It’s more than that. Denigration of homosexuality and transgender identity is inextricably linked with patriarchy. The means by which queer people are oppressed is tied very strongly to notions of gender hierarchy. They push biological gender essentialism and homosexuality as unnatural and dangerous specifically because it places heterosexual cisgender men in the highest social position possible. It allows them to benefit from the exploitation of women and queer people as much as possible. Queer people are less directly useful to them, and so they are generally very overtly violent and genocidal towards us. Trans people in particular are targeted as if one can change their gender, if gender is not innate, then it undermines the superiority of cisgender men over cisgender women. Men cannot biologically innately be superior if women could become men, in essence.

The number of armed dissidents does not need to be a majority of the population. The government itself has direct control of the police and the military. Those groups are already weaponized to commit acts of political violence, they will continue to do so under the Trump regime. Particularly as mass deportations begin.

Okay, yeah, your framing at the end there makes sense. I’m not sure how or why our conversation came about that specifically, but yes Chinese citizens are essentially sequestered on Douyin. I don’t know that they are unable to install TikTok, but I kind of assume so.

I still think the framing of two tiered is an odd way to put it but I at least understand what it is you’re trying to say.

You can imagine my confusion on what I thought was a pretty innocuous comment touching on something most people don’t know much about that I actually do and was met with some pretty intense responses from you lol.

I’m not making anything about me I’m just responding to this general skepticism about the intention of my statements. If I read your comment incorrectly then I’m sorry. I’m also not in the business of acting like this is a discussion that matters to anyone beyond you and me, this isn’t groundbreaking political commentary that people are anxiously watching play out. Acknowledging the fact that we’ve spoken many times before is I think worthwhile within that context.

Tiers implies one is above the other somehow. But they aren’t they’re two distinct systems. I’m going to loop back to what I initially commented about which was the app itself and how it doesn’t function the way the commenter I responded to described it. Why would someone lie about how an app functions? Why specifically douyin, why specifically a Chinese social media app? It’s worth examining that decision and the ideas that it fosters about China.

I just don’t see this in particular as a two tiered system. Chinese citizens don’t use TikTok content is copied over from that platform by other people. Douyin connects with a bunch of the other social media systems created in China, it’s exclusively in Chinese and is made for Chinese citizens. TikTok is usable, essentially anywhere else in the world. Douyin is usable in China specifically. You can use it outside of China you just cannot comment or post.

I don’t know I’m just under no particularly obsessive illusions about China. Yeah they definitely censor their citizens in intrusive and oppressive ways and that’s wrong and bad. So does nearly every single nation on earth. Why would my beef with China specifically, as opposed to American social media which spans the globe and is constantly flooded with western neoliberal propaganda?

Like it’s just silly and frustrating the way so much fear and discussions is directed towards China specifically. Like to a wild extent like anything done by China anything Chinese must be nefarious in some way. Fear mongering around TikTok is just. Weird. The same reaction doesn’t exist towards reels even though reels censors even more subjects than TikTok does.

And like that’s what my initial comment was about right I saw someone say something I know wasn’t true because I’ve used the app myself.

And you know me too, we’ve talked many times we’re definitely not strangers haha. We’ve been on the same and on opposite sides of at least a dozen discussions on Lemmy before. You can have some small measure of faith that I’m not a tankie here to act like authoritarian oppression is good actually.

Pretty uncommonly, since you need a valid Chinese phone number to make a douyin account. A few english speakers living outside china get posted there, but English isn’t a super common language in mainland China. It’s there of course but not widespread enough for it to be much of a market for it. Not to mention America and China are culturally quite a ways apart and I’d imagine western content wouldn’t see widespread popularity there.

Douyin content is very similar to TikTok content. There are many popular douyin creators whose content gets copied to TikTok. There’s loads of makeup, cosplay, cooking, skit, DIY, etc. Mukbang style content is very popular there as well. Their makeup and fashion content, like on TikTok, is sponsored by huge international brands like Mac and Gucci and others along those lines. Also super popular is pet content, like people who run cat shelters and dog walkers and stuff. There is also no age verification to use the app unless you want to post or comment yourself, and there is no time limit to use it. Some TikTok creators get reposted to douyin as well, but the overwhelming majority of people in china do not speak English, and to post on it, you need to be a citizen of China. Not that there aren’t ways around it, but it’s harder than it’s worth.

I get that you’re paranoid about Chinese international political interference, rightfully so in some ways. But this is just blatant lies and fear mongering. I’ve used the app extensively myself to follow some makeup content creators from China. It’s functionally identical to TikTok. Censorship does exist, but it’s based around specific events, mostly from what i can tell. I don’t use to find political content, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they censored content based on stuff like the Honk Kong protests. Propaganda is also on there, most likely, but I never encounter it in my feed.

