This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.
The idea of putting "Tibet" and "human rights" close to each other doesn't look very promising to me based on some historic observations of pre-China Tibet lifestyle http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html (sorry for russian, but hopefully it is pretty simple for automatic translation)
This statement makes sense for some specific ethic systems.
For instance, in almost all modern states there are ideas, which are shared by some majorities and considered unethical in Christian ethic system.
But bad_user seems to imply ethic system which is based on the aggregate citizens vision. With such ethic system opinions of majorities are ethical by tautology.
> Even if the majority wants to suppress minority dissent (or do worse things to minorities), it's not the right thing to do.
Let me follow your definition, say, in the case of Ancient Rome. There is a minority of masters and a majority of slaves. Minority of masters has a dissent (from the slave's point of view, of course) that slaves should stay slaves. So, according to you, it is wrong for them to fight for their freedom, right?
Not exactly :) If we suppose that entire economy (which is nearly 70,000,000$M) is expressed in bitcoins (there will be 20M of it), then each bitcoin would cost 3.5$M. Started from order of 4e-2, it is now traded around 4e2, so it have done half-way (in logarithmic scale) to 4e6 -- its potential limit value.
I would like to add an instructive story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignalina_Nuclear_Power_Plant there. It shows how new and profitable nuclear power plant was turned into a money-consuming hole by the political efforts of EU leaders. This story adds some additional point of view on the problems of Baltic states.
It's counterintuitive, but now Russia is drifting away from its soviet past. Meanwhile western leaders start to understand that there is a good strategy with uniform democracy: play with envy (all this stuff "reach people should pay more, in order to keep compensation for unemployed, etc"). In some sense, this is motion towards socialism.
These people didn't negotiate this meeting. This is the formal reason.
Informal reason is that they are often organized by the institutions which funded by other countries, institutions, which aim is definitely not a prohibition of Russia.
May be it is a good idea to avoid judgements about countries/cultures, which you don't understand?
Well, it could be so de jure in USA. But de facto we see opposite. Snowden mentioned unconstitutional violation of human rights of US citizen. And now he is hunted by US government, seriously hunted.
It doesn't make any sense. Gay propaganda is considered to be a crime and it is normal to restrict this crime. Meanwhile one could discuss is it correct to consider such a thing as a crime or not.