Hacker News Reader

Comment by Medicalidiot | Hacker News Reader

>Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

The US went through a judicial process and didn't just imprison or delete this person's account ( I know this isn't a US national), but this is a false equivalency to say that this process is even close to China when China currently has over a million prisoners in concentration camps.

View on HN

Places like gitmo aside, almost everyone goes through a judicial process before they're locked up. China has judicial processes too. It's a question of the integrity of those processes.

If you'd like to understand the integrity of the US process, please read The New Jim Crow. It's not at all clear the US process is better than China's.

It's not at all clear the US process is better than China's.

Yes..just last week I was stopped outside Pennsylvania Avenue and forced to install a government mandated app on my phone and submit a DNA sample...

Right right, the whatabouttheUSbeingracist argument. The US does not put people in jail for political speech.

I don't think that's quite the argument.

The argument is that the US justice system uses pressure of plea bargains to put millions of innocent people in prison, financial pressure to keep millions of people from getting justice, etc.

The level of injustice seems at least similar.

You're right the reasons are different. But until we fix our courts, we don't quite have the moral high ground here.

Plus gitmo.

US has about 5 times as many people locked up, proportionally, as China.

The people you mentioned in the US went through a judicial proceeding which resulted in their imprisonment. We can debate the merits (or lack therefore) of the laws broken which resulted in their imprisonment, but the point is there was a process and a review in place before said people were sent off to prison.

Contrast that situation to China. China has over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps for non-criminal, political reasons. Most (if not all) of the said Uyghur people imprisoned were given no judicial review, and have no access to legal counsel.

God damn I hate the whataboutism on HN I see with regards to China - it is really rampant. It may shatter some folks' liberal sentiments but the US really is not the worst country on the block (planet), by a long-long margin.

I don't think having people in concentration camps getting their organs harvested is so similar that comparing numbers makes sense.

I'm amazed at just how little press coverage that is getting. Some public figure says something that's not sufficiently woke and it's on the front page of every news site in the country. China gets caught putting religious and ethnic minorities into camps and harvests their organs and most Americans haven't heard about it.

This is what leads me to believe the information is shaky at best. The press has no issues reporting “bad and scary” news about China since it sells, and they report on the re-education camps all the time. However, if they are shying away from the “organ harvesting” story, then it’s probably suspect.

It's getting reported on by major outlets, just not very loudly or prominently. There have been articles in the Guardian, The Daily Mail, Reuters, Forbes and others. The press frequently gives China a pass on things that any Western country would be pilloried for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1018646

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/16/china-cov...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-harvesting-china-survivo...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/the-ugly-truth-about-chinas-or...

https://qz.com/1717338/china-accused-of-harvesting-organs-fr...

https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-orga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-organ-harves...

I hear this claim repeated a lot, but has anybody got a good source for it?

All I can see are extreme news sources (Breitbart) and NBC reporting on https://chinatribunal.com, and while I know nothing about the chinatribunal, its name somewhat implies a clear stance at the outset.

Particularly in relation to the Uyghur muslims, I can't find any evidence that they're having their organs harvested

> The China Tribunal has been initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international not for profit organisation, with headquarters in Australia and National Committees in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

I find the fact that the media doesn’t report this, but they do report the re-education camps, suggests the sources aren’t very solid.

It seems that you created a new name just to doubt organ harvesting by China. You say the media doesn't report it, but a single search for china organ harvesting turns up this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1018646

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/16/china-cov...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-harvesting-china-survivo...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/the-ugly-truth-about-chinas-or...

https://qz.com/1717338/china-accused-of-harvesting-organs-fr...

https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-orga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-organ-harves...

Here you go, from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

It's about the Fulan Gong movement, FWIW.

This is reporting the same china tribunal mentioned in my OP. Interestingly, the interviewee mentioned by the Guardian here 'did not see any direct evidence of forced organ removal'; if the tribunal heard evidence from people with direct experience of organ removal, I'm surprised they were not quoted. It seems like I may have to dig deeper into the tribunal's actual report to gain more insight.

Yeah agreed. It is terrible that US has the largest prison population and it is also terrible that China has harvested organs and puts Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. They are terrible in different dimensions and it would serve no clear purpose to me to try and figure out which is the “more terrible” one to focus the criticism on to the cost of ignoring the other.

China doesn't need to keep them locked up. China has the largest rate of organ transplants in the world, the highest rates of executions (actual number a state secret) yet has low rates of organ donors with trial registration schemes only starting within the last decade. Guess where they get the organs from.

Journalists investigating the suppression of Falun Gong estimated that approximately 60,000 convicted members were executed and their organs harvested. People are routinely arrested and never heard from again. In some cases families have been told a relative was executed years previously, but often they hear nothing at all.

In 2008 China's own deputy health minister estimated over 60% of transplant organs were sourced from prisoners, but Chinese officials have clamped up about this in recent years. They have occasionally said that this source of organs has been excluded, but there's no way to verify this as rates of donor registration aren't known, rates of executions are a state secret and none of the people or facilities involved are known or open to investigations.

So yes, sure, just like the USA.

> We kill suspects whose names we know, and whose names we don’t; we kill the guilty and the not guilty; we kill men, but also women and children; we kill by day and by night; we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets.

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

That, while terrible, has nothing to do with the subject being discussed. That's plain whataboutism.

The US military's stance is that this is war.

Certainly there's no rule that during war one has to know the name of someone before killing them.

We are entering a new era and no one knows what the rules are.

... Not to mention "Bodies" exhibit, filled with corpses of Chinese prisoners -- very reason I refuse to buy tickets.

The person has no rights under that judicial process so it's no defence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com