I’m sharing this in response to Thai transgender YouTuber alleges sexist treatment at Chinese airport
TL;DW:
If you identify as someone in the LGBTQIA+ community, please don’t travel to China. It is very unlikely that your human rights will be respected to say the least.
So I first got suspicious of them when they aired a story about economic troubles in rural America… and they kept going out of their way to connect it to the Democrats. I mean, they’re not really wrong, but at the time they aired it was right in the middle of Biden’s absolutely massive effort to address economic troubles for working Americans. They talked about how wages have been going down for these people in this small town for decades because of 100% bipartisan not-giving-a-shit (which, yes, fair), without mentioning that wages had been going up pretty specifically and specifically for that small town for the past year, because of the IRA.
I mean that alone is not fatal. Not everyone with bad things to say about the Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer corporatocracy is a secret Chinese agent or anything. But it just started to strike me as weird the conjunction of:
If someone tells me that we can add to that list a new bullet point “Weirdly totally unconcerned about human rights abuses in China and in fact hostile to the idea that they happen and to anyone who wants to talk about them,” that would be another huge bullet point in the pattern that would start to take the shape of a pretty recognizable outline, to me.
Thank you for the information. I think I had seen that video, but didn’t consider the timing of when it released. That does seem odd.
Yeah. There are people like Hasan Piker who are clearly just talking about what they want to talk about, and the chips fall where they may. And then, there are other people in the landscape, where the topics of conversation follow a very particular ebb and flow (as you say, the economy and the government’s relationship to it has suddenly become super unimportant to them, now, this year, not worthy of close and extensive examination all of a sudden). And also, when those topics are discussed, certain very particular framings and cliches seem to show up again and again.
I honestly don’t really know which category “Second Thought” falls into. My suspicion of them isn’t based on all that much more than a couple things I found suspicious. But I did find a couple things about them to be suspicious.
Well that’s interesting, thanks for sharing. I think it’s good to always ask questions about what media we consume. Even if we like what it’s saying or think it’s fine. Critical thinking and being cautious can never hurt