Heebietake: OP link 1:
2009, a watershed year when a Uighur riot broke out in Xinjiang, leaving nearly 200 members of China's Han ethnic majority dead, and security began to ratchet up.That's far from the whole story though. I've just started reading on this, but the PRC (and ROC before it) has really deep problems with its non-Han minorities.
For instance:
What about the Tibetans, Mongols, Manchu, and other former Qing dynasty frontier peoples that Sun [Yatsen] admitted did not share the same minzu [race/nation] characteristics as the Han majority? He dismissed them as numerically insignificant and evolutionarily unfit, arguing that despite the less than ten million "non-natives" (wailai), "we can say that the four hundred million Chinese people are entirely Hanzu: sharing a common blood, common language, common religion, and common customs--a single, pure minzu" (Sun, [1924a] 1981-86: 188). As for the frontier minorities, it was only a matter of time before they "smelted together in the same oven" (rongye wei yilu) with the Han majority to fashioning a new corporate, yet equally pure, Zhonghua minzu
[...]
Despite its slightly different vocabulary, the goal of the PRC discourse on national unity (minzu tuanjie) remains the same: the construction of a myth of national belonging rooted in the perception of a common history, soil, and blood.
There were a bunch of terrorist knife attacks in Xinjiang a few years back too.
And, of course, Xinjiang has not been Chinese for very long, in historical terms. It was only conquered and annexed in 1760, and there were several very large rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Uighur terrorism is real, but that's only a fraction of the explanation (not that I think Barry buys the party line).
A bunch of shorter pieces:
China bans list of Islamic names in restive Xinjiang region (the names include "Muhammad").
China moves to expand DNA testing in Muslim region
Anger with China drives Uighurs to Syrian war
China using personal data as repression tool
From the last:
The Human Rights Watch report reveals for the first time that the disparate data collection efforts appear to be unified under one central digital database that calculates citizens' political risk. [...] Wang said she has found evidence that Chinese police are building similar big-data tracking capabilities in other parts of the country under a program called the "police cloud," but do not deploy them to as such an extent as in Xinjiang.It's not just the Uighurs, it's all the minorities; and it's not just the minorities, it's everyone. This is how the PRC treats people.
4: And effectively independent, or under Soviet control, in the early-mid 20th.
4: Also true, give or take a century, for Tibet, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Taiwan, much of Guanxi and Yunnan. Qing conquests are ~60% of of modern Chinese territory.
But remember, that's not imperialism, because reasons.
Had a discussion a decade ago with a Chinese person about Tibet. She was surprised at criticism of China denying Tibetan autonomy, because Tibetans were a backward, primitive civilization that China was giving everything to, so they could be modernized. "Interesting," I thought, "so the treatment of Tibet is basically like the treatment of Native Americans by us, back then." And now it's moved from that, to high-tech Stalinism.
But while Sun Yat-sen and other moderates within the Tongmenghui had no problem with Liang Qichao's call for the assimilation of the evolutionarily unfit minorities, accepting his entire formula would nullify the very foundation of revolutionary activism: the need to overthrow the Manchu dynasty. Sun's predicament hinged on the need to exclude the Manchus from political power in order to legitimate the establishment of a Han-dominated republic while still inheriting the territorial boundaries and by extension the various ethnic polities of the Qing empire.
Qing conquests are ~60% of of modern Chinese territory.
And they were incredibly expensive to conquer and keep - hence Beijing's insatiable hunger for silver in the 18th and 19th centuries, to pay its troops with, hence their bans on pretty much any conceivable foreign import, hence the Opium Wars.
And chronically inadequate taxation, and rapid population growth on a hard currency...But yes.
Thanks for the links, Mossy! The first link especially is really good.
I have no response besides being appalled, and kind of afraid. People in the US don't think this can happen here. But there's a low-competence enormous internal security force more militarized than local police being built right now.
Kind of surprised that there's no response from either SA or UAE. I see mentions that there's no coverage of this in Arabic language media, but I can't tell myself. Lebanese paper in French that I read covers it, lots of comments there. (L'Orient Le Jour)
The history (and the semantics thereof) are sufficiently more complicated than 7 allows that I think I have to disagree with it. I might buy 30 or 40%, just because Xinjiang and Qinghai are *big*, but 60 seems excessive.
I think it also turned out that opium is bad for you.
Oh, and it's hundreds, rather than tens, of thousands.
14: Wiki gives a total land area for China of 9.6m square kilometres, of which:
Xinjiang 1.7m
Tibet 1.2m
Inner Mongolia 1.2m
Qinghai 0.7m
Total 4.8m.
