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by denerio-a 2849 days ago
His point is obvious, clear, and inarguable. If you can’t grasp it that’s on you.
1 comments

> His point is obvious, clear, and inarguable. If you can’t grasp it that’s on you.

His point is definitely arguable and not at all obvious or clear: it rests on conflating prisons with political re-education camps. The two things obviously have similarities, but they also have important differences.

how important are the differences really?

whether you are in a Chinese prison or a US prison does it really matter which injust, ridiculous, hypocritical system put you there? does it really matter what kind of grandiose intellectual contortions your captors use to justify their behavior towards you? if you are being raped or beaten or worked until you bleed do you really care what language they are using to scream at you while they do it? does your family, who doesnt know where you are, and wont see you for years, care what flag is flown over the walls that enclose you?

> how important are the differences really?

The differences are very important. In one, the prisoners are ideally a threat to the members of their society in some way: rapists, con artists, thieves. In the other, the prisoners are only a threat to or a scapegoat for the already-powerful rulers: intellectuals, dissidents, minorities.

> whether you are in a Chinese prison or a US prison does it really matter which injust, ridiculous, hypocritical system put you there?

Yes it does, because they're not "injust, ridiculous, hypocritical" to anywhere near the same degree.