this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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I provided the report I believe the other person was thinking of, where they were asked by the genocide allegers to prepare a report on the abuses and this is what they made. You were, apparently, completely unaware of all of this, and are complaining about learning something slightly different, but functionally equivalent to, what you asked for.
And your previous comment was quite combative and had many allegations, including debatebro nonsense that simply does not apply. That is not a curious person, that is a person using irrational attacks instead of doing the work of reading the source material and becoming educated. And again, zero thanks for me going out of my way to provide this information for you and no apology for your poor behavior in response to it. That is not what curious people do.
I am not riled up, I am responding to your change in tone and combativeness by pointing out how you are, personally, incorrect on multiple levels. If you want to have a discussion that is about the facts and things you do not know and have no investigated, and try to learn about them, you can drop the various accusations and attempts to rationalize me providing you with information as "Gish Gallops" and other bullshitting. We are having the conversation that you are modeling, though I am actually being quite a bit fairer to and more patient with you than you are being to me.
Skepticism is withholding judgment and applying critical thinking to the problem. You are not engaging with the materials skeptically, but in a way that attempts to confirm your priors. You did not investigate the report itself and its source material, but took at face value the sections where it relied on associations to let an uncritical reader jump to conclusions. Oh, and just started adding new claims that were not in the report at all.
I expect a curious person to read the report itself, follow its sourcing, see who commissioned it, how it was used, and how it has been criticized. This is not a small topic, particularly if you are unfamiliar with how modern state-funded propaganda operations function, which seems to be the case. I also expect a curious person to reply to the germane parts of what I say, and you have so far ignored most of it. Your self-descriptions are not very accurate. The behavior you are displaying is a combative "debater", and again, this is not a debate.
Why do you think I'm upset? Because I am critical when you behave irrationally or dishonestly? I am not upset, you are just guessing incorrectly and then turning it into rhetoric and conclusions, which is an example of what I am talking about.
I was thinking of the personal accounts I have seen, which have conflated sterilization with injections and IUD insertions. As I noted and asked you to critically analyze (which you still have not done, so I guess I have to tell you) these two claims are stated one after the other, but are not actually describing the same thing - the personal accounts and the statistics. The personal accounts allege forced interventions that prevent pregnancy whereas the statistics are region-wide medical procedure aggregates, including people of all ethnicities.
To discuss China's statistics re: sterilization for the entire region vs. others, we will need to actually review them. If you took a look at the bibliography for this report, you would find that the report itself does not do a very good job of citing its sources, as it is fairly clear that they are recycling original research from their bibliography and citing the sources listed by that work. Unfortunately, the cast of characters in that bibliography are not exactly academically honest and have a history of alleging false or impossible statistics through either error (they often do not speak or read Chinese) or dishonesty.
So, let me know when you have found and linked China's Yearbook from 2019 that discusses these exact stats.
I provided the source you asked for. You seem to have it in your head that I stand by its contents or something. Who knows where you got that idea from, and I have already corrected you on this idea, so you may want to take a few seconds to internalize that fact.
Again, this is you being combative rather than curious. You seem to think that if I provide a source it means it is somehow associated with me, as in I defend it and it reflects on me and so how could I ever criticize it, lmao.
You have not critically engaged with the allegations, authors, or source material at all. You are announcing the opposite of skepticism: accepting claims without investigation or criticism.
PS, you should not trust the UN. That is silly. The UN is a political body of competing states and its various organs put out propaganda on a constant basis.
Neither section 85 nor 86 claim wide-scale destruction of mosques. They use vague qualifiers like "many", "recurring", and "large number" and they lump together several different categories of sites in that list. From how it is described, it could be 4 or 8000. They list the number of sites that do exist for no clear reason, perhaps just to have some large-looking numbers visually proximal to these claims. This is particularly interesting given that their cited sources do provide numbers. One wonders why they did not. Perhaps they realize how absurd they would look? I would hope you quickly figured out what was wrong with their sourcing. That topic seems to be what you are discussing next.
