Really weird (/s) how quickly it went from a couple of Chinese tourists asking politely not be filmed to the guy embracing the racist Winnie the Pooh stereotype and talking about how oppressed Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
Really weird (/s) how quickly it went from a couple of Chinese tourists asking politely not be filmed to the guy embracing the racist Winnie the Pooh stereotype and talking about how oppressed Hong Kong and Taiwan are.
Winnie the Pooh is now racist? I could have sworn it was just a jab at the Chinese president because he hates it.
Yes, the meme comparing the Chinese president to a yellow cartoon character with beady eyes is, in fact, racist.
Mods arrest this poster
he talks in memes
The president of China having strong feelings about Winnie the Pooh is on my top ten list of things that are definitely real.
Xi Jinping is a brutal totalitarian autocrat who hates Winnie the Pooh but allows this to exist at Shanghai Disney:
haha chinese president is yellow animal because he's totalitarian (i love my political system founded by slave owners which produces millions of homeless people; it is a paragon of freedom and efficiency)
comparing an asian man to a yellow cartoon character is racist now?
It was originally Chinese people comparing Xi and Obama to the characters because of the way they walked. That’s fine. But then westerners decided to make it some protest symbol.
Would you agree that political cartoons depicting Obama with big monkey ears and lips are racist even if political cartoons caricaturize all their subjects to the extreme?
If black people had made those cartoons originally it would just be black people doing something that's ok among black people. For example it's not particularly uncommon for black people to call black shoplifters a bunch of animals or apes or whatever. They're not doing it racially they're using it because they're just calling them animals. Same shit I do about football hooligans wrecking the town.
It completely changes context when it's white people saying it.
yeah xi lies awake at night seething over some fucking racist nerds on the other side of the planet memeing that he looks like an archaic cartoon bear
This is always so funny to me. Xi is the president of the most populated country on earth, and a state enemy to half the world. And yet what really bothers him are reddit memes
that "half" is more like the richest 20% of countries lol.
They must think Xi is as mentally and emotionally fragile as Elon Musk
the original meme that was reportedly censored used a picture of Xi as Pooh and Obama as a character whose name rhymes with the N word
The potential of it causing diplomatic issues with it possibly being a racist meme targeted at Obama was the exact reason it was proactively censored.
I have a bridge to sell you
i never actually got the connection before now.. i just thought it was because he's kinda chubby and pooh is a little bit dopey.. didn't realize the yellow thing at all.. wow
Originally it was a meme about the way he and Obama looked while walking in a picture, and was innocuous. It began to be used as a way to refer to Xi Jinping in negative propaganda without directly putting his face on it and grew the racist connotations implicitly quickly after by new users of the meme, and the explicit usage with dog-whistled racism followed quickly thereafter with the excuse "we only do it because he doesn't like it."
If I had to guess he didn't care and maybe found it funny originally (if he even saw it early on) but using a caricature for politics instead of good critique is dumb and good to ban. And that's all this was
thinking about this stupid online phenomenon more generally, i dunno if westerners will ever realize that:
nobody in china or russia gives a shit about winnie the pooh or putler memes
posting such memes isn't going to stop the relative decline of the west
their own governments are much greater threats to their personal well-being than china or russia
I see it as a result of the way that imperialism gives Americans the feeling that whatever they do is influential because of the status given through imperialism. A hybrid which grows every time America announces that they will do something on the global stage and is received by vassals as god-given words.
So, no, they won't realize any of that until a significant shift in material circumstances allows for some class consciousness to grow, and that depends on Americans fighting to deepen and work out what that will look like.