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Quantumfate posted:It's like pointing to oklahoma and going "When the natives held it, there was no free health care, people lived close to starvation and since the white man took over for them it's been a region with vastly improved quality of life. There's currently a horrid repression of people going on there, and a pretty bad genocide.
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Jan 13, 2014 10:33
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Squalid posted:The hotel is also named after the novel. That I did not know.
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Jan 13, 2014 10:34
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Chinese kinda suck at this genocide business then, given that the number of Tibetans have quadrupled since their takeover. They're obviously cementing their control of TIbet, suppression of native culture included, but calling it "a pretty bad genocide" seems like a stretch. Do you have a source for this? And do you mean Han Chinese immigrants or native Tibetans?
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Jan 13, 2014 10:45
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Chinese kinda suck at this genocide business then, given that the number of Tibetans have quadrupled since their takeover. They're obviously cementing their control of TIbet, suppression of native culture included, but calling it "a pretty bad genocide" seems like a stretch. Life expectancy and literacy have also improved by leaps and bounds. The Han have a better deal of it but . . . looking at places like Nepal, I'm inclined to say a lot of "Free Tibet" stuff has more to do with British Imperialism (and a very charismatic Dalai Lama! Though orientalism plays a role there) and less to do with actual human rights. Not that the PRC is good on human rights. They obviously aren't.
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Jan 13, 2014 10:45
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Shbobdb posted:Life expectancy and literacy have also improved by leaps and bounds.
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Jan 13, 2014 14:25
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Carbon dioxide posted:This projection makes the line that goes over the North look really weird and stretched. I wonder what happened to those ducks. Did they get stuck in ice for the winter? The line would be much more of a natural curve if we were viewing it from a polar projection. Alternatively, the path could disappeared "up" through the northern edge of the map near the Bering Strait and just "reappear" near Greenland.
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Jan 13, 2014 14:43
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Chinese kinda suck at this genocide business then, given that the number of Tibetans have quadrupled since their takeover. They're obviously cementing their control of TIbet, suppression of native culture included, but calling it "a pretty bad genocide" seems like a stretch. Genocide is not strictly limited to "kill all people ever". Carbon dioxide posted:This projection makes the line that goes over the North look really weird and stretched. I wonder what happened to those ducks. Did they get stuck in ice for the winter? Yep! Wikipedia posted:Using the models they had developed, the oceanographers correctly predicted further landfalls of the toys in Washington state in 1996 and theorized that many of the remaining Floatees would have travelled to Alaska, westward to Japan, back to Alaska, and then drifted northwards through the Bering Strait and become trapped in the Arctic pack ice. Moving slowly with the ice across the Pole, they predicted it would take five or six years for the toys to reach the North Atlantic where the ice would thaw and release them. Between July and December 2003, The First Years Inc. offered a $100 US savings bond reward to anybody who recovered a Floatee in New England, Canada or Iceland.
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Jan 13, 2014 15:17
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Chinese kinda suck at this genocide business then, given that the number of Tibetans have quadrupled since their takeover. They're obviously cementing their control of TIbet, suppression of native culture included, but calling it "a pretty bad genocide" seems like a stretch. You could use the same reasoning for plenty of conquered peoples. I'm a bit wary of these 'white burden' arguments, it was still an invasion of a sovereign nation no matter how much the Tibetans needed to be enlightened and no matter how much the Han Chinese feel that the region historically belongs to them.
