is it just me or has removing downvotes noticeably worsened quality already?
It’s great. People can finally speak their mind without being censored into discouragement. It’s easy for someone who just agrees with everything that’s already popular here to say it’s bad, but I personally have always wanted to see what a platform like this would look like and I love that the mods here are willing to try new things.
it was like that for a little while at the beginning and then someone posted a big drama post complaining about not being able to see them
That was either me or Enver. Sorry everyone if it was me lol
It feels more libby tbh. Like dumbass takes that don't warrant a response of their own got downvoted. Now you have to dedicate a response to every blatantly wrong post or comment. I was on board with removing downvotes at first but so far I'm not enjoying the result.
In chill posts it's good but when the topic is serious it's a detriment.
anyone who doesn’t believe in Zenz’s propaganda as a white western larper.
Wait, shit, I'm white how? Holy crap, where do I get me some white privilege?
TIL all of China is white. Remarkable.
Aside from lifetimes of propaganda I think there's a yellow peril element to it as well that I notice libs have a hard time shaking off and say messed up racist stuff not comprehending how horrible what they said was. Mixing ages old phobias together makes propaganda so easy alphabet agencies can run with it.
I would prioritize the experiences of people who actually have to deal with the Chinese government over people who support China because it’s ideologically convenient, personally
propaganda has really hard-wired libs' brains to see literally anything about china and go 'genocide'
So I had heard good things about the Trashfuture pod, but one of the hosts is currently going off cause "leftists are changing their tune from it didn't happen to, it's cool and based it happened". And I don't know any serious leftists that didn't acknowledge Uyghur re-education, what they denied was systemic persecution and oppression based on religious affiliation. Even if you don't want to believe "leftists" the U.N Human Rights report makes several detailed observations about the improvement of life in rural provinces in Xinjiang where most Uyghur Muslims reside and there is little mention of discrimination.
What is up with every imbecile grifter getting a podcast?
goddamn I miss proles of the roundtable. Leave it to Colorado Dumb hipsters and their desire to start a fucking micro-brew to split a group.
Leave it to Colorado Dumb hipsters and their desire to start a fucking micro-brew to split a group.
Just more justification to not listen to those fucking petty bourg dorks
Exactly. There's no way we can reliably know what's happening in China at the moment.
There's no way that we can reliably know what's happening in the Alpha Centuari system either, but if someone told me that the Centaurans are genociding the Glorbons over there, I'd demand some proof beyond one religious nut job.
Come on everyone knows the Centauran Communist Party is evil, and the hubble telescope has pictures of 18 kajillion Glorbons in camps.
I’d demand some proof beyond one religious nut job.
"you think people with power and hegemony use it to control those who don't, CITATION NEEDED!!!"
idk if the centaurans flew here to defend themselves from accusations of genocide & their defense was "its good that we're doing genocide" I would just take them at their word that they're doing genocide
but the more they can get people to talk about this the less people will feel bad about ICE holding terrified toddlers separated from their parents in squalid conditions
I think a mass surveillance of people based on race and then taking people who you have identified as amendable to extremists ideas to reeducation camps is bad. Isn't it concluded that elevating the material conditions of people makes them less reactionary
sure China isn't literally genociding people but targeting people on race / religion with mass surveillance isn't a shinning light for communist ideals lol
the camps are a reaction to a world hegemon and it's allies using islamic + separatist radicalization to destabilize countries, at any opportunity. not sure what china is expected to do, tbh.
the problem with this article is that the CCP started admitting that they're doing it openly, like four years ago, & is now just going with the "its good actually" and "ur a hypocrite for saying its a bad thing bc the US & Canada did the same thing ):<", the latter of which is only really a defense if you think what the US & Canada did to indigenous peoples was a good thing
I mean, putting people in prison camps based on ethnic and religious profiling is completely fucked, and implying the reactionary seperatist movement is entirely or even primarily the result of C.I.A. meddling and that religious and ethnic based repression and internment camps were the only solution is ignorant, racist, islamophobic and anti-materialist.
Like, duh the C.I.A. supports the Uighur seperatist movement, they're a reactionary separatist movement on the Chinese side of a China/NATO-puppet-state border, what's not to love, but the movement would have almost certainly existed whether or not the CIA was involved. There has been a Uighur seperatist movement in Xinjiang longer that there has been a CIA, for most of its history its been a lot less violent than it was in the last two decades and the violence in the last two decades is at least as much a result of the CPC's atrocious mishandling as it was of any CIA meddling.
