"Content warning: extremely graphic distressing images of people being shot in the head by PRC security forces"

Not sure how this could be any clearer.

I found this warning clear enough.

I think it's a good thing to include these images, we've become too used to content moderation that we're desensitized to a lot of the atrocities that are still happening daily around the world.

The images are worse than that. A picture taken at a distance of someone being shot in the head is easier to see or scroll by than a closeup of a head blown in half.

The photo of the woman whose head was blown in half by the rifle is many years (decades?) old. It’s profoundly disturbing, but it’s been widely available for a long time.

That doesn’t make it any less brutal or disturbing, but it serves as a reminder of how often we are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities when it’s economically or politically expedient.

The phrase sometimes gets a bit overused. I wasn't fully prepared for some images either.

Distressing can be pretty subjective, and I was definitely not expecting to be THAT distressed. Figured other people might also be caught off guard.

I see where you’re coming from, but perhaps something like “close-ups of mutilated bodies after execution by large-calibre weapons to the head” would give more of an indication. I didn’t expect the gore, just a wide shot of someone with a gun to their head, a bit like the famous one of the add-hoc execution in the street in Vietnam by Eddie Adams.

Maybe the thing is that we are so conditioned by having half assed censored media pictures and quotes like its graphic, that when someone finally delivers on it, we just get shocked. This is how it looks like when someone head gets blown off.

Let me put it bluntly. There is a closeup of a woman with only half a head. It comes as a surprise as the first images are not as bad, and the article's content draws you in. I had to stop there even though I wanted to continue reading.

Personally, the images themselves do not particularly upset me. Maybe regretfully, but I have seen enough of the actual results of armed conflicts. Personally, I think the images of mass murders with piles of death (often naked) people from WW2 far more disturbing.

However, you do correctly point out how this article appears to draw people in and then goes for maximum shock effect. I'm sure that whoever created this article did that on purpose. Even if the cited numbers happen to be accurate, this kind of tactic is rather typical for propaganda. The same can be said about producing "facts" that are either hard or impossible to verify.

To be clear: I am not saying that this is propaganda, but it does at least raise a few red flags about potentially being just that. Further research needed.

EDIT: to be even more clear: I have no doubt that the CCP have committed horrible crimes. But that will not make me just believe whatever somebody might write about it.

After that image there's only a closing paragraph anyway, so you didn't miss much.

Did not expect to see an image of someone with their head half blown off.

Trying to find my thoughts on this. The Einsatzgruppen pretty much started the Holocaust via mass shootings (before all other methods). They switched to gas vans (according to this article, China uses this too? What in the fuck) for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time (to carry out the deed). They sought a more efficient, less taxing method, and that’s where the gas vans came in.

The Nazis did this to anyone that they could lump into ‘a national threat’ bucket, so Jews that were also communist Russians were instant kill (as opposed to German Jews who initially got put in labor camps).

If the CCP ever decides routine shootings is taxing or inefficient (like the Nazis), things wouldn’t be so far off to having an “efficient” death camp to just handle it en masse.

I tend to always over-fit the Nazi parallels, especially with China, but China’s prime issue is scale. Whatever they do, they must always consider scale.

Crackdowns will happen at scale (Hong Kong), censorship will happen at scale (speech/internet), imprisonment will happen at scale (Uighurs), and mass executions (if we were to ever get the numbers) will happen at scale.

As hard it is to not turn away from that picture in the article, I would sincerely like to know what that woman’s crime was.

I think the point of the article is that the choice to involve ordinary police officers in the killings is to give them a stake in the current regime (or at least to make them fear the consequences of any other future regime.) I don’t think more organised death camps fit with that motive, but it could be wrong.

The Einsatzgruppen were actually like ordinary police. They were never actually told to create death camps initially, it was just more ... efficient, so Nazi sub leadership switched to that somewhat independently.

This book makes an interesting point about the bottom-up theory of what really started the Holocaust (this is an unforgettable read, I feel like author literally accounted for every death batch (and yes ‘batch’ has to be used due to the scale):

https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stal...

Basically, it was simple broad directives that got interpreted by these disparate elements of the Nazis in the Eastern front. What does it mean if someone is not only a Jew, but also a communist Russian? Pretty much an instant threat, and forward deployed units liberally interpreted it into mass-killing vs forced labor camps. Once that genie was out of the bottle, you would look unproductive in the regime if you weren’t upping the ante.

