Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/18/organ-ized-crime.html
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organ harvesting
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They exercise regularly and are often vegetarian. It’s all horrific, but somehow additionally horrific that that may have made them better targets.
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Cyberpunk SF was supposed to remain safely in the realm of fiction. This is not what I wanted leaking into reality.
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Cyberpunk? This goes back to swinging Known Space stories of the 70s, at least.
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Just because they’re rumors doesn’t mean they’re not true.
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Dear Lord, it doesn’t even say how old!
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I had this exact thought when I heard this story on the radio a day or two ago. I was like, daaaamn, we’ve come to sketchy Asian organ banks from harvested prisoners, that is some dark Gibsonian shit right there.
Once again, I can’t imagine how I’d respond to this shit if I hadn’t been using technology heavily and reading a ton of cyberpunk fiction since my early teens back in the first half of the 90s. At least I saw it coming and have some context for it. How do the norms who started using the internet after smartphones came out possibly deal with this crap?
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Niven’s story “The Organleggers” (reprinted as “Death by Ecstasy”) was published in the January 1969 issue of Galaxy.
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Reminder: DON’T BUY FUCKING ANYTHING FROM CHINA, because FUCK THOSE PEOPLE.
We starved Cuba to death for 50 years so Republicans could win Florida, but we’re also in deep and in debt with Communist China. Someone tell me how that’s consistent and I’ll know you’re lying.
Tired of living on what feels like a diet of crazy pills.
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Given that Falun Gong is a sort of racist, homophobic Chinese version of Scientology, I’m not sure who I trust less; them or the Chinese govt. I don’t trust either of them to give a truthful account about anything. And the website of the “independent people’s tribunal” is remarkably light on who set them up, leading to the conclusion that it was probably set up by Falun Gong. Not that it necessarily discredits their findings, but strangely, none of the sources repeating their press release seems to have asked any question as to who originated the tribunal.
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Next step along the chain is The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) - I don’t have the wherewithal to track its sources of income or analyse their interests further, though.
It says they’re registered as a not-for-profit, but not where.
I was just about to ask what was up with that group. When I moved to NY in the early 2000s there were often people from that group on the streets handing out newspapers with headlines about Chinese government crackdowns on their group. I’m really don’t like Scientology (to use your comparison) but I would be horrified if I found out the government was imprisoning them and harvesting their organs.
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If you’re in such straits that you’re willing to push a button and receive a plastic cup of whisky, bottle unseen, “how old?” is not the question.
“Is it strong enough to knock over an alien from another galaxy?”, perhaps.
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Classic cyberpunk was was basically “gangsters and drug addicts will use computers to do crimes.”
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I deleted my original post on this point as I was rearranging my thoughts, but focusing on the Falun Gong misses out the suspicions of this shit happening to the Uighur minority as well, who we know China is putting into camps on ethnoreligious grounds.
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Yeah, good luck with that.
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