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Comment by confusedhnguy | Hacker News Reader

> Imprisoning over a million Uighurs

Have you tried to image what kind of resource does it need to do this? How many prisons and guards are needed? How many hospitals, power stations and other related facilities are required to support this? Where are the satellite images?

If we are arresting them for their Islamic religion, how come I still have a large amount of Hui friends hanging out with me just as usual? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people

Trusting the Western media unconditionally without thinking about how ridiculous the news are, truly ignorant and arrogant. Surely your media will never lie or leaving important facts out, like the terrorist attacks happened in China. But I am sure your media has already painted them as some kind of freedom fighters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack

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I'll read the links, thanks.

> Have you tried to image what kind of resource does it need to do this?

Imprisoning 0.1% of your population is quite doable

> How many prisons and guards are needed?

Quite a few: "As easy as it may be to silently whisk away thousands of people to new re-education centres, skyrocketing prisoner would also require a huge recruitment drive. According to Zenz, from May 2017, counties with large ethnic minority populations “initiated a wave of recruitments” for so-called education and training centres". From <https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-many-people-are-impri...

> Where are the satellite images?

<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/asia/xinjiang-china...

> how come I still have a large amount of Hui friends hanging out with me just as usual

I dunno, you tell me.

> Trusting the Western media unconditionally without thinking about how ridiculous the news are, truly ignorant and arrogant

True, and I do try to. You don't seem to be similarly encumbered.

> Surely your media will never lie or leaving important facts out, like the terrorist attacks happened in China

So that's why they're imprisoning a million people! for an attack by six people (which killed 31 people others).

You agree that it's happening now because you've explained why it's happening

> But I am sure your media has already painted them as some kind of freedom fighters

They have not.

By the way, who do you work for?

So now I am a wumao right? If someone disagrees with the Western media, just say he/she is a wumao and you automatically win, how convenient.

The image in your link makes me laugh. I can do the same, just get an image of an Amazon fulfillment center and say it is holding thousands of supporters of Edward Snowden against their will.

> I dunno, you tell me.

Because we don't arrest people for their religions.

It's not just 31 people btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio...

If you don't think your media could lie, there is nothing I can do.

> So now I am a wumao right?

Odd. Most westerners wouldn't have that word to hand. I myself was trying and failing to remember it.

But to answer the question, I asked, I did not accuse. And you did not answer. Why?

> The image in your link makes me laugh

You asked for evidence. It's evidence, not proof because pix can be faked, I agree. But anything I put in front of you you can dismiss as fake so what can I do - specifically, what do you want?

> Because we don't arrest people for their religions.

Seems you do, and put them in giant camps. And you explained why with all the links you post.

> it's not just 31 people btw

Re this link, of course it's more than 6, but the link you gave was to that specific attack in which 6 people were killed. Which I acknowledged. Don't fudge things.

And you have not denied that the crackdown on Uighurs occurred, and you yourself gave the reason why - so you don't deny any of this.

I don't think you are thinking for yourself, as you suggest me of not doing, and you have not said who you work for. Which is interesting.

I don't mean to pick on you personally at all, but I have to reply to you a third time in this thread.

This comment not only broke the site guidelines terribly, it became aggressive enough to count as harrassment. You simply can't bully another user like that on HN. We ban people for that.

Let's look at the larger picture for a minute. Geopolitics between China and the West have taken a polarizing turn. Hacker News' audience is highly international but majority Western, so most users here identify with one side of the story. That's natural, but it means that people representing the other side are in a minority position. No matter how wrong you think their position is, you and other HN users need to treat the people you're arguing with respectfully. Otherwise we get a mob dynamic, which is vastly more destructive to HN than comments being wrong about China—and unfortunately there has been a lot of it lately. HN users who have a Chinese background, or have lived in China and so on, have a right to present their side of the story without being accused of being spies or foreign agents and run out of town. The site guidelines ask you to "assume good faith" for good reason: when people don't, it turns a functioning community into a tire fire.

Our experience with the issue of astroturfing is that internet users are all too eager to imagine it about commenters they just happen to disagree with. Having imagined it they then feel entitled to sling the accusation to twist the knife a bit further in an argument. That's not ok. If you're genuinely concerned about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. But it's not ok to casually insinuate it in the threads: most of the time there's no evidence for it, and the accusation is a powerful poison in its own right.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Posting in the flamewar style like this will get you banned on HN. Insinuating astroturfing ("By the way, who do you work for?") is particularly not allowed here—it's pure poison in internet discussions. I've posted about this at great length: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Please review the site guidelines and stick to them regardless of how wrong you think someone else is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: all HN users who have been using this issue to vent aggression and flame enemies ought to read this exchange between a Hong Kong user involved in the protests, and a mainland Chinese user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197903. If they can be that civil and respectful, what excuse do the rest of us have for not doing so?

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