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Jan 13, 2014 17:29
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Shbobdb posted:(and a very charismatic Dalai Lama! Though orientalism plays a role there) and less to do with actual human rights I was part of a Dalai Lama stage crew back in 2005 and I distinctly remember him making very clear that he doesn't want Tibetan independence, something that Westerners conveniently forget when they trip over themselves to look righteous. This is his stance even today: FT posted:It’s a far cry from the Dalai Lama’s bleak mood when the FT interviewed him in 2008, after protests had swept Tibet. Then, the Nobel laureate mourned his waning influence over a younger, angrier generation. Today, he seems relaxed and confident, insisting he can convince most Tibetans – even independence advocates – to accept Chinese rule if genuine autonomy is granted. Of course, he desires greater autonomy for Tibet - that much is obvious given everything that's played over the media about Tibetan independence. But what's less known is that he doesn't want the Chinese to leave Tibet, because, in his own words, Dalai Lama posted:In 1974, following serious discussions with my Kashag (cabinet), as well as the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker of the then Assembly of the Tibetan People's Deputies, we decided to find a Middle Way that would seek not to separate Tibet from China, but would facilitate the peaceful development of Tibet. Although we had no contact at the time with the PRC - which was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution - we had already recognized that, sooner or later, we would have to resolve the question of Tibet through negotiations. We also acknowledged that, at least with regard to modernization and economic development, it would greatly benefit Tibet if it remained within the PRC. Although Tibet has a rich and ancient cultural heritage, it is materially undeveloped. This isn't to say the Dalai Lama is some pro-PRC guy misrepresented by the media; he clearly clashes with the PRC over Tibetan autonomy. But even he is deploying the 'white burden' argument to argue against independence for 'his' people. Whether he's actually representative of Tibetans is another question, but he's treated as such in the West. It's ironic how Free Tibet movements that sponsor him also downplay his insistence that Tibet should be under Chinese rule.
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Jan 13, 2014 18:03
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Sri.Theo posted:Do you have a source for this? And do you mean Han Chinese immigrants or native Tibetans? Fuschia tude posted:Genocide is not strictly limited to "kill all people ever". Phlegmish posted:You could use the same reasoning for plenty of conquered peoples. I'm a bit wary of these 'white burden' arguments, it was still an invasion of a sovereign nation no matter how much the Tibetans needed to be enlightened and no matter how much the Han Chinese feel that the region historically belongs to them.
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Jan 13, 2014 18:07
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steinrokkan posted:http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html He does skip over some rather unpleasant things that the Chinese have done to the Tibetans however, such as forced sterilization procedures, while laying very heavily into the rather repressive regime of feudal Tibet. His portrayal of the harm that China has done to Tibet is depicted as mostly a byproduct of China's general problems with corruption and the wealthy raiding the resource of the poor, and a general suppression of cultural identity (present throughout most of China anyways), rather than addressing the problem that maybe the Tibetans shouldn't have been robbed of their homeland in the first place, given their status as an independent nation, even if it was a bad state. One could argue the same thing about Manchukuo under the yoke of Japanese Imperial occupation, or the Aztec Empire when the Spanish conquered them. Yes, there was a general unpleasant suppression of local culture, and the local wealth was being raided by the wealthier party. But look how horrible the culture was before (i.e. forced hair queue or death under Qing, human sacrifice under the Aztecs), and the conquerors stopped that horrendous nastiness. Even though he claims on the surface that it is important to recognize that China is also an equally guilty party which must be also held accountable, the amount of space he gives to describing the atrocities committed by the Tibetan aristocracy and religious elite, versus a light description of those of the Chinese occupiers seems to suggests otherwise.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:08
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I have a source in an old thread, but I'm not sure the best way to find it again, since it was gassed two years ago. All I remember off the top of my head is that the pre-invasion population numbers were done by some Italian dude. The U.N. definition of genocide includes ethnocide, which is arguably the whole reason the Chinese are encouraging large-scale Han migration to the region.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:27
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The Dalai Lama is a self-described Communist as well. Marxist, in fact. He's a lot more complicated person then he's usually portrayed as. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzin_Gyatso#Economics
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Jan 13, 2014 22:05
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The Chinese kinda suck at this genocide business then, given that the number of Tibetans have quadrupled since their takeover. They're obviously cementing their control of TIbet, suppression of native culture included, but calling it "a pretty bad genocide" seems like a stretch. Even today, Peruvians are much more like the Inca than the Spanish that invaded, and a major reason for that is that it's actually really really hard to kill off an entire people (unless they're completely defenseless to diseases or something like that).
