Vaguely related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_FQU4KzN7A

No, you have to understand. The US is so much worse than NK. NK can only hurt 20 million of it’s own citizens, the US is killing the world. But also, this is western media, so it’s not true anyway. /tankie

I fucking hate those cunts.

He tried to buy loyalty instead of earn it.

Your argument is the difference between reactive and proactive legislation, and it’s what we need to do to actually succeed. We are constantly on the back foot because we are trying to stop one problem at a time, i.e. Data Center deforestation. Data Centers are a problem, but not the problem. Destruction of natural, irreplaceable resources is the real problem. Sure, it would be great to stop all data centers from ever being built, but then something else will just take its place. We need to protect our resources first, then it won’t matter what they want to build because they won’t be able to. Getting mad about data centers is good, we should be mad, but let’s make that anger work for us in the best way.

The caveat is that a lot of these protections can just be stripped away by whoever is in the oval office, as we’ve seen with this administration. When they don’t give a damn about poll numbers, they just do whatever they want with impunity. That’s why these need to be written into state constitutions and not just statutes, things that a Washington signature can’t undo. They need to be guarded in land trusts and conservation easements. Put too many stops between the bastards and their prize.

Ok, you offered goalposts, so let’s play. No Zenz. No RFA. Deal. In fact, I’ll give you the RFA point for free. The Kim Jong Un haircut story was fucking trash, and the unicorn thing was a mangled translation of North Korea’s own state media announcing a “unicorn lair” historical site, which is honestly funnier than the fake version. RFA has printed junk. Conceded. Here’s the thing though. My case never touched RFA, and it doesn’t need Zenz either.

Here is the Xinjiang case built entirely from sources you didn’t exclude:

The Xinjiang Police Files. Thousands of internal Chinese police records, detainee mugshots, and shoot-to-kill escape protocols, hacked directly from police servers in Xinjiang and authenticated by a consortium of 14 international news outlets. This is the Chinese government describing its own camps in its own internal paperwork.

The China Cables. Leaked internal CCP operations manuals for running the facilities, classified as secret, describing locked compounds, mandatory “no escapes” protocols, and points systems for ideological transformation. Again, their own documents, in their own words.

The 2022 UN OHCHR assessment, published over Beijing’s screaming objections, finding the detention system may constitute crimes against humanity. Not a US agency. The UN human rights office.

AP’s birth suppression reporting, which was built partly on China’s own published health statistics. Their own yearbooks show sterilization procedures collapsing nationwide while spiking massively in Xinjiang during the same years. That’s their math, not mine. And China’s own white papers, which openly admit to operating “vocational education and training centers” at mass scale. The existence of the facilities was never in dispute. The only dispute is what to call a locked compound you can be sent to without a charge, a trial, or a lawyer.

On to the kids, now. You wanted extraordinary evidence. The evidence is Chinese government paperwork. State documents on “centralized care” boarding facilities for children of detained parents, reported from the government’s own education bureau records. I didn’t make that shit up. They wrote that shit down.

You said you’d concede. Every source above is leaked CCP internal documentation, Chinese government statistics, Chinese government admissions, or a UN body. Zero Zenz. Zero RFA. The ball is in your court.

Now, the “prove it’s worse than US prisons AND CECOT” framing. I’m not going to play misery Olympics, but I will give you the El Salvador point straight, because it’s your strongest play. The CECOT renditions are the most Xinjiang-shaped thing the US has done in years. People shipped to a foreign mega-prison without due process, including wrongful deportations the government shrugged at. That’s real and it’s disgusting. But look at what surrounds it: Emergency litigation. Supreme Court orders. Front page coverage. Congressmen physically flying to El Salvador. The act resembles the authoritarian playbook. The reaction is the difference. One system commits a horror and the alarm goes off everywhere. The other system commits a horror and arrests the alarm.

And the categorical difference with prisons still stands. Every US prisoner, in the worst prison we have, passed through a charge, a trial, a sentence, and an appeal. Unequal and broken as that process is, it exists. Xinjiang internment required no crime, no trial, no sentence, and no lawyer. Selection was by ethnicity. Those are not the same institution.

Your free speech theory eats itself, also. You said the US tolerates dissent because it doesn’t feel threatened. McCarthyism and COINTELPRO are on YOUR list, and they are exactly what the US did when it DID feel threatened. So your theory predicts American repression under threat, history delivers it, and then what happened? It was exposed by American activists, published by American papers, investigated by the Church Committee, ended, condemned, and put in textbooks. Meanwhile China at the absolute peak of its power and security passed the Hong Kong National Security Law. Repression under threat is universal. The question is whether the system can catch it and reverse it. One of these systems does that. The other one imprisons the people who try. He’s the lawyer this whole thread is about.

