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Coup happening in Myanmar.
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Could China theoretically do nefarious things with healthcare info? Sure.
Will the USA do nefarious things with healthcare info? Absofuckinglutely.
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Every fucking time.
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There goes Dorothy Day’s get-out-of-sainthood card.
Empire, bipartisan, etc.
They don’t even need to use a new lie; just recycle the same bullshit and the wilfully amnesiac jingoistic fools will buy into it every fucking time.
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I may be (and probably am) wrong, but… yes, Bernie has privilege. He is white, male, well-educated, fairly rich, with much power due to his Senatorial seat. It’s truth to point that out.
But isn’t the point to acknowledge one’s privilege and use what you have to help others? While he’s not always as aware of intersectionality as I’d like, Bernie has been fighting for the working class for decades. The fact that we have a system that creates and perpetuates privilege is shameful. But I’m not seeing the utility in shaming Bernie (if that’s what they’re doing, the article’s not clear to me on that point) for using that privilege to work for others.
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Yes, of course he does. Pretty much everyone is privileged on one axis or another.
Including, notably, the author: she’s white, highly educated, professional status, bourgeois, cisgendered, holds citizenship in the imperial core, etc. She was formerly a Professor at Berkeley.
Do you think that they would have published the same article about Janet Yellen?
Virtually identical aesthetics, and on every axis except gender her privilege matches or exceeds Bernie.
They also would not have published this article about any other member of the Dem establishment.
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The author was appropriating the disprivileged perspective of her students (and the radical politics underlying intersectionality theory) and applying that for the purpose of defending a hyper-privileged white supremacist war criminal and a cop.
It’s cynical and disingenuous. It’s a more sophisticated version of when Megan McCain was pretending to be Jewish during the Ilhan Omar antisemitism beatup.
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LGBTCIA.
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Are Chinese actions in Xinjiang primarily motivated by Islamophobic bias? No, they’re fighting a deadly and foreign-supported insurgency. Islamic communities throughout the rest of China are not notably targeted for oppression. Pretty much every Islamic nation on the planet that isn’t a US puppet continues to support China.
Does the Chinese response to Uighur insurgency involve oppression of non-insurgent Uighurs? Yes, much like the response to jihadist terrorism in every Western nation.
Does the Chinese response affect large numbers of people? Yes, because China is fucking huge. Everything there is mega-scale.
Are the US’s actions motivated by a genuine commitment to human rights and Uighur self-determination? No, they’re trying to fuck with China’s oil supply, as that is their primary strategic vulnerability.
It’s the standard CIA playbook, used countless times throughout the Cold War.
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Incite insurgency and terrorism in a target nation by amplifying pre-existing grievances and arming/funding/training/importing militants.
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When the targets defend themselves, exaggerate and highlight their reaction as a way of painting them as irredeemably evil and deserving of Western aggression.
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Completely ignore or excuse the equivalent actions when carried out on behalf of the West and their proxies.
Now, it is possible to take a hardline Anarchist or pseudo-Wilsonian perspective and argue that all ethnic groups have the right to pursue self-determination via armed struggle. But by doing so, you’ve also committed to a defence of the Confederacy, the Nazi conquest of the Sudetenland, etc. etc.
“But that’s different! The Confederates were bastards, and they only represented a minority of the people in the Confederacy!”
Same goes for the East Turkestan crew in Xinjiang. They’re fundamentalist, misogynistic, sectarian ethno-nationalists who are guaranteed to enthusiastically genocide every non-Uighur in Xinjiang if they get the chance, and oppress the fuck out of any survivors who do not share their exact brand of fundamentalist theocracy. They’re a small minority even within the Uighur community, and a tiny minority within the larger context of the hugely diverse ethnicities living in Xinjiang.
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