What is the CCP creating here? You want units with blood on their hands ratcheting up new and interesting ways of currying favor with the regime? Hey bosses, I found a great new way to promote CCP Authority, forget Uighur camps, get a load of this. Suddenly you have a macabre competition within a peculiar institution that can only become darker if left to find it’s own logical purpose (be the very best ccp you can be, whatever that means, and oh John the guy you started with recently rose the ranks doing this, not saying you should too, but take some initiative).

No master plan, just a dark organic evolution.

> for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time

Sadly mental gymnastics seem to do their work often enough. For example firing squad style executions also tend to use mental gymnastics, by introducing blank rounds the individual members of the squad are no longer certain that they will fire the lethal shot, making them less hesitant to aim and shoot correctly.

> imprisonment will happen at scale (Uighurs),

Not just imprisonment, mass raping of Uighurs women as well: https://www.insider.com/uighur-activists-mass-rape-chinese-m...

Quite frankly, I suggest the opposite. Most people in the west, and especially in the US, don't appreciate just how evil the CCP is. Our corporate media has given the CCP a free pass on mass murder because many of our wealthiest people have made their fortunes through trade with China. We should all look long and hard at these images so that we don't forget them.

It is fun to see criticisms of China get insta-downvoted to hell. Mine is fully referenced and went to -1 instantly... there is definitely some real denial about what the CCP actually do.

If you don't have actual evidence of communist agents downvoting your comments, then you're breaking the rules by posting like this. Please review and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."

Overwhelmingly, this stuff is just internet-style cloak-and-dagger fantasy, and cheap rhetoric. How do I know that? Because when I look at who the actual users are who make these votes, and I see they were, for example, commenting on HN about Julia in 2015, the odds that they are a communist plant round to zero. This reality is so absolutely remote from what comments like yours are insinuating that it's hard for me to believe that people are willing to go there. Yet here we are, with spies in every closet and foreign agents under every bed. The only word for this is cartoonish.

The truth is that this is a very large, very international community, with millions of users having all sorts of backgrounds and views, and they disagree on divisive topics like China. That is the extremely mundane—albeit emotionally charged—reality of what is going on here. Accusing people who hold different views of being spies and foreign agents is the fastest way to poison the community, so we don't allow it, especially when there isn't a shred of anything resembling evidence to support it.

This entire dynamic is determined by tribal identifications on both sides. That leads people to hate and ultimately want to destroy each other. That's not compatible with the value of this site, which is curiosity. People can't be curious with each other and want to destroy each other at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way.

If anyone wants more explanation, there are arbitrary amounts of it at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

> see criticisms of China get insta-downvoted to hell.

Let's dissociate the country from the political apparatus. What's evil is the CCP, not China in itself - it's not like the citizens can vote the current regime out.

I really get extremely tired of this kind of thing. Obviously I mean the CCP when I say 'China'. Why does nobody say this when people criticise other countries?

In nearly all parlance talking about countries you reference those countries directly 'the US invaded Iraq' for e.g.

It's a shorthand for 'the govt of xxx'.

> Why does nobody say this when people criticise other countries?

because most other countries we talk about have some kind of representative system where the people actually have a say in who governs them. Of course it's all relative, no representation is ever perfect, but in a dictatorial regime there's no representation at all.

Yeah sure, I mean when people say 'Iran' did X or 'Venezuela' did Y those are fully representative govts that the people can overturn at any point. Oh wait.

Why aren't you saying نظام‎ instead of Iran? Why not 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' instead of Venezuela?

Come on man.

> Oh wait

You do realize that Iran is a republic right?

They hold legislative and executive branch elections every few years with different political parties and all....

> , I mean when people say 'Iran' did X or 'Venezuela' did Y those are fully representative govts that the people can overturn at any point.

For Venezuela, people did vote for Chavez in the first place right? Which then made the turn to dictatorship. Which is what you should expect when when you elect a Marxist.

it's to separate 'the Chinese people' from 'the CCP'... the Chinese people are the victims, CCP the perpetuators. A lot of people confuse this distinction, and do racial behaviors thinking they're doing good for the world.

