I think a lot of people might think...well why does it matter anyway if the words aren't being used right as long as it gets through to people? But I think from a social-scientific perspective, and from the PoV of actually wanting to eliminate genocide as a practice, it is important.

Let's use a medical analogy. You cannot treat cancer without knowing exactly what cancer is-when something is cancer and when it's something else, and the specific mechanisms through which cancer occurs and becomes fatal. If you are an activist and you see every serious ailment as cancer and go "we need to treat this cancer, now!" and people take you seriously, then you will not understand the cancer, nor know how to prevent/cure it.

It's the same with genocide. You cannot have a "cure" or a "preventative technique" for genocide unless you study it. Study how it occurs, why it occurs-the specific causal factors that lead to political elites making the decision to commit genocide. For this-because we never have experimental conditions in the social sciences-we need to use comparison. We need to compare between cases to determine common factors that are specific (probabilistically rather than deterministically, in reality) to genocide. You need to be able to have a list of cases you can compare between to do this, and you need to be able to have a boundary within which these cases exist, and outside of which you can put everything as "not genocide". If this boundary is wrong (e.g., if you put every case of persecution in the 'genocide' case list) then you're going to end up msunderstanding every little thing about genocide, and you'll never get any closer to figuring out how to stop it or prevent it.

Thus ipso facto making a political/activist call of 'genocide!' to get attention is actually extremely harmful, and it is a key part of the social scientist's job to determine whether X or Y case can be considered genocide because, if we consider genocide an ontologically specific phenomenon (e.g., it has its own mechanisms and processes separate to that of, say, general repression), we need to keep false positives outside of our case list which will make it harder to uncover the causal logics of genocide in the first place.

Theoretically he could still be right but there is no reason to believe he is. He doesn't speak any local languages, has never done any fieldwork in the region, and his methodology/analysis is extremely unscientific and poor. I would encourage you to read his articles and see for yourself-it's based on extremely shoddy and weak correlations w/ no serious causal connection whatsoever. I was honestly shocked at how poor the "scholarship" was considering how many people take it seriously.

There's obviously extensive evidence of persecution and forced cultural assimilation, but that is not genocide. These things matter.

Tbf both were a sign of a troubled state but the Wagner mutiny was waaaaaaaaayyy more serious than Jan 6.

I am critical of China and I've never been attacked for it on Hexbear. It's ok if you approach topics in good faith and have nuanced arguments rather than just "CPC evil".

Personally I think wanting to destroy the American state as it is today and historically is actually very inclusive.

I would actually stop using Reddit if they did this. New Reddit is intolerable.

It's important to remember that mass killing =/= genocide. Yes, the Iraq Invasion led to mass destruction, chaos, and death, but what matters in genocide is intent. It was not with the intent to destroy Arab Iraqis as a social group, hence it was not genocide. Something can only be genocide if there was intent or, alternatively, that the actions taken would knowlingly deprive a social group of the conditions for life to the point where the social group would be destroyed (e.g., orchestrated famines, ontological destruction).

The US has plenty of other genocides to its name on its own continent, though, don't worry!

Kenya: Mass concentration camps and mass murder, though more for control than to destroy a social group. Perhaps not genocide, but certainly grave crimes against humanity.

Scotland: Not letting the SNP have a second referendum? Scotland was our comrade in arms for all the worst parts of British imperialism.

India: Bengal Famine was orchestrated by Britain knowing the consequences would be mass death, there is a good argument that this was therefore genocide. Not historical consensus but very much possibly so.

Iran: ???. I guess overthrow of Mossadegh which was bad but not genocide, of course. (EDIT: see reply to this).

Ireland: Orchestrated a famine knowing it would result in the death of a large portion of the population. Most likely genocide.

Australia/Tasmania: Extremely clear case of genocide, almost consensus within the field of Genocide Studies.

Malaysia: Mass internment in concentration camps, considerable extrajudicial killing. Not genocide, but crimes against humanity most certainly.

So that's a pretty bad record for the old Brits.

Sure

Well they won in Mariupol, that was a pretty big win. That's their only major victory in the whole campaign though, for sure. They are losers in this war, though Ukrainians are hardly winning, either. Everybody loses except arms manufacturers, pretty much.

I agree that deplatforming is good against Nazis and the like, 'debate' as a sacred virtue is just not how you defeat these sorts of awful belief systems (and people acting upon them, more importantly). I think studies have shown repeatedly that deplatforming does work + that debating them just boosts their message.

As you say, I think equating socialists (even revolutionary socialists) with Nazis and fascists is completely wrong though, for certain. It's unfortunately too common these days in certain areas of the internet.

At the end of the day 'evil' is not a particularly valuable analytical framing if we are being proper social scientists (since, of course, "the capitalist becomes capital personified", e.g., their actual personality traits don't matter and they needn't be sociopathic to do horrible things. Though a disproportionate of landlords are horrible people ofc). On a social media site, however, there's nothing wrong with using emotive language like 'evil' and using venting memes like the guillotine pictures and I guess there is a disconnect in how it's perceived to the 'materialist' mode of analysis that does not focus on individual personality traits + does not see the individual as the supreme and singular unit of analysis.

To be honest I don't understand it whatsoever I just go on chapo.chat and look at the posts on there. Now there are posts from other places which is neat. I don't leave the site though as I don't want to make a new account. Idk if I'm even doing it right or wrong.