So just those four get you 50% of China's total land area.
Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, get me to 57.6% of present-day PRC+ROC. And some fraction of Yunnan and Guanxi (and I think Gansu) should be added to that.
It always surprises me the extent to which many highly educated Chinese people genuinely buy into the party line. Seems very different from say Soviets. (And hence why such stronger restrictions on travel were needed for the Soviet Union than China has.)
Maybe China saw what happened there and decided to spread around consumer goods.
I'm at the point of wanting to know what to do: keep pressing for more visibility? Bring it up with everyone I know? Sign petitions? Call members of Congress? The lack of international leverage against China worries me, but there might be something.
There's plenty of leverage against China. They're more integrated than the USSR ever was, and fear of western sanctions did much to kill them. The leverage cuts both ways, yes, but it's there.
5.1 You're right, I don't. But it's hard not to see it as one of the triggers (the way that mass Falun Gong protest was a trigger for the repression that followed, although that was much more immediate).
13.3 I'm not surprised that there has been no response from KSA or the UAE in the least, in fact I'd be (very pleasantly) surprised if there was. Nothing about this in what passes for a press here, but I don't watch Arabic TV news so maybe there's some coverage there, I'll have to ask.
19, 20: presumably that's part of it; you don't have the same dynamic where all the cool consumer goods are produced abroad and effectively unavailable to citizens.
Another part of it may be that Russia is basically the Donald Trump of countries; it desperately wants to be part of the cool kids' club (the West) but knows that they all look down on it as a sort of semi-comical uncouth peasant, and so oscillates between frantic attempts at emulation and embittered lashing out. China doesn't have that.
24.1: Totally. The USSR had to convince the nomenklatura of communist superiority, in obvious contradiction with the facts. The CCP has a much better (broadly true) story to tell, where China has always been the center of civilization, it's just had some bad luck lately. (That the CCP was the worst of that luck is of course airbrushed.)
22: I can't parse your second sentence. The final "them" is the USSR?
Anyway yes, in theory there's plenty of leverage against China. But where should a person put pressure in practice? And I do mean "a person." It has crossed my mind that the current U.S. government is worse than fucking useless here. (California might be another story, economically and/or culturally.)
I also find myself idly wondering if the ~six people who regularly comment here are the only non-users of Facebook left over from the larger group circa 2012/13.
28 Is there a lot of discussion about similar Unfogged type topics by former Unfogged commenters on Facebook?
18,19: Oh, I was forgetting about the Northeast.
Tibet is a lot more complicated than the standard Western narrative assumes though, as I'm sure Mossy knows. They haven't been de jure independent since before the Mongol (Yuan) conquest. Not that it matters a great deal, but in the Chinese conception of things, Tibet has been "theirs" for like eight hundred years.
I also have things to say about Yunnan and Guangxi, too, but that will have to wait.
24. China is also importing tens or even hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese to Xinjiang, building new cities or sections of cities, and places for them to work as well. They have done in this Tibet and Inner Mongolia, too. In Inner Mongolia they are doing their best to stamp out the indigenous language and script. Not sure if they are doing that in Tibet. Forced assimilation has been their way of dealing with non-Han for millennia, and it has been very successful.
China's issue (which they IMHO overhype constantly both at home and abroad) is that they were beaten up during the 19th century by the Western powers, and by Japan in the 20th century. There is a whole school curriculum of Chinese degradation by outsiders. It goes on and on and includes that for truly significant segments of its history, "China" has been ruled by outsiders, which to say the Emperor was also the leader of another polity. Most but not all of the invaders were from Mongolia and points north and west, including parts of what now Xinjiang and Tibet.
China also constantly overstates the case about how unified China was at almost any time in the past, and the extent of Chinese rule as well. Hence you get fantasies like the "9-dash line" in the South China Sea and equally imaginary borders everywhere else.
If America were really the land of the free and the home of the brave, we would open the door to Uigher refugees.
Not only is it the right thing to do on humanitarian grounds, but it would provide a international base for political resistance to ethnic cleansing of Uighers.
33. !lham's daughter is a student in the US. Li Hongzhi is now a US citizen and resident as well. I think that's the style of brave freedom that's realistic to expect.
28: I remember CharleyCarp saying something to this effect last year, which confirmed my suspicions. The blog has also seemed more depopulated than usual in the last few months, with flurries of activity. I wouldn't know whether the exodus-to-Facebook is an open secret or something I'm making up, because I don't have an account.
