https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Vocational_Education_and_Training_Centers

I appreciate the effort you put into your replies to me. Genuinely. But this article is… not good. While it does make some good points about accusations of genocide being weaponized against China maliciously and about US hypocrisy, it’s also riddled with arguments I’d expect from Zionists and conservatives. To give a few examples:

abetting them to “die for their belief in order to enter heaven”.

Has very much similar energy to western stereotypes about suicide bombers and 77 virgins.

They over-generalize the “Halal” concept, stamping food, medicine, cosmetics, clothing, etc. with the Halal symbol.

This is such a weird and specific grievance that it comes off as not just prejudiced, but personally so.

Chinese protections of Islam have been reputed to be contested by some citizens as suggesting preferential treatment, refuting the claim that the China’s policies are anti-Islam.

Conservatives claim that trans, Black, etc people in the US are protected classes all the time despite severe prejudice - both systemic and social - against them existing at all levels of society, e.g. the recent refrains against DEI. One might even argue that assertions that a marginalized group is treated too well tend to be a feature of widespread prejudice. (Not saying that’s necessarily the case IRT China, just that this is a very poor argument.)

I’ll stop there, because I don’t want to be obnoxious and turn this into an argument, but there’s an abundance of issues like that. I think the writer(s) of this article have, to be blunt, probably spent too long exclusively circulating the same talking points to like minded people and have become completely oblivious as to how they sound to outsiders. I’m not trying to be insulting or mean when I say that. I personally believe that anti-China sentiment in the west currently cannot serve as anything but an excuse for western imperialism, regardless of whether or not it’s justified, so I sympathize regardless - but the only thing this article has convinced me of is that I owe my partner an apology.

There is some useful information in it and in your replies, particularly about the US side of things, but I unfortunately do have to take even that with a grain of salt as well because I cannot overstate just how poor an impression that article leaves. It may have served its purpose a few years ago, but after almost two years of the world watching the genocide in Palestine and the justifications used for it, even the most obtuse of us are intimately acquainted with Islamophobia.

That’s insane. Hope Russia didn’t get hit too hard, since it was right off the coast.

Tsunami was mid.

Tsunami warning on my island. I’m out of the evacuation zone, but still got me rattled. Likely not to have power tonight at the very least.

Ough. I didn’t know that, thanks. Would explain why I got sick again so quickly. :/

Ooh, thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. Idk I’m not too worried yet because it’s only been the two times, but if it comes back again after this I’ll definitely try and get tested.

Yeah, that’s always good advice. I do try and wash everything I use before cooking.

Picked up a nasty stomach bug for the second time in a few months. Wondering if it’s something in the soil or somesuch since I harvest a lot of fresh vegetables. Either way, went like thirty six hours without eating and just ate a strawberry and a few miracle fruit (called thusly because they coat your tongue in an enzyme that makes sour things taste sweet) and am already regretting it. Either way, eurgh.

As a white nonbinary trans woman, we absolutely do not need to be defending white trans women from critique for being racist. Cease this infernal nonsense.

I know some people do guerilla gardening and plant trees without permission, too. Sometimes nobody bothers to file the paperwork take them down.

Speaking as someone who grew up in a family that idolized homesteading, and who now has a very abundant garden, I do think we should be careful with promoting the ideal of food self-sufficiency - at least on an individual level. Gardening is a lot of work. Most people don’t even have enough space to produce any meaningful amount of food. Yes, you can try growing some beans on your balcony or something of that sort, but if you factor in the price of soil, potting materials, fertilizer, etc and time spent, it’s hard to justify compared to just buying the food in stores, and it certainly won’t be enough to feed yourself in a famine.

