What you are missing is that, unlike US citizens, Europeans don't hesitate to fire their political parties. New parties will appear and take the power. The republicans from Sarkozy were swiftly replaced by Rennaisance by Macron, a party with just ten years of life.
Even more, Sarcozy was jailed later by corruption, a symptom of a healthy democracy that US should try sometime (It would fix a lot of the current and future US problems).
Jumping in the Trump circus in Europe one year ago, maybe could work; now it equals to political suicide after Greenland, the Middle East mess and the more and more obvious symptoms of Trump's dementia and disgusting behaviour. Definitely didn't worked for Elon in the past Germany elections. European politicians are very aware of this, currently.
The elections in Hungary are probably ultra-rigged at this point, but we will see if Vance performing as guest comedian for the pro-Russian party Fidesz will help Orban (or Vance) in the long term.
Your(American)future will be controlled by them. Very soon,they will get the government to ban bad Chinese open source models and your choice will only be these good democratic closed source AIs.
We can get videos from remote hellholes of Africa like Dafur and Mali but apparently,that's too much to ask in Xinjiang.We can't even get satellite images to show us evidence of this so called wigur genocide
The Xinjiang Police Files: A 2022 leak of over 5,000 police photos, internal documents, and spreadsheets revealing the scale of detention, with images showing prisoners shackled, hooded, and under guard in 2018.
The China Cables (2019): Leaked, classified instructions on how to run the camps, including directives to ensure "no escapes" promote "repentance" and use full video surveillance.
Satellite Imagery Analysis: Researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) identified over 380 suspected detention sites, including new construction and expansion, often featuring guard towers and razor wire.
Testimonies and Research: Former detainees have reported torture, rape, forced sterilization, and intense indoctrination to abandon their religious and cultural practices.
Government Documentation: The Karakax list, a leaked document, provided detailed, case-by-case justifications for detention, such as having too many children or wearing a veil.
Are you this incredulous when someone reports that the US locks up more Black people capita than White?
Someone defending the US could make the same claims you are that everyone is out to make the US look bad. That multiple independent groups are fabricating evidence etc…
1. give links or one link to the collection of above "evidence" to let others to get conclusion by their own. BTW, I've seen some ("Leaked, classified instructions...) but easily get different interpretation.
2. Also using "I" is better than "We". That means you get your conclusion, not representing others.
1. I've provided a half dozen links in this thread. Feel free to google for more if you want them. Most of the people I'm replying to will respond with some variation of "funded by nefarious group x" regardless of what links are posted.
2. Lecturing random people you meet like they're a freshman English student is patronizing.
Can you imagine hundreds of journalists who would lie to promote a false story that hasn't really been all that effective and harming China (the only possible motivation for such a campaign). And not a single one of the journalists approached by the creators of this campaign leaked anything. If this really was a massive conspiracy theory, that itself is a much much bigger story than the Chinese rounding up people that most of the world don't seem to care about. One of those hundreds of journalists wouldn't have been able to resist such a scoop.
I'm guessing the next part of your conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy group is so powerful that everyone is scared to come forward. But if they are that powerful, why construct such an ineffective anti-china story? Surely such a powerful group could construct something more damaging.
That's a very outdated model for how conspiracies work. Why would it be necessary to bribe and threaten journalists working at these organizations? They genuinely believe in the project of the US financial, military, and cultural empire. They went to the same schools and were socialized with the same core beliefs as the people in US government and high finance or those running the intelligence agencies and military-industrial complex. They wouldn't have the opportunity to work at these 'news' organizations if they had worldviews that were radically incompatible.
Likewise, I don't believe anyone is coercing you to push these ideas online. I believe I could drill down on every single source and claim, and your fundamental beliefs about this question would remain the same.
Proximity to and dependence upon established institutions exerts an inexorable gravity on worldview. It determines one's social circle and path to advancement in every area of life. Those inside the bubble feel themselves to be 'free thinkers', but one who strays outside the acceptable range of beliefs and ideas will immediately experience a sharp discontinuity in this 'freedom'.
You have a group of Swiss journalists who regularly publish critical stories about war crimes in Gaza, the US detaining immigrants, the Trump administration, and waning influence.
