Didn’t you say you were done with this conversation and then said goodbye?

Yeah, but then I got interested again.

I will note again that you ignored nearly everything I said

Really ask yourself what the the basis of these incredibly selective responses is.

I began by simply sharing information, but you started trying to argue combatively about it and treat this like a debate

You are welcome for having been provided with context to help you understand this topic and investigate it critically. As a curious skeptic, surely you appreciate this kind of information and won’t search for a way to whine about my audacity.

Yes. Like I said before, if I have no particular reason to trust you, then I’m not going to accept the information that you give me. I’m not sure why that’s so persistently difficult to understand, or why you keep framing things in terms of you providing information that I am required to accept, and me making things difficult by examining it skeptically first.

What basic facts have I gotten wrong?

• The special treatment of Uyghurs for family planning quotas ended in 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20170908140929/https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1058905.shtml (or in section 105 of the report you sent me)
• You claimed the OHCHR made no claim of wide-scale destruction of mosques. You then tried to claim that “wide scale” and “a large number” are two totally different things, and you sort of hinted that if I read the underlying sources, I would find something damning. I spot-checked the underlying sources, and I found confirmation for the idea that mosques are being destroyed at a wide scale, or a large number, or whatever you want to call it.
• You claimed “Though it should be noted that Han have the most restrictive control over reproduction,” when the numbers cited by the OHCHR report indicate about an order of magnitude greater sterilizations among the Uyghurs (section 108).

You don’t have to trust the OHCHR report, of course. Let me ask this: What sources would you trust? What can I refer to that you consider as a trustworthy source of information? That’s why I specifically referred to globaltimes.cn above. But then, I have no idea if you trust them.

It is actually your onus to investigate all of this.

I just got tired of the conversation again.

You seem to be interested in talking about this, to some extent, but I’m not going to respond to general hints about what I might want to look at, or retreats into “do your own research”-type non-answers. If I’m making a claim, it’s my duty to be willing to back it up instead of just sort of hinting.

You have a valid point that I’ve been ignoring things you’ve said or questions you ask. Are there any of the unanswered questions that you want me to take some real time and answer for you? Part of my not “getting with the program” so to speak, it seems, is like I say that I simply don’t believe you based on my little bit of investigations so far, so I’m focusing my attention on seeing if you’re trustworthy before taking anything of the very large and varied number of claims you’re making seriously.

That’s my process: Test some things that people say, before you believe them on the wider narrative.

That’s an irrational process. You need to actually read critically and inform yourself.

In your world, what does “read critically” mean? If testing some of the things from a particular source before you start to take it seriously isn’t that?

I generally trust the OHCHR report, not because I automatically trust everything from the UN, but because it doesn’t have any obvious inconsistencies with its sources and seems to draw on things that broadly match with what’s broadly accepted by human rights NGOs, Wikipedia, news sources with a variety of allegiances, and so on. I went through some version of the process with it that I’m trying to do with you, and it didn’t have sudden changes in its story, factual inconsistencies with other things that were trustworthy, suspect logical patterns, and so on.

Like I say, I think we’re just at an impasse, because you’re absolutely convinced that you’ve already done the critical reading, and I just need to get with that program and accept what you’re saying. I don’t think your reading of sources is as critically minded as you think it is. I think you’ve absorbed, and are trying to relay to me, a particular way of analyzing sources that I’m just fundamentally not on board for.

There’s a very particular failure mode that the human brain can get into when “it’s all propaganda” or “all their sources are biased” or corrupted by money, or whatever, start to become how you analyze sources. It starts to become very easy to just discard anything that doesn’t match the picture that’s already in your mind, and accept anything that matches the picture that’s already in your mind, because you’re defining the trustworthiness of the source in that sort of self-referential way. The way you talk about needing to “contextualize,” and the way you allocate trust to different sources, makes me think you’re unintentionally using that type of maladaptive pattern. Part of the reason I’m spending this length of time talking with you is that you do seem passionate about the truth, willing to invest energy into getting to the bottom of things, and so on. But I really think that you could benefit from some self-reflection about objectively, “Is this statement I am making true? Is this source trusthworthy?” before starting to go HAM with it, or uncritically accept other things from adjacent sources.

Does that make sense? Just my two cents, good luck with everything.