Didn’t know these kinds of people existed until I showed up here. They must have been hiding on reddit or something it’s insane how braindead these people are.
Mostly they got banned wherever they congregated on Reddit. Not knowing they existed seems like a significant oversight, but to be expected with the way that China is depicted to you.
I didn’t realize people like legitimately fell for such obvious lies from an authoritarian government. I can understand closed of citizens inside the country but people with access to so much I formation that prooces otherwise and yet they cling to a totalitarian regimes commiting genocide. It’s sad honestly.
And yet surely these people must have a reason to believe it, don’t they? Even if one assumes they are wrong, this doesn’t just come from nowhere, it must have some cause to seem reasonable to them, right? They are like you, thinking human beings, and no progress can be made in understanding the disagreement if you start from them being, in so many words, intellectually inferior to you.
The beliefs of Marxism / Leninism are fairly noble, but never once in the history of them or any of their offshoots (i.e communism / socialism) have they ever worked. In the end the revolutions all colapse into themselves and turn into authoritarian capitalist regimes. China has been an authoritarian government since the beginning and is run by an evil dictator.
The beliefs of Marxism / Leninism . . . or any of their offshoots (i.e communism / socialism)
I suppose it’s just a matter of syntax, but I first read this as a very silly statement wherein “communism” is an offshoot of “Marxism / Leninism”.
Anyway, don’t worry, I’m familiar with the “real Marxism has never been tried!” line that some people have for various reasons, but I a) can’t see how this is particularly useful as a distinction compared to other states and b) don’t think this remotely answers my question.
I think you and I both know why the so-called marxists who say “real Marxism has never been tried” exist, or at least our beliefs on the matter are a close enough parallel that it’s not a very enticing discussion, but what you have failed to do is explain the basic prompt of why a westerner would support a state like China.
I can give an internally-consistent answer for these groups and yourself coming to their beliefs: You all live to varying degrees in a bubble of western Discourse and pseudo-historical mythmaking.
The “never been tried” Marxist believes everything the State Department says about its enemies but still believes in some sort of ever-failing communism like a good little Trot because they are, for the time being and in part motivated by their social position, appalled by what capitalism has wrought even in the imperial core and want something better even if they struggle to conceive what that could be in practical terms, since every success of socialism has been transmuted into an ultimate failure. Nonetheless, “there must be an alternative,” and that possibility, however hazy, is worth fighting for over the corrupt establishment.
The liberal believes everything the State Department says about its enemies and comes to the reasonable conclusion (if we assume the State Department is honest) that socialism has failed its many chances and therefore “there is no alternative”. They are more likely to have a higher social position than the previous group because it is much easier to say capitalism works when it works for you.
The “tankie” is typically the worst off of the three groups in social position, with long term prospects that look pretty grim, and this has pushed them into a desperation to find a way to improve their prospects since they can’t afford a hazy future and communalist circle-jerking but the invisible hand of the free market would crush them even faster, so they do something that these other groups are not driven to, which is some level of serious research, and by this means they were able to accept that the State Department lies as often as it speaks and that they have been born into the slightly unnerving position of being nestled in the imperial core as the empire runs roughshod over as much of the world as it can. Whether they simply concluded that states like Russia or Iran were plainly the lesser of two evils for their opposition to NATO, or they found a more extreme position like genuinely believing in the project of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, they were able to develop a framework that gives them a path forward where previously they felt they had none.
Of course, various biographical details can also be vitally important, like being the descendant of defectors vs generic diaspora, or knowing people who are. I’m white as the driven snow, but I know Chinese people from both groups. The “tankie” one didn’t persuade me on very much (though I learned a lot about the Korean War and various elements of the 20th century PRC) but the diaspora descendant taught me things that I still am trying to process, because they made genuinely ridiculous claims (e.g. Mao burning down libraries during the Civil War) that I have not been able to find repeated by even the most ridiculous anti-PRC rag when I search online. There’s a bizarre sort of cult to intergenerational trauma that seems to emerge where stories are embellished and exaggerated over time (deliberately or not) and the truth of these stories cannot be questioned because, in so many words, “it’s their truth.”
I meant it when I said I’m still processing it, because to me it’s in many respects a bizarre behavior even though it’s actually not that hard to explain sociologically (view it like religious trauma and it’s trivially simple). I think there is more to learn from it, but I couldn’t tell you what.
