All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I also want to point out that this was possible because, against all evidence, the Roberts Court deemed the Voting Rights Act no longer necessary.

Pfft! Who needs evidence when cretins like Roberts have right wing ideology to fall back on?

[Kirby101]

Well you know I am an educator and taking time out of my day to inform the ignorant is always well worth the effort.

Does arrogant condescension work in your classroom?

[Tami]

The days of full covid coverage are over. Insurers are restoring deductibles and co-pays, leaving patients with big bills.

Jamie Azar left a rehab hospital in Tennessee this week with the help of a walker after spending the entire month of August in the ICU and on a ventilator. She had received a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in mid-July but tested positive for the coronavirus within 11 days and nearly died.

Now Azar, who earns about $36,000 a year as the director of a preschool at a Baptist church in Georgia, is facing thousands of dollars in medical expenses that she can’t afford.

“I’m very thankful to be home. I am still weak. And I’m just waiting for the bills to come in to know what to do with them,” she said Wednesday, after returning home.

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available. The companies imposed the costs as industry profits remained strong or grew in 2020, with insurers paying out less to cover elective procedures that hospitals suspended during the crisis.

Now the financial burden of covid is falling unevenly on patients across the country, varying widely by health-care plan and geography, according to a survey of the two largest health plans in every state by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

If you’re fortunate enough to live in Vermont or New Mexico, for instance, state mandates require insurance companies to cover 100 percent of treatment. But most Americans with covid are now exposed to the uncertainty, confusion and expense of business-as-usual medical billing and insurance practices — joining those with cancer, diabetes and other serious, costly illnesses.

[numberthirty]

The days of full covid coverage are over. Insurers are restoring deductibles and co-pays, leaving patients with big bills.

Folks nominated a Democrat who was for the current "For Profit..." private insurance approach.

Where else was that going to lead except to companies doing exactly what they did in that article?

[The Cool Thatguy]

Big if true. And since you’re so knowledgeable about the subject, let’s start by naming some of these ethnic groups, pointing out where they live for the benefit of the audience, and identifying some aspects of their culture that is currently under threat from the diabolical Chinese.

Why, so you can ignore the matter like you have been doing with the Uyghurs?

[PwrdOn]

Does arrogant condescension work in your classroom?

Well with students, as with anyone else, the best way to communicate is to speak on their level rather than insist they speak on yours.

Why, so you can ignore the matter like you have been doing with the Uyghurs?

I’m still waiting to hear what exactly is going on in Xinjiang that I should be so upset about. If there were some kind of mass extermination happening there that would indeed be pretty horrific, though luckily history has shown that it’s pretty hard to hide millions of dead bodies so I’m sure there is more than enough evidence for that.

[Tendrin]

Pretty sure there's a name for moving your people into an area that speak a different language than the locals, and then supplanting their language with your own. If only I could put my finger on it.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Well with students, as with anyone else, the best way to communicate is to speak on their level rather than insist they speak on yours.



I’m still waiting to hear what exactly is going on in Xinjiang that I should be so upset about. If there were some kind of mass extermination happening there that would indeed be pretty horrific, though luckily history has shown that it’s pretty hard to hide millions of dead bodies so I’m sure there is more than enough evidence for that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17oCQakzIl8&t=160s

Here ya go.

Also, good to know that mass murder is all we care about now. Cultural elimination is A-okay now?

[PwrdOn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17oCQakzIl8&t=160s

Here ya go.

Also, good to know that mass murder is all we care about now. Cultural elimination is A-okay now?

So "Uyghurs are being shipped and not ALWAYS willingly to work in factories across China" kind of implies that they are USUALLY traveling, not "shipped" Jesus Christ, to do necessary work that they are being paid for, which again, doesn't really sound like genocide to me.

The point is that, yes there are plenty of problems in Xinjiang including ethnic tensions which have exploded in violence in the past, and the government's handling of these issues has been heavy handed and has frequently backfired and made the problems worse. However, absolutely nothing that they have done comes close to the kinds of heinous atrocities, committed so often by Western powers in both the past and the present, that necessitated coining the term genocide to elevate them above mere crimes against humanity. The ONLY reason that this is even being discussed is because the US and its allies need to try and justify their military buildup and present their cold war tactics as a necessary response to a new Nazi-like threat, rather than what it is really is, a nakedly self-interested attempt to stamp out an economic and military rival in order to maintain their own hegemony.

Remember this whole discussion started because the US decided to tick off not only China but France, our oldest ally, in order to sell Australia a couple of nuclear submarines, which in case anyone is unclear, are OFFENSIVE weapons. Weapons that Australia would never need if they were indeed some peace-loving nation under threat from some authoritarian menace, rather than a country that seems more than eager to jump into every fight that the US and UK start, and have committed more than their share of war crimes along the way. And unlike with this supposed Uyghur genocide there is more than enough evidence of shocking atrocities committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan that, for some unknown reason, never quite made it into the news over here.

[The Cool Thatguy]

So "Uyghurs are being shipped and not ALWAYS willingly to work in factories across China" kind of implies that they are USUALLY traveling, not "shipped" Jesus Christ, to do necessary work that they are being paid for, which again, doesn't really sound like genocide to me.

The point is that, yes there are plenty of problems in Xinjiang including ethnic tensions which have exploded in violence in the past, and the government's handling of these issues has been heavy handed and has frequently backfired and made the problems worse. However, absolutely nothing that they have done comes close to the kinds of heinous atrocities, committed so often by Western powers in both the past and the present, that necessitated coining the term genocide to elevate them above mere crimes against humanity. The ONLY reason that this is even being discussed is because the US and its allies need to try and justify their military buildup and present their cold war tactics as a necessary response to a new Nazi-like threat, rather than what it is really is, a nakedly self-interested attempt to stamp out an economic and military rival in order to maintain their own hegemony.

