rusbots and xibots

[George.]

Facial features.

Using that CCP facial recognition software?

Or just being racist, like the Nazis saying they could tell a Jew from the cranial measurements?

[L.W. Baxter]

I feel that an attack on Ms Pelosi is what she deserves.

you have zero credibility remaining, hr.

i take nothing you say at face value.

because i have learned that you will say anything for the sake of argument.

[George.]

I am happy to shoot that photo over to a policeman we know,

Your handler?

who will have a much better idea of what's going on. But I'm more than confident it's another one of your frauds.

It's from Wikipedia. Been there for years. Frauds don't survive long on Wikipedia.

BTW, can you read Wikipedia in China without a VPN?

Wikipedia also says, on the Uighur genocide:

The Chinese government has conducted propaganda campaigns on social media to further denial of the abuses. In 2021, the Chinese government posted thousands of videos to social media showing residents of Xinjiang denying claims of abuse made by Mike Pompeo; a joint investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times found the videos were part of an influence campaign coordinated by the government propaganda department.^[523] They have also used their existing disinformation networks, including social media trolls, to deny the Uyghur genocide.^[524]

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Anyone can spend an hour or more typing “Uighur” then “images” into Google and trying to make sense of the results.

There are lots of pretty girls and rather handsome young men, which a cynic like me will ascribe to selection by photogenicity.

Beyond that, I would not have a clue.

[George.]

Here is an Uighur:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihrigul_Tursun

[George.]

BTW, she is actually from Xinjiang, unlike HR, and Xinjiang is complicated, so I will take her word over his:

"My hands bled from their beatings, each time I was electrocuted, my whole body would shake violently and I could feel the pain in my veins, I thought I would rather die than go through this torture and begged them to kill me."

"There were around 60 people kept in a 430 square feet [40 m²] cell so at nights, 10 to 15 women would stand up while the rest of us would sleep on sideways so we could fit, and then we would rotate every 2 hours. There were people who had not taken a shower over a year."

[George Jung]

keep fluffing the sheets, hrd; those who believe you, will continue; those who don't, won't.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Here is an Uighur:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihrigul_Tursun

There is one part of this story which puzzles me a great deal, and whoever wrote the Wiki item has left it hanging.

Is the lady’s husband Uighur or Egyptian? Both are implied. It doesn’t make sense.

As to the rest of the story, as I said about half a mile ago, China is in the grip of the sort of Islamophobia that gripped the USA after 9/11. I have no problem accepting her account. She would indeed have seemed suspicious to Chinese immigration people because they would have known that the Muslim Brotherhood is an organisation that originated in Egypt.

Anyone who tries to hold the Chinese bureaucracy to a higher standard than the deplorable standard of the US bureaucracy including the US immigration service is going in for special pleading.

[L.W. Baxter]

i think i spotted some han chinese in the photo

7C351A8E-3D13-417F-9744-4F7C88DB7629.jpeg

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

A quick look at Ms Mihrigul Tursun and anyone with knowledge of the world is going to laugh. She was allegedly beaten, tortured, sterilised, her child was killed, and then they let her go to Egypt.

Do any of you wonder why a vicious group of thugs who beat, torture, electrocute, sterilize (and she didn't know it ?) women and kill babies would let this woman go off to egypt ? If it were true that this is a genocide and what she claims is true, they'd just kill her. You'd have to be an idiot to let a person like this leave the country.

There is another factor in this that many people don't think of : there is good money to be made in the US by being a victim of the ruling communist party. A lot of people live pretty well by doing that. I hate to bring Ms Nayirah up agian but not everyone is honest.

As I just said, anyone who expects the Chinese immigration and security services to operate to a higher standard than their brutal and shambolically disorganised US equivalents is special pleading. I don’t doubt her account.

I’m not suggesting that Britain is any better save in one respect; unlike China and the USA we have a professional legal system which is as yet untainted by politics.

[L.W. Baxter]

so, if there were concentration camps for uyghurs, there is no way there could be any photographs of them. therefore no evidence to be shared.

if there were a genocide taking place, there is no way that any member of that persecuted ethnicity would be allowed to leave. thus, there can be no reported anecdotes.

i think you have described exactly how you can come to believe that there "is no thing with the uyghurs". it can go on right under your nose, and the ccp is so good at what they do, you can have no idea.

you know nothing more, and maybe less, than spectators 10,000 miles away.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Oh, the computer system works, these days, HRD! It even works (to the shock horror and dismay of many people!)
in the Philippines!

