Winter 2021 LC Thread—I Want Sous Vide

People are real dum.

It’s this.

Nah, to be fair they’re they do seem real conflicted about it and won’t say anybody is lying. There’s a whole lot of hand-waving and hold-on-i’m-going-though-a-tunnel-you’re-breaking-up over it. There’s definitely not the hatred you see like for Palestinians from Israel-defenders.

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Told my boss that “we live in different realities and one of them is insanity” during a heated debate about how the government is going ban gas cars, a carbon tax is nothing but a way to fund the liberals programs, and climate change isn’t real. Hope that doesn’t get me fired :grinning:

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Reminds me of a great line from a Mountain Goats song: “I know that one of us, I’m not saying who, has rocks in her head”.

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No one here supports China in regards to the Uyghers. You’re in Taiwan right? It’s a disgrace how cowardly everyone (governments and corporations) is about Taiwan.

Also the reluctance to criticize China from say liberals (the sort of left) isn’t mostly because China is ostensibly “leftist”). Some tankies exist for sure, but 99% of libs don’t think anything about whether the Chinese government is leftist or not.

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This part is a little weird though. Since recorded history began that land has never really been anybody’s land. I know “settler colonialism” is the hot new buzzword but something can be a totally fucked up and horrible criminal human rights violation even if we can’t use the spicy popular phrase for it. I mean, holy shit, the concept of thinking some land is definitively some people’s land is big part of what has the Israelis behaving how they are.

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Yeah, there’s a notion among the liberals/left of Greater China, at least on Twitter, that Xinjiang denialism is common among the western left. I’ve generally assumed it’s pretty rare* but, as I posted, there are pockets of it that I’ve encountered.

*It’s very hard to imagine seeing it here being a big reason why

As Crocodile Dundee said, owning land is like fleas arguing over who owns the dog.

This is true. People don’t criticize China because China is an economic powerhouse. Western governments prioritize trade with China over human rights.

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Dunno about chapo or that kind of fringe, but obviously the MSM is afraid of China. You don’t even have to be CHINA to scare people. Governments and corporations are so scared of Turkey, they are afraid to talk about a hundred year old genocide. You just have to be willing to follow through on threats against commerce.

Aside from that, from the perspective of the general population, our relationship with China is markedly different than Israel. We have provided direct support to them since it’s creation and we have a lot more influence over their behavior than we do over China’s and we also have a lot more information about what’s being done. So it seems understandable that people here (in the US) would have much stronger feelings about the treatment of Palestinians by Israel than what China is doing to a people we know much less about. I hadn’t really heard any denialism from
People on the left, but I’m not on Twitter.

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I think this is true for the 4% of the population or whatever that ever thinks about Israel and China. I doubt its true for the “general population”. The median American couldn’t find China on a map.

Belongs in the other thread or maybe nowhere, but the “we give money to Israel” (we barely did until Nixon) doesn’t seem like the real reason to me. There are different reasons for different people. On the left, a lot of it is just that we consider them Western, white, democratic, rich, advanced and fair to criticize. No one thought we had to give military aid to South Africa in order to criticize it.

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I lived in China from 2013-2919 and hopefully will be returning there soon. Micro is right that I’m now in Taiwan.

There’s a ton of bullshit about China out there and the media is almost universally awful when reporting on it. Not to mention just generic racism.

Just about every comment I’ve made about China on Reddit gets a hundred downvotes because only a CCP shill would suggest that Chinese people can, in fact, wait in line or that “social credit” doesn’t exist in the way lots of people think it does.

Almost no one in USA#1 who casually follows the news has any clue about what’s going on in Western China. It’s not reported on, it’s remote and few people have a personal connection. Drawing a parallel with Palestine “Why isn’t AOC calling out China??!?1!” seems like a dubious take.

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Does it not matter if you talk about Uyghurs and Taiwan because you aren’t a Chinese citizen, you are confident in your anonymity or obscurity, or the whole thing about China being dicks about that is overblown?

That 4% probably makes up like 30% of the political
Left in the US, though.

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“Ostensibly” is the right word to use there - China offers very little to its citizens by way of health insurance and welfare state (which is why there’s a culture of saving and families pooling resources), and cares not a jot about horrendous city pollution and other environmental concerns.

Without its Maoist history and claims of a leftist tradition everyone would regard it as a far right regime under central control.

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https://twitter.com/blessadj/status/1394231051233398786

Apparently there is a large chunk of the population out there who never realized what the numbers meant in minesweeper, and just randomly clicked hoping to get lucky.

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I’ll go slightly to bat for ‘denialism’ if only because it seems Mendoza is being slightly criticised for asking if it exists.

I’ve read critques of some of the research about what’s happening in Xinjiang that are convincing, (though just in establishing that some specific claims are at best exaggerations). It didn’t surprise me that a subject that is being used by western governments as part of their China posturing has people exaggerating and misrepresenting, and it didn’t surprise me that some ‘left’ sources are pointing out the use of dodgy stuff. The people who write well about it are not denying mistreatment of Uyghurs.

I don’t read grayzone much, if at all, but I know they have been at the aggressive end of that sort of thing and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they engaged in their own misrepresentations and exaggerations. I think 6ix and geewhysee between them nailed why that sort of thing exists.

None of the above is mainstream left thinking, not even close.

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