astebbin
Joined 10 years ago
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Member since
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Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Fechter
Many similar cases.
Comment · 8 years ago
“The first thing you notice is the quiet. Then the white strips of paper stretched diagonally across the front doors of stores that look like they were vacated in a hurry. Once you get close enough, you can read the painted serial numbers on the house walls — WB-BUK 1 to 15 on one street — that tell you no one is coming back to these homes, and that many of those who lived there have been detained.
Welcome to Xinjiang in China’s north west.”
One of many such reports.
https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0...
Comment · 8 years ago
Local laws in East Berlin sanctioned the murder of Germans who sought to escape. Local laws in Vichy France required people to report hidden Jews to the police. Local laws in America under Jim Crow forbade interracial marriage, and denied Blacks their right to vote. Would you consider it unfortunate that some held these local laws to be unethical?
I’d ascribe no more legitimacy to similar laws made by an unelected, authoritarian government with a history of kidnapping, torturing, and killing nonviolent dissidents. I’m privately amazed that the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights is now a subject of controversy. Why do we believe the Chinese Communist Party when it says, “China is special, and the Chinese people do not deserve basic human freedoms?”
Comment · 8 years ago
I don't know what America has to do with anything, but China's income inequality is also worse than America's, so there's that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Comment · 8 years ago
The one-child policy also resulted in the worst gender imbalance in the world, which "could lead to instability as more men remain unmarried, raising the risks of anti-social and violent behavior."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-says-its-ge...
Comment · 8 years ago
If this were true, surely it would be in China's best interest to cease its many protectionist trade policies immediately. On the contrary, protectionism seems to work well when other countries are willing to put up with it, either for access to your workforce or access to your markets.
Comment · 8 years ago
“At first, Bekali did not want the AP to publish his account for fear that his sister and mother in China would be detained and sent to re-education.
But on March 10, back in China, the police took his sister, Adila Bekali. A week later, on March 19, they took his mother, Amina Sadik. And on April 24, his father, Ebrayem.“
Comment · 8 years ago
It denies them in kind, in intent, and in scope and scale.
“Six million Jews have been relocated by the German government for the purpose of poverty reduction.”
Comment · 8 years ago
The takeaway quote from your link:
"Authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China relocated 461,000 poverty-ridden residents to work in other parts of the region during the first quarter of the year, in what a Chinese expert on Friday said was a bid to improve social stability and alleviate poverty."
How kind of the government to forcibly separate families and relocate Uighurs to camps where there culture is eradicated, all in the name of poverty alleviation.
Here is another quote, with a link to a longer, more detailed article from a less-biased source (the Global Times is run by the Chinese Communist Party):
"Asked to comment on the camps, China’s Foreign Ministry said it “had not heard” of the situation."
Comment · 8 years ago
There is relevance to state-of-the-art surveillance technologies deployed in Xinjiang:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/china-s-xinjiang-p...
Comment · 8 years ago
Hypothetical: as the cost of mass storage continues to plunge, why wouldn’t less-scrupulous states gather as much dirt as possible on anyone of even the remotest national interest (through intermediaries, of course), in case it ever becomes valuable?
The cost/benefit equation there seems pretty clear. As a competitor state, his much would YOU pay for the next U.S. President’s private Facebook message history? A million dollars? A hundred million? Trade deals in the billions could be at stake.
Comment · 8 years ago
This gun-drone is real, however, and may have already been deployed in Israel:
It carries a stripped-down AR-style carbine, and makes shots at what looks like 50-100 yards with sufficient accuracy.
Comment · 8 years ago
I imagine a scaled-down version of the U.S. Army’s C-RAM, or Israel’s Trophy system, could work quite well for VIPs. Some drones can be VERY fast (think hobby-sized jet engine fast), so you’d need active radar and full automation to stand any kind of a chance.
Perhaps you’d use shotgun shells loaded with rock salt, so any overshoot into a crowd would be less-than-lethal.
Further evidence, if any is needed:
"The use of lethal force on the Berlin Wall was an integral part of the East German state's policy towards its border system."
"The Stasi took charge of "corpse cases" and those injured while trying to cross the border, who were transported to hospitals run by the Stasi or the police where they would recuperate before being transferred to Stasi prisons. The Stasi also took sole responsibility for the disposal of the dead and their possessions. Bodies were not returned to relatives but were cremated, usually at the crematorium at Baumschulenweg. Occasionally the cost of the cremations was covered by the victims themselves using money taken from their pockets.[25]
Stasi officers posing as policemen would inform the relatives, though not before trying to obtain "valuable pieces of information on the border violation". Deaths would be stated as being due to "a border provocation of his own causing", "a fatal accident of his own causing" or "drowning in a border waterway". Every border death was investigated in detail to identify how the attempt had been made, whether there were any vulnerabilities in the border system that needed to be remedied and whether anyone else had been involved. If necessary, the family, relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours were put under surveillance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_at_the_Berlin_W...