It's not the relationships of the parties in control that worries me. It's the arrests and abductions of the people that concerns me.
Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.
The CCP is a completely different beast, it has no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings and much worse.
We're talking about millions of people (hundreds of millions over the last ~70 years) that have been sought out by the CCP for arrest and murder because of their non-violent views and ideals.
The problem is you’re judging based on different standards and ideals, but the violations are fundamentally the same. So China can imprison citizens, the US decided to make it harder to imprison citizens. We do arbitrary drone strikes on people we don’t like, on foreign sovereign territory. We have Guantanamo. The fact that we arbitrarily draw a line at “our own citizens” is frankly meaningless in the grand scale and not really a meaningful distinction in terms of human rights.
A best explanation by EFF here(https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/government-hasnt-justi...) is that it is not only for TikTok. A transparant system of regulating and even auditing what telemetry services can acquire is fundamentally and universally beneficial for whatever country the service is based in.
But it is not surprising that those laws are never passed so far. Google in their software realm is too strong to be combated as compared to their hardware realm with right to repair. The big names in hardware are replacable as they all buy stock solution (like fingerprint sensor), and those sensor manufacturers don't care about right to repair. But Instagram or Snapchat or WhatsApp or Tiktok or whatever are not that replacable and thus more addictive and better for the company. Google or Meta is definitely not giving up on these places, and considering their influence, the future ain't bright.
hundreds of millions people have been arrested and murdered because of "your reality", do you take into the consideration for the infrastructure to arrest and murder hundreds of millions people?
For these exact reasons, I'm more comfortable with Xi Jinping's cronies spying on my every movement than my own government. The Chinese only do that stuff to their own citizens and I'm a zero-value target to them. US authorities may feel like being petty one day.
Seriously. What happened to that whole philosophy that the founding fathers had about being wary of our own government and the tendency of governments to overreach to control its citizenry.
That entire sentiment seem to have disappeared especially in the last few years in favor of China-Russia-terrorism-whatever new bs hysteria.
"fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography" [0]
You mention only being concerned about US authorities, but have somehow failed to realize they can fabricate evidence and send it to US authorities in an attempt to reach you from across the pond.
However, China has 1.4 billion people, they will do whatever to collect resources, including information and user stats which powers the recommendation system behind TikTok, which is ruining your next generation.
Have I mentioned that China and Russia are deep allied and are probably sharing intelligence? I don't think the US government is worse than Russia's.
Macarthy was disgraced by 1954, and almost universally reviled for the lives he ruined with his slander. I think you can point to him as an example of what happens when demagogues go unopposed (even for a time) in the American system, but not as the normal or desired product of our political system.
> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.
Let me think of groups of people in the US and if they have been treated like this - C language programmers...we'll there is Julian Assange.
> no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings
China has more than four times the US population, yet the US incarcerates more people than China does. In that context it does not sound like much of a knock "China locks up less than a quarter of the people the US does!" Well - yes.
You are completely dodging the other poster's central point.
The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.
Those are different problems and they need to be addressed. The war on drugs must end, policing culture and policies must be corrected, the US prison system must be corrected. Other options for dealing more effectively with various social and mental health problems must be instituted.
And none of that is the same as what China is doing to their people, nor does it absolve China of the wrongs it has committed. And it doesn't take the edge off of it either. Going to China can still get you locked up for reasons you don't understand because you said the wrong thing one time and forgot you even said it.
That actually is a more risky situation for most people than making sure they are not buying or carrying around the wrong plants. That is what comments such as the one you are responding to are actually worried about. It's not a raw numbers game for the individual, it's a question of "how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?"
> The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.
That's just the casus belli for the arrest - the real motivation changes over time. Drug laws have been used to target and disrupt various groups from Latinos and African Americans to hippies and anti-war protestors. First it was about racism and Hearst's economic interests, then about policing wrong think, then it was about the tough on crime wave, and now it's largely about protecting several lucrative industries.
I can go with the general feeling here, but to use that to put the US's behavior on par with China's, specifically with regard to each country's own citizens, that is definitely a point that would need some data to back it up. Data that is likely hard to get on both the US and China.
It seems that line of argument would get much deeper into how, how fairly, and on which groups, the various countries have tended to apply their laws.