Ah nope, you didn't look into the funnier source. Keep looking.
But did you look into UHRP? Tell me about them. Why do you think they would be uncritically cited by anyone? I will just note that critically looking into Omer Kanat alone should take you on a revelatory journey regarding all of this. What is his orbit?
Yes I know what it is, that's why I can see this report, note the glaring lack of a genocide accusation given that the US State department and this constellation of hacks cited had escalated to that epithet by this point, and compare even the silly contents of this report to the definition and say, "obviously not".
How seriously? Seriously enough to do basic media criticism on sourcing and claims? No? Hmmmmm.
Do they? What are the numbers? If you read the report, you would already see them acknowledge that China has already had a problem - to which they have contributed substantial resources to combat - with people of varying ethnicities, including Han, being sterilized or implanted with IUDs without their knowledge. Does that mean China is genociding the Han? Are you seriously considering that they might be because of this fact? How many people does China have in vocational schools? Or hell, to entertain the absurdities, how many in prisons? How many die? How do the rates compare to Xinjiang?
You are falling for lazy propaganda because you are, by default, giving weight to these claims without having investigated them.
You have no reason to. Certainly less reason than me, and I still have patience.
My model is that you can investigate things you are curious about and should act in good faith in how you characterize what I say or where I am coming from. You are fighting because you are being combative, trying to reach into a bag of named rationalizations (Gish Gallop) to make this an antagonistic conversation.
I don't care. I am strictly responding to what you are saying and matching tone.
If you think anything I have said re: behavior is incorrect, you may want to address it directly instead of summarizing. You might find out your summaries are wrong!
Here's what I said at the time: "I really did read the report. I don’t know all that much about Xinjiang, so it was informative for me to see it, so thank you."
I also quoted some sections from the report which directly addressed things we were talking about.
I think you're unhappy that I didn't reach your conclusions by reading the report, and are trying to tell me that my conclusions are incorrect and lecture me on what the correct ones are. That's not really how it works. Someone you're talking to could be right or wrong, but if you take the mode of just lecturing, I can't really see it ever convincing someone to take on your conclusions.
Sorry if I gave offense about the Gish Gallop. You started talking all kinds of things about terrorism in Syria, this story about a woman who fled with no money, World Uyghur Congress, NED-funded organizations, and so on. I can see maybe you're trying to communicate the context or a broader scope, but coming in rapid-fire to someone who has absolutely no context, it comes across very differently.
I looked up quickly how many mosques in Xinjiang have been destroyed. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/22/china-mosques-shuttered-razed-altered-muslim-areas says two-thirds of them have been damaged or destroyed. I actually already thought about your point about sterilization being a thing that happens in China anyway, so are they genociding the Han? That was one part of the report I read in detail, and they do talk about it and give some points of comparison and arguments and other explanations for the numbers, and I can see some points to be able to disagree on.
That's about as much as I want to look into it. I wasn't intending this to be a long debate, I was just struck by some of the claims from the other person and was interested to see what backing there was behind them and unintentionally went down a rabbit-hole. But I'm not interested in the debate anymore. Have a good one.
Ah, there was eventually a thank you! Count me corrected.
That second sentence could've been your entire response and we'd have been just as productive.
Yeah duh.
I'm perfectly happy. You're bad at guessing my emotions.
Again, I am just responding to what you say, like praising yourself as curious or skeptical while doing opposite things and trying to find ways to be combative. I figure a curious, skeptical person might respond positively to a suggested critical reading and context from someone that does actually know this stuff. Alas, it is exactly the opposite.
This is getting boring and repetitive because you ignore most of what I sau and then just make up some bullshit again, so my gracious task is to remind you what I actually said.
