It will be so funny if he takrs a sharp turn downhill and dies. Dude was famous for never getting a chance to be king and then to go out so quickly would be * chef’s kiss *
Do you think they have any compassion for the random proles like us? Like they could divest themselves of wealth to help people, and just live luxurious lives instead of gold flakes in food lives.
I think any human being with enough compassion to deserve treatment as anything more than a hostile enemy would do that
He literally chooses every single day to actively ignore the plight of the people he claims to rule. He does nothing
Every single day he actively chooses to ignore suffering, probably even cracks jokes about it, while actively working to preserve his enormous privilege and protect his kin from facing consequences for their heinous actions. He stands at the head of an institution of violence, racism, cruelty, and exploitation and every single moment of his life he chooses to side with that over any earnest attempt to redeem their reputation.
The entire justification for their privilege is so insane it makes phrenology look respectable.
He is horrible, he could help so many people with a few words and the equivalent of pocket change but he chooses not to for fear of starting a process that ends with him living as one of the ordinary citizens he claims to protect. It’s fucking bananas that you think there is some moral reasons to extend civility to such a monsterous person.
It’s not brave or noble to police expressions of anger at oppressors it’s just foolish. It won’t make society better, civility is just a tool the powerful use to enforce the status quo.
He chooses to let someone starve over feeding them, this is fine a civil behavior. I call him a fucking cunt for doing that and wish death upon him and this is uncivil behaviour and I lack compassion? nonsense, it is compassion that fills me with rage.
…in an effort to force the Biden administration’s defense department to rescind a policy of leave and expense reimbursement for service members and their dependents traveling for abortions.
I can only assume this is for bases that don’t have the means to just do it themselves. I was a surgical tech in the Air Force, and every hospital I was stationed at provided abortion services.
The VA does, too.
Cuz abortion services ARE FUCKING HEALTHCARE. You want to destroy a service member’s mission readiness? Give them a kid they can’t support.
You don’t want to pay service members to travel for abortions? Fine. Fine. Equip and staff every single military base with an OBGYN clinic w/ surgical capabilities. Don’t want to give them med leave to recover from an abortion? Fucking FINE. Schedule a uteroscopy and biopsy along with it so we can throw in a cancer screen, nab any polyps, ablate any endometriosis, etc; and give them extra leave for those, cuz damn was that one a bleeder! She’ll need extra time to recover for sure!!
Then declare a state of emergency in the Y’all Qaeda infested regions of the US on the basis of denied healthcare leading to the current and worsening humanitarian crisis; and in doing so, enabling the VA to provide abortion services to non-veterans under section §1784 of title 38, United States Code.
This dystopian GOP shit is maddening. We need to stop trying to argue with it, and start finding ways to just work around it. Fuck em.
The problem with that is that it may have been legal at the place it was done, but states would absolutely place police next door to wait for those women to come out. They already have laws that criminalize women who go out of state
How is that legal? I thought states can only enforce laws that are broken in their own jurisdiction? Interstate would make it a federal matter, no? (In regards to women going out of state)
It’s almost certainly unconstitutional, but there’s not specific case law so it has to be litigated to know for sure. So there needs to be people charged who have the means and willingness to go through several years of trials and appeals. And they have to maintain that motivation for a long time - some cases drag on for a decade or longer.
The point isn’t to make it illegal forever, it’s to scare people and organizations without the resources to engage in a legal fight to stop supporting interstate care for the next three or five or ten years.
Then we need to do the short term solution while we work on the long term solution. I’m kind of sick of one side trying to keep it a fair fight. GOP politicians have all shown they don’t care about that and will employ any means necessary to get their policies enacted while doing everything they can to disrupt the policies on the other side
Trump is obviously an agent of Putin, he is not even hiding it any more. Putin probably has videos of Trump abusing minors on Epstein island or something similarly compromising.
No it’s worse than this. If it were based upon compromising info, Trump would be an UNWILLING participant. He is so invested in the Russian oligarchy money laundering for decades that he is a WILLING participant. He BELIEVES they are on the same team.
These two aren’t even mutually exclusive. An idiot like Trump, upon getting blackmailed, could probably convince himself that the other guy would never release his secrets because they’re such good friends.
doesn’t the Bible specifically warn about people like Trump?
For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.
Yes, but it doesn’t matter, these people don’t read the Bible.
They do read the Bible though, at least in my experience. I’ve gone to a number of different churches, Evangelical and otherwise, and the Evangelical or otherwise Calvinist folks were the ones that read the Bible the most and in the most detail — but perhaps also the ones who came to horrible conclusions the most often. Like that you should shine the light of Christ into the world by blocking women for promotion at your job, because 1 Tim 2:12 says that Paul does not permit them to have authority over men. (Real example, if possibly the worst one I’ve seen.) Maybe my experience is not representative, but I don’t think the problem is primarily that Evangelicals don’t read the Bible.