For now I can fully grant that selective enforcement has and still does happen in the US. The legal system here definitely does leave that possibility open and prosecutors are elected officials, some of whom have provably gone after certain groups or individuals, hunting for a reason to put them in jail.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Agreed, Nixon was a moron, basically everything his administration did was truly awful. The war on drugs must end, the people put in jail for having or consuming the wrong plants must be released, and the US government should make amends with those people. Anyone still alive who provably participated in that should go to jail for the rest of their lives, ideally occupying the same cells as the people they unjustly locked away.
The process of repairing the damage that was done should include large payouts for unjustly taking away years of those people's lives, if nothing else. I'm not exactly holding my breath on these points, but if we take seriously the idea that the world should become more fair and just over time, we're going to have to square with the wrongs that were committed in the name of unjust laws.
In the post you are responding to, what you see is me acknowledging that, in order to answer the specific questions: "Is the US just as bad as China on this?" or "Is what China does to it's citizens in order to suppress wrong-think being unfairly criticized in light of what the US does to it's citizens in order to suppress drug use and generally be racist about it?"; one would require good data on just how many citizens are sent to jail for what should be trivial acts of speaking their mind or consuming weird plants, and that data is unlikely to be available or good data if it exists since both countries have rather large incentives to make sure it doesn't.
Please also note that I fully granted Akiselev's point that selective enforcement happens in the US even now. There should be genuine outrage over this until it is changed. However, I understand why people can't even keep up with the sheer scale of the bullshit modern governments get up to.
Chinas drug laws are way harsher than US ones. Do their citizens not partake in drug use? It is actually a pretty interesting question, did the war on drugs work in China? They have harsh drug laws but do not have mass incarceration of drug users.
"Nowadays, the penalties for being caught with cannabis are severe. Offenders run the risk of receiving the death penalty for being in possession of just five kilograms or more. Additionally, strict sentences are imposed; anything from five years imprisonment to a life sentence."
I don't agree with the death penalty or cannabis prohibition, but 'just five kilograms' is about a 27 year supply for someone who smokes a couple of joints every day. It's not an amount you could have casually, you're definitely in it as a business.
>how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?
Yes and PRC wrong think 99% of time gets you an invite to the police station to "drink tea" and sign a paperwork not to do it again. Maybe occasionally a write self criticism letter. Consequences are about as trivial as it gets. It generally takes enormous repeat and public offenses that gains popular traction to get administratively punished let alone end up in jail for the simple reason that PRC doesn't have mass networks of for profit prison that incentive internment. It takes extraordinary bad luck (i.e. % of become a trending author in particularly sensitive times) and to get punished / arrested for wrong think on the same level as Americans carrying the wrong plant, which is statistically a much riskier situation due to how US racial prosecution and internment system is incentivized. Ask PRC citizen how many people they know has been formally punished, even mildly, for wrong think vs Americans who know someone jailed for drug offense and the numbers will be revealing. In both raw numbers and ease of getting fucked over "trivial" offenses, PRC wrong think is much less riskier than US drugs. Which is not to say PRC wrong think wouldn't stack up poorly compared to other "liberal" countries, rather US internment is just that messed up.
>wrong think 99% of time gets you an invite to the police station to "drink tea" and sign a paperwork not to do it again. Maybe occasionally a write self criticism letter.
That is good to know. And genuinely new information for me. Thank you for contributing it.
And the details you offer do help calibrate something of an answer to the question you are responding to. Thank you also for being a great participant in that conversation!
> Ask PRC citizen how many people they know has been formally punished, even mildly, for wrong think vs Americans who know someone jailed for drug offense and the numbers will be revealing.
We should definitely like to have real data on that for both countries. It seems difficult to find though. In the mean time I take your seemingly first hand experience as insightful. Thanks again!
>"we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution."
I personally do not see much difference. Holding person in prison for profit is a result of corporations buying government. It is as political as it gets. Those people in my view are just as bad scam of the Earth their political counterparts in China.
With you on that point for sure. It is just as important for the US to end it's for-profit prison system as it is for China to stop punishing people for thinking the wrong thing.
> The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.
