House Democrats have repeatedly funded Israel in the middle of its obvious genocide and supported its genocider-in-chief and now vice-genocider-in-chief. Tlaib has been the lone consistent opponent and has been attacked by her colleagues for doing so.

I didn’t mention chattel slavery or indentured servitude. There have been slave economies outside the American colonies / the United States.

There is no evidence of slavery in Xinjiang, though there is a network of propagandists tied to Adrian Zenz, the US State Department, and the Australian equivalent who make dubious claims.

Oh yes, sorry if I implied giving these particular people a break. I was speaking more generally but miscommunicated. The people you mentioned should all be banned in my opinion.

Neither of those are exactly quality organizations whose claims should be taken at face value, though Amnesty International has made no claims about slave labor and HRW doesn’t itself have any statements about that so far as I can tell.

Though this is beside the point as, again, we are talking about EV manufacturing. Please do your best to not support the orientalist implications throughout this thread. If you would like to make a specific claim, go ahead and do so, but be ready to explain it with more than NGO or State Department name dropping.

I’m sorry you’ve had to experience that transphobia on Lemmy. It is unfortunately common. And sometimes it even lurks as internalized transphobia in people that do not think of themselves as transphobjc. For example, there are Lemmy instances that actually promote chasers.

I believe all instances if transphobia should be called out and obvious examples should result in bans. Sometimes it is good to let people have a chance to accept criticism and retract but I am biased towards more often banning. Comments that are transphobic should also be removed.

Already responded to this one comment over.

Media criticism is a journey! It’s good that you wanted to question sources and spent some time doing so. The annoying thing about media criticism is that there are a lot of tropes and think tanks and journalistic malpractices. And often no alternative information, so to understand a given news piece you might have to use a biased source with a poor track record (e.g. New York Times), look into the author, review all of the sources, try to see what might be accurate vs. what is PR BS, and still end up (correctly) thinking, “it’s only 50:50 that the main claim us even true”. After a while it gets easier because you know the think tanks, or already know enough about the subject matter to spot BS, or immediately notice that a given article is full of unsourced editorialization masquerading as journalism.

If you like podcasts, Citations Needed is an entertaining one that by two journalists goes over a trope or topic per episode. There are also transcripts available. I also recommend that people check out FAIR.org, a site focused on media criticism and more specifically calling out ongoing bad faith practices for current topics

A US State Department “fact sheet” from 2021 that cites no sources. Amazing.

Anyways, Chinese companies make electric cars in modern factories with normal workers paid for their labor. Y’all are peddling in orientalist assumptions that only work on people that know nothing at all about the country aside from, say, US State Department single page propaganda pieces.

Depends on which part of the EU you are in. There is a reason the poor of Poland move to places like the UK.

Though this is neither here nor there as the original allegation was slave labor, which is simply a lie.

Israel targets civilians, particularly children, hospitals, and residential areas. Their tactic is pure genocidal terrorism, as it has been since its founding.

MBFC presents itself as “fact check” but it is really just subjective determinations slotted into an inappropriate analysis as judged by a political illiterate. The overall curve of “centrist” sources being high on facts simply reveals their own bias, where they fail to recognize the non-factual components of those sources, the train of think tanks, and whether topics are covered at all, or in certain contexts.

Ironically, the only time I ever see anyone trying to unironically make use of it and cite it is so that they can avoid critically engaging with media. They just say, “this website says it’s bad” and turn their brains off, successfully short-circuiting cognitive dissonance.

That’s true but the logic applies. The EU is part of the imperial core that eats from that trough and in turn supports its maintainer. It is simply following the US’ lead.

The bar is set so low that striking at all is seen as an advancement, even though you are correct that they could have got much more.

The fact that they were still working during the strike to move military materials during a genocide speaks volumes.

Democrats aren’t even a friend to labor when they need your votes. They rarely provide anything material, usually just looking for a photo op. For a small and weak union that can be helpful for pressuring management but for a president, senator, etc, who only comment on big strikes or negotiations, it is of virtually zero impact.

In terms of policy, the Biden NLRB has maintained most of the anti-labor Trump NLRB policies. Democrats and Republicans love to tag team anti-labor policy. Republicans can openly do so with minimal to no pushback from Dems and Dems can maintain those policies without taking the blame.

Slave labor is a system in which a person is bought sold and indentured to a master for a substantial duration, often life. Their labor is coerced as property of that master.

That is not how China produces cars. They use highly automated systems and paid workers like everywhere else. While Chinese workers are paid less due to the forces of unequal exchange (a system imposed by the US) and an export economy (a system usually imposed by the US but more of a 4D chess move by China to develop productive forces, with the US gladly taking the deal for exploitation), that is not really why the cars are so much cheaper. It is because China has highly concentrated industry and a much less financialized system.

Speaking about “fair” is amazing in this context. The US is simply trying to protect domestic monopsony industry and to damage Chinese industry. This is a jingoistic and corporate policy.

They haven’t 25th Amendment’d this ultrazionist so it’s actually quite possible.

Mont Blanc will soon need to be returned to its rightful owner, Montenegro.

The lede is a little buried as the missiles were shot down above Jordan, leading to the shrapnel there. If the Jordanian government weren’t complicit in the genocide of Gaza they would of course be pushing back against any Israelis or Americans shooting down the Iranian missiles over their country.

To be honest it isn’t that complicated. Who stood to gain? What equipment and expertise is required for this kind of operation? And why are all of these Western countries being shady and coy about their “investigations”?

Obviously this was done via US channels and with US approval. Biden even made vague threatening remarks about it.

That’s too 5-d chess for “the US” to pull off.

It is not a complicated strategy. It just requires a large group that cares about the petrodollar. The US has a ton of those people in high places in government and finance.

The US invented the petrodollar.

I find it more plausible that the US supports Israel because Israel has a lot of powerful supporters in the US who manipulate public opinion and government policy.

Israel has powerful supporters in the US because it is in the interests of capital to support Israel. The higher interests of capital do understand why the Middle East must be destabilized for their own gain. They are fully aware of and influence, for example, the invasion to control Iraq’s oil fields and depose the government of Iraq that was acting too sovereign about it. Same for the Syrian oil fields seized and controlled by the US to this day. This is also why the US promotes the Saudis as an ally - they stabilize the petrodollar system. It is no coincidence that they also target an independent Yemem.

Powerful supporters are just the middlemen for capital, as are major media campaigns. It is not explanatory to say that powerful people support a country or policy. Of course they must do so, that is how every policy decision happens: the powerful people fall in line with the decisions of capital, decisions that may have been made decades ago but are now entrenched. Capital also leverages its close collaboration with the highest levels of the state. The White House is constantly consulting finance, economic advisors from finance, think tanks built to advance the interests of finance, etc (finance is the dominsnt wing of caoital in the US). And in the other direction, capital is constantly making threats and PR pushes.