VentraSqwal

These all sound like good ideas.

This turned out to be a surprisingly fascinating question lol.

It'll take me awhile to go through all them lol, but thanks for all the sources. You're one of the few people I've seen from lemmygrad or hexbear not just immediately default to ad hominem attacks, trolling, and pig poop balls, and I appreciate the actual attempt at a discussion in good faith instead of shouting "racist lib" and running back to your echo chamber to make fun of how clueless all us libs are. I appreciate it.

Some good points there, but I will say, you're acting like the West are the only civilizations which have ever committed atrocities, which I think is a mistake to make. Every large group of humans have been capable of doing such horrible things, as we've seen in wars and such all over the world.

Oh right, I remember hearing about relays. Is that something the admin of the instance controls?

Good to know!

To be fair, I'm basically with the UN on this in that I'm not fully convinced it's a genocide, but there's a lot of evidence against them of at least some human rights abuses. Like it might be tending towards cultural genocide, through not letting them wear their clothes or practice their religion or culture, which would be how the population is still increasing.

As for it all just being Zenz's word, what about the satellite pictures of their massive camps and their growth, videos and pictures of their re-education schools (think I saw this on the Jon Oliver episode of the subject?), Xi's 2017 order that all religions have to be Chinese in nature, and some Uyghur saying they had family members arrested and now don't know where they are, like Ilham Tohti.

Like it could be that these camps are necessary to quell a massive terrorism group, and at least they said the schools have been dismantled, but it comes off as the Islamophobic version of the WW2 Japanese-American internment camps where innocent are thrown in with the guilty. Why else would they need to be that big? And not letting people see the prisoners like that guy I linked above isn't great either. It's not a great look, especially since the people defending it are usually the same people criticizing the US's massive prison industrial complex, although I sometimes confuse the views of ML communists, who might be okay with that if they were used on the right people, and anarchists, who I know are definitely not.

I think the Jon Oliver video convinced me the most along with normal news articles detailing the history and China's treatment of the region. Do you have a source for the East Turkistan Project? It comes off as a conspiracy theory.

And I know it's trite, but if you've got a YouTube video debunking Jon's, I'd be curious to hear it out, too. It's like one I heard before debunking Jon's video on Venezuela helped convince me at one point that it's our complicated than it seems. But the Uyghur situation I'm still not convinced on. I'll read up on the East Turkmenistan thing and see if there are any links between them and US Int, but still, there might just be more than one bad guy. Too many accusations and China is being so secretive. China is allowed to be distrustful of the West, but I don't think that trumps human rights.

Sort of related, but does anyone know if Mastadon servers require others in the server to find other instances before you see feeds from them in the All tab, like with Lemmy?

I'm thinking of getting into Mastadon and that would be a big reason to pick a bigger instance than a smaller one.

Wikipedia seems to disagree with their population increasing. In fact, it's saying their birth rate is decreasing compared to the rest of China.

Also, I don't think it's just the one crazy guy. The UN also sent someone over in 2022, and they published the UN Human Rights Office report on Xinjiang, which was pretty damning. It's sources include interviewing people who lived in Xinjiang at the time the abuse had been reported. They also restricted where she could go so she couldn't do a full investigation, which also isn't a great look. And this was by Michele Bachlet, someone who had been accused of being too soft on Beijing before, who praised China before, and who you'd probably agree with on other subjects like Israel's occupation of Palestine and who disagrees with US sanctions during the pandemic.

See, this is why so many instances want to defederate from hexbear. The giant pig shit image, the immediate ad-hominem jump to racism or insults when you receive the slightest pushback to your ideas, the overt hostility to all other points of view, assuming everyone else is talking in bad faith, and the meme-y 4chan-like in culture that's forced on everyone else. I get being mad someone is calling you a bot, because that's not an argument either, but the initial replies were like that, too.

At least freagle made an actual argument with historical context and such, and even though I think things from the 1800s aren't an excuse to never work with the west again, especially with international incidents like this, they made a point and supported it earnestly. So it's not like hexbear is this bad, but damn, I get it sometimes.

You can't just assume someone is racist because they disagree with you. It's like calling you antisemitic for criticizing Israel. They brought up that China shouldn't have blocked initial investigations and instead of replying with any facts yourself, you immediately jumped to assuming they're racist and how they would've behaved if they hadn't.

Seriously, after that story about the guy who killed that women for having a pride flag, you never know how randomly violent these people will be.

About what Hearts of Iron? I tried that game once (3 or 4, don't remember) and basically gave up when the tutorial ended and I still had no idea how to do anything.