Now the big one. Your metric is “harm to other countries’ people,” and I want you to look hard at what that scoping deletes. The Great Leap Forward, tens of millions dead. The Cultural Revolution. North Korea’s famine in the 90s. The gulags. The largest atrocities of the twentieth century were governments destroying their own populations, and your framework scores every single one of them at zero because the victims held the perpetrator’s passport. “The US has done more harm to North Koreans than the NK government” only works if three generations of camps and famine count for nothing because Pyongyang did it to its own people. That’s not a moral framework. That’s a border shaped loophole, drawn so the crimes of the states you defend land outside the measuring area.

And I’ll concede the true thing inside your Korea point, because it’s real and most Americans don’t know it. The Korean War air campaign was annihilating. US commanders themselves described leveling most of the North’s cities. That happened and it was monstrous. It still doesn’t outweigh seventy years of totalitarianism unless domestic victims are worth zero, which is the exact math your ledger runs on.

Taliban, partial credit at best. The US funded the mujahideen. The Taliban emerged from Pakistani madrassas and the post Soviet civil war a decade later. And even at full credit, “the US contributed to the Taliban existing” doesn’t fucking cash out as “the US is worse than the Taliban,” which is what your actual thesis requires.

Last thing, and I’m answering this one straight because I think you asked it straight. You asked why it’s so easy for me to forgive napalming Vietnamese villages. It isn’t, and I don’t. The napalming of Vietnamese villages was an atrocity, full stop. Nothing in my position requires forgiving it, and if you’ve read me as saying foreign harm is fine as long as your own citizens are comfy, you’ve read the opposite of my argument. My argument is about what happened next. That atrocity was photographed by American journalists, published by American outlets, and it blew up inside the country that committed it. The antiwar movement. The Pentagon Papers. Congress cutting the funding. The War Powers Act. The draft, gone. The war became America’s permanent byword for a shameful war. Slow, partial, and paid for with Vietnamese lives that no accountability ever restored. All true. But the machinery turned against its own war.

So here’s my question back, and it’s the only one that matters. When China moves on Taiwan, what’s the Chinese antiwar movement that stops it? Who publishes the napalm girl photo in the People’s Daily? You already know what happens to the person who tries, because we’ve spent this whole thread talking about him.

It was instagram padding so that the entire image shows on instagram instead of being cropped. Less artistic, more utilitarian, but I like your interpretation.

The surveillance point is half-right and I’ve conceded it elsewhere in this thread. US corporate data collection is a disgrace. But “the only difference”? Scroll up. There’s a lawyer serving five years for WeChat posts in this very thread, tried in secret, family notified after. Meta sells your data… it doesn’t disappear you. Both are bad. They are not the same kind of bad, and “both should be avoided” is a luxury position, just ask the people who can’t avoid theirs.

Lol, Tampa is pretty tame until the holidays when the snowbirds come. Then you have to wonder whose bright idea it was to put a monorail in an airport.

Forced labor camps? You mean like private prisons, where in the US the incarceration rate is the highest in the world?

I invite you to go look at a prison, and then go look at a Uyghur camp. I’m not trying to say that the US prison system doesn’t need reform, it’s horrific and I won’t argue that, but we are on orders of magnitudes of difference going by first hand accounts of what is being done in Chinese forced labor camps. The difference, though is that you can read about how bad the prison system is while you live in the US. You can’t read about how bad the concentration camps are while you live in China.

That follows into your next point about freedom of speech. All of the things you’ve listed are real, and shameful. However, you know about them because of the freedoms in the US. You can’t read about shit like that from China because when it happens, China erases the person that reported it. Again, orders of magnitude. You posted a western media source that criticizes the party in power. Try that in China and see where it gets you. Then you can have your own first hand experiences in the forced labor camps. Don’t worry, they’ll make sure your family joins you. They’ve got schools for your kids and everything in there…

US corporate surveillance is a disgrace, I won’t fight you there. No federal privacy law, black market data brokers selling to the pigs. And you are right that the EU is helping the US, but California also has the CCPA, which is how we are attempting to fight it at home. I’ll concede that we need help on that front, no push back. However, China has everything you described plus the State. Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law legally obligates every Chinese citizen and company to cooperate with state intelligence. That’s why we had to push back on Huawei and TikTok. They don’t need a back door. They wrote the front door into law. There is no courtroom standoff where Meta has to answer for its crimes to a panel. These companies work for the CCP. It says so on the sticker. In the US our problem is holding people accountable. In China the accountability is welded on, and not in a good way.