Anyway, this is less important than shedding light on crimes against humanity, but it also sadly highlights the comparative uselessness of this space (versus social networks) for trying to strategize any kind of action. This guy, who wrote the article gswift linked a few weeks ago, seems like a good one to follow... but again, that's social media, doing what social media does. If you're a China scholar or related public figure you can take some kind of pledge here, etc.
We may be more useless than Facebook, but, unless I missed something in the archives, we've provided much less genocidal propaganda.
I have an fb, see a few ex-uf people there.
I don't post much there. Two people from here (both professors) post thoughtful text occasionally that gets good responses there.
My own occasional postings of words don't go anywhere-- the few times that I've posted something non-personal that gets much response, it's been an image and a few words that serve basically as a headline, domestically relevant, not international.
Possibly if you have an fb audience of some size built by other means, international news snippets will be worthwhile, but I don't know how well that would actually work.
I haven't read Z Tufekci's book, maybe she has useful insights.
James Palmer is also a good follow for things Xinjiang and China more generally.He used to comment and post at B&T and has written some great books.
36: Well, leaving aside Halford.
36: Well, there are a few weeks of the archives from 2007 that have been mysteriously scrubbed. Oh, well. Nobody's perfect.
41: Sorry. Can't do that. Oath of silence.
35: I've been around here less than I was let's say 2+ years ago, but not because I've been using Facebook more. I have an account but I'm probably here more and definitely have been using Facebook less than I was back then. Instead I've been doing more real-life socializing (parenthood is a mixed blessing), and reading about Warcraft and other things on Reddit. I'm ambivalent about this.
This seems more likely to provoke a reaction in the U.S.
https://nypost.com/2018/09/10/china-wages-war-on-jesus/
You lose 10 points in the Chinese social ranking scheme* if you aren't Alliance, because Pandarens are Alliance and Pandaria is pretty much China.
* Not really, but they are cracking down on people, especially kids, who use too much screen time. It's part of a national campaign against myopia.
Leraning to read with small type and bad lighting is really hard on the eyes. This makes China's curriculum, which takes a lot of rote exercise from material printed on cheap paper (便宜的纸) hard on the eyes, even before you consider low-wattage flourescent light effects.
In all seriousness, LED installation everywhere is goiung to make a big difference.
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Oh my god, I posted an entry and then realized I was being dumb, so I went to delete the post, and somehow it asked me if I wanted to "rebuild the site" and now it's spinning it's wheels - rebuilding page 2000-2100! - and I hope I didn't wreck this whole 15 year venture.
Anyway that's why that nonfunctional post is still up.
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Oh phew, it's gone. Carry on. Maybe I should just delete all of this, in the spirit of the PRC.
It was a dumb explanation from a precalculus textbook that irritated me, but I was misreading it and thinking they were being much worse than they're actually being.
Well, looks like it's just you and me, Heebie.
49: You should have left it up. I would never have figured out that you were wrong.
I migrated to the inside of my head, mostly.
Anyway, finding a mistake in the OP is one of the few things that brings this place back to life. Remember that time ogged posted something wrong about baseball! Good times!
Surely it's twitter, not facebook, that unfogged has lost people too? And maybe Reddit for some people. But there's always been a churn, less new lurkers don't turn up and become regulars.
Unfogged comments aren't as good as they used to, but I don't really see any reason to complain about volume when you have so many 100+ comments. Threads are still longer than in the early years of the site.
I hope I didn't wreck this whole 15 year venture.
There's backups, right?
The blog has also seemed more depopulated than usual in the last few months
Unfogged is often slower during the summer months.
41: Remember the train wreck scene at the beginning of the Fugitive remake that went on for about 45 minutes and had more train cars flying in every time you thought it was over?
I think 56 is part of it, and also I think things pick up in election season. Our long dark national season of angst is nigh.
There's a lot going on in Uighur country.
China has always been about the Han, and a standardized version of the Han at that. China itself is facing economic problems as growth slows and it gets harder to subsidize old industries. The political crackdown began five or ten years ago with Xi consolidating power within the party. It isn't just the Uighurs. Chinese Christians are under attack as are those practicing any non-Han religion. That includes Islam.
China is facing a demographic crisis. The Uighurs, as an ethnic minority, were excluded from the one child policy. China is aging and the number of Han of childbearing age is shrinking. I'm sure that demographic worries are part of the direction of the crackdown.
Uighur country is an energy rich region with lots of coal and oil. That increases the sensitivity to threats in the region.
Finally, industry in Chinas has been restructuring. They have been automating and increasing productivity which means they have a big rust belt and a lot of un and under employed miners and factory workers. Repression has increased in the Chinese rust belt as it has elsewhere. The Uighurs have gotten aught up in that as well.
