TimothyOilypants

Three-card monte has many different names too.

Humans have consistently moved the goalposts on "sentience" explicitly to ensure that we are the only living thing that fits into the category.

"The only thing that can stop a bad dog with a gun is a good dog with a gun."

If you're not interested in a good faith discussion that's fine, you can just say that like an adult.

I wish I could live in your black and white world, but unfortunately I've seen enough of the real one to understand that things are rarely as simple as internet trolls think they should be...

Have a good one.

That's certainly a bombastic and alarmist strawman.

I have seen a great deal of propaganda, but I have seen no compelling evidence of genocide. Quite the contrary, China has actually been very transparent about Xinjiang, and MANY people from the west have visited the region and provided extensive documentary evidence which contradicts the narrative

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

And ANYTHING to do with natural resource harvesting and processing.

The Alberta separatism thing has influenced my opinion on the Xinjiang Uyghur situation. Providing a decent standard of living for >1,400,000,000 is a big undertaking, no one in human history has come even close. Absolute individual liberty sounds good on the surface, but at what cost?

If you have a small, but very disruptive minority of your population who have made it clear that they would rather tear your country apart than integrate into your established social fabric and norms, what do you do? Isolation and re-education seems like a reasonable, and humane option. Extermination or expulsion would be much easier solutions; investing the time and resources to improve material conditions while also giving people the opportunity to be rehabilitated seems like a preferable alternative.

I see a lot of people very critical of China's Sinicization campaign; but at the same time I also see growing instability in most other culturally diverse nations. Ideological extremism is on the rise, anti-immigration sentiment plagues many other developed nations, and I have yet to see systems or proposed solutions which I think can scale to the extent required for a population of 50,000,000... Let alone billions.

The Dream and Magic were the beginning of an era!

It's just about increasing the friction. No door lock will stop a motivated thief, but it will discourage 75% of people from trying. The laziest/stupidest kids (read: the most at risk for grooming and indoctrination) will be the ones least likely to overcome this friction, so it's still a good harm reduction strategy.

To be fair, kids clever and motivated enough to get around this type of gating generally aren't the ones at the greatest risk. I think this is more about creating a reasonable barrier to protect our most vulnerable.