You completely ignored OP's example of Julian Assange, I guess?
There's a wide gap of a difference between "publishing something that is simply critical of the government" and "publishing classified / state communications", including massive information dumps of unredacted diplomatic cables.
Put it this way, if you can name a country that would not react in the exact same manner to the actions that the US did to Assange's actions, please let me know. I certainly can't think of any.
Wikileaks became very close to Russia in the end, anyways, not exactly a bastion of freedom and IMHO destroying any credibility Assange had. If Assange was on the "other side" and the classified stuff was from Russia, he'd probably have been "Novichoked" for what he did.
That's fine. The corrective for it is to name the bad conversational behavior where you see it, don't get too bothered about it, and demonstrate the kind of conversations you wish to have instead.
It's not terribly taxing to just say, "that's not the kind of conversation we want to have here" and go on to continue engaging with any specific points being made. And that's doable even when you suspect the post you are responding to might just be trolling. If there is an identifiable point, engage with that if you will, gently and patiently correct or ignore the rest. Kind of similar to being patient with a rowdy kid. Trolls don't get much out of it if they can't get your goat.
The sub-thread below still managed to take on a few people who just wanted to virtue signal with argumentative sniping but others showed up with good points and information, that part was good to see.
Is it? I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats.
Given that the Western states and their establishment are atleast 2 centuries ahead of the curve of anyone else in terms of modern state apparatus, ideological basis (...), it is natural that we will observe distinct patterns of oppression and red lines. Most of the emerging powers are acutely sensitive to ideological challenges, challenges to the legitimacy of the establishment, precisely because they are the newly arrived and insecure in their position.
Someone mentioned Julian Assange. Why did US and UK come down so hard on this guy? Because he represents an existential threat: he represents dissident factions in their intelligence communities (5 eyes) and that layer of the system is central to their maintenance of power and they will -not- tolerate any challenges in that area.
So the equations defining the dynamic are identical. We just need to plug in the appropriate values for the equation's variables.
>>posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.
I would not be so confident about that, at least until the US and other western countries wise up to the CCP's tactics, which may be starting. E.g., CCP is running overseas "police stations" to intimidate and harrass people oversead, and the US FBI finally just arrested two people doing so in New York City.
>>TikTok spied on me. Why?
Short answer, is that it, along with every other Chinese company, has no choice other than to bend to the will of the CCP. Plus, they have no ethical boundaries (other than crossing the CCP) in seeking absolute market position, and this journalist had done something to threaten that dominant position.
> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.
regretfully, being poor and in certain parts of the USA is sufficient to get sucked up by the system. no ideology necessary, just getting caught and loaning money for bail is enough to get swallowed by this beast.
i suppose the CCP pays for these systems directly? whereas the American way has a distributed system of crony 'entrepreneurs' (shoddy lawyers, loan sharks, court bureaucrats and so on) all keeping this system of private jails and other 'services' and industries built around people 'breaking the law'
While I don't think the US is on the same scale as the CCP, I also think you're being a little naive. Expressing the wrong ideas or misjudging the time/place to do so can absolutely land you behind bars.
I have very little to fear, on a personal level, from the CCP. They may or may not be collecting data on me, and I find that distasteful and somewhat scary, but they are not a direct threat to my personal liberty, safety or civil rights.
The NSA, CIA and the US intelligence-industrial complex, however, is a direct and credible threat to me. Perhaps not today, and hopefully not tomorrow, but as history has shown us, governments change, sometimes wildly so, in a short period of time while still holding the trappings and lip-service of their predecessors. If you dismiss the concerns about warrantless data collection, tracking, active suppression of free discourse and political targeting of people who ideologically threaten those in power (no matter the political background), well, you just haven't been paying attention.
You don't have to be a citizen of the nation that does the spying for the data they collect on you to be harmful. Following your logic, nobody outside of the US or China has reasons to be concerned, which is not the case.
Governments—particularly those of the world's greatest superpowers—have influence outside of their borders, and can make your life hell, no matter where you currently live. They can restrict your freedom to travel, censor your public speech, and target you electronically in many ways. This can happen if you fall on their radar for whatever reason, including by mistake. Good luck getting off that list, and getting your life back after that.
