Yeah yeah, I’ve heard that before. There’s a whole cottage industry of “experts” that have predicted the imminent collapse of China going back decades. Call me when it actually happens.
China’s economy is stacked like a house of cards and could come crumbling down due to some unforeseen global financial shock, but then again that sounds like most modern economies. I think people just pick on China because, instead of having a group of billionaires stack up the cards, the government does it themselves.
You just described the US, UK, and much of the western world entirely. The global economy is just a bunch of "IOU"s
China is a bit different in that regard, though.
Since apartments are pretty much the only investment for private savings, there’s a huge percentage of the GDP tied to construction. This bubble is not quite bursting, but rapidly deflating, leaving many regular people practically without savings.
Other countries have inflated real estate markets as well, but their markets simply are not that large in comparison (percentage of GDP).
Even if that shock happens, China will still be in a better situation. Like, they actually manufacture stuff there, and the government builds infrastructure aggressively. That’s two massive benefits to economic security and health.
But what if all that high speed rail disappears, huh? Didn’t think about that, stupid tankie.
It’s a legitimate risk. Rail theft by the mole-people is up 12% in the last quarter.
Well, actually it’s because China’s roaring economic success is both deeply embarassing and existentially dangerous to international fascism and it is absolutely vital that they both discredit China and prevent their thoroughly indoctrinated population from learning anything about China at all costs.
The Chinese government stacks the cards though it actually has the capability to use some toothpicks to hold them in place, and will immediately rebuild it things start to fall apart.
To contrast, the US will flounder and pull their one “low interest rates” lever while having a political blowout over some sort of stimulus funding package that probably won’t pass.
Do you repeat something you heard there or can you in detail describe how the worlds greates manufacturing Hub is a economy build on Cards…
china believes in the heart of the cards
This is what China wanted their relationship with the US to be like but our ruling class is just too evil and shortsighted for that
If that’s the case then the US’s economy is a card dealer pointing a gun at everyone at the table
People (westerners) pick on China because they want it to collapse. It’s entirely wishful thinking.
I’ll drop this beautiful book here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Collapse_of_China
Americans have been predicting the collapse of China for 30+ years. It’s just wishful thinking.
I don’t know about China, but Biden is really throwing stones from glass houses here as the leader of a country which is teetering on the edge of civil war, had a full blown insurrection in the past few years, and not only has it failed to prosecute the leader and instigator, it has allowed him to run for election again and there is a possibility of him being elected.
And this is not mentioning that so many in the highest offices “on both sides” are so hilariously corrupt in a country with its national ethos being “the land of the free”.
I’m not happy about this by the way, I don’t think a world order built by China would be better than the shitty one we got from the US.
I believe the correct spelling is “Land of the free^*” ^* terms and conditions may apply
It 100% would be better. There is nothing in modern Chinese history that remotely approaches the level of imperial devastation the US has wrought on the world. This is not up for debate by any serious person. How many countries has China invaded recently? How many coups have they instigated? Is their “foreign aid” designed to help countries develop, or to extract as much wealth as possible while keeping them impoverished, underdeveloped, and dependent on the west for their most basic needs? Has the standard of living in China been going up or down in recent decades? Now ask yourself the same questions about the US.
I don’t think a world order built by China would be better than the shitty one we got from the US
I do to be honest.
I’d rather be under the rule of a hegemony that is composed of many different cultures and in the process of healing than one who is still actively genociding their minorities.
EDIT: Welp, I guess there is no war in Ba Sing Se. Ya’ll are expert brigaders, well done.
I’d rather be under the rule of a hegemony that is composed of many different cultures and in the process of healing than one who is still actively genociding their minorities.
Source: Adrian Zenz
China has 56 different major ethinicities and 5 different autonomous regions. The only racist here is you, for believing this shit and knowing nothing about the country. The two fastest growing ethnicities in China are Tibetan followed by Uighur.
The Hui people are also a different kind of Muslim living in China but liberals haven’t learned about them yet.
