Interesting Global News
What is global news?
Something that happened or was uncovered recently anywhere in the world. It doesn't have to have global implications. Just has to be informative in some way.
Post guidelines
Title format
Post title should mirror the news source title.
URL format
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. No social media posts
Avoid all social media posts. Try searching for a source that has a written article or transcription on the subject.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
- [email protected] - International and local legal news.
- [email protected] - Technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
- [email protected] - Interesting articles, projects, and research that doesn't fit the definition of news.
- [email protected] - News and information from Europe.
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
view the rest of the comments
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.
This is not a good comparison and isn't necessary to show this report is bullshit. It isn't even internally coherent:
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.
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.
See this is the kind of sarcasm that only works if you're in a space that has also uncritically accepted at face value the output of the world's biggest disinformation machine.
Also it's CPC, not CCP. Dead giveaway as to where you get your scholarly reading.
Pg. 18 of the full report, linked in the post:
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:
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
Non-legal definitions of those terms also imply illegality. There is no legal way to kidnap someone.
There are a wide variety of legal ways to kidnap someone. Such as the one I described which happened to me.
How is this logic different from the article's? You're both calling a legal arrest you don't like "kidnapping."
See also: a libertarian saying "of course you can legally steal, it's called taxes!"
Why are you bootlicking? The US government doesn't define common English words and their usage, and it's very weird that you seem to think that the fact that they have control over the land means that they are incapable of committing violence against people. What the government goons I am describing did to me were acts of state-sanctioned violence in which I was taken under threat of physical harm to a location I did not want to go to and held against my will despite having done absolutely nothing to deserve violence being inflicted upon me. People with fucking souls call that abduction/kidnapping, where is your soul?
Jesus Christ. Having a consistent definition of "kidnapping" is not bootlicking.
Consistency is when you can't call an act of violence what it is if it's cops committing the act of violence
Are you an anarchist? I'm not. Like every AES state, I think it's possible to have justifiable government actions. Governments have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, so yeah, a cop making a legal arrest is not the same as me hitting a stranger over the head and stuffing them in a van.
It's not hitting a stranger over the head and stuffing them in a van. It's "an arrest." You can't call it hitting a stranger over the head and stuffing them in a van, because of who's doing it.
This isn't a theory discussion, it's a fucking linguistics discussion. You're insisting that the word "abduction" refers only to a legal term, which it does not. Obviously it does not. Idk what more to say.
We love imprisoning people, blowing them up extra judicially, and deporting our veterans so we don't have to support them, and sometimes we even blow them up extrajudicially after we deport them!
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.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2022-statistical-tables
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.
Your definition of abduction apparently includes persuading people to go somewhere, so I think there are many lacks in terms of definitions here.
Asking under a threat of harm is no longer called persuasion, it's a crime.
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.
There is an archived version, and I attached the full report to the post.
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).
Here's the definition I use, it's quite common
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.
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.
Probably a false equivalence to the prisoner population, as if China doesn't have any prisons and it wasn't an entirely different issue