And yes, the same should go for Iran and Venezuela. But it's easy for CCP because they officially made the acronyms by themselves...

The name of a place is commonly used synonymously with its governance (e.g. "EU invests $X bn" is on the frontpage right now). It should be clear that it's not referring to the individuals living there.

> (e.g. "EU invests $X bn"

Poor example, EU is not a country and represents a political apparatus, nothing else.

Even with nitpicking you still got the point, so I guess it's good enough.

Calling for shock-porn rather than rationality and discourse is exactly the kind of things that receive downvotes on HN, not sure why you act so surprised

Please read and follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You broke them badly here.

There is no evidence that the people downvoting the comments you disagree with are communist agents. The evidence is entirely that the community is simply divided on divisive topics, like this one. That's what's going on here, and it's destructive to post these inflated accusations to the contrary—it's poison, in fact. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to do it.

On a meta note, I wanted to respond to your top-level comment to point out (playing devil’s advocate) that there are countries like Japan with conviction rates well exceeding 99% (but for different reasons).

I suspect that minor gotchas like this are capable of having the opposite effect: neutral people who care about nuance will feel like you are slightly adapting facts to suit anti-CCP narrative. Compounded by the fact that there is little verifiable information due to heavy censorship, this makes any argument on the topic quite challenging.

After your top-level comment got downvoted I didn’t feel comfortable expressing my opinion: some might think I downvoted you and/or others will mistake me for an astroturfer. Personally, I’ve upvoted it and I agree on general sentiment.

That's a good point to make, however it appears that the conviction rate in Japan comes down more to plea bargaining and only the most blatant cases being allowed to proceed forward [0].

I agree that kind of thing can erode the argument so thank you for pointing it out, I wasn't actually aware of that fact re: Japan and probably I'd put less emphasis on that knowing that there can be other alternative explanations.

I don't agree that it's a struggle to criticise the CCP more generally however as while they lock down as much information as they can, plenty leaks out (as always with totalitarian regimes) and there is overwhelming evidence including video, testimony, etc. as to treatment of Uighurs and Falon Gong. I intentionally added references to my original post as to avoid such criticism... for all the good it did me!

And please feel free to express yourself, I have upvoted you also :)

[0]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468111?jou...

The problem with the line of thinking that China deliberately engineered/created/released sars-cov-2 is that there's zero motivation for it. What could they possibly gain from it? What's the strategic value of it?

Oh god... I didn't say it was deliberate!!!!

The argument is that they were profoundly negligent.

As for the lab side of things, the argument is that it was an accidental release (as happened multiple times with SARS 1).

My point is whether or not it walked out of the lab (by ACCIDENT) given they knew in 2003 that certain things were major risks, they should have come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fact they re-opened wet markets and took no further steps to tackle that makes them responsible through negligence.

The combination of facts is (I’m also giving some references to your points):

1) China is known to have contributed[0] to bat coronavirus research, my speculation is that Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab exists primarily for this reason.

2) There were documented lab escapes of original SARS-CoV from labs in Beijing[1] in 2004, as I recall resulting in at least one death.

3) WHO’s study starts this month, but they don’t seem to mention lab escape (not of some “engineered virus”, just straight up a natural sample escaping on a person) as a possibility[2]. I am not sure if they are playing politics or this is their sincere outlook.

I can’t stress this enough: China may have been unlucky to be struck by the original SARS-CoV, so it’s reasonable that they had the motivation to study its origins; that research is valuable and it’d be absolutely bonkers to criticize scientists for having done it. Even if lab escape did indeed happen to be the cause of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I am not sure this should be a basis for prosecution of a particular country (as opposed to e.g. tightening of BSL security practices): there’s human factor, and mistakes happen; if it hadn’t been China it could’ve eventually been another country.

What I find alarming is if an effort to obstruct the study of pandemic origins in order to save face (?) is taking place. If it was a lab escape, humanity’s future could be much safer if we knew how it happened—but how would researchers know it was a lab escape if they can’t look in that direction?

[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... (2015, two authors are with Wuhan Institute of Virology)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak#April_...

[2] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-convened-global-...

yeah I'm not unreasonable about the pandemic situation, and of course it's feasible it occurred through no fault of their own in the first place, however it is clear that they were WELL aware after SARS1 that wet markets/traditional Chinese medicine/etc. were major pandemic vectors and re-opened e.g. wet markets very quickly after both SARS and SARS2-CoV. This is actually insane (as in mentally unwell) levels of arrogance and negligence.