I won’t push back on the emissions, it’s a point I’ve conceded in other responses. However, I will remind you that their internal reports are validated by the State, and if you counter them, the State will punish you. I’m not going to claim their math is wrong, but I won’t take it at face value when I know that the alternative for anyone speaking against the narrative is jail time at best.

And lastly, you claim that the US is the single worst country in the world… Which makes them worse than North Korea? Eritrea? Taliban Afghanistan? I mean… I understand that hyperbole is a fun thing to fall back on, but you’ve been lacing historic examples against modern practices for your entire argument, so do we put the US against Colonial Britain? The Mongol Empire? If we are scoring the present by the past, no one survives the calculus, China included (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, et al.). Pick your arguments wisely.

I’m actually gonna take this in reverse order, because I feel like it will make for a more interesting read.

1. Yes. Trump took a whole bunch of billionaires to China and they begged for stupid shit. No one is saying China doesn’t hold power. I’d be an idiot to claim that. So, not sure what your point is here, power was never in dispute, conduct is. The USSR had a space program…

2. Yes, they are dominating in trade, infrastructure, and EVs and renewables. I’ve talked about this in another reply here. No contesting it. What they make and how they treat their own people are two different axis.

3. This is the big one, because I’m not sure what histories you are reading. The CCP is the most prolific controller of women’s reproductive rights in human history. One-child policy? Forced abortions? Forced Sterilizations? Late term terminations? Fines and job loss after an unauthorized birth? Yeah. Those are things that really happened under the CCP. So… I’m not sure where you want to go with women’s reproductive rights under the CCP. Also, keep in mind, all of the shit that is being done to women in the US is being fought in the courts. You can’t do that in China. They just make a rule and suddenly your pregnancy is invalid. But, you say. “The CCP isn’t like that any more!” Yes, they are, but in reverse. Declining birthrates and a lack of new labor has forced them to course correct. Now they want all of their women to have children and reproduce because the pension system isn’t going to fund itself. And while they are pressuring Han women to have more babies they are sterilizing Uyghur women in Xinjiang. Same government, same time, different orders depending on whose womb it is. That isn’t reproductive rights, that’s supply side genocide.

4. And how am I sure I’m not the one drinking the kool-aid? Multiple. Independent. Sources. I triangulate my facts. I look at everything from multiple angles to make sure I’m seeing the whole picture. I’ve talked about this before in the thread, but I’ll say it again now. I don’t rely exclusively on western press. I don’t rely on clickbait and ad revenue driven sources. I trust independent sources, and the more corroboration I get in my sources, the more I can tell between fact and propaganda.

Yeah, it is Tampa. Those are the monorails on the left and right side. I fly back home pretty often to visit family.

Quick correction before anything else: you keep saying “your sources,” plural, Western, aligned. I’ve cited exactly two things in this entire thread: Human Rights Watch and a UN Working Group. Neither is a newspaper. Neither ran a single word of Iraq WMD coverage. One of them attacks US policy for a living (check HRW’s reports on Guantanamo, the border, Israel… Washington hates them monthly), and the other isn’t Western at all, it’s a multinational panel of jurists. If you want to argue against the NYT’s 2003 war reporting, find someone who cited the NYT. Your propaganda model runs on advertising revenue and profit-driven ownership. Which of my two sources sells ads?

Now, Iraq is a fair hit, and I’ll give it to you straight: the WMD coverage was a genuine press failure. The Times published a mea culpa over its own reporting. But notice how you know that. Western journalists exposed it, Western papers apologized for it, and it’s taught in Western journalism schools as the canonical screwup. The system indicted itself, in public, on the record. That’s the difference in kind I keep pointing at. Where’s CGTN’s Iraq moment? What’s the Chinese state media mea culpa for its Xinjiang coverage? Self-correction requires the legal right to self-accuse, and only one of these systems has it.

And here’s the thing about the theory you’re running… it’s Chomsky’s, and Chomsky is his own counterexample. He called the American press a propaganda machine in a bestseller, from an endowed chair at MIT, for fifty years, and he’ll likely die famous and unarrested. The most successful critique of Western media was published, promoted, and taught by the West. The guy who tried that career in China is the lawyer this whole thread is about, and he’s in a cell in Changsha.

