What the Heck?! Thread (Closed)

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SanWenYu

Senior Member
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During the couple’s monthslong detention, for example, they said, they were frequently threatened with execution or told that they would be sent to a North Korean gulag.
I highly doubt that any Chinese security official nowadays would threaten anyone with execution, foreigner included. Threatening to send someone to a North Korean gulag is just laughable.

Either the couple were lying about their experience or the NYT reporter was making it up.

After seeing this line, I don't need to read the rest.
 
It's not the low-paying menial jobs that are the problem. The problem is when people can't move up from those jobs.

Low wage jobs have a role in the economy. They're supposed to be stepping stones to better jobs.

Instead of targeting the minimum wage, which as plawolf has pointed out, is a necessity born from the existence of a state welfare system, why not identify and tackle those barriers that are preventing people from getting better jobs?

Child care, health care, education, entrepreneurship, these are the things that empower people and allows them to work at building a better life.

I understand that the two are not mutually exclusive, and that the former seems to be "free" while the latter costs a lot of tax-payer money, not to mention leadership and vision. I am just tired of seeing politicians pass "feel good" minimum wage laws instead of making actual progress at bettering people's lives.

Ontario is a prime example of this.

I can agree with that, talking about the entire picture including other problems and other solutions for empowering people while not overburdening society. In general I still do think that labor costs, especially at the bottom end, are too often wrongly blamed as a diversion and excuse to not address other actual causes of problems.
 
What the Heck?!
Sunday at 8:27 AM
gosh
US-Russia tensions rise as malware found at Vermont electric utility
  • Burlington electric department says it found code
  • New York compound allegedly linked to Russian intelligence is evacuated

source is The Guardian
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it's a different been
What the Heck?!
"From Russian hackers burrowed deep within the US electrical grid, ready to plunge the nation into darkness at the flip of a switch, an hour and a half later the story suddenly became that a single non-grid laptop had a piece of malware on it and that the laptop was not connected to the utility grid in any way."
'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid
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LOLOL am wondering if there'll be a continuation
What the Heck?!
 

Broccoli

Senior Member
How common is in China? Crazy stuff boiling a dog alive and laughing about it. I'm not against eating dogs but that seems to be pure sadism.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
If Chinese eating dog is common, why would people diabolically laugh about it every time they do it especially when it's being boiled alive? Charging "laughing" assumes they know what they're doing is wrong and are in spite of it. The critics boil crab and lobster alive. Is the only difference because they're not laughing about it? Then it's not about sparing the suffering of innocent animals. Yes all of the sudden there's a hierarchy on what animals are more valuable. Hence why the critics also have a history of racial discrimination. That's called a distraction.
 
thought I might share
Neural Network-based Automatic Image Colorization
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I didn't try it, just a minute ago noticed on Facebook it worked surprisingly well for pictures of pre-WW2 Czechoslovak bunkers though :)
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
I highly doubt that any Chinese security official nowadays would threaten anyone with execution, foreigner included. Threatening to send someone to a North Korean gulag is just laughable.

Either the couple were lying about their experience or the NYT reporter was making it up.

After seeing this line, I don't need to read the rest.

Sounds like propaganda tricks.

It's a very common and legitimate interrogation technique for security officers to list the worst punishments legally possible for an accused offence.

For example, it would be pretty routine for US police officers to remind a suspect if the state they are in have the death penalty for the crime the suspect is accused of, as a way to get them to confess in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Similarly, it would not at all be out of order for law enforcement to use the threat to extradition to get suspects to co-operate.

I believe in China, espionage can carry the death penalty, and since the couple were accused of spying on China and North Korea, it would certainly have been within China's rights to extradite them to North Korea if NK wanted them.

Just a case study in how routine western propagandists can easily twist normal things to sound sinister and evil (or the reverse when it's the west that does it, just look at the contrasting coverage of Aleppo vs Mosul, where it's genocidal barrel bombs vs smart freedom bombs)
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
I saw this a few hours ago but didn't have time to post it then, and had just wanted to post this story now that I have time, which I found to be interesting.

But turns out it is a lot more interesting than I first thought.