What the PRC is doing is horrendous. But a part of me wonders whether the goal is OK even if the means are abhorrent. How many examples are there of multi-ethnic nation states where different groups have peacefully and respectfully coexisted for multiple generations? Switzerland and who else?
National identities are social constructs, so maybe the least bad option is to promote cohesion and convergence of identity by policies like heavy-handed education of children and giving tax breaks to people who form families of mixed ethnic identities.
There's a lot of ground between 'let's have public education for all in a common national culture" and running concentration camps.
60: I don't particularly see the elimination of a people as a desirable goal, whatever the means.
If we're listing multi-ethnic states, "respectful" is a high bar, but I'll give it a shot: Singapore, Iran, the Andean countries, Canada, the UK, Tanzania, for varying values of "respectful".
Where the fuck did this genocide apologist come from?
62: I think how you strive for objectives matters a great deal.
Shades of Tucker Carlson's latest.
Nothing good will come from this social networking.
Clean up in aisle 64. Take the Twitter hot takes elsewhere. If you actually wanted to contribute, you would at a minimum use the term ethnocide. Shame on you.
I regret the false precision. I meant Nazi.
63:
Singapore had the 1964 race riots.
Iran had/has an insurgency in Balochistan, and it represses the Kurds.
The Mapuche people are repressed in Chile, and the word "indio" is used as a generic insult.
Canada was/is horrible to First Nations people.
The UK is peaceful to the extent that Danelaw and Anglo-Saxon identities merged and then merged again with Norman identity. It wasn't peaceful early on, and it's still iffy in Northern Ireland.
67, 70: yes, that common Nazi demand of tax breaks for inter-ethnic/racial couples. You've been poisoned by Twitter knee jerk culture. #BeBetter
63: is it "elimination of a people" to promote intermarriage and the sense of a shared national identity (which is not the same as forcing the majority cultural identity on minority groups)?
65: I agree. What I hear from you is you're OK with promoting intermarriage and the sense of a shared national identity by some means but not by others. I'm not sure I agree with that goal myself, but I'm open being persuaded.
60. Here, at least before your mom showed up. Some other idiot offered to shave her back, and now look.
60.2 is a real point, but it's adequately refuted by 61. The objective of PRC policy isn't mutual respect or harmony or national cohesion, it's annihilation of non-Han culture. Their policies are importantly different from fascism or racism as they are familiar to Westerners, but that shouldn't obscure what we're looking at. The UN Genocide Convention:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:PRC actions to date include (a) and (b); I assume the children of those in detention are now wards of the (Han) state, amounting to (e); and the policy as a whole clearly is intended to destroy Uighurs as a "group, as such", albeit not (yet) by physically killing all of them.(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Tibet is a lot more complicated than the standard Western narrative assumes though, as I'm sure Mossy knows. They haven't been de jure independent since before the Mongol (Yuan) conquest. Not that it matters a great deal, but in the Chinese conception of things, Tibet has been "theirs" for like eight hundred years.
The Qing state was Manchu, not Han, and the Han were only one of five major ethnicities it included, on formally equal footing (I think similar things apply to the Yuan). After 1911 the ROC claimed succession to the Qing and all its territory. In most places they managed to get that claim accepted diplomatically, but the ROC never effectively occupied all Qing territory, and the PRC didn't do so until the 1950s.
You say the Chinese conception doesn't much matter, and I agree, but I think it's worth drawing that out explicitly, because the CCP (and KMT) love to push the line of an eternal, immutable, indivisible China, and a lot of Westerners buy that, or even push it themselves for their own reasons. But ROC succession to the Qing was highly contingent. Where their claims were effectively disputed, they didn't stick. They lost Outer Mongolia; had Taiwan formally declared independence in the early Cold War I think they would have lost Taiwan; one can imagine not-implausible timelines producing an independent Tibet, or Xinjiang, or Manchuria. For a sense of just how contingent:
During the late 1920s, the Twenty-fourth Army pushed the Tibetan forces west of the Yangtze, gradually garrisoning a number of settlements on the river's eastern shores. In the summer of 1930, the Tibetan militia in Kham counterattacked Liu's positions in Xikang on the pretext of assisting the Tibetan monks of the Targye Monastery in their long-running dispute with the Twenty-fourth-Army-backed Pehru tribal chieftain (tusi). Thanks to its new weaponry and training received from the British, the Tibetan army quickly pushed the overextended forces of Liu Wenhui back to within one hundred miles of Kangding.This while Tibet was not de jure independent; one can see the same things happening in the same places throughout the Tang period. I don't know about the intervening millennium, but I expect things were broadly similar.