You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Communication and learning is a two-way street. It can't just be that I have knowledge and information and suggested readings and pointers for where to criticize media. You have to be honestly interested in investigation and learning. Technically I don't think my part should even be necessary: a curious skeptic would be asking themselves the same questions I've asked you before taking the genocide claim seriously in the first place. And a curious skeptic might appreciate being told to read more deeply because there is intrigue. But clearly that's not happening on its own. You are either new to critical readings and investigating sources and think tanks and funding and seeking out criticisms or you just aren't interested in doing that on this topic. I think it's probably both and connected to the antagonism to basic things like giving you a source or treating me criticizing that source as something inherently wrong.
I'm not offended. Maybe a little bored.
Which is very relevant to violent separatists in Xinjiang that did the terrorism leading to the actual policies implemented there. And who are linked to the US and its propaganda pushes, including contents of this report. I gave you relevant context to help you self-inform and you decided to frame this as a combative debate.
Because it is relevant to the basics of this propaganda push, one pillar of which is premised on a handful of testimonies where every time the person is named it turns out they are tied to funding and usually very inconsistent. Some of them were surely in the unnamed interviewees, per thr report saying they talked to people that were previously published.
The relevance here will be obvious if you look into it.
Because this is a propaganda push by organizations tied to US state propaganda organs like the NED. If you follow sourcing and funding you end up with a surprisingly small network of players.
That's a you thing.
Who did they cite?
They are not. In fact a lot of this false narrative is about inappropriately and ahistorically projecting Western white supremacy amd colonialism onto China because they are selling this to a liberal Western audience that, at least in theory, rejects those things. Han are the plurality ethnicity in China and the propagandists want you to believe that Han supremacy is prevalent and responsible for all kinds of ills in Xinjiang.
China is not genociding its largest ethnic group. Though it should be noted that Han have the most restrictive control over reproduction. As a multi-ethnic country that embraces and protects its ethnic minorities, China implements affirmative action for them. One example of this is that ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, are permitted to have more children, with the numbers being dictated, in part, by lifestyle (urban vs rural).
Read those sections critically and as if you were a scientist trying to review whether their conclusions or insinuations follow from their premises and evidence. And read the sources.
This isn't a debate.
The rabbit hole is even more ridiculous than they let on but it is instructive for how the US creates and supports propaganda campaigns.
Okay bye then you too
There was immediately a thank you. It was in the message you were replying to, where you accused me of not saying thank you. You actually quoted it back to me at one point, in one of your sections after you said it.
You're coming at this from the perspective that you are right, and I am wrong, and you need to educate me. That's fine, but it's coming in conjunction with getting some basic facts wrong, which is why I'm so unreceptive. That's my process: Test some things that people say, before you believe them on the wider narrative. You keep trying to do the educating and making much broader claims, without doing the proving piece in detail first.
Let me show you how it works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China#Compulsory_sterilizations_and_contraception
Let's test your assertion. How are Zumrat Dwut and Sayragul Sauytbay tied to funding? Can you send me the source which indicates that they are? Also, do you know of inconsistencies in their story?
You want me to be open to being led to conclusions and doing investigations prompted by you, so let's see if it goes both ways.
This hasn't been true since 2017.
Didn't you say you were done with this conversation and then said goodbye?
I will note again that you ignored nearly everything I said, including the part where I said you keep ignoring what I say.
It was a few replies in, actually, and I already acknowledged it. Why belabor it while ignoring nearly everything else I said? That's not a rhetorical question. Really ask yourself what the the basis of these incredibly selective responses is.
I'm coming at this from the perspective that you are by your own admission unfamiliar with this topic and that I am not. You, by definition, need education on this topic and if you weren't putting up irrational barriers I could indeed help you with that. I began by simply sharing information, but you started trying to argue combatively about it and treat this like a debate and I am now just responding to the (usually silly) things you say.
You being wrong isn't interesting and has little weight. You know basically nothing about this topic, still, and are spending your energy trying to fight me rather than investigate critically. What would you call someone that declares combative opinions before doing enough investigation?
