I heard China sucks
Tankie/imperialist propaganda is so fucking stupid
^ how to let people know you have mental capacity of a 13 year old
Imperialism? What’s that?
“Fuck this violent imperialist country that snuffs out human rights. Imma move to another one 💪💪💪” absolute bootlickers
Least mentally deranged neoliberal btw.
Imperialism is when war or trade with other counties
Truly a running dog for imperialism
Hi, I’m very concerned about violent imperialism. Can you explain how China fits that description?
Wasn’t the great leap forward by Mao the biggest mass murder in world history, according to historians not governments?
Doesn’t whitewashing that amount to Holocaust denial level cultural blindness?
I know nothing, quick Google search.
I know nothing, quick Google search.
lol we know, you don’t have to tell us.
Do you understand the difference between causing a famine unintentionally and doing mass murder?
“Oops! I killed 15 million people, but it was an accident. My bad.”
-Mao, probably
PS: 15 million is the low end number. 15-55 million is the commonly accepted number, with some estimates as high as 70 million.
At some point you’d think he’d look around and notice.
They did notice, and very quickly changed policy.
The Great Chinese Famine was an enormous tragedy but it very obviously wasn’t deliberate.
Also important to note, it was the last famine in China’s history.
So you think Mao decided starving his own people benefited him? Why?
I’m sorry, but why would that matter? We tend to judge people by their actions, not their intent, when it comes to mass deaths.
Right?
Right?
It matter for the same reason a tribunal need to know the motive of a crime to give it appropriate punishment. It’s not about the morality of the action, it’s about a logically sound and coherent picture of the event.
Peoples doing something bad for terribly bad reasons is coherent, peoples doing something bad for no reason at all isn’t. The fact that you don’t have any explanation as to why an entire government composed of thousand of peoples would do such a thing -like it or not- is a very big hole in your narrative, and rise some serious questions about it’s consistency and therefore about it’s likelihood (because an incoherent statement can never be true no matter what).
Insisting that the event happened the way you say it did without providing any rational or cause-effect relationship and becoming defensive when explicitly asked to provide one puts both your narrative and your argumentation in it’s favor in the same category as those of conspiracy theorists who insists that “they” lie to us and immediately gets mad when asked to explain why “they” would.
You’re talking about narrative, spin a story about tribunal, and then spin a story that I’m defensive. I’m not.
Insisting that the event happened the way you say it did without providing any rational or cause-effect relationship
Literally what the first commenter gave - there was a widespread famine in China, it’s caused by Mao agricultural policies.
What are you contesting here? There was no famine? Famine is the narrative? Or that it wasn’t caused by policies but by… What? Weather? Weather was good.
I don’t understand your point, please clarify it, in a way that isn’t just calling your interlocutors stupid or defensive.
I’m sorry, but why would that matter? We tend to judge people by their actions, not their intent, when it comes to mass deaths.
Right?
Right?
Maybe it’s my autism but dismissing a relevant question by implying that the person who asked it is immoral/unempathetic for even asking it seems pretty defensive to me, and is a non-argument regardless.
Literally what the first commenter gave - there was a widespread famine in China, it’s caused by Mao agricultural policies.
Now that one is on me, I could have worded that better. By cause-effect relationship in this context I meant the cause who’s effect was that the government chose to take whatever course of action you believe is responsible for the famine. Peoples take decisions for reasons, bad reasons sometimes, yes, but reasons nonetheless.
It’s not about agreeing with the reasons, it’s about coherency. That an entire government, a group formed of thousands of peoples, would act all in concert with no motive, especially for a project on such a large scale and which would take so many resources, is nonsense. If you can’t present either proof that they really took the conscious decision to manufacture a famine or a motive to explain why they would want to do that, the claim that the famine was intentional is extremely dubious at best.
Also, speaking of a government’s actions as if only the one person at the top was to blame is something peoples trying to speak about politics and history seriously should avoid.
What are you contesting here? There was no famine? Famine is the narrative? Or that it wasn’t caused by policies but by… What? Weather? Weather was good.
