The link I posted is not a "random" link, and whether you click on it or not is up to you, but it's a real video of Victoria Nuland (a high ranking US government official) speaking to the US Congress. It's not Russian propaganda.

I honestly don't really care if the US has biological weapons labs in Ukraine. I don't live in the US, or Ukraine, or Russia. I don't have any skin in that game. When I first saw rumours of it I thought it was a nonsense conspiracy theory. It wasn't until I saw Victoria Nuland's "denial" that I thought "huh, maybe there's something to that".

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the claim myself, though Victoria Nuland's "denial"[1] certainly raised a few eyebrows. She said that Ukraine has biological "research facilities" and implied that it would be a very bad thing if any of these "research materials" fell into the hands of the Russian forces. Whether that counts as a "biological weapons lab" or not seems to just be arguing about semantics.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y39veTO7kF4

You're not imagining this — Muslim countries support China. See this map of a UN vote to condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang[1]. You'll notice that every Muslim country that didn't abstain defended China. In fact the only countries that condemned China are countries that are militarily allied with the United States.

If you look at any of the "NGOs" that push the narrative that China is oppressing Muslims in Xinjiang, every single one of them is funded either by the National Endowment for Democracy[2][3][4] (an arm of the US State Department notorious for pushing regime change in countries the US doesn't like) or the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative, which in turn is sponsored by several US arms manufacturers[5], such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc. — all of whom would profit massively from a war with China, for which this narrative is manufacturing consent.

Even the site that spawned this discussion seems to be associated with Adrian Zenz. A lot of the claims in Xinjiang can be traced back to his "work". He's a fundamentalist Christian bigot, is a fellow at the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation" and claims to have been sent on a mission by God himself to destroy the Communist Party of China. His "work" has been thoroughly debunked many times over.[6]

Frankly, the narrative is bullshit. The Muslim world that has suffered massively at the hands of US imperialism can see right through it and votes accordingly. China has never invaded or bombed any Muslim country. The US has no credibility in the Muslim world.

[1]: https://graphics.axios.com/2020-10-06-china-uyghur-statement...

[2]: https://www.ned.org/region/asia/xinjiang-east-turkestan-chin...

[3]: https://www.ned.org/2019-democracy-award/world-uyghur-congre...

[4]: https://www.ned.org/uyghur-human-rights-policy-act-builds-on...

[5]: https://www.aspi.org.au/sponsors

[6]: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/30/WS608c1286a31024ad...

I bought an "X2100" (a ThinkPad X200 with a 10th-gen Intel CPU) from him in 2020 and it's been fantastic.

https://xyte.ch

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3160159/ch...

[2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-02-17/China-calls-for-return...

I found this documentary[1] by CGTN about the recent history of extremism and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang to be useful in outlining some of the context for this.

These terrorist attacks were a real problem and have resulted in the deaths of over 1000 civilians (including Uyghurs). China's argument is basically their re-education "camps" are an attempt to address the underlying causes of this, which is basically economic under-development, lack of education and job opportunities. So China basically identified the people who were involved in these groups and susceptible to radicalisation by them, and set up these schools for them which would teach them skills, including Mandarin, that would help find decent jobs that could provide for them and their families, which eliminates the underlying material basis of the support from some parts of the population that the terrorists may have had.

Having said that, there is still a huge discrepancy in what China says it's doing and what the west claims it's doing. Western sources claim that these are actually "concentration camps" and that there are as many as one or even two million Uyghurs interred there. These allegations are dubious for a number of reasons, but that's a topic for a different post.

Like I said, your question is the right question: what is the Chinese justification for this? And I think it's fair to say their answer is at least plausible on the surface of things and internally consistent. But it leads us to another question: if the claims of western sources of one million plus Uyghurs in "concentration camps" are true, then how does the west explain China's motive for that? China isn't stupid. Why would it put 10% of the population of an entire province in a concentration camp? Are they just that cartoonishly evil? It doesn't really add up to me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqlzunwilGM

Are you able to substantiate that claim?

I'm not sure that's actually a great example. I had a project a while ago where I needed to extract certain information from Word and Excel files, and it was less work to just write my own parser (it's just XML in a ZIP file) that got exactly the information I needed than to figure out all the complexity of using a full-blown docx/xlsx parser. It ended up being 100 lines of Haskell, and half of that was imports.

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/duairc/db3e99a7808668e84e...

Edit: The docx part of it is only 10 lines of code.

Obviously it's fucked that so many people are homeless in San Francisco. Everybody blames us (techies with loads of money) for the homeless problem because we gentrifying the shit out of the place with all our money. And then this guy comes out and says this shit, and that only reinforces the narrative that we're the problem. And that's shit for us.

But why don't we do something about it? We don't want to be seen as the cause of the homeless problem, and surely we don't want assholes like this speaking for us. But people are right that we are rich compares to most people. Why not use this as an opportunity to show people that we can be part of the solution? Being rich doesn't have to make us evil, and anyway what's the point of being rich if we can't use our wealth to help the people who need it?

And it's not just our wealth: what about our skills? Take Homes Not Jails, for example. They're one organisation off the top of my head that does work that directly houses homeless people. They're renowned by squatters all over the world for the work they do to get homes for homeless people in San Francisco. But I just checked, and it looks like their website (http://homesnotjailssf.org/) is down? Surely one of us techies could get in contact with them and offer to help fix their website, or even just pay their hosting costs and domain name renewal for a few years? I've been involved in organisations like that and that kind of stuff can be a real hassle.

I'm sure there are countless grassroots organisations like this that are already working to help homeless people that probably don't even have proper websites and shit, that desperately need money. Fuck this guy, it's not worth wasting our time arguing over his stupid words. Let's show people that he doesn't represent us with our actions!

What's your basis for saying this? Do you have any way of verifying this claim?

Thank you! I've long been suspicious of so-called music theory for exactly the reasons you outline. I always wanted to learn more about music and why it "works" as you say, so I assumed what I wanted to learn was music theory, but then when I tried to learn it it didn't seem to explain any of the things I was looking for. I'll have to check out that book.

https://libcom.org/library/right-be-greedy-theses-practical-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism

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There must be a name for this kind of fallacy.

[1]: http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/fuckpolice.php