‘If I disappear’: Chinese students make farewell messages amid crackdowns

If you offer me (1G$/50yr=) 20 million dollars a year to spend eight hours a day trying to find a solution to this, then sure, I'll take that job and do it to the best of my ability. I don't expect to succeed, but as long as the paychecks clear I'll keep working.

If you offer me a billion dollars contingent on finding a solution, I'm going to ignore you, just like I ignore the people offering a million dollars for a solution to P vs NP, or XX million dollars for correctly predicting which six balls they pull out of a basket.

I wouldn't spend 100% of my time on that singular social problem, but yes.

But that has nothing to do with reality on account of you having not given me any money, and me not having enough resources to quit my job and fund such initiatives against one of the largest economic powers in the world.

Going there and spreading that message seems like a bad idea.

It seems like a lot of people with moderate computer skills are fulfilling this role. My skills and time would be wasted on such an initiative.

I do think it's good advice to contact some people who are already involved, though. They would best know what else needs to be done.

I don't know any Chinese people living near me. I don't know many people here at all. I would definitely like to talk to people close to the issue.

Right now it's still more of a civilized sparring.

I think that the following devices would be REALLY useful not just for human rights but proving what happened in an altercation:

A tiny device that can record video or video, perhaps embedded in the clothing or body of a person.

The stream is ENCRYPTED AND THEN transmitted to local towers or wifi or whatever, and finds its way to some servers. Maybe via a DHT routing.

Anyway, these servers store the encrypted data and the keys are generated by Shamir Secret Sharing so 3 or more parties can come together and decrypt the video.

In countries with rule of law, this could be used to figure out rapes on campus, by having such cameras in every dorm and bedroom. The keys would be obtained during a court case only.

In human rights cases, the keys would be generated by human rights organizations.

So this will eliminate “peeing toms” and “spying” by having warrants for decrypton of a video strean, and curation by trusted agencies what gets shown to the public.

On the other hand, such camps would not look much different from prisons, so I doubt you can expect KZ style pictures.

Edit: just wondering, is my argument really that bad, or am I dealing with patriotic bite reflexes?

I asked for the best VIDEO evidence from inside, showing the most people and smoking guns

It’s the difference between hearsay and video evidence. Like when people say the IDF harasses people in the West Bank, or cops kill unarmed Black people, and people dispute it one way or the other. But having video reveals exactly WHAT is happening. The more context for the video, the better.

Financial crimes always boil down to some kind of theft.

The US is an empire comprising the mainland, as well as vassal and occupied states. China has a smaller periphery (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, etc.)

If you actually wanted to make this comparison, you would need to compare the treatment of people in the USA's occupied territories, such as Iraq or Palestine, to the worst in China, not the worst in China to the worst in the USA, that by default grants a huge arbitrary importance to national borders. (Although the worst within the USA is very bad). China's appalling assimilation of muslims should be criticized, but Americans rarely draw a baseline comparison to how they deal with large muslim populations (invading their countries, murdering their people, drone-bombing weddings, etc.)

Reminds me of a friend who said "Churchill may have been a belligerent racist, but I'd rather have lived under Churchill than under Stalin!". The assumption is that "soviets" lived "under Stalin", but "englishmen" lived "under Churchill". However, it turns out the victims of Irish and Indian human-made famines also lived "under Churchill". He automatically imagines himself as an english citizen, not an indian subject... and it's not clear why?

Or, to put it more simply, if the middle east or historical comparisons don't work for you, you can just look at the Monroe Doctrine that has been openly re-centered thanks to the efforts to realign Venezuela into American consensus.

If you compare all of China to all of the Americas, you get a much better comparable population + land mass, and you can really contrast how the USA treats peripheral regions: blockades, banana republics, coups, black sites, paramilitaries, etc.

Americans will tell themselves "we may be bad but we are better than the enemy" over and over again, and that is what we will eventually study as the core repeated mantra of American propaganda during its waning years.

And that's about islamophobia? Saudi-Arabia is refusing to help because they hate muslims?

Imprisoning someone for drug charges after due process is not the same as imprisoning someone for being the wrong ethnicity.

The moral weight of a life does not change based on the population of a country.

I feel like these statements are pretty close to being axiomatic.

"The USSR is bad for its people."

"What about Jim Crow?"

It's also worth noting that there is a bipartisan criminal justice reform movement in the U.S. that is critical of the U.S. government at various levels, so, no, it's not apples to apples.

We've all got strong feelings about politics, but maybe Americans in particular ought to be a little less cavalier about dead foreigners in the name of American idealism.