Secondly they covered up the outbreak. Had it been reported a few weeks earlier apparently up to 95% of deaths could have been prevented. That is really insane.

The lab side of it is interesting and it seems just so much of a coincidence that the lab was right next to the oubreak, of all the places in all of the huge country of China.

I don't doubt they were motivated to study bat coronaviruses, of course they were and there was in fact very big competition with the US.

The problem is China is such a corrupt country where health + safety + following protocols is something of a joke, as with most communist/totalitarian systems people always try to get away with as much as they can that I have zero trust in their BS4 lab being properly constructed and procedures followed correctly.

They also covered up the discovery of a very similar virus some years ago (they actively anonymised records around it after covid19 emerged) in a bat cave (no pun intended) which already appeared to have bat-human transmission.

It is something like 96% similar to covid19 though some scientists say it isn't feasible that it evolved into covid19 except in nature. However I wonder whether some form of natural evolution of the virus was experimented on or encouraged in the lab or whether this assumption is in fact correct.

So the lab thing is definitely up for debate, however the general attitude from much of the media and certainly China is to dismiss it as a crackpot theory. Absolutely don't think it is.

Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.

Keeping in mind the next virus might not be a 0.4% case fatality rate that mostly kills the very old, it's deeply frightening.

> Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.

I agree completely.

The reason I - and others - commented, is that your initial comments made it sound like you believed it was 100% on purpose, that it was some weird plan of the CCP to gain power, somehow.

The fact that the BSL4 lab had a grant for "characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk" using "in vivo infection experiments" at around the time of the breakout is also a bit of a coincidence.

Whether it's deliberate is besides the point - they clearly lied about it, misled the WHO, and let their people transmit the disease worldwide for months before starting to share what they knew.

> they clearly lied about it

I fail to see the value of this, China is not Sweden, I am not sure why you hold them to the same standards, that seems strange to me

But anyhow, I just wanted to add that the CIA and the US state department was aware of a new Pneumonia surging on China back in November and sped to warn NATO and Israel of it[0], after all, no one ever needed to actually listen to what the Chinese government says, that's what intelligence agencies are for

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-dise...

Good grief. You can't violate the HN guidelines like this—neither nationalistic flamewar nor personal attack is allowed on HN, and you combined them. This thread is full of people breaking the guidelines that but your post may be the worst I've seen. Doing this will get you banned here.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. If you want explanation, I've posted extensively in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616408

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615903

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616042

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616205

and there are hundreds more past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Look at economic situation of all big countries and China. Its atleast an important motivation.

This sort of nationalistic flamewar boilerplate is not welcome on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with. This is not conversation, it's blaring through a megaphone, and it's not what this site is for. Internet battle rhetoric is off topic on Hacker News, because regardless of what the underlying topic is, it makes curious conversation impossible.

No, we're not communist agents or secret sympathizers; we're simply trying to moderate an internet forum that doesn't suck. Posts like this one destroy that like salt on a slug, so please fight your battles elsewhere. Edit: Sorry, I realize it probably sounds like I'm picking on you personally and I don't mean to at all—this kind of thing is unfortunately common, and it's a big deal.

Personal attacks and name-calling are also not ok ("your frankly very ignorant"), so please don't do those either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> But they certainly gained a lot in the process and capitalized in every possible way

What did they gain? How did they capitalize?

> and tried to cover their corruption and continued to dissapear physicians, journalists and anyone who tried to expose their incompetence and maleficence in regards to COVID.

100% agree here. But that they're desperately trying to cover it up, regardless of origin, doesn't mean they gained anything from it.

> I can go on, but this should at least give you some context to your frankly very ignorant position on the matter.

Did you confuse me with some other poster? Nothing in that wall of text has got anything to do with my position, or this specific argument, and you still didn't address my actual question.

> What did they gain? How did they capitalize?

That they violated international Law and got to illegally occupy and then annex a major financial Hub, isn't that alone enough? I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.

