https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57759480
Many of the closed WeChat accounts display messages saying that they had "violated" Internet regulations, without giving further details.
The account names have also been deleted and just read "unnamed".
"After receiving relevant complaints, all content has been blocked and the account has been suspended," the notice said.
The crackdown is the latest example of what some call growing intolerance toward the LGBT community. Last year, Shanghai Pride week, modelled on Pride events in the West, was cancelled without explanation after 11 years of it going ahead.
In 2019, the Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was released in Chinese cinemas, but references to the Queen singer's sexuality and AIDS diagnosis were censored.
In 2018, Weibo said all posts related to homosexuality would be taken down, although it backtracked after massive outrage.
I have a theory about this that isn't politically correct, but here goes. This has nothing to "conservative values" or homophobia or whatever you call sexual repression in places like Arkansas and Afghanistan. It's not based on religion or culture. It's just the CCP running an actuarial table.
The CCP is a blunt force instrument. It realized some time ago that the one-child policy had left it holding the bag on taking care of a rapidly aging population without enough young people to power the economy in 10-20 years. Not only that, you couldn't easily just repeal the policy and expect a baby boom. They took a look at Japan and realized they were about to hit a demographically driven, deflationary wall. So the party planners moved from repealing the 1CPolicy to actually offering cash bonuses for second children. This volte-face happened within a few short years. But it didn't work as well as expected. Their sudden magnanimous gesture didn't bump their 5-year plan's crop of new Han for a few reasons: A shortage of women (unexpected consequence of the 1CP), more women in the workforce who don't want to have children, video game culture which makes young men stay home instead of going out and impregnating girls -- which is why they're now limiting screen time, gender fluidity / queerness which suppresses baby-generation, and of course western individualism, the great bugbear of "harmony," which encourages people to wait for love and financial stability before having children. At the end of 5 years of encouraging people to have babies, they don't have enough babies. So now they have to get harder on the edge cases.
It's probably safe to assume that gays and lesbians represent at least 10% of the Chinese population as they do in most countries. So that's what, 120 million people? Let's say half of whom are young enough to have at least one child? So we're talking about an extra 30-60 million children if you can somehow get a replacement rate.
That's what I believe all these recent moves by the CCP have been about. And banning test study programs? Same thing. No point having more babies if you're also getting overproduction of elites. They need construction workers and factory workers. And someone was told, we ain't gonna become Germany by bringing them in from Tajikistan, so take this data and figure out how to squeeze as much Han production as possible out of it in the next 5 years.
In the West we have already tried to force LGBTQ people to accept the behavior of their assigned sex. Result? Increased suicides, depression and drug use.
Obviously, after decades/centuries of failure we finally decided to recognize the reality of the facts: you cannot force people into a heteronormative life, nor to make children.
They are in for a hard failure.
This is not even remotely the same as the Taliban banning music or China cracking down on LGBTQ stuff.
> Christopher Rufo reported[2] that 30 public school districts in 15 states are teaching a book, Not My Idea, that tells readers that “whiteness” leads white people to make deals with the devil for “stolen land, stolen riches, and special favors.” White people get to “mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of color for the purpose of profit,” the book adds.
> There are plenty of other examples that prove racial essentialism and collective guilt are being taught to young students. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school required[3] third graders to rank themselves according to the “power and privilege” associated with their ethnicities. Schools in Buffalo, New York, taught students[4] that “all white people” perpetuate “systemic racism” and had kindergarteners watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.” And in Arizona, the state’s education department sent out[5] an “equity toolkit” to schools that claimed infants as young as 3 months old can start to show signs of racism and “remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness” by age 5.
[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/yes-critical-race...
[2] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1413292881264005126
[3] https://www.city-journal.org/identity-politics-in-cupertino-...
[4] https://www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-critical...
[5] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/arizona-education-ba...
30 school districts (out of how many?) use a book Rufo doesn't like.
Any reason why anyone, aside from Rufo, should care?
Half of the nation doesn't teach sex ed because skyperson doesn't like when people bang without signing an exclusive banging agreement in public first. Half the nation teaches kids that the Confederacy was formed to protect "states' rights", carefully omitting that the right in question was to own black people as livestock[1]. But hey, 30 districts use a white-people-bad, and that's the real problem.
And what does the last part of your comment (about AZ) have to do with anything? Telling educators that 5-year-olds can absorb shitty beliefs is now a cOnTrOvErSiAl tHeOrY?
