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The article is talking about something very specific. Muslims being forced into labor camps against their will. The US has it's share of problems - nobody san

by Alupis 6y ago

The article is talking about something very specific. Muslims being forced into labor camps against their will. The US has it's share of problems - nobody sane would deny that. But, what the US does do that the CCP does not is allow the open discourse of it's problems, and to change it's policies if people agree. Even the very numbers that come from the CCP regarding their prison population are extremely suspect - they do not allow independent auditing, and we discover new slave labor camps like the ones in this article nearly every other day it seems. Flatly, the numbers put forth by the CCP are not to be trusted because the CCP has done nothing to make the numbers trustworthy. Bringing things up from the US' past, nearly a century ago or longer, or equivocating paid voluntary prison labor with mandatory forced labor based on religion is flatly wrong.

quicklime 6y ago
> what the US does do that the CCP does not is allow the open discourse of it's problems, and to change it's policies if people agree If this is true in practice, then the US prison labor problem is much more tractable than trying to fix an issue in a far off land where they don't allow open discourse. It wouldn't be a disaster if Americans focused their attention on their many domestic issues first, which they have direct control over. But currently there is very little open discourse in the US about prison labor, especially compared to the amount of discourse about Xinjiang. This doesn't excuse China for the things they are doing wrong.
- Alupis 6y ago
  The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China, that the CCP denies exist despite overwhelming evidence that continues to flourish.
  - sellyme 6y ago
    I think you've lost sight of the original context of this thread. Here's the top comment: > As long as companies Apple are not legally responsible for their supply chain in front of developed countries’ courts nothing will change. Of course Americans can and should decry Chinese slave labour camps, but you've just finished explaining why the American slave labour issue is a lot easier to address and deal with, so if they can't get that one sorted out I don't have high hopes for their chances of enforcing legal responsibility when dealing with China.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      The context of the thread is perfectly clear. Some people believe as long as the US underpays prisoners convicted of crimes, the CCP gets carte blanche to imprison a million people because of their religion, and force them into labor camps. Or did I misread this entire thread? And making companies like Apple legally responsible for their supply chain labor will do nothing to stem the flurry of actual slave labor camps seemingly sprouting up all over China. Chinese companies will continue to use the free labor and compete on an uneven global playing field, so long as the CCP sees a benefit.
      - sellyme 6y ago
        > Or did I misread this entire thread? Yes. In fact most of the people you've responded to very explicitly said the exact opposite of what you've interpreted.
        Alupis 6y ago
        Where is that? Can you quote them? We seem to have read different threads apparently...
        sellyme 6y ago
        > Where is that? Can you quote them? Sure thing. The most recent comment in this thread not made by one of us was by quicklime, and ended with this line: > [The lack of open discourse about America's prison slavery problem] doesn't excuse China for the things they are doing wrong. The one immediately prior to that was by mike_h and started with this: > I doubt anyone in this thread is arguing that forced labor would be ok anywhere. I'm not sure how you read either of those statements and extracted "the CCP gets carte blanche to imprison a million people because of their religion, and force them into labor camps".
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China Oh, yes, it does. Surely not perfect, but much better, or at least not as bad. Especially since unlike China thus far, the US tends to drop bombs and invade places they "decry".
    - Alupis 6y ago
