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If you are reflexively pro US enemies 100% of the time, you will be on the right side of history 90% of the time.
Pol Pot is an alright example. If we go into African “post-colonial” history we also have some wild alliances.
I’d say it is a fair bit more than 90% hit rate though.
Think they supported him when Vietnam invaded, but any support during the civil war would have been dwarfed by the support given to the Khmer Republic. You could say that they opened the door for Pol Pot by weakening Vietnamese factions, but that isn’t really providing support in my opinion.
The reason that Pol Pot is a decent example is because he got a fair amount of support simply for being anti-US (from
for example) . The US covertly supporting an anti-US faction to keep their bigger enemies (Vietnam) from becoming more influential doesn’t mean that they were perceived as an ally of the USA (once again, prior to Vietnam invading).I think it was more a reverse, they supported him eventually. Once his place as a disruptor for Vietnam was clear
edit: and now this question has me wanting to do a deep dive cause there are for sure other exceptions.
Yeah, it's more of a technicality of one letter since one was USA and second CSA.
I'm sure there was some legitimately horrible "regime" somewhere along the line that happened to line up against US interests by accident but I can't think of any. Most of the legitimately awful terrorist groups the US has been against in my life were funded by the CIA, and the US only went after them as an excuse to loot resources, control territory in places we have no right to be in, or to harm a geopolitical enemy with no relation to the terrorist group we were supposedly fighting.
“USA does bad things.”
“That’s not an ideology.”
“Your mom’s not an ideology.”
Deeply unserious. We have libraries full of theory that explains our ideology.
Yup, I'm currently halfway done with the fourth Harry Potter book and will be watching the next Captain America movie
The BE headline is correct, idk what the video says and obviously the tweet is dogshit.
I have no problem condemning America and have done so in rant after rant on this very website. The issue is that "marg bar america" is the conclusion, not the premise. I believe the Cubans and DPR Koreans should breathe freely, therefore marg bar america. Not the inverse. I think some people on Pre-Elon twitter, those of like Gonzalite-adjacent contrarian persuasions, did actual take it as a premise, though it's rare enough that putting out a headline like that, even if he used it to make exactly the kind of arguments I just did, is irresponsible.
Anyone remember the time BE said that Adrian Zenz wasn't as problematic of a source as usually considered in his Xinjiang video? Same energy.
Edit: More accurrate wording.
? He literally says at the timestamped section that Adrian Zenz is a bad source who exaggerates as much as he can get away with and it's a travesty that the Western media cites him so much.
Just afterwards he says that Zenz shouldn't be completely dismissed. That his Mandarin speaking interns scoured the Chinese internet and found various incriminating documents that stand as solid evidence when Zenz's spin is not taken into account.
So he essentially tells you to be critical of your sources, but don't completely dismiss all the information someone provides even if they disagree with you politically?
And you think that's bad?
eh zenz is pretty firmly in the You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, "Gotta Hand It To Them" camp
wtf even is this, this shit is table stakes
He's right. I'm getting too attached to the internet adult child team sports approach to politics where I look for whatever confirms my pre-existing worldview, evidence and good scholarship be damned.
That kind of mindset is the only reason I can see me (and a dissappointingly large portion of hexbear and lemmygrad's userbases) getting so assmad over his takes on Xinjiang and, more recently, the Venezuelan election.
What does it mean to 'scour the Internet for stuff'? We know what happened in Xinjang. Mass reeducation, job placement, and probably some level of police abuse while it was occuring. We know that because the Chinese government was pretty open about what was going on at the time (outside of the police abuse, I just assume that happens because it's pretty inherent to policing culture).
But not genocide. Nor even targeted killings and kidnappings (outside of police abuse). If you think it was genocide or there 'may be merits to the arguement outside of Zenz claims' you are barking up a series of rumor trees that have only posts for evidence. And the funniest part is that most of the large scale of it was wrapping up by the time anyone in the U.S. was seriously reporting on it.
The problem isn't even that, it is that he provides critique without solution, like most unserious leftists and BreadTube academics. Would he rather have fundamentalists continue to bomb other religious minorities in Xinjang? Maybe doing nothing would have been better, just give the region up to the separatists? What he wants them to do isn't clear, what is clear is all he wants to do is complain about people who have a problem, the power to do something about it, and are actually attempting to do something that isn't just bombing random villages in the Middle East, even if it isnt perfect.
And it is like this for everything he does. He is the ur-reactionary. He has no plans to even execute poorly, he would never even know what do if he did catch the car.
You can say 'America bad is not an ideology' but 'people with power only do corrupt and evil things, so we should believe intern internet scholarship' is also not a cohesive ideology for actual fucking change. If you think it is, then you are not a leftist, you are a nihilist.
Zenz does employ a lot of Chinese speaking interns who do sometimes dig up Chinese government documents that do seem a bit concerning, none of what they've dug up proves there's a secret genocide going on. At worst they've shown that China's anti-Islamic terrorism efforts have resulted in some discrimination against Muslims in western China, which is bad, but not a genocide.