Ming is the weird part. Tibet was pretty damn independent, but the Ming court kept insisting on appointing Tibetan kings as its viceroys, so the Tibetans started appointing Chinese nobles as their viceroys.
has anyone told you to fuck off lately, FB? I'm happy to volunteer.
Ming claiming, evidently unsuccessfully, to succeed to the Yuan? Parallels abound.
Why don't you go assimilate yourself into a different blog culture, FB?
74: do you think what we're seeing is better explained as motivated by Han-supremacism or by the desire to secure national control over a region the PRC only took over in 1949? It can be hard to disambiguate the two, but it at least seems plausible that to the extent they conflict, Chen Quanguo prioritizes the latter over the former. I'm super extremely highly skeptical of this quote, but if it's true, the Han residents are taking on some parts of Uigher identity:
"They don't really eat those things [pig] regularly anymore so I don't usually ask about them."
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/special/uyghur-oppression/ChenPolicy2.html
How do 60.2 and 61 conflict?
73, 77: ?
Heebie, does Unfogged have a Code of Conduct? Because it appears to need one, based on some of the bizarre harassment being sent my way. It appears to be friendly fire coming from people who are misreading my comments as if this were Twitter, but it's still abusive.
For you abusers, just realize you're sending your vitriol into a member of an ethnic community undergoing assimilation, and not entirely voluntarily. Your mistakes, taken to their conclusion, led to the death of Rukmani:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/18/technology/whatsapp-india-killings.html
Shame on you and your ignorant friendly
Oh, dear FB, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more;
Or, if that burden be too great,
To go away at any rate.
I started to feel bad about 82 but then I re-read the escalation of manipulation in 80, on top of the bad faith of previous comments.
Let's all post our SAT scores, ethnic backgrounds, and methods that nation states can use to enforce a shared national identity within their respective geographic borders that obliterates all ethnic difference in totally low-key, voluntary ways that do not involve violations of fundamental human rights. But not because we think that nation states should enforce national identities that obliterate all ethnic difference, but because we're just wondering whether it would be a good goal for nation states to enforce national identities that obliterate all ethnic difference and our open minds are open to persuasion.
I also find myself idly wondering if the ~six people who regularly comment here are the only non-users of Facebook left over from the larger group circa 2012/13.
I use Facebook, but I'm not connected on FB with most of the people here.
Via the FT, long and relevant article here
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2018.1507997?scroll=top&needAccess=true&
Basically there were three triggers for the latest wave of repression: the 9/11 attacks made Beijing worried about AQ activity among its own Muslim subjects; the riots in 2009 seemed to confirm that this was actually happening; the Belt and Braces Initiative in 2013 made keeping the Muslims under control an economic and strategic imperative.
80.1: The answer obviously is both. IDK which, if either, weighs more. Either motive makes the PRC atrocious, as the policy is vastly disproportionate to any possible security threat.
86 last: Some people think the causation also runs the other way: the BRI was launched to gain influence in central Asia and so deny the Uighurs a nearby hinterland.
How do 60.2 and 61 conflict?
Logically, they don't, and I misused "refute". Restated: even if we admit as a legitimate goal the creation of a common national culture, we need not admit atrocious PRC policies as legitimate means to that end, nor admit such an end as an argument in mitigation for such policies. (Which last you are certainly doing by rhetoric, and my civility for you is exhausted.)
Yeah. I went to sleep anyway, so I missed it. I've been performing neoliberalism lately and I'm exhausted.
I still read everything here but don't comment very often, I guess mostly because I don't always want to bother with arguments where I feel my take is predictable and assumed. I've been thinking about being more active but clearly haven't done much about it.
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A student sent me an apologetic email titled "Absence of class". It's true that he's a bit of a redneck, but if he'd only show up for class, we'd be good.
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Yes. It's like an absence of class.
I don't always want to bother with arguments where I feel my take is predictable and assumed
I never let that hold me back.
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Can I get a meet-up post? I'm coming to the UK tomorrow (Oxford for a few days, then London with a brief stop at Taunton). I'll be free in London on Sept 19-20 and Sept 22-23 (unless someone wants to join me for a 35mm screening of Youssef Chahine's The Earth on the 18th and Elaine May's A New Leaf ot hde 21st.
I'll be staying very near the British Library.
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ot hde s/b on the.
I'm not drunk, just panic packing.
There is a surprising alternative to trying to assimilate a recalcitrant and geographically isolated population, one that's called "independence". Certainly it's not something that the US has ever tried, but it's not inconceivable.