Oh would you look at that, him and president elect Musk are political allies.

Doesn’t NY not even have the death penalty?? And over a grievance killing? Theres absolutely no way they get a death penalty verdict. If they force a death penalty on him there will be actual riots. They didn’t even give the Buffalo mass shooting perp a death penalty. He murdered 10 black people in a supermarket in a targeted mass shooting based on hate and he gets to rot in a cell the rest of his life. This is an outrage, a complete mockery of justice.

Imagine if all the billions of dollars sunk into policing went to homeless shelters, healthcare and universal basic income. Instead of, you know. It being used to commit acts of violence against mothers going into labor.

I can’t even comprehend that I’m really reading headlines like this. While the US government cheers from the sidelines. It’s unbelievable. Surreal. This is mass murder, massacre after massacre. This is complete and utter destruction. This is what erasing a whole people looks like. Destroying their culture, their homes, their infrastructure, their heritage, their safety, their history, their children, their health, their bodies, their minds, their dignity. It just never ends.

I don’t think they’re going to stop. I think they have pushed so far and wrought such utter devastation that Gaza is done for. That the Palestinian people and homeland will be completely destroyed. Israel has its sights on even bigger goals now that the world is (miserably) trying to prevent escalating. Gaza will never see a ceasefire while the US exists. Not unless the Israelis suddenly show mercy, and they never have before.

Maybe the most televised and publicized genocide in history. Brought to you by the US state department. Brought to you by zionism. Watching it for over a year has been a long nightmare that never ended. For families there, for children growing up surrounded by death disease devastation and disruption, the damage done is absolutely indescribable. Their are children who are the only living members of their families, who have lost their parents, every single cousin, every uncle, and every grandparent. Who just have no one left at all. And have the unimaginable weight of all the lives they saw cut short around them. There are 13 year old kids there who know they’ll be murdered by Israel. They know because it is happening to everyone around them. It has been happening since they were born.

They do care about bigotry, for sure. But I wholeheartedly reject the notion that they don’t care about the economy. The majority of America has suffered catastrophic financial losses over the last 4 years. The democratic platform did not honestly do a very convincing job of showing that they can or will remedy that. And they see everything from a reactionary right wing news source that lies to them.

The proof is in the past week. It’s in the bipartisan celebration of the public execution of a mass murderer. Seriously, the conservative right is floundering trying to condemn the slaying while their whole base celebrates it openly. Working class conservatives still suffer medical debt, they still suffer cost of living increases, they still suffer from wage theft and pay stagnation. The way to appeal to those people wasn’t to reach out to Republicans it was to reach out to them directly. It was to come forward with a radical plan to change the ways society sucks for all working class people.

The bigotry is unacceptable. I’m a trans woman, I agree. I’m an anarchist. I’m about as opposite politically as I could be from far right reactionary conservatives. The way to actually garner mass appeal among the working class is to actually do things that appeal to the working class. Establishment democrats categorically failed to do that, time and again. This recent health insurance dialog clearly shows that people want change. But instead of advocating for change, the establishment advocated for itself. Instead of combating transphobic and xenophobic narratives they just said the token progressive things expected of them. Why didn’t Harris come out and say that focus on trans people and illegal immigrants is meant to draw attention away from the billionaires and capitalists who are profiting off of mass worker exploitation? She couldn’t do that. She is as beholden to those billionaires and capitalists as MAGA is.

Like it’s time to acknowledge that most transphobic members of the working class don’t even understand what trans people are. They are outraged solely because the right wing propaganda tells them to be. The way forward isn’t ostracization and more partisanship, but actual dialog focusing on the things that affect them and us negatively. It’s far easier to demonstrate to them that they’ve been fed propaganda about trans people, when we can show them things they already know are true (like health insurance is bullshit) and then point out the propaganda they’re being fed on that. We have common enemies. Class unity should be our goal. Not to appeal to Republican pundits and politicians and law makers, but to appeal to the well-being of all working class people. To be actually progressive, to be the actual left and to push for real radical positive change.

Yea. Once our right to exist itself is entirely obliterated, they’ll shift all their focus on to the next group of people to destroy.

This is how a generation is raised without the words to talk about their own bodies. This is how girls get their first period and it’s terrifying and unexpected and shame inducing. This is how kids are sexually abused by adults and lack the understanding that what happened to them was wrong or the terminology to tell anyone about it. It’s how teenage pregnancy happens because teenagers aren’t being educated on how to have safe sex, on how to use birth control.

It’s disgusting. This inherent view that knowledge of the functions and parts of your own body and the bodies of other people is somehow harmful is horrifically misguided. Parents are (generally) notoriously bad at educating their children about reproductive anatomy. It’s an uncomfortable subject to have with your child in the culture we live in. It’s reasonable to assume that a majority of parents either won’t at all, or will fail to properly educate their children about reproductive anatomy. Parents who are abusing their children also have a vested interest in their children not understanding what is happening to them.