If we pretend that what the USA does to its own people is acceptable, you still have to consider what it does to the rest of the world. I’m sorry, but in light of all the evidence, I see the US hegemony as evil. I also doubt the western media’s portrayal of the Uyghur “genocide” and I don’t agree that China is in the process of a Holocaust against its own people.
I’m lucky enough to have a job that puts me in contact with a lot of countries all over the global south of the world, and the general opinion from all of them is that China is a lot better prospect than old Western imperialism.
The Chinese propaganda made to counter the satellite images, testimony from victims, and video evidence consists of some YouTubers visiting the same handful of uncomfortably smiling Uyghur families under the careful eye of Chinese censors and fluff pieces that amount to “nuh-uh”.
China is trying to erase the culture of people within their borders, again, and there is a long tradition of this forced assimilation in China. They are not pluralistic, and don’t want to be, and their attitude towards non-chinese within their borders lead me to have very low expectations on how they will treat minorities outside.
How could anyone possibly have any doubts in the face of satellite images and eye-witness testimony?
The Iraqi propaganda was hastily produced to justify a war. The Uyghur situation has been uncovered by journalists slowly over decades.
I thought your links would be to any of the dozens of images, articles, and videos on the Uyghur situation. Why not link a debunking of that instead of trying to assert that because lies exist that the Uyghur ethnocide is also a lie. Your argument is weak because facts won’t support it.
Since you sound like an expert who has really done your homework here, let’s see some of these stunning pictures you’re talking about and then compare them to photos from America’s prisons. I wonder which will look worse? Doesn’t the USA also lock up far more people per capita than China?
Uncovered over decades? It seems like decades in internet years but the first reports started in 2014, less than 9 years ago.
If a grainy satellite photo that could be of literally anything and random testimony is your standard of evidence please stay the fuck away from any position of authority, everywhere.
China has 56 different major ethinicities and 5 different autonomous regions. The only racist here is you, for believing this shit and knowing nothing about the country. The two fastest growing ethnicities in China are Tibetan followed by Uighur.
their attitude towards non-chinese within their borders lead me to have very low expectations on how they will treat minorities outside.
“Chinese” is not an ethnicity you racist dumbass. It is a nationality. They are all Chinese.
Is it just one grainy satellite footage? I was under the impression it was a series of images documenting the construction and expansion of detention centers located suspiciously near the population that has been complaining about being disappeared to detention centers. I also thought there are very clear ground-level pictures, showing thousands Uyghur in blue jumpsuits.
Is the testimony random? I thought it was testimony was mostly from Uyghurs from the affected area, with credible stories that line up with other witnesses and victims that were also questioned.
You will deny this is true because it is crucial for your reality that it is false. Nothing the US is currently doing is a fucked up as what China is doing in terms of racism and ethnic suppression.
You will deny this is true because it is crucial for your reality that it is false.
Many grainy satellite photos vs 1 grainy satellite photo is really not much of a different.
I also thought there are very clear ground-level pictures, showing thousands Uyghur in blue jumpsuits.
No the photo you are referring to is of a prisoner movement between two prisons. You’re being showed photos and people are telling you they’re X when they’re actually Y.
Is the testimony random? I thought it was testimony was mostly from Uyghurs from the affected area, with credible stories that line up with other witnesses and victims that were also questioned.
There’s about 30, and almost always extremely sus circumstances surrounding them. Meanwhile we have literally thousands of videos of tourists readily available, right now, of people visiting the area and having conversations. Who do you believe here? People IN XINJIANG or people outside it?
Look. Let me give you some food for thought on this from another angle. Let’s look at another country where know REAL oppression is taking place, Israel, which has more money and a far smaller country mileage area to spend that money. Israel is an apartheid state actively murdering and oppressing the Palestinians with the intent of stealing their land and eliminating them. https://reddit.com/r/israelexposed is what this looks like.
The evidence against Israel is insurmountable. Mountains of it. Hundreds of thousands of actual video of actual shit. Real evidence.