I would support a blog Code of Conduct, but only if it does not constrain my behavior in any way.
98: Drunk packing is clearly preferable to panic packing.
a brief stop at Taunton
Town motto: it smells worse on the inside.
I'm trying to comment here less, as I feel like I haven't been adding much lately.
Heh. I was looking for a joke on that but didn't find one.
|| Idiot doodle-scribbler Jordan Peterson claims to subsist entirely on beef, salt and water. This is a bad idea. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/10/my-carnivore-diet-jordan-peterson-beef
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100.last Not true, you add value. Comment more!
99. An alternative not tried very often. Czechoslovakia's "velvet divorce"? Singapore from Malaysia? ISTR some small islands in the Caribbean and Pacific doing this successfully. Most of the time the recalcitrant minority attempts to secede against the wishes of the majority, and war ensues.
China has all sorts of realpolitik reasons not to permit Xinjiang (much less Inner Mongolia, Tibet or Taiwan) to gain independence. Alas.
There is a surprising alternative to trying to assimilate a recalcitrant and geographically isolated population, one that's called "independence". Certainly it's not something that the US has ever tried
The Philippines?
What 103 said.
I guess I can add marginally related value in saying my current stupid custody dispute is about whether (and if so how) Lee should be allowed to take Mara to China for a week or two this summer while teaching there. That she attached this request to a series of emails I had sent from the ER the night before about how doctors really weren't sure what was wrong with Mara but wanted to try a new medicine and have us keep an eye on things might make a judge more inclined to agree with me that Lee isn't keeping Mara's health as a top priority in this planning. But maybe not!
96: I'm generally available around those dates. The 19th would be perfect for me as I'm taking the day off work. Others may prefer a weekend though.
An alternative not tried very often.
Really? Independence without a war to gain it hasn't been tried very often?
Just off the top of my head:
India
Nigeria
Ghana
Tanzania
All the post-Soviet states (subject to some clawback in Ukraine obviously)
Malaysia, arguably (the MPLA didn't succeed in winning independence on their terms)
Myanmar
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa
Egypt
and Cuba.
As you'd expect, FB is different and much more personal. The one fellow's father who passed away a day or two ago, kids going off to college, new jobs, new homes, life moving along, some politics as well, but that also maybe a bit more personal. The audience for any given post is much more diverse, which affects form more than content, I think. No genocide apologists in my feed, which is good, because I do have some Native folks in my flock, and assimilation looks pretty personal. (I also have a Uyghur exile (whom I know from GTMO), so I see a bunch of stuff about what's going on there . . .)
Twitter is less personal, and well placed to serve as an aggregation service. I may not click through all the links Barry posts, but it's a fine thing that he's doing them.
For the record, I did not know we were supposed to be adding value.
It's in our code of conduct, which is posted by the unicorn pen.
third 103, more Thorn would be nice, no need for innovative argument.
I'll add value by recommending the Mountain Goats' Song for Cleomenes
88: what rhetoric? Did you fail to read that I said what China is doing is abhorrent?
Idiot doodle-scribbler Jordan Peterson claims to subsist entirely on beef, salt and water.
See also bitcoin carnivorism, which is a thing. Because of course it is.
80: Unpacking these sorts of tangles requires a diplomacy far above my skill set, but you're wrassling with long-established good-faith commenters who have my backing.
You are probably right that you're getting the Twitter-treatment, because nobody knows you from Adam here.
I think you riled people up with this:
What the PRC is doing is horrendous. But a part of me wonders whether the goal is OK even if the means are abhorrent. How many examples are there of multi-ethnic nation states where different groups have peacefully and respectfully coexisted for multiple generations? Switzerland and who else?
because the first sentence isn't forceful enough to outweigh the unpleasantness of the second sentence.
I concur as someone else who hasn't been chiming in here. You read like you're either trying to deniably convey sympathy with the PRC's methods, or just extremely deaf to those connotations.
(Also, it's just... an extraordinarily boring question, taken purely on its face, whether their end goals are reasonable. Most moral monsters have plausibly reasonable end goals; it's proverbial.)
I'm pretty sure "alameida gets to tell people to fuck off" is in the code of conduct regardless.
What the PRC is doing is horrendous. But a part of me wonders whether the goal is OK even if the means are abhorrent. How many examples are there of multi-ethnic nation states where different groups have peacefully and respectfully coexisted for multiple generations? Switzerland and who else?
I thought it was odd that Tucker Carlson was posting here, but maybe Unfogged still does matter.