The CPC's handling of Uighur seperatism in this millenium has been reminiscent in its racism, escalation, and brutality of Bush's inestimably worse war on terror that the CPC repeatedly tried to equate it with. Instead of firing and imprisoning people based on outwards religious and expression like wearing a burqa, a turban, or even too long of a beard, here are some recommendations from a 2002 paper by Chien-peng Chung, a political science professor at Lingnan University whose main research interest at the time was the Xinjiang situation.
The government's call to develop the west has accelerated migration by Han Chinese into Xinjiang, thereby exacerbating tensions. In 1949, the region was almost 80 percent Uighur; today, that figure has dropped to 45-50 percent. Many Uighurs do not speak Mandarin Chinese, which is usually the prerequisite for any good-paying job or government position, and few are as well educated as the immi grants. As a result, the Han dominate commerce in Xinjiang's urban areas and are frequently seen by the locals as having the region's best jobs in the government, the Communist Party, and the military. The Han also usually live in newer neighborhoods and go to informally segregated schools.
Rather than allowing the flow of immigration into Xinjiang to remain unchecked, the Chinese regime should regulate it so that immigrants do not compete unnecessarily with the locals for jobs, schools, or state services. Beijing should encourage public-sector corporations, oil companies, and government agencies to increase their hiring of ethnic minorities. Quotas for Uighur admission into colleges and government positions should also be expanded and enforced. The government must also allocate funds fairly among Han and Uighur neighborhoods. Cleaning up the area around China's nuclear test site at Lop Nor in the Taklimakan Desert, where soil and groundwater pollution are causing birth defects and health problems among the local inhabitants, would be another important step.
Furthermore, as guaranteed in the Chinese constitution, the government must uphold religious freedom. Muslim Uighurs who openly practice their faith complain of harassment by the authori ties. The government must respect Muslim customs and allow the free functioning of mosques and religious schools, interfering only if they are found to be educating or harboring militants. Political changes are required as well: less gerrymandering in favor of Han Chinese among Xinjiang's administrative units, more proportionate ethnic representation in party and government structures, and more devolution of power from Beijing to the region. Hunting down terrorists is only a partial solution to the violence in Xinjiang. Unless China listens to the Uighurs and treats them better, its troubled western region is unlikely to be calmed any time soon.
Basically, he's saying that the reason the seperatist movement is turning violent again is that Uighur people's material conditions were getting worse, and if those material conditions improved the seperatist movement would both lose supporters and get less violent.
What the CPC ended up doing instead of confronting the material needs was level increasingly severe punishments against increasingly more avenues of religious and ethno-cultural expression and using the :shocked-pikachu: increasingly escalating terrorist violence resulting from this radicalising people to justify increasingly harsher measures.
It's racist, islamophobic, reactionary and anti-materialist to imply that targetting people based on their expression of the Islamic faith and Uighur cultural identity was the only possible way to disempower and deradicalise the Uighur seperatist movement.
It’s a testament to how little any of the loudest voices here actually care about any of this that no one will read this. I appreciate the post any way.
Disagree with some of it, but it's a great post. Appreciated the 2002 paper.
For me, it's impossible to get away from the fact that the US, through facilitating wahabbism, and everything else over a century, has kept the entire middle east in hellworld to get that oil.
China will do anything to avoid that.
e: I mean, it's the stated US policy to slow the rise of China by any means necessary.
Consider the fact that wahabbists in the KSA have no problem with what China is doing and the conclusion is obvious. They aren’t interring uyghurs because they are Muslim or because they’re worried about terrorism. They’re doing this for the same reason america loves putting black men in prison. It’s free labor. The profiling is just a PR tool to acquire it without a fuss. It’s nice to believe the PRC is any different but reality is that this is just them doing what they do best: knocking off American imperialism at a more efficient clip than previously thought possible.
That's the first time I've heard free labour cited as a reason for the measures. It doesn't seem persuasive tbh.
It’s nice to believe the PRC is any different
But there is a category difference here. The PRC is a multi millenia civilisation coming out of a century of chaos largely caused by western imperialism. The US inherited and propagates that western imperialism by any means necessary.
The two countries are at very different stages of technological and political development.
The US, as the geographically secure hegemon, has had the luxury of notional unfettered political freedom. China has, naturally, has had to develop a more secure, less free political system, because of outside threats of destabilisation. By the hegemon.
Need to compare them with way more context than "they both are doing imperialism right now," which I don't accept that China is doing in any way camparable to the west.
