So with all the stuff going on recently in Gaza and Iran, and with all the islamophobic comments I've been seeing recently on youtube, I realized I really didn't know as much about middle eastern history as I'd like to. I did learn some in history class, which was decent enough and fortunately lacked chuddish overtones, but I'd like to know much more since there was so much they could fit into the course. Does anyone have good suggestions? Doesn't have to be explicitly communist, but I would prefer if the author wasn't a raging midwest armybro pro-iraq war chud.

Thanks in advance!

So last year while I was in China, all my vpns were super busted, so I spent a long time watching bilibili. And I was able to soak up quite a bit of knowledge about the average user there by doomscrolling the comments.

Contrary to what one might think, the average Chinese person isn't actually an expert in Marxism-Leninism and dialectical materialism. Most people, as in the west, don't care much about coherent ideology and just go off vibes. And as anywhere, that can lead to some pretty wacky beliefs. In this tierlist, I'll go over some of the more common ones I've seen/heard about, and rank them based on their wackiness and stupidity, and place them in a tier. Keep in mind I'm approaching this mostly as an outsider, and apologize in advance for any mistakes or oversights, and welcome any corrections. With that being said, let's get into it.

F tier

First we have the conservative westhaters. As you might imagine, these people hate the west, which is good. They also hate gay people, trans people, feminism, etc., which is... not good. Despite the existence of the firewall they seem to have somehow gained access to jordan peterson, and proceeded to mental gymnastics themselves into a maga position, but from the standpoint that America is bad precisely because of 'wokeness'. Granted, they're not as hyperfixated on minorities as western rightoids are; it's more of a casual thing, but can still be annoying. They get a 7 in stupidity, and 1 in wackiness. Pretty basic stuff.

D tier

D tier is where things get a bit more interesting. We start off with a kind of lib that may be familiar to many of us, of the thermonuclear variety. Chinese ultras are every bit as insufferable as western ones, and pretty common. They cite statistics such as the top 2% in China owning 98% of the wealth, without ever giving a source. Quite convenient how 98 and 2 add up to 100 for the dramatic effect, doesn't it? In contrast to western ultras, these don't really fixate on Albania or Catalonia as much. Mostly they just bash China and talk about how shit it is for the poor farmers in the desert and how everything the government does is just self-interest of capital. I hate them so fucking much but they're pretty boring honestly. I give them an 8 in stupidity and 3 in wackiness.

Next we have western bootlickers. Now believe it or not these are actually quite rare; I've almost never seen one in the wild. These people are basically run-of-the-mill bootlickers who say that the west is great, china bad, in the most generic sense. They seemingly mostly died out a decade back and have never recovered since. Good riddance. 6 in stupidity, 0 in wackiness.

C tier

The first entry in C tier are mingcels. These people love history, kind of like western crusadebros. Similar to crusadebros, mingcels love the Ming empire and think it was the best thing ever, and they hate the Qing dynasty for ending it and, in their opinion, ruining China. Unable to let go of beef that's almost 400 years old, you can still find them angrily screeching in comment sections of any qing-related content to this day. 5 in stupidity, 7 in wackiness.

The second entry for C tier are professional Japan haters. In China, the public consciousness of the European holocaust and Japan's crimes are flipped, so while many understandably harbor a distaste for Japan given its history with China and refusal to offer any sort of apology, some take it a step further and essentially make hating Japan their entire personality. The closest analogy I can think of is professional pedophile haters. Obviously, pedophiles and japan are bad, but... dial it down a bit, geez. These people support showing nsfl war crime documentaries to children in order to ingrain hatred for Japan (and ptsd) into the next generation so they can nuke it to dust. I get the idea but the execution here is just... not great. Stupidity 5, wackiness 0.

B tier

Finally, B tier, where things really get going. All of these are super funny, so I had a hard time ranking, but I had to make a decision in the end.

First entry in B tier are the conspiracybros. While some conspiracies are mostly apolitical, such as brains being extraterrestrial parasites, others are significantly more out there. For instance, the existence of japanese technical schools in China is irrefutable evidence to these people that there's some sort of Japanese Great Replacement plan to... replace Chinese people with Japanese people? Yeah it doesn't make that much sense to me either. They also may believe that GMOs are a western plot to poison Chinese people. Honestly this is just generic conspiracyslop with an anti-west spin, and it's really just sad once you get past the novelty. 7 stupidity, 6 in wackiness.