They then got to quell dissenters and hunted them down in order to re-affirm Pooh's (Xi) stance as the tough man of the CCP. 3 high profile activists have been jailed for nothing more than being involved in a protest, a previously Civil Right in HK, 10 of 12 Hongkoners were captured for non-crimes and sent to be tried on the mainland, essentially bypassing the need for the extradition bill that got rejected due to the protests as was intended, but worked anyway due to the perverse nature of the National Security Law.

I'm not sure what more to say to the rest of your response, and I'm wondering if you even bothered to read any of it; are you not familiar with amount of money that flows through Hong Kong's Capital Markets at all? The value of the real estate in the most expensive place on Earth?

Also, I properly used paragraphs: so it's hardly a wall of text. Lengthy perhaps, but not a wall of text as its properly structured.

> I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.

No, you haven't given any reason whatsoever how the coronavirus allowed China to do all these things. How, specifically, did the intentional or unintentional release of the virus aid the CCP strategically?

What did the virus allow them to gain that they would otherwise be unable to do?

How did they capitalize on the global pandemic?

There do seem to be a lot of CCP apologists when the evident facts that they commonly lie to their people, strictly control emigration, and go as far as killing dissenters, should make it very clear that this is not a regime you want to live under.

> I honestly wonder whether it's ... just standard HNers who are in some sort of woke-led state of denial.

I don't think there's any evidence for that. Every woke tech person I know would rather quit their job than do work that benefits the CCP. I think that's why all the biggest tech companies have tiptoed up to that point (e.g. project dragonfly) but haven't been able to cross it.

There's loads of Chinese and Chinese-ancestry developers on here, some non-trivial proportion harbor nationalistic sentiment towards China and auto downvote anything critical of the CCP. I've worked with over 10 mainland Chinese devs who had emigrated out of China, and even though they're wonderful people and very talented (half of them PhDs from places like Tsingua or a college outside of China), they by and large were incredibly nationalistic and won't hear a single bad word about Mao etc.

I've worked with several Chinese engineers, who are quietly critical of the CCP. Since they still have family in China they know better than to be openly critical of China.

I am mainlander Chinese diaspora and this is such a reductionist portrait of the variety of opinions held by emigrants from China about the CCP, which can differ dramatically depending on when you emigrated, what age you are, what part of the country you are from, whether you are religious, your own specific family history, and who is currently in power in China.

There is also quite a bit of dissonance and public vs. private attitudes that you have to sort through. The mainstream and tolerated view in mainland china is that the cultural revolution was a huge mistake - there are way too many families that were fucked up by it - but Mao was still a great guy.

This is some of what I've seen, each entry being from a distinct person:

- One dev has a twitter account that's a nonstop stream of pro CCP ("Tiananmen is Western propaganda") and anti HK propaganda. I found it because it's named the same as his stackoverflow page which is a very unique identifier with the same uppercasing on specific letters.

- Another doesn't believe there were famines under Mao (we were discussing the Wiki page on it) and calls it propaganda. This was from a Uighur emigrant.

- Another agrees fully with the CCP ocean territory claims in the SEA that take basically all the oceans to the west of Philippines etc.

- Another thinks China can't be a democracy because the logistics of over a billion voting are too hard

- Another left HK early on because of disdain towards the democracy protests (long before attacks on mainland businesses)

I'm sure you're right that there's heterogeneity there (that almost goes without saying and is true of any group of people) and a public vs private distinction but that doesn't contradict what I've said.

Yeah in China the education system is hugely geared up to indoctrinate. I studied at university with many Chinese people, know people who have lived there and of course have read a lot about it. It is no surprise!

well things go bad when they actually realize and/or admit CCP isn't a beneficial entity for the Chinese...

they have family/relatives in mainland... have to be careful even in abroad

Things like "pandemic-unleashing" devalue your comment.

I do find the sensitivity on that phrasing hilarious given the absolute hysteria around US/UK politics and some of the phrasing used there. I won't make specific examples to avoid partisanship but it is just mind boggling.

would "gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" work better for you? [0]

[0]:https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/china-coronavirus-coveru...

"gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" So the Chinese government is acting like any other government?

err, no? This kind of (typically self-loathing) moral equivalence really bothers me. It's so entitled to think that govts leading countries like the UK and US which are nice to live in and have so many incredible freedoms and benefits which so many seem entitled and utterly unappreciative of.

