NikkiB

This article is indistinguishable from satire. I know that's cliche, but this is honest-to-god something someone here would have banged out in an afternoon as a niche joke. I don't have anything clever to say, you just have to read it.

Oh God, my eyes.

This article, written by a Taiwan-based "sinologist," has been copied and pasted over several major outlets and a dozen other Christian clickbait news sites. The pastor in question is John Sanqiang Cao, and was charged with human trafficking upon returning from a mission trip to Myanmar.

I don't know anything about the validity of the charges he's facing, and I'm quite certain that IF the events alleged by the article are true, then this is a clear miscarriage of justice.

There is something very funny about this story appearing all over American media, though. As if ex-convicts in the US don't deal with very similar problems...

At risk of beating the dead horse…

These god damn liberals keep harping over how Joe Biden is the “lesser evil” compared to Donald Trump, necessitating that we go out and vote for him come November lest our flawless democratic system give way to fascism. “Something something incrementalism purity test push him left do you want Trump to win???”

In 2020, it could be feasibly argued, if poorly, that Joe Biden was, in fact, the “lesser evil.” Donald Trump was the president, and Joe Biden was not. Given the dual assumption that Donald Trump was a “substandard” president and that Biden would likely be at least “standard” quality, this made some sense. But the cards are on the table now. All of our most fearful suspicions about a Biden presidency have been utterly validated, and that’s not even counting all the atrocities people scarcely imagined him committing or lacked the capacity to predict altogether. He is more evil than we could have possibly known.

All these same libs are now in a bind. Apparently, Biden HAS to be the Democratic ticket, so he HAS to be elected president, because otherwise Trump would win, and that would be bad, wouldn’t it? The only problem is that Biden, the Anointed One, quite literally has no redeeming qualities. So what do you do to convince people to vote for Biden in spite of literally every crime he has committed and every promise he neglected to fulfill?

The most popular strategy is seemingly to just insist, with zero supporting evidence or even reasoning, that Trump’s America is just an objectively worse version of Biden’s America. Everything will be worse under Trump. Everything. Yes, Biden has failed in almost every respect and has actively worked against what he promised to his constituents, and yes, nothing has improved under Biden and in fact almost everything has generally become worse, but Trump will do all those bad things even harder! So you have to vote for Biden. Or you’re making the world worse. You fascist.

At risk of being the Russian troll living inside everyone’s walls, can we take a moment to appreciate the degree to which the discourse has degenerated? “Vote for the lesser evil” used to mean that we were expected to make “compromises” with politicians we didn’t completely agree with or even took some issues with to avoid aggressive fragmentation within the Democratic Party, a sacrosanct institution representing all that is good in the world. This is perhaps the first election I’ve ever seen where we are not even being promised marginal progress. We are not even being offered different poisons to pick. The same toxic politics of the fascist right have been watered down by the “adults in the room,” and we are expected to not only drink but be thankful it’s not even more concentrated than it is.

Vote Biden 2024: It could be worse!

Anyone else noticing that the Zionists tend to be a bit hasty in taking a victory lap?

We've all expressed immense frustration over being lumped in with Nazis and other rabid bigots over our opposition to apartheid and settler colonialism. The cynical attempts to crush opposition to Zionism by browbeating anyone who opposes the American empire with accusations of secret antisemitism can be seen both before and since October 7. It is somewhat ironic that Zionism, especially among evangelical Christians, is itself an unconscious expression of toxic and deleterious antisemitism from which they have failed to liberate themselves.

Among Evangelical Americans, a popular belief posits white Israelis as not only being indigenous to Palestine, a bizarre contortion of reality in itself, but as being the "chosen people" with a separate covenant with their god which guarantees a Jewish ethnostate in the "Holy Land." In the same way that their god promised the New World to white European settlers from coast to coast, he has promised Jews all the land in Palestine from the river to the sea.

On its face, this belief seems to be pointedly not antisemitic, but a clean inversion of the idea that Jews are inferior. But this inversion of antisemitism is not the same thing as the abolition of antisemitism.

Importantly, "chosen people" is not and has never before been an expression of supremacist thinking, at least not traditionally among Jews. The true meaning of the phrase "chosen people" refers to the special obligations, or "mitzvot," which Jews observe in obedience to their god. They are the "chosen people" because, unlike in Christian doctrine, these laws are not universally applicable. No Jew in their right mind will claim eating pork, for instance, is an offense to God independently of one's own religious identity precisely because non-Jews do not have the same obligations to God. We gentiles have no mitzvot to follow. That is what actually makes Jews "chosen."

The insistence that Jews' unique relationship to the divine reflects a supremacist worldview is, in fact, an antisemitic contortion of Jewish doctrine to justify the oppression and extermination of Jews. Antisemites are very fond of invoking this imaginary Jewish doctrine to claim that Jews are the originators of the ideology of racial hierarchy. It is a bold-faced lie engineered to justify genocide. "If we don't do it to them, they will do it to us."

