If you're not a cop, you're doing a cop's job. You've done more than anyone to kneecap an extremely promising leftist space.

1. You're a troll.
2. You're a fucking moron to boot.

Picking stats and putting them together isn't making an informed opinion.

I don't know what type of lazy bullshit you're accustomed to, but reading up on a situation, typing out your opinion, and supporting that opinion with the information you found is the definition of an informed opinion.

Showing reporters speak to Muslims in china and hearing a consensus that they were not under attack from the government would be sufficient.

As I pointed out in my comment, diplomats from a dozen largely-Muslim countries visited Xinjiang in 2019 and they (and their governments) aren't calling the situation genocide.

Is it really so hard to believe that the State Department might be lying about a foreign government?

Did that person even comment here?

No answer, then? Thought not.

No, I meant "who here is a fascist" literally. As in, which users, and what comments or posts lead you to that conclusion. Who here is advocating for this:

the destruction of an entire culture or way of life, through any institutional means

And where are the comments where they do this?

You're really going to respond to a detailed opinion supported by numerous sources with that? What are you trying to accomplish here?

Who here is a fascist? Or are we playing "everyone who doesn't agree with 100% of what I say is a fascist" today?

thx chapo

lol what forum do you think you're on here?

do you believe the uighurs are going through a genocide and colonization process

Let's start the conversation with these two facts:

1. The U.S. State Department -- one of the most anti-China institutions on the planet -- estimates that a maximum of 3 million Uyghurs have been imprisoned.
2. As a direct result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- which was sold to the public on lies about WMDs -- resulted in around 2.4 million Iraqi deaths.

It would make a mockery of the term "genocide" to apply that term to 3 million people in prison but not seriously consider applying that term to 2.4 million people in the ground.

Now I would bet anything that you aren't going to start defending the Iraq War anytime soon, and you may even be willing to call it a genocide, too. I'm sure we agree almost entirely on how terrible the Iraq War is. The point is that if you search through U.S. media it's very easy to find instances where one of these events is labeled a genocide, and it's very difficult to find instances where the other is labeled a genocide. That alone should make anyone incredibly skeptical of how whatever is happening in Xinjiang is being reported. This skepticism should only be increased by the fact that one of the "academic" sources underpinning much of the news about China is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who thinks god sent him to oppose communism in China, and by the fact that Western academics exaggerated and mischaracterized the Soviet penal system.

With that heavy lens of skepticism in place, consider these additional facts:

1. By far the loudest voice that's taken up the "China is genociding Muslim Uyghurs" narrative is the U.S. Republican Party, which is openly anti-Islamic.
2. Diplomats from 12 largely-Muslim countries -- who presumably aren't anti-Islamic -- visited Xinjiang in 2019, and to the degree their governments are criticizing China's actions at all, I'm not aware of any of those governments labeling the situation "genocide."
3. China has about 166 mosques per 100,000 Muslims; for comparison, the U.S. has about 61 mosques per 100,000 Muslims.

If there's actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe the anti-Islamic GOP is the group that's most concerned about Muslims in China. If there's actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that countries with large Muslim populations aren't equally concerned, or even more concerned. If there's actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that China still has almost three times as many mosques-per-worshipper as the U.S., which (despite its many faults) is pretty open about allowing mosques to be built.

There's plenty to criticize China over -- shit, non-genocidal mass incarceration is worthy of criticism -- but a lot here seems like propaganda, especially in context of the larger "gobunism killed 48,090,111 bazillion people!1!1!!!" propaganda narrative.

Wow, spamming memes sounds like a great way to have a productive conversation about what the left wants society to look like. "Tankie entryism" really sounds like you aren't just looking to pick fights with people, too.

• Jacket
• Bracelet
• Bandana
• Shoes
• No pants

It kills me that this asshole isn't going away anytime soon.

For example, Taibbi is upset that Lee Fang got called out on twitter because he went around asking “what about black on black crime”

Well no, it looks like he didn't. Here's the interview Fang got in trouble over, linked to in that article. It looks like he wasn't asking people about black-on-black crime; a black person mentioned that as part of a two-minute comment about his thoughts on the protests. And Fang posted the whole two-minute comment, not just an edited "black-on-black crime" soundbite. The man who made that comment apparently didn't think Fang was baiting him or suggesting a certain answer, either: “I couldn’t believe they were coming for the man’s job over something I said... It was not Lee’s opinion. It was my opinion.”

