Prisoners in Xinjiang are systematically gang raped and sexually tortured, sometimes publicly. If you look in the wikipedia link you will find details on exactly what the sexual torture involves. Unless you have a thick stomach I would not recommend reading it.
This isn't even half of the crimes against humanity in that region. Men, women and children. All of these claims have been corroborated by multiple independent observers. One million people, none of which are convicted of a reasonable crime. Just...let's step back and realize what we're talking about here.
Knowing this, do you believe there is a valid moral equivalence between this and even the most steel-manned, critical interpretation of US-prison-labor? Do you believe that the existence of US prison labor, even with all its (far more nuanced than you may give it credit for) problems precludes or somehow invalidates boycott and criticism of products connected to atrocities in Xinjiang? If so, why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/06/china-draconi...
Kid was held without trial for 3 years.
I'm not saying who's worse, I'm saying we need to do better before we critic others.
https://eji.org/issues/children-in-prison/
We put kids in prison here.
No. Every injustice, no matter where it happened, is deserving of critique and being dragged to the spotlight.
why can't we do both at the same time?
But you ARE saying they are morally equivalent. In your own words, "the pot calling the kettle black". And...one of them is so insanely worse than the other that to dance around the issue like that is absurd.
If Hitler rose from the dead tomorrow and started another Holocaust, would you be against critique or action against it because "we need to do better about our flawed prison policy at home before we criticize others"? "Hitler just killed another million people in the gas chambers, but sometimes innocent people get the death penalty in America too, we can't criticize their concentration camps until we fix our problems at home"?
We're talking about the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't try to stop a genocide because the US criminal justice system has some notable flaws and we need to fix them first? Am I understanding you correctly? Even after reading the part about the mass rape and sexual torture of an entire culture of people?
> The investigations sparked by her case, which is featured in the documentary Belly of the Beast, showed hundreds of inmates had been sterilized in prisons without proper consent as late as 2010, even though the practice was by then illegal.
In fact, the article you post is literally about the state offering monetary recompense for the act - hence, doing the very thing you asked for in your first post.
America is not as bad as China. These false equivalences are supporting genocide.
https://globalvoices.org/2021/08/19/the-chinese-government-d...
HN has rules against accusations of bad faith, and they work 99% of the time, and I try hard not accuse an individual comment of being in bad faith even if I strongly suspect it. But it seems so obvious by looking at any thread about the Uyghur Genocide on Hacker News that there is a pattern when looking at the whole thread, the whole site, in aggregate. I'm not suggesting 50-cent-army-type astroturfing either -- I don't think it's 1 person with 100 accounts spreading FUD for malicious reasons, I think it's 100 people with 100 accounts spreading FUD about the Uyghur genocide because they are nationalistic and proud of their country for personal reasons.
I think this is bad, and needs to be stopped because the genocide in Xinjiang is too important, but I think that HN's policies about not accusing people of bad faith or astroturfing may actually make it harder to have honest discussions on the topic. It's a conspicuous failure case for a site where normally things don't get this bad. I'm not sure what a better policy would be either, which I suspect might be the reason why nothing has changed.
I apologize is this comment is considered rule-breaking, and I will remove it if it is. I just can't stand watching this kind of thing happen.
What's wrong with prison labor in US? Those criminals committed acts deemed bad for society.
We could either pay for them to stay in a fancy hotel, or make them pay back debt to society.
This is not comparable to imprisoning people based on ethnicity.
In fact you could argue that prisoners are stealing job from others by working for next to nothing.
And those people in prison working for pennies per day ,as you've alluded, take jobs from free people. If you want to see peak absurdity, California has legions of prisoner firefighters.
But you can be a firefighter with a felony on your record, so while the state of California is fine with paying them peanuts for risking their lives, it won't make them full-fledged firefighters once they're released.
If any other country was doing this, our various propaganda agencies would be crying foul.