Rather than parting with this bigoted idea, non-Jewish Zionists have preserved their erroneous antisemitic belief with the additional caveat that Jews are, in fact, "chosen" in the sense that they have not just special obligations, but special rights, namely the right to all the land in Palestine. They have not parted with antisemitism whatsoever, but have merely inverted it to justify yet another genocide.

When these same people accuse us of antisemitism, it is wholesale projection which suggests since that they are the self-appointed opposite of antisemites, and since we oppose their Zionist regime, we must be antisemitic. In reality, in agreement with true Jewish doctrine, we reject all claims of racial supremacy.

So don't let anyone tell you that you're antisemitic for not being a Zionist. Zionism is antisemitism. Do not forget this for a second.

From an early age, even during primary education, Americans are told that their country is exceptional. It's not clear what is meant when we are told this, since no explanation is given as to how we are exceptional.

In fact, most of American propaganda makes endless excuses for itself. "American slavery and genocide isn't all that bad, especially considering everyone else does it too. All land is stolen. You have to keep 'historical context' in mind when criticizing the United States. It's not fair to judge our actions by modern standards."

Without even deconstructing this argument, how it is filled with deception and misdirection, we can see a glaring hypocrisy. I thought we were supposed to be exceptional. Now you're saying we aren't?

This kind of self-destructive argumentation always emerges in regards to America's colonial underclass. When people discuss the annexation of Indian land or the enslavement of Africans, we are always told that the conquered and enslaved peoples were underdeveloped economically and had little in the way of sociopolitical organization, infrastructure, or wealth before we so charitably brought them under our heel and gave them everything worth having.

Of course, we know this isn't true. Indigenous peoples had quite a bit to steal. Otherwise, we wouldn't have stolen their land, their human labor, their natural resources, or have dissolved their existing polities to facilitate our theft. People with no riches have nothing to plunder.

Even concerning our annexation of Hawaii and the enslavement of indigenous Hawaiians, people have argued that Hawaii would have been "a poor fishing nation in the middle of nowhere" without our gracious intervention, that we built Hawaii's wealth and worth. Another obvious lie. If Hawaii was truly what they claim it was, which is in itself a lie, there would be no point in annexing it, dissolving its government, and plundering its resources. If Hawaii is poor, how did it come to be that American capitalists profited from it? Similarly, people argue that if we hadn't annexed Hawaii, some other country would have. Why, if it's so unimportant, would any country bother to do so?

On the one hand, colonizers and settlers love to say that they are doing nothing wrong because the people they exploit are so infantile and helpless that our aggression and theft is counterintuitively an overall benefit for the people we brutalize. On the other hand, they sure seem to want what indigenous people have, which is why they steal it.

This is the white savior complex brought into clear focus. The belief that the colonized must be colonized to save them from themselves isn't merely a delusion borne of believing the wrong facts. It is a rationalization. They must believe they are superior to justify their theft, but if they truly were superior to the people they exploit, as they claim they are, the exploitation itself would not only be unnecessary, but a total waste of time.

Do not let liberals get away with arguing like this. Who knows, if someone spells it out for them, they might realize the errors of their ways.

I see sex work as somewhat analogous to coal mining. It's not that it isn't real work, or that those who work in that capacity don't deserve rights, dignity, or a society that works for them. The problem, of course, is the ever-present exploitation of the workers coupled with the severe unpleasantness of the occupation which ensures that the people who do work these jobs are those with few other options. That isn't to say that all sex workers and/or coal miners are miserable. Even so, the patterns around this kind of work are unmistakable.

Given these facts, I think most reasonable people understand that sex work should go extinct. That isn't to say that you can't make pornography or have sex with strangers. However, it's impossible to gauge enthusiastic consent when money is changing hands, and enthusiastic consent is a vital component for an ethical sexual encounter.

My question for the community is how exactly this is meant to be accomplished. How can sex work be abolished without harming the very people it's meant to protect? The number one problem western sex workers face, more so than creepy clients, is the cops, who profile them, steal their wages, and arrest them on a whim. Clearly, criminalizing sex work hasn't done much for sex workers. What are some alternatives?

What actually happened as a result of these movements? People usually use them as evidence that Mao killed however many millions of people. I'm aware that they aren't fondly remembered periods in Chinese history, but I'm not sure how accurate the wikipedia entry on the subjects are. Does anyone have further reading?

Given that this community has generally positive view of Stalin, I'm curious what he did that my comrades find irredeemable or out of line. Since it's easy to criticize the Soviet Union from a western perspective, bonus points if you explain how this was detrimental to the development of socialism and/or communism.

The book by J. Sakai, not the type of person, hence the capitalization. There are people who say it's too divisive.