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Jan 13, 2014 22:43
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computer parts posted:Even today, Peruvians are much more like the Inca than the Spanish that invaded, and a major reason for that is that it's actually really really hard to kill off an entire people (unless they're completely defenseless to diseases or something like that). Uh, that's pretty disingenuous. The Inca and subordinate tribes died off in huge numbers during the 1500s and 1600s when the Spaniards cemented their re-concentration village layouts and mita for silver production. The fertility rate of Indians in Peru was incredibly low for hundreds of years and huge numbers of Indians fled the lovely villages the Spanish built for them and adopted Mestizo cultural traits as a way of integrating themselves into the Spanish casta system. While there are definitely important elements of native culture left Peruvian Indians (and south Americans in general) are largely a mixed-race, culturally syncretic people. Basically the Peruvians are 'like' neither the Spanish nor the Incas but are, except maybe in really remote places, an entirely different type of person.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:50
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computer parts posted:Even today, Peruvians are much more like the Inca than the Spanish that invaded, and a major reason for that is that it's actually really really hard to kill off an entire people (unless they're completely defenseless to diseases or something like that). Or have a religion that prevents reproduction. Its taken 233 years but all we've got to do is outlast Sister June Carpenter, Brother Arnold Hadd, and Sister Frances Carr and we'll finally have wiped the Shaker menace from the Earth.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:51
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Fandyien posted:Uh, that's pretty disingenuous. The Inca and subordinate tribes died off in huge numbers during the 1500s and 1600s when the Spaniards cemented their re-concentration village layouts and mita for silver production. The fertility rate of Indians in Peru was incredibly low for hundreds of years and huge numbers of Indians fled the lovely villages the Spanish built for them and adopted Mestizo cultural traits as a way of integrating themselves into the Spanish casta system. While there are definitely important elements of native culture left Peruvian Indians (and south Americans in general) are largely a mixed-race, culturally syncretic people. Basically the Peruvians are 'like' neither the Spanish nor the Incas but are, except maybe in really remote places, an entirely different type of person. Perhaps I should have phrased it differently but the point was that historically people just don't murder every last man woman and child and then take their land. They just do the latter.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:55
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Yes that is true almost universally except for in the Americas where more than 90% of the original populations died because of all the old world diseases and were actually replaced. You should probably have picked a different example.
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Jan 13, 2014 22:58
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computer parts posted:Perhaps I should have phrased it differently but the point was that historically people just don't murder every last man woman and child and then take their land. They just do the latter. Oh yeah? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanian  But really, you're right about virtually every case of colonial conquest. That's why the UN definition of genocide lists things outside of "actual physical extermination."
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Jan 13, 2014 23:02
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I found a report on sterilization, abortion and birth control in Tibet, conducted by an independent American anthropologist, which completely contradicts the stories of mobile sterilization teams being a Chinese policy in Tibet. (Or any other discriminatory fertility policies.) The report obviously touches upon the subject of fertility, which doesn't seem to be a problem at all in Tibet. (Well, the high population growth might be a problem due to lack of good land, but that's another issue.) Haven't read the other reports, but there are more about Tibet if anyone cares. ookuwagata posted:One could argue the same thing about Manchukuo under the yoke of Japanese Imperial occupation, or the Aztec Empire when the Spanish conquered them. Yes, there was a general unpleasant suppression of local culture, and the local wealth was being raided by the wealthier party. But look how horrible the culture was before (i.e. forced hair queue or death under Qing, human sacrifice under the Aztecs), and the conquerors stopped that horrendous nastiness. *The centralization and subsequent discrimination against regional cultures is another matter. ookuwagata posted:Even though he claims on the surface that it is important to recognize that China is also an equally guilty party which must be also held accountable, the amount of space he gives to describing the atrocities committed by the Tibetan aristocracy and religious elite, versus a light description of those of the Chinese occupiers seems to suggests otherwise. Fandyien posted:The U.N. definition of genocide includes ethnocide, which is arguably the whole reason the Chinese are encouraging large-scale Han migration to the region. Fandyien posted:Uh, that's pretty disingenuous. The Inca and subordinate tribes died off in huge numbers during the 1500s and 1600s when the Spaniards cemented their re-concentration village layouts and mita for silver production. The fertility rate of Indians in Peru was incredibly low for hundreds of years and huge numbers of Indians fled the lovely villages the Spanish built for them and adopted Mestizo cultural traits as a way of integrating themselves into the Spanish casta system. While there are definitely important elements of native culture left Peruvian Indians (and south Americans in general) are largely a mixed-race, culturally syncretic people. Basically the Peruvians are 'like' neither the Spanish nor the Incas but are, except maybe in really remote places, an entirely different type of person.