I have a long theory about some of the ways that Evangelicalism distorts Scripture, but one root of the issue is that (IMHO) Scripture was written by humans, reflects the biases of the authors and their societies, and has a lot of horrible things in it. If you take a sola scriptura view and then read it through a lens that’s been cultivated over years to reinforce patriarchy and supremacy (see e.g. Manifest Destiny, the curse of Ham, etc) then you will end up absorbing the genocidal and supremacist bits and not the hospitable and altruistic bits.
For them, it’s just an excuse to do whatever it is they’re doing.
For sure. People don’t want to repent. They want to find justifications for what they were already doing, or planning to do.
If you take a sola scriptura view and then read it through a lens that’s been cultivated over years to reinforce patriarchy and supremacy (see e.g. Manifest Destiny, the curse of Ham, etc) then you will end up absorbing the genocidal and supremacist bits and not the hospitable and altruistic bits.
Agreed, over the years I’ve come to firmly believe the root cause of all the Christian extremism we have nowadays is the literal interpretation of the scripture by Evangelicals. When you take every word of that book as law and you refuse to acknowledge some of it shouldn’t be relevant anymore, you end with some really absurd worldviews and beliefs. Especially in those small churches without affiliation to some larger religious body, without some authority dictating what is acceptable and what isn’t, the insanity runs amok.
This is something I admire in the Catholic church, their willingness to reinterpret the Bible to current circumstances, they get a lot of flak (deservedly so) for some things, but at least they have that going for them.
In the case of the creator of the video, they literally don’t.
The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, characterizes himself as Christian and a man of faith but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church.
Source, which then links to a video also on the NYTimes.
Don’t think so in this case - we were all expecting him to be assassinated somehow, and the old ‘sushi dinner with a nice cup of tea after’ wasn’t very likely. Should have had a sweepstake on his life expectancy - guessing 60 days would have been pretty impressive.
This post is on lemmy.ml, an instance whose owner decided to continue federating with lemmygrad.ml for… reasons. Go visit lemmygrad.ml and you’ll understand why.
I really wish Lemmy supported defederation of instances by individual users (so I’d auto-block anything that came from lemmygrad or its users for any reason). I have been threatened with death by communists enough and just want to be left alone to my far-left-but-not-communist devices.
I’d love that, but as I said elsewhere I have communities I run and a post history. Are we talking about me just making myself a mod elsewhere and cutting all my post histories? I mean, it’s not the end of the world, but it’d be nice to keep my post histories coherent.
I see it all over Lemmy unfortunately. I think it is because Lemmy is still relatively fringe and it is where lots of pro communism communities emerged. Normally, I find it actually pretty refreshing to see more left wing stuff but the pro China (or at least the kneejerk reactions to anything anti China) to be exhausting.
To be fair, I used to see a lot of it on Reddit as well. I think they are just a bigger proportion percentage wise on Lemmy so you see much more of it.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. There are a lot of pro-China comments that are just… Well they either drank the kool-aid or are dishing it out. Especially when it comes to social policies.
On the other hand, China has been making significant technological accomplishments that you just don’t hear about in Western media. They’ve made a lot of advancements in spaceflight and manufacturing processes that humanity as a whole could benefit from if we were more cooperative. And that’s not even mentioning Nuclear Power.
China is WAY ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to new nuclear power. They’re the only ones with Gen 4 reactors, the only ones working on Thorium reactors, and are on track to build over 100 new nuclear plants over the next few years. China is to nuclear power as the US is to weapons; sure other countries might be tinkering with some stuff, but there’s really no comparison when they’re doing more than the rest of the world combined.
I wish there were more unbiased sources. Unfortunately, there’s usually only one of two sides. Either you get news from China which usually boils down to “We’re amazing and nothing we do is ever bad or wrong. Anyone saying otherwise is just lying because they’re jealous/afraid of our wild success!” Or you get news from the US/West that’s basically “China is a totalitarian poo-country that’s on the verge of collapse. They contribute nothing to global advancement and the only thing they’re good for is making cheap, poor quality, crap.”
I guess you would have to sift the scientific literature to get a general idea. It would be the least biased source. Being totalitarian really helps with nuclear. Just look at what Germany has been up to.
What’s with all the conspiracy nutcases here? The fucking Uighur genocide…
… is mostly sourced from a far right German nationalist who’s been proven to mistranslate Chinese documents over and over again, and claims that God gave him a mission to destroy China.
