• birdcat@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Fuck, china is so brutal to just arrest people simply on the suspicion of illegally providing state secrets to foreign countries! What kind of country does that? 915 days now!

    … and the missing sunshine part really makes me wonder what those Uyghurs were missing during their time of imprisonment…

    • Edham Mamet: 2827 days
    • Arkin Mahmud: 2793 days
    • Ahmad Tourson: 2824 days
    • Abdul Razak: 3586 days
    • Hassan Anvar: 2818 days
    • Ahmed Adil: 1547 days
    • Yusef Abbas: 4204 days
    • Akhdar Qasem Basit: 1425 days
    • Bahtiyar Mahnut: 2791 days
    • Abdul Helil Mamut: 2558 days
    • Haji Mohammed: 1425 days
    • Saidullah Khalik: (data missing)
    • Abdul Ghappar: 2679 days
    • Hajiakbar Abdulghupur: (data missing)
    • Abu Bakr Qasim: 1425 days
    • Abdullah Abdulqadirakhun: 2558 days
    • Dawut Abdurehim: 2677 days
    • Adel Abdulhehim: 1425 days
    • Emam Abdulahat: 2558 days
    • Hozaifa Parhat: 2604 days
    • Hammad Memet: 3586 days
    • Adel Noori: 2706 days
    • Lurker123 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been seeing this sort of thing in a few threads now since the federation and im a bit confused by it. Showing that China is doing similar things to the US doesn’t seem like a strong argument if the thing the US is doing (in this case indefinite detention without trial in a horrible prison) is bad. Is the idea that post-federation there’s users who don’t view the US as doing bad things?

      • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Showing that China is doing similar things to the US doesn’t seem like a strong argument if the thing the US is doing (in this case indefinite detention without trial in a horrible prison) is bad. Is the idea that post-federation there’s users who don’t view the US as doing bad things?

        The problem is that liberals are operating on “Our country (the US, UK, a European country, etc) is better than China because of these reasons, China bad, 100 million dead” and so the idea is to first go “Actually, China isn’t doing anything worse than the United States is doing” and then later on go “…and, in fact, the United States is the one that’s by far the worst.” Basically to cushion the blow of having their worldview swept out from under them.

        So the first step is to go “Oh, is China bad because they imprison people for revealing state secrets? Then look at all these people in your own countries that have done the same.”

        And then the second step is to go “And, in fact, China has a lower number of incarcerated people than the United States despite having almost five times more people.”

        of course, then they start blubbering about “buh buh buh, they’re lying and a-actually have trillions in prison and they’re killing them and xi is personally beating them because he’s evil and a monster and the CCP they’re bad and they–” but the seed of doubt has still been established

        • RedClouds@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Nice, reasonable explanation comrade! Just in case anyone didn’t know, TheDeprogram has a good wiki page on whataboutism that covers this nicely as well.

          But yeah, people will find that we communists do criticize socialist governments, past and present, and do find flaws in China’s system. You just have to come to the communist subs and read around, or ask honest questions. But on platforms like this, where obvious lies, biases, and if nothing else, just one-sided reporting is rampant, we need to balance out the rhetoric. Of course capitalist countries (past and previous) have jailed journalists and those that have pushed back against American imperialism. Native Americans, Middle Easterners, Mexico, are just a short list of those that we constantly oppress.

          China keeps making the news because western media keeps putting them in the news, even if it is for things that the USA or western Europe is also currently doing (You don’t think the USA and Europe don’t ban websites, do you? Have they ever forcefully sterilized people? Yes. Have they ever taken journalists prisoners… obviously yes… Oppressed religions? Duh… The list goes on and on). Calling out these non-western nations for doing these things is simply adding fuel to the fire to create a monolithic opinion that the USA or Europe is the best place on earth.

          If you are on Elysium, things looks pretty great, and you can look down upon the others and judge them easily, while extracting their resources and causing their struggles in the first place. Being taken out of your bubble feels really uncomfortable, but it’s the first step in learning.

      • birdcat@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You’re confusing me a bit too tbh.

        seeing this sort of thing

        What sort of thing?

        since the federation

        I checked hexbear before the federation and found it to be mostly an awfully friendly and kinda cool place, so I was excited. But now I see so many paranoid hexbear users talking about “the federation” as if it were some kind of historical event with great significance; almost like how Palestinians talk about the Nakba. Why is that?

        Showing that China is doing similar things to the US doesn’t seem like a strong argument if the thing the US is doing (in this case indefinite detention without trial in a horrible prison) is bad.

        I don’t really understand what you mean. Even the best liberal super-democracy (let’s say Switzerland) will detain you if they suspect that you have given out state secrets to foreign countries. Literally every country will. That was kinda the point of my comment.

        Secondly, I was not trying to show anything; I was just wondering what those people were missing during their (not indefinite) imprisonment. They’re all free now, including the ones with data missing. And I didn’t research the reasons for their imprisonment, use a search engine if you want to know more.

        Is the idea that post-federation there’s users who don’t view the US as doing bad things?

        You know that there have always been and that there always will be users with that view, so why even ask that question; and why ask it with “post-federation”? it honestly gives the impression you’re in a cult, no offense.