If I'm rating which government I'm more afraid of, it would be the one that has a totalitarian control over its citizens, and no regard for human life. Otherwise, they're all equally harmful to my wellbeing.
If you run a business, visit or know someone from China you will be targeted. If you try to publish an article against China and have a high profile your secrets will come out.
But if you are nobody why worry about the NSA, FBI, etc they have better people to target
> Just because you advocate programs that are not aligned with or approved by the U.S. government, siding with anti-racist, anti-colonial forces should not make you a target of U.S. cointelpro actions, raids on the homes of citizens, and humiliating arrests.
Your example is about what exactly? Yes Russia intervenes and China does too, you expect it to not be acted upon?
By the way in China as of this month saying something that is against national interest is punishable under espionage law. If they want they can jail you for using VPN to access something outside of great firewall.
> indicted on April 18 for allegedly working on behalf of the Russian government and Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a “malign influence campaign” designed to “sow discord” and “advance Russian propaganda.”
> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.
Which parallel world are you living in ? I would like to migrate there to this utopian USA.
Not a state-sponsored and state-accredited propagandist, you mean?
It might be fair to say that Julian Assange encompassed the roles of journalist, editor and publisher in the same person, which is perhaps not the optimal setup although it's more or less what everyone publishing their work on substack does - but that's not a justification of state persecution.
It's undeniable that Wikileak's publication of the CableGate archive of State Department cables and the Vault7 archive of CIA hacking tool documentation was in the public interest. Some of the more important revelations include that the CIA has tools apparently designed for false-flag cyberattacks, that the State Department's claim to be concerned about human rights and democracy is not reflected in the content of their secret cables (which tend to focus on things like oil pipelines, arms deals, terrorist financing, economic deals, geopolitical maneuvering, etc.).
You might not like it, but it is legitimate journalism as the word is commonly defined.
So you're just going to assert, in drive-by fashion, that these journalists are government shills? Do you have any evidence that supports that claim? Do you say that about everyone that you disagree with?
It's kind of funny. At first I was going to say, what do you expect - a line on his CV 'worked as a medium for US propaganda'? But bizarrely enough, that's completely accurate. Michael Weiss is editor in chief at the 'Institute of Modern Russia.' It's part of Radio Free Europe [2], which is literally a propaganda outlet owned by the US government.
But the reason I decided to look this up is something much more simple than these facts. That Atlantic article reeks of state propaganda, and if it's not sending your propaganda detector to 11, you really need to get it tuned a bit - especially in this day and age. More often than not, you're not going to be able to find a link on somebody's CV or Wiki or whatever directly tying them to state interests, but I mean this just isn't how "normal" people think, behave, or write. It's like he's desperately trying to convince you of a position, by making you believe that thinking otherwise would be absurd. Note the stark similarities in style and rhetoric to something like this [3] piece from the NYtimes in the leadup to the Iraq War.
We don't license journalists in Western democracies (or Eastern ones, for that matter.) That's something that you see in places like Zimbabwe or Rwanda.
I do understand that neocons see limitations on domestic civil liberties as an arms race that they're losing to China and Russia, but this version of the Missile Gap is still largely a myth meant to secure the continual state financing of military and intelligence contractors.
Try calling yourself a journalist in Portugal (a western European democracy member of the EU and NATO) without being a part of the journalist trade association and see what happens if you get on the radar.
The first article says he wasn't a journalist because he wasn't accountable to anyone, and that he didn't filter what he published. I think he just didn't have the hubris to think he knows better then others what information should or shouldn't be free.
The 2nd article doesn't seem to claim he isn't a journalist at all. It even says "his own unique brand of journalism", which seems to be an acknowledgement that he is a journalist.
This has been debunked many times over. It's the Guardian journalists, David Leigh and Luke Harding, that published the password to the unredacted archives. Assange, on the other hand, was "meticulous about redacting names in the documents."
I don't think it's at all fair for you to demand high-effort rebuttals while putting in no effort on your own. You're asking people to respond to thousands of words that you didn't write, and you're not even engaging with the content of a 100-word reply that you specifically asked for.
They may indeed like to disagree, as I'm sure anyone who has broken the law would and is entitled to. Hence the existence of a fair trial and the possibility of a "not guilty" plea along with the opportunity to present a defense before a jury.