Next we have han nationalists. While pretty rare, I have seen one in the wild. There are some truly bizarre flavors of ethnonationalism given the sheer volume of internet-using people in China, and these are perhaps exemplified by the very real belief that China should like, un-annex every territory that's not a han homeland. This is so unfathomably stupid I can't even put it into words. They don't seem to rag on about minorities as much as save europebros do, but they do really hate black people for some reason. 9 stupidity, 7 wackiness.

A tier

We start off A tier with one of my personal favorites, sarcasmbros. I've never really known a counterpart in the west to these people, and while they're pretty far from being an 'ideology' per se, they're definitely noteworthy enough to be included here. If I had to say, they're like personifications of the 'erm akshuwually' soyjak. I'm not even kidding, they talk exactly like the stereotype, but in Chinese. They also really love using the doge emoji, though not related to musk as far as I'm aware. They generally don't seem to like China very much, and they make this clear to everyone by sarcastically hinting at how China is actually terrible because of [insert nonissue here]. They're super super insufferable and have the most milquetoast ultra takes. It's like if anarchists spent way too long moderating discord and reddit and tried to model themselves after the strawman smugjack, I really don't know how else to describe it. They get an 8 in stupidity, and a 4 in wackiness.

S tier

Finally, S tier. We have the king of all wacky ideologies, the undisputed most moronic and absurd of them all: Chinese fascism.

Remember when I said in China, public consciousness of the Holocaust and Japanese atrocities are flipped compared to in the west? And you know how some people in the west will simp for imperial Japan and overlook or even glorify their crimes?

Yeah.

Chinese fascists, disturbingly common (though still very minute in quantity), slurp up 1930s German propaganda about price-inflating Jews in complete earnestness, and still believe the US is controlled by the Israeli Jewish shadow government. They also came up this bizarre fanfiction about Hitler where he was saved from drowning by a Chinese guy, and he then vowed to share the world with China after he finished conquering it because he loved Chinese people so much and owed them such a great debt. They actually believe this stuff, too, which is just...

Don't write wet dream fantasies about your favorite fascist dictators please...

They also think that Japan somehow loved Jews and wanted to make part of China into a Jewish homeland, which doesn't make sense even in the context of their ideology. Is the axis your brave anti-semitic vanguard or is it a Jewish shadow plot? And the answer is neither, because their entire worldview is just nazi fanfiction they made up in their head while gooning to fascist boat women in azur lane. Needless to say, these people get 10 in stupidity and 10 in wackiness as well.

That's all for this tier list. Again, please correct me if I've gotten anything wrong.

I have little doubt that we have all heard the line that transphobes use, that your gender is what you're born with, you can't change it, etc, and needless to say this is stupid, almost as stupid as the time I saw someone on reddit trying to convince someone diagnosed with NPD they didn't actually have it (the stigma surrounding that condition is absurd). But while I'm assured most of us know that this is wrong, I still think it's important to know why, and what better way to do this than by using the very same 'basic biology' these people try to uphold?

To begin with, it's quite easy to see that the very concepts of 'male' and 'female are vague when you get into the specifics. As I have mentioned several times in the past, 'maleness' as we usually think of it is not in fact determined by the entire y chromosome, but by only a segment of it. If that segment is lost, as it sometimes is, the person in question develops as female but is chromosomally 'male', by the definitions of transphobes. So are they actually male or not? Either way, their criteria are completely broken down. And this problem isn't just limited to the Y chromosome; what about XXY men? They bear some female secondary sexual characteristics, but they are undoubtedly recognizably developmentally male. And X, XXX, and XXX+ women do exist. What about them? Should XYY men be banned from sports as well due to their supposed heightened testosterone?

To make matters more complicated, development of sexual characteristics is more complicated than just one gene. If anything downstream malfunctions, someone can end up with both male and female reproductive structures, also known as intersex people. What about them? Are they supposed to play male sports half the time and female sports the other half?

Even ignoring all this, the very conclusion that the existence of trans people is 'unscientific' is false. The consensus in the scientific community is that sex and gender are indeed separate, and can be misaligned for an individual. If they're willing to deny what actual scientists are saying for their own ideology, they're free to do that, but they have no excuse to pretend to uphold science. How do I know what scientists agree on? My anatomy and physiology textbook. From 2006.

