'If you enter a camp, you never come out': inside China's war on Islam
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This feels like a very unique HN thread. I can't recall seeing people actually attempting to defend something like this before on HN.
From an HN point of view, how do we support intellectual curiosity while at the same time holding a place for the people—all people—whose lives are affected by this? I don't know. For the time being, the only thing I know to do is keep calling people back to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. According to the guidelines, saying things like "I can't believe you support concentration camps" is not ok on HN, regardless of how strongly one feels about the topic. That's not a direct quote of anyone, but it's the sentiment the most aggressive commenters are jumping to when this story comes up, which it has frequently lately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/podcasts/the-daily/china-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China
In December 2016 in Xinjiang, Islamic militants drove a vehicle into a yard at the county Communist party offices and set off a bomb but were all shot dead. Three people were wounded and one other died.
In July 2011, At least 18 people died in a series of alleged terrorist attacks in the city of Kashgar. According to state-run media accounts, the violence began when two Uyghur men hijacked a truck, ran it into a crowded street, and started stabbing people, killing six. The attack ended when the assailants were overpowered by the crowd, which killed one attacker. On the second day, state media reported that a "group of armed terrorists" stormed a restaurant, killed the owner and a waiter, and set it ablaze. They then proceeded to indiscriminately kill four more civilians. Armed clashes then reportedly ensured, ending with police capturing or killing the attackers. The Turkistan Islamic Party later claimed responsibility for the attack. One of the suspects appeared in a TIP video training in Pakistan.
In March 2015 in Guangzhou, three ethnic Uyghur assailants with long knives attacked civilians at Guangzhou train station, 13 injured.
In November 2014 in Xinjian, militants with knives and explosives attacked civilians, 15 dead and 14 injured. 14 of the 15 deaths were attackers
In May 2014 in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, Two sport utility vehicles (SUVs) carrying five assailants were driven into a busy street market in Ürümqi. Up to a dozen explosives were thrown at shoppers from the windows of the SUVs. The SUVs crashed into shoppers then collided with each other and exploded. 43 people were killed, including 4 of the assailants, and more than 90 wounded.
There are many more.
And nobody has the courage to stand up to China. Not even to publicly denounce them.
Isn't this what the UN is for? To impose economic sanctions on flagrant human rights abusers?
(Please, no whataboutism replies, what any other country is doing does not justify what China is doing.)
But for now, forget UN and forget the West.
Even the Islamic World and it's biggest representative, the OIC, is reluctant to even make a comment about it! Totally appalling!
'Soft power' such as https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equit... might help explain US/global unwillingness to be too noisy. tldr: "In short, the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers."
It has a much less preponderant mission of incentivizing the adoption of human rights and democracy, but none of the tools for that. Any effective structure with this goal would be opposed by most of its members (or maybe even nearly all). Strong countries can impose some human rights on weaker ones, and they do use the UN as a forum for that, but China is strong enough for nobody to mess with them.
Unfortunately, international norms or UN sanctions don't have any teeth against world powers. It's just the unfortunate aspect of realpolitik that we all have to deal with.
Comparables are often relevant, and looking for contradictions in what people argue or believe is a tool for shedding light on a situation. Somehow the word "whataboutism" became catchy enough that people started to believe in the right to exclude unwanted examples this way, but that's clearly a fallacy. If you can show how I'm applying a principle selectively in different cases, you've taught me something valuable. We need to stay open to that.
There's a subtler fallacy worth pointing out too: it doesn't follow that you're justifying the thing I'm against. That is, if you point out an inconsistency or some comparable example on my side of the argument, it doesn't follow that you're a communist or whatnot. Maybe you are, maybe not. Maybe we actually agree. All that follows is that you've found an inconsistency in me, and that's information I need.
When someone brings up an example that they think is relevant and you don't, the way to refute that is not with a garlic word, but to explain what the significant difference is. If there isn't a significant difference, maybe it's not irrelevant.
People do bring up irrelevancies, but that's rarer than it seems. More likely it's that they have a different perspective on what's relevant, as part of the original disagreement that needs hashing out in the first place. Cordoning off discussion doesn't help with that, and no party to a dispute gets the power to draw the lines of what's in and out for everybody. Indeed, that would amount to the power to impose one's view on the entire dispute.
And I wonder: if we could agree on what's relevant, perhaps by including everything we both really care about, how close that might get us to resolving our conflict itself.
[1] Obviously, if that's what happened, I'm with you completely. Whataboutism should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
... and to say that most instances in which ad-hom is invoked on HN result in stupid debates about whether an argument is (a) actually ad-hom and (b) fallaciously ad-hom (a subtlety most invokers on HN don't really grok).
I think we already have a culture that rejects personalized arguments, and "ad hominem", which gets deployed because people have long ago pulled it out of one of those Internet "fallacy lists", virtually always just clouds discussions. It's certainly more corrosive than "whataboutism".
Honestly, I think it's possible that all "canned" fallacy arguments --- ad hom, whataboutism, argument from authority, straw-man --- basically contravene the "principle of charity" guideline, and that it'd be worth having the guidelines ask people not to deploy pre-canned responses to other people's arguments. You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
Optimize HN for better writing!
You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
Soviet Russia invoked it all the time to justify their actions, as does Trump and currently China. Whataboutism is a favourite tactic of oppressive regimes, "practically a national ideology".
On "whataboutism", there's no debate to have; if you follow Dan and Scott's moderation comments, appeals to "whataboutism" have been verboten on the site for awhile now.
The second is why isn't the UN doing something, and clearly whether the UN regularly engages in this behavior is relevant. And here are a bunch of cases of human rights abuses that the UN hasn't tried very hard to solve and therefore maybe this isn't what the UN consistently does is relevant.
Your post here breaks the site guidelines. Would you please read them, and follow them when commenting here?
...so I went and did a little research. It turns out that one of these mosques is a shrine to a certain Imam Asim, a charming fellow that played an important part in the purposeful destruction in the 10/11th centuries of the Buddhist Khotan kingdom that once occupied the area, during which destruction apparently 'there were years of battles where "blood flows like the Oxus", "heads litter the battlefield like stones" until the "infidels" were defeated'. Unsurprisingly this violence also included the razing of countless Buddhist temples in the area.
Thus the Guardian, apparently with a straight face, asks us to mourn the destruction of a shrine to a warlord when said warlord was part of a deliberate and concerted programme of ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction including destruction of the temples of an earlier culture. At this point my irony meter is off the scale.
Numbers 31 "The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”
3 So Moses said to the people, “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them...7 They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man...9 The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10 They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. 11 They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, 12 and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar...14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."
"Over the past year, local governments have shut hundreds of unofficial congregations or “house churches” that operate outside the government-approved church network, including Early Rain. A statement signed by 500 house church leaders in November says authorities have removed crosses from buildings, forced churches to hang the Chinese flag and sing patriotic songs, and barred minors from attending."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christia...
If you want something more concrete, the Catholic church committed atrocities during the crusades (which were conveniently also around the 10th and 11th centuries), and there are still statues and altars of historical saints and popes.
Not that I am saying what is happening is right.
From looking at the texts, you could say this about most major religions. From looking at the people, things are much less simple.
Interesting question is why China have decided on such massive social engineering Kulturkampf[1] project in Xinjiang?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturkampf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Speculation_on_rati...