Hacker News Reader

Comment by existencebox | Hacker News Reader

I honestly have to ask. Why does this come up in _every thread_ about china. I'm not even going to pull out the "whataboutism" meme but I have to nod at it as it seems relevant. What happened to observing "this is horrific and looks a lot like levels of oppression we've seen end very badly in recent history." I'm all for introspection and self-flagellation, but these are parallel discussions, and the latter shouldn't supplant focus on elements _clearly_ discrete in magnitude and potential future risk.

Post-hoc edit: I almost wish I had made this as a top level comment to avoid seeming to fixate your reply in particular, because it's by no means alone or the sole focus of my observation.

View on HN

It’s about putting things in perspective.

For example, there is the often cited “1 million Muslims” in jail figure, which seems like a lot. 1 million!

But if know that there are over 2.2 million people in US prisons, then that 1 million figure doesn’t seem so high anymore.

I think providing a full perspective to those who are not as familiar with the topic can add to the discussion.

The Chinese penal system is separate with an official count of over 1.5 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_system_in_China

> I think providing a full perspective to those who are not as familiar with the topic can add to the discussion

I don't think you do. Making such an apples to nails comparison as the US prison system vs secret Chinese re-education camp is counter-productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

People wonder how the Holocaust happened.

> The number of people in the camps, which had fallen to 7,500, grew again to 21,000 by the start of World War II[8] and peaked at 715,000 in January 1945.[9]

I'm sure people around the world said something similar to "well, it's China and it's THEIR country, so that's up to them and we shouldn't be getting involved".

I wasn't even going to go the inevitable "nazi comparison" direction, one can make a sound argument based on sub-cultural oppression leading largely towards genocide going on in a handful of different countries even now and it avoids ratholing on the third rail that is "nazis".

Want an additional kicker? Watch how quickly we get downvoted for even mentioning this, and typically sans any reply or deeper discussion.

I'm not sure what social phenomena we're witnessing here, but it's very unsettling to me.

Not just downvoted, flagged off the front page like a brick, while this fluff is on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18606070

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612237

I love how all people talking about the second piece refute it, but it has over 30 upvotes.

Maybe it's not a social phenomenon, maybe it's the fact that people can vote and flag without that being public, on a site that requires nothing but a password, posting some generics about programming to get 500 karma and off you go.

>>I'm not sure what social phenomena we're witnessing here, but it's very unsettling to me.

The building on the new man, the Party man. It's logical, the Party wants no competition, wants to be the only ideology there. Islam is competition: Muslims look towards Mecca not towards the Politburo palace. So they'll mess with them, anyway they can. It's not personal, it's business (see Falun Gong, Tibet etc)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com