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:03
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Christ, yet another horrific thing in history that I had never heard of. Goddamnit Europeans used to be really evil.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:16
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A Buttery Pastry posted:It does? I don't see where. This is 100% semantics at this point (does it make it any worse if you attach the word genocide to it?) but quote:a legal definition is found in the library of official rights of Guatemala the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." right at the top of the wikipedia article. quote:This despite the Spanish being half a world away. Alternatively, consider the Chinese approaching Tibet like the Israelis have done with Palestine. There are 200 times as many Han Chinese as there are Israeli Jews, while the Tibetan population is on the same scale as the Palestinian one in Israeli controlled territory. Are we really to believe the Chinese, on a similar time scale as the Israelis, have failed so miserable in their takeover of Tibet? Uh genocides aren't a competition. Maybe the Chinese aren't as good at them as the Israelis, that doesn't mean it's not happening.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:18
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I found a report on sterilization, abortion and birth control in Tibet, conducted by an independent American anthropologist, which completely contradicts the stories of mobile sterilization teams being a Chinese policy in Tibet. (Or any other discriminatory fertility policies.) The report obviously touches upon the subject of fertility, which doesn't seem to be a problem at all in Tibet. (Well, the high population growth might be a problem due to lack of good land, but that's another issue.) Haven't read the other reports, but there are more about Tibet if anyone cares. It isn't a question of "success" or "failure". China's goals in Tibet are markedly different then Israel's goals in Palestine and both states are so wildly different that they're obviously gonna be totally different. Israel wants a two-state solution and/or the ejection of Israeli Arabs (or, at least, maintaining their minority status) whereas China wants to see Tibet totally assimilated. They also have less dubious historical claims, but that's really neither here nor there. The Chinese have arguably been more "successful" in their takeover of Tibet because direct force isn't employed nearly as often as it is by Israel. Really though it's distasteful to discuss that because, like Koramei said, genocide or ethnocide or insert morally unacceptable geopollitical action x isn't a competition.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:29
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Fandyien posted:It isn't a question of "success" or "failure". China's goals in Tibet are markedly different then Israel's goals in Palestine and both states are so wildly different that they're obviously gonna be totally different. Israel wants a two-state solution and/or the ejection of Israeli Arabs (or, at least, maintaining their minority status) whereas China wants to see Tibet totally assimilated. They also have less dubious historical claims, but that's really neither here nor there. The Chinese have arguably been more "successful" in their takeover of Tibet because direct force isn't employed nearly as often as it is by Israel. Koramei posted:This is 100% semantics at this point (does it make it any worse if you attach the word genocide to it?) but Koramei posted:Uh genocides aren't a competition. Maybe the Chinese aren't as good at them as the Israelis, that doesn't mean it's not happening.
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Jan 13, 2014 23:44
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DarkCrawler posted:Christ, yet another horrific thing in history that I had never heard of. Goddamnit Europeans used to be really evil. Used to be?
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Jan 13, 2014 23:45
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The thing to keep in mind when you rail about westerners espousing a "Shangri-la" narrative: Tibet before the chinese invasion was essentially a premodern state. It was no worse than any other premodern state, arguably in some ways better than other such states. Modern life has an inarguably better quality of life. To that end; focusing on how "horrid" Tibet was is really utterly irrelevant to the issue. It's like everytime someone criticizes the US treatment of native americans or african americans you respond "Yes, but before the white man they were living awful premodern lives, little better than savages! Oh the ills they had!"