If you do have land, one thing you could try doing is looking into trees that produce food, because trees tend to be pretty low maintenance and abundant producers. I’m personally growing breadfruit, moringa, and ice cream bean, all of which are vigorous growers and should be abundant food sources once they’re big enough. (Though I live in Hawai’i, and many places will likely have too much frost for these to survive.) You can also go with edible weeds & invasives - every area has at least a few of those. Jerusalem Artichokes (/ sunchokes), for instance, are a plant in the sunflower family native to North America that produce an abundance of roots and are virtually impossible to remove once they get going. I’ve personally considered keeping some air potato starts on hand in case things ever get really desperate, since they’re highly invasive and produce an absurd amount of edible rhizomes.

It’s a good idea to look into plants native to your area that are edible (even some weeds you consider grasses can be edibles) and lesser known fruits / vegetables / leaf greens in general. The food grown at supermarkets is generally there because it does well on large scale farms with plenty of pesticide, and more importantly, stores well. But there are hundreds (if not thousands) of other edible plants that you will never see in a store, and in many cases they’ll produce food far more efficiently than seeds from a grocery store tomato. You also have to note that a lot of produce sold in stores are from hybrid varieties that won’t be true to seed; if you really want to be food self-sufficient, even if you do just want to grow green beans and tomatoes, you’re still going to want to look into heirloom seeds and seed saving. Finding varieties that grow well in your area is also something to consider, as again, grocery store produce is bred for mass production and won’t necessarily do well where you live. Plus, if you’re going to go through all that effort, you may as well grow something that brings you more joy than russet potatoes. E.g. I’m very fond of this heirloom Italian purple green bean variety which is more or less stringless when young and produces abundantly here.

I think there’s a good reason so many communities have moved towards specialization. It’s simply not efficient to have a few people (or even a large family) trying to do everything they need to do to survive. What we should be doing is establishing mutual aid networks for when things go bad that include farmers, people with building know-how, blacksmiths (and yes, those are still an actual thing, speaking from personal experience), etc. If you have free time and want to get your hands dirty, by all means, start a herb garden, plant some potatoes, or whatever else - but be aware that it’s a lot harder than it sounds, and realistically, the vast majority of people in the west do not have access to enough land to grow a significant amount of food.

Edit: Had to rush this post b/c I had to leave the house - want to clarify that this wasn’t meant as a rebuke of the OP so much as sharing my thoughts on gardening as a whole.

Also, one potential solution for the lack of space issue is finding members of the community who do have space but no time to make use of it themselves. At least where I live, this is a common situation, but I don’t live in a city, so it probably won’t be much help to those that do.

I think learning how to grow our own food is very important, but just as important is organizing locally and figuring out the logistics of doing so.

Yeah, I feel you. It was Bernie for me. Kill your heroes.

Nevermind that Contrapoints originally started becoming hated because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut about nonbinary folk (and non-passing binary trans people)… plus the whole Buck Angel thing.

But I dunno maybe outing a trans woman against her consent is fine as long as you don’t criticize her while doing it.

The thing that initially started backlash against her started when she put out a thread complaining about people asking for pronouns and how it made things harder and more awkward for her as a “semi-passable trans”. It wasn’t that offensive, but people pointed out how asking for pronouns is good because it accommodates non-passing binary trans people and nonbinary trans people and she was… not the most receptive. There’s a lot to be said on the subject, but the TL;DR is that a lot of binary trans people look at the mechanism of misgendering (e.g. assuming gender) and see it as something to spin in their favor (once they pass well enough) to validate themselves as really being men / women.

“I’m sure this is not the experience of many NBs. I leave it to them to articulate what NB existence looks like in a binary world. I do not and cannot speak for them. But surely an account that begins and ends with “I’m not a man because I don’t identify as one” is pretty weak.”