One could argue about the fairness of any trial or set of trials, of course, and we should definitely do that and work out what we the people think of those trials as well as what we want to see in a fair trial.
However, if you are trying to say that what those people did was just a protest or just speech, you will need to address the actual crimes the people going to jail were charged with and convicted of. Otherwise, your argument there is not convincing at all.
It's not just free speech when you destroy property, break into government buildings, assault cops and government employees, actually invade and interrupt a session of congress, trespass in government offices, and actually try to locate the vice-president with the loudly declared intent to hang him.
Jack Ma was essentially on house arrest for over a year after flying a little too close to the sun with his IPO plans. Peng Shuai was on house arrest for denouncing sexual abuse by a CCP member.
The psychological, widespread chilling effects of these high profile "vanishings" has absolutely no commonality with the Patriot act (bad as it is).
The vanishings like the sheriff who had three voter registration workers killed in Mississippi are not common, it tends to be straightforward extrajudicial executions like Fred Hampton. I wouldn't even include the car bombing of 25 year old Ronni Moffitt in 1976.
The US police are killing people all the time. In January police killed an environmentalist in January, Manuel Taran. The US kills and jails political prisoners all the time.
But that sort of thing is just murder, not anything legally sanctioned by the patriot act. Don't get me wrong, I think the patriot act is a travesty, but it doesn't go quite that far.
"The killings were part of a broader program of "targeted killing" by the United States outside the context of armed conflict and based on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts. "
Your comment sounds awfully disingenuous. I seriously doubt you do not see the huge difference between implementing official policies of extrajudicial imprisonments and having a random person murder people for their own personal reasons.
What are you talking about? OP did not mentioned any example remotely involving Guantanamo bay. Are you trying to move the goalpost out of ignorance or cynicism?
Any billionaire who thinks of themselves as indispensable to society and has a highly visible public presence. If Musk was behaving towards the CCP half as disrespectfully as he does towards the the US political caste, he'd have been stripped of his China holdings and locked out of that market long ago.
No, the equivalent in US wouldnt be a capitalist billionaire. It would be its opposite: a popular group with marxist or communist ideals that menaces the status quo and current order. Like the Black Panther Party. And, oh, they were disappeared, some of them still are in solitary confinenent because the government is afraid that they could spread their ideology to other inmates.
The only example you can find is from 40-50 years ago? Around the time that China (while we're at comparing with China) was having its military shoot protesters in Tiananmen square?
Just because the government here was so successful that there isn't any remotely threatening fundamental opposition doesn't mean they wouldn't do it again. Those people are still unjustly in prison and still haven't been released.
(R) party is left to exist as a group of useful idiots who never pass any meaningful legislation that isn't immediately dismantled by (D) establishment within a few years.
we are not a plutocracy at all, that's ridiculous. There are many places in the world where rich people hardly pay taxes. That is not at all true in the US where "the 1%" pay 40% of the income tax
if the rich controlled the government, don't you think they'd lower their taxes? or are we lucky to be ruled by the rich because they are so benevolent?
Rich people in America pay taxes, don't be ridiculous. Wealthy (D) supporters abroad don't file tax returns and don't get penalized for it unless they fall out of line with the party. Then suddenly they're audited every year. This also happened to Trump, even though he was filing in NY.
That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety.
Let's say a certain billionare enters politics, and is not a party favorite, and against the bipartisan elite consensus. Say, they are, god forbid, populist, and against job outsourcing, wars, and such.
Media, who loved him for decades, can suddenly start covering his every action as if describing the leader of the Axis in WWII. Suddenly his associates might start to get investigated for things all sides in DC did since time immemorial with impunity. Experts might appear day and night on TV to give a psychological assessment of him. Some high standing people might openly advocate for his elimination. Government agencies might join the "good fight". Mere tech corporations might decide to ban his (the active President's) account.
Others might pay some hack to come up with a bogus document binder hack job, a dossier if you will, that will feature day and night on the news. And inversely, his opponent's son might be news gold, be involved in all kinds of shady dealings, and even lose a certain computing device, and they're not covered, lest their parent is harmed.