An entire decade before the whole wokemongering bullshit started. It's not as if the authors are particularly progressive either; several other textbooks I own from the early 2000s to a few years back agree on this.

I think it's quite clear that anything transphobes say isn't based in fact, but only their own delusions. They can't deny that they don't give a shit about biology at all, which is perfectly fine to me. However, they shouldn't go around masquerading as triumphant 'experts' when they don't understand what they're trying to use as a cudgel. The sad thing is, many uninformed people will see their rhetoric online and fall for their bad faith arguments, and I think it's the responsibility of those who know better to not only tell them not only that they are wrong, but also why they are wrong.

I apologize for the terrible structure and awkward phrasing.

Can't make this shit up

I burst out laughing when I read this sentence

I'm not quite sure what to think of this yet. A few months back I remember there was talk about a marxist winning an election in Sri Lanka, but now it looks like things are a lot more complicated than I'd thought. What do we think about this?

So I was browsing reddit out of boredom, and I saw a random post on the hoi4 subreddit and I clicked it without much thought. It was about Chinese players giving bad reviews to the game due to India getting cores for Tibet but not China. I clicked on it due to my masochistic desire to see if anyone else would recognize how stupid it was, and was sorely disappointed.

There were the usual 'muh ccp' jokes there, also shit about 'west taiwan' (ah yes 'I understand history very well'), and then one guy who really caught my attention saying Chinese 'people' (savages) don't matter because they speak a different language from 'us' (the civilized white people). Now granted that isn't the most charitable interpretation, but... like... come on, this is reddit.

Shit like this makes my blood boil. Because libs will go, 'oh we accept everyone!' 'we hate the government not the people!' and drop the most disgusting garbage like this because they're proud little pigs knowing how much propaganda they can fucking shove down their own throats and see an entire race as subhuman. I've always thought reeducation was better than punishment and that a lot of these folks are simply misguided, but jesus christ they're not making it easy for me to suppress the desire to bind them to a rock with metal chains and beat their ribs to pieces with my bare fists and/or a metal bar while screaming "BEG FOR MERCY NOW YOU RACIST SHIT-FOR-BRAINS!"

It gets even more frustrating when it's people you know in real life. I have a trans friend who generally has pretty good takes on stuff like palestine, disabled rights etc, but even he regurgitates the same shit from the state department and about how he'd 'definitely kill xi if he got the chance.'

It's so fucking tiring that these assholes can just turn the 'counts as human' switch on and off whenever they want for whatever race they want and suffer no consequences whatsoever. Really makes me wish I could Diver Down their screens and remind them of the weight of their words by bashing in their pale distorted sweaty reddit faces.

rant over.

Yesterday a random article popped up in my feed about authorities supposedly shutting down a grave after a car attack. Didn't think too much of it, but today I got another one talking about how it's a Chinese tendency to cope with denial referring to 'deadly attacks' (wow racist much?)

given that my youtube page isn't flooded with this junk it's safe to assume everyone will forget about this in a week, if they even heard of it, but what's this whole thing about?

um guys is this freddy fazbear ur ur ur ur ur ur ur ur ur (help I'm becoming kirby)

Currently in China, my vpn actually worked for once and I was looking to join, but it keeps saying unable to connect. Is the server still up?

Since I'm currently in China I've been randomly browsing bilibili and under certain videos I have been noticing a certain insufferable group of ultras somehow even worse than (what I've seen of) western ones, who can obviously afford a device and internet yet claim to care for the poor oppressed masses and talk about how capital is destroying people's wills to live and stuff, and continuously use the term 'downtrodden masses'. One even said that modern society was just like in Lao She's Teahouse (where a lady had to sell her child to survive), and shifted the goalposts when asked about this by saying 'muh abductions!111!11!!

What I would like to know is, who are these people? Why are they like this? Given that most have obviously not experienced for themselves the massive improvement in quality of life between the 2000s and today, are they mostly too young and have too much free time, or are they petty bourgeoisie who also have too much free time? Am I looking at them the wrong way?

Would appreciate insights from those more knowledgeable than me, thanks.