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.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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seeing this get posted always pleases me greatly.
They will also inexplicably (to themselves as well as others) find the very words "five year plan" and "great leap forward" sinister, to the extent of using them as punchlines to non-existent jokes whenever a phrase travels in that direction.
"We need to make a plan to fix thi-"
"As long as it's not a five-year-plan, amiright?"
the whole chatbot analogy is incredibly fitting when you think about it
It's worse when western "communists" do the same thing
indeed