The United States withdraws from UNESCO

The CCP has been lobbying the World Heritage Evaluation Committee for a long time now to increase its number of sites. This directly promote’s china’s false narrative of “5,000 years continuous civilization” with attached mythos (despite much of the early evidence coming from the mythical Shiji, china simply blackmails academics into silence with source access and mainland collaboration to maintain a monopoly on her historical narrative) and this idea of a “glorious past”, which is also critical for maintaining her “reunification” narrative and justifying current or future control of Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong… this extends to baseless and historical claims like state propaganda claiming the Yuan founded beijing to support this totalizing metanarrative “grand arc” type story the chicoms attempt to construct.

Meanwhile 28 of the 196 state parties to the world heritage convention have no sites listed at all. Of course, Taiwan has no sites at all.

It’s well known that many of the UN bodies and similar international orgs have been wholly captured by china or her new axis of evil. Ghebreyesus, for example, has been china’s man from the get-go. American dollars should not go to support a grand red chinese narrative.

UNESCO has, in recent years:

- published an “anti-racism toolkit”

- campaigned to “#ChangeMENtalities”, to “reshape masculinities for gender equality”

- published “comprehensive sexuality education” that is strongly at odds with many Americans views on how such things ought to be taught

- published ai ethics recommendations that focus on issues like “gender” and “climate”

- run partnerships to “get every learner climate-ready”

In other words, it’s operating out of its original scope, doing things that are clearly and massively one-sided. I recognize the NGO-industrial complex, along with much of mass media and culture, has been so wholly captured by the left for long enough that y’all can see a change back to the status quo as disruptive or odd. But the other half of the Overton window does still exist. A lot of what the current administration has done is stupid or wrong, but my tax dollars being sent to this organization would also be stupid and wrong.

I'm responding to the general point that the administration just wants to destroy and not build. I'm saying that there's actually a good argument for that. Whether that's what's actually happening is ... now questionable.

I don't know anything about UNESCO, but Palestine is a plausible answer to this administration's actual motivations here. But then that would be different from the simple "just wants to destroy" angle.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I don't think he's saying to dismiss the Ministry's numbers, but more that the death toll is actually even higher than the Ministry's numbers, in opposition to Israeli claims that the Ministry is making up deaths.

What’s the counter to the standard “nation-states do not run like family budgets, especially when the nation-state is the global hegemon”? Or “Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.”?

Woke is the commingling of awareness of social injustices with a rigid ideological framework that suppresses individual thought and redefines moral foundations.

Instead of recognizing injustice, it became an imposition of ideological points that have to be adopted wholesale instead of being evaluated independently.

There are valid positions on issues related to race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories but the method of promoting these ideas by enforcing group consensus is not valid and is anti-liberal.

Genuine intellectual curiosity is punished with what is basically name-calling. In result, there is a fear that leads people to publicly profess something unthinkingly or that they question only privately. This creates a culture of just parroting consensus views to avoid social penalties.

In a nutshell, it is pressure to conform.