We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/reproductive-abu...
And unfortunately our record isn't great on forced sterilization either:
https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/forced-sterilization-policies-us...
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizat...
https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/04/americas-forgotten-histo...
> The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.
So this goes back to the mid 1800s, not just from WWII. But I guess the Nazis didn't want to correctly label them "extermination camps", big surprise there.
Then there's:
> The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable."
So I guess the "concentration" bit is because they are taking people of a certain group and "concentrating" them physically in one location. So... okay... but still a really weird term to me.
1. There is a massive amount of propaganda around the situation in Xinjiang. While the Chinese government is extremely harsh in going after separatism and what it views as religious extremism, there is also a huge amount of lying, exaggeration and misrepresentation from Western governments and media on the issue. The Trump administration tried to spin Xinjiang as some sort of modern-day Holocaust, and as often happens when it comes to demonizing official enemies of the US, much of the media has gone along.
2. The US has waged war after war in the Middle East. The US' unprovoked (and illegal) invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In terms of sheer damage done and suffering caused, there's no comparison between the US' wars and China's actions in Xinjiang.
The Chinese government is of course also worried about Uyghur separatism.
However, I don't think these are entirely separate phenomena.
What do you mean by illegal specifically? I am fairly sure it was against Iraq's laws. Not sure it was against American laws, or at least not in the sense that 'can you get a court to convict'?
War is only allowed in two circumstances:
* Self-defense against an imminent threat (for example, a pre-emptive strike against a clearly hostile army gathering on your border for an invasion).
* With UN Security Council authorization.
The US did not fight the Iraq War in self-defense. It was a war of choice on the other side of the world.
The US specifically avoided asking for UNSC authorization, because it was aware that it would be denied.
Keep in mind that the US did not declare their invasion of Iraq to be a war.
I did a bit of Googling on the legality of the Iraq War. Not so much to figure out whether it was legal in some objective sense, but in what the various parties involved see as the legal underpinnings of their doings.
See eg https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
That's a purely domestic issue within US law. The full-scale invasion of another country constitutes "war" for the purposes of international law.
The Iraq War is one of the clearest examples of an illegal war of aggression in modern times.
The US faced no serious threat from Iraq. Even if one were to believe all the claims about WMD (which were made in bad faith), Iraq would still not be an imminent threat to the US. Defensive wars have to be in response to an imminent, concrete threat, like an enemy force massing on the border. The mere fact that a hostile country possesses weapons does not justify a pre-emptive strike. If it did, the ban on aggressive war would be meaningless.
Of course, as is now known from leaked memos, the entire WMD issue was viewed by the Bush administration as a convenient pretext for invading Iraq.[0] Many people (myself included) already saw through the WMD propaganda back in 2002-2003, despite it being relentlessly hyped by major media (from the New York Times on down). I personally was surprised, however, by just how cynical the WMD claims of the Bush administration later turned out to be: for every claim they confidently made in public, they knew the evidence was thin to non-existent.
If the invasion of Iraq - a non-defensive war, sold using a dishonest media campaign, waged without UNSC authorization by the world's most powerful country against a comparatively tiny country - isn't an illegal war of aggression, then nothing is.
0. Downing Street Memo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo
I am often amused that many people who doesn't hesitate to call main stream media unreliable in most affairs, suddenly trust them with strong passion when they are starting to be much more biased towards China and Chinese people.
Hopefully this situation can be changed eventually.
Earth is not large enough for blind hate. We have to learn live with each other. Or move into Space.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.
I just mean that, when one's passions are engaged on a topic, there's a tendency to see the moderators as lined up against one's view. Meanwhile, people with the opposite view see the mods as lined up against them. It's the same mods in both cases; the variable with predictive power here is the passions of the perceiver. That is, if you tell me that someone's unhappy with the mods and you tell me what that person is passionate about, I can tell you what they think the mods' bias is.
I believe that the explanation for this is that we're all much more likely to notice the datapoints we most dislike or disagree with, and to weight them more heavily. If you had opposite priors (that is, if you disliked and disagreed with the opposite sort of story), then you'd be noticing and/or weighting more heavily the datapoints with opposite valence, and you'd feel like the moderators were favoring those instead. Indeed, people with the opposing view to yours do feel exactly that about the mods—just as the hypothesis would predict
Past explanations here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
p.s. From my perspective also, we're definitely not consulting the direction of someone's views about the U.S., or any other country, when evaluating whether their comment is breaking the HN guidelines. I realize that's not necessarily easy to believe, and of course unconscious bias is still a thing even when one is consciously trying to be even-handed. All I can tell you is that we're consciously trying very hard at that, and we at least have many years of practice at it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.
Around the same time the Chinese government started imprisoning Muslims, the US government started killing or was at the very least was a direct cause in the death of 1M muslims, not to stop violence but for revenge.
Oh and as far as concentration camps are concerned, there's a bunch of brown skinned kids in cages that would like a word
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114691.