you're relying completely on your experience. And everything about your experience that you describe, indicates you were treated as an elite. Some parts of what you described, sounds eerily similar to Chinese propaganda. (Only a few pieces)

My knowledge and awareness of what goes on in China, it is far more egregious than what you describe, and it's not based on open source information. I do have to say my information is more than decade old, but when I see stuff like you wrote be eerily similar to the propaganda I read back then, doesn't seem much has changed, especially with LeBron James and Blizzard bending the knee.

When it comes to human rights, comparing China to the United States is like comparing LeBron James talent to Manute Bol. And nobody is saying the US is perfect when it comes to human rights.

I'm replying to your comment about my ex but that post is huge and I'm on my phone.

I did consider it. But then she reached out to me after she left China, and we had a very long conversation about a number of things. We've maintained an amicable relationship after the break up. Also, I wouldn't frame anything as concentration camp this or that. It's not really how I do. You can see my opinion on the subject towards the beginning of the thread

Guys, le Ron's comment about Morey being uninformed is because the NBA briefed a bunch of players about how to act in China and they were basically ordered to act and say certain things. He's saying that Morey's tweet went directly against their guidance and he brought up his issue to the NBA, saying that if a player had done that he thought there would be massive repercussions. It's not a statement on the actual issues in China lol.

And employees have never had free speech, especially on Twitter. People get fired every day for saying things that could potentially coat someone else money. Let's not kid ourselves here

Re: concentration camp hubalub

I do not know what's more tone deaf about this, the fact the NBA and it's players pretty much went through an entire series of events where they bragged about their ability and desire to talk about social issues, and all of sudden make excuses and capitulate to requirements when it comes to talking about a social issue (an uncontroversial one at that, one that the pretty much the entire non-communist political spectrum agrees on), or that literally no one in the western world would get fired for that tweet, unless the Chinese government demanded the company to fire that person. It's a noncontroversial tweet, that only became controversial when the NBA and it's players capitulated to the Chinese demand for silence. Let's not kid ourselves, hardly any informed NBA player would take the communist side in this matter, but they took the next worst step of being commie nuthuggers for money, instead of just standing up for democracy, which was the easiest course of actions to take.

They can't support something that is so obviously supportable, they've destroyed their credibility. They willingly chose to be villains, rather than heroes. Stop trying to rationalize it. They all took the money instead of standing up for something they supposedly all support, freedom from tyranny.