This is easily the best video that has ever been made in the topic of Xinjiang and remains to this day.
I will always support bad expanada's posting. His videos are mid but seeing him troll veterans so hard they cry on Twitter in-between bannings is worth putting up with his mid videos
I will always support bad expanada's posting.
You probably shouldnt always support his posting considering the amount of times he's shit on nonbinary people on it.
i'm not on twitter so all i know about is his video on lingua inclusiva or whatever showing "latinx" being used in graffiti by native spanish speakers in south ameirca
bizarre to essentially defend latinx and then be shitty about the people it's for.
On Twitter there is no amount of hate and rage he wouldn't spit at anyone. I know I have seen him be incredibly savage to people who I know agree with him because they pushed back on Twitter. I think it is a character/bit he is playing but I don't actually know.
Oh no, did I miss a thing? Are they catching strays from his pure elemental hatred of all life or does he have a specific beef with NB folk?
He's mocked it/its pronouns and completly dismissed the idea of xenogenders before.
Impossible to take anybody seriously who says "america bad" as a criticism of leftists. "Ohhh you can't ever trust China or Russia all their stats are fake/they always have ulterior motives/they're always violating sovereignty". So Russia and China; Always bad.
Where's this energy when discussing America though? It's always "America ought to be doing this. America ought to be doing that. According to Senator Shitforbrains from Minnesota and Congressman Asswipe Dickfart who cosigned this blah blah blah-" Oh wow that's really interesting. When we're discussing America, they never have to answer for their crimes. We need to rely on their stats. They have a responsibility to affect the world and enact their will in XYZ situations. We have to take American politicians at their word when they're publicly discussing literally any policy they claim will help ordinary people that they supposedly plan on pursuing. Suddenly these same idiots aren't saying "America bad you can't trust those stats and those shifty insidious politicians are just lying for votes and America should be ejected from all international relations until they answer for their crimes".
No, no, all of a sudden we need to apply nuance when the Obvious-Fed-Fakest-Leftist-of-All-Time tags an angry Communist with "anti-imperialist left" scare-quotes as if this fucking weasel speaking has one grain of anti-imperialism in their ideological desert.
Where's this energy when discussing America though?
BE hates America. He thinks all US troops are war criminals. He voices third worldist views that Americans are too morally cowardly and too materially invested in imperialism to fight their government.
Now, that could all be phony rhetoric that he plays up, but he's definitely not engaging in the rhetoric you describe. He's doing something different
My bad, to be clear I'm talking about the person in the post referring to BE, not BE himself
I was kinda going for a "the tweet is four years old and yet still relevant, time is a flat circle" kinda vibe
is grayzone good or bad? i see them getting shit on by libs but i also remember them reporting on israel using the Hannibal directive on October 7th in October which was based as hell
They used to be very good, but Ben Norton was their biggest asset and he left when Blumenthal became a right wing anti vax crank. Ben Norton now runs Geopolitical Economy though. Grayzone has the occasional good article and some good coverage but they're a mixed bag now.
Very mixed since Max Blumenthal came out as an anti-vaxxer. It got so bad that Ben Norton left and started his own news space too.
I haven't kept up with them all that much, but they seem to be a bit of a mixed bad. Generally not all that bad on foreign policy, but pretty shit otherwise. I think Max Blumenthal went all anti-vax, Covid conspiracy theorist and if I'm not mistaken Anya Parampil is anti-trans. Ben Norton, who was probably the most consistently good out of the bunch, ended up leaving. And I kinda forget about Aaron Mate, but I don't remember him having bad takes, but again I haven't closely followed whats come out of Grayzone for the past year or two.
It's funny you post Roderic Day as a source since he's another online figure I've made several posts criticizing on here. lol
The irony's not lost on me; I've reposted your post of him criticizing Hexbear, aight...
I literally can't tell one person on the left with the reach of more than a thousand people who hasn't been called a fed because of a simple disagreement or being associated with the wrong people. BadEmpanada? Fed. Max Blumenthal? Fed. Noam Chomsky? Fed. Vijay Prashad? Fed.
Six degrees of separation applies to everyone so every single person who ever lived is a fed.
He's also posted multiple enbyphobic things on his twitter.
The best you got is....digging up a retweet someone else did of a video of his from 4 years ago? Jesus christ
This retweet does not constitute as even starting let alone not stopping. You wanna critique someone, do an actual critique. Pointing at someone bad retweeting them once is hollow AF. You are better than that
I just never liked the guy because he has an abrasive and confrontational personality.
I think the abrasive personality is meant to serve more than just entertaining people by being their asshole. He often dunks on people uncritically using their preferred parasocial internet person to make their point for them and baby-bird already chewed up history/theory into their mouth. His dickishness kicks people in the ass to say "don't be a baby brain - actually read about history from primary sources and think for yourself instead of parroting your side's contet creators." He wants to avoid his audience doing the same uncritical shit with his content.