… has been debunked by many Muslim countries visiting China to investigate
… is a media narrative connected to the US funding radical Islamic groups to destabilize east turkestan and failing miserably as the Chinese response was mostly improving economic conditions and funding uyghur cultural programs which actually is effective at deradicalization, which is what the US could have done in Iraq in Afghanistan if they were over there for altruistic or mutually beneficial reasons and not just to extract oil and opium while making some defense contractors very rich.
I’d appreciate sources on these points, please. I don’t trust western media blindly, but I also recognize that China has its own propaganda machine (as does every state). I’d like to learn more, but would need links for topics about which I’m unfamiliar else I’ll only be able to read the western media I mentioned above.
You can look up a bunch of articles on uyghurs and follow the links for claims. They almost always at some point come back to “Zenz says” with a sprinkle of radio free asia, which is a front for the state department charitably, and a front for the CIA uncharitably. This tactic of circuitous citation was also used when the US wanted to make people believe that Iraq had WMDs.
Here is a right wing anti-china article that talks about 14 different Muslim countries investigating, claiming without any proof that it is all staged. www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/…/2003792883
I dont have a source on reducing poverty decreasing radicalization but Im guessing you’d agree people with a secure economic future are less likely to throw their lives away. If you disagree I can go find some sources.
Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.
The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.
If you are left with any questions while looking at the other comments, I’m sure they’d be happy to explain but if they don’t I also would be. I just don’t want to fill your inbox with redundant information.
Lots of mainstream western racists are now here after reddit migration. It’s a good reminder of just how deranged people who guzzle western propaganda all day are.
It seems to be a much greater conspiracy to claim that there is a genocide going on over a huge population concentrated in the region without producing a massive refugee crisis like we saw with other genocides (e.g. the Holocaust) and with a massive dearth of photo/video evidence despite most young people in China having a VPN on their phones.
Exactly, if we look at an actual genocidal situation then we have to look no further than Afghanistan where US has been massacring people for the past two decades and created 2.6 million refugees in the process www.unhcr.org/countries/afghanistan
If anything remotely like what the west claims was happening in Xinjiang then we’d see a huge flood of refugees in the neighbouring countries.
It differs from sub to sub but the bigger and more political the stronger the imperial narrative is enforced.
r/worldnews is one of the worst, and honestly suspect its astroturf and run by assets or a derivative of an imperial institution (council on foreign relation, think tanks, the likes)
I legitimately don’t understand why Leninists are so keen on making folk heroes out of tyrants. Why exert the energy to defend this shit instead of learning from it and building a better class of socialist??
I’ll listen to western leftists when we actually take power and have to learn to use it to defend ourselves, currently we have a big fat 0 in the wins department
Not in the Square itself, which was the scene of many absurd claims by defectors, like the “tanks crushing people to wash them down the gutters” cartoon bullshit.
I legitimately don’t understand why Leninists are so keen on making folk heroes out of tyrants.
What a sentence! You’re jumping to conclusions all over the place!
You’re conflating information with a desire to “make folk heroes out of tyrants”, trying to denormalise a desire to understand what was actually happening.
There was bloodshed but not on the Tienanmen square and the conditions are less clear than you believe
It is obvious that most peoples idea of what happened is heavily influenced by propaganda, I know mine was.
If you could stop sabotaging efforts to cut through the disinformation that would be great thanks
Also: “They are tyrants” thanks I’ll defer judgement as long as the evidence you present us with turns out to be propaganda, there are other “tyrannical governments” much more in reach
A big part of my gripe here is precisely the idea that one can engage in critical analysis of statecraft, while hand waving away inconvenient statecraft. Or worse - supporting broad censorship of inconvenient statecraft.
A big part of my gripe here is precisely the idea that one can engage in critical analysis of statecraft, while hand waving away inconvenient statecraft. Or worse - supporting broad censorship of inconvenient statecraft.
I have no idea what that sentence is supposed to mean.
My gripe here is that nobody can have an informed opinion on foreign policy if they do not acknowledge the tons of pro US propaganda that surround them on EVERY issue in this category and dominate most of it.
It is important to call you out on your power-serving statements.
You tried to push critical thought out of the overton window when you painted it a kind of sacrilege (“make folk heroes out of tyrants”) and everyone engaging in it someone that needs to be shunned by society (a “tankie”).
Mind you all without addressing, let alone contesting, the facts.
With all due respect: As long as your actions are indistinguishable from those of a US intelligence social media asset, don’t expect any good will engagement.
Have an open mind and start to reflect a little more
But I am fine criticizing the US and acknowledging US propaganda. I do it all the time. You are the one dismissing anything which doesn’t align with a very narrow ML head-cannon as indicative of being a US intelligence asset. And you are telling me to have an open mind?