In a country where literally everyone owns a smartphone it is impossible to prevent the creation of this evidence. Even with more resources and a smaller surface area to stop this shit from getting out - Israel can’t stop it getting out. But you’re trying to say that China can? With fewer resources and a much MUCH larger surface area? They can stop 100% of all evidence from coming out? Just some misrepresented photos that don’t actually depict what people claim they depict? Some critical thinking is needed here. Why is there so much evidence in Israel and absolutely zero evidence in China? Don’t just turn to the idea that they have an all-powerful state that can somehow be in all places at all times magically preventing even a single video from getting out, that idea is a fantasy and comes from the realm of the delusional. Really THINK about this. Be critical.
The reason the evidence does not exist is because what has been claimed is not accurate.
Now, does that mean that China didn’t implement a re-education program? No it doesn’t. Does that mean that this wasn’t quite a heavy handed measure aimed at stopping terrorism? No it doesn’t. It was a really serious undertaking that was certainly a heavy handed use of authority that probably had individual instances of dickwads in that authority acting as dickwads. But, what I am asking you to do is to see through this bullshit genocide crap. It’s nonsense. There is no evidence for it and it’s not what actually happened. They had a serious string of terrorism, and to stop it they implemented a very large re-education program that people had to attend Monday-Friday (they could go home on weekends). That’s what actually happened. No genocide. No mass sterilisation nonsense. No massive repression of religion (other than the extremist one that was committing the terrorism, imported from over the border in Afghanistan).
Do a google image search for “Uyghur genocide.” Report back with any interesting images you find. This has been going on for twenty years now, surely there must be some pretty gruesome photos somewhere, comparable at least to the images of the Haitians deported by Biden to make room for Ukrainians in a totally not racist way?
Imagine being from Canada and bleating about China trying to erase the culture of people. Projecting much?
Ya’ll are expert brigaders, well done.
It’s a frontpage post dumbass 💀 we’re not brigading we’re just commenting on the post that appears on our feeds
Yes, a swarm of tankies from the same instance(hexbear) descending upon the same thread with the same opinions, and spamming images, totally not brigading.
They’re just a bunch of harmless china apologists. Pretend taiwan isn’t a country and they’ll leave you alone
So the DPR and LPR are independent countries, right?
"Yes, but if they invite allied troops into their country it stills counts as an invasion of Ukraine. What do you mean that isn’t independence? "
The only spam-like opinions I’m seeing are all the same stale old forms of apologia for the world-strangling US Empire, and the same old stale racism and homophobia from scratched liberals.
It’s a communist instance with very few other instances federated, what the fuck do you expect? The CPC doesn’t give a shit about either of us, you aren’t involved in some YA dystopia story by posting.
I’d like to live in China too
Less than 10% of Native Americans can speak their native language. How many Uighers and Tibetans can speak theirs?
Have you been to a reservation? I remember one that we drove through in Arizona, the Hualapai. It wasn’t just a desert, but a salt flat, utterly devoid of vegetation. Along the road, you had dilapidated pre-fabs, occupied of course by the victims that had been placed here. Not all reservations are as harrowing. I’ve visited the Navajo Nation, as well as Lakota and Ute reservations. Poverty is intense, and people do the best they can, but the reality is that these people had their lands stolen from them and were forced to the most marginal places in US, unsuitable for much agriculture and barely suitable for ranching.
There is no healing in these places, rather the victims of genocide are constantly blamed for their own poverty by the settler communities stole their land. The native peoples were devastated by covid due to the lack of healthcare resources as well.
Let’s look at the Black American community as well. It was just 3 years ago that the US had its largest protest movement in history against the police killings of unarmed Black men. And what was the response by the government and media? After a moment of groveling, to take back all promises of reform and instead funnel even more money to an increasingly militarized police force, and to engage in a panicked sensationalized crime wave reportage. Police killings continue (1 in 20 homicides are perpetrated by the police), and the economic situation hasn’t improved much for Black Americans since the Great Recession lead to a massive seizure of Black household wealth.
The situation in the US isn’t healing, it’s an oozing pustulate sore. There has been a failure to reinforce voting rights, and anything like reparations, even just targeted relief, is considered a joke and a non-starter in the halls of power. The only healing is in the minds of libs that think that donning Kente cloth and watching Black Panther constitutes absolution.