What basic facts have I gotten wrong? As best I can tell every time you've tried to dispute I have only needed to clarify and you then ignored what I said.
That's an irrational process. You need to actually read critically and inform yourself. Your process will fail in both directions: people with correct understandings will get details wrong (though I and not) and people with incorrect understandings can give you a perfect regurgitation of bullshit from sources with the veneer or credibility.
You are also not really following that process, given that you bail early on nearly every point discussed.
I give you context because so far you seem to be quite gullible and unquestioning when it comes to confirming your priors and reading this report. At one point you declared, epistemically, trusting the UN, holy shit. If all you do is lazily read without investigating sources or critical responses you will simply never see the information I have provided you. The first 50 results for searches will be various rewordings of a statement by one NED-funded think tank and you will, apparently, find that credible by default.
You are welcome for having been provided with context to help you understand this topic and investigate it critically. As a curious skeptic, surely you appreciate this kind of information and won't search for a way to whine about my audacity.
It is actually your onus to investigate all of this. This is not a debate and I am not here to fetch you yet more sources when you are being resistant to self-education and very selective in your responses. I do not require you to simply accept what I say and stop investigating. I give you breadcrumbs. You're a curious skeptic, right?
Here are some breadcrumbs to help you answer your own first question: Zumrat Dawut got a US Visa, lives in Washington, DC, and is now publishing a graphic novel. How did those things happen so quickly, and during the Trump Administration, particularly given the US' islamophobic immigration policies? Why Washington, DC? What does she do there?
I await the results of your curious sceptic investigation.
I've already done that work years ago. It did not require prompting let alone whatever this is. I critically examined multiple narratives and sources and spent particular time on the most slick academized works, as they seemed most credible at the time.
Yes it has. China actually recently scrapped most of the family planning policy at the highest level, but regionally its reveal is still being implemented.
Yeah, but then I got interested again.
Yes. Like I said before, if I have no particular reason to trust you, then I'm not going to accept the information that you give me. I'm not sure why that's so persistently difficult to understand, or why you keep framing things in terms of you providing information that I am required to accept, and me making things difficult by examining it skeptically first.
You don't have to trust the OHCHR report, of course. Let me ask this: What sources would you trust? What can I refer to that you consider as a trustworthy source of information? That's why I specifically referred to globaltimes.cn above. But then, I have no idea if you trust them.
I just got tired of the conversation again.
You seem to be interested in talking about this, to some extent, but I'm not going to respond to general hints about what I might want to look at, or retreats into "do your own research"-type non-answers. If I'm making a claim, it's my duty to be willing to back it up instead of just sort of hinting.
You have a valid point that I've been ignoring things you've said or questions you ask. Are there any of the unanswered questions that you want me to take some real time and answer for you? Part of my not "getting with the program" so to speak, it seems, is like I say that I simply don't believe you based on my little bit of investigations so far, so I'm focusing my attention on seeing if you're trustworthy before taking anything of the very large and varied number of claims you're making seriously.
In your world, what does "read critically" mean? If testing some of the things from a particular source before you start to take it seriously isn't that?
I generally trust the OHCHR report, not because I automatically trust everything from the UN, but because it doesn't have any obvious inconsistencies with its sources and seems to draw on things that broadly match with what's broadly accepted by human rights NGOs, Wikipedia, news sources with a variety of allegiances, and so on. I went through some version of the process with it that I'm trying to do with you, and it didn't have sudden changes in its story, factual inconsistencies with other things that were trustworthy, suspect logical patterns, and so on.
Like I say, I think we're just at an impasse, because you're absolutely convinced that you've already done the critical reading, and I just need to get with that program and accept what you're saying. I don't think your reading of sources is as critically minded as you think it is. I think you've absorbed, and are trying to relay to me, a particular way of analyzing sources that I'm just fundamentally not on board for.