Buddy, there is an entire world of socialist thought and literature which diverges from and challenges ML dogma. Either you are unaware of this, or you are so narrow minded that you see anything outside of that script as some monolithic enemy.
Call me buddy all you want but it doesn’t change the fact that you are not good at making sense
Why are you jumping to conclusions so weirdly?
Case in point that complete second half is you responding to conclusions you’ve drawn up in your head. Re-read this thread, nowhere is it ever about ML or socialism. You think its accurate to call me ML because…?
This thread is about US propaganda on reddit, which I characterized by posting a fact that is affected by it (with the goal of fabricating consent for military action against another country).
Your mind is closed AF when you equate my mention of that with being a “LEniNisT tyRanT LoVEr”
You are the one dismissing anything which doesn’t align with a very narrow ML head-cannon as indicative of being a US intelligence asset
An obviously completly untruthful rendition of my statement. I phrased it carefully so if you’d do me the favor and try harder to understand it.
I would appreciate it if you could refrain from purposefully misrepresenting my statements as you have done in every one of your comments so far
Imagine thinking there are paid astroturfers on a tiny niche platform with a few thousand users. We have some utterly insane people here after reddit migration.
Imagine thinking governments, fascists and PR agencies wouldn’t migrate to wherever people choose to hang out and continue their decades-long campaign to brainwash people into believing whatever is convenient for them.
I see you don’t understand the concept of niches. Governments, fascists, and PR agencies are going to spend their effort where it makes the most impact. Only a brainwashed person couldn’t comprehend that people could legitimately disagree with their world view, and anybody who thinks different from them must therefore be a paid troll.
If you don’t like it here then feel free to go somewhere else. Lemmy was a community of sane people who were capable of having civilized discussion, and then a bunch of reddit chuds flooded here and started acting like you own the place. Get over yourself.
Bahaha look at you. “Everyone who disagrees with me is a bootlicker/troll/westerner.”
Edit for the bootlicking troll below: Ahem A straw man fallacy is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
You don’t understand what a straw man is.
You’re really bad at this. You even tried to copy my comment and failed miserably! Congratulations, you’re stupid in two languages!
Most socialists are people in the global south. Their projects that “tankies” support are actually being done. Most of this “you’re a tankie” shit stems from western chauvinist white man’s burden shit. Call us when you’ve done a successful socialist revolution, until then we’re going to be emulating the ideologies of successful socialist projects.
Edit: because lol “the US did a revolution” , read “the counter revolution of 1776”
So engaging in violence is the determining factor for determining who can have opinions?
That’s great news, because Marx drew pretty heavily from the French and US revolutions when discussing his own revolutionary framework. Where do I pick up my badge?
So engaging in violence is the determining factor for determining who can have opinions?
No, you are free to engage in revolutionary violence that results in a socialist society with a communist ruling party or elect your way into a socialist society with a communist ruling party. Plenty of socialists did the latter, they just didn’t live for long. If you do that I’ll gladly listen to you.
Wow that kind of seems like a very narrow view of who can have a voice. It seems to exclude any socialist tradition which is skeptical of revolutionary praxis, or any statecraft which is not based on democratic centralism. Do I have that correct? You only find Orthodoxy and Leninism valid and are not interested in any forms of libertarian or democratic socialism?
Do you think only the successful revolutions have been orthodox marxist or orthodox ML?
You are free to follow the example of libertarian socialists and electoral socialists, but I’d prefer if you didn’t get yourself killed. Why do you only like ideologies that aren’t successful?
Nah, this shit is broken on mobile and I can’t see the context of my own comments for some reason. Sometimes when I hit context it shows me random comments under the same parent.
But bro you are on the same website having the same conversation I am lmao.
“Every person who doesn’t participate in Sinophobi is paid off by the Chinese government”
Like, really? You actually believe that? Was 911 an inside job? How hot DOES jet fuel get??? Is Q-anon real? Is the earth flat?
If you’ve ever debunked a conspiracy theory, you should reconsider the idea that maybe, just maybe, not everyone hates China. It’s probably more likely than you think…
Edit: And then they edited their comment to be more defensive instead. Perfect.
Can you provide even circumstantial evidence of people like myself being paid, or are you resorting to unhinged conspiracy theories to explain people vociferously disagreeing with you?
It literally wouldn’t even matter, you’ll just deny it and refuse to concede even the most minor of points because for you, debate is not a means to find truth, it’s a power play. We’ve all seen it countless times. We know your game, your patterns of behavior, and since you do not want to play fairly because you’ll know you’ll lose, you don’t get to play at all. You don’t get to participate in discussions with us, especially not me. You’re isolated to your cult now. I hope you find happiness in choosing genocide.
