If you get a DUI and the state orders you to take an alcohol class, is that re-education meant to eradicate your culture?

If you do a bunch of petty thefts and the state orders you to participate in a re-entry plan that includes job training, is that re-education meant to eradicate your culture?

the US does not incarerate them just for being black

Historically, this is completely untrue. The post-Reconstruction U.S. famously had all sorts of laws designed to lock up black people for being black, as well as officially tolerated (with public officials often taking part) terror killings of black people just for being black. Even after Jim Crow, the War on Drugs was was explicitly designed to disproportionately lock up black people:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Even if you argue that today this intent has been largely wrung out of the system (which is not a given, and does not address the remaining disproportionate effects of the War on Drugs), there’s still the question of when exactly the U.S. stopped doing what you’re calling genocide and started doing non-genocidal mass incarceration.

That’s what Democrats have been telling me for the past 13 months

I just don’t believe the vast majority of “lesser evil” Democrats because I saw them turn around and enthusiastically cheer on Harris, and then act like someone shot their dog when she lost. If you’re reluctantly supporting 99% Hitler over 100% Hitler, you don’t go to 99% Hitler rallies and you don’t care when he loses.

The UN doesn’t claim China is committing genocide, even in a report that in no way paints China in a good light. The delegation from 14 Muslim-majority countries that visited Xinjiang didn’t think there was a genocide, either.

The only countries claiming there’s a genocide, and that they’re so concerned about the treatment of Muslims in China, are the ones who spent the last 20 years slaughtering millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. has spy satellites that can read a license plate. China could have total control over every camera in their country (lmao) and they wouldn’t be able to hide a genocide.

There’s also a point here in how if you have to kill a bunch of people to fight a movement, and still lose, that means you’re fighting a genuinely popular movement. But if it takes orders of magnitude less violence to fight a movement, and the movement fails, how popular was it to begin with?

If the evidence shows few people support the government, you believe it; if the evidence shows many people support the government, that itself is evidence of government threatening its people. This is an unfalsifiable position; you’ve just decided you don’t like the government no matter what the evidence says.

The 90% figure is also from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Do you think they had the wool pulled over their eyes?

Funny, I was just telling @Cowbee about how the tankies I see on here are insufferable & impossible to converse with.

You don’t see how writing shit like this is insufferable and impossible to converse with?

If China is a socialist state worth supporting then I’m a donkey with a laser dick :P But I’m more anarchistically inclined

Chinese state propaganda

Pretty easy to see your views on China, which sound an awful lot like the State Department’s. If I’m reading too much into what you’re saying, tell us what you really think about the PRC.

It means “anyone who does not immediately believe the most lurid rumors about the Bad Countries”

Comparing different countries’ actions in similar circumstances is the very foundation of international law. “The international community didn’t consider this similar incident a breach of international law, so it shouldn’t consider my much smaller version of the same thing a breach” isn’t whataboutism, it’s an argument advanced in and accepted by the ICJ all the time.

These types of comparisons usually aren’t even used to excuse anything, either (and they aren’t used that way here). The point of the comparison is to ask “do you have a principled opposition to this act that you would apply universally?”

I have a hard time imagining anyone who would stop listening at “communist” but not “tankie”

It’s both overused in the way you describe and yet obscure enough that only terminally-online political people have even heard of it.

We’d had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.

Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001 (edit: and the original series Star Trek doesn’t have near the realism of 2001). The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking – they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.

Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.

“The guy running over living people while he bulldozes their homes is also a victim” is, to put it kindly, a terrible take.

The worst thing that would have happened to that guy had he refused to grind up living people under a bulldozer is he would have went to prison. I have zero sympathy for anyone who chooses genocide over going to prison. Even accounting for conscription, propaganda, economic reasons to be in the military, etc., there are a million offramps he could have taken before that point.

People who do monstrous things will almost always try to excuse it or say their hand was forced. It’s OK to call bullshit on that.