C-SPAM moderation and Xinjiang: read rules in op

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > C-SPAM moderation and Xinjiang: read rules in op

fanfic insert: Nov 4, 2009

Herstory Begins Now posted:

Given the general concentration of islamic extremists (which typically represent ~.5% or less of the total population of the roughly 1.5 billion muslims) I am deeply skeptical that there are enough of them to be anywhere even remotely proportional to the scale of the effort mounted against them.

Even in Saudi Arabia, wahabbi islam is a minority branch of Islam.

Sorry about replying some 7 pages later but im just catching up.

You should look into the numerous straight up terror attacks that has been done in Xinjiang by extremists. It's very clearly been a problem for a long time and something had to be done about it for the safety of civilians living in the region. Chinas response is heavy handed and very much goes to far, but they couldve done literal bread and circuses only and they wouldve been accused of lacing the bread with contraceptives by western media.

# ? Mar 26, 2021 09:58

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# ? May 11, 2024 06:32

Doktor Avalanche: Dec 30, 2008

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

There are blocs and movements within the UK Conservatives, too, but in spite of this, political parties inexplicably choose to exist outside Johnson's revolutionary vanguard

and somehow they have all been supporting neoliberalism for the last 40 years in lockstep
almost like the existence of different political parties is just lipstick on a pig

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

china has more parties represented in their govt than the US lol

the fact that they have any socialists and communists in the party at all makes them more ideologically diverse than the west

# ? Mar 26, 2021 09:59

F Stop Fitzgerald: Dec 12, 2010

fanfic insert posted:

Sorry about replying some 7 pages later but im just catching up.

You should look into the numerous straight up terror attacks that has been done in Xinjiang by extremists. It's very clearly been a problem for a long time and something had to be done about it for the safety of civilians living in the region. Chinas response is heavy handed and very much goes to far, but they couldve done literal bread and circuses only and they wouldve been accused of lacing the bread with contraceptives by western media.

the west reported on nearly every terror attack too but just described it as "chinese knife attack" with no discernable motives. the posters in gbs china thread probably remember them

# ? Mar 26, 2021 10:08

Junkozeyne: Feb 13, 2012

BrainDance posted:

I can't speak for everyone but where I'm coming from, I'm really, really critical of the party. I'm incredibly suspicious of what they're doing in Xinjiang. I avoid 'genocide or not' discussions because I think, outside of specific situations that's a dumb way to go about it. You get into stupid semantics arguments. The question should be, are they doing something that's morally indefensible? Whatever noun you want for it, that's what really matters.

The thread exists because of mod decisions in the past that any labelling short of genocide about Xinjiang was bannable.

And even in this thread you have people arguing that, while not death camps surely there is no doubt that it is cultural genocide?

As has been posted before, there is no doubt that there are measures in place to further assimilation. The Chinese government very much wants everyone to learn mandarin for both adults and children and they have ended exemption from stuff like U2C. "Re-education" camps exists and people can be sent there after being arrested and charged. Various police measures are used with counterterrorism as justification.

Does China however want to deliberately exterminate Uighur culture, aka cultural genocide? That would mean erasing their language (while not primary language it is still taught and public use in Xinjiang is unsurprisingly very common), their history, their cultural rituals, their clothing, their religion etc. If you have sources I would be interested to read them but from my view the extent of cultural repression does not meet genocide. Bad things can happen without it being outright extermination. China is not a monoculture.

# ? Mar 26, 2021 10:29

fanfic insert: Nov 4, 2009

Good Soldier Svejk posted:

I mean... yeah. In an ideal world the UN would be sanctioning the US for our human rights abuses.
They never will because... all the reasons but that's kinda the charter we signed on to and the prescribed remedy for violating it.

Just a reminder that the US has a law on the books giving authorization to invade the netherlands if any US citizen is ever brought up on charges at the ICC. I dont think the threat of invasion is a real one but that its a law designed to signal to the rest of the western world that "no, we will not do as you ask but you better do as we tell". Its legislative terrorism.