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Jan 13, 2014 23:52
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On the flip-side of that, a lot of the "cultural genocide" that people talk about in Tibet is a function of modernity. And that's always an unpleasant ride for a culture.
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Jan 14, 2014 00:01
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Quantumfate posted:The thing to keep in mind when you rail about westerners espousing a "Shangri-la" narrative: Tibet before the chinese invasion was essentially a premodern state. It was no worse than any other premodern state, arguably in some ways better than other such states. Modern life has an inarguably better quality of life. Quantumfate posted:To that end; focusing on how "horrid" Tibet was is really utterly irrelevant to the issue. It's like everytime someone criticizes the US treatment of native americans or african americans you respond "Yes, but before the white man they were living awful premodern lives, little better than savages! Oh the ills they had!"
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Jan 14, 2014 00:16
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Quantumfate posted:You really ought read up on asian history- And as much as I love michael parenti he is pretty wrong. Tibet was a pretty not-capitalist state, and I guess that's bad? But it was far from a theocratic hellhole- that's a position that's in line with PRC propaganda for a reason. OH NO TIBETANS MADE THINGS OUT OF PEOPLE! (It is a deeply venerative act to reuse the bones of your teacher in the making of religious artifacts). Fact is there is more modernisation in the coutnry, and a larger population. One which is mostly chinese. It's like pointing to oklahoma and going "When the natives held it, there was no free health care, people lived close to starvation and since the white man took over for them it's been a region with vastly improved quality of life. There's currently a horrid repression of people going on there, and a pretty bad genocide. What is the reasoning and evidence behind the genocide charges? Your links provide evidence of assimilationist policies, but The U.N. definition of genocide Koramei shared seems designed explicitly to exclude such activity. Certain Chinese policies, for example the Tibetan exception from the 1-child policy, are inconsistent with a centralized effort to destroy Tibetans as a people. Clearly there is much resentment against Chinese authority in Tibet, but embarrassingly I have no idea what grievances they claim, do you know?
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Jan 14, 2014 03:50
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Can we get some maps?
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Jan 15, 2014 00:18
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Xandu posted:Can we get some maps?  Did you know?!?!?!? Greenland is not actually bigger than South America!!!!! It's because of the way the map is made, called the projection!!! This one is called Mercator and really distorts the view of our world!!!!!! The more you know!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 15, 2014 00:28
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Farecoal posted:
I don't know whether Mercator affects the way most people view the world, but it certainly has a dangerous effect on cartographers. Talk about projection.
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Jan 15, 2014 02:16
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Hypothetical uncolonized Africa.
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Jan 15, 2014 02:59
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Qwo posted:Hypothetical uncolonized Africa. They gave them Spain. That was generous. edit: And Sicily.
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Jan 15, 2014 03:31
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Basically, the Reconquista and the Norman conquest of Sicily never happened.
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Jan 15, 2014 03:34
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Is this from The Years of Rice and Salt or something? And what's with the trigrams on the compass rose?
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Jan 15, 2014 03:38
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made of bees posted:Is this from The Years of Rice and Salt or something? And what's with the trigrams on the compass rose? Is that series any good by the way? I think it has an interesting premise but what I'm told is that everything that happened in real life happened again except it was Chinese and Arabian.
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Jan 15, 2014 04:32
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Fojar38 posted:Is that series any good by the way? I think it has an interesting premise but what I'm told is that everything that happened in real life happened again except it was Chinese and Arabian. Oh so Harry Turtledove style "Global Search and Replace Alternate History"?
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Jan 15, 2014 04:38
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Fojar38 posted:Is that series any good by the way? I think it has an interesting premise but what I'm told is that everything that happened in real life happened again except it was Chinese and Arabian.
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Jan 15, 2014 04:43
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OctaviusBeaver posted:They gave them Spain. That was generous. They gave them Madeira too. There is flimsy justification in Al Andalus or Sicily given they had been ruled by African conquerors about 1000 years ago. Why Madeira though? It's not like the Canaries, there were no native inhabitants of Madeira. edit: My bad didn't expand the timg all the way and it looked to me like it had been given to the Canaries.
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Jan 15, 2014 04:53
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