It seems unlikely that Fang was proactively raising the topic of black-on-black crime, and it seems unlikely he was acting in bad faith in some other way. Putting someone's career on the line over that is pretty thin.

But Taibbi is extending that to defending NYT Oped Editor Bennet losing his job.

His take on Bennet is shit, but that's one anecdote provided to support some larger points. If the discussion gets too far into the specific facts of each underlying anecdote, all you do is end up exhuming a bunch of semi-obscure stories and you never get to the more substantive, more interesting points. Say I said "never take a running back in the first round of the NFL draft" and provided 10 players as examples. If a number of my underlying anecdotes (say 8 or 9 of those players) do a decent job of supporting my point, but you take issue with my factual description of 1 or 2 of them, we're never going to get to whether it's a good idea to take a running back in the first round if we spend all day arguing about whether my assessment of player number 10 is a good one.

I don't mind focusing on that larger point as long as it's (a) not based on complete bullshit and (b) raised in good faith.

Criticism -- actual criticism, not just "XYZ network is trash" -- of mainstream media is the way to go if you have to have a political conversation with family.

What's she replying to here?

"actually not all cops are racist murderers" and "did you know communities of color want MORE cops???"

This is a bad-faith oversimplification of what they said, so yeah, of course it's not going to sound very good.

• On the first point, they said that some people get into policing with good intentions but that they are surrounded with incentives to be bad and they eventually respond to those incentives. All of that's true. That doesn't make the actions of police any more justifiable or the outcomes of policing any better, but it does mean you'll run into trouble if you try selling people on the idea that literally all cops are literally Klan members and have literally murdered someone. People will call bullshit because yeah, that's bullshit. You have to be able to explain the problems with police without sounding like you're naive or poorly informed or more interested in radical rhetoric than in what the reality of the problem is.
• On the second point, yeah, communities of color are not universally in favor of literal police abolition. Some do, in fact, want more cops. That's just reality. You can argue that what they really want is safe communities, and that police are the only tool society presents to achieve that. You can argue that they want more cops but also want to radically redefine what a "cop" does. You can argue that the real goal is economic, and they don't want to eliminate one of the few well-compensated jobs you can get without an expensive degree. But you can't just bury your head in the sand and ignore what (at least a significant percentage of) those communities are, in fact, saying.

This criticism has the same energy as the chuds who rip Obama over "you didn't build that."

they didn’t want to challenge him and have a friendly interview

What are the situations where you really need to challenge someone, and what are the situations where someone can say something you don't 100% agree with and you just let it go? I don't recall Taibbi saying anything so out of line that it demanded opposition, and it's fine to have some discussions where different viewpoints are raised but you don't reach a consensus at that time.

Towards the end of the episode they were discussing a writer who got fired for a comment on cultural appropriation along the lines of:

As writers, aren't we supposed to be imagining what it's like to be someone else and then writing that story? Shouldn't we be seeing which writer can appropriate culture the best? We could even give out an award for it!

That strikes me as a pretty narrow, good-faith comment on the subject. Maybe you disagree with it, but there's a world of difference between that and some blatantly bigoted right-wing troll, so it makes sense to treat the situations differently.

And while they didn't detail what exactly the difference between the two situations is, I think it's reasonably clear: it's a mix of how egregious the original comment was and whether that comment was made in good faith. Seems like the intuition was OK even if they didn't articulate it all that well.

lol "interim President"

Or:

• They don't know about this specific small reddit alternative,
• They know about this site but went to a different small reddit alternative,
• They have other, non-Chapo subreddits they like that aren't available here,
• They're here lurking, but there's not enough activity for them to bother creating an account,

Etc., etc., etc.

Every weird product label you see is a result of corporations fucking over people, getting caught, and then being restrained by some new rule.

The best way to counter "but who will help you when your house gets robbed????" hysteria is with anecdotes about cops not doing shit to investigate (non-corporate) property crime. The people who say that sort of thing reason by anecdote anyway, and if they try to dig up statistics about crime they'll find stuff like a decades-long trend towards less crime and terrible closure rates for just about all crimes.