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

the west reported on nearly every terror attack too but just described it as "chinese knife attack" with no discernable motives. the posters in gbs china thread probably remember them

yeah thats how i remember it and how my skepticism towards the genocide allegations started. I've only ever been confirmed that they're extremely fishy.

Back then it looked like the west was trying to paint china as a failed state with rampant violence when reporting on them and even back then it made me suspect US state department sponsoring extremist group just like they've done in every state where they don't approve of the current government.

fanfic insert has issued a correction as of 10:34 on Mar 26, 2021

# ? Mar 26, 2021 10:31

F Stop Fitzgerald: Dec 12, 2010

sandy hook had happened around the same time so the Neither Beijing Nor Washington folks were able to squeeze out a reductive tedious take

# ? Mar 26, 2021 10:51

fanfic insert: Nov 4, 2009

Throatwarbler posted:

Hey guys as a former resident of the XUAR and one with close family ties to the region,

Hey, I just thought of something and I think you might be the best(only?) person here that could meaningfully answer it. Only quoted you to maybe make you see my questions easier.

Ive seen people claim(with official looking documents to back it up) that there are grants which Muslims in China can take advantage of to go on the Hajj, my questions are: is this true, and if so, is it something people do take advantage of or is it dismissed because because of difficulties to obtain it? And also is going on Hajj something Uyghurs generally care about?

# ? Mar 26, 2021 11:15

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

i was too young to follow what was happening back when ahmed chalabi was doing his thing, and would appreciate if the american dogs on here stopped trying to recreate it

# ? Mar 26, 2021 12:10

Serf: May 5, 2011

comedyblissoption posted:

anyways people are going to hold mainstream ghoulish opinions but the solution is to discuss them and tell them why theyre wrong instead of banning discussion

the problem, as we saw yesterday in this very thread, is that people will post whatever sources, and when they're debunked they don't accept that. it leads to a very circular form of argument and doesn't really accomplish anything. i have no solution to this problem, as i also don't want to ban discussion

# ? Mar 26, 2021 12:34

Brain Candy: May 18, 2006

Serf posted:

the problem, as we saw yesterday in this very thread, is that people will post whatever sources, and when they're debunked they don't accept that. it leads to a very circular form of argument and doesn't really accomplish anything. i have no solution to this problem, as i also don't want to ban discussion

you never convince the poster, only the lurker. even if you make a good argument that convinces the person you are specifically arguing with, it's usually going to be much later that they come around

# ? Mar 26, 2021 13:03

THS: Sep 15, 2017

Brain Candy posted:

you never convince the poster, only the lurker.

hi lurkers dont fall for stuff like

-inflated or manufactured narratives by the lying news media
-�sanctioning china will pressure them to do what we want�
-�encircling china with missiles, bases, and ships will Protect The Region and is defensive in nature�
-�china is becoming too powerful, these authoritarian monsters cannot be allowed to overtake US �leadership� in east asia, and the world�

# ? Mar 26, 2021 13:51

Cpt_Obvious: Jun 18, 2007

Auschwitz is the most famous example of concentration camps, but it's also one of the most extreme making it a pretty poor yardstick. The camps in China can have little in common with Auschwitz and still be lovely.

# ? Mar 26, 2021 13:55

Breakfast All Day: Oct 21, 2004

Herstory Begins Now posted:

National-scale sanctions are absolutely horrific and should be roundly illegal under international law. idk about sanctioning a handful of administration officials that are explicitly complicit. historically those have been fairly effective at creating pressure and I've never seen really any case made for those causing significant (or even really any?) collateral damage.

