What else would learning R mean? The programming language?

No one is attacking your "factual and informative" comment.

No one is disputing the difficulties you've highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won't be able to achieve this.

And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

Your argument is that "Hard science doesn't care about politics," so I assume you don't want to imply that you're critiquing the capabilities of China's political system. So what's left? Is it racism? The removed can't achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don't just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

No one is asking you to?

because there are not actually two parties

"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."

• Julius Nyerere

Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.

Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren't murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.

Israelis don't have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they're just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can't get along.

mismanagement

When talking about the US, it's more often correct to assume malice rather than incompetence

I wrote a long comment about this a few days ago (not about the DPRK specifically, but still very relevant)

US citizens don't lack access to those things because of a lack of budget. The threat of homelessness, hunger, and health insecurity are all forms of worker discipline. The barrier to solving those things is ideological, not budgetary.

It's also based on this false mythology that the US (and I'm sure other countries) have crafted around their involvement in World War 2. There's this popular notion based on the idea where "if we simply knew what was going on we would have stepped in sooner, and all the atrocities that were occurring were simply too hidden from the public view for us to do anything about until it was too late!" And the logic that follows from that mythology is that if we want to stop atrocities like the Holocaust from happening again we have to take every accusation seriously, because brushing it off could risk another Holocaust happening under our noses without us knowing about it! And this allows atrocity propaganda to get away with providing shockingly little evidence to support its accusations, because not meeting an appropriate burden of proof can just be explained away by the "clandestine" nature of genocide. That it's all happening behind closed doors, hidden away from the public. The proof of conspiracy is locked away in secret archives, but a collection of anecdotes is all you should need! If you don't believe the first hand accounts we are publishing about our ~~targets~~ enemy states, then you're going to allow another Holocaust to happen!

But this understanding of genocide is completely ahistorical. Genocide does not happen in quiet, behind closed doors. Most people are actually quite opposed to their neighbors being discriminated against and eventually either run out of their homes or murdered, and most attempts to do so at any kind of scale would be met with social backlash and resistance. To get a society to the point where even the early stages of genocide are possible, you need to whip up segments of the population into a bloodthirst fervor. You need to agitate in public with loud speakers and megaphones, rallying people against the "subhuman removed" who are weighing like a cancer on the moral and righteous citizenry who is beset by a plague of undesirables. You need to boldly proclaim what your agenda is, and whip up enough of a critical mass of supporters to your cause that protesting against it becomes dangerous and risky because violent fascists will meet you in the streets to oppose those protests. Only then is it even logistically feasible to carry out even the initial stages of a genocide, and the entire process up to that point was required to be incredibly public. And at every stage afterwards genocide leaves behind incredibly damning evidence that incredibly apparent even on a cursory investigation. Starting with the mass refuge crisis that inevitably occurs as people attempt to flee from a campaign of mass persecution, down to the massive logistical networks required to carry out a campaign of mass death in the final stages.

The Holocaust did not happen in secret, it was well understood what was going on even with the standards of reporting and intelligence gathering of the times. This idea that we simply didn't know comes from a desire to whitewash how complicit our country was with the Nazi regime. There was no debate on if the Holocaust was happening, we had transcripts of Hitler's speeches and translations of the things he published, we had reports on the nazi rallies and the speeches given there, we had boats filled with refugees begging for asylum that were turned away from our doorstep. The public debate at the time was not, "Well gosh, we would certainly intervene if we knew what was going on, but the evidence is just so wishy-washy and we don't want to be rash and jump to conclusions." Instead, the debate was around whether or not eugenics and ethnic cleansing was good, with a significant portion of the public whole-heartedly endorsing Hitler's policies and actions. Especially in the Jim Crow south and in other places of the country where the eugenics movement had a strong foothold and significant political sway due in part to endowments from organizations like the Rockefeller foundation and the Carnegie Institute who promoted Eugenics and race science as legitimate fields of academic study which you could get a degree in from American Universities as part of their mission to fund education. In fact, Hitler cites the American Eugenics Movement directly in Mein Kampf, crediting it with giving him the the "scientific basis" for nazi race laws like the Nuremberg codes. And of course, American corporations gave tremendous economic support, and those corporations had major business and financial interests tied up with supporting the nazis.

America was not unaware, America was complicit. Many of the policies implemented by Hitler are things that the American Eugenics movement had been trying to either pass into law or expand into other parts of the country for years. Many of the race laws in Jim Crow states were even harsher than what could be found in the Nuremberg codes, and eugenicist policies of forced sterilization had even started becoming state law in places like California. This idea that we simply didn't know better is a comforting thought that allows people to pretend their country was the good guys, and they would have stepped off the sidelines sooner had we simply known better. And now we must remain hypervigilant for the slightest hint of impropriety.

And propaganda about Soviet states and other socialist projects fits this worldview quite well. This style of propaganda is full of stories about doublethink and brainwashing the public so that they don't question the party while a secret conspiracy goes on under their noses as people are disappeared in secret.