Even if I grant your model completely: profit bias, ownership concentration, wartime framing, all of it… it explains emphasis. Which stories get pushed, what gets buried. It does not explain forgery. What’s the capitalist profit motive for inventing a specific prisoner, a specific court, a specific date, and a specific fine, corroborated by a UN panel and announced by the man’s own family from exile? Your theory covers which stories get told loudly. It doesn’t cover a fabricated human being, and that’s what you’d need it to cover. Last thing: you listed Gaza as proof of uniform framing? Gaza coverage is Western media in open civil war with itself. Resignations in both directions, terminology fights, outlets contradicting each other daily. That’s not manufactured consent. That’s what the absence of a manufacturer looks like.

You’ve now argued with sources I didn’t cite and experiences I didn’t claim. At some point you have to respond to what’s actually in the thread. It’s two sources and one prisoner. Start there.

And merging your other reply here so we can get back to one thread:

Tour? Do you think people traveling to China are only allowed to travel in tour groups and talk to pre-approved actors, including uhygurs outside China? The point isn’t that I verify literally everything, but that I have seen exactly how distorted media coverage is.

Fair hit on “tour”, its a sloppy word. Travel in China is genuinely free, no minders. But the correction doesn’t rescue the method. Xie Yang’s family moved freely through their own country and still didn’t know his trial happened. Nobody vacations their way into a secret proceeding; the secrecy is load-bearing. And “Uyghurs outside China”… those diaspora accounts aren’t a counterexample to my sourcing, they’re a pillar of it. HRW and the UN built their documentation partly on exactly those testimonies. You’re pointing at my evidence and calling it your rebuttal.

“The point isn’t that I verify literally everything.” Ok, but two posts ago the point was exactly that: your words were that you assume anything unverified firsthand is wildly distorted narrative-pushing. Now the claim is ‘media coverage is often distorted,’ which, yes. Agreed. That’s why my method is corroboration across unaligned sources, which is what I did, which is what you’ve been arguing against for four posts. Welcome to my position; the Mai Tais are cold, but you can have a hot one if you like. I’ve never tried it, so I don’t know how good it is.

And a second reply to the edit you made after I read your post the first time:

Fair point that media butchers stories. Gell-Mann amnesia is real, I’ve seen it too. But ‘gets context wrong’ and ‘invented a prisoner’ are different failure classes. HRW named the court, the date, and the fine; the UN backed it; his own family announced it. Falsify that if you can. As for “I go to China and see for myself”…that’s the one method guaranteed to miss the subject. A tourist in 2017 would’ve seen zero evidence of the Xinjiang camps, because they weren’t on the tour. Xie Yang’s trial was so secret his family didn’t know it occurred, and they live there. You can’t eyeball a secret trial; the secrecy is the point. Potemkin figured this out a few hundred years ago. And the people with the most “direct knowledge” of Chinese repression can’t answer your questions because they’re the ones in the cells. You’re polling survivors and calling it the whole picture.

Last thing: by your own rule: “distrust anything you haven’t personally verified”, the thread should ignore your trips to China, since we can’t verify them, and you should ignore everything you believe about literally anything you’ve never seen first hand, likely Gaza and Hormuz, or that Marmite is created in a factory and not a Koala secretion, since you didn’t verify those firsthand either. Your standard doesn’t survive contact with your own arguments. Mine does: documents, multiple unaligned sources, public record. Meanwhile, I’m gonna go sit down and drink a Mai Tai on the tropical Antarctic beaches that I can personally verify are there for real. You should come by some time. Trust, but verify.

SCMP is owned by Alibaba, which is a Party mouthpiece, and CGTN is literally the mouth. This isn’t a shared bias, this is shared ownership and coercion.

Here is my chain. HRW which is a watch group that routinely pisses off Washington, and UN Working Group is a multinational group with no ties to (or love for) the US. Hell, his trial was held in secret. His family only found out afterward, and his ex-wife had to announce the verdict from exile. They didn’t even want people to know they disappeared the lawyer. The Chinese government only lets you see what they want you to see, and they do it through the SCMP or CGTN. The truth has to be literally smuggled out of the country.

The second thing is that when you have multiple, unaligned, sources, you can dispute them with facts. Careers are MADE on dismantling the narrative in the west. Watergate didn’t just go away. Snowden. Abu Ghraib, The Pentagon Papers. Fucking Christ. How many Pulitzers is CGTN winning?

So, I mean, sure, you can make whatever argument you want about bias, but lets not pretend that Chinese media is some bastion of free speech. Multiple. Independent. Sources. Trust, but verify.

You know what, honestly, thanks for a real fucking response instead of doing what these other farts are, and just shilling the CCP. So, here’s your good faith answer.