China are literally harvesting organs, disappearing political dissidents and covered up the outbreak of a pandemic (to say the least you could about that), and their govt is responsible for 10's of millions of deaths of their own people.

Some nebulous Chomsky-ish nonsense doesn't rank against that, sorry.

Is that the cause of the riots in the US? Nice living and freedom? Or are you comparing apples and oranges and ignore the true costs? How is the living for the lower classes? They get exploited, imprisoned, killed. Not for the communist party but for the market. Same same but different. And that are only their own people. What happens to other nations is worse. Strange enough that the victims of the US war on drugs and war on terror aren't attributed to the US government although they are the consequences of government actions and lies. The Shah in Iran, the killing of Kurds by Saddam, the lies about WMD in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iraq wars, Guantanamo, the emergence of ISIS, etc. And that's only the middle east. Is that cognitive dissonance or ignorance? You probably enjoy the benefits of the "free world", that puts you in the top 10%, as it does me. I bet the top 10% of China are satisfied with the government too. Do you have as much sympathy for the Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc as you do for the Uyghrs in China? Or are they just terrorists or savages for you? Do you even know any of the names of the corresponding ethnic groups in these countries, or are they uninteresting because they are just collateral damage of the good guys? And don't start with whataboutism, the West has the longer history in this respect.

> It seems criticising the US, UK etc. for the slightest thing is fine but criticising totalitarian genocidal sabre-rattling pandemic-unleashing states is beyond the pale

Yeah, because you are not calling for "criticism" but state level character assassination which is rather different

Just again the suggestion of conspiracy theories can be a topic of discussion if you want, but I don't believe you are interested on discussing specifics which is rather sad to me

Please do not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are, or how badly they are behaving.

I understand very well that there is extra pressure on a minority view that feels embattled, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules. When you break them it dissuades people from giving you a hearing anyhow, so individual interest and community interest are the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a conspiracy theory that wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors? And that re-opening the markets and putting absolutely no controls whatsoever on them for 17 years after the SARS 1 outbreak is significantly increasing the chances of a pandemic?

And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab (since the SARS virus did multiple times before [0]) by accident? Though there is some real debate about that so I'm not blindly advocating that theory, only saying it's not entirely implausible.

I mean I'd love to hear your arguments as to the contrary, since you accuse me of 'state level character assassination' by... providing a large number of references to incredibly evil behaviour by the CCP? Please feel free to rebut any 'specific' which you accuse me of refusing to discuss?

I am making specific criticisms none of which I see you have chosen to rebut or discuss rather you are instead trying to smear me. Am happy to hear your actual arguments...

[0]:https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...

> wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors?

Ofc, that's why they were reformed, current meat and grocery markets commonly found are nothing like the markets of SARS

And yeah, huge reforms took place on Chinese Healthcare policy[0] alongside South Korean and Vietnamese Healthcare policy, which is why all three countries have been doing so well, they learned all the lessons from SARS which were ignored in the West

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92479/

Overall sad to see that you are clearly not engaging in good faith, as these discussions are very important :/

> And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab by accident?

And no, once again you show the conspiracy angle, no, it is not the case because the virus has been genetically analyzed all over the world now and not datasets have been produced which could show manipulation, let alone the fact that patient Zero was found a while ago[1], but of course I am sadly not expecting you to actually accept it, as I am sure you will pivot to another branch of the broader "China == Evil" conspiracy-adjacent beliefs :/

[1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

Please keep flamewar swipes like "once again you show the conspiracy angle" and "I am not expecting you to" and "I am sure you will" and so on out of your comments here. As this thread shows, the topic is extremely activating to people. Everyone needs to take responsibility for staying within the zone of curiosity and respect. As a bonus, doing that makes your posts much more likely to be heard. Perhaps you won't persuade the person you're arguing with, but there are thousands of other readers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You have repeatedly misrepresented me, spread misinformation and defended a state that organ harvests political prisoners and runs concentration camps.

You're either a troll, very naive, a patriot to the point of delusion or in the employ of the CCP. Think for yourself and think about what you're defending.

This sort of flamewar comment is not allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please stop posting before things get to this stage. No matter how important the issues are or how strongly you feel, you need to stay within the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You broke them badly and repeatedly in this thread. That is not cool.

That's a fair take. I've seen plenty of this where I'm from, so I don't really have the stomach for more.

