The SOS in my Halloween decorations
bbc.com
bbc.com
She published the message and it was fact.
The writer fled to Jakarta. They've met.
Then, the writer was suspected to be killed by Chinese agent.
> was contacted by a suspected Chinese agent - and two months later he died of acute kidney failure. Despite a request from his ex-wife and sisters, there was no investigation into the cause of death. Leon is suspicious: "He had no kidney problems before and when I was there in Indonesia he seemed perfectly healthy."
A very good non-fiction dystopian novel.
I don’t think even the most enthusiastic proponents would argue that it always works, and surely popular media is full of protagonists on whom it was ineffective.
I'm not saying that the Chinese government are not capable of streneous labor camps on their prisoners, but Falun Gong is not anything good either. This report made it out as if they were "prosecuted" just because they were growing too large, while the simple fact is that they are essentially a cult organization that swindled millions out of retirees, and organized attacks which destroyed public TV stations and local government institutions which dared to call their bluffs (yeah, sitting in front of Tian'anmen is one thing, but locally they have been much more violent), and therefore was eventually clamped down out of existence in the mainland by the authorities. Ever since then they have been (deliberately) supported by western money to perform anti-China propaganda. Most of what they write on their pamphlets/publications are pure fabrication or at least gross mischaracterizations. Ask 10 Chinese around you and 9 out of them will tell you how laughable and unreliable Falun Gong is. They're definitely not beyond fabricating stories and creating characters just to feed the anti-China rhetoric.
The fact that the Chinese government is authoritarian doesn't automatically mean that every enemy of it is automatically "good", or that every vivid accusation against it is factual. Anti-China propaganda does exist, and unfortunately it more usual than not doesn't get distinguished in the western media.
Also the end of the article which links this incident with the internment camps in Xinjiang is unreasonable. Prison labor camps are one thing, while the main purpose of the re-education camps in Xinjiang is not to hold those youths forever and use them as cheap labor, but rather try to ensure that they don't get easily swayed by extremism. Whether the program can achieve its end and whether the format in which it's carried out is suitable, is debatable, but to equate it with brutal prison labor camps is just deliberately misleading and dishonest. Also the Chinese government doesn't deny their existence at all so to call them "secret detention camps" is just simply false.
So that story and another article about womens' conditions in the camps was the catalyst for change. Now imagine if the Portland newspaper was owned by a larger company, who determined it was not in their interest to publish a story whose veracity could not be fully determined and that could worse the relations with their Chinese investors.
On the other hand it's sad that Humans Right Watch could go on for years about this, and this personal story was enough to get people talking. Similar to KSA's destruction of Yemen being hardly visible until the recent murder.
Prison labor+questionable environmental record+environmental cost of shipping adds up to a really bad idea.
Just put together some stuff yourself, from scrap wood and stuff most people have lying around anyway, instead of horrible styrofoam junk.
The intersection of HNers and DIYers is much smaller than you think. Also when you're paying $2500 for a 500ft^2 apartment in SF you don't tend to hang on to things like scrap wood.
Most people won't pick up woodworking skills until they own their own home and need to maintain it and only people with woodworking skills will have a pile of scrap wood around. Keeping scrap material in general around "because it might be useful" is not something the HN crowd is generally predisposed to doing.
Basically, we're mostly a bunch of office workers so expecting more than a couple people to whip up decorations out of whatever is lying around is kind of unrealistic since only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people here are going to be in a position to do that.
And before everyone comments about how they're personally an exception and they drag sheets of plywood home on the roof of their smart car I'm talking about the typical case here.
I would never ever do anything like that (or suicide for that matter), but as in most matters, things are more complex than first glance might tell.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones#Mass_murder_in_Jones...
And it has so little to do with Jim Jones brainwashing and murdering 900-odd people that I'm really not sure why you brought that up.
Also makes the impact of the story stronger as far as I’m concerned.
They suggested that she contact human rights organisations, so Julie rang up and left messages with several - but she never received a reply.
What is up with non-replies from organizations? She reaches out and nothing. It's not a Facebook Ad Request appeal (an aside, is crazy how non-responsive they can be and get away with it) it's human rights!
I believe a vitally important way to fight those powers is to build independent people-first power. We can do it. Our earth is so productive now that it’s possible to live like a king without hurting others. But we must abstain from buying this cheap plastic garbage like the product the woman found the note in. Buying products we know will become waste, or whose workers we can’t account for, means we are directly supporting the destruction of the earth and of society.
We have to stand up. We must. There is no other way to change. Not voting, not blogging. We must stop being consumers of harmful products and use our money to support organizations that truly represent change.
Absolutely. The reasons for social control/ownership of the means of production are more than economic, it is a question of democracy. Voting isn't good enough, it helps people control the part of the power that is in the hands of the government, but not the rest. The more power is in the hands of corporations, the less power is in the hands of people. Eventually, even in "western democracies" (let alone authoritarian nations), much of the power answers to an elite few and not to the people. One even reconsiders whether to truly call them "democracies" when this is the case.
Social ownership / common control of the means of production lets the people democratically decide how to best use those resources and those means to the best ends, rather than to the benefit of a select elite, whose interests may or may not, by pure coincidence, align with those of the general public. The latter system is broken by design.
Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too - they aren’t part of the government.
Should we mandate that workers own 50% of every corporation?