Can’t you guys just stop using Adrian Zens? Is no one else able to make up unhinged nonsense about China? Literally all it takes is for him to adopt a pseudonym and the credibility of the propaganda increases entirely for free.
Adrian Zens is integral to the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
This is honestly pretty dismaying. This isn’t meant as a put down because it is outside of your control but we’ve got to work on investigative literacy as a country if so many people are having a hard time doing simple stuff like this.
How is he so integral? I’ve looked all over their site and at a few of their reports and there’s nothing about it him or his findings? Look, I’m willing to hear people out but I’ve looked and I can’t find anything that backs up what people are claiming here so I don’t think it’s me that needs to work on investigative literacy.
I encourage anyone on the fence about this to do their own research. His Wikipedia article has some interesting points:
"As a result of his work on Xinjiang, Zenz has become a target for coordinated disinformation attacks from pro-Beijing and Chinese state-run media, as well as other state-affiliated entities. Zenz and his work on Xinjiang have been criticized by the Chinese government, which, according to The Globe and Mail, “has called his findings ‘lies’—even when it confirmed them.”
“During an interview with The Daily Telegraph published in May 2021, Zenz defended himself against allegations of fabrication, noting that 95% of documents he has analyzed are publicly available government records.”
Plus his findings have been corroborated by lots of reputable reporters. I’ve seen a lot of claims that people need to stop believing the lies and look at the sources. I’ve done that and not found what they are claiming so what exactly am I missing here?
Yep, I googled it and I encourage everyone else to do it too. There was nothing. I did see a few Chinese sources calling him out as fraud but nothing unbiased. I did see lots of other credible organizations backing up his findings too.
The Wikipedia article was simply a good starting point that I encouraged people to check out. There’s tons of citations in there that back up their points.
Did you find where Adrian was used in each of these articles? Can you tell me the extent that he is relied on by the organization, based on how he is used?
I encourage everyone to look into the links provided and see for yourself what I’m talking about. In the very first link, out of 32 citations provided, Zenz was used 4 times. I’d hardly say his research was a critical part of their research or regardless there’s plenty of other sources provided if you don’t like him as a source. Don’t listen to all the others saying and look for yourself. There’s very little to back up their reasons for dismissing everything as some kind of anti China conspiracy.
That is incredible because I intentionally made them invalid URLs. I get redirect errors when I click on them, and I assume folks who actually bother to click on them should get similar errors.
You should ask yourself why you’re so committed to intellectual dishonesty.
Uhh, what? The links work perfectly fine and are not “invalid”. You do get a redirect notice but that doesn’t make them invalid links?
I’m not the one being intellectually dishonest here, man. I haven’t even accused other people of being dishonest. I’m just saying that I looked into what people have claimed and I can’t see what they are saying. People should check for themselves and I think they’ll see quickly who’s really spreading BS here…
You’re right here actually. Some devices give a redirect warning without letting you go to the site. That’s my bad.
Still, 4 of the 32 links directly reference zenz. If you read all of the links sources however, you will note that they overwhelmingly have zenz somewhere in the citations. This is why I’m not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Because I keep telling you to vet the citations, and when you go to check, you do not properly vet the citations.
This institution is also funded by the NED (through a shell org) which is a US government tool for regime change.
Also, if 1/8th of the citations are directly from a Christian fascist why would you assume the rest are credible? Even following the logic of your shoddy research I really don’t get that.
OK fair enough. I’ll admit that I first didn’t see any connection to Zenz at all, but then I noticed you have to click on each citation individually to see all of the sources (I assumed all the citations would be listed at the bottom so I could just search for his name and when it didn’t pop up I assumed he wasn’t there at all).
I fully admit that I don’t have the time to look through and vet every citation (who does?) and I never claimed I checked everything. People were just claiming that Zenz was the source of all of this info and that was clearly not true based on just a quick check. Lots of this information is corroborated by lots of reputable organizations so I don’t think it is appropriate to just dismiss it all.
I think at least the thing we seem to agree on is that people should do some research into this stuff themselves rather than blindly believe what everyone is shouting. I fully support that. I took a look and what I saw didn’t convince me of the claims people are making here. I encourage everyone else to do the same.
Lots of this information is corroborated by lots of reputable organizations so I don’t think it is appropriate to just dismiss it all.
Except Aria just walked you through how there were no reputable citations for this specific article.
You are assuming that there are plenty of reputable organizations that support this with quality evidence, but Im assuming this is the most in depth you’ve ever gone on looking at sources for claims here and all of them were not trustable.
