Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 14:37:07 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tiananmen square (was: Does it's true?) Message-ID: <19980629143707.Q897@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199806290455.WAA23018@softweyr.com>; from Wes Peters on Sun, Jun 28, 1998 at 10:55:35PM -0600 References: <19980629105035.E897@freebie.lemis.com> <199806290455.WAA23018@softweyr.com>
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On Sunday, 28 June 1998 at 22:55:35 -0600, Wes Peters wrote:
> My hidden microphone recorded Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.com) saying:
>
>>> only to find that the police killed your wife for commiting the
>>> heinous crime of having a second child.
>>
>> How often does that happen? I've never heard of it. Even if it does,
>> it's not the norm. I'd guess (based only on my own patchy observation
>> of news media) that it's about as likely to happen as getting shot on
>> the highway in the US.
>
> Not according to the state social worker who applied for asylum in the USA
> several weeks ago, and was interviewed on one of the "news magazine" shows
> here last week. She had an epiphany when one of the illegal young mothers
> brought into her clinic and locked up for "correction" was some sort of
> relative, and decided to leave the country with her case files. It appears
> that policy dictated the clinic abort the first unauthorized child, forcibly
> if necessary, and sterilize the mother after aborting the second. Several
> women during her years of service were simply killed outright because they
> physically resisted their "treatment." If you want quotes of the report, I'll
> see if I can find which show it was reported on.
We're getting out of focus here, and maybe we ned to wrap up this
particular subthread. But your comments are missing a number of
points:
1. Forced abortion and forced sterilization. For Christians, of
course, an abomination. In China, quite possibly law. Yes, I can
believe they do this. After seeing what has happened in the 30
years between my two visits to India, I can understand the Chinese
view.
2. "Simply killed outright". Did she bring documentation of this as
well? How often? Where? Why? If they had the power to kill,
they had the power to anaesthetize and sterilize.
> I have lived in many of the larger US cities, and have found none of them to
> be frightening, even after dark. I've been held up at gunpoint once, in
> Indianaplis, and at knifepoint once, in Seattle, neither of which would make
> most people's list of the scariest cities in the USA. I consider both
> experiences an anomoly, and felt less threatend by either of them than I did
> by the man who threw a cinder block through my school bus window to "protest"
> the forced bussing of children when it started in the south.
I think this shows the degree to which people can adapt to adverse
circumstances. I think your experiences (first hand, and thus *much*
more plausible) are very frightening, not so much for what happened to
you (nothing) as for the fact that it happened twice in "safe" cities,
and because of your lack of concern about it. I've been in lots of
places in the world, and nothing like that has ever happened to me.
>> ... The real question to ask (and one for which I have no obvious
>> answer) is: who lives a happier life, the slum-dwellers in the US, in
>> India, in China or in Russia? I certainly don't see any particular
>> reason to decide for the US or against China, especially after you
>> remove the problem of overpopulation (against which the Chinese
>> Government, unlike the Indian Government, is doing something).
>
> That is probably the most intelligent point brought up in this entire thread.
> Between you and I, a more important question would be, in which place are we
> most likely to find happiness for ourselves and our families?
>
> If I thought that was more likely in China or Russia or Australia or South
> Borneo, I'd be living there today.
Ditto.
> I see the quality of life in the Salt Lake Valley diminishing
> rapidly, and have been looking for an upgrade path for several years
> now. While I try to be as open-minded as possible, I certainly
> won't be moving my family to some totalitarian dunghole with zero
> respect for human rights like China.
Again, I think this is based on a lack of understanding, certainly
helped by the US media's reports.
>>> Let's not forget where the criminals in China are - the government
>>> itself.
>>
>> I think that claim needs a little justification.
>
> See the above-mentioned report by the Chinese "welfare worker."
Let's see a URL or something. I'm not denying that this happened.
After all, even in Australia (and quite possibly in the US) forced
sterilizations have been practised. The difference is that in
Australia they had only a very tenuous legal basis.
Greg
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