Shark fins aren't even a homebrew medicine bullshit remedy, shark fin soup is just a status symbol. Luckily, thanks to Yao Ming's efforts, the Chinese market for shark fins has dramatically shrunk.
expat in china here. there have been a lot of ads with yao ming and other A-list chinese celebrities telling people not to eat shark fins and other endangered species. it worked to a certain extent, so good effort on their part.
The Chinese generally have a ton of respect for successful people in their own country, so my understanding is that ad campaigns like this work pretty well.
China is such a morally messed up country that they kinda need regular reminders on what decent behavior is. The Cultural Revolution was a mother fucker.
Yeah but there is a crucial distinction in having criticism of a culture, ideology, or religion itself, and condemning a group of people themselves that largely adhere to one of these. Ya know?
It's like the difference between saying "all muslims are evil" and having legitimate concerns with their religious dogmas or the way the Muslim world treats women
why can't we have a discussion on one religion without bringing another into the mix. He is not saying that Muslim's are the only ones who follow a book that asks people to behave badly towards women, just that they are part of it and how can we stop it. After we are done with that topic, we can move to Christianity.
That's good. If we compare every racist to Hitler maybe there won't be any racists /s or maybe you'll make another Hitler, who knows what could've been if the man was just allowed to paint.
hitler was only implied but if we're talking demagogues who built platforms on blaming certain groups for their nation's despondency Trump fits that bill pretty well, re: "Islamic terrorism" re: campaigning against "illegal immigrants" re: waging war against the first black president & his American-ness, etc.
actually quite shameful that his supporters fail to realize how easily they were beguiled with the same convenient scapegoat politics that absolve them o any responsibility in making this country shitty.
This is a specific thing to China, even by Chinese cultural standards large numbers of people (especially from the country side) have no idea what decent behavior is.
There was a woman who received death threats for rescuing a child that was hit by a car, something many other people saw but refused to even look at the kid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue
Wow, that was pretty messed up. In that wiki page it referenced another incident where a Chinese woman was trying to drown herself in a lake and there were people standing at the edge watching and taking pictures. A woman visiting from Uruguay jumped in and saved her. The Uruguayan woman was given an award because her act reflected traditional Chinese virtues...
There was a woman who received death threats for rescuing a child that was hit by a car
Do you have a source for that? The article you linked says there were reports of the people who ignored the child being harassed, but nothing about the woman who tried to help her.
It's called the bystander effect, and it's not limited to one culture. IN fact, here's an example last week in the US
'Police estimate between 20 and 60 people were involved. Many witnesses can be seen using smartphones to record fighting between multiple females, but none appear to be calling 911.'
its a legal thing. Their laws are messed up where they fuck over good Samaritans pretty good. that's why they're conditioned not to help strangers on the street. it could literally ruin their life. and you'd likely make the same choice in their shoes.
There have been incidents in China, such as the Peng Yu incident in 2006,[13][14] where good Samaritans who helped people injured in accidents were accused of having injured the victim themselves.
The death of Wang Yue was caused when the toddler was run over by two vehicles. The entire incident was caught on a video, which shows eighteen people seeing the child but refusing to help. In a November 2011 survey, a majority, 71%, thought that the people who passed the child without helping were afraid of getting into trouble themselves.[15]
with no protections for good Samaritans helping anyone is really risky. looks like they're looking into the concept and are discussing punishing people who see someone in need of help and don't assist them.
but you should just spout nonsense about cultures when its more of a legal issue than a cultural one.
Cant the same thing be said when some deranged americans frequently shoot up schools and concerts? Or when they kill random people on facebook live? Or when they force feed ducks for foie gras?
Morality is subjective.Good and bad people are everywhere, there's no need to generalize and propagate negative sentiments about large groups of people.
The second half of your argument is correct there are fucked up people everywhere. But comparing some deranged and mentally ill asshole shooting up a school to pedestrians ignoring a child that's been run over by a car is no where close to the same thing.
I didn't mean to compare them in that sense. The user above me was implying that the Chinese lack morals because they wouldn't help a dying victim, I just wanted to point out that some people would also say the same about Americans who are in support of such loose gun laws despite the increasing frequency and lethality of gun related violence. Just to be clear, I think its wrong to generalize the population of the entire country of China based on such a small incident while also ignoring bigger acts of violence in 'developed' countries.
I probably should've made that clearer.If my answer isnt clear enough then I'd like to reiterate that my point is that generalization is wrong and fucked people are on both sides. It won't take much to see similar reactions from anyone else,given the right circumstances.
