For real. When I asked my Muslim mom, who keeps up on this sort of thing, for her take on Xinjiang (because a bunch of local anarchist comrades were talking about China Bad Because Xinjiang but I could not find anything about "genocide in Xinjiang" which didn't trace its citations back to Washington DC think tanks, which I "know* don't give a shit about Muslims) , she gave me a very long and nuanced answer about the spread of radical Islamic sects, terrorism, separatism, the internationalism of those movements, and how none of these questions can be seriously considered without looking at both geography and history. Her take: is there some heavy-handedness in the crackdown? Maybe some, but what is China supposed to do in response to the bombings? Is it genocide? Lmfao no, we can see what genocide looks like by looking at Palestine and that's not happening in Xinjiang. Is it cultural supremacy or erasure? Maybe a little, but she argues that the spread of extremist Islam itself was changing regional culture anyway. That blue burqa China banned to combat extremism isn't something you see in early 20th century photos of Uyghurs, but it looks strikingly similar to the dress code the Afghani Taliban enforced. And she brought this back to geography again: there's that long narrow strip of Afghanistan that connects to China, specifically Xinjiang.

A much more nuanced and different analysis than I expected to hear from a woman who has anticommunist brainworms from cold war era propaganda and has said concerningly problematic things about China. My mom is certainly no tankie.

Where was I going with any of this?

Oh right. I think BadEmpanada actually has bad material analysis, bad attention to detail, and bad methodology. It's actually really easy to figure out the correct stance on isntreal vs Palestine because the former is committing horrific acts of mass murder against the largely defenseless population in the latter. It's almost a truer test of someone's analytical skills to see what their stances on China and Ukraine are, and BadEmpanada fails those tests.

He also spent the last week shitting on Morales for not engaging in bourgeois electoralism enough and how MAS losing the recent election was entirely his fault and nothing to do with MAS under Arce losing revolutionary energy and the support of class conscious workers. And has voiced heavy opposition to Venezuela in the past. The guy has always had a bit of an anti-AES stance and felt like a Trotskyist to me.