Pardon me, I thought you were responding to a different comment (I was replying in my inbox to many different disputes). Seeing the actual context, this is ridiculous. You accuse me of being a paid actor and then say that you have no reason to present evidence of the accusation?
Let us imagine that I was a paid actor and would behave exactly as you expect. Aren’t there other people reading the conversation? Wouldn’t it be worth proving to them that you aren’t just going on paranoid rants because your ideology has no way to deal with the concept of westerners freely disagreeing with you on these issues?
Man it’s almost like the vast majority of tourists stick to coastal cities and big urban areas where the Uighur population isn’t and not the vast desert that these camps and people’s exist in.
Wait, do you think there aren’t people who tour Muslim cultural sites, of which there are many? Do you not think that anyone ever goes to interior spots? In the US, the rocky mountains and the Appalachians are both used a lot for tourism.
Do you think there aren’t uyghurs in the cities in the region?
It sounds like you dont know anything about the situation and are trying to justify already held beliefs by making rhetoric that doesn’t really apply to the reality of the situation.
Buddy, this was incredibly easy to search. The Uyghur population mainly lives in Xinjiang, composed primarily of the Gobi desert. While somewhat popular with domestic travel, it is at the bottom of the list for international travel statistics. This is also something you can very easily hide in the desert. You act like reeducation camps have to be placed next to cities. You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either. I know more about the situation than you, as evident by your many replies that spout nothing and don’t cover your own base. You’ve been overtaken by propaganda, you should educate yourself and the many many problems the Uyghur population is currently facing from China.
You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either.
Firstly, there is much more restriction on tourist movement in the DPRK for a litany of reasons, mostly pertaining to national security. Tourists in Xinjiang can move pretty freely, though if they are going all over the place they will cumulatively need to pass through many checkpoints.
Secondly, “work camps” here is what people call prison labor in Bad Country. The DPRK has prisons, certainly, and we can have discussions about penal labor, but it’s much less notable than people pretend and much less secretive as well.
Thirdly, “work camps” are not remotely comparable to committing genocide against one tenth of the entire population of the region, which is the claim that was popularly made against Xinjiang before it got walked back to “cultural genocide”.
Incredibly easy to search for this. Prison labour in America through the 13th amendment is certainly wrong but nowhere near what North Korea does. Look up Yeonmi Park and her story. A North Korean defector, she would know what happens when people fail to please Kim Jong Un. Entire generations of families are taken and worked to death, from pretty crimes like burglary to the heinous like not being sad enough when dear leader dies. Attempting to equivocate the two disproves that theory.
Second, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocideLike come on there’s so much documented evidence of this atrocity. I don’t trust death rates on either side, but if the estimation of 1mil+ Uyghurs are in detainment camps, that’s still about 10% of the entire people’s being here for political reasons. Whether it’s a human genocide or cultural genocide, its still wrong and immoral being spear headed by an evil totalitarian regime.
Your comment got removed before I saw it. If you’d like to give it another shot, I guess maybe check the modlog to see what rule you broke and reword it a little.
It’s nice to know there are cool people on blahaj zone. Near the start of the reddit migration I saw that there was a bit of a red scare going on there. Are things a bit better now?
Edit: I looked up that user’s comment in the modlog a yeesh, they really went whole-hog with Park’s spiel. As an aside, people say some really unhinged shit, like since then there was another comment about how the only thing to do about the DPRK is invade and diplomacy is a waste of time.
A decent TLDR: The article argues that anti-Chinese propaganda spread by the U.S. and Western media is fueling racist sentiment. Claims of mass detention of Uyghurs are based on flawed studies and sources like Adrian Zenz, a far-right Christian fundamentalist. Atrocity propaganda is a common tactic used by the U.S. to justify wars. The U.S. is threatened by China’s economic rise and technological progress, so it is trying to portray China negatively and prepare public opinion for a potential conflict. However, most of the world sees China positively and as an economic opportunity, making a new Cold War against China unlikely to succeed
In short, a lot of information about China that has come out of Western news media has been proven to be based on known biased sources, known anit-China rhetoric, and/or outright lies. It’s difficult to prove/disprove of any information specifically, that takes time and reporting, but a lot of people see the anti-China pattern in BBC reporting, and tend to dismiss it because of known history.
I think this flies a bit too far in the other direction. China is totalitarian. It is not a democracy. It is also increasingly antagonizing nations abroad. I think it is valid to consider it a threat if you are any other nation, period.
So… No, it’s not like Russia at all. But that nuance is too long for me to explain right now. Short answer is that Russia is capitalist, and China is 50/50 capitalist/socialist, depending on definitions, and yeah a lot of nuance.