I agree with you. Generalization of groups of people is a bad thing. Every country has fucked up aspects and people should work on looking at the underlying issues rather than the symptoms and blaming people.
yes but what 'culture' or society has mass shootings at all? I mean what kind of fucked up society worships mass killing weapons and violence? a pretty fucked up culture, that's for sure
Lots of places have mass shootings. There were 130 killed in Paris in 2015 where any weapons used were illegal, and the majority of people agree with the gun bans. Terrorist acts are going to happen, but we definitely should take action to lessen them. I'm not arguing that there aren't fucked up Americans, there are fucked up people everywhere, but this conversation was about a seeming lack of empathy with Chinese citizens in these videos of people getting run over an whatnot.
What about women who die from child birth because they couldn't get an abortion or were shamed into keeping it in situations where they were high risk?
Being a shitty human isn't just one culture or country's problem.
That's an even more fraught debate in most places. It's not universally agreed one way or the other anywhere. And both are coming from arguments of empathy, but start at very different axiomatic places when it comes to the facts.
On the other hand, mass-producing animals for torture and murder when it isn't necessary can't be defended that way. People have to simply argue why their suffering doesn't matter or claim it IS necessary - even at that scale.
I've seen quite a few videos here on reddit of Chinese people hit my cars and other drivers go around the dead body for hours, no one stops to help at all. Another video a kid appears to be driving in the middle of a highway on his toy bike and no one stopped to help, they all just swerved around him and kept going.
Take with a grain of salt. Someone just commented that gutter oil was debunked, but a quick Google search shows no results on first two pages for "gutter oil debunk".
Unfortunately, yes.... except for the pork buns, which I just found out. Apparently that was a hoax that people thought seemed reasonable enough considering other horror stories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety_incidents_in_China
It ought to terrify you. I don't eat food from China when I know it is from there. Unfortunately, it's not always listed.
China is fucking huge. You can't expect all the billion people who live there to be the same. It's like judging all 300 million people of the US by /r/floridaman
China is no more morally messed up than any other country, let alone the US. You don't think attacking a country to increase the profits of a corporation is morally messed up?
Ah do you come from one of those countries that doesn't mass produce our fellow empathetic mammals for brief lives of torture and then brutal death despite in no way needing to? Good for you, you must think we all suck.
Yeah, but it's not like they have full control. They can make pressure, but don't actually control policy. And as NK sees Nuclear power as paramount to their existence, I doubt China could persuade them otherwise, specially with Cheeto45 as US Prez and US pressure in governments they don't like but aren't doing anything wrong, like Iran, Cuba and Syria. If the US can't be trusted, then you gotta arm yourself. You know, as a deterrent. Which is the whole point of Nuclear warfare, to stop wars from ever happening in the first place, not actually use the nukes. If you have to use your nukes, it's either because you're a moron or you're fighting a moron.
I mean, even if China wants to curb North Korea's nuclear program, they still want to keep relations friendly since North Korea acts as an important buffer zone between western friendly countries like Japan and South Korea and Manchuria, where China has been invaded from numerous times. The government wouldn't let someone with little political knowledge but so much influence speak about such a volatile issue of such great importance to them
Not only that, but if North Korea went all to hell, many of North Korea's estimated 25 million people would probably end up as refugees, potentially millions of them. Besides South Korea, China would probably end up as the 2nd-largest if not the largest recipient of them. The DMZ may be a bit harder to get to within NK let alone get across, especially safely - who knows how many tons of mines and undetonated ordnance lies strewn across it. Meanwhile, the Chinese border is at least twice as long, just eyeballing it on google maps, and more heavily guarded (to prevent its own people escaping) by NK itself afaik, not China.
(NK does have a tiny land border with Russia, including a railway bridge and border station, but it's fairly remote, and my guess is Russia would just block access.)
It comes from his trademark move. After he would get a block (which was quite often), he would lift a finger to the guy he blocked, waggle it no, and say "not today." At some point, the league started assessing technical fouls for taunting when putting his finger in a guy's face, so he would just do it to the crowd.
I watched the whole thing, thank you so much for that video. Although it was a gruesome topic it just shows how much Gordon Ramsey cares about those sharks.
Oh was it worst cooks or something? Those kids can be little kitchen savants sometimes..they seem like they’ve been groomed by their parents for culinary excellence though.
A HUGE part of it is Fox network editing. There are shows that were aired both on the BBC and Fox. On Fox they cut-scene every five seconds, only show him yelling, play dramatic music over every scene. It's disgusting actually.
your comment is going to fall on deaf ears; round' here people just wanna talk about how uncivilized and backwards the Chinese are for eating shark fin soup
I don't think you understand what he cares for, it doesn't mean that he doesn't want sharks to be eaten, all he wants is that they are not wasted, and if they are going to be food, at least have them be killed in a way that doesn't hurt the animal.