And your first thought is that these people have such a hard on for the American Cultural Empire that they are willing to fabricate massive amounts of evidence of Chinese wrongdoing with no coercion required?
They’re just all sitting around writing stories about how fucked up the Trump administration is and how America is over and how the next century belongs to China, and then they think “hey we should probably all work together to make China look bad because America Fuck Yeah! Am I right!?!?”
Please calm down. They might not like Trump — that would be a given for many in these elite circles — but are they really opposed to the prevailing world order? In what material way?
How does being Swiss contradict anything I said? Switzerland is deeply integrated into this prevailing order. It is home to the Bank of International Settlements, the supra-national central bank of central banks whose charter grants it immunity from any national subpoena or inquest.
Sure. I can also much more easily imagine pseudnonymous accounts making material misrepresentations for politically motivated reasons, spreading FUD about journalists making things up.
On the other hand you can travel to Xinjiang, visit mosques, Uighur museums, experience Uighur culture, observe Uighurs just minding their own business in their daily life.
“Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor, sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to have been locked up in so-called “re-education” camps and prisons in the region over the last decade, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.”
UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet actually visited Xinjiang and made no such assertions. Whoever did release the report you're referencing, they waited until immediately after her term ended to release it (within hours). Pretty conspicuous.
No it was actually released hours before her term ended not after. And the reason she held off releasing until the last minute is because of pressure from China to refrain from releasing it.
In addition to releasing the report she released a 131 page Chinese rebuttal simultaneously. Not the actions one would expect of a shadowy group at the UN out to get China.
“Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.”
The organization’s human rights office delivered its much-delayed report minutes before Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was to leave office.
I agree it was reported this way, but do we have evidence it was actually prepared and published by her at that time? The report conspicuously does not mention the viewpoint and concerns of the High Commissioner as other OHCHR reports do nor does it reference Bachelet's findings from her May 2021 visit to Xinjiang.
So you don't have any evidence it was published the next day? You just made that up out of whole cloth?
The internet archive lists the first time they archived the document as August 31 22:23 GMT, which was August 31 23:23 in Geneva. That matches the reporting from NYT and Guardian from the next morning. Both of those reports are also available on the internet archive.
Yep missed that. The internet archive did indeed fist scrape that document 23 minutes after midnight Geneva time.
However it is unlikely that the internet archive web scraper would have picked up a relatively obscure document within 23 minutes of its release.
The NYT and Gaurdian articles published that morning (verified by the internet archive) said that the article was published 11 minutes before midnight Geneva time. That lines up with the internet archive scraping it about 30 minutes later.
So unless they were both wrong or in on it, it was released before midnight Geneva time.
What evidence do you have to support that the UN was lying, and that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong about the time?
The Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
So your evidence is that the internet archive didn’t scrape the document until 23 minutes after midnight? And the most likely explanation isn’t that it took the IA scraper a few minutes to pick it up? The most likely explanation is that the NYT and the Guardian were wrong or lying and that the UN was lying?
Did you even know about the time on the internet archive before I brought it up? You said “within hours” so I assume you didn’t? Where did you hear that it as published on September 1st?
You chose the Internet Archive as authoritative evidence, not me. Your back-pedaling "most likely explanation" is again disproven by your own source as the Internet Archive recorded an error page for that URL just four minutes prior. So we know that the document was not available before September 1, after Bachelet's term had ended.
Where has the UN asserted that Bachelet prepared this report? Please share if you are aware of any such assertion.
Again, the report does not make any reference to the High Commissioner's inquiries as other reports do. Your "most likely explanation" fails to account for this.
Yes, media outlets lie and make errors all the time. Sorry to be the one to break this to you.
Numerous newspapers and NGOs who received the press release have stated that it was released on her last day in office. Many of them complained that by doing this she was attempting to avoid the fallout.
Bachelet made no statements even hinting that it wasn’t the report she prepared.
If she was worried that someone would release a report once she left, she could have released her version before she left to prevent that.
Reuters quotes the Chinese Ambassador thusly “If I read her mind correctly, I don't think she's on board with the report and that's why it was released in the last minute,"
Notice he made no mention of “the report was backdated”. He says “last minute”.
I can find no evidence of any official Chinese position that the report was backdated. Surely the Chinese government would have complained if this had taken place.