1. China’s emissions reports are self-regulated. They have arrested and jailed climate activists and reporters that have said anything that goes against their official report. So, take it at face value if you like, but I don’t know if I can trust someone who jails the people that contradict their “facts.” That being said, I will agree that China has a strong role in climate change corrective actions. They are leading in EVs and renewables at scale. However, they are the worlds largest polluter by a wide margin and are actively permitting new coal power. Take that for what you will.

2. I get that you are taking a stab at Trump here, and I want to say that I fully support it. However, China has it’s own share of trade bullshit. Subsidies, dumping, forced tech transfer, and the leverage of rare-earth exports among them. They are the textbook definition of predatory trade. I’m not saying that the US is currently doing a better job, but I don’t think they are doing much worse. I’d honestly call this one a wash.

3. I’m gonna need a little more from you on this one, if I’m being honest. Give me some sources or something. That’s a pretty general claim and I don’t want to waste yours or my time on disputing something you never meant for me to think you said.

And as far as the billions that aren’t eating pissy cereal… well, that’s because the ones that are can’t speak for themselves. The Uyghurs, Tibetans, and those from Hong Kong who can’t contribute to a pew poll. The grass is always greener, so they say, and doubly so when the people who control the grass are the ones telling you how green it is.

When a piece of media presents a new idea to me, I verify it every time. I don’t take things at face value. It’s too easy to get fooled. So, I verify new ideas when someone presents one. If I can’t find corroborating facts from more sources I trust, then I don’t lean on it until I do. It has a bonus effect of letting me learn even more about something I may not have been educated on.

Most recently? The Xie Yang sentencing I cited in the edit of my topmost post. I traced it from the article I found, to the Human Rights Watch release it was based on, to the UN Working Group opinion HRW cites. Took ten minutes.

It’s weird that you even ask me this. I feel like it’s a fairly common practice with people that actually read the news. Are you just taking every article at face value? Your question makes me wonder if you think that others don’t verify because you yourself don’t verify. If that’s the case, it’s a very dangerous way to get your news.

I love fractals. So much so that they are the basis of magic in the book I’m writing. This website is wonderful, but holy hell, don’t click the music button.

There is an old Russian proverb, maybe you know it: доверяй, но проверяй. It says: Trust, but verify. There is a funny story about how it made its way into American culture, but I’ll let you google that for yourself.

I trust my sources, but I still verify what they say.

Here’s the difference you’re missing. I can read Chinese state media right now, legally, and check it against everything else—and I have. A person in China can’t do the same with my sources without breaking the law. One of us lives somewhere that allows ‘trust but verify.’ The other’s government made ‘verify’ a crime. If your media were the honest one, why would checking it against outside sources be illegal?

When did you eat dog shit for the first time? I assume you did just so you’d have first hand knowledge that something was bad. That’s the only way we can ever know anything, right? It has to be first hand. Maybe you should try it again. Tastes change over the years. Maybe you like dog shit now.

But, maybe you are asking in good faith, and I’d hate to be just another asshole online stirring up shit, so here’s how you can tell I’ve never lived in China. I’m still here, and I’m still saying it. If I were in China, I’d be in prison.

It’s fine to dislike the US, I get it, but to favor China above the US shows me you have no idea how horrible China truly is. I guess the propaganda is working.

Edit: Yep, the propaganda is working. I hope you like the taste of Xi’s boot, you fucking idiots. Maybe if you lick hard enough you can work in a sweatshop with windows. I bet the housing is cheap in the forced labor camps, and you can be neighbors with the Uyghurs.

You are defending a nation that wouldn’t extend you the same rights to defend another. Think about that. The CCP controls the narrative. When you shit on the US or another country, you do it with the freedom that is granted to you by the country you live in. The CCP offers none of that within it’s walls. They arrest journalists. They disappear lawyers and leakers. When you post criticism of the US from a US IP Address, while praising the CCP, you truly don’t understand what you are doing, because it doesn’t work the other way. You don’t get to say things about the CCP from within China. You think the US is a surveillance state? Try being a Chinese national in China. Try reporting on it. Maybe you’ll get lucky and just end up like this guy: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/23/china-prominent-rights-lawyer-sentenced-to-5-years. Or maybe your family won’t know what happened to you. His ex-wife had to announce that verdict from exile because she was hounded and harassed while still living in China. So, yeah, go ahead, talk your shit. Maybe you’ll be the outlier. Maybe the CCP will let you slide. I doubt it, but you are free to make your own choices, right?