2024

Extraordinary rendition is actually something they’ve been quite credibly accused of doing, look into the case of Ling Huazhan.

I can’t read Chinese, can you?

Yes, I lived in China for almost a decade.

The things mentioned in the article aren’t police stations, Chinese or otherwise, nor are they secret.

That is the exactly the crux of the conflict, when does a citizen service station abroad that maintains communications with province-level PSBs and performs functions that the PSB would perform domestically need to seek approval from a host country? And why would the volunteers burn comms after the FBI started snooping in there were no secret dealings behind the scenes in the non-secret, totally-above-board hukou and drivers license operation? Beyond that, the testimonials from diaspora Chinese in the US are hard for me to handwave away. To be clear, I don’t intend to take any moral stance on this, I just think it is a bit naive to assume China wouldn’t do that or hasn’t done that, even without considering the weight of the claims on either side, diaspora community/Biden DOJ and Zhao Lijian/the MFA.

[https://www.mfa.gov.cn/fyrbt_673021/jzhsl_673025/202211/t20221102_10797427.shtml](A briefing by MFA spokesman Zhao Lijian)

It is widely known and actually mentioned in the article you linked above. You also read the Chinese government’s explanation for their existence if you search the MFA website for 海外警务服务中心

It was my understanding that the existence of police stations in foreign countries is not debated, they have them. The allegation that they are used for repressive purposes beyond their stated aim of providing administrative services to citizens living abroad is what is controversial. It really seems like, when you cut all the baggage away, all we have is testimonials from expats claiming harassment and assurances from the MFA that it never happened, so I struggle to land firmly on one side of belief considering both parties have historically been loose with the truth.

Anything that deals more directly with the issue than the past of the founder of one associated organization? “One of the guys saying it is bad, so it isn’t true” doesn’t work well on the people I argue with.

I was hoping this had been debunked, any (non-CCP affiliated) sources for this?

Yeah, you’re right to clarify that, saying printed word has absolutely no place is hyperbolic and wrong. In cases where it is necessary to maintain parity of information access, paper is fine.

No, I won’t stop calling things like I see them, and I am unlikely to see them differently unless presented with an actual argument (premise, claim, evidence, impact) that amounts to more than “no u”

The resources were wasted by the publishers when they transformed the resources into a finished product with very limited utility and reusability. Books on shelves are not resources.

They don’t need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.

This seems more like an indictment of the practice of physical publishing than destructive book scanning, in which case I generally agree. There are a host of industries with baked-in inefficiencies that our life experiences have conditioned us to accept as normal or unavoidable when really have no business persisting in the modern world. Printed books is definitely one of them.

Words and ideas don’t become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.

At some point, somewhere on the internet, someone authoritatively claimed that tailscale is the one and only acceptable solution to getting your jellyfin server outside your LAN and it just kind of took root. nginx has worked perfectly fine for me.

Hey, thanks for the write-up, this is cool. Do you have any latency issues with the video? If so, or you want to lower the bitrate for responsiveness over WAN, you might want to look into integrating gst-wayland-display and gstreamer.