To be clear, in Xinjiang, as of 2017 "outward manifestations of extremism" such as, wearing a veil in public, or having an abnormal beard are banned.
The CPC is not just targeting separatists who happen to be Islamic and Uighur, they've criminalized practicing Islam and expressing Uighur ethno-cultural identity purportedly as a way of trying to target separatists.
The source is the official government news website for the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Tianshan net.
Tianshan net's archive only goes back to October 2017 and this happened in March, but the SCMP reported on it sourcing the website here.
The rest of your comment is a massive fucking yikes.
To put it in a US context, you're saying that because Bin Laden's Mujahideen was an Islamic and ethnically Arab movement the US should have put everyone who refused to stop wearing long beards or veils in internment camps as there's otherwise no way to tell which muslim or arab is a salafiist jihadi without reading their minds, and even if they're not should we wait until they're already radicalised and armed?
That was literally the chud line in the US after 9/11 and like in the US, the answer here is because the vast majority of the Uighur and Islamic population aren't ideologically aligned with the militant seperatists and of the minority who are only a miniscule proportion is willing to back those beliefs up with violence. According to the Global Terrorism Database, in 2017 there were only 6 terrorist attacks in Xinjiang in total and they only killed 16 people and injured a further 76.
If you can't see why discriminating against a whole ethnic group with millions of members and imprisoning any of them who won't stop publically practicing their culture and religion is fucked up and reactionary then you might be the one who needs re-education.
Them not being equivalent is also, literally, the US state department line. The CPC has been trying to equate their handling of Uighur seperatism in Xinjiang with the US "war on terror" since 2001. It kind of worked too. They got Uighur seperatist groups designated as terrorist organisations, did international anti-terror collaborations against them and until 2009 there were even Uighur seperatists imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.
What should and have happened, as was suggested in the paper I quoted, was a crackdown on everyone advocating for or planning terrorist acts or violent seperatism while addressing the blatant inequalities between the Uighur people and Han Chinese via affirmitive action and ending the systematic discrimination that was spurring radicalization in the first place and leaving the vast majoriy of the many millions of Muslims and Uighur's who weren't violent or even ideological seperatists to practice their culture and religion in peace.
Why do you think it's ok for an ethnic and religious minority to be discriminated against systematically and that when that discrimination radicalises a tiny minority of that group into seperatism to address this and double digit numbers of that minority commit terrorist acts in the name of separatism that somehow justifies banning outward expression of that religion and culture practiced by millions and imprisoning everyone who resists?
Hate to break it to you but you might be a reactionary!
You don't actually mean you're ok with anything so long as it keeps CIA influence as low as possible, as the answer to that is just nuking humanity into extinction (no CIA influence if there's no CIA and no CIA if there's no humans headtappingman.jpg) you mean you're ok with mass racial discrimination and incarceration based on that and are using "combatting CIA influence" to justify it.
I hope you deworm your brain until racism isn't something you're ok with, but until then, this conversation is over and you can go fuck yourself.
You thinking that mass racial discrimination and incarceration is a necessary, appropriate or even effective measure to stop that is the racist part.
You're arguing that just because fascists who make up a tiny minority of a religion/culture want an ethnostate of a certain religion/culture that religion/culture should be banned and everyone who practices it despite the ban should be incarcerated (reactionary, implicitly buying into the fascist claim that everyone of a culture/religion should/does want an ethnostate,) and you're somehow only applying this to a group of brown muslims (islamophobic and racist!).
That you seem to think a fascist ethnostate can only be prevented from forming by eradicating the culture the fascists want to form an ethnostate of is super fucking reactionary and that you're only applying this twisted logic to a group of brown muslims is super fucking racist.
I'm going to bed now.
Hope you unfuck your brain.
I dont think that paper is useful at all. The geography of the region is completely different from the impression this guy tries to paint. The northern silk road corridor which is the areas of han inmigration isnt where the uyghurs typically live. these areas have always been multicultural. the tarim basin though, is concentrated by the uyghur, and there have been traces of attempts to keep them there as opposed to migrating to the rest of the region. growth of migrants to the new cities paints a different picture from this again. the fact that regional ethnic statistics have been readically altered is a non-factor because of the regional difference between the tarim basin on the one hand and the turpan and dzungar valley systems on the other
There is a spectre haunting Chapo.chat.
The spectre is a Nazbol.
idk about u but "there are enough muslim extremists that we need to build camps to put them in" reeks a lot like a chauvinistic imperialist worldview.