targeted sanctions are as much of a myth/purely linguistic creation of the state department as precision bombing

theyre either ineffectual if applied narrowly because their unilateral nature allows the targeted parties just to shift assets/travel elsewhere internationally and become more dependent on the regime (even anti-government, pro-us-intervention "observers" are often critical of them bc of this, and argue data shows they drive more concentration of regime power and counter-us global alignment rather than the opposite), or just a pretext for doing effectively broader sanctions (using individual sanction EOs as justification for seizing nationalized assets/blocking general commerce bc it supposedly benefits government-associated individuals)

on the topic of the thread, i appreciate the openness of discussion in cspam, because it's thoroughly exposed how nearly all western coverage somehow passes through zenz and co and intermixes known misinformation in a way that makes distilling reliable information impossible. this isn't to say it makes chinese state media more reliable, but that we have such little reliable information that any discussion will inevitably involve a lot of diverging possibilities. i dont doubt han-centric racism and cultural prejudice has created many unethical systems in xinjiang and elsewhere, and even the most in-good-faith interpretation of extending birth quota policies to ethnic minorities demands getting into serious ethics about equality vs equity and integration in governance and nationhood -- but these are areas of debate we can and do have openly about the americas, europe, africa, and middle east, both historically and in current events, all the time without labeling any discussion that deviates from a state department press release as being bannably abhorrent. i do think it's possible what's happening does amount to genocide, and regardless of whether it does there are clearly abuses of rights happening. but accepting the zenz account of salo that's getting continually laundered and propagandized by western media when it's clearly driven more by his personal ideology and us/eu interests rather than any kind of fact-finding or expertise is insane and should not be some sort of forum policy

and as many posts are pointing out, this is tied to a larger and decades-long messaging push (honestly, centuries-long) painting western military and economic strong arming of an entire continent as being altruistic

itd be like if the climate thread banned talking in detail about climate change's impact on wildlife ecosystems bc the media decided to launder and platform alex jones saying frogs turning gay since he started saying it was chinese chemicals that did it. banned for frog gay denial. or the actual example of if we'd banned anyone who dared to call the bolivian coup a coup when the us government and western media declared it not a coup

tl;dr i appreciate the slapfighting of the 16 hour a day posters on this topic and would not want it to be banned. if individual posters turn out to be islamophobes or eugenicists or whatever they can be humiliated or banned based on existing precedent without needing to become another awful politifact-canon subforum

# ? Mar 26, 2021 14:14

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

to be clear, when I look at Dolphin posting an article from the Japan Times about a conference of Uyghurs in Japan that talk about their experience with being unable to reach relatives in Xinjiang, and I find a link back to the Japan Uyghur Association, and I that that organization is an affiliate of the World Uyghur Congress, and I point out that the World Uyghur Congress is backed and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy...

... that's not to say that the accounts of those people in Japan are false. I'm sure there are people who are being completely honest and sincere about their stories of being unable to reach relatives in Xinjiang, or their knowledge that their relatives have been detained outright.

The reason we link back to the US government is because giving these people a public forum to air their grievances plays into the US government's agenda. I'm not saying they're liars*, I'm saying that these people are only having their voices amplified by the US government for the US government's purposes. That doesn't make them bad, so much as the people like Mike Pompeo or Tony Blinken who exploit the truth of their accounts in the name of jingoistic propaganda.

I make this reflection explicit, in the spirit of having a nuanced discussion.

___

_{* though as we've also seen from the likes of Zenz (or the Nayirah Testimony from an older era), it's also not beyond-the-pale for other things to be made up whole-cloth anyway.}

# ? Mar 26, 2021 14:54

Agrajag: Jan 21, 2006; gat dang thats hot

gradenko_2000 posted:

to be clear, when I look at Dolphin posting an article from the Japan Times about a conference of Uyghurs in Japan that talk about their experience with being unable to reach relatives in Xinjiang, and I find a link back to the Japan Uyghur Association, and I that that organization is an affiliate of the World Uyghur Congress, and I point out that the World Uyghur Congress is backed and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy...

... that's not to say that the accounts of those people in Japan are false. I'm sure there are people who are being completely honest and sincere about their stories of being unable to reach relatives in Xinjiang, or their knowledge that their relatives have been detained outright.

The reason we link back to the US government is because giving these people a public forum to air their grievances plays into the US government's agenda. I'm not saying they're liars*, I'm saying that these people are only having their voices amplified by the US government for the US government's purposes. That doesn't make them bad, so much as the people like Mike Pompeo or Tony Blinken who exploit the truth of their accounts in the name of jingoistic propaganda.