In reality what a real ongoing genocide looks like is what is happening on the southern US border. Sure, reporters are often denied access to the inside of the migrant detention facilities on the border and other internment style camps, so some specific details about the process are somewhat obscured from public view. But the actual facts of what is occurring on the border is not the subject of public debate. Everyone knows that migrants are being locked up, families are being separated, women are being forcibly sterilized in these facilities against their consent, migrants are being horribly mistreated to the point of torture, adequate nutrition and health care is often not available to the people being detained resulting in many deaths. The public debate around this issue is not centered around what is happening in these facilities, it's centered around whether the people being locked up and horrifically mistreated deserve it. With one side of that debate enthusiastically endorsing that cruelty, whipped up into a vitriolic fervor fueled by a constant stream of hate media broadcast by Fox News and various other tv, radio, and internet based hate media outlets. One side of that debate is celebrating how the illegals who are a plight and a burden on the good, hard-working American patriots are getting what's coming to them, and that it serves them right for trying to come here and drag down the country. One side is claiming that Mexico is sending over their rapists, their drug dealers, and their murders, that these people are subhuman criminal scum, and that anyone who opposes these detention facilities are enemies of Law and Order and are traitors to this country and are traitors to all the true patriots who defend our borders.

You don't have to dig beneath the surface to uncover some secret hidden conspiracy. Genocide is very loud and very public because it needs to be. It needs the consent and support of at least some portion of the public to be carried out, it needs these policies to be contentious so that the public fights among itself and resistance is difficult to organize.

When these libs raise concerns about being a genocide denier/apologist it comes from this idea that genocide is this secretive act, and if we don't take even the most flimsy accusations seriously we risk being complicit in another atrocity. That the consequences of not taking accusations of genocide seriously are just too horrific to think about, and anyone who doesn't feel the same way must themselves be complicit. But what this train of thought misses is that the consequences for supporting unfounded accusations is equally disastrously, and to illustrate that point we have decades of brutally interventionist US foreign policy which has repeatedly fabricated atrocity propaganda to manufacture consent for the slaughter of millions at the hands of a globe spanning military empire, with even more deaths being caused by countries under US sanctions being starved of resources as an act of non-combatant warfare. A false positive is just as disastrous as a false negative. But when you actually study history and understand the reasonable burden of proof you would expect investigators and reporters to be able to meet, you can feel more comfortable raising the standards of evidence you're willing to accept to substantiate accusations of atrocity instead of naively buying into every accusation that you're presented with and find yourself unwittingly in support of horrific foreign policy and militarism again and again and again.

For /c/capitalismindecay, the most that you need to do is accept the principle that the Axis was worse than the U.S.S.R., which sounds obvious and trivial to us but can be surprisingly difficult for some people.

Problem is you are fighting against stuff like the Double Genocide Theory, which was literal nazi propaganda made to muddy the water and "both sides" the actual Holocaust, and even though that propaganda wasn't even remotely credible when it was published it has since been reheated and served up as Cold War propaganda that was repeated so often that it's just "common sense" at this point.

And part of what makes atrocity propaganda so effective is that once people buy into it it is filled with thought-terminating clichés that are built in which makes challenging that narrative difficult.

Back in the early xbox days when open world destructible environments were still novel, there were quite a few games where just running around and breaking shit was a core part of the gameplay. I'm thinking of games like "Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction." After a while, destructible environments just became just became a bullet point on a lot of games, usually scaled back and refined so that you still had areas with sensible level design after things were broken. But I can't recall any games where destruction was a core part of the experience being made in a long time.

So I'd love to see a game like Ultimate Destruction made to modern standards with modern physics and such. I know Red Faction: Guerilla is known for having destructible environments with very complex physics that required you to think about how a building was constructed and which supports were load bearing if you wanted to topple a building over, and that is certainly the kind of attention to detail I'd want, but it still doesn't scratch the same itch. The environment is certainly very destructible, but your tools for destroying the environment are much more limited and the game play is much more focused on the combat with the destructible environment offering an option for how you can approach combat.

"Break things apart sandboxes" probably aren't made anymore because it's not actually that engaging, and I only liked it because I was a dumb kid, but I would love to see a break the world with outrageous power style of game made to modern standards.

Part 3, Why does this context matter for talking about Xinjiang?

First, genocide is a powerful word with a lot of political weight behind it. Being able to declare something as a genocide is a powerful rhetorical tool, and is useful for manufacturing consent for war and other kinds of economic/political interventions. That's the basis of atrocity propaganda as a tool for manipulating public opinion. Accusations of genocide and similar atrocity propaganda techniques are incredibly difficult to brush off regardless of how much evidence there is to substantiate those accusations, because any rebuttal to those accusations has a wide range of built-in "thought terminating clichés" that can be used to shut down dissent. Clichés like, "you're just a genocide denier," "why are you defending an authoritarian regime?" "but what if you're wrong and we just let another holocaust happen under our noses!"