This whole thing is just some nonsense internet speculation with zero evidence that proposes a version of the facts that not even the Chinese government agrees with.
So North Korea, China, America, Russia and basically all other countries have propaganda, and Europe doesn’t? I live in Europe and think we do. Not everything that is in the news is true.
"So other heads are also flamable. Do you think your head isn't?"
Something potentially happening elsewhere doesn't invalidate it being pointed out. In fact if Von der Leyen got booed in China and a Geeman broadcaster muted it, I would also like to know what was ommited.
Europe doesn’t bill itself as “the land of the free” and doesn’t proudly tout itself as having free speech above all else no matter the cost. So famously fascist symbols - like the swastika/hakenkreuz among other things - are banned a few places, it may be controversial but it’s not a dirty little secret or anything like that
Your argument is no clearer. Someone's claiming US is beginning to resemble China in that they hide criticism of the ruling parties - they have not mentioned Europe once and you're saying ... something about censorship in Europe?
This reminds me of my Dutch friend who is prone to exaggeration to make things sound dramatic and scary to outsiders, and frequently claims the Netherlands is a "narco state" - big "Nederlandse hiphop: Ik kom van de straat" energy going on here.
> This reminds me of my Dutch friend who is prone to exaggeration to make things sound dramatic and scary to outsiders, and frequently claims the Netherlands is a "narco state" - big "Nederlandse hiphop: Ik kom van de straat" energy going on here.
Well I think there is definitely WAY too much drugs here. Definitely not as bad as California, but I've lived in Eindhoven for a while and people could just put their car window open a bit and text a certain number and get it delivered to their car! Also I've met plenty of students who took XTC during parties and thought it was all fine. When I said something about it they called me a "moral knight". Guess I'm old fashion.
I have showdead set to yes, and while so some articles get a gray color and an occasional [flagged] tag, everything is still searchable[0]. The only form of censorship is the ordering in the news list, but I could pick any other list[1] if I wanted to.
And how many people do you think use these 3 lnks compared to the base URL? That's the clever little ways to censor. You don't need everyone to be unaware, just as many as possible.
That's why I tend to search top in the last day and week. Specifically to catch flagged articles like this, since at least the votes don't get undone.
Please, the topic in question is whether HN "is one of the biggest culprits" in "adopting Chinese censorship methods". Granted, I'm far from being knowledgeable in Chinese censorship methods, but I doubt they can be circumvented by just using different URIs.
I don't agree with that because HN is a relatively small site. But the methods used here aren't dissimilar to what is happening in this story nor in China. Burying stories is a big part of censorship while minimizing dissent.
...so what? "Most stories about politics" are considered Off-Topic, as per the guidelines[0], and some members favor the flag- over the hide-button more than I'd like. It's still on place 19 on the active list[1], and a far cry from any practiced censorship like on Reddit, where stuff just gets [deleted] out of existence.
Yes. When it is complaint about some leftist student protesting and thus interfering with far right speaker free speech rigth to never be opposed, regualarly discussed. Rarely flagged.
But, when there is something making current admin or far right lool bad, flagged quickly
Wouldn't be surprised this is information warfare.
Derailing technical conversations on Chinese models in 2026 with nonsensical comments is exactly what the US government and Closed AI labs would want .
I think I kind of understand why the Soviets were able to industrialize that fast and win an existential war against the mighty Wehrmacht.
The so called purges from late 20s to to the 30s were Stalin eliminating these 5th columnists.
The Soviets had a lot of Western assistance with industrializing. Ford in particular played a huge role in the Gorky factories.
The Wehrmacht lost because numbers kind of matter in war. When you look at the natural resources Russia had, the population disparity between Russia and Germany, and the size of territory the Germans attempted to conquer, it really wasn't a close contest at all.
Stalin's purges had absolutely nothing with removing any "5th Column." The White Movement was thoroughly defeated by 1921 as were the Mensheviks etc. Stalin purged his officer class because he was supremely paranoid. And while he killed many of the officers, many were sent to the gulags and recalled to service after the German invasion in 1941.
The entire concept of a 5th column is just fear-mongering by most countries who faced defeat due to their incompetence. And the term was used by countries to impose draconian controls and oppression.
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