#Malicious Attacks

[xtruss]

Malicious Attacks Can't Stop My Research About Xinjiang

— Maureen Huebel, An Australian Scholar | March 23, 2023

Illustration: Liu Rui/Global Times

I first became seriously interested in studying China when I noticed the growing Australian poverty and homelessness. At the same time, my close friends in China (Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu) were enjoying a higher standard of living which was thriving. The most outstanding GDP growth in the Chinese provinces was identified as Xinjiang. I wanted to learn more as I couldn't reconcile the fact that there was a "genocide" in Xinjiang with evidence that there was a growing population and no refugees. For example, Ukraine has had over eight million people leave the country as refugees, and the bottom has fallen out of the Ukrainian economy with public servants and teachers not being paid.

I joined Twitter to do preliminary research, but I did not expect the outrage that I would receive from Western people. A backlash blew up even before I started the project. The West is convinced that China is bad, so I couldn't be a critical thinker and say anything good about China, despite the fact that I am an established scholar in Australia and Britain with many published papers. Allegations of being a sophisticated Chinese Bot quickly emerged, but this was clearly shown to be false once I proved to the world to be a real person.

The mainstream media in the West is taken to be accurate, with very few questioning its narratives, particularly if it is produced by the ABC or the BBC. Australian mainstream media is one of the most concentrated in the Western world, with the main narrative explained through three groups: NewsCorp Australia, 9Entertainment and 7WestMedia, who control the lion's share of print, news websites and TV. Their influence is significant in shaping the narrative and opinions of the average Australian. The US media, with 90 percent of its media controlled by six corporations - AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, NewsCorp and Viacom, is also highly concentrated and focused on promoting its political interests.

Australia experiences pressure from the US in every aspect of our lives. At this point in history, the US is seriously threatened by the amazing economic growth of China. China's growth trajectory is set to overtake the US economy in a few years. American hegemony, with its international power and control, is now weakening.

This loss of US power is already showing up in the US banking system. It's starting to show cracks, with international trade being transacted less in US dollars. Competing international transfer mechanisms have emerged in local currencies instead of SWIFT, the primary US international transfer mechanism. SWIFT required local currencies to be swapped into US dollars before being converted into a recipient currency. The US felt it was entitled to take a percentage of international trade by transacting in US dollars. This is now changing as international contracts are being written in local currencies rather than in US dollars, permitting economies more control over their own import and export prices.

Since I announced on Twitter that I was planning to go to Xinjiang in 2024 to research poverty alleviation, I have been hounded by trolls and people insulting me on Twitter, sometimes ganging up on me with a Twitter pile-on, these include death threats.

I started by contacting Adrian Zenz, who conducted the original research on Xinjiang and made the claim of "genocide," "forced labor" and "human rights abuses." I asked him for his field research notes and methodology and published peer-reviewed journals. He strangely took offense to this and behaved in a way I have never experienced from other scholars. He blocked me and, together with other Americans, had me indefinitely suspended from Twitter. I had to ask Monash University to write to Twitter to state that I had been associated with the University and had done research there, and my research was published. Twitter then reinstated my account.

I approached the principal of the Australian Centre on China in the World of the Australian National University (ANU) for her to be my mentor and supervisor. At first, she had a favorable approach to what I was studying.

Then, at the Canberra Press Club, the principal had heard from some researchers in Xinjiang that she knew and respected were too afraid to put their names to their research papers. The principal stated through their research that Zenz's claims may not be factually correct. She was immediately stood down on indefinite sick leave, and approved grants to study research grants on China were canceled.

When I visited China in the World at the ANU, I encountered people who were full of fear and afraid to speak to me. They had just concluded a conference on academic freedom of speech and what was happening to it.

The more opposition I got, the more determined I became to forge a path to complete my project. I was blocking trolls that did not contribute to the research, sometimes 10 at a time, who ganged up on me, to what is called a Twitter pile-on.