112. We need to add value to increase the size of the upcoming Unfogged IPO.
108. Not to carp too nerdily, but I think the "gaining independence without a war" thing was aimed at areas contiguous with the larger polity, even if "geographically isolated." India-Nigeria-Ghana/UK, etc. don't qualify. CCarp's 110? Cuba became independent without a war? Not in 1898.
117: that sounds reasonable. To give more context, I come from a group that has experienced forms of colonialism, cultural genocide, assimilation, ethnocide, you name it. Because of that, I've studied the experience of minority groups extensively, and the more I learn, the more depressed I am about humans. Majority groups being shitty is so common, it's the exception to learn about cases where they were minimally decent for a long stretch of time.
So what do I do with this? I do some activism, but I'm skeptical about whether activism alone is enough. How can we immunize humans from being shitty toward minority groups? If the problem is in-group vs. out-group identities, the ideal is expanding the definition of in-group to encompass all humanity, but that seems unlikely. As a lesser goal, is it possible to engineer a situation where if there must be out-groups, and least there is some cost to attacking them?
I'm not convinced it's a good idea, but considering how flawed humans are, I've wondered whether the least bad option is some form of cultural engineering so that nation states match in-group boundaries, and an enlightened diplomatic class forms a higher-level in-group, bridging the nation-level in-groups.
Tax breaks for mixed marriages would be a possible form of this engineering. China is doing this, in addition to other horrible things. Is what China is doing bad because of how they're doing it, or is the goal itself bad, assuming China is trying to form a nation-level in-group?
And I'll point out that the response many of you had to me was motivated by in-group/out-group mentality. Even if your intentions were good, you were an example of what you condemned.
Well, most of us own stock in concentration camp companies.
Why don't you frame your question more concretely? What group are you a member of, and what trade-offs in loss of culture would you welcome in exchange for material safety?
For the second half, I mean, people are super shitty. We're all doomed. We're all just trying to pass until we can go back to bed and be by ourselves, at which point you're stuck in your own head, so you might as well live the kind of moral life you can live with.
That's why I never see what my 401k is invested in.
Also how the hell does Switzerland count as multi ethnic?
121 -- I was thinking of independence from the US, rather than from Spain. There was a war, I should have remembered, or a Pacification, as we call it. I was misremembering the Teller and Platt amendments.
124: Ironically, the nasty response from some here in addition to elsewhere means I don't feel safe to answer the first question. For the second, my family has given up the language, and I have given up living within the community, such as it existed in my childhood, in order to lead a middleclass coastal existence.
126: They have many kinds of Germans.
If you turn out to be from a rural flyover small town in the US, I'm going to have some belly laughs, but ok.
Born and raised in South Detroit.
I've wondered whether the least bad option is some form of cultural engineering so that nation states match in-group boundaries
Nation states are getting more and more obsolete every day. Instead of figuring out how ethnic separatism can be used to keep them going, probably its better to devote energy into figuring out how pluralism can be a part of whatever comes next.
122.last: Oh, seriously, please fuck off with that bollocks. The rest of your ethnic group, whatever it is, are welcome to stay, but you should fuck off at your earliest convenience. You don't get to pop up, say "hmm well I deplore their methods but maybe the Chinese have the right general idea about their minorities" and then, when people call you on it, accuse _them_ of genocidal tendencies.
117&118 are right. Here's what FB actually says. (Almost all of it not said outright but insinuated, by open questions and wordily hedged statements - techniques known as rhetoric.)
60:
1. PRC is horrendous.
2. Heterogeneous states aren't workable (CCP line.)
3. Assimilationist education and family policies are good. (CCP line.)
62: 60.3 policies and public education in liberal democracies have the same intention, implying moral equivalence. (Probably CCP line.)
69: Insult.
71: Claims supporting 60.2. (True (AFAIK), but tendentious in context; claims regarding abuses in Western countries also CCP lines.); insults.
72
1. 60.3 policies don't amount to genocide. (CCP line.)
2. Implies (falsely) that Moby assents to 60.3 policies, and that FB doesn't (in contradiction with 60).
80-81:
1. PRC Xinzhuang policy is plausibly driven by security, not assimilationism. (CCP line, untrue.)
2. Han are also assimilating to Uighur culture. (probably CCP line.)
3. Reasserts 62 (CCP line), asserts 60.3 doesn't entail concentration camps. (True, but tendentious in context.)
4. Disingenuousness.
5. Insults.
6. Special pleading.
7. Insults.
115: Disingenuousness.