I think she was allowed to leave because she was innocent and because her surviving children are Egyptian citizens and were travelling on Egyptian passports. China is careful about that sort of thing, as long as there are no bigger issues involved. I still don’t understand about the husband. The sterilisation seems plausible; she had (through no fault of her own) exceeded the quota. I’m perfectly sure that we have all met the sort of woman (I’m sure it will have been a woman) who gave that order.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I see that Islamophobia is still flourishing in the States: Ilhan Omar has just been kicked off the House Foreign Relations Committee by the Trumpery.

And the citizens of the great nation that gave us Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (plus a citizen of the great nation that is carrying on its own genocide in the Amazon basin) presume to lecture China on its treatment of an Islamic minority…

Pot, meet kettle.

[Keith Wilson]

Pot, meet kettle.

One evil is not a justification for another. The fact that the pot is black doesn't change the color of the kettle in the slightest.

[L.W. Baxter]

Except I have a brain and actually look at these claims with a critical eye...

right. back to your own personal credibility, your ability and willingness to reason from your own anecdotal experience, and report in an unbiased fashion.

meh.

[George.]

the citizens of the great nation that gave us Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (plus a citizen of the great nation that is carrying on its own genocide in the Amazon basin) presume to lecture China on its treatment of an Islamic minority…

I seem to recall that back in the 2000s several people, including you and I, were vehemently condemning Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo here in the Bilge.

And I myself started a thread on the Yanomami genocide under Bolsonaro that is just being uncovered.

Why should the Uighur genocide get different treatment?

[George.]

There's way too many people making a living by being mouthpieces of the ruling communist party

ftfy

[Canoeyawl]

This conversation reminds me of advanced Phrenology classes in graduate school

[Paul Pless]

This conversation reminds me of advanced Phrenology classes in graduate school

[CWSmith]

This conversation reminds me of advanced Phrenology classes in graduate school

They don't really teach that, do they?

[Canoeyawl]

They don't really teach that, do they?

Only in China

[Chip-skiff]

Poor, misguided Canadians. . .

Canada votes to take in 10,000 Uyghur refugees amid Chinese pressure
to force their return

Move shows ‘what is happening to the Uyghurs is unacceptable’, says MP after non-binding
parliamentary ballot with prime minister’s support


Police on patrol in Kashgar, in China’s Xinjiang region. Rights groups believe at least 1 million
Uyghurs and minorities have been incarcerated in internment camps in the region.
Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters


Agence France-Presse

Wed 1 Feb 2023
Canada’s parliament has unanimously passed a motion to take in 10,000 Uyghur refugees who fled China, but are now facing pressure to return.

The vote on Wednesday builds on a February 2021 move by Canadian lawmakers to label Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in its north-western Xinjiang territory as genocide.

Rights groups believe at least 1 million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been incarcerated in internment camps in the region, where China is also accused of forcibly sterilising women and imposing forced labour. Tens of thousands have fled the region, and according to Canadian backbench MP Sameer Zuberi, who sponsored the motion, at least 1,600 have been detained in other countries at China’s behest or forcibly repatriated.

Zuberi noted that prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and his cabinet voted in support of the motion, signalling the government’s “intent to make this happen” even though it is non-binding. “It is a clear signal that we do not accept human rights violations against the Uyghur people,” Zuberi said at a news conference. “What is happening to the Uyghurs is unacceptable.”

Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, said it was a message that “will resonate not only in China and in Canada but around the world”. The motion says Uyghurs who “fled to third countries face pressure and intimidation by the Chinese state to return to China” and accuses Beijing of also applying diplomatic and economic pressure on countries to detain and deport them, “leaving them without a safe haven in the world.”

It proposes resettling 10,000 Uyghurs in Canada over two years, starting in 2024.

China has defended its Uyghur camps in Xinjiang, saying they are crucial to battling terrorism and providing vocational training to minorities.

But the US has said China’s repression of Uyghurs amounts to “genocide”, and the United Nations has condemned China’s persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.

Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said: “The Uyghur people are under attack: our language, culture, religion, history, ethnic identity.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...e_iOSApp_Other

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I seem to recall that back in the 2000s several people, including you and I, were vehemently condemning Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo here in the Bilge.

And I myself started a thread on the Yanomami genocide under Bolsonaro that is just being uncovered.

Why should the Uighur genocide get different treatment?