      >> The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China > Oh, yes, it does. Surely not perfect, but much better, or at least not as bad. The country that was founded on the principal of religious freedom, by people that fled religious persecution, and felt so strongly as to list religious freedom as item number one in their list of human rights, does not need to be "much better" to call out religious slave labor camps.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >The country that was founded on the principal of religious freedom, by people that fled religious persecution, and felt so strongly as to list religious freedom as item number one in their list of human rights, does not need to be "much better" to call out religious slave labor camps. "The country that founded on the principal of religious freedom" is nationalistic trite, like "land of the free" (which ended slavery later than other western countries, gave poor, blacks, and women the vote later, has 25% of the world's prison population, and so on), and "home of the brave" (where the Army is professional and the majority of the population had never had the chance to fight in any war or suffer any war domestically for over a century, so one wonders how/what this "braveness" is measured with and against). First, what the country was "founded on" means little. What the country has historically did and up to now does (warred, enslaved, invaded, occupied, strong-armed, intimidated, etc.) matters more. Second, the fact that a country was founded by religious hardcores literally thrown out of Europe for being such, and that they wanted "religious freedom" in their new dwellings so as to they not kill each other, doesn't give it any special moral high ground. Heck, if it was up to any of the religious sects that ended up there, the others would be illegal (the US still has the most fundamentalist religious people in the West, which when they had the upper hand were ok with forcing their will as law on anything from abortions to music releases). But they needed "religious freedom" because none of them had the power over all the other denominations (all Christian at the time, mostly variations of protestantism), and thus they made a virtue out of necessity. Not to mention that they still managed all together to opress the blacks (nuff said), the native americans ("trail of tears"), the early Chinese, Irish, etc immigrants, and so on...
mike_h 6y ago
I think you're being earnest so I'll dive into this thread for a few more minutes before I go back to work. Because I'm being earnest too: If the West wants to influence internal China policy, it needs either a clear moral high ground for Chinese citizens to refer to, or clear economic upper hand. It doesn't have the latter right now (maybe never will again), and as this thread demonstrates, it doesn't have the former either. Re: open discourse and changeable policies, China policies are more changeable than you would gather from the cartoon picture in Western media. They change constantly, in response not only to public opinion (as expressed on the internet these days), but also in response to continual internal debate within the CCP. The US, for all its waving of the "free speech" banner, is only as changeable as the culture allows. Right now, for example, there would be no hope of reforming either prisons or e.g. a climate policy that might destroy civilization itself, because ~50% of US culture believes those aren't necessary. Also note that open discourse is only allowed to a certain extent, as seen in surveillance and countermeasures against protests and organizers of any kind, from 1776 until the present day. So we can't in reality claim to be a society of free discourse when it comes to threats against the status quo, perceived or otherwise. Prison labor in the US is only voluntary if people choose it over labor outside of prison. The fact that people sometimes choose it over staring at a wall for decades (and, one can imagine, being harassed by prison staff for not making the place more profitable) doesn't make it voluntary. And finally re: Muslims being forced into labor camps against their will. It was not a century ago that the West dealt with its Muslim-extremism problem by bombing cities and weddings, and causing the economic collapse of entire countries. You want leverage over Chinese policy, you need to address this first.
- Alupis 6y ago
  Bottom line: China has forced a million Muslims into slave labor camps simply because they are Muslim... But you want to focus on how the US doesn't pay enough for voluntary prison labor. Am I missing something here?
  - logicchains 6y ago
    I suppose the Chinese response would be "America has forced hundreds of thousand of black people into prison slave labor just because they're black".