This of course is to say nothing of the murderous wars waged by the US in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere, and the genocides it co-sponsored in Guatamala and Indonesia. Or the general neo-colonial global financial mechanisms that lock the third world into permanent debt traps and underdevelopment.
Yeah, the US did and is doing fucked up things. But we’re talking scale in the modern era here.
How much longer will the Uyghurs be able to speak their language when china bans Uyghur language books in Uyghur schools? Why does China put up signs at those schools saying that only language permitted on school grounds is Mandarin? Why is china sending hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese to Uyghur home for days at a time to ensure they are speaking Mandarin?
Maybe the US can heal better and faster from its atrocities, but China is actively pursuing atrocities at an official industrial state level.
Have you heard of Adrian Zenz? The dude is a Christofascist CIA operative, and every claim you made there can be traced straight back to his imagination (aside from your nonsensical hypotheticals of course). Liberals hate christofascists—except when they uphold anticommunism. The Uyghurs and Han Chinese have also coexisted for centuries. Even if anything Zenz says is remotely true, none of it compares in the slightest to the genocide, slavery, and destruction perpetrated around the world by the USA in the last ten years alone.
??? Xinjiang’s curriculum still has Uyghur as the primary language as of 2023, Uyghur internet celebs aren’t speaking Mandarin on Douyin (ever wonder why TikTok has subtitles as a default? Partially for the hearing impaired, but the app it’s cloned from is Chinese and that is multilingual, hence pushing for subtitles as a default. Cantonese, Hokkien, Haka, Min, Tibetan, Uyghur, etc etc)
The news is broadcast in Uyghur, the road signs are in Uyghur
What Reddit post said Han people were going into homes to enforce Mandarin? Han people ourselves don’t even speak Mandarin exclusively.
youve got a lot of spunk for somebody who doesnt really know what they are talking about. China has 56 recognized and protected ethnic minority groups where scholars are creating alphabets for minority languages that had not been previously written as a way to preserve their languages. How many indigenous people in the US and Hawaii can even say that they speak their language after having had them systematically destroyed for decades?
Go live there for a few years and tell us more on your way back.
I’m going there in February for a few months, that’s a start. Looking forward to it.
I’ll be there, and I travel often across main cities for work, so let me know then if you want to hang out.
Sure, I will be all over the place. Once I know my plans a bit solidly I will let you know.
I’m in Shanghai a few times a year on business and really have to double check that I have multiple VPN options available before leaving. Had a coworker have his phone checked at customs but we always bring dedicated “China-only” cell phones and laptops. They seem to be getting more on top of crushing outside communications but I always get at least one connection working when there. Last time it was an ssh tunnel to an AWS instance that I used to route traffic. Before that it was ExpressVPN which gave me trouble on the last visit. China is playing whack a mile with the VPNs.
Wow it’s almost like the great firewall is trivial to circumvent and countless millions of people do it every day.
Oh my god, just think, you won’t be able to check reddit or read the new york times without your precious VPN! The horror!
It’s not like the new york times outputs anything of value anyway
I’ve got some bad news for you if you think Jews are the problem. The white capitalists wouldn’t even spit on you if you were on fire, so doing their work for them by rooting out their competition is just being a useful idiot
Report back. Am genuinely curious!
Will do.
A great way to tell us you’re a chauvinist who doesn’t know anybody who lives in China and never been there.
It could be that. Or it could be the exact opposite (which it is, would you want to see my hukou?), and the fact that you can’t tell the difference while thinking that you could and that it matters makes you an angry little person.
The fact that all you ever do here is shit on China shows what your agenda is buddy. The only angry little person here is the one who can’t say a single nice thing about a country that’s lifting millions of people out of poverty each and every year.
“agenda”, I like how you make it sound like my posts are some kind of greater, organized operation or conspiracy. Projection maybe? Because between the two of us, you are the only one whose post history is consistently made of political activism disguised as news. Not that it automatically makes you a bad person, but you can’t reasonably expect people to take you and your opinion seriously when you have the pretence to simultaneously speak from position of authority on geopolitical topics as broad as China, Russia, West Africa, North America, Central America, Eastern Europe, all at the same time. You should realize that you can’t possibly have such a broad life exposure, or your time would be better invested outside of Lemmy, don’t you think? The only reasonable alternative, and sad reality, is that you are just repeating talking points conveniently arranged for you and repeated inside your echo chamber.