I think you've made a good point.

100% this, we buy crap cheaply and in fact we actively seek it out and it's enabled by China. We are all complicit.

We've already asked you not to post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN and you've continued to do it repeatedly. That's not what this site is for, so please stop.

When an account posts like this in various threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25583482

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029414

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855732

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721883

...it's painfully clear that this is not curious conversation but a pre-existing agenda.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Turning those images off won't make them disappear from existence nor resurrect the victims. Stop being willfully ignorant - that alone enables any monster out there to do as they wish unaccounted for.

It's important to see the photos to properly absorb the content and message of the article. This reflex to shield one's self from reality is extremely harmful for society and it's cowardly.

The fact that the images are a 'shock' to some people shows just how disconnected they are from reality. They are powerful images but they should not be shocking... The term 'killing' should already embody these emotions without the images.

The emotions that people feel when looking at these images, that's exactly what 'killing a person' means.

The warning should be absent. This is the reality of the CCP and could be the direction that pro-censorship and pro-communist nations laud. It’s all fun and and games when popular opinion vilifies the likes of terrorists or pedophiles but it’s a slippery slope.

Next thing you know the executions start for DMCA violations and so called hate speech that will radically change in 40y.

As george carlin famously said we are all circulating the drain.

Some people, and stay with me here, have different reactions to graphic violence than you. Shocker, I know.

I want the shock and negative feelings. People need to get their head out of the sand and realize the true cost of your new iPhone 12 and all the other cheap Chinese junk.

We shouldn’t be supporting China, we should bring skilled work back to the USA.

Well these people in particular need to toughen up and face reality so that they know what it means if the government executes someone, that it's not just a data point on a chart. They need to feel it and toughen up. If we become a nation of cowards, then those in power are going to start doing this and nobody will have the courage to stand up to it.

> then those in power are going to start doing this

I don't know where you have been these last 70 years, but western powers have been "doing this" for a long, long, long time

What we really need is to listen to some Angela Davis speeches on what has been going on in the areas that The Media is too cowardly to report

This comment is extremely disingenuous. The annual number of state sponsored executions in the United States can be counted on one hand. Most (all?) of the EU has banned the death penalty altogether.

Trauma is a real thing people experience, and having associated triggers is not particularly rare, believe it or not. I'm sorry if some particular political leaning convinced you that's only a thing on tumblr.

And I don't see how "standing up" in the US would ever do you any good, with the sheer force of militarized police and actual military. I hope this is not leading into a tired "if only Germany would've had guns" point.

I don't understand how 'being triggered' is a bad thing...

People who 'get triggered' are too sensitive. They have to train themselves. We are on planet earth, we live then we die. This is a fact. Emotions are tools to allow us to navigate our lives as members of society. They are useful, not something we should be shielded from.

We need negative emotions just like we need hunger to know we need to eat, thirst to know we need to drink, pain to know we need to avoid physical harm, etc...

IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.

Happy to see your peer-reviewed work on this. In the unlikely case you haven't actually done any research, I'll go back to believing the scientific consensus of "retraumatizing does not work beyond phobias".

>IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.

What is this even advocacy for? Voting rights only after you sit through a slideshow of graphic violence?

The purpose of these images is not to help individuals to avoid emotional discomfort, it is merely to teach individuals what a term means. In this case, terms like 'state killing' and 'execution' are supposed to create emotional discomfort when read.

The association with the horrible imagery needs to be created or else people will not understand what they're reading with the appropriate degree of emphasis when the term comes up in the future. We will be a nation of apathetic, sedated cowards.

In the old days, people actually saw these horrors with their own eyes, not merely seen pictures; so they understood very well what 'war' meant. Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.

> Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.

It is funny reading this after not even been two weeks since the last attack on the US embassy compound in Iraq after the US denied Iraqi calls to remove US troops of the country it invaded 17 years ago

> Consider turning images off to read the content.

I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?

No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.

I wasn't always first world city folk, I've seen the horror and my family has been touched by it. I'd rather never see it again, though unfortunately news from my former home often makes it unavoidable.

If you need to see brutality to empathize with the brutalized, then go ahead and look at the gore. But I think most people are emotionally capable enough to realize that executions aren't pleasant experiences without photo evidence.

Who are you yelling at? They're not here.