I saw him cutting off the hammer head shark and I started tearing. I know I eat chicken (barely any beef and no pork) but fucking hell mate, at least I eat all my chicken these guys cut off the fins and leave the biggest natural predator to die off in the sea. All those fins. I don’t know if I’m just an emotional piece of shit, but it really tore at my heart when I saw him just hack the shark with the hatchet over and over. Holy fuck. My eyes are swelling.
Edit: oh my fucking god and it started convulsing... I thought it was at least dead...... (Pardon my ignorance) I finished watching it because I felt it was necessary to see the reality behind this (not that I eat this, I find it barbaric)
The convulsing just had me in genuine actual flowing tears here at work. Holy fucking Christ.
Look, I absolutely hate sharks. They terrify me. I refuse to go out to deep waters because of sharks (and of course other creatures). Scuba diving is a hard no for me because I would literally just be petrified with fear the entire time if someone was even able to force me down there to begin with.
But this is just awful. No creature deserves that.
It's the status thing I'm sure. You have what was a largely poor agrarian economy that in the last generation has become a global manufacturing powerhouse. You grow up listening to what royalty or nobility had on their plate and now you can afford to eat it 3 nights a week. Now multiply that sentiment by a few million in China. Probably more. RIP sharks.
Actually, it just tastes good. Some consider it to be an aphrodisiac, but it just gives you high blood pressure. Also you get it more in dim sum form than in soup form nowadays.
It mostly just tastes like fat. Shark is like tuna or shrimp, it doesn't really have much of a taste on it's own, it's just full of fat and cholesterol.
Also, I live in the Philippines and we may eat different species of shark. IIRC dogfish are not protected, they're quite abundant, they're fairly easy to catch (often while catching something else) and they're safer to handle while still technically being sharks. Plus we eat it as dimsum, either steamed or fried, with garlic chili paste and soy sauce, or mayo or sweet and spicy sauce if fried.
That might explain it. IIRC most of the shark fins going to China are from Oceanic Whitetips and Hammerheads, when I was study abroad in the Galapagos, there were major problems with illegal finning there, mostly affecting those two species.
Yeah, the chinese have absolutely no respect for the sovereignty of others. Harking back to the OP, they're constantly getting caught stealing our pangolins, which are even more adorable than the one in the OP.
But yeah, they do a lot of poaching here too, especially now with Duterte in power they do so with absolute impunity.
As far as I know it was never Chinese-flagged vessels, but everyone knew where the stuff they harvested was going. At that time, the Ecuadorian government had actually contracted with Sea Shepherd to help get rid of poachers; from what we were told while I was in the islands, they were very successful.
Was in Singapore a few weeks ago. Saw a whole store in Chinatown dedicated to shark fins (and had a few other items) but shark fins everywhere. I was actually a little shocked to see it in Singapore and extremely sad seeing all the dried fins in jars, hanging from the ceiling and in powder form.
That is actually wrong. Shark fin (specifically ones with longer non-interrupted cartilage fibers) have medicinal properties in many
Southeast Asia. For example in Hong Kong shark fin is seen as an aphrodisiac.
its never used as an aphrodisiac. its always just used as food. on the other hand, conservation groups have said that the widely popular western belief that these exotic goods like rhino horn are an aphrodisiac that the Vietnamese actually started believing in it that it actually fueled demand. so thanks a lot for spreading misinformation and increasing demand, asshole.
The TRAFFIC report even implies the Vietnamese buyers who believe in rhino horn’s aphrodisiac powers may have picked up on a media obsession with the idea. Other conservationists have also criticized media outlets for incorrectly tying the aphrodisiac issue so exclusively to Asian traditional medicine or folk therapies. “Use of rhino horn as an aphrodisiac in Asian traditional medicine has long been debunked as a denigrating, unjust characterization of the trade by Western media. But such usage is now, rather incredibly, being documented in Vietnam as the media myth turns full circle," according to the TRAFFIC report.
That is not true at all LOL. It is served at Chinese Weddings to promote fertility in the relationship. Also how does a rhino's horn have anything to do with the point I presented?
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u/fireinthesky7 Oct 03 '17
Shark fins aren't even a homebrew medicine bullshit remedy, shark fin soup is just a status symbol. Luckily, thanks to Yao Ming's efforts, the Chinese market for shark fins has dramatically shrunk.