But as we've seen above, the official definition of genocide rejects the academic and historical context of genocide, and instead chose to define genocide in a political way. Specifically in a way that the UN nations who would otherwise be guilty of genocide could not be convicted, but that could still be used to prosecute their enemies. We see this play out all of the time not just with genocide, but in regards to human rights in general. Citations Needed has an excellent episode titled "The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex" That talks about the history of Human Rights groups and international courts almost exclusively weaponizing Human Rights violations as ways to penalize mainly formerly colonized nations in the global south, and are almost never used to punish the plethora of Human Rights abuses that occur in Western nations.

What this politicization of genocide creates is a warped conversation where events will try to be twisted in a way that can allow events to be classified as a genocide on a technicality for political purposes. That's why you see a focus on coverage of Xinjiang focusing on things like increased access to contraceptives, because that could be twisted to fit the UN definition of "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."

But with the broader, more holistic, more academic definition of genocide, and with an analysis of the techniques of the historical genocides that definition was meant to encompass, we can get a better idea of this kind of genocide and see how the situation in China compares. First, and probably most importantly, would be the vocational schools.

What we know about these schools is that they were started in response a rash of extremist terrorist attacks in the region carried out by the East Turkmenistan Separatist movement. Many of those who were radicalized are people who were native to Xinjiang, left the region and fought on behalf of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and then returned home to Xinjiang still radicalized after ISIS was dissolved.

The stated purpose of these vocational schools is to offer populations at risk of radicalization, those who have already expressed radicalized intents, those who have participated in extremist movements such as ISIS and the East Turkmenistan Separatist movement, and those who have been convicted of crimes related to the above categories. The vocational schools have a focus on creating economic and political opportunities through job training, Mandarin language education, and with an overall focus on deradicalization and countering the narratives that are used in radicalization.

These schools are used as the primary evidence that China is carrying out a genocide in secret, with comparisons made to concentration camps and indigenous schools. But these arguments fall apart when interrogated. In historical genocides that we can compare to, concentration camps are at best a way to force a group into a status as a second class citizen, systematically remove them from higher levels of participation in government, social practice, and economic activity. At worse, they are used as part of a wider program of mass extermination. Not only do we not see these kinds of outcomes as a result of the Xinjiang vocational schools, we see exactly the opposite of what you would expect from a genocide. Those who attend the vocational schools end up with higher levels of social, political, and economic participation. They have expanded opportunities for employment and political participation, and social participation is developed through broader policies that invest in building places of worship, cultural centers, and general public development.

Similarly, comparisons to indigenous schools in colonial empires also fall flat. The kind of cultural destruction and forced assimilation carried out by indigenous schools requires at least a generation of grooming children from the moment that they reach school age until they reach adulthood, and only makes sense in a broader context of cultural suppression. The vocational schools, on the other hand, are adult education, the classes are offered in their native languages, and there's no broader cultural suppression to suggest that "deradicalization" is actually some kind of euphemism for cultural destruction and forced assimilation. And far from being a generations long effort attempting to systematically destroy any association or connection you have with your heritage, these vocational schools were only in operation for roughly 2-3 years, with any given person attending for around a year on average, and with the last classes finishing up in late 2019.

And that idea about broader policy is the really damning bit. Genocide, cultural or otherwise, has never been a single isolated policy. You never just have concentration camps, you have an entire legal and social framework designed around promoting one national group over others. Yet in China you don't see that pattern anywhere else. There are 55 recognized national groups that are all guaranteed proportional representation in government at both the local and national level. Cultural sites, places of worship, and the like aren't being destroyed, on the contrary public funding is used to help build places of worship and preserve cultural landmarks. Native languages aren't suppressed and scrubbed from public life, on the contrary public spaces are accessible by native language speakers, public signage is multi-lingual, government services are available in your native language, including the right to an education in your native language. Economic opportunities and wealth isn't being stripped away from any of these groups, on the contrary their economic livelihood is constantly being invested in.

There is no other policy that could establish the pattern of genocide that any other historical genocide has exhibited, and therefore nothing to suggest that Xinjiang schools are actually part of a genocide as opposed to the stated goals of deradicalization through education. There isn't even the argument that this is a stepping stone that will lead to further repression, because the program has already concluded and is considered to be a success, having ended in 2019 after the rate of terrorist attacks and extremist inspired violence dropped to zero. If this were actually some form of brutal repression instead of the education and job training it is claimed to be, then you would expect to see an increase in radicalization and extremist inspired violence in response to fierce government repression, but we end up seeing precisely the opposite.

The only reason left for alleging that there is a genocide, cultural or otherwise, or that there is a pattern of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, is that those allegations help to advance US foreign policy interests in the same way that "Saddam has WMDs" did.

And you will even have state department officials admit to this in certain company, it's not like they're exactly shy about their intentions. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson gave a speech that lends credence to this idea that separatist violence and extremism has been cultivated and instigated by the US specifically as a way to destabilize China as part of the strategic objectives of the US military, and weaponizing the response to extremist violence in the media in order to control the narrative is a natural extension of this kind of warmongering.