But China is run by the people, their authoritarian politics keeps their billionaires and induatry in check. Their local politics is a negotiation with the national politics.
And… How exactly is China antagonizing nations abroad? Because a lot of countries are choosing to work with China because they AREN’T antagonizing them as much as America and Europe. So… The reality is the opposite.
I mean, if you haven’t been there or don’t know anyone from there you could pretend they are a democracy, but they are authoritarian like Russia is authoritarian. Long term they will seek a wider swath to be authoritarian over.
Newsflash, you can find people in any country who don’t like their government, and you’ll obviously see these people over represented in the population that left the country. The fallacy of your argument is to conclude that the people you know hold the opinion of the majority of people in China. I made plenty of friends who from China in university, and most of them went back after graduating. Vast majority of people in China support their government and are proud of their country. Even western polling admits this.
You used so many words to tell us that you don’t know anything about Chinese political system and expose yourself as being confidently wrong. Maybe spend some time educating yourself instead of flaunting your ignorance in public.
If you thought that was “so many words” reality is too complicated for you.
“The Government of the People’s Republic of China is a unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party authoritarian political system under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
The people who actually live in China consider their democracy to work far better than pretty much any western shithole country that calls itself a democracy and have consistently higher satisfaction with their government because unlike in the west they see it working in their interest.
Thinking that the number of parties is a measure of democracy demonstrates an infantile understanding of the concept. Democracy is a government that works in the interest of the majority and is held accountable by the majority. Procedural democracies such as seen in the west demonstrably produce terrible results in practice. As a recent study of US shows, the system does not actually work in a democratic fashion
If Taiwan is its own nation, they should really specify that in their constitution instead of claiming to be the rightful government of all of China and Mongolia.
That claim is mutually exclusive with Taiwan being “its own nation” distinct from China. It is definitionally its own government, but it claims to be a superset of the nation of China (because of also claiming Mongolia and some smaller territories). Nations are a social construct based on historical group identities, so the PRC is the same nation as the ROC was back when the ROC controlled the mainland. The ROC claims to still be that nation (plus Mongolia) which the PRC currently administers.
1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn’t matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.
In the end they all answer to the whims of the central government, which can change or remove and rights and responsibilities autonomous regions within China have.
So what I’m hearing is it doesn’t matter if you’re ignorant about the way China works because the US media told you Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything and you believed them. Got it.
No, Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything he wants to. It doesn’t matter if you technically control something you will always end up doing the bidding of Xi or you will disappear. From reading your replies, it’s evident you have fallen for Chinese propaganda and now simp for an evil dictator and totalitarian regimes. Got it.
1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn’t matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.
Do you know what a legislative body is? Anglophones are almost all educated on “executive, legislative, judicial” aren’t they? Xi is the leader of the Executive branch in China, not the Legislative or Judicial.
You do know what a dictator is right? You can call yourself the head of this and that and have cronies technically control the rest, but it’s not fooling anyone slightly smarter than the average microwave. It’s inherently evident you do Xi Xinpings bidding no matter where you are placed or you will be replaced. Not a hard concept, even someone like you can understand.
Such fierce condescension and yet you’re the one pushing a children’s story. All these hundreds and thousands of representatives, all the millions of Party members, are just puppets under the Bad Guy’s control. There was no violence to install him, the existing government put him there (since I assume you don’t endorse Chinese elections) and then he played an Uno Reverse and now they are all an extension of him, with all of Chinese politics then becoming merely being a matter of how much people chaff under the collars and fetters he fixes to them. When politicians fight each other? When journalists fire back and forth in the papers? When policy goes one way and then pivots? It’s all just a Potemkin Village with a few hundred million people as the staff.
So no, “someone like me” cannot understand how such a thing could exist outside of a children’s cartoon or a similar sort of story told to an audience that is very much suspending its disbelief.
How in went way is that a children’s story. It’s incredibly easy to understand like a children’s story but is very real, so real you can see it happening in real time. Your idea of China is more like a children’s fairytale rather than the reality it currently is.
I do not support Chinese elections, same way I do not support Russian or North Korean elections. These are also similar to children’s stories.
On your next point, politicians can argue all they want but in the end they will fall in line. Similar to journalists, who may I remind you are often targeted as political prisoners to be sent to reeducation camps. Also, yes, policy changes, people change their minds or gain retrospection on what doesn’t work and pivot, it happens often. For example, China’s Great Leap Forward, which really lead to mass starvation and steel barely useable. Then Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi reversed these policies and ended the great Chinese famine. Then Mao changing his mind again and having both of them thrown into reeducation camps, Shaoqi would die.