As poverty alleviation is critical for any economy to improve, I decided to visit Xinjiang myself. We should not leave our most vulnerable behind. I will be exploring how this has happened in China and what learnings can be for Australia. It is good for a country to have its participants be active contributors to it. It becomes a win-win situation. This will be the focus of the not-for-profit foundation which I have started in Australia.

— The Author is an Australian Scholar. She Writes in an Honorary Capacity.

[bonefall]

Anyway. Bi and Mspec Lesbians aren't a hotly "debated" topic or even new to queer culture, it's just the newest thing that bullies who REALLY want to be homophobic and even racist use to justify harassing gay people they don't like.

It's the thinnest possible veneer of progressive language wrapped around TERF and reactionary rhetoric so that they can feel righteous for forming an angry mob against vulnerable targets. If you're gullible enough to fall for the newest wave of bigotry within the queer community, and turn on your allies because they're "confusing" or "invading your spaces," the SAME way they turned on bi/pan labels, trans people, xenogenders, neopronouns, and aroace people before this, then get lost.

[trans-androgyne]

You are capable of harming others. No matter who you are or what you’ve been through. Even if you think you are the most oppressed demographic in the world. Even if you’ve been through the worst traumas known to humankind. None of it gives you an excuse to lash out at people who have done nothing to you personally. None of it. The people you think are your oppressors, whether you’re right or not, are people with flesh and blood and feelings. You can hurt your oppressors and you can hurt people you oppress and you can hurt members of your own marginalized communities. Women can perpetuate sexism against others. Trans people can perpetuate exorsexism, transmisogyny, and transandrophobia against others. Poc can perpetuate racism and colorism against others. Disabled people can perpetuate ableism against others. Your strongest held beliefs are not always right and if you act in a way that harms others based on them you may very well regret it later. Keep this in mind and recognize and respond appropriately to harm when it does happen. Because I can tell you it almost certainly will. Not because of who you are, but because that is what it means to be human. Let’s be kind to other humans together.

[blueskittlesart]

deeply refreshing to see someone critical of Swift who also like, genuinely likes her. Like i'm neutral to positive on her, but the online discourse has been absolutely rancid. flipping between "Taylor Swift has never done anything wrong ever and she's a fucking genius" and "Taylor Swift is the worst lyricist of all time and also a bad person" is exhausting, so thank you for like. nuance or something lmao

not to make it serious for a sec but i genuinely think that being able to like things that are bad is really important. like I think that it's an important skill to be able to look at something and see what you personally enjoy about it and then take a step back and acknowledge that objectively it's flawed. and to also be able to acknowledge that liking something isn't necessarily an identity or a moral stance. and i think that fandom space in general could really benefit from more people taking the time to learn how to do that. it's okay to like things that are bad

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Just over a decade ago, the late novelist Hilary Mantel (6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) delivered a lecture to an event at the London Review of Books and triggered national outrage.

In the course of a talk on “Royal Bodies,” which ranged widely across royal women from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, she had made what many perceived as disparaging remarks about Kate Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge.

The Duchess, she said, appeared to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."

Indeed, Mantel said, Kate “seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”

At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar.

The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive.”

Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at.

That was true but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait:

Which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?

Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes.

Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate.

That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline.

The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides.

Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews.

Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class.

She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.

After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously.

The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job:

To turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner.

This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art.

A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.

Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality.

Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite.

Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted?

The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.

The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty.

The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema, or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged.

When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character,” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist.

In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit.

In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect.

Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.

Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character,” meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others.

In recent years, the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health.

The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story:

“People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague.

In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.

Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers.

Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it.

There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser,” but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends.

Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children.

Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood.

She seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide.

Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox.

Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.

In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men.

Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations.

As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it:

“Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her.

When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”

In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee,” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”

Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends.

The dramatic collided with the dutiful and was kept alive by it.

From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys.

Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage, and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic.

She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution:

Hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon.

The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem.

In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.

With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations.

What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency.

It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery and was taking time to recover.

And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed.

According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions.

Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.

Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty.

Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”

The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks.

Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”

In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice:

Her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama.

With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.

NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.

[cabinetduo]

guys it's not gonna be "egg drama" unless Sunny retaliates and the chances of her doing that are NOT high

[paeinovis]

I feel like the scishow video is being interpreted as telling trans women to not call their own experiences with hrt as mood swings, when in the video it reads more like "we're not trying to say every woman is ~hysterical~ and ~moody~, which is something rooted in sexism, but there can be emotional variations related to feminizing hrt. Either way, it's not a bad thing because it's better overall for the person"

[lord-radish]

imagine thinking that trans men are inherently bad or evil or predatory on the basis of gendered privilege and societal power structures. cringe

[spearxwind]

now im thinking about cercerion and how ive been wanting to do more soulsborne mockups of him as a boss, the problem is that i have way too many titles I want to give him because all of them sound so cool

so what I've compromised with until now is that he would be a three phase boss, the first phase being regular Cer (blue) "The Grief of the Storm", the second phase would be Rion (orange) "The Tyrant of the Storm" and the last phase would be both of them (both blue and orange clashing for dominance) "Cercerion, The Apocalypse"

during the last fight the more you damage his health bar the more the name glitches out and turns into "YOU REAP WHAT YOU HAVE SOWN" and the more intense the fight gets the more the map gets destroyed with huge chunks of earth flying up into the sky because of the electromagnetic field he's generating

since his whole story arc is about repenting for what he did (destroyed the world by losing control and giving into anger) it'd be really really ironic to have him be a boss fight where you FORCE him to destroy the world just to fight you

and then maybe you do kill him at the end. but at what cost.

[frogcoded]

something fun i learned in computer security recently is that if you have to open shady websites it's best to do that in a separate window than all your other tabs, even better in a completely different browser where you don't usually log in with let's say your bank for example. so opening streaming sites in a different anonymous window sounds like something that is more placebo than anything else but it is actually a good protection about some common types of attacks lol (not every kind of attack ofc just specific types)

[raemeh]

if there is a season 3 for dndads I want it to be the teens as grown ups other than a new generation of kids.

I want to see them as adults coping and overcoming whatever trauma happens in season 2. Including Hermie

this doesn’t have to be in a potential season 3 but I also want to see scary adopt a paedon esce child that reminds her of herself

[trees-to-meet-you]

Btw if anyone doesn’t know what it means and doesn’t want to open a new tab for whatever reason DDOS means Distributed Denial of Service and it’s where cyberterrorists (i think that’s the right term???) flood a server so that regular users can’t access it.

[m-hunterr]

ok i have so many thoughts about round 6 still in my head and i need to let it out so

I like to think that Ivan knows how unimportant he is to Till and how he is never in his mind/sight at all so when he attacked Till to guarantee his own death, he chose to squeeze his neck JUST cause Till could look at him this once and last time (just like the kiss hehe)

I think Ivan almost lost it when choking out Till and choking on his blood is what snapped him out of actually killing Till,,,,

cause like,,,, it's like,, it would be so easy to take Till with him but nah, he doesn't love Ivan back and he knows it damn well, so he lets Till go. He's selfish like Sua but him dying for Till here isn't the same as Sua dying for Mizi, cause Till doesn't replicate his feelings, he's just here to show his love cause he's got nothing to lose

OK SIDE NOTE: I LOVE THE LITTLE PECK AFTER HE SAW THE VOTES AND BEING SURE THAT HES GONNA DIE, ITS LIKE A KISS GOODBYE😭😭😭😭

[cosmic-kaden]

Teehee might fuck around and have a paranoid episode inside a grocery store🫠 /srs

[obiwansucks]

An attack on AO3 feels like a direct violation of the first amendment. Or does the US government just not care because it's predominantly queer writers?

[trexalicious]

Is it me or is Omid's generic Bellendgame dedication rather sad? No thanks to Mom or Dad, to an English teacher, to anyone specific--he's just like TW! Thanks for the clicks and helping make me money...🤢