1. I want to talk about the actual data behind the connection between negative media coverage of China and violence against Asian Americans because I think there's 2 different things happening there that are being dangerously conflated: negative
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2. media coverage in general and racist fearmongering about the China and the pandemic. It's not particularly shocking that American views on China have been deteriorating basically since the beginning of the Trump administration but it really
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3. takes off during the trade war in 2018 and 2019 and then accelerates again as the pandemic starts. These numbers are from Pew Research Center, what you should notice immediately is that there's a 13% increase in unfavorable views of China
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4. between 2018 and the end of 2019 and another 13% increase between the end of 2019 and when the data stops in 2020. Now if you're looking at this and you think there's a direct 1 to 1 correlation between negative coverage of China translating
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5. into increasing negative perceptions of China into violence against Asian Americans you would expect similar increases in violence against Asian Americans between 2018 and 2019 and 2019 and 2020. That didn't happen at all. The 13% increases in
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6. the 2018-2019 cycle has basically no effect on anti-Asian violence but between 2019 and 2020 there was a ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PERCENT INCREASE in hate crimes. Now what was different between 2019 when views of China were already incredibly low
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7. and 2020, when the massive surge in hate crimes started? The answer is the media's coverage of the pandemic. Almost immediately in late December and early January the pandemic was turned into a referendum on the CCP. You IMMEDIATELY started
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8. seeing the China flu shit pushed by the right, most of the political spectrum got in on the racist wet market panic and the bat eating shit. And anti-Asian racism spiked INSTANTLY. This was the period where people first started screaming slurs
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9. at me, it was the period where the whole repertoire of anti-masker violence was developed as a way to attack Asian people for wearing masks (the shouting, the spitting, the coughing on them, and eventually physical violence) and by February
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10. the real hardcore attacks start. Now I think it's really important to understand what happened here. The regular anti-China media frenzy had been going on for 3 years now, but for 2 of those years nothing happened. There was no increase in
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11. anti-Asian violence even as China's approval rating collapsed. But when the pandemic started everything changed instantly. China's approval rating continued to fall but this time there an almost immediate surge in violence. This suggests that
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12. the pandemic fear mongering and racist coverage was SIGNIFICANTLY more dangerous than the anti-China coverage that came before, quantitatively and qualitatively so. I think the reason for this is twofold. One is that the pandemic tapped into
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13. some really old and deep seated anti-Asian racism that has to do with Asians being seen as the spreaders of disease. The other is that unlike even the spying panic the racist pandemic fear mongering immediately gives racists a perceived threat
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14. that personally affects them in their everyday lives (which is just Asian Americans in general, now transformed into plague bearers). This led to instant surges in racism and immediate increases in attacks, culminating in the 150% increase.
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15. So what can we actually conclude from this? First off the two distinct types of fear mongering (the normal stuff that's an attempt to hype up threats like the imaginary missile gap so that defense contractors can make more money one expensive
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16. shit like hypersonic missiles and the COVID shit) are distinct phenomena even if their impact on views of China are similar. The 2nd is that it's the China flu shit that's actually dangerous, the weapon sales stuff has basically no effect on
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17. levels of violence (and also fails on a scapegoating level, per Yougov only 8% of Americans think the greatest threat to their way of life is from any foreign threat and even then a lot of that is Russia or Iran). This means that if you
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18. actually care at all about the lives of Asian Americans then the shit you need to be going after is the pandemic fear mongering because the geopolitical threat stuff doesn't do shit to Asian Americans. So stop fucking using dead Asian
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19. Americans as human shields for China and as a stick to beat people who care about The People's War on Terror with,you're not fucking stopping the violence against us you're using our fucking blood to settle your own personal scores. Don't
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20. fucking pretend that you're trying to protect us when you're really, clearly just using as as human ammunition
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I literally can't read anything Xu Lizhi wrote without bursting into tears. I can't do it and I don't understand what the fuck is wrong with these people that they can just ignore it
Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year
Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think
Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die
Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an
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idiot
I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems
Every time I open the window or the wicker gate
I seem like a dead man
Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin
All of the fucking suicide net socialists are out in force again today "defending China against the CIA" by saying that the People's War on Terror isn't fucking putting Muslims into reeducation camps and using them for slave labor.
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cw suicide
AND FOR FUCKING WHAT? THIS IS YOUR FUCKING SOCIALISM? A STATE CHINESE WORKERS WOULD RATHER FUCKING KILL THEMSELVES THAN LIVE IN IT ANY LONGER? SUICIDE NETS HANGING OFF OF FACTORIES UNDER A RED FLAG? THIS IS
WHAT YOU FUCKING WANT? FOR THE CHINESE WORKING CLASS TO WORK ITSELF TO DEATH SO YOU CAN POINT TO A GDP GRAPH AND SAY CHINA IS GETTING RICHER? AND YOU FUCKING CALL US THE SINOPHOBES?
The whole early 20th century is this happening over and over again. Rockefeller set up his own unions and workers councils (that are actually the basis for all of the "socialist" proposals about workers on company boards) to stop the syndicalists,
Bismarck created the welfare state literally as a way to buy of social democratic workers, and the right created its own "national syndicalism" and "national socialism" to deal with syndicalism and socialism respectively. You start getting right
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wing nationalist Bolsheviks among the Russian emigres, fascist versions of anti-imperialism in Japan (which eventually become one of Japan's ruling ideologies) and later right wing anti-colonialists in the form of Wahhabism. It's literally just
See the problem with trying to own Max Blumenthal for going on a show with just like actual Tories is that he does interviews with Tucker Carlson, who and I cannot emphasize this enough is enough is personally responsible for making me literally
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afraid to go outside for fear of getting fucking stabbed, all the fucking time and nothing fucking happens
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There is a DIRECT fucking line from Tucker's Wuhan Flu shit to Asian Americans being lit on fire and these fucking assholes go on his show for the publicity and don't even fucking mention it
Under-discussed aspect of the failure of socialist revolutions in the 20th century is that like if you're a worker in the first "socialist" state your life is still literally just you go to work in a factory, get paid, and go home except also
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you get reported to the secret police and get sent to a gulag because you pissed off your neighbor. Like literally a majority of the BOLSHEVIKS on the original central committee ended up getting put in front of firing squads by Stalin and like
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lord help you if you were part of any other faction during or after the revolution. Meanwhile the secret police is run by one of history's greatest pedophiles and every other communist party has to take their political lines from Moscow, which