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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop arguing on the terminology and whether other countries do bad stuff as well and just agree that this is something we should condemn.

It may be difficult or even impossible for the rest of the world to stop it, but it shouldn't be so hard to come to a consensus that this is wrong.

Edit: this just dropped off the front page from #4 to #34 in a few minutes while another article about China selling US dollars with far fewer upvotes and comments from around the same time is still at #2. Can we get an explanation for why this happened?

Edit: It's now almost off the 2nd page at #52 in under an hour.

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A moderator downweighted the thread the same way we downweight any topic that has been highly repeated, especially when it is highly repeated and also highly politicized and provocative.

I know that sounds tendentious when you feel strongly about a story, but you have to remember what HN exists for. We're optimizing for one thing: intellectual curiosity. If you take that statement literally, which you should, then it will be obvious what the moderation call is here. Curiosity is incompatible with repetition and rage, however justified the rage. Actually, justified rage is even worse for curiosity; it crowds it out for longer. This doesn't mean the story is unimportant—quite the contrary.

More on this for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

I understand that you're optimizing for curiosity, but I feel that on some issues that this goal should take a backseat. For instance, I don't think that optimizing for curiosity would be a particularly convincing defense for a popular science type magazine that refused to publish letters to the editor/articles related to the situation in Germany in the early 1930s.

Nevertheless, I understand that this is a subjective issue--there is room for argument on whether allowing such discussions here would have any real world benefit anyway, so thank you very much for the transparency.

Upvote this! Just because other regimes had done something bad, it does not remove the fact that this is also bad. 2 wrongs don't make it a right.

Well, please define what is "wrong".

"Transformation camps" on your thoughts and how you think. Hmm.. That sounds wrong to me.

Education is a transformation of your thoughts and how you think. So does education sound wrong to you?

Education is a choice. You can choose to be educated by religious schools, or going to public schools.

To those in Xinjiang Uyghur regions, this is not a choice.

Yes, to an adult, it's a choice because he/she knows the difference. But to a kid, it that a choice by himself/herself or by his/her parents, or by the ideology group he/she is in? To some extent, we chose a kind of education to be mind washed.

Sure, so it's the same for the kids. We never expect a 7-yrs old mature enough to make such judgement. But the choice is still there with their parents. Does that choice exist for these folks in Xinjiang Uyghur regions? Is it free to join/leave or is it forced?

Folks in Xinjiang are free to leave if they choose to be "educated". By the way, do you really think you got to choose the education you want? Can't education transform your mind before you can make such choice? Ever read "Educated"? Do you know how much effort there is to realize that there is alternative choices? Do you remember reading anything that says good things about communism or socialism? Why is it always portrayed badly here? Is it really that bad or someone for some purposes makes it look totally bad?

"other countries do bad stuff as well" is just the excuse you have, when you would like to support your country doing the bad stuff... Everybody has a free will and can decide what to believe and what not. Forcing other people to believe in something is making robots out of humans. But robots can't express love... Love can be expressed only out of a completely free will, where no force is present...

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