First, the Yanomami horror may indeed be a genocide (we don’t know enough, yet) but the other events are not genocides.

Second, it should not get different treatment; it should get the same treatment.

China is in the grip of a form of Islamophobia which excludes the Hui because “they are just like us apart from the shellfish and the pork”. This is why the Uighurs are being treated so badly. It’s Islamophobia. Just like in the USA. China has a very very long history of “cracking heads together” ie people getting treated badly until they either stop what they are doing or they are dead.

Remember that, unlike the rest of us, China had two huge and very bloody Muslim rebellions in the middle of the 19th century - the Hui Rebellion* and the Du Wenxiu Rebellion** - and these along with the Taiping rebellion (which was very broadly Christian in its inspiration) helped to bring down the Qing dynasty.

(I shall immodestly quote myself at this point!)
https://gwulo.com/node/6167

Please note the massive scale of these events. They make every European war before 1914 look trivial. Millions were killed, died of starvation or of disease. Entire populations were forcibly moved across vast distances.

If the British could round up every Irish Republican they could find and throw them into Long Kesh without trial in 1971 and if the Americans could do the same to everyone of Japanese descent in 1941 we can understand why the Chinese are doing this today. None of these three instances were or are “right”; they are all of them wrong, but they are all responses by “generally reasonable” governments to widespread popular fear of minorities that were and are seen to be associated with an external threat.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan...%E2%80%931877)

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthay_Rebellion

[Canoeyawl]

If the British could round up every Irish Republican they could find and throw them into Long Kesh without trial in 1971 and if the Americans could do the same to everyone of Japanese descent in 1941 we can understand why the Chinese are doing this today. None of these three instances were or are “right”; they are all of them wrong, but they are all responses by “generally reasonable” governments to widespread popular fear of minorities that were and are seen to be associated with an external threat.

Two excellent reasons that we can not and should not understand it. The passage of time since those tragedies should have served to educate anyone or any government that wanted to learn.
It is racism, plain and simple

[Canoeyawl]

They all look alike but not to chinese people, and after a while you start to pick up on differences.


China ethnic groups really do look different. I think there'd be no discussion about a group photo that was supposed to be zulu's, where 1/3 of them had blue eyes, blond hair and beards ? Chinese ethnicities are not obvious to us and entertainingly, foreigners all look the same to China people, but yes, there are enough differences to say "that photo is not what it pretends to be."

If there were not visible differences, where would that leave the "ethnic genocide" story ? Obviously there are, or the uygurs would just be han.
And George.'s own photo graphically illustrates what I just said, if you can't tell the difference between her and majority han people, you are blind.

One has to wonder how Mssr D. would place a person with Downs Syndrome in his ideology

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Two excellent reasons that we can not and should not understand it. The passage of time since those tragedies should have served to educate anyone or any government that wanted to learn.
It is racism, plain and simple

No, none of these events is or was “racism, plain and simple”. They were very bad things but they were not “racism plain and simple”, and we do need to understand them. The thing that drives populations to call for and to approve these measures is fear. Fear makes frightened people behave badly and race and religion can act as triggers for this. You know it isn’t simple.

[Canoeyawl]

I guess it depends on your definition of Racism...

It used to be a simple thing to identify someone of the Irish race

"Anti-Irish racism is as old as the 12th century: it is not the result of IRA terrorism, says a study published yesterday.
Even Irish jokes go back at least to the 16th century and chroniclers as long ago as 1187 were attacking the Irish for their filth and ignorance.

Dr Mary Hickman, director of the Irish Studies Centre at the University of North London, says in her book, Religion, Class and Identity, that since the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century the English have tried to justify their attacks on Ireland by racism"
Words from the history of a nation's prejudice
12th century: "A most filthy race ... sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of the faith ... They pay neither tithes nor first fruits; they do not contract marriage, nor shun incestuous connections" - Giraldus Cambrensis.
18th century: The Irish are "buried in the most profound barbarism and ignorance" - David Hume.
1836: Irish immigration into Britain "is an example of a less civilised population spreading itself as a substratum beneath a more civilised community" - parliamentary inquiry into the Irish in Britain.
1930s: "They (the Irish) have settled into the closest poor quarter and turned the settlement into a slum" - J. B. Priestley.
1950s: "No Irish need apply" - lodging house notice."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/i...s-1342976.html

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Off the topic, but you have omitted the Irish people choosing to remain Catholics in the 16th century and King James II’s use of Irish Catholic troops against the English in the events leading up to the Glorious Revolution. These were very important in causing the Protestant English to fear the Catholic Irish.

