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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

Organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

> "According to the reports, political prisoners, mainly Falun Gong practitioners, are being executed "on demand" in order to provide organs to recipients."

Wild... I had no idea this was going on. There are a lot of things about China that I disagree with, but this might be the worst thing I've heard so far.

Imagine how much more efficiently the Chinese government could identify involuntary donors if it had better access to people's personal information.

Perhaps through a search engine of some kind. One with a harmless-sounding name. Maybe "Dragonfly" would be a good name.

especially if it has significant connection (like through common investors/execs) to a huge database of DNA.

> identify involuntary donors

err... dissidents. Highest political crime - being a 100%-match for a Central Committee member who needs liver transplant.

Google's mission statement is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful".

I'm sure we can all be happy if, with the help of Google, China becomes a more harmonious society, without any pesky troublemakers, and that hard-working Chinese Communist Party officials get the transplants they so deserve.

You must be using a definition of "universal" that I'm unfamiliar with, since Dragonfly removes key information on things like human rights.

I guess it wouldn't be HN if we didn't tie every story back to our own issues.

In this case, if Google ever does return to China I doubt the authorities would find it more useful for such purposes than existing sources such as iCloud, Bing, and Baidu already are.

Hey, at least everyone else is doing it too!

The point is more that the parent comment raises a different issue that doesn't really address the topic at hand. Even if another search engine did appear, it wouldn't allow the authorities to target dissidents more effectively than existing services already do.

If we want to actually make a difference, we might consider calling for those existing services to change their ways. Harder to pressure the domestic Chinese companies, of course, but it's surprising how little attention is paid to Western companies who are actually in China and benefitting from it.

Good incentive to get your social credit score up.

High social credit could be an indicator of a clean life and thus, clean organs.

Better off looking like an alcoholic on paper.

My imagination fails here - the government administers mandatory physicals to the citizens and holds any other medical data, how a search engine will help it to be more efficient at finding matching donors? Am I missing something obvious here?

China, like Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - any nation that is a totalitarian state - will commit endless atrocities so long as those in power believe they can get away with it. Be it their own people or other nations.

And they do get away with it. All so I can buy a phone for 20% less that it would cost to manufacture in my own country. A few million dead, disfigured, tortured, scarred, raped. Billions living under thought control. Chump change to keep my clothes dirt cheap so the Walton family can buy a few more islands in the Caribbean while Jeff Bezos accumulates enough money to buy the moon.

>And they do get away with it. All so I can buy a phone for 20% less that it would cost to manufacture in my own country. A few million dead, disfigured, tortured, scarred, raped. Billions living under thought control. Chump change to keep my clothes dirt cheap so the Walton family can buy a few more islands in the Caribbean while Jeff Bezos accumulates enough money to buy the moon.

Are you really saying that if US President had balls to push China on human rights then China would retaliate by refusing to produce cheap phones and clothes for US? Or say Russia would stop selling the oil?

Unbelievable. It would be an atrocity merely to rob someone of “non-vital” organs that they can live without, like a spare kidney.

To murder someone and profit from the sale of vital organs is simply beyond my comprehension. I cannot fathom a more monstrous act.

There is another way to look at this.

These are people who are already subject to execution. They get to stay alive a bit longer in order to preserve the organs. So rather than causing death, the possibility of organ transplants is what keeps these people alive.

There's always a more depraved way to look at something. Unless you actually hold that view, why dig for it?

Supposedly the prisoners were alive and conscious while they were cut open and their organs removed (no anesthesic). If I’m going to die, I think I’d rather face the firing squad and get it over with.

And then there’s the extraordinarily perverse profit motive to arrest more dissidents for organ harvesting.

Why would they do that? That has to be unpleasant for the doctors and damaging to the organs themselves... or is this “fake news”

That was my first reaction too: it risks damaging the valuable organs that they’re going to extraordinary lengths to ‘acquire’.

The testimony came from an officer who stood guard while it happened.

> Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive. [..] we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand a phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all the standards we know. There is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Every time you try to imagine some nightmarish dystopia, chances are China already implemented it with a great success.

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