I’ll just leave this here.
“Keith heeded the writer’s call by reaching out to human rights groups but received no response. She then posted the letter on Facebook, which prompted the local Oregonian newspaper to run a front-page article.”
Things like this make me totally forget about Guantánamo.
It’s like the old joke of a cookie fortune saying “Help, I’m being held prisoner in the fortune cookie factory,” only for real.
This is the saddest variation on “Help, I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory” ever.
CNN located the ex-prisoner and interviewed him as he narrated a story of “inhumane torture” at the camp.
Their staff in Beijing spent months searching for the man. Finally, they found him and confirmed his identity, but didn’t reveal it to the public. He is a follower of Falun Gong, which most of the world calls a Buddhist-Taoist spiritual movement but the Chinese government considers a dangerous cult. He was sentenced to two and a half years in the Masanjia labor camp.
Buy American kiddies. Or pretty much anywhere but China.
Better yet. Make your own Halloween decorations.
yeah, America has far better prison labor facilities, and a good thing too what with the highest prison population per capita in the world.
In response to comments here, I’m not sure why one has to chose between which repressive and violent state activities are allowable to discuss. I feel perfectly free to condemn both US and Chinese violence and repression. I generally pay more attention to US sins on the matter because I’m a US citizen, but denunciations of Chinese abusive practices hardly equates to an endorsement of US abusive practices, as some commenters seem to be implying.
I was just talking to a Chinese reporter who told me that his family had to pay three years salary to get their father out of a Chinese work camp. I hate how we look the other way with this stuff. It really is inhuman and shows how much we are desensitized by our iphones. I don’t think we have the strength for any kind of real large scale intervention as a citizenry.
Hey, at least we allow our prisoners to work out and develop underworld connections to facilitate their future criminal enterprises instead of forcing them to make disposable crap for export.
Looks like someone looking for attention.
Yeah, like, maybe, a prisoner in a brutal labour camp. Looking for attention. Attention to the horrible conditions he suffers so we can buy cheap plastic crap.
Things like this make me totally forget to care whether or not an asteroid takes out the whole planet.
Human beings have been doing inhuman things and ignoring them when they happen for thousands of years. Our smart phones have nothing to do with it.
Most of us are trying to be better than our medieval ancestors. Not all, to be sure, but most. YMMV.
If anyone wanted to import our shit we would have them doing that, instead they are used for other forms of forced for-profit labor, usually to the betterment of the privately owned prison and the company doing the exploiting.
Thankfully, this is true. My point was that the fact that people aren’t rising up to fix this problem isn’t due to being “desensitized by our iphones.”
er … just wanted you to clarify what that meant, would you mind? Thanks!
By “most” are you implicitly excluding @Medievalist?