As of me, I am equally entitled to my own opinions, equally partaking to information bubbles, with the difference that my life is actually forever bound to China and that I can legitimately pretend that I have something to contribute to that discussion. Unlike you, I am not brigading from a far-away continent. I don’t “shit on China”. Had you any idea of my situation, you wouldn’t even think of saying something like that. You do may find that some of what I have to say on certain topics is contrary to your ideals, but so is China: it isn’t the monolithic strong fortress people make it to be in the media (in either side of the discourse).
I’m actually pretty open about my political activism. I’m not disguising anything. Having grown up in USSR, and moved around the world a lot, I do think I have a much broader exposure than majority of people. The fact that you presume to know so much about me exposes the sad reality about you projecting what you know of yourself to be true onto others I’m afraid. I also love how you accuse me of doing what you yourself regularly do here, unless you’ll have us believe that you have some deep expertise on the political situation in Africa. Seems to me that you’re trying to speak from position of authority in comments such as this one, while clearly demonstrating utter lack of knowledge on the subject. I don’t know why you felt the need to be “brigading” that far away continent.
Meanwhile, nowhere have I claimed that China is some monolithic strong fortress or that there aren’t legitimate problems in China. My only claims has been that despite the problems China has, it shows a better alternative to what the west is doing. While you seem to be fixating on problems such as unlimited freedom of expression, that affects a tiny majority of the people, I’m looking at the problem of meeting the material needs of the people. China has done a far better job in ensuring that people have things like food, housing, education, and healthcare than the supposedly enlightened western liberal societies.
To sum up, you pretend to have some sort of high ground and sling feces at me, but the only difference is that you support western empire and all its horrors whether you realize it or not.
They’re at least building green energy and trains lol. And less wars. Already better.
And shrinking deserts! Fucking wild
The evil CCP is committing genocide against deserts!
Think of the grains of sand
Disillusioned Fremen noises
Found the tankie. How about neither lol.
Yeah the CCP bots are all over this thread, easily the worst thing about Lemmy.
Staying federated with Hexbear was a really stupid decision, given their clear intended outspoken goal to brigade and harass.
I love Ground News as a concept, but I always feel suss using anything which is promoted in sponsorship deal by YouTubers.
Is there anything I should know about them as an organisation? I feel by design if they were to have biases or open to manipulation that it would be really obvious…
Each specific article will show you the sources. It’s kind of interesting to flip through the headlines and see how each source might describe the same thing differently.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ground-news/
EDIT: Come on, don’t shoot the messenger…
“Both sides of the political spectrum”
Overall, we rate Ground News Least Biased based on publishing news stories from both sides of the political spectrum and appropriately labeling their bias. We also rate them mostly factual rather than High due to the use of poor sources that can publish false or misleading information; however, these news stories are typically reported by other credible media outlets meaning they most likely are factual.
A whole website of citation bingo
More than a fifth of Chinese age 16 to 24 are out of work.
Spain and other southern EU countries have experienced this, and even higher unemployment rates in the past, but with China’s rather large population, we’re about 30 million young people in a country with few safety nets.
China’s economy barely grew in the second quarter from the first and youth unemployment hit a record high in June, providing evidence of a fading recovery.
So what is Xi going to do when these 30 million hit the streets to demonstrate? Draft them and attack Taiwan?
The situation isn’t really a lack of jobs, it’s that younger generations don’t want to work the factory jobs (because they all studied for better jobs) and there is pressure to look after parents. Not only is there an imbalance in young vs old people due to the one child policy but China also passed a law that required children to provide mental and financial support to their parents. Some parents are effectively paying their children to look after them, thereby removing them from the workforce count.
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-elder-care-law-a-struggle-for-one-child-families/1704200.html
More than a fifth of Chinese age 16 to 24 are out of work.