I make this reflection explicit, in the spirit of having a nuanced discussion.

___

_{* though as we've also seen from the likes of Zenz (or the Nayirah Testimony from an older era), it's also not beyond-the-pale for other things to be made up whole-cloth anyway.}

well i mean Bush Jr and co. literally made up the whole WMD thing and invaded Iraq which then led to the domino effect of destabilizing the whole freaking region and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions

so i think anything that can be linked back to the CIA or State Dept should be reasonably treated as dubious at best

Agrajag has issued a correction as of 15:26 on Mar 26, 2021

# ? Mar 26, 2021 15:22

Agrajag: Jan 21, 2006; gat dang thats hot

Breakfast All Day posted:

on the topic of the thread, i appreciate the openness of discussion in cspam, because it's thoroughly exposed how nearly all western coverage somehow passes through zenz and co and intermixes known misinformation in a way that makes distilling reliable information impossible. this isn't to say it makes chinese state media more reliable, but that we have such little reliable information that any discussion will inevitably involve a lot of diverging possibilities. i dont doubt han-centric racism and cultural prejudice has created many unethical systems in xinjiang and elsewhere, and even the most in-good-faith interpretation of extending birth quota policies to ethnic minorities demands getting into serious ethics about equality vs equity and integration in governance and nationhood -- but these are areas of debate we can and do have openly about the americas, europe, africa, and middle east, both historically and in current events, all the time without labeling any discussion that deviates from a state department press release as being bannably abhorrent. i do think it's possible what's happening does amount to genocide, and regardless of whether it does there are clearly abuses of rights happening. but accepting the zenz account of salo that's getting continually laundered and propagandized by western media when it's clearly driven more by his personal ideology and us/eu interests rather than any kind of fact-finding or expertise is insane and should not be some sort of forum policy

i dont doubt there is ethnic cleansing going on with china's policies towards uighurs but i do find it weird that many of the same people/instituions seem to ignore what israel has done and continues to do to the palestinians which is ethnic cleansing and also the american gov't continued logistics support/arms sales to saudi arabia that is directly responsible for what can arguably be considered ethnic cleansing in yemen

like theres some serious double standards going on here and makes me wonder what exactly the motivations are for this campaign going on in regards to china bad

# ? Mar 26, 2021 15:36

Baykin: Feb 11, 2008

Brain Candy posted:

you never convince the poster, only the lurker. even if you make a good argument that convinces the person you are specifically arguing with, it's usually going to be much later that they come around

this is primarily why i ended up posting more in a single day yesterday than i've posted in the 20+ years i've lurked on these forums. i've only somewhat relatively recently realized how absolutely submerged that i've been in the anti-china media cloud in the west and the disgust that i have with myself for not noticing until now perhaps makes this whole issue feel more personally important than it may otherwise be.

# ? Mar 26, 2021 15:48

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

Agrajag posted:

i dont doubt there is ethnic cleansing going on with china's policies towards uighurs but i do find it weird that many of the same people/instituions seem to ignore what israel has done and continues to do to the palestinians which is ethnic cleansing and also the american gov't continued logistics support/arms sales to saudi arabia that is directly responsible for what can arguably be considered ethnic cleansing in yemen

like theres some serious double standards going on here and makes me wonder what exactly the motivations are for this campaign going on in regards to china bad

China is a geopolitical rival of the US, that's the motivation lol

But both things can be true: China is committing genocide, and the CIA is cynically exploiting and exaggerating it for propaganda purposes. I really don't understand the point of bringing up Palestine and Yemen here. Of course US media is soft on US allies and hostile to its rivals. As someone who doesn't actually live in Xinjiang, knowing that Western media is subject to bias just creates doubt, it doesn't actually get you any closer to the facts.

# ? Mar 26, 2021 16:01

Agrajag: Jan 21, 2006; gat dang thats hot