Or let's say another billionaire lacks the good taste to not antagonize the consensus of the elites and their lapdogs in the aspirational classes. Perhaps their glowing "let's all kiss the ass of the billionaire tech god" coverage changes overnight...
The lack of verification of the claims made related to the "bogus document binder hack job" doesn't preclude the possibility of conspiracy, sedition, etc. actually occuring, and the dossier played essentially no role in subsequent investigations. He also wasn't exactly anti-war. On the campaign trail rhetorically he was, but aside from the (disastrous but did need to happen) withdrawal from Afghanistan mostly continued the imperialist status quo. Iran and Syria are high-profile examples. He is an authoritarian populist, yes. I'm not sure why only people with money would have a reason to oppose that. The main reason people oppose him is he is an ineffective, narcissistic leader who did his utmost to personally enrich himself, continue to fan the flames of division, and forcefully push through fiscal policy that was basically the opposite of what should have been implemented at the time. It was not all bad, but it is hard to find much good. The market does not like uncertainty, and a bombastic cult of personality ball of teenage angst is not who you want with the levers to the world's largest economy.
What does this have to do with mysterious vanishing?
The "media" includes Fox News - and it is, in audience terms, the most mainstream of them. It had absolutely glowing coverage of Trump throughout its presidency and continues heavy coverage of Biden's son. The "media" includes the Falun-affiliated Epoch Times, which is still widely available and continues along the same lines. The "media" includes Twitter, which its owner directed to get his own tweets significantly more audience.
None of these people can even remotely claim to have been vanished by the government.
>What does this have to do with mysterious vanishing?
Nothing. As the very first line of the comment goes: "That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety".
When establishment power is privitazed, distributed, and can be yielded more finely, you don't need to vanish people to shut them up or shut them down.
Bob Marley - needle with oncogenic viruses implanted into shoe
MLK Jr. - FBI–King suicide letter
Seth Rich - You should remember this one easily
Stephen Paddock - his life history was deleted from databases (4chan archived lots of it before it vanished) and he was hit with a character assassination to deflect from what actually happened in Vegas (failed firearms sale to would-be murderers of the Saudi royal family staying upstairs)
That's just off the top of my head. Bill Oxley claimed to do in 17 people for Uncle Sam but the "legitimate news sites" which are totally not compromised by Operation Mockingbird conveniently discredit that theory.
Oh yeah crazy effects of the Patriot act indeed...
Edit: your post kinda proves the point. You're evidently not afraid of posting stuff online that most people would consider crazy conspiracy BS ("Bill Oxley"?). In an actually oppressive regime, that shit would have landed you in jail already...
While, uh, no,
regardless, that has no bearing on my point, which is that your point claiming that [it is reasonable to treat A as evidence for B, but irrational/religious to treat B as evidence for A], is entirely wrong[1].
[1](... with the possible exception of observing something which one previously had assigned a probability of zero, but, this ideally should only ever happen for things where one at least had a positive probability density, in which case a similar argument should still work. I didn't feel like working out all the details in the case of continuous probability distributions, as it is finicky and in any case is irrelevant to the discrete events you mentioned.)
I remember thinking about this recently and coming to the same conclusion[0]. If Jack Ma was supposedly disappeared and placed under arrest while also denying that he was ever placed under an official arrest then there's some background shenanigans going on by the CCP. Not to say that can't happen, just that it's not more likely than Jack Ma realizing that he poked a very vengeful bear[1] and deciding to lay low. Peng Shuai might be different (I haven't encountered information on that case recently that comes to mind) but it's fair to assume the same thing from her.
Otherwise the CCP did disappear at least one of them, which, admittedly, might happen if the appropriate decision-makers were willing to put such an operation into motion. That just doesn't really seem so significantly more likely than people choosing to retreat from the spotlight.
You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
There is a large set of past explanations about why we have this rule and why it's so important. You can find many by sifting through this history, if you (or anyone) wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... On China-related topics, which particularly give rise to this sort of attack, I put this list together for a user a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. Nothing has changed since then.
Captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002, al-Sharbi was transferred to Guantanamo Bay later that year. In 2006, al-Sharbi told a military commission that he was a member of al-Qaeda and proud of his actions against the United States. Serious war crimes charges were dropped against him in October 2008, as it had been found they were based on evidence gained through torture of Abu Zubaydah. Al-Sharbi had a habeas corpus petition which his father had initiated on his behalf; when it reached the court in March 2009, al-Sharbi requested that it be dismissed. He did not want to pursue it.
Al-Sharbi was held at Guantanamo for twenty years.
The rest of his wikipedia page is not particularly flattering. I don't know to what extent the quasi-justice system that applies to enemy combatants went off the rails here, but I do know that if you're being accused of waging war against the United States, maybe chanting "May God help me fight the infidels or the unfaithful ones" is a bad idea.
Say what you will, a lot of legal process (good and bad) was applied, and we're talking about a guy who sought out and attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He spent 5 years in Gitmo. This is not someone who challenged a political leader by calling him a funny name.
The word "vanished" is a massive over-dramatization.
Not defending - but you know what happened to him.
That’s the opposite of vanished.
Vanished would be things like [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights] where many of the victims were never recorded, and literally no one from their lives knows what happened to them - and many of the perpetrators have taken the memories to their graves, or never knew the victims names to begin with.
I thought from the quotes that you were trying to show someone who was held without trial for 20 years based on accusations extracted through torture at a black site as an example of something bad. Instead, you seem to be saying that he asked for it because he was rude. Real twist ending.
I'd say that comment goes a bit beyond rude. When you're being interrogated, even in US domestic criminal cases, the rule is "everything you say can and will be used against you". If you're suspected of giving material aid to the enemy in wartime, saying "I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I'm proud of my actions against the United States, may God help me fight the infidels" is the kind of thing that will get you convicted - of something.
Did the guy deserve to spend 20 years in Gitmo? Maybe not. But if I look into my heart of hearts, I genuinely have a tough time feeling too much sympathy. The crazy guy off his meds who points a fake gun at police officers probably didn't deserve to get shot to death either, but that's just what happens.
Note that this does not apply to US citizens. US citizens, even those accused of terrorism, still retain their legal rights under US law. That is what citizenship in any country, is.
Can those rights be violated? Yes, governments do bad things all the time. But that is not the same as a foreign national participating in Al-Qaeda training camps and meeting with Osama bin Laden. No nation on Earth has a strong history of giving full citizenship legal rights to foreign nationals and/or enemy combatants captured in a warzone.
Hicks was also returned to Australia to be dealt with by his own government, where presumably he then did retain his legal rights as a citizen of Australia. And at that point it would indeed be a violation on part of Australia if they did not treat him as any citizen of their nation should be treated.
All of that said, Guantanamo has still been a completely broken and messed up situation. We the people of the US owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to hold our government accountable for that and not allow it to happen again.
It's just if you are wanting to say that the US treatment of it's citizens has been on par with China's treatment of it's citizens, your case may be better served by finding a more direct example.
> Can those rights be violated? Yes, governments do bad things all the time. But that is not the same as a foreign national participating in Al-Qaeda training camps and meeting with Osama bin Laden. No nation on Earth has a strong history of giving full citizenship legal rights to foreign nationals and/or enemy combatants captured in a warzone.
You're aware that the US actually kidnapped random people because they had the misfortune of using the wrong watch type or having the same name as an alleged terrorist, right? They didn't "capture enemy combatants in a warzone".
> Note that this does not apply to US citizens. US citizens, even those accused of terrorism, still retain their legal rights under US law. That is what citizenship in any country, is.
And also murdered US citizens abroad that were alleged to have ties to terrorists, without due trial.
The specific people referenced in the post I was responding to were not US citizens and should not be expected to be granted legal rights equal to US citizens.
> Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 by the Afghan Northern Alliance
>He was captured in March 2002 by Pakistani forces during a raid at Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was held in Islamabad for two months before being turned over the United States forces.
As I said, they were captured as enemy combatants, in a warzone. The circumstances of Sharbi's capture are much more questionable. But from the US's perspective, an ally turned him over as a captured enemy combatant.
It's all questionable and stupid, of course. But the question of their status at the time is relevant to the question of whether the US "vanishes" it's own citizens. These two were not citizens, so what happened to them does not support the case that the US is just as bad as China on that point.