There is evidence of a crackdown in response to terrorism(the US government funded Islamic extremist groups in the area) and some excesses from that crackdown, but every time a claim rises to the level of genocide, you’re going to go back into Adrian Zenz or the state run media says lala land.
To the best of my research, the counterterrorism program is primarily focused on improving economic prospects and reassuring folks that their culture will be respected. And they have used very heavy handed methods, such as involuntarily throwing people who are only marginally connected to extremists in vocational training centers -where abuses do happen- in order to do the former. And they very much deserve to be criticized from an informed place about that. But you know what, the US would just kill them or black site them, as we’ve seen play out over and over again in the middle east the last 20 years, which just created even more insurgents.
I am this thorough whenever something new comes out because I care about being informed about this as China is the largest socialist project in the world and as a socialist I think its flaws need to be very carefully studied so as not to be emulated.
I’d like to draw attention to how every tankie who commented in this thread actually looked at the sources whereas the liberals mostly read the headline.
Did you really look at the sources? Because the first source in the article links another BBC article (which links to another article) that ultimately sources research from the Uyghur Human Rights Project. That project does not appear to have any connection to Adrian Zenz. So my original question still stands what does Adrian Zenz have to do with this?
You say every tankie who commented actually looked at the sources but, as far as I can tell, they are just parroting propaganda talking points that they are accusing everyone else of falling for.
Look, I get being skeptical of what the West says about China but I don’t think anyone can deny that anything anti China gets quickly astroturfed on Lemmy. I’m seeing lots more knee jerk reactions from tankies that obviously did not read the article and are accusing everyone else of just falling for Western propaganda without doing some real introspection that they are basically just doing the same thing.
Adrian Zens is integral to the Uyghur Human Rights Project. I suppose I don’t do new research, I just follow links until I find something I’ve judged as untrustworthy before. He’s not directly credited as a contributor, but Uyghur Human Rights Project uses him as their source for all their publishing, and invites him to their events.
Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. I couldn’t find anything about him on their site or him being used for any of research that I looked into. Now, I didn’t go over everything so it is possible he’s worked with them in the past but I don’t think that would be a reason to discredit all the work the UHRP.
What am I seeing is anything critical of China getting downvoted and a bunch of people congrating themselves for not falling for the propaganda when I literally looked and could not find anything they were claiming as part of the article.
I encourage anyone seeing all these comments discrediting this story and look into the details yourself. I could not find any evidence for all the claims they are making to discredit this. There has been some good thoughtful discussion and I appreciate that but lots of knee jerk reactions that people not doing proper research when even just a cursory check doesn’t back up what they are claiming.
Anyone reading the above comment, simple Google “Uyghur Human Rights Project Adrian Zenz” and investigate how involved he is with the links on their own website that show up. It will be obvious how full of shit this poster is.
Ctrl F, RFA 7 matches, RFERL 6 matches, radio free 7 matches, uhrp.org to see how many times they source themselves. There are 23 matches but only 19 instances of them using circular sourcing. ASPI 1 match. Jamestown 2 matches. There are some better sources in there, like Human Rights Watch, but the HRW article in question uses Adrian Zenz as their source. The only source I’m seeing quickly that isn’t directly with zero steps of separation tied to a NATO member spy agency or propaganda agency is NY Times.
For the New York Times article though be careful following their Tinyurl link because it goes through a Viglink reroute that is unlikely to be safe. I can’t imagine why else they’d find it appropriate to use a tinyurl link in their paper if not to attack readers. You can use an extractor service. But anyway if you read that article you’ll see that their source is only Uyghur Human Rights Project so it’s a circular citation again. No I don’t check stuff like this every time. But by now we should know that Uyghur Human Rights Project is an untrustworthy front for Adrian Zenz and stop when we encounter it.
That’s not their most recent published work. That was published in Feb 2023 and they released a more recent report on Jul 2023 (and I believe it has less troublesome references but I’ll admit I don’t have the time to go through them all):
Regardless, your point still stands, there’s likely more circular referencing than I originally believed. I’m still not convinced it is as much of a conspiracy as others have claimed, but it is food for thought. I appreciate the less combative tone and a willingness to discuss in good faith.
I’m still not convinced it is as much of a conspiracy as others have claimed, but it is food for thought.