There's a very particular failure mode that the human brain can get into when "it's all propaganda" or "all their sources are biased" or corrupted by money, or whatever, start to become how you analyze sources. It starts to become very easy to just discard anything that doesn't match the picture that's already in your mind, and accept anything that matches the picture that's already in your mind, because you're defining the trustworthiness of the source in that sort of self-referential way. The way you talk about needing to "contextualize," and the way you allocate trust to different sources, makes me think you're unintentionally using that type of maladaptive pattern. Part of the reason I'm spending this length of time talking with you is that you do seem passionate about the truth, willing to invest energy into getting to the bottom of things, and so on. But I really think that you could benefit from some self-reflection about objectively, "Is this statement I am making true? Is this source trusthworthy?" before starting to go HAM with it, or uncritically accept other things from adjacent sources.
Does that make sense? Just my two cents, good luck with everything.
This is seemingly in response to me repeatedly noting your selective responses, but it doesn't address it at all.
I'm sufficiently bored of repeating myself. If you want to continue discussing this, you will have to quit the habit of only replying to 1/8 of what I say. Note that I asked you to identify your pattern of response and you, in now typical form, ignored that, too.
Edit: PS I'm not reading the rest of what you wrote until you can demonstrate basic good faith.
It absolutely addresses it. It explains why I'm doing it. You just don't like my explanation.
Okey dokey.
It obviously did not address the habit of ignoring most of what I say to you. I await your demonstration of good faith.
I don't really consider myself obligated to chase down each and every new thing you bring up in each message, investing hours of time absorbing your sources in detail while you airily discard any of my sources claiming that they are propaganda. But, like I say, it's not an unreasonable complaint, and if you want to bring up a couple of the unanswered questions now, I'm happy to spend a quick moment addressing them if you want.
The section you just quoted is several responses down, past what I said I would read. I'm not going to count this as a good faith response as it required you to make almost no attempt to read and understand a couple simple sentences.
You're free to try again.
I'll have to try to find a way to carry on regardless. Best of luck.
Thank you for this comment, it is an excellent demonstration of (boring) bad faith engagement.
My guy: You raised an issue with how I was participating. I explained why I was doing it, but also offered to correct it, admitting that you kind of had a point. You said you weren’t going to count that as good faith, but that I was “free to try again.”
I don’t know what sort of person you are trying to engage with, but it is some sort of obedient robot or sniveling quisling. I wish you luck in finding that person. They would probably also respond well to being told that it’s not your job to find sources for your statement, but their job to find sources for your statements. I think you will have difficulty in finding such a person but like I said I wish you luck.
I gave a reason for it, which you ignored to instead deflect and be flippant. Like I said, a great demonstration of bad faith. Excellent way to wrap this up.
PS this is the second or third time you have said you are done ans goodbye.
I engage very patiently. You were being irrational and combative from the very beginning, which is whete most people will write you off and maybe call you a name. Something I am sure you will repeatedly experience when you talk to someone that knows more than you about something. I then matched your tone to give you opportunities to reflect on that tone and progress via your apparently preferred form of discussion. This also did not work, as your selective engagement and preferenve for vaguely puffing up your "method" instead of directly discussing what was said results in either derailment or pointless repetition. Note that I still did not write you off over this period, as most people will do when met with such unserious arrogance.
I have now simplified it down to one thing: addressing, in good faith, the issue of highly selective responses so that we go in circles. And right off the bat you demonstrated that you didn't even read or think for 30 seconds about the simple couple of sentences I wrote. And even thrn, I gave you another chance, which you have now squandered.
I teach and screen people irl who are new to such topics on a regular basis. Nearly weekly. This requires a lot of patience, as many people learn to adopt opinions before they have done investigation ans they absorb these opinions into their idr tity, feeling attacked when contradicted and becoming combative. It is a common task to figure out who should be directly pipelined for the central education pathway and who needs to be isolated from it lest they become pointlessly disruptive to others' learning, as they have demonstrated that they will interrupt with silly ideas they have not really thought about or will double down on chauvinism, rather than engage in goos faith.