She seems to be agreeing with what appears to be a transmed here (this was in response to a thread where she talked about ‘20 something boy moding trans women who will go up to you and tell you they use she/her pronouns’ and the generational gap between her and younger trans people)

Anyway, she continued to double down on that instead of apologizing, at one point going on a rant about how she’s “the last of the old school transsexuals” (whatever that means), and at another point expressing sympathy with people who are worried about the future of trans acceptance due to more radical / non-conforming members of the community. As the other person mentioned, there was also the whole thing with her platforming Buck Angel, a very bigoted trans man who is a transmed and outed Lily Wachowski without her consent. She eventually deleted her Twitter and went on a sort of “I’ve been cancelled” pity tour, making a video about how unjustly harassed she’s been in which, for whatever fucking reason, she compares herself to JK Rowling and seems to argue that even if Rowling was a shitty person, the harassment she received wasn’t necessarily justified (?). She also compared leftists & trans folk who criticized her to Kiwifarms trolls. In one of her videos, she also was really unnecessarily shitty towards that one Gamestop trans woman that had a video of her circulating a few years back.

She later returned to Twitter, having clearly learned nothing, and continued making insensitive, catty remarks about niche groups within the queer community - e.g. bi lesbians, asexual folk who have sex, etc - and generally proving that she had learned nothing.

Like, it’s not like she’s JK Rowling (although it took a long while for even JK Rowling to become JK Rowling) - she’s not going on crusades against nonbinary people - but she’s a privileged, white binary trans woman who is consistently insensitive towards other members of the community and instead of apologizing, doubles down in response to backlash and tries to paint herself as a victim of the ever ubiquitous cancel culture.

Genuinely. They’re so fucking wretched.

“I don’t care what the Houthis have on their flag as long as Israel suffers monetarily for siccing rockets on civilians. I don’t care what Hamas have on their flag as long as doctors under their govt treat maimed civilians. If it’s unproductive to blast Dems for supporting Israel, what on Earth gives lefties the moral high ground to blast what little resistance Gazans have to do anything about their genocide?”

Very good point from someone in the replies.

Being a binary trans person does not mean that you ‘only believe in two genders’, it means that you personally identify with one of the two binary genders. A binary trans woman is not a TERF, she is a trans person who identifies with womanhood and is comfortable with that role. But ultimately nonbinary people and binary trans people have more in common than they have apart, because we are all subverting the established gender binary, whether it’s to traverse from one side to the other or to break out entirely. (And, as I said in my previous post, “nonbinary” and “trans” are not two distinct things - nonbinary people are included under the trans umbrella by default, and plenty of nonbinary people physically transition. I myself started out identifying as a binary trans person and then felt less like I needed to conform to the gender binary as my dysphoria diminished.)

There is some friction between binary trans people and nonbinary (trans) people, but IMO it is no different than some cis gays being biphobic towards cis bisexuals.

As a nonbinary trans person, I’m going to have to disagree with pretty much this entire post.

1. First off, yes, TERFs do conflate sex and gender. They view gender when expressed as distinct from sex as something to be abolished - but that does not equate to them actually being critical of the idea of gender. TERFs believe in a world where AMAB people are men and AFAB people are women. (And intersex people get to be whatever their doctors / parents want at that particular moment.) That’s why TERFS are fine with trans mascs & butch cis women (among others) being kicked out from women’s restrooms - it has never been about sex. Any form of gender non-conformity is the enemy. “Sex-based differences” is a smokescreen for what TERFs actually want to do, which is return to an era where there was no difference between gender and sex.

2. The nonbinary and trans communities are not two distinct things. They can, and very frequently do, overlap. TERFs are fundamentally not NB friendly because they view all forms of non-conformity to one’s assigned gender as indicative of mental illness. They may humor nonbinary folk who are fine with being treated as woman-lite / man-lite, but it is only to weaponize them against the trans & nonbinary people they hate even more.

I dunno, the man’s called to defund the police repeatedly, protested for Palestine before October 7th (e.g. before there was social pressure to do so / clout to be gained by doing so), and has promised to arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York. I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt until he’s in office. He could very well end up being a rotten egg like AOC, but I think for the time being it’d be best to milk the Mamdani hype train for all it’s worth. If and when he betrays us / Democratic Party ratfucks us, it’ll be easier to radicalize his more liberal supporters if we’re positioned as allies.

Plus, the Democratic Party will have to waste hundreds of millions of dollars and untold amounts of energy either way, and that’ll be hilarious.