Two things about this:
It doesn’t require “conspiracy” on the scale of dozens of different international organizations conspiring and then working in lock step. What you have is a set of media entities (following the governments who they have a vested interest in getting along with) following their individual interests of publishing bullshit, and when another company publishes bullshit of the same genre you are publishing, there’s a good chance you will find it worthwhile to recycle their reporting (as many do with AP and BBC articles, for example). There is no need for these groups to “conspire” to produce this result, there is only need for common interests that are observably true to us. Circular citations making spurious claims again, say, China is the natural result of media outlets being aligned with an entity like NATO because of a number of factors like funding and access journalism. That’s the market for you.
The view that conspiracy is an epistemic hazard (though it does certainly happen) is correct and important. I encourage you to keep that in mind next time you read an article about North Korea calling basically every observed part of the country a potemkin village, or all the flimsy claims of subterfuge by China when they do things that are normal for other states but blown up into world-domination catastrophizing when the BBC puts it through its very filtered lens.
How could you possibly believe this? Which part of his work do you find well reasoned? Is it the work he does with VoC where he says Covid-19 is a communist weapon? Is it Worthy to Escape where he says that if you abuse women, homosexuals or children, you’re always morally in the right because those actions repel the Antichrist?
I’ve seen people say this, but how? Are any lemmy clients compatible with mastodon in the sense that you can follow people or instances? I thought that was the big draw of kbin, that it combined both.
I mean I’d be more interested in it going the other way, and following a few mastodon accounts on my lemmy app. I’m not on mastodon and don’t care to post there, but it’d be nice to be able to see some select things in my feed.
From a mastodon users point of view a Lemmy user behaves like another Mastodon user. For instance this is what my Lemmy profile looks like from mastodon:
Even though they boost ( e.g. “retweet” ) everything that has been posted to the community. Be it a thread or a new comment.
The big upside of kbin is, that it, as you said, combines micro blogging and news aggregation. While Mastodonusers can interact with lemmy content users on lemmy can only reply to comments posted from Mastodon. We have no real way to send a toot (e.g. “tweet”) to mastodon deliberately.
Only somewhat. Lemmy Communities show up as users when viewed from mastodon, that boost every single post and comment in the community (so browsing it is near impossible, and there is no sorting). Mastodon users can interact with posts (but can’t downvote), and they can post by @-ing the community.
You can’t follow mastodon users or view mastodon posts from Lemmy. I heard kbin had some functionality to do with this tho
I agree in a lot of ways. Lemmy does feel very beta at times. Mastodon does feel much more finished, except for the fact that favorites and boosts don’t federate properly a lot of the time.
But this specifically feels perfectly fine to me. The fact that they’re interoperable at all is more than I’d expect. Lemmy and Mastodon are so different in how they show content that I can’t think of a much better way to do it (other than maybe having communities boost only posts and not comments when seen from mastodon).
How do you think they should be reworked to work better with each other?
I’ve been doing this a lot over on lemmy.world/c/coys. I mostly post directly from my Mastodon account.
Sometimes I have to jump over and use my Lemmy account because, for example, you can’t post links (that I know of) in the same way you can directly on Lemmy.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !coys
Man I wish other news organizations would join. Press.coop had a bunch of accounts that were mirroring their twitter feeds but the API change killed them.
I don’t have any issue with that, the less toxic people I have to interact with on here the happier I’ll be. I encourage anybody who finds my comments and posts upsetting to block me and move on.
Don’t feed the troll. He’s an actual professional troll who will try his hardest to drag you into a debate. I like to just keep editing my comments with new links that refute his claims, and that’s when he totally loses it and gives me -30 and himself +55 updoots on a post with a grand total of 18 votes. He’s really aggressive but he’s not very good at his job.
Edit: I can see he has gone through my post history and downvoted everything so I have 0 or negative karma or whatever it’s called… and he did it a week afterwards. He’s a spiteful little troll, isn’t he? I don’t care about updoots. You can’t silence the truth, you dumb fuck.
Most notably, they will not actually engage in any real discussion on these topics. They only want to shut down discussion by calling everyone brainwashed. They will offer not a single critical word against China or Russia, past present or future. Obviously this analysis is very noteworthy, and the conjecture that these societies are above reproach makes for a very good faith argument. Especially when combined with the intellectually honest strategy of removing their opponent’s agency by calling them brainwashed. Truly a master debater.
I have no idea where you get that idea from. I have tons of praise for China - the culture, the people, the food, the history. I speak ok Mandarin, have family in China and visit once a year typically. I probably have more direct experience with China than anyone on lemmygrad. Unlike those folks, I’m not just here to troll and disrupt conversation. I want to have real conversations about the good as well as the bad. It’s the tankie trolls who will never actually engage in good faith. It’s the surest sign someone is, in fact, just a troll imo.