I think the question FB raises is actually more interesting than Minivet allows, but it isn't the question for this thread, and certainly not the most salient question about the PRC. For that, I reiterate 74.
when people call you on it, accuse _them_ of genocidal tendencies.
When those genocidal tendencies are what FB appears to be endorsing.
Thank you for the kind words, all. Wasn't fishing for compliments, but appreciated. And of course we can always use more Thorn-content.
FB, while people might be a little bit kinder if you were a regular, since they'd know where you're coming from, I think it was literally your ideas that were an issue, not that you're a member of an out-group*. Another way to view the goal of turning a multi-culture by harmonious single-culture state is that you put little value on the original minority culture, or at least less than on the harmony a monoculture would provide the majority. And it's fair to call any movement in that direction cultural genocide (or ethnocide if you really prefer; I'm not a sociologist so the distinction is too fine for me), whether via push or pull. I think you can make a distinction between doing so and providing skills via education that allow a member of the minority culture to survive alongside the majority culture without necessarily being part of it. (And yes of course there'll be fusion and some degree of contact convergence, there always is, but I think that has very little to do with what we're talking about.)
* I assume the out-group in question is non-regulars. If you meant whichever ethnic group you belong to, well. That's something.
136: Which bridge in Stockholm do the trolls live under?
There's a big troll under a bridge in Seattle.
It's bad, but we have no leverage over them, and it's not invading Iraq.
I don't remember. But it's rather famous.
Yes I know the troll. I just don't know what it's up to at the moment.
So do we bring the fruit basket or do they bring pastries?
Generally, FB, if people respond to things you type with outraged offense, it can be helpful to apologize for giving offense and look for a less inflammatory way to put things, or to ask for feedback about how to resolve the conflict. One de facto code of conduct here seems to be that everyone is responsible for proactively resolving conflicts as they arise, particularly whoever spoke first. 69 is not a model of how to do this.
Hey wait... are you Frostbite? Is that what FB stands for? Either way, it's fine, but knowing that would provide some clarity.
142 to 139. Not as long as we can keep it in Seattle, certainly.
The best thing about the Swedish election wass local post in Karlstad that was known as the anti moomin party because it campaigned against a moomin theme park being built on what had been common land.i love them. It is entirely in the spirit o of Tove Jansson tio prefer wilderness to theme parks
I was going to launch into the whole thing about not allowing two-letter names but somebody fucked that up for me.
Hey, I forget, was I supposed to remember something today?
Well, it's seventeen years to the day since my habit of not getting up early in the mornings unintentionally saved me from having a widebody airliner rammed into my face.
How is this night different from all other nights?
150: You'd better not be remembering the Alamo today. Or Coco.
Genocidal Tendencies is my least favorite punk metal band.
OT: These gummy bears all have a little "A" on their chests. Which makes me wonder what they were up to in bag.
Somewhere there is another bag of identical gummy bears with a little "RANGERS" on their chests.
155: yes, it was an interesting holiday.
Related: the mysterious disappearance of Fan Bingbing. This bit is striking:
Fan scored zero out of 100 in the category in the 2017-18 China Film and Television Star Social Responsibility Report, compiled by Beijing Normal University and the state-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Corporate Social Responsibility Research Institute...Only nine celebrities scored above 60 in terms of social responsibility, considered a passing grade, and the report said stars should promote "positive energy" and be more mindful they could cause "negative social impact".
FB, seems like the most humane policy if different ethnic groups can't equitably share a state would often be to allow and encourage the minority to secede (or at least mostly self-govern), rather than to forcibly acculturate them to the majority culture.
Science-fictional, but I've been enjoying the Centenal Cycle by Malka Older (third book released yesterday). The basic political unit is a territory of 100,000 population, which can go it alone or vote to sign up with a larger political alignment, but all elections are run by and communications annotated for accuracy by a big neutral global agency, Information. Whose actions, alignment, and governance is obviously a huge deal in turn.
164 sounds similar to this http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_15754.html#1929459 but with no Badger of Honour.
I'm going to paste this link here for the weekend:
https://newrepublic.com/article/150476/american-elite-universities-selfcensorship-china
Self-censorship is a familiar concept in global business--and especially in Washington's political circles. But academic self-censorship when it comes to China is particularly troubling. The country is America's most important foreign relationship, chief geostrategic concern, largest single trading partner, and only real rival for global political power. U.S. universities and think tanks are among the best sources of information about China, especially because censorship there reduces the utility of Chinese journalists and academics working in the country. Self-censorship within American institutions, therefore, restricts the ability of U.S. policymakers, businesspeople, human rights advocates, and the general public to make smart decisions about how to interact with China.