Your “no u” line about how actually I am telling children’s stories doesn’t work as well as you think it does. The crux of my case is that these states aren’t monoliths and potemkin villages but actually have complex internal politics where people of varying viewpoints are able to openly disagree and protest, as is observably true in these countries! Not everyone in the Russian legislature supports the war, and they generally did okay with this position. There are all sorts of left/right debates in China among various politicians and journalists and so on. To call this kabuki theater or totally inconsequential without any actual evidence is silly.
Also your timeline is bad. The Great Famine ended circa '61 and the Cultural Revolution began in '66. The Cultural Revolution certainly had its issues, but it didn’t cause a famine. Deng did end the Cultural Revolution, sort of, but only after Mao’s death and the purging of the Gang of Four (prior to Deng’s re-ascent).
As an aside, I don’t think Deng was ever imprisoned in connection to the Cultural Revolution, though he was half-purged and assigned to menial duties in one case and basically paid leave in another. It’s quite interesting how pissed Mao and his clique were at Deng and yet they held their hand, relatively speaking. Wasn’t it supposed to be a death sentence to oppose Mao, as the liberals tell it? Of course, Mao took pride in trying to rehabilitate people (even the last Chinese Emperor and captured Japanese soldiers!), so he would in almost all cases resist having someone killed or left to rot in prison.
There’s a wild bias in western media in trying to make a Khrushchev out of Deng, but Deng himself vociferously refuted those comparisons while in office, calling Khrushchev a fool, a traitor, and so on, and saying that being compared to Khrushchev was an insult (which is true).
I understand you think Xi Xinping is very good at kung fu because he’s Chinese, so there’s nothing anyone can do to stop his Hokuto Shinken, but China actually has over a milliard Chinese people, and they’re equally Chinese, so their Kung Fu should be just as strong. Hope this helps =)
We put a lot of stock in personal stories, but we also pay a lot for incriminating evidence against China.
Do you know about the 1 child policy (That was recently ended?) And how that affects this? Because I actually looked into it. But I bet an online personality won’t change your mind. So I won’t even bother.
Remember America didn’t forcefully sterilize anyone. We just straight up bombed them, raped them, and shot them.
Or the fact we literally have drone and camera footage of mass arrests. I’m not one to view Vice these days, but one of their reporters went there and saw some rather suggestive situations as well.
After Trump was so nice (dumb) enough to showcase just how clear US satellite photos are these days, one has to question why some here are so quick to cry in China’s defense. Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?
I’m sure some pro-Chinese twit will come rushing in with some whataboutism or a crack on US history, as if that excuses things.
Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?
You’re projecting. China exempted ethnic minorities from the one child policy, that is how anti “han supremacist”(which itself is just white supremacist projection) they are.
Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?
After China followed the diplomatic agreement it had with Britain for decades to handle the transition from Hong Kong being a British colony back to it being under the jurisdiction of its own nation (as a Special Autonomous Region exempted, like other such regions, from a great portion of federal law), now that means China will do ethnic cleansing? Most of Hong Kong supports the mainland, but that falls very much along class lines. The protestors you saw on western news 24/7 for a while were mostly members of wealthier families who don’t represent the majority.
I have mixed feelings about the protest itself in that I think back when it was more fragmented there were surely meaningful segments that weren’t concerned about an extremely normal (but now withdrawn anyway) extradition law, but once it became the Five Demands and begging for their white colonizers to return, the highest credit I can give them is that they still were at least dignified enough to turn away Azov fascists who visited them.
I mean the nice thing about the internet is that you can at least find videos documenting what the article claims. I mean sure… it could all just be propaganda. But somehow there is a little much of it from so many different sources.
You say this and yet, what videos? How many have you actually watched vs assumed were there vs read the headline? I’ve seen a bunch of photos and videos and all of them were either hoaxes (calling normal buildings camps), ridiculous misunderstandings (like saying the screeching of brakes was screaming victims), or gross misrepresentations (e.g. normal prison transfers being a slate of new genocide victims). But if you just skim through what just so happens to trend on Reddit, you’ll see atrocity after atrocity and not stick around long enough to see the retraction, or the people in the comments debunking it, and so on.
There’s a reason neoliberal outlets walked their claims back to “cultural genocide” over time, because there was nothing there except the testimony of like three people from a region of 15 million.
So that is one of the things worth considering, but that hypothesis isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card and needs to be weighed against other factors like the variety of sources and people involved, their history and material interests, etc.
Yes, I am saying things need to be scrutinized instead of just taken at face value if they comport with our prejudices, I apologize if that takes the wind out of your sails, but blind faith won’t lead you to good conclusions.
