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This may seem unrelated, but if US was willing to worsen its relations with china, and introduce tarifs punishing its own economy, it should have done it as san

• smileysteve 7y ago
  It would help if the U.S. had a leg to stand on; the official numbers point to us having higher incarceration per capita; and both the public perception and medical statistics point to rape being expected in prison.
  • shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    The state massively rounding up religious minorities and harvesting the organs of its prison population is practically the same thing as being incarcerated in a non-restorative justice system with shitty incentives where prisoners assault each other. Btw, judging Nazi Germany for the Holocaust while celebrating Columbus Day? You don't know how bad you look right now. XDD
  • wavefunction 7y ago
    Many of the people in US prisons belong there. The same can't be said of the inhabitants of Xinjiang concentration camps.
    • smileysteve 7y ago
      > Many of the people in US prisons belong there. Legally, do they belong there, "many" of them have been sentenced by a jury or judge; though often not with a jury thanks to aggressive plea bargaining. Do the prisons also have a legal obligation to protect prisoners from undue harm like rape? But it also points to issues in our legal system. When the per capita number of warrants in Ferguson is > 1.5. When 3 strike laws and mandatory minimums lead to life in prison for non-violent offenders. But also, if 4% of death row inmates are innocent; do we suppose that number is higher or lower for lesser sentences? for those that took plea deals? For those where the police have been corrupt. https://www.newsweek.com/one-25-executed-us-innocent-study-claims-248889 https://www.newsweek.com/one-25-executed-us-innocent-study-c...
      • Fjolsvith 7y ago
        I've done over 10 years in state and federal prisons. Reading your extensive comments on prison conditions in this forum for US Steel idling their plants has me wondering if you are an activist for prison reform or an ex-con with an axe to grind.
  • chr1 7y ago
    After reading the linked article i don't think the two are anything comparable. Too little food, cramped cells, people taking turns to sleep, not being allowed to talk with each other, being led to toilet at the set time with whole cell, injections that cause depression and chemical castration, being forced to call to wife and tell that you have a new family and won't be coming back, rape (though only for those whom guards like)... Of course number of prisoners in USA is larger than it should be and they need better protection (mainly from other prisoners), but it is not in a same class as this reeducation camps.
    • smileysteve 7y ago
      You couldn't have made a better list of recent issues that have been in the news about U.S. prisons if you had tried. Little and low quality food so that sheriffs could take the money https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/03/49_alabama_sheriffs_flout_open.html https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/03/49_alabama_sheriffs_flout... Widespread prison rape https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-show-widespread-prison-rape https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-sh... Prisons under staffed and over crowded https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-26/understaffed-and-overcrowded-state-prisons-crippled-by-budget-constraints-bad-leadership https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-26/... Widespread use of solitary confinement https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/04/20/solitary-confinement-in-u-s-prisons-qualifies-today-as-torture/ https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/04/20/solitary-co... Chemical Castration in at least 8 states https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-passes-bill-requiring-chemical-castration-for-certain-child-molesters https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-passes-bill-requiri...
      • nightwing 7y ago
        I don't understand why some people in US so desperately want to claim the first place in human right violations. Do you believe "Chemical castration for certain child molesters" is comparable to mass injections of huge number of people whose only guilt is having whatsapp on the phone, or not speaking Chinese, or having a beard, or not drinking alcohol? Is low quality food comparable with getting small piece of rice dough the whole day? The way US treated prisoners in Guantanamo is probably comparable to the situation in china, but normal prison are not. I think it is important to keep the sense of proportion, things can be bad and require urgent action without being the worst. And saying things like: Trump is Hitler or human right violations in US are comparable to China do not help anyone. It just downplays the seriousness of the worst case and make the bad case look good.
  • beart 7y ago
    Can official numbers out of China be trusted? Do they consider their 'reeducation camps' to hold prisoners?
    • smileysteve 7y ago
      > Can official numbers out of China be trusted? No; which is why I phrased it the way I did. This doesn't change the perception though because the U.S. stands out in the developed world of numbers we can trust.
  • b_tterc_p 7y ago
    I’m pretty sure prison rape rates are more around 15% in the us
• dexen 7y ago
  It's a fine sentiment. The american government needs to balance the need to protect chinese citizens (and other ones under influence from China) vs. the economic needs of americans, who are the government's primary responsibility. The problem is that american citizens and businesses are heavily dependent on one specific source of imports -China- with little to no alternatives on certain goods [1]. It's a good long term aim to diversity the imports, but it needs to be done gradually, allowing sufficient time for american economy to adjust. Attempting to do that in one fell swoop would cause a lot of disruption and economic hardships to american citizenry. Once the key imports are diversified, US will have much more room to put pressure on China, to curb their humanitarian abuses. [1] China also holds a significant share of US bonds
  • drocer88 7y ago
    That sounds like "cheap stuff now, human rights later". Apologies if I am mis-interpreting you. As an American, I'd be willing to pay more for goods if it meant Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and other folks in China had basic human rights.
    • mensetmanusman 7y ago
      I agree, along with: ‘Cheap stuff now, environmental disaster later’
• stevenwoo 7y ago
  I think this problem could be traced back Clinton pushing for WTO admittance for China without conditions, IIRC the next Dalai Lama had already been seized by this time and the crack down/Han flood into Tibet was under way. I remember someone writing the West always falls for the promise of this huge Chinese market in exchange for normalizing trade and China changing after the people see what the world has to offer, but there's almost no evidence for this.
  • thrower123 7y ago
    > the West always falls for the promise of this huge Chinese market Historically, the only thing that the West was ever able to successfully import into China was opium, and even that was a small window before native production became cheaper than shipping it all the way from India or Turkey. Over the long haul, China has had millenia-long trade surpluses, to the point that Roman writers were complaining about the trade through the Red Sea in spices and silks siphoning off their gold and silver, and later on so much of the silver of Mexico and Potosi ending up in China that it destabilized their bimetallic currency system.
• makotech222 7y ago
  Sanctions are an act of war. The US will only do them against countries it has a huge military advantage over.
• tomohawk 7y ago
  Very terrifying. https://chinatribunal.com/about-etac/ https://chinatribunal.com/about-etac/
• robocat 7y ago
  This may seem unrelated, but if China was willing to worsen its relations with the US, and introduce tarifs punishing its own economy, it should have done it as sanctions against the horrible things the US does to people in its prisons. Stories told by blacks who were released from prisons in the US are terrifying, and China is one of the few countries that could actually help. * The US imprisons 4 times as many people than China per capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce... * Xinjiang Accounts for 21% of prison arrests * The US has 2 million people in prison http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2... What is happening in China is an abomination, and political pressure is necessary. However the US should expect to be held to the same standards when applying political pressure, and it needs to resolve its own problems too.
  • jjwhitaker 7y ago
    These are two analogous issues by major world powers that don't validate each other and can both be addressed. This is a great perspective on a different issue but doesn't pose solutions, thoughts, or further information on the issue in the parent comment. Think less "all lives matter" and more walk and chew gum at the same time.
  • chr1 7y ago
    Mirroring the sentence sure looks cool and makes the two situations look so equal, but any US citizen is free to criticize US prisons, and free to find information about them. This is very different from China which desperately tries to hide the fact of existence of this concentration camps. Anyone who tries to talk about this in China ends up in Chinese prison (which is separate from this camps and worse than US prison). All the people who were released were threatened to not talk about camps, people living in cities near camps have malware installed on their phones to not be able to talk with anyone outside their cities. China condemning US won't change anything because the situation in US is the way it is because the people know and do not care enough about the issue. US condemning China would help because China tries to hide the truth from its own citizens who believe the camps are kind of schools where people learn history and get rid of religious superstitions. By putting the false equivalence sign between these two situations you do disservice to both causes.