Does that include people in school?
No. School is “work” in that statistic.
Am I supposed to believe a 1/5th of 16 year olds aren’t in school?
Yeah I was going to say that seemed like a weird range to cherry pick. I have to imagine the 16-17 crowd in the US is like, 25-50% employed at best, and that’s 2/9. 5-6/9 in that range are school age if you count college.
I wonder what that looks like for the US
it’s 7.5% for the US and 13.9% for the Euro zone. India, which has a similar population to China is at 17.9% which is so much lower than I would have imagined.
Like we’re one to talk lmao
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Ground News isn’t a source per se. They provide links to various news sources so you can see different viewpoints on the same story. They try to align the sources left and right and indicate their factuality but that is just meant to be a guide to allow you to challenge your viewpoints or determine factuality and to make it clear what the ownership structure might be guiding them to write.
I’ve been a paying subscriber for 4 or 5 months after finding them and find it quite reasonable and interesting.
https://ground.news/rating-system
tl;dr they buy those ratings from press rating agencies and then average them.
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BRO WHY ARE THERE 600+ COMMENTS HERE, I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS EVER
Its far more weird how many people pick one of these countries like its a RPG faction. Can we all agree most of these countries do some totally evil things as far as governments go? Who gives a fuck how much debt they’re in, they’re all just printing their monopoly dollars anyways and we’re stuck with the inflation. Its like people like to masterbate to their favorite team via internet comments.
Isn’t China undergoing deflation?
I haven’t heard about that but I doubt it. Deflation is horrible. It stops economies from functioning. Your money will be worth more the longer you wait to spend it, so you don’t spend it until you need to. No government is going to let deflation happen without something going horribly wrong, which it might be, idk.
Edit: apparently the consumer sector experienced deflation. I believe that means it shrank, not the value of money increased over time, which is what is implied by inflation/deflation without other context. I could be wrong though. Either way, it doesn’t look great.
I just wanted to say thanks for explaining this in a way that is helpful to idiots like me.
600+ years of “team white Europe” hooligans and you’re going to complain about unsportsman-like conduct now that the camp you live in will likely have its economy decimated by successful decolonial projects and rematriation of stolen wealth?
The US is the last torchbearer of the “may our team beat their team” that led to the deaths of nearly a billion people, the utter subjugation and domination of multiple billions constituting 80% of the world population, and now that the US finally shows signs of being in an unstoppable collapse and China is creating the conditions for a new global social order you want to say “hey everybody, just be nice to each other and realize all countries are probably bad to the same degree and anybody winning is honestly just as good or bad as anyone else winning”.
Fuck off
Fuck you right in your ass. I complained that everyone in here is pitching their agenda for their favorite country in the comments and what do you do? Exactly that. Learn to read.
You need to learn to distinguish between sports and real life. In real life, we actually engage in historical and political analysis for the purpose of creating better understanding of how societies work so that we can a put our weight behind a better future. In sports we just pick favorites. If you think the people supporting China are just picking favorites, then you are deliberately ignoring everything that goes against your indoctrination and diminishing it so that you don’t have to think and challenge your deeply held beliefs. That’s a lot of effort to, ultimately, just watch North Atlantic fascism go on a global killing spree. Either disengage from politics entirely or get gud, noob.
I see the issue. You’re on Lemmygrad. So naturally everything has to be pro China, pro communism, and the moment someone says “yeah they all suck equally” you have to lick the boot. Seek a prescription for schizophrenia.
Amazingly salient point. It’s clearly schizophrenic to have a political position, research it, and then engage in political debate with ignorant people who believe that their uninformed opinions are not merely worthy of being posted in public but also shouldn’t be challenged because they are both valid and even-keeeled.
Of course, that’s why I joined Lemmygrad, because I decided that team Red was better than other teams, and team Red fans all go to Lemmygrad where we swap stats and gossip about the players and coaches and we root for the red team to build comraderie, sorry, I mean friendships. And then of course we would show up to say “red team good” like a bunch of schizos any time someone says a bad thing about our team because our entire identity is based on whether our jersey wins the world war.
