• booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    As of 2022, there were approximately 1.2 million victims of US government abduction being held on US soil. Just to put things into perspective.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      This is not a good comparison and isn’t necessary to show this report is bullshit. It isn’t even internally coherent:

      “Indeed, the official methodology involves kidnapping,” Harth said. “Citizens are persuaded to return…”

      They’re talking about China telling its citizens to return, which is nothing like kidnapping, but they’re calling it that anyway to gin up outrage. Between that and the telltale “Chinese Communist Party” mislabeling, they’re obviously not interested in doing any sort of objective analysis.

      • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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        8 months ago

        Yes, the CCP is notorious for being super friendly when persuading people. They would never ever threaten a person’s entire family to get people to step in line.

        Grabbing a person off the streets and throwing them into a van isn’t the only method of kidnapping.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          Pg. 18 of the full report, linked in the post:

          Ye is the former mayor of Chuanliao Town Government in Qingtian County, Zhejiang. Accused of bribery, he fled to Milan, Italy, in July 2001.

          In December 2014, the Zhejiang Public Security Department and the Protectorate sent a joint working group to Italy and Spain to carry out persuade to return operations of fugitives from the Lishui and Wenzhou areas.

          After being persuaded face-to-face by the working group, Ye flew back to China with the working group to surrender himself on December 23, 2014.

          Not only is there no evidence of what you’re suggesting, but this anti-China group’s own report paints a pretty mundane picture.

          Their strategy is to create an unfalsifiable position:

          1. Print a bunch of “China Bad” bullshit, like this report.
          2. People skim the headlines and think “China Bad.”
          3. Other people read the report and point out how the facts presented don’t show anything objectionable.
          4. The first group thinks “but we all know China Bad, so I’ll just read that into the facts, no matter how tame they are.”
      • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        I did not even click the link because it’s obvious on its face that it’s bullshit anti-china propaganda in like 7 different ways. My comment is essentially a steel-man argument: Even if I assume that the liberal bullshit propaganda is 100% true, the US is still far worse in every way.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          Ah, makes sense. I’d look more at the U.S. drone assassination program and its (actual) kidnapping and torture operations. That’s the best comparison to what this report alleges.

          • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            Well, I don’t appreciate the implication that the time I was in the wrong place at the wrong time so I got forced into the back of a stranger’s car at gunpoint and driven 30 minutes to the stranger’s HQ where I was then locked in a room and interrogated doesn’t count as “abduction” or “kidnapping”

            • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              8 months ago

              I mean, that wasn’t an abuction or kidnapping. There are countless actions that are legal when the government does them but criminal if done by a private citizen. In many cases there’s probable cause to make an arrest, but the person is later cleared, which sounds like it happened to you. That doesn’t make the arrest illegal, much less kidnapping.

              This isn’t a technical point, either. Mischaracterizing lawful government conduct as criminal is exactly what this report is attempting to do, and we shouldn’t do it ourselves.

              • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                8 months ago

                I mean, that wasn’t an abuction or kidnapping.

                It was exactly both of those things, and I don’t understand why you are the second person to reply to me under the mistaken impression that abduction and kidnapping are only possible when they are done illegally. Where are you getting this nonsense from?

                • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  8 months ago

                  Where are you getting this nonsense from?

                  The law. Yes, abduction and kidnapping are only possible when they are done illegally. Illegality is a crucial part of what those terms mean.

                  You’re essentially making the libertarian “tax is theft” argument: it would be criminal if I did it to you, so it must be criminal when the government does it to you.

                  • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    8 months ago

                    Illegality is a crucial part of what those terms mean.

                    No dude, it isn’t. At all. You literally have it backwards. The law uses these terms because they are English terms with meanings. The law doesn’t give them their meanings.

    • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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      8 months ago

      Source? From my experience, US goes in the opposite direction. They keep inventing new reasons to kick people out. Their Title 42 is a perfect example of how they circumvent their Title 8 protections.

      • wahming@monyet.cc
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        8 months ago

        Probably a false equivalence to the prisoner population, as if China doesn’t have any prisons and it wasn’t an entirely different issue

        • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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          8 months ago

          Well, you and I use a different definition of abduction. While I’ll give you that some of those people are probably imprisoned wrongly, the majority are there because of their own actions. I wouldn’t fault China imprisoning someone for breaking their laws (even if I disagree with the law), I also don’t fault US for imprisoning people for breaking their laws. Treatment of those prisoners is a different question altogether.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            Your definition of abduction apparently includes persuading people to go somewhere, so I think there are many lacks in terms of definitions here.

            • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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              8 months ago

              Asking under a threat of harm is no longer called persuasion, it’s a crime.

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                8 months ago

                The link 404s for me, so I can’t really look at the details, but more information would be required to establish it as actually being criminal. Saying, and I’m just producing an arbitrary example, “Come here to attend a court case or you will be tried in abstentia (and therefore probably found guilty), which will result in fines that, if ignored, will be satisfied by asset forfeiture in the form of us seizing your shit” is consistent with your description of “asking under threat of harm” while also being an extremely normal thing for a country to do and not a crime.

                • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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                  8 months ago

                  There is an archived version, and I attached the full report to the post.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    8 months ago

                    The article is worthless, turns out, and looking at the report, it doesn’t really help because so many of its critical claims (i.e. actual, specific instances of collective punishment that weren’t countered by Chinese courts) just have citations to other reports by the same group. I’m just here to procrastinate on school work rather than read through a collective 500 pages of histrionics (seriously, the stylization of this whole thing is laughable).

            • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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              8 months ago

              Now compare that to imprisonment. One is legal action, another is illegal action. One can argue about the morality of that, but the distinction is clear.

              • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                8 months ago

                The difference between imprisonment and abduction is not, in fact, legality. I have no idea how you could come to the conclusion that legality has anything to do with the definitions of those words. Average liberal word salad.