[Keith Wilson]

Andrew's right. It's not simple racism - unless one expands 'racism' to mean tribalism, different standards for Those Not Like Us. Not Like Us can be skin color, physical features, language, religion, any of ten thousand aspects of culture, or even just those living in the next valley over. When one has reason to be afraid, it's a lot easier to blame it on Them. That's pretty much hardwired into human beings by evolution, although we can overcome it with effort. But calling it something other than 'racism' doesn't make it any better,

[Peerie Maa]

Andrew's right. It's not simple racism - unless one expands 'racism' to mean tribalism, different standards for Those Not Like Us. Not Like Us can be skin color, physical features, language, religion, any of ten thousand aspects of culture, or even just those living in the next valley over. When one has reason to be afraid, it's a lot easier to blame it on Them. That's pretty much hardwired into human beings by evolution, although we can overcome it with effort.

Racism is tribalism writ large and sinister.

It just occurs to me that it probably a recent thing. Pretty well unknown in the 5th C. The Roman empire employed any one willing to serve in the army, and then gave them land as a pensio on their retirement.
THe Norse and Danes travelled and traded everywhere with anyone.
There were Africans on Henry's Mary Rose in valued roles.

Having an interest in history and reading about the Irish, I think that the average Irish farmer and tenant had the misfortune to be apaulingly badly goverened. It went downhill when one of their princes asked the Norman lords to come fight as mercenaries in a border dispute, and continued down hill from there. The Catholic gentry owning lands beyond the Pale continued to flirt with Catholic kings on the continent, trying to overthrow the English crown, and so on.

[Canoeyawl]

Facial features.....

China people are actually aces at this, they can pick out different groups at a hundred yards. I'm a amateur but that photo is a fraud.

"racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some racesare innately superior to others. The term is also applied to political, economic, or legal institutions and systems that engage in or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of race or otherwise reinforce racial inequalities in wealth and income, education, health care, civil rights, and other areas. Such institutional, structural, or systemic racism became a particular focus of scholarly investigation in the 1980s with the emergence of critical race theory, an offshoot of the critical legal studies movement. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/racism

Italics mine^
That humans can even be labeled as "other" is beyond the pale, let alone identify them as such and corral them into "re-education" camps

[Keith Wilson]

Racism is tribalism writ large and sinister.

Nah. Racism (in the conventional sense) is just a subset of tribalism, and it can be large and horrible, or small and not much of a problem. The kind we have to deal with in the US is mostly a hangover from the African slave trade and its aftermath, with an assist from the 'scientific racism' invented to justify the European empires. In most of the former Spanish Empire, it's a relic of the conquest and subjugation of the indigenous population. In other places, it has different sources.

[Peerie Maa]

Nah. Racism (in the conventional sense) is just a subset of tribalism, and it can be large and horrible, or small and not much of a problem. The kind we have to deal with in the US is mostly a hangover from the African slave trade and its aftermath, with an assist from 'scientific racism' invented to justify the European empires. In most of the former Spanish Empire, it's a relic of the conquest and subjugation of the indigenous population. In other places, it has different sources.

When and where is it small and not much of a problem?

You appear to be disagreeing with Dr Mary Hickman, unless ethnic jokes about the Irish are not racist.

[George.]

the Yanomami horror may indeed be a genocide (we don’t know enough, yet) but the other events are not genocides.

You are showing a pro-China bias. The Yanomami horror is far, far smaller in scale, number of victims, and level of government involvement than the Uighur horror. Quantitively and qualitatively, if it is a genocide, then so is the Uighur horror.

Interestingly, we are having a wave of denialism about the Yanomami by Bolsonaro and his former minions. Their playbook is the same as HR's: The media is lying. The pictures are actually of starving Indians in Venezuela. It is all a plot by Brazil-hating foreigners and communists. Bolsonaro actually tried to stop it, and actually did stop it. The Yanomami have been suffering since the 1980s so what happened now is nothing new. Here are some pictures of happy Yanomami children, which prove there is no genocide. Etc., etc., etc. News reports and social media are being flooded with this BS.

You can probably imagine how I feel about this. Right now it is not a good moment to downplay genocide with me.

[L.W. Baxter]

they let her go because they knew she couldn't keep a story straight.

that she would be the perfect tool for discrediting the notion of uyghur repression.

look how well her existence is working on you.