Your grasp of the situation is, of course, astoundingly clear eyed.
:VOMIT:
Ok, with that out of the way, the only one licking boots here is you. No one wants empire to end more than communists. Empire is the antithesis of communism. If you don’t understand that, you’re ignorant and just shouting things at people based on vibes.
But when you look at an enemy of empire, or a victim of empire, and you repeat imperial propaganda against them, you are indistinguishable from boot licking imperial settler racists. The empire doesn’t ask you to love it. The empire only asks that you hate its enemies. And like a good little soldier, that’s the position you hold and express and defend like your life depends on it. When someone says"hey the empire is lying and the enemies of the empire aren’t actually that bad", you go into a frenzied rage, rabidly trying to convince them they have a mental health disorder and that they are blindly rooting for a sports team and cannot see reality like you can. But you’re just ignorant. You don’t have any more information or ability to reason than I do. In fact, you demonstrably have less information than I do. Literally everything you can post about China and Russia not only have I already seen but I have also read a dozen analyses on already.
You have been lied to your entire life. It’s time to read a book and see the world and the empire for what it truly is. And no, LemmyGrad is not the one licking boots here. It’s the people who think NATO is right to expand and stop the evil Russians from their dastardly deeds. It’s the ones who think the US war ships in the South China Sea getting pushed out by China’s projection of power are victims of Chinese expansionism. It’s the ones who think Taiwan and Hong Kong despite being proxies of imperial powers have legitimate claims to autonomy that they should be allowed to use in service of the empire. All of that is boot licking for the empire. And no, it doesn’t matter if you express hatred for the taste, because you keep, fucking, doing it.
While the US sits on $32 trillion of debt…
The post itself is dumb, so I wouldn’t complain about dumb comments
Tbh, I find the hexbears quite refreshing👌
Big fan :)
Brigading isn’t a thing, that’s the point of federation. Why is it always people who’ve joined in the last two months making these complaints? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with events on reddit in that time frame could it? 🤔
I had a look cause you made me curious… It’s just hippies. “Disassociating from the system will destroy it” “I’m sick of furry porn re-enforcing capitalist ideals” “The only reason you’re not a Marxist is that you didn’t really ‘listen’ when you were in college. Wait is Marxism the bad one?”
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China is a socialist state.
China is a socialist state.
“Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” is socialism now?
Capitalism with Chinese characteristics
One little mistake though. It is actually Socialism with Chinese characteristics
In other words… it’s capitalism with Chinese characteristics.
just insisting that you’re right doesn’t actually work
Aaaaaaand… it’s still capitalism with Chinese characteristics.
they larping as communists? 😂
It’s more about trajectories. In China, statistics such as life expectancy keep going up, and have actually overtaken the US, whereas these quality of life indicators in the US are stagnating or even going down. Is China an ideal society at this point? Of course not, but one can still recognise what has been accomplished by their plans, weather you want to call it state capitalist, socialist or whatever other label, the results are there when compared to the quality of life 40 or 50 years ago.
That’s why it’s pretty funny for Biden to try deflect to China.
Don’t know what any of this has to do with sexual violence though.
Political elites allowing a certain segment of the society they lord over to not be mired in poverty to better secure their own power and privilege is no sign of “progress” - as the US proves, such economic manipulation can be very temporary.
it’s actually bad when good things happenYeah… it’s still capitalism with Chinese characteristics - no matter how much you masturbate to pictures of Xi Jinping.
It’s only a matter of time before liberals bring out the weird homophobic insults.
Why do they do that? It’s so weirdly consistent. “Fact supported by evidence” “oh yeah, well… uh… uhn… you’re gay!” Like okay, so? I can’t speak for othe instances in the Fediverse but Hexbear is one of the queerest places on the internet, and the lib is still wrong.
Well the short answer is Patriarchy. Accusing people of behaving in a way contrary to traditional ideas of masculinity is a classic technique for shaming people with heterodox views.
USA probably exploded an actual bomb somewhere while he said that.
Doesn’t China have a history of repeatedly shattering into a thousand pieces?