Apparently there is a PRC smear campaign against Adrian Zenz - mandiant.com/…/pro-prc-information-operations-cam…, including by creating what Mandiant describes as what they “suspect to be at least three fabricated letters based on obvious grammatical errors and typos” to smear him - so I’d take anything that is ad hominem attacks against him rather than debating his actual work with a grain of salt.
However, even if you don’t accept his writings, there are plenty of other people who have done credible research into the plight of the Uyghur people - e.g. resources contributed to xjdp.aspi.org.au, such as articles like this one by Gene A. Bunin: livingotherwise.com/…/the-elephant-in-the-xuar-ii….
Why would ASPI do credible research into the ethnic minorities in China? Who are ASPI again? Actually, what’s ASPI’s own track record of being directly responsible for systematic murder of muslims?
Hilton, 43, accused the industry, which is worth billions of dollars, of being more interested in making money than protecting and caring for the vulnerable children it is responsible for.
At which point the Republicans present smiled, nodded, and made mental notes to check their investment portfolios.
“Vulnerable children you say? Ah… uh Ms. Hilton, you do know the presidential candidate for our party ran the miss teen USA pageant?
Oh yes he even bragged about how much he liked to walk into the girls dressing room and how they (us republicans now) just LET him do that cause he is famous you know…
Tell you what let me introduce you to my colleague Matt Gaetz he’s offered to help any of your younger friends still facing these terrible circumstances…”
I bet that’s part of why she’s in this situation, rich people lost money. Lots of corrupt government officials also want the spotlight to stay on her. I mean of course in addition to the fact that she did ruin many people’s lives…
“I sentence to you ten years, with 9 years 360 days credit for time served, and a $25 fine. Your incarceration shall consist of checking in once weekly via Zoom.”
It takes days or weeks for the polonium to kick in. He might look to be in the clear for now, but don’t count all your chickens before they get defenestrated.
Someone tell me how to feel! Do I hate this or like this!?
edit: I have been told to like this, and thus… I do.
Disclaimer: please ignore my negative initial vote score, as I have the privilege of being bot-downvoted by CCP sympathizers because of comments on this post lemmy.world/post/2338419, there is also the possibility that I’m just an asshole.
It’s a news organisation, so it’s okay. We definitely want more journalists and news organisations in the Fediverse. I’d much rather have them directly on mastodon than the million different bird.tld mirrors.
yes, unless it reports on the Iraq war and use ‘embedded’ journalists or reports on the Syria war and instead of sending journalists on the ground, just reprints white house memos or reporting on lgbt issues and just parrots gender critical views. But apart from that, it’s integrity is 100%, or just the bar is too low these days, idk ;(
Me anytime I do anything that sometimes gets anyone slightly upset
Exactly my thoughts.
p.s. You can quote using the “>” (greater than) symbol at the beginning of the line.
Disclaimer: please ignore my negative initial vote score, as I have the privilege of being bot-downvoted by CCP sympathizers because of comments on this post lemmy.world/post/2338419, there is also the possibility that I’m just an asshole.
Disclaimer: please ignore my initial negative vote score, as I have the privilege of being bot-downvoted by CCP sympathizers because of comments on this post lemmy.world/post/2338419, there is also the possibility that I’m just an asshole.
You can manually do a quote block the same as on reddit, just put a right-chevron (I don’t know how to type it without it triggering quote, mine is the same key as “.”) directly before the text
Just like on reddit, the escape character is a . You can easily remember this by thinking of all the shrug emoticons that were missing their arm, like so: ¯_(ツ)_/¯ because the backslash wasn’t itself escaped.
So, if you want to type a character that normally results in formatting, precede it with a blackslash.
*checks notes* results in checks notes instead of checks notes.
Although there’s not a general karma score on your profile, seeing a post heavily downvoted tends to make people disregard it… I assume it’s the intention, that or to make the user feel unhappy / harried and close their profile
Maybe, but we aren’t at the critical mass where downvotes posts and comments are routinely hidden. People will see downvoted content and interact with it.
You are also missing that the other site used karma as a way to judge if an account should be allowed to talk more. I had enough karma there so that I stopped getting the “you’re commenting too much” pause when commenting a lot. Some subs also used minimum karma points as a way to judge if someone was a troll or not. That doesn’t exist here.
I think it depends on what sort of content is posted. If it’s mostly promotional stuff some people may feel that it doesn’t fit the vibe of Mastodon. If it’s thought-provoking content (especially journalism) then it will be a win. Either way, having The BBC on Mastodon seems like a big deal, to me, and maybe it will induce other journalists to explore the fediverse.
Literally read the link above. They mention the issues of nitrogen oxides exponentionally fucking up the atmosphere when burned at high altitude, but they they totally leave that out when calculating only co2 in the conclusion
bbc.co.uk
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