? 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?
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.
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.
Huh... WTF
https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js&t=4186
? 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.