You’re changing the question, I mean the Chinese government and so did you in your previous comment. I’m sure you’re aware that “tankies” don’t just give a blanket endorsement of, for example, patriarchal social norms in China, and believe there are many cultural elements which must be the object of struggle. One must conclude that you didn’t include that because it was beyond the scope of your claim when you said “China”.
The tankies on Lemmy absolutely give it a blanket endorsement. Trust me I’ve tried many times to seek a real discussion on this topic. Specifically with regard to the hukou caste system and lack of public trials. I think this is very low hanging fruit tbh.
You are pushing in the direction of “he said/she said”. If I made a thread over on lemmygrad and actually asked about this, would you accept that as evidence?
Of course, that would be super interesting. I’m left-lib and every interaction I’ve had with them so far has led me to believe they are the most ridiculous kind of ML extremists
That’s a little heartening. Lemmygrad is aware of this thread, but I’ll try to word the post to not tip my hand too too much, and then I’ll link it back here and you can watch it (actually, you can post in it if you want since you’re on a lemmy.ml account, but that’s up to you).
Let me tell you from experience that sometimes people only look ridiculous because of prejudices we are bringing into the interaction (though some people are ridiculous).
Should I include Russia or is that too easy?
As an aside in the meantime, what do you make of the fact that I am quite willing to talk about negative elements despite being a “tankie”?
Eh, I’ve seen errors here and there (and called them out, as you can see) but I think they are generally putting forward decent arguments with better evidence. The Yuri Gagarin stan for example is very well-read and intelligent, you just need to demonstrate good faith (and maybe catch him in a not-bad mood). Anyway, here’s the thread that I just made. Feel free to upvote for visibility, we’ll see how it goes.
We got at least a couple of takers, and I expanded a little on some of my views. What do you think?
I should mention that one thing that probably skews matters is a prevalent thought (that I mostly agree with) among communists that the criticism of rivals of one’s state to appease liberals is not a good use of time. The reasoning goes that you aren’t really in a position to correct those problems, so spending time on these things when speaking publicly is only going to support the basis for a “left opposition” to those foreign states even if that’s not your personal aim. A version of this has been used by the FBI.
Because of this, I think your sampling might have been sabotaged by people operating on that principle, because convincing a liberal to be an anarcho-bidenist [someone who claims to be a radical but supports US foreign policy and/or the Democrats] isn’t really a useful effort.
Nah, just people who uncritically regurgitate propaganda, and screech about everybody who disagrees with them being a Russian puppet and a tankie whatever that means.
My friend, I would like to remind you as gently as possible that brainwashing does not exist and was in fact an orientalist lie popularized to explain away why US soldiers would support China.
Yeah, that’s a fair point. It’s important to keep in mind that people are accepting the propaganda because they want to believe it and they understand that it serves their selfish interests.
Yes, thank you for being understanding. I think it’s better to avoid calling people brainwashed because – as one liberal in this thread pointed out – it denies agency which our interlocutors plainly do have which makes them much more responsible for their bad epistemology than the theory of “brainwashing” allows for.
If we want to persuade people – and I’ve seen that you have incredible enthusiasm for that cause! – we must do our best to meet them where they actually are rather than where we imagine them to be.
I’ll get off my soapbox here, I just wanted to mention it. I wish you all the best in your efforts!
Even though I take issue with the BBC, I hope they choose to stay on mastadon in the long term. A large organisation like the BBC on a federated platform is sure to spread word and hopefully convince more people to join the fediverse and see it a a feasible alternative to the current big tech landscape.
This is how twitter and Youtube picked up pace. News organizations stsrted slowly creeping towards it and they have a lot of incentive to do so with how twitter is becoming a cesspool of Nazis and CSAM.
Pretty much the same as the US (and I imagine other English-speaking countries) with similar age distribution (i.e. facebook mums, tiktok kids) and of course toxic cesspit behaviour on twiitter.
You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastadon but not the other way around. And it doesn’t work well anyway.
You can use Kbin for both Lemmy and Mastadon.
But Mastadon content is not very Lemmy-like so if all you want is the BBC toots, but not a Mastadon account, you might as well bookmark bbc.social and scroll it occasionally.
The more exposure the better (for better or worse). As the fediverse grows we gotta watch for the growing pains of becoming a large social media platform.
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