Most china can only do it once
And you’re from the Permanent Kingdom of Perfect Stability where borders never change powers do not rise and fall?
I’ll take that as a yes.
Reading the comments…
Wish I could block an entire instance at once. Is that a thing I can do?
That’s fair. I did not know the background of lemmy.ml or hexbear and I’m certainly learning that users from particularly the latter are somewhat unstable. I just subbed to a bunch of top news communities when I joined Lemmy. That’s on me lol.
If it works for you, good. I did the same for ‘politics’ which is just us politics. I still look over the fence occasionally though.
Yeah, some of these posts get wild. It’s a shame, since the actual communists are cool.
It is interesting seeing the left’s version of MAGAts, though.
How is saying this ‘China’s going to collapse any second now I promise bro’ is dumb being MAGAt
It’s not, and those aren’t the comments myself or the person I responded to were talking about. And yes, that take is dumb.
We were talking about the tankies – in the original meaning of the word as coined by communists, not as a slur against communists in general. Authoritarianism and its apologists can get fucked. People that think we’re in a zero-sum-game where they have to offset the (legitimate) evils of “the west” by being equally disgusting and brutal while on “the left” are fucking morons and don’t deserve the title “communist”.
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
Where are people on this Internet forum being as disgusting and brutal as US imperialism? You know, the global hegemon, violently enforced through hybrid warfare
If you’re a fan of genocides and totalitarian regimes then yeah, communists are cool.
On Kbin, individual users can block instances. By going to https://kbin.social/d/**instance.name**
You can’t block instances but you can block the lemmy.ml and hexbear.net magazines, which are all tankie hell.
lemmygrad is the tankie one, pls don’t block me
I’m gonna keep .ml blocked for as long as they are federated with hexbear, they are annoying as fuck. Also lemmy.ml is super pro-china so it is pretty tankie, might have changed with the reddit migration, but, eh.
It was my impression that lemmy.ml is lemmgrad with a mask on, to pass as somewhat reasonable to the rest of the fediverse. On lemmagrad they just spew their bullshit with no filter.
You’re probably right, they probably bought the .ml domain to refer to marxism-leninism .
Yeah, same. But I’m having fun sending pig poop balls to liberals before they can’t handle the heat and block our instance. By the way, here is a picture of a hog with shit in its testicles. Please look closely.
Lol if that’s how you want to spend your time? Go nuts. Rest of us have lives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You’re literally Canadian your outside life probably isn’t worth it
🤨
I’m Canadian too don’t pretend like you have anything going for you
I’m so sorry to hear that life hasn’t treated you well.
What do KKKlanadians even do with their time? Come up with excuses to explain their housing crises without questioning capitalism? Develop asthma from the wildfires? Cheer on resource extraction companies as they poison the land and brutalize first nations people?
What do KKKlanadians even do with their time?
Here are just a few small selections.
- Unlimited genocide on the Native peoples of the land. (Everyone)
- Recreational blackface. (Politicians)
- Beating people up for buying “gay” beer. (Citizens)
- Doing false flag bombings on behalf of oil companies. (Police)
As you can see there’s plenty of fun activities to do here.
Remember when an RCMP asset killed dozens of people, the police bungled everything about the response, and then Fidel’s kid made everyone turn in their guns right before historical cost of living crisis began to destabilize Kkklanada? I don’t care anyone I’m board, it’s saturday, I say they planned it.
Mostly maple syrup I imagine
Ice fishing?
My brother in Christ you’re literally using Lemmy
Nope. Enjoy the poop! If you don’t like it, you can always return to your fellow school shooters at reddit!
I’m sure what you just said makes sense in that head of yours but we’re all out here dude.
It must really suck to have so many people mocking you and calling you a racist and a fascist when you advocate for drinking the blood of every last man, woman, and child in China and Russia.
…are u ok?
I’m sorry, you just want to transform these countries into Iraq or Libya, right? You don’t want to hurt anyone there at all! Not even a fly gets hurt when it’s my beloved DEMOCRATS bombing CNN’s enemy of the week!
No I just want to know how to block your instance!!
Use this:
