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>it is running actual concentration camps in which members of the Chinese Muslim minority are being tortured and mutilated Are you unaware of what the US is do

>it is running actual concentration camps in which members of the Chinese Muslim minority are being tortured and mutilated Are you unaware of what the US is doing to asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border?

rayiner 7y ago
That is what I mean by over-the-top rhetoric. On the scale of bad things, the asylum situation on the US-Mexico border is below what Australia is doing on Manus Island, below what India is doing on the border with Bangladesh, and none of those should even be discussed in the same paragraph as what China is doing. It's Orwellian. When you contort the rhetoric and language such that you're unable to describe graduations and degrees in what we might all agree are bad things, you lose the ability to think clearly and make judgments rationally.
- minikites 7y ago
  All of those things can be bad (and are) and the existence of bad things elsewhere doesn't make a local bad thing into something that isn't bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism If you don't think permanently separating children from their families is torture or genocide (separation is genocide, it doesn't have to involve murder), how would you classify it? >The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    You're mixing up two different things. The fact that Chinese concentration camps exist doesn't make family separation not bad. You can't bring up Chinese concentration camps to derail a discussion about ending family separation. That's whataboutism. But it's not whataboutism to say that our thought leaders should be encouraging a discourse, and abstain from rhetoric, that distorts the relative bad-ness of things. Because you can't get rid of every bad thing at once, and being able to prioritize and have moral clarity about what's the really bad things in the world is important. My point is that Cohen and people like him are cultivating a national discourse that is distorted and confused. It treats Alex Jones and Facebook as the key villains, when instead we should be focusing on companies like Google that are actively collaborating with a dangerous and evil regime.
  - rzmnzm 7y ago
    Strange that they can avoid this 'genocide' by not illegally entering the United States. Comparing this to the holocaust is frankly offensive.
    - minikites 7y ago
      It's not illegal, the law spells out how seeking asylum works.
  - alfromspace 7y ago
    >The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. Is it genocide whenever we arrest somebody, then? Because they can't take their kids to jail with them. Illegal immigrants get their kids back, and there's nothing unreasonable about detaining them for a while as a consequence of illegally crossing our border. This is a fake scandal. And I strongly suspect the true objection is that they're not all being freely released into the country's interior, this "family separation" argument being used to appeal to people's sensibilities as a far more unpopular agenda is really being pursued.

rayiner 7y ago

That is what I mean by over-the-top rhetoric. On the scale of bad things, the asylum situation on the US-Mexico border is below what Australia is doing on Manus Island, below what India is doing on the border with Bangladesh, and none of those should even be discussed in the same paragraph as what China is doing. It's Orwellian. When you contort the rhetoric and language such that you're unable to describe graduations and degrees in what we might all agree are bad things, you lose the ability to think clearly and make judgments rationally.

minikites 7y ago
All of those things can be bad (and are) and the existence of bad things elsewhere doesn't make a local bad thing into something that isn't bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism If you don't think permanently separating children from their families is torture or genocide (separation is genocide, it doesn't have to involve murder), how would you classify it? >The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group.
- rayiner 7y ago
  You're mixing up two different things. The fact that Chinese concentration camps exist doesn't make family separation not bad. You can't bring up Chinese concentration camps to derail a discussion about ending family separation. That's whataboutism. But it's not whataboutism to say that our thought leaders should be encouraging a discourse, and abstain from rhetoric, that distorts the relative bad-ness of things. Because you can't get rid of every bad thing at once, and being able to prioritize and have moral clarity about what's the really bad things in the world is important. My point is that Cohen and people like him are cultivating a national discourse that is distorted and confused. It treats Alex Jones and Facebook as the key villains, when instead we should be focusing on companies like Google that are actively collaborating with a dangerous and evil regime.
- rzmnzm 7y ago
  Strange that they can avoid this 'genocide' by not illegally entering the United States. Comparing this to the holocaust is frankly offensive.
  - minikites 7y ago
    It's not illegal, the law spells out how seeking asylum works.
- alfromspace 7y ago
  >The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. Is it genocide whenever we arrest somebody, then? Because they can't take their kids to jail with them. Illegal immigrants get their kids back, and there's nothing unreasonable about detaining them for a while as a consequence of illegally crossing our border. This is a fake scandal. And I strongly suspect the true objection is that they're not all being freely released into the country's interior, this "family separation" argument being used to appeal to people's sensibilities as a far more unpopular agenda is really being pursued.