Decision making is going to be much harder as you have to poll the workers to get a majority vote.
What happens if the corporation gets super powerful? It’s still a concentration of power - the executive and the workers of the company.
> Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too - they aren’t part of the government.
You left out a very important word from your quote of the GP that's critical to the GP's meaning. I quoted him more fully and emphasized the unquoted word, the, above.
The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.
> Should we mandate that workers own 50% of every corporation?
> Decision making is going to be much harder as you have to poll the workers to get a majority vote.
Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.
That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares. You just have to be willing to risk your money to buy said shares that may or may not yield any returns - i.e. risk throwing away your money.
> Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.
On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.
The government can unilaterally (corporations have no real say) set laws and even break up corporations or even just outright seize them (i.e. nationalization).
Are you serious? There's nothing preventing anyone from buying shares, except having lots of money to spare. The people include a great many who don't. That's the thing.
Then you have things like share classes with massively disproportionate voting power and individuals with massively more money than is typical.
The people aren't going to find representation and control through shareholding.
> On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.
One difficulty with the current system is that the actions the people can take to influence the government are too remote from the use of that government's power, so in the end it does a poor job diffusing the "concentrated power" that the GGGP post was talking about. This is true especially in the present day, when that "concentrated power" has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.
BTW, if you're not aware, I can't downvote you.
I doubt the downvotes are due to an ideological disagreement or anything like that. If I had to guess the reason, it's that the ideas you're expressing here just don't have much merit and are pretty tone deaf to boot. They're not that much different than saying a penniless, starving man should just buy food, which you personally find pretty affordable as a well-compensated software engineer.
You can buy stock with just a few hundred dollars ...
You of course won’t have much voting power but you aren’t risking all that much money. If you have little to no money in it ... then you should have little to no say in how they conduct their business - it’s none of your business; Would you want random strangers to get a say in how you spend your time and money?
Regardless, no one buys stock to “have influence”. People buy stock to (ultimately) make money.
If said shareholders and their corporations are doing things that are harmful to society at large ... that’s what the government and the laws they enforce are for.
> has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.
And how do they do that?
Also Amazon’s shareholders do not democratically control the company, so most shareholders are beholden to the board of directors and the few very wealthy large shareholders.
While I do not propose mandatory changes, I think it would behoove us to consider how current power structures affect our freedom and the freedom of others. Amazon has a lot of power over us.
What I advocate is that, if we find the current arrangement problematic, we construct alternative power structures that are democratic in nature. And we use those power structures in lieu of centralized corporate power.
If a single democratically operated company got very large and used its power in anti social ways, I would again advocate that people consider seriously the affects of that power and change their support as needed.
I do think, however, that the “problem” of large democratically controlled powers is a better problem to have than large centrally controlled powers, so it would be an improvement nonetheless.
Ideally, the democratic corporations would also make collective decisions through a congress of rotating company representatives. This would provide some forcing function that would reduce anti social behavior in a single corporation, at the risk of trade embargoes.
What do you think of that?
We kind of already have that in that democratically elected government officials have the power to unilaterally (without corporations having a say) set laws to constrain the behavior of corporations.
Problem is most of the people don’t elect officials that do so - at least according to some people’s standards.
This is a vacuous truth. Technically, everything is people, governments are people, repressive megacorps are people, oil sheiks are people. Obviously that's not what the grandparent meant.
The irony of this is palpable. The communist government, who got there trumpeting this exact ideology, would be stopped by the exact same thing? Is this the case of those who dont know history are doomed to repeat it?
If that is already problematic, then this would imply to me that the means of production should never be controlled by the people who do the actual work, otherwise we'd get an authoritarian outcome - which seems a pretty authoritarian statement in itself.
> The communist government, who got there trumpeting this exact ideology, would be stopped by the exact same thing? Is this the case of those who dont know history are doomed to repeat it?
To be fair to the GP, that's not the "exact [same] ideology" it's more like the "exact same goal." There are different ways of achieving the same goal, and obviously the methods touted by the CCP in this respect are completely bankrupt (i.e. control by the people == control by a revolutionary one-party state that does not tolerate dissent).
I used to work for a big Consulting engineer who did a lot of work in the middle east and we had our friends in high places (you can probably guess who I worked for)
OP appears to be British.
And nobody seems to have figured out how to refactor the law so that ontology (which is finicky, takes lots of resources to get right, and could be applied globally, even if different nations will want some extra nouns and verbs for their own use) and preferences (which ought be as local as possible) are cleanly separated and the former are easily reusable across nations without obligating that such nations come to global consensus on the latter. Instead, every sovereign entity (USA and EU, not France nor Florida) is its own pile of spaghetti-code.
> But apparently the nonexistence of a monopoly in the dispute-resolution market - such a monopoly being the definition of "government" - is sacrilegious to most.
It's not sacrilegious. It's just smart. A "monopoly in the dispute-resolution market", i.e. a government, is both a) something that groups of humans naturally gravitate towards as they grow, and b) an efficient solution to whole lot of problems of coordination between people.
- No healthcare for everyone - War over oil - closed borders and no asylum support but cheap foreign labor
(You are also further assuming that the person to whom you are replying is a US citizen, which is far from given on HN.)
Not necessarily: Some of the letters could have been intercepted in China. Others could have made it to people who cared but were less successful in getting media attention. Still more could have been destroyed, unread, with unsold inventory.