No nation on Earth has a history of treating such captives as full citizens entitled to the same legal rights as it's own people. But maybe that's what we all would want. That's a fair point to argue, separately.
However, that is not the point the person I was responding to was making. Which is part of why I say the examples they offered were ineffective as support for their point.
You may find it helpful to practice re-reading and making sure you understand the case a post is making before responding to it.
You and I clearly agree that what the US did in Guantanamo was bad. You and I also agree that the US can, has, and may yet still violate the rights of it's own citizens as well as the rights of people who are not it's citizens, even in situations where it has signed treaties with those people's nations.
And the US government should definitely be held accountable whenever it does something like that.
None of that changes the observation that the US's failure to give full citizen legal rights to Ghassan al Sharbi and David Matthew Hicks, people who were not US citizens, does not make a good supporting example to the case for the US being just as bad as China about "vanishing" it's own citizens.
You are, of course, free to offer concrete examples which would better make that case. That is essentially what I was opening the door for. But here you seem to be responding more to an emotion evoked by how I said something rather than the point I was actually making.
The majority of criminal cases in the USA result in a plea agreement. The majority of plea agreements take away a persons right to access to the Courts (taking away Constitutional protects. They claim that you CAN still access in certain constitutional situations but if you try both the lower court and Prosecutor will threaten you with revoking your plea if you pursue an appeal to higher courts. Source: that's how it went down in my situation). Plea agreements were unconstitutional for the majority of the existence of the USA but somehow later became constitutional (even though our system of law are required to respect precedence). While for appearance purposes some limited constitutional rights remain, for all practical purposes anyone convicted via plea has their constitutional rights to the courts removed. In addition, the Federal Court system only allows 14 days from sentencing to file an appeal. 14 days, including days being transferred from court to a Federal Detention Center to your final destination seems extremely unreasonable. Again, it was unlimited until recent history, but it was decided it needed to be 14 days for financial reasons (too many people were accessing their constitutional right to the court and clogging up the system).
We must pass the Restrict Act, because anyone arguing against the Restrict Act will have no evidence against the Restrict Act until we pass the Restrict Act. Sadly, the passage of the Restrict Act will require those arguing against the Restrict Act to be jailed for Misinformation on Behalf of a Foreign Power if they have no evidence. If they do have evidence, however, they will be jailed under the Espionage Act.
> No, the US is not as bad as the CCP. But it has its own issues you can easily find yourself on the wrong side of based off your skin color or ethnicity.
Or traditional religious and political views that do not agree with the failed doctrines of the regime [0].
The history [1,2] is interesting and sad. It's unfortunate that the US waited 45 years to officially apologize and pay reparations.
It's somewhat surprising that Hawaii didn't enact the same mass internment/incarceration as California, in spite of being the location of both Pearl Harbor and the Niihau incident [3], and being under martial law.
She's still alive because she was 4 at the time... you can't say the same about the perpetrators. There's nobody left to prosecute, they're all dead. Ancestral sin is not part of the justice system.
Bad things done 80 years ago do not excuse bad things done by someone else today. We're not all entitled to a turn at mass murder or genocide. That's now how morality works.
> There's nobody left to prosecute, they're all dead. Ancestral sin is not part of the justice system.
Perhaps, but the government can still do something: apologize for the original injustice, provide some compensation, and try to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
> And you don't have to look too many years back in time to find concentration camps for specific ethnicities.
Two things here.
First, 1945 was a long time ago.
Second, the interment of Japanese-Americans was shameful. It was a concentration camp. It was not intended to make them "un-Japanese" or to destroy their culture.
What's happening to the Uighurs is different on both fronts. It's right now. And it's not just "we'll round up these people and put them in a camp to keep them from maybe doing espionage for a country that we're currently at war with". It's "we're going to completely destroy their cultural identity". What China is doing meets the definition of genocide (even if they aren't killing people, they're killing their ability to be part of "a people"). What the US did was shameful and was falling far short of our ideals as a nation, but it was short of genocide.
It's not the relationships of the parties in control that worries me. It's the arrests and abductions of the people that concerns me.
Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.
The CCP is a completely different beast, it has no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings and much worse.