        • AOCapitulator [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Re: hexbear stalking about “the federation” in heavy tones.

          we’ve been bitten by linking up with other communities before, (r/vegancirclejerk) and the moment before federation we were preemptively defederated from lemmy.world

          Quiet shire no more, now there are liberals at the gates and ominous tidings (I’m joking, but there’s change in the air is what I mean)

          • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            To be honest, I think .world kind of long-term fucked themselves on that one. They were one of the only instances big enough to act as any kind of counterweight to our posting power, and by sealing themselves off from us, and because our lack of downvotes results in more and higher rated comments, they’ve pretty much ceded rhetorical dominance of much of the rest of the verse to us and our lemmygrad friends.

        • brain_in_a_box [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          But now I see so many paranoid hexbear users talking about “the federation” as if it were some kind of historical event with great significance; almost like how Palestinians talk about the Nakba. Why is that?

          It’s tongue in cheek, mocking the hysterical libs who can’t process actually sharing an online space with leftists.

      • Joncash2@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        A bigger question is whether or not this is necessary to be a super power. There has never been a super power that did not do this. We can argue good or bad till we are blue in the face, but if it’s a necessity, then it’s going to happen. Even if the necessity is just to become a global dominant power.

        An easier example to understand is selling military equipment that will absolutely be used in genocides. You can’t be a super power if you don’t sell advanced military equipment. Inevitably, some of those you sell to will be using it to murder journalists for reporting about the line.

        So, yeah selling them those weapons is bad. But if you don’t do it, someone else will. That someone else will gain inordinate amounts of power making sure your country will never be in power. So we sell, we sell it as we watch Palestinians burn.

  • LesbianLiberty [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Damn, when my brother got locked up for years for weed possession before it was legalized and he never got a glowing article like this despite being a loving father as well. Doesn’t the US do the same thing for spy and espionage stuff?

    • AOCapitulator [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      There are also a couple “cop city” journalists who were arrested for domestic terrorism recently for, checks notes, reporting what the cops were doing to protestors

      Nice!

  • radiofreeval [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    seems to be soley writing anti-China posts for western media. This doesn’t change the fact that prisons are inhumane and should be abolished. I reccomend any of Angela Davis’ works on the topic.

      • radiofreeval [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Systems of rehabilitation and methods to prevent crime, not punish it. Look up Angela Davis for someone smarter than me who has explained it better.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s very hard to rehabilitate a foreign spy while the government they work for is still around. What we would do to handle crime in a hypothetical global commune is very different from how socialist states fighting for survival need to handle such matters.

          • a Kendrick fan@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Perhaps a starting point would be to expose their acts and lawfully charge them to court based, the spies should bear the full brunt of that. No state should arrest or accuse an individual based on suspicion or speculations without any proof or evidence to support it.

            And for what its worth, China is neither a socialist state nor is it fighting for survival.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              nor is it fighting for survival.

              Those US military bases are just surrounding it to keep it warm and the CIA fronts and agents are doing PR.

              Few things are as annoying as immensely ignorant social chauvinists masquerading as progressives.

        • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Prisons will still be necessary for the most egregious and irredeemable criminals. The sad reality is that there are certain people who simply need to be sequestered from the rest of society for the general public’s safety, and no amount of rehabilitation or intervention will solve that. But that should be the exception, not the norm. The massive prison population is absolutely a problem, but it isn’t something that can be completely abolished. It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.

          • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            It could be abolished in the sense that the “location where we keep the most irredeemable people in society, who absolutely can not be left unsupervised” may not be a “prison”, but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution they may be able to make to society.

            • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution to society they may be able to make to society.

              Yeah, I touched on that with my last sentence:

              It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.

              There are two problems with that. The first is that “maximizing contribution to society” can easily be interpreted as “being forced to stamp license plates for 16 hours a day.” We already know this is a possible interpretation, because that’s how our system already interprets it. Either way they’re locked up against their will, and are being forced to perform labor to someone else’s benefit. The very nature of their confinement means that any contribution they make will be for someone else and not themselves. And the simple word for that is “slavery”. The second problem is that it’s still prison. We haven’t actually solved the prison problem at all in this scenario; We’ve simply given it a mask so we can say prisons have been abolished. Like if we don’t call them prisons, we can say we don’t have any prisoners.

              • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                My bad for the lack of reading before replying

                They will be locked up against their will, unfortunately (until a future society figures out something better)

                They don’t need to be forced to stamp license plates under socialism (prison abolition can’t happen under capitalism ofc), but if work were available to them they could receive a fair wage. That would not be slavery, it would be imprisonment, i guess (did I contradict my original point? Idk Maybe, but I still see it as fundamentally different than how a “prison” is defined in the 2020s).

                Also “prison abolition” doesn’t need to be literal, it’s just a goal to work towards over many generations. Is it even viable? Who knows, but it’s not gonna get figured out during our lifetimes anyway. In the meantime, we can start to restructure our society in a way that will minimize the scale of prisons, and maybe our grandchildren will find a way to phase them out totally, but that’s their problem.

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    “These damn tankies are so obsessed with China, as can be seen from them regularly commenting on the hitpieces on China that we constantly post and upvote”

    I don’t see you fuckers saying one tenth as much about India. I wonder why that is?

    [Tbf the algorithm is going to be part of why, but I would be shocked if an audit of threads posted showed India reaching even a fifth of the threads China gets here]

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know. I saw some reporting on how India basically closed off internet access and made the area a bit of a black box, but the reports were short-lived that I saw.