I don't even know where to start here, let's set this one aside.
So, let's focus on this question first: assuming the book you mentioned is bad, which percentage of pubic schools use it, and in which way?
[1] TX is my go-to example. They were teaching that slavery was a "side issue" in the Civil War when I was living there in 2010-2017.
I'm not even going to bother dissecting the bullshit they peddle these days. Feel free to dig in.
Texas oversees 1,247 school districts. Tell me more about the problem of CRT in schools though.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/texas-will-finally...
> this is happening and it's good
From here[1]:
> Christopher Rufo, a prominent opponent of critical race theory, in March acknowledged intentionally using the term to describe a range of race-related topics and conjure a negative association.
> “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” wrote Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/29/critical...
When it comes to teaching children Not My Idea, definitely seems to be more to the concern than just shadows:
The fallacy of ‘whiteness’ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/08/opinion/fallacy-white...
> According to recent reports, public and private elementary schools across the United States have used, as part of racial equity education, an illustrated children’s book called “Not My Idea,” in which a devil with a pointy tail offers the young reader a “contract binding you to whiteness.” The contract promises “stolen land,” “stolen riches,” and “special favors”; in exchange, whiteness gets “your soul” and power over “the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR.”
I looked at some of the illustrations of "Not My Idea"... it's a bit wired and cringe worthy sometimes. Still compare that to the indoctrination that is in some of the schoolbooks:
Slavery was just "black immigration" https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing...
The kkk was not morally wrong ... ?? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-senate-...
Banning of Black and Latino Authors https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-banned-boo...
Teaching creationism: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/apr/08/house-advanc...
Are you as outraged about that as you are about a fringe law theory?
Can you name numbers comparing how many books with problematic woke content are used versus the books mentioned from the guardian?
Not quite. Rufo knows what CRT is, and importantly, what shares the same problems CRT does. That is to say, different branches of the same general ideology that operate on different topics. The CRT model is kinda like ideological lego, you can just plug in a topic). The demon is legion and has many names. Rufo's stuff is mostly about calling woke thought in general CRT, since the name stuck. I haven't yet seen Rufo label things that aren't wokeness or influenced by wokeness CRT.
It's the same kind of thing as when we call Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and all the Protestant sects "Christianity" even though they are not the same, or how we still call Zen "Buddhism" even though it lacks the supernatural component of its older cousins. None of those things is the same, but they share a family resemblance, they have a character to them that makes them unique among the sea of ideologies, religions and philosophies. Rufo's nailing "CRT" to that family resemblance, because the family is there, the demon is real, and it needs a name to be talked about usefully, not a legion of them.
I'm also always surprised how little US citizens know about their own history. Ask somebody about "Birth of a Nation" and see what they can tell you about it.
Ask them if they know about the "Pro American Rally" in 1939 and see what they say.
These things are not taught in school and it's a shame. I know what I'm talking about I'm German and I hated our history education in school as we were discussing the 3rd Reich nearly every year. Yet, reflecting on it and seeing that the same stupid ideas get a hold today again, it was not nearly enough. We should have taught more. The same holds for the German colonial history (that was not covered and is changing slowly).
If you don't know your past, you are condemned to repeat it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-lat...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/12/right-wing...
These stories are lenses through which you can describe the world. They’re like software for the mind. And like software, they aren’t objectively right or objectively wrong. Each of these stories (dubiously) explain and obsesses over some aspects of the world, and ignores other aspects completely.
No, its not.
Though there is a mythic anti-”Critical Race Theory” story created by the American Right, and the thing within it called “Critical Race Theory” is a (particularly incoherent, because a number of unrelated and opposing things from the real world that share only that they concern race, and they are disliked by the American Right, and they are not actually Critical Race Theory, are jammed into it) mythic story.
> These stories are lenses through which you can describe the world. They’re like software for the mind. And like software, they aren’t objectively right or objectively wrong.
Actual critical race theory (like critical legal studies, from which it stems) holds the existence of objective features of social structures, with tangible, material, effects.
Like many hypothesized social phenomenon, the complexity of the systems involved may make falsification difficult on a practical level, but the claims it makes are fact claims which are objectively true or false.
Rufo is trying to create the world's biggest molehill.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Public_school_district_(United_State...
A decade ago, all those things were on the Internet worldwide.