I have given you about as much patience as we give to a combative chauvinist, which is more than you will receive in pretty much any context outside of when someone is paid to interact with you.
It is literally not my responsibility to do that, yes. You seem to be very confused about this conversation and its commitments. Contrast our expectations. You expect me to fetch sources and explain and justify them to you while you make various silly allegations (e.g. surprise that I was critical of what I sourced for you) like this is some kind of debate and repeatedly act in bad faith. In contrast, I only expect you to respond germanely and accurately to what I say.
I recruit and onboard, in average, 2-3 people per week, and lead sessions of 10-30 every week. I have no problems whatsoever in doing so despite various personality conflicts, ranges of curiosity, and tolerance for arrogance.
Anyways, because you are not demonstrating good faith and are now making up a nonsense version of the kind of person you think I expect, and because you seem to want the last word regardless of how many times you say you are done and goodbye, I will help you out by ending this conversation and leaving you the last word.
And all of a sudden, it all snapped into focus.
I've been involved in education for almost all my adult life. The number of times I can remember having to do something like this is once, for one person, in all of that time.
Way up at the beginning, I said "In non-authoritarian contexts" certain modes of interaction are common, and you asked, "What on earth are you talking about." This is what I'm talking about. It's very strange and inhuman, to me, for the teacher to say that someone's ideas are silly, and for that reason they need to be removed from the class before they disrupt everyone else's "learning." One of the most important parts of teaching is understanding where people are coming from, actually truly coming from, so you can address their current perceptions directly, so they can understand. They might be right or partially right, they might be wrong, or they might be silly. It's fine. Another critical early stage of the process is to earn their respect, demonstrate that you know what you're talking about, so that in a genuine sense they'll want to learn from you. That can be incredibly hard, because there's not really a system for it. It has to be a human thing. If you can do that, though, everything after is easy. The students are coming to you because their current understanding isn't there, presumably, and because they want to fix that. If you can show them you're qualified to improve their understanding, then of course they will listen to you instead of being "silly" as you say it.
If you say something, and they don't understand it or don't agree with it, and then you abandon them and say they have to be separated before someone else hears what they have to say, that's a massive red flag to me. It might be for reasons of time or organization, you don't necessarily need to hear out completely every beginner idea that every single student has to say. But also... presumably, they're there because they have some interest in what you're teaching. Hopefully. If during the course of the interaction, they're espousing ideas you think are wrong, they're probably not the only person in the class that thinks that way. Some other people just might not be saying it. If you can address things in a productive way, then you give everyone else in the class the chance to hear out the exchange of ideas. That's hugely instructive. That's actual education. Hopefully, your ideas are solid enough and you have the skill to address it in a way where overall it's pretty clear that your ideas are the "right" ones. To everyone else, if not to the "silly" student, or not to them right away.
I don't truly know anything at all about your method of teaching. But like I say, this makes it all come clearly to me. You've been sort of giving me orders about how I am required to engage with you. You're trying to "instruct" me, which is a fine thing to do obviously, but you clearly haven't earned the right to do that, in my eyes. I was confused about why you kept approaching the interaction as if you had, and I needed to "get with the program" and treat you that way, but again, now it makes sense. You're treating me like one of your students.
Most people work in this way that I'm describing. If you want genuine respect from your students, you need to engage with them as human beings, and not become so aggrieved if they're not taking part in the process with completely correct ideas already formed, or with "correct" behavior already in place. Most people operate by respect, not by obedience, although certain types of coercion will cause them to obediently fake it. All you'll do by demanding obedience whether or not the respect is there, though, is produce insincere students, which is a terrible thing. And you'll also miss the chance to actually educate someone, if their inner ideas don't match the things you're trying to teach them.
Impressive patience in this discussion