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Turkey nightclub attack: Police 'detain several Uighurs' in raids
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_93210618_twix.gif

Image captionImages of the suspect have already been widely circulated in Turkish media
Turkey has arrested a number of people of Uighur ethnicity over a deadly nightclub attack that killed 39, the state-run news agency reports.

Those detained are believed to have come from China's Xinjiang region with ties to the attacker, Anadolu says.

Deputy PM Veysi Kaynak also said they were closing in on the gunman, who he said was possibly an ethnic Uighur.

Also on Thursday, there was an explosion near the courthouse in the city of Izmir in western Turkey.

Social media images showed two cars ablaze and several people were reported wounded.

Other images showed what appeared to be the body of a man carrying a gun, amid media reports he was an attacker who was shot dead by police.

Anadolu reported a second man was shot dead and police were seeking a third.

'Aiding and abetting'
So-called Islamic State (IS) says it carried out the Istanbul attack over Turkey's military involvement in the Syrian civil war.

The authorities have reportedly tightened security at Turkey's land borders and airports to prevent the attacker from fleeing the country.

Turkish media have run images of a suspect, saying the pictures were handed out by the police. But the police have given no official details.

The Turkish foreign minister has said the authorities have identified the attacker, but has not given further details.

_93274323_92eede26-c964-4302-8805-8dd2766c1eaf.jpg
Image copyrightREUTERS
Image captionTurkey has heightened security across the country, including at land borders and airports
Special forces made the early morning arrests at a housing complex in Selimpasa, a coastal town on the outskirts of Istanbul, after police were reportedly tipped off that individuals linked to the attacker were in the area.

Uighurs were among those arrested - the number was not confirmed - on suspicion of "aiding and abetting" the gunman, Anadolu reported.

At least 36 people were already in custody over suspected links to the attack, many of whom were picked up in an earlier police operation in Izmir.

Several families had recently travelled there from Konya, a central city where the main suspect was said to have stayed for several weeks before the attack.

Who are the Uighurs? BBC Monitoring
The Uighurs are
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who are mainly Muslims, primarily living in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in China. Their language is related to Turkish and a substantial Uighur diaspora lives in Turkey.

Some Uighurs have complained for years about persecution at the hands of the Chinese authorities. Al-Qaeda has long-developed links with Uighur jihadists - known as the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) - and has offered them military training in Afghanistan.

Uighur jihadists appear to have joined the fighting in Syria in relatively large numbers, alongside both Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS, formerly al-Qaeda's Syrian branch al-Nusra) and al-Qaeda's rivals, the so-called Islamic State (IS).

They have featured in IS propaganda and the group's magazine, Rumiyah, has been published in Uighur, along with English and a range of other languages.

It is believed Uighurs make their way to Kyrgyzstan through the mountains between Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang. Once in Kyrgyzstan, they fly to Turkey using forged Kyrgyz passports...

All I originally wanted to point out was the hypocrisy of how the media keeps repeating their party line lie that China doesn't have a Uighur terrorist problem and how (always unnamed) western intelligence officials dispute Chinese claims the Uighurs are part of international jihadist terrorists networks, but this development challenges that.

Note that this story was only published 4 hours ago, which would have been 2pm GMT, on a Thursday, so traffic would have been very light as the lunchtime break would have been over and everyone would be back at their desks working rather than browsing the news.

Now, the interesting additional insight this story gives us is how the western main stream media supresses news they don't want the public to see, while still maintain the facade of claiming to not censor news.

Just go to the BBC website and try to find this story without specifically searching for it. Can't find it can you?

I couldnt even find this again after going to all the BBC articles related to the nightclub attack, and none of them links back to this article. Not even the ones this article itself links to.

Unless you just happened to have seen this in the few hours it was featured on the BBC News World home page, like I did, anyone casually checking the news, or even specially researching this attack just simply won't ever see this article.

The only way to find it now is if you specifically searched for it using keywords.

So, the BBC gets to effectively stop the overwhelming majority of its readers from ever knowing about this development, but they have evidence that they did indeed publish it, so Irs very hard to prove what they have done unless you caught them red handed by chance like I did.

The Chinese censors still have a lot to learn from the western media masters.
 
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