Remember this whole discussion started because the US decided to tick off not only China but France, our oldest ally, in order to sell Australia a couple of nuclear submarines, which in case anyone is unclear, are OFFENSIVE weapons. Weapons that Australia would never need if they were indeed some peace-loving nation under threat from some authoritarian menace, rather than a country that seems more than eager to jump into every fight that the US and UK start, and have committed more than their share of war crimes along the way. And unlike with this supposed Uyghur genocide there is more than enough evidence of shocking atrocities committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan that, for some unknown reason, never quite made it into the news over here.

I salute your ability to dance around cultural genocide.

"They're not being pushed into ovens, they're fine!"

[PwrdOn]

I salute your ability to dance around cultural genocide.

"They're not being pushed into ovens, they're fine!"

Again, which elements of Uyghur culture are being lost?

Pretty sure there's a name for moving your people into an area that speak a different language than the locals, and then supplanting their language with your own. If only I could put my finger on it.

Just for a little bit of perspective, the total population of Xinjiang is about 25 million people, and after 70+ years of PRC rule the region has maintained a Uyghur majority the entire time with little evidence that the Han migrants, who are mostly concentrated in urban areas, are displacing Uyghurs from their traditional lands. In Tibet, the "mass migration" of Han "colonists" has left the region with a *checks notes* 90% ethnic Tibetan majority. And this "great replacement" stands against a backdrop of one of the largest mass movements of people in human history, with an estimated 300 million rural peasants in China having moved to cities to find work since the rapid industrialization drive began in the late 70s. If the Chinese government had just diverted even a tiny of fraction of those people to the western provinces they could have easily accomplished this "demographic genocide" that you seem convinced is happening, yet they have not. Just as an example, Shenzhen in 1979 was just a tiny village nobody had ever heard of, nowadays it's a megacity of 20 million people that somehow most Westerners still have never heard of, but that's neither here nor there. When it wants to, the Chinese government can direct the movements of masses of humanity on an unprecedented scale, the fact that this has not come close to happening in Xinjiang or Tibet kinds of means that they don't want it to happen.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Again, which elements of Uyghur culture are being lost?

The graves they paved over and erected a non denominational park over, with a warped panda mascot?

Also https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...es-of-xinjiang

They kept one woman separated from her family for 2 years, and you act like it was just a bad overnight shift at Wendy's.

This may surprise you, but a one party system that doesn't answer to any voters can be surprisingly ruthless.

[babyblob]

The graves they paved over and erected a non denominational park over, with a warped panda mascot?

Also https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...es-of-xinjiang

They kept one woman separated from her family for 2 years, and you act like it was just a bad overnight shift at Wendy's.

This may surprise you, but a one party system that doesn't answer to any voters can be surprisingly ruthless.

Dude it's not a big deal because it is not America doing it. So we can ignore all the bad stuff China does because the West has done way way worse. So China gets a free pass on everything didnt you know?

[PwrdOn]

The graves they paved over and erected a non denominational park over, with a warped panda mascot?

Also https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...es-of-xinjiang

They kept one woman separated from her family for 2 years, and you act like it was just a bad overnight shift at Wendy's.

This may surprise you, but a one party system that doesn't answer to any voters can be surprisingly ruthless.

You should actually read the article you are linking, the study claims that from looking at satellite photos, not even inspecting the sites on the ground, that they found evidence of 15 mosques that had been razed and another 16 damaged, and then extrapolated this sample to conclude that thousands of mosques were being demolished all across Xinjiang. Meanwhile there have been about 25,000 mosques built in Xinjiang since the end of Cultural Revolution, when the government actually did actively promote an anti-religious agenda which they have since entirely reversed course from, which is about 10 times as many as there are in the entire US.

And this is all presupposing that the ultra-conservative Wahabist orthodoxy which most Americans associate with the entirety of the Islamic world does in fact represent native Uyghur culture, which of course isn't really true. Central Asia has always been on the periphery of the Muslim world and Uyghur culture, like many of its neighbors, generally draws more from their pre-Islamic traditions. Just like in Afghanistan, the hardcore fundamentalist ideology is a rather recent import and the fact that the Chinese government is cracking down on this should definitely not be confused with an attempt to eliminate Uyghur culture.

Dude it's not a big deal because it is not America doing it. So we can ignore all the bad stuff China does because the West has done way way worse. So China gets a free pass on everything didnt you know?

Has done, is doing, and will continue doing for the foreseeable future, even if you restrict it to just Muslims, or hell, even specifically to Uyghurs.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...men-guantanamo

See, the difference is that there are mountains of evidence for all of the atrocities the West is committing. When it comes to China, the reporting always picks its wording carefully to insinuate that something horrific is going on, but at best provides circumstantial evidence of a far lesser problem. The reader is then supposed to fill in the blanks by assuming that in the free and open Western nations everything that people could possibly want to know is out there for the public to see, while of course in authoritarian China all of the damning evidence is being covered up and so thus we should freely assume that there's something much worse going on that what we actually know about. It's the same logic that leads people to conclude that China is hiding millions of dead covid patients behind its low official numbers, or that it is goosing its GDP figures to such a degree that the true size of its economy is three or four times smaller. Sure you can believe that if you want, but don't expect anyone who knows better to agree with you.

[AnakinFlair]

Pfft! Who needs evidence when cretins like Roberts have right wing ideology to fall back on?

But the Supreme Court isn't political! Amy Barret and Clarence Thomas said so!