People who say "Well I'm Muslim and it bothers me that Biden supports Israel so I won't vote for him" have to be completely out of touch with reality or are completely fake
"If you aren't voting for me, you're not Muslim, Jack"
Wild how corporations have so much leeway to dictate the law.
The bulk of Taiwanese support the status quo, including that being their official diplomatic position, so I think it would go over better than you imagine. The diehard separatists are a minority faction.
This is functionally a case of affirming the consequent or something similar. "Ball is life" is really expressing something more like "there is no life worth living except one involving ball", so "fuck it we ball" is needed to keep living a worthwhile life if you assume that, but it's not really an endorsement of living itself.
It's like how, if I believe "drinking is the only reason I live", saying "I want to drink" only endorses "I want to live" incidentally at best, rather than the two statements being equivalent. It's like, in a mundane context, saying you want to eat. Eating is a condition of living, but the desire to eat is not identical to the desire to live, and a suicidal person can still be hungry and eat not to live but merely to relieve the pain of hunger. So too can the alcoholic lifestylist drink and the baller ball for the sake of their enjoyment of the respective activity (or aversion to how they feel without it) without there being a direct desire to live as such.
If this was true, racism would be eradicated. It must further be stated that, though many racists are very ignorant, ascribing racism fundamentally to "stupidity" is just as worthless as ascribing it to "evil". It is a moralizing account that cannot be usefully applied as systemic critique because it is all supposedly a matter of personal virtue.
People are racist as a strategy to prosper, first and foremost. It is not until you understand racism as a social strategy that you can fight it.
Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.
What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.
It's constitution has not even been amended to not include Mongolia, let alone mainland China.
And the KMT did do a number on the indigenous Formosan population.
ChatGPT failed you. In a political philosophical sense, the US is extremely liberal, maybe the most liberal country in the first world (at least if you are white and look cishet, etc). That, however, is exactly the problem, as liberalism places power in the hands of the wealthy.
It's not my government, and neither is Russia, but you aren't fooling anyone by disparaging someone by identifying them as living in China (or Russia, since the EU recently decided again that it's Not White Enough).
The problem is that it isn't a separate issue, it's the same body (Congress, with WH support) that imposes these problems and then offers "solutions" to the impacted population in exchange for acting as a jackbooted thug overseas.
GS even admits that the brigading is obnoxious then goes on to defend it.
Dogpiling and brigading are two different things. Brigading is (at least loosely) coordinated, dogpiling is something people do when they are there, coordinated or not. The algorithm just happened to put this thread near the top on Hexbear, which is only federated with a handful of instances, as can be seen by the fact that I was the very first person to comment on it (next was op, then myself again, iirc). It is categorically false to my knowledge that this thread was "brigaded," a bunch of people with similar opinions on this issue just all saw the thread.
And it is obnoxious, but "obnoxious" doesn't mean "evil," especially when you were speaking so derisively about the people you had to have seen made up the bulk of the thread when you made your first comment. Honestly, what did you expect? In most political communities you'd get a very similar reaction, and I'd prefer a single emote to a "Crimes of China" copypasta filling up my inbox.
GarbageShoot
joined 2 years ago
This article has ~4 inventions from last year:
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/10/4/nwad058/7070744
Stop being a racist piece of shit