Immigrant community spouting right-wing bullshit? I’m guessing lots of money or just stupid.

Didn’t read lol

On Christmas our family had a general “discussion” which included comments on China. As usual I kept my mouth shut so that

1. an unpleasant political argument wouldn’t ensue which would either just be uncomfortable or actually cause a rift

2. I could avoid either an appeal to experience (I’m 17 for reference) or a random anecdote that couldn’t be challenged.

Afterwards I wrote a response on several points but then decided against showing it to anybody. Pardon the writing style I’m like a chameleon and had just read Vonnegut’s Timequake:

Christmas! Put this in your pipe and smoke it: the American Marxism book (recommended by **** & ****) that I took a short glance at tries to refute the LTV by saying “if labor determined value then the third world wouldn’t be poor” (I have this quote and a couple others bookmarked in your paperback copy). If you need an explanation as to why this is stupid, why it completely ignores the export of capital, imperial expropriation, and so on, how it rewrites sweatshops not as easily accessible labor for foreign transnational corporations like Chiquita Brands Int. in El Salvador but as construction projects within which value is circulated throughout the community, it might be useless to go into more detail. Anyone who recommends this is either an idiot or dishonestly illiterate. Down with experience! What can be said of other claims (I was surprised not to be on the fringe per-usual!)?

Do COVID vaccines help with hospitalization?

The usual narrative goes that it was announced officially that the vaccine would prevent contracting the virus, then prevent dying, then prevent being hospitalized (all completely as a rule of course). It is accepted without question, but I have not been able to find any evidence whatsoever of this. This platitude has nothing behind it! Of course the state had said in one form or another that the vaccines would “essentially”, “seriously”, etc. prevent COVID transmission “in the large part”, but as a rule? The ridiculous statement that COVID vaccines have not aided in hospitalization (please do not think that this or that anecdote will be an adequate counter), has been proven objectively false (whilst the majority of the U.S. population is vaccinated somewhat including not fully, COVID related hospitalization is overrepresented by those not vaccinated at any stage [https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination]). I am not banking on an appeal to authority here, as I assume you will be banking on a rejection of it. Critique the methodology of these tests (for which the data is separate and not subject to response bias). This will be nearly impossible since vaccination rates are total and according to state records (which are publicly accessible). A single provincial database could be modified potentially but it’s relatively inconceivable that all regions would independently conspire to this effect. In addition, you made a point that I had found extremely funny. To paraphrase, “if Donald Trump had been president when the COVID vaccine was being administered at this stage, the media would be against it rather than for it.” Very well! We will not go into the merits of this, how does this reflect on you and others? (Of course the same principle would apply! FOX News would be for the COVID vaccine, and by proxy so would you). This is the issue!

Domestic sweatshops in China?

China’s labor regulations are extremely progressive compared to the West, and the West is what I’d assume most would claim the “baseline” of what adequate labor regulations are [despite them of course not being adequate]; nearly all jobs have trade unions which are under the one CPC trade union [which meets twice every year and targets problems in every single union], most jobs have 30 minutes to an hour in addition to lunch to sleep [also happens in schools as well], jobs can’t extend beyond 8.5 hours a day [with most jobs being between 7.5 hours to 8 hours, which couldn’t possibly be construed as arbitrary]. Days off are required under law to be provided for laborers on New Year’s, Spring Festival, International Labor Day (May Day), National Day, and so on. In regards to “high labor exploitation”, I’m not sure what you’re referring to by this, but China’s annual national income rises by 16% every year [largest in the world, so is the 400% annual income rise since the 1980s], all pensions are nationalized, China has the lowest retirement age in the world, workplace safety standards are higher than all Capitalist countries, and more. Where did this narrative arise? Likely from the period during the 1980s to very early 2000s where heavy industrialization occurred, and the introduction of foreign bourgeoisie began to properly occur, so the famous “sweatshops” [which lasted for an extremely short period, but did exist, and thus you have those Apple suicide net pictures and such] and things arose. Most people haven’t a clue on China, and still believe they’re something like this, thus coming to the conclusion that they’re some dystopian labor farm. I’d also assume that, China challenging the West, while differently from the West being an exporting country, means that people fall under the belief that they’re completely squeezing labor to the greatest degree in order to maximize profits.

Note: Foxconn, the subject of recent protests in Zhengzhou China regarding employment contracts, is a Taiwanese corporation that has been going through a process of being expelled and has a number of other scandals under its belt. The company is only represented in Henan, a uniquely poor province (which has evaded poverty reduction efforts due to its being landlocked and its lack of farmland per-capita), since every other province has higher labor costs, especially coastal provinces.

Foreign expropriation by China?

Cobalt mining was brought up, a notoriously awful and exploitative practice, but then it was agreed that the PRC was the most invested in foreign expropriation and awful labor practices abroad. This is incorrect by every conceivable metric. It’s not even worth arguing, it’s just wrong.

Global warming?

The big one, we’ll go point by point.

1. So what if the earth gets warmer, I want scientists to tell me how a few degrees will change anything! (quoted by **** from a podcast)

The definition of an appeal to personal incredulity; as if every single climate scientist hadn’t answered this repeatedly (as such, I won’t indulge an answer). This isn’t even a technical argument, which none of you were remotely capable of making, it’s a fallacy. I don’t understand how anyone could possibly consider this to be a good point.

2. The supposed projection that all the ice caps would be “completely melted by 2009” (courtesy of ****)

A fabrication! A failure to recite similar nonsense, that ex-VP Al Gore had at the tail end of 2009 stated that, “there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years”. This was a misrepresentation of a report that he had cited, it would be dishonest to weigh this rather than the actual report which can be found below. Here is the summary by Reuters: [https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-climate-change/fact-check-al-gore-did-not-predict-ice-caps-melting-by-2013-but-misrepresented-data-idUSL1N2RV0K6] (and I hate to give this disclaimer every time, but context is important, and this Reuters article works as a summary because it cites every single quote from both Al Gore and Wieslav Maslowski, so a critique of Reuters generally would be a non-sequitur).

I could go into other things that were said (for example that the armed forces of the US exist to protect freedom, or the ridiculous notion that pronouns were determined by biological traits in an affirmative sense) but you should get the point. Skepticism isn’t enough anymore. You seriously need to reconsider the vast majority of your viewpoints. I thought that this would happen when I did away with the notion that China had “killed everyone’s pets”, but apparently not.

Get off of Fox News, where Tucker Carlson recently had one of the most unbelievably stupid rants ever aired on television [https://www.fox.com/watch/1bc42abfc1c88b9acc0e03978073bd7a/], defending British colonialism and Queen Elizabeth II who oversaw the relocation of ~1.5 million Kenyans to concentration camps during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule, failing to go into any specifics like the absolute brutal dominion over Yemen. Instead, the British empire was just because of what came after it, in Africa for example, states Carlson, since the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was such a tyrant. This ignores the most elementary facts about Idi Amin: that he was a part of the British Colonial Army and even engaged in the aforementioned suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; that he was trained by the British; that his regime was funded and armed by the British up to a point when he went against their interests. In other words, rather than his dictatorial hegemony being a contradiction of British influence, it was a direct byproduct. With this in mind it is obvious that Carlson is wrong on the front that China is perpetrating neo-colonialist rule over the African continent, but it must be addressed:

[https://www.invent-the-future.org/2018/10/is-china-the-new-imperialist-force-in-africa] [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1536279894098853889.html].

whats the truth?