[menato]

The idea of putting "Tibet" and "human rights" close to each other doesn't look very promising to me based on some historic observations of pre-China Tibet lifestyle http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html (sorry for russian, but hopefully it is pretty simple for automatic translation)

[kryptiskt]

What a red herring. That is one weak excuse for China's violation of human rights. Yeah, most of the world lacked human rights in the past, so what?

[annapurna]

Completely agree. Always the same excuse - bring up the past to defend the present. More than 125 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since March 2011[1], including three in the past week [2] (37-yr-old monk, 20-yr-old woman, and a 34-yr-old man) to protest against this repressive Chinese occupation. As a Tibetan, the past protests and these self-immolations are heart-wrenching and at the Toronto vigil this past weekend, there were people in tears. It's just hard.

We live in this amazing world and yet we have all these geopolitical issues (Eastern Europe, Middle East, Tibet, Kashmir, etc.) caused by various factors we vehemently believe/oppose (we humans have an brilliant capacity to rationalize any of our actions/beliefs). This past summer, I traveled across Kashmir with my two high school friends to visit the areas where the Indo-Pakistani[3] and Sino-Indian[4] wars took place. The landscape was beautiful, especially in the Ladakh regions. But overall, these regions are occupied by villages and small towns dwarfed by the huge military bases. Why can't these local people live by themselves without the fear of another war? Most of you already know, it's the same textbook example: a new ruler comes in town, finds the need to distract/rally his or her country - what better than a war (this "war" could be extended to politics/tech/biz, not just the old Roman wars)? History is littered with the similar plots and it works every single time.

Sometimes, I wonder if an ET contact would be good for our world so we could put down our differences and realize we are all in this together so we could take care of each other, our neighbors, and our amazing planet! Also, solving Fermi's paradox [5] would be icing on the cake!

[1]http://freetibet.org/news-media/na/full-list-self-immolation... [2]http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/26/uk-china-tibet-idUK... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_wars_and_confli... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War [5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796270

[menato]

This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.

[jrochkind1]

The other way around? What other way around? People in China are terrified by Tibet, because of Tibet's historic human rights violations? Like the Chinese are scared that Tibet might invade and take over China? Really?

I mean, I suppose Americans are terrified of the Pakistani children their military is killing with drones too.

[Normati]

Human rights are a luxury of stable, developed countries. If autocratic governments are too liberal with them, they can lose their power, and that can end up worse than all the human rights problems put together (ie civil war). See Iraq or Syria for example.

[tobltobs]

Or human rights are a requirement to become a stable, developed country.

[Normati]

Not a requirement. Eg USA didn't have them half a century ago despite being mostly developed (I understand some parts are still a bit wild west), and fairly stable (probably not really going to be taken over by communism).