by Alupis 6y ago

quicklime 6y ago

> what the US does do that the CCP does not is allow the open discourse of it's problems, and to change it's policies if people agree If this is true in practice, then the US prison labor problem is much more tractable than trying to fix an issue in a far off land where they don't allow open discourse. It wouldn't be a disaster if Americans focused their attention on their many domestic issues first, which they have direct control over. But currently there is very little open discourse in the US about prison labor, especially compared to the amount of discourse about Xinjiang. This doesn't excuse China for the things they are doing wrong.

Alupis 6y ago
The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China, that the CCP denies exist despite overwhelming evidence that continues to flourish.
- sellyme 6y ago
  I think you've lost sight of the original context of this thread. Here's the top comment: > As long as companies Apple are not legally responsible for their supply chain in front of developed countries’ courts nothing will change. Of course Americans can and should decry Chinese slave labour camps, but you've just finished explaining why the American slave labour issue is a lot easier to address and deal with, so if they can't get that one sorted out I don't have high hopes for their chances of enforcing legal responsibility when dealing with China.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    The context of the thread is perfectly clear. Some people believe as long as the US underpays prisoners convicted of crimes, the CCP gets carte blanche to imprison a million people because of their religion, and force them into labor camps. Or did I misread this entire thread? And making companies like Apple legally responsible for their supply chain labor will do nothing to stem the flurry of actual slave labor camps seemingly sprouting up all over China. Chinese companies will continue to use the free labor and compete on an uneven global playing field, so long as the CCP sees a benefit.
    - sellyme 6y ago
      > Or did I misread this entire thread? Yes. In fact most of the people you've responded to very explicitly said the exact opposite of what you've interpreted.
      - Alupis 6y ago
        Where is that? Can you quote them? We seem to have read different threads apparently...
        sellyme 6y ago
        > Where is that? Can you quote them? Sure thing. The most recent comment in this thread not made by one of us was by quicklime, and ended with this line: > [The lack of open discourse about America's prison slavery problem] doesn't excuse China for the things they are doing wrong. The one immediately prior to that was by mike_h and started with this: > I doubt anyone in this thread is arguing that forced labor would be ok anywhere. I'm not sure how you read either of those statements and extracted "the CCP gets carte blanche to imprison a million people because of their religion, and force them into labor camps".
- coldtea 6y ago
  >The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China Oh, yes, it does. Surely not perfect, but much better, or at least not as bad. Especially since unlike China thus far, the US tends to drop bombs and invade places they "decry".
  - Alupis 6y ago
    >> The US doesn't need to be perfect before US citizens can decry Religious Slave Labor Camps in China > Oh, yes, it does. Surely not perfect, but much better, or at least not as bad. The country that was founded on the principal of religious freedom, by people that fled religious persecution, and felt so strongly as to list religious freedom as item number one in their list of human rights, does not need to be "much better" to call out religious slave labor camps.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >The country that was founded on the principal of religious freedom, by people that fled religious persecution, and felt so strongly as to list religious freedom as item number one in their list of human rights, does not need to be "much better" to call out religious slave labor camps. "The country that founded on the principal of religious freedom" is nationalistic trite, like "land of the free" (which ended slavery later than other western countries, gave poor, blacks, and women the vote later, has 25% of the world's prison population, and so on), and "home of the brave" (where the Army is professional and the majority of the population had never had the chance to fight in any war or suffer any war domestically for over a century, so one wonders how/what this "braveness" is measured with and against). First, what the country was "founded on" means little. What the country has historically did and up to now does (warred, enslaved, invaded, occupied, strong-armed, intimidated, etc.) matters more. Second, the fact that a country was founded by religious hardcores literally thrown out of Europe for being such, and that they wanted "religious freedom" in their new dwellings so as to they not kill each other, doesn't give it any special moral high ground. Heck, if it was up to any of the religious sects that ended up there, the others would be illegal (the US still has the most fundamentalist religious people in the West, which when they had the upper hand were ok with forcing their will as law on anything from abortions to music releases). But they needed "religious freedom" because none of them had the power over all the other denominations (all Christian at the time, mostly variations of protestantism), and thus they made a virtue out of necessity. Not to mention that they still managed all together to opress the blacks (nuff said), the native americans ("trail of tears"), the early Chinese, Irish, etc immigrants, and so on...

mike_h 6y ago

I think you're being earnest so I'll dive into this thread for a few more minutes before I go back to work. Because I'm being earnest too: If the West wants to influence internal China policy, it needs either a clear moral high ground for Chinese citizens to refer to, or clear economic upper hand. It doesn't have the latter right now (maybe never will again), and as this thread demonstrates, it doesn't have the former either. Re: open discourse and changeable policies, China policies are more changeable than you would gather from the cartoon picture in Western media. They change constantly, in response not only to public opinion (as expressed on the internet these days), but also in response to continual internal debate within the CCP. The US, for all its waving of the "free speech" banner, is only as changeable as the culture allows. Right now, for example, there would be no hope of reforming either prisons or e.g. a climate policy that might destroy civilization itself, because ~50% of US culture believes those aren't necessary. Also note that open discourse is only allowed to a certain extent, as seen in surveillance and countermeasures against protests and organizers of any kind, from 1776 until the present day. So we can't in reality claim to be a society of free discourse when it comes to threats against the status quo, perceived or otherwise. Prison labor in the US is only voluntary if people choose it over labor outside of prison. The fact that people sometimes choose it over staring at a wall for decades (and, one can imagine, being harassed by prison staff for not making the place more profitable) doesn't make it voluntary. And finally re: Muslims being forced into labor camps against their will. It was not a century ago that the West dealt with its Muslim-extremism problem by bombing cities and weddings, and causing the economic collapse of entire countries. You want leverage over Chinese policy, you need to address this first.

Alupis 6y ago
Bottom line: China has forced a million Muslims into slave labor camps simply because they are Muslim... But you want to focus on how the US doesn't pay enough for voluntary prison labor. Am I missing something here?
- logicchains 6y ago
  I suppose the Chinese response would be "America has forced hundreds of thousand of black people into prison slave labor just because they're black".