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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • This has two issues with it that are sourced from the fact that most people here are likely from the States or similar. Namely:

    1. How are we supposed to do anything about China or Russia? It’s anger for its own sake.
    2. Criticism of the U.S. is unlikely to make Americans racist towards themselves. Sinophobia, meanwhile, is a real risk.

    This aside, I personally am irritated by the quantity moreso than anything else. As I said elsewhere, it’s the same few users, and I find it obsessive. It stops sounding to me like “I want people to be aware of particular issues from China” and starts sounding to me like “I want to bombard people with all possible negativity about China until they hate everything related to the place as much as I do.”

    Thanks to these folks, Beehaw virtually always has at least one post about China or Russia on its front page. Often several. Credit where it’s due; I’ve seen a pro-Palestine post here and there, which I appreciate. But Christ, I’m sick of the rest. Blocks are fair, but I feel like that just hides the issue rather than solving it. I feel like I’m seeing a propaganda mill in action, and I don’t like the idea of just ignoring it.










  • I have already expressed my doubts as to the trustworthiness of the article’s sources regarding the companies in question being controlled by North Korea directly, so I don’t understand why you’d reference the very same article as a justification as to why my suspicions are wrong.

    The rest of your post is a lot of stuff that I’ve heard time and time again. Things like “North Korea is a dystopian hellscape where everyone is dying to leave or dying outright” is the kind of thing that I keep seeing people state as though it’s common sense. That is to say, it’s obvious, and needs no further thought or consideration. And the way NK is described, you’d think it was the perfection of totalitarianism, with scarcely any flaws in its population control. I find this level of success a difficult sell. This is all worsened by the fact that the United States has a vested interest in people believing that places like China and NK are basically Mordor. Put them all together, and I’d hope you can see why I might not take this all at face value.

    But I’m honestly not interested in debating if North Korea’s really as hellish as so many have said. I think it’s an awful country with an awful, dictatorial government, and whether or not it’s as awful as is claimed is not something I care for. I can’t fix the place.

    But I do care for the defaulting assumption of bad faith on my part and repeated uncharitable readings of my posts. I at no point ever made any claims about Tardigrada, nor have I cast any doubt upon their character anywhere in this thread. My criticisms were aimed squarely at the article and the sources it used. Coming back to this thread to see paragraphs written at me and everyone else with a similar opinion to me that do feel like they cast doubt upon my character is not a fun thing to see in my inbox when I come to the site.




  • A federal court in St Louis has indicted 14 North Koreans for allegedly being part of a long-running conspiracy aimed at extorting funds from US companies and funneling money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes.

    Not gonna lie, I don’t really feel comfortable these days taking a U.S. courts’ word on this. Sounds more likely to me that this is just a result of companies that happen to be run from North Korea and that this only “[funnels] money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes” in the same way that buying something off Amazon “funnels” money to DARPA.

    In which case, this only really makes sense to get mad at if you find yourself having particular hate for things like “the North Korean economy having slightly more money in it,” or “U.S. sanctions getting bypassed.” Personally, I don’t care about either. The use of stolen identities is awful if true, sure, so I get being mad about that, but that happens plenty enough domestically, so I’m not really sure why it’s particularly deserving of a news article here.


  • I agree with you that “free market” standpoints aren’t very good places to criticize this decision from – except to point out the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which I do think the original comment was trying to do – but it has to be said that nobody is obligated to criticize both China and the U.S. equally in order to not be a hypocrite.

    One simple example of why would be that most if not all users here have absolutely no say at all as to what China does. There aren’t a lot of Chinese citizenry here. But there are a lot of Americans. It so follows that it makes sense to criticize the U.S. more, because many people on Beehaw can actually do something about it, especially in aggregate.

    It doesn’t help to criticize China much either, anyway. China’s bad, yes; we know. Even among honest-to-god capital-C Communist circles, China is controversial. Posts about it tend to do three things: 1) Create a sort of misery/anger circle-jerk, 2) arbitrarily and unnecessarily signal to others that you aren’t a tankie, when nobody should really need to clarify that in most scenarios, and 3) further U.S. propaganda interests by taking people’s time and attention away from issues they’re more likely to be able to do something about.

    I’m obviously not in favor of forgetting what China’s done, either, but there’s a happy middle-ground I think a lot of Western-centric sites sail right past, and I don’t think any of it is helpful.