Depriving children of this education is a fundamental infringement of their human rights. Child welfare is one of the absolute most basic goals of the education system, and depriving children of education about their bodies and reproductive anatomies is harmful to their well-being and safety.

They would effectively become stateless. And how they do what from there depends a lot on where they are forcefully relocated to. Assuming the majority will be forced into Mexico, Mexico has an established legal process for accepting refugees. Through the application process, if approved, you (and your family unit) would gain permanent residency. It’s not the same as citizenship, but you could stay there indefinitely and have mostly the same rights as Mexican citizens. You might run into issues with getting passports and traveling internationally, but at the least, you would be able to stay in Mexico. That depends on your refugee application being approved, and I’d imagine when the numbers cross over into the millions their established system would break down a bit and there would probably be very long delays during which you could be deported.

If it’s somewhere else, well, it varies widely. Most of the Caribbean islands have comparatively smaller populations and probably only handle migration on a small scale. It’s very hard to say how things would play out. Many would almost certainly be forced to illegally immigrate back into America.

Yeah I mean it’s human trafficking one way or the other. Forced mass displacement. It doesn’t usually end well for those being forcefully displaced. The mass displacement of Armenians was a central part of how the Armenian genocide took place.

I really think that the notion that the world has broadly become more progressive over time is entirely fabricated. It was an invention purely to deflect from the ways in which society hasn’t progressed. The past decade has been defined by unified international bigotry. People are as racist, as misogynistic, as homophobic as they always have been. People hate minorities as much as they ever did in the past. Bigotry has only temporarily become partially non-explicit. As we have seen with the election result, they will become entirely explicit as soon as they have solidified their power.

Such a large percentage of the population need only hear the words “transgender” or “cisgender” or “pronouns,” and their immediate response is hate. I’ve watched it happen since I transitioned in 2014. Every year, it’s gotten worse. Large-scale state sanctioned violence against us isn’t just very likely. It’s an inevitability. The modern, far-right ultra nationalists have created one of the most successful propaganda engines in history. People support these nightclub raids. People support movements to criminalize gender non-conformity and non-heterosexual orientation. It is very likely we will see similar acts of violence in America in the near future. It’s been done here before and with enough support or even enough indifference it will happen again.

Like look at any fox news comment section on essentially any subject. Trans people are always mentioned there, always in reference to how we should be forcefully put through conversion therapy or how we should be in jail or how children cant know their gender identity unless its cis. There are millions of people out there who legitimately believe that I am not who I say am. After a decade of hormones and surgery that have dramatically improved my quality of life, I’m still insane.

I feel like this doesn’t solve much of the things you think it would.

Also, capitalists will never agree to this. They like having their own currencies cause they can manipulate them.

I don’t know that story has a good ending for Trump. An advantage that the SA had was that they could very easily control what the world saw of their actions. They controlled the people with the cameras, and the people writing articles I’m newspapers. So they were able to sanitize their own image and portray the aspects of their strength that they wanted to.

That’s not possible today. Nearly every single person has a cell phone with a camera and unlimited access to the internet. Those challenges are not insurmountable but inevitably live broadcasts of what’s happening would appear around the world. America is not so powerful that they can afford to not care at all about how they are perceived. The US involvement and conduct during the Palestinian genocide and the upcoming second term of Donald Trump has put an alienating pressure on many foreign nations. This is to the advantage of other super powers like the EU and China who are alternatives to trade and political relationships with the US. If the US was seen to have a secret police dolling out indiscriminate violence in their pursuit of mass displacement and genocide it would probably turn that alienating force into a flood.

Trump is a bumbling idiot in terms of competence and ability. That being said I don’t think he would do something that totally destroys his ability to economically benefit from his presidency. I can’t guarantee that that is the case because he is nearly unpredictable, but I perceive his loyalty to himself as being above any loyalty he has towards the neo-fascist project. I think it’s more likely he would err on states rights and do things like refuse federal funding to states that refuse to fall in line regarding mass displacement and his other policies. Using outright violence didn’t work for him last time.

But then again he might not care because he isn’t going to live forever, and he might see his current presidency as his final mark on history. He might do everything in his power to shape the nation into whatever vision he has for it. He could create a secret police of die hard maga loyalists. He could (and has said he will) turn the American military on the people. He could start wars of territorial aggression. Really the sky’s the limit once he’s in that chair. He could have “burning of the reichstag” emergency powers act pushed through with his slim congress majority, suspending all constitutional rights and the political process under some guise of “protecting the nation from the radical left”. I’m preparing for that inevitability. But I don’t know that it’s a guaranteed one.

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