There was a famine. But it was not man made with the purpose of killing a large portion of the population, again, as the other commenter pointed out, why would they do such a thing? And why did they stop doing it? It makes no sense.
The famine was the produce of a great number of different factors, inefficient and backward agricultural methods, bad weather, compound effects of WW2 + the Chinese civil war, mismanagement, trade embargoes, etc… But others could explain it better than I can.
An other point we disagree on is the number of deaths from the famine. Numerous western academics intentionally inflate the death tolls of countries ruled by communist parties, most infamously “the black book of communism” and the “victims of communism foundation” who literally count Nazi invaders killed by the red army and peoples who could potentially have been born but weren’t as victims of communism.
I don’t understand your point, please clarify it, in a way that isn’t just calling your interlocutors stupid or defensive.
I called you defensive but I did not call you stupid, nor did I imply it.
Lol what’s your source on this, the black book? Also do you think Mao was like the king of China or?
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Yeah lots of people died but the cultural revolution and Great Leap Forward but it has been over for 50 years now, meanwhile how many millions of people have had their lives ruined by US sanctions or wars in the last 70 years? Imperial countries export their misery so that people like you and me can live nice comfortable lives. Meanwhile we point at other countries who were deliberately impoverished for our benefit. When leaders in those countries try to take back their wealth they’re assassinated, when trade unionists try to organise to give the workers better rights they’re tortured and then assassinated. At least the Great Leap Forward only negatively impacted Chinese people, meanwhile you get to sit smugly on your computer or phone and eat your chocolate bar that was built or farmed with the blood of poor labourers in Africa and when those poor people try to rise up to better their conditions our governments and their fascist lackeys will be there in minutes killing them for you so you can keep getting cheap treats.
Also do you really think there is no political repression in the west? I recently read the obituary of a guy who was in my local communist party who was denied work his whole life because he was an „unteachable communist“ being on the wrong side of the ruling classes ideology sucks no matter where you are.
In short, no, that was cold war propaganda. These intro articles get into some of the details of the Mao era:
- Monster or Liberator? by Carlos Martinez
- How did Mao manage to kill ~78 million people? by Godfree Roberts
- The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
- The Rise of the Chinese People’s Communes by Anna Louise Strong
I could find books that say the Nazis are great guys too. Doesn’t make it right.
This kind of post-truth nihilism is completely fruitless. If you dismiss evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions on the basis that evidence against other unrelated facts might also exist, then the only valid beliefs are the ones you already have. You’ve arrived at an epistemological position that rejects all new knowledge and positions all knowledge you already have as infallible.
Why not evaluate the claims and their evidence, instead of starting from the position that any defense of Mao is comparable to defending the Nazi Holocaust? Not to mention, if you did come across a group of Holocaust deniers, is this really the weak response you’d give them? Not even going to produce any evidence in support of your own claims?
Getting people to read even short articles is impossible.
Just be honest with yourself any say that you’re not looking to challenge your orientalist biases, that you just want things to confirm them.
The communists were the ones who defeated fascism in ww2, Mao being one of the most important leaders in that fight against japanese fascism. To equate Mao with nazis or the axis powers, who they shed so much blood to defeat, is sickening.
And you are impartial, saying someone you do not know has an “orientalist” bias. Throwing out pejorative words, linking to lengthy fringe arguments like a Trump supporter telling me to watch Hannity.
I see you’re defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it’s exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.
Carry on, comrade. Enjoy yourself. You have the evangelistic fervor of a Baptist preacher.
The People’s Republic of China oversaw the largest increase of quality of life in human history, and the previously mentioned famine would be the last in a region where they have frequently occurred throughout history.
The PRC’s legacy is not one of causing famine, it is of ending it.
everyone knows that china was perfectly alright before the communists came, no one died of hunger and no one was addicted to opium, also no one died by the hands of the japanese.
That’s a bold statement, what’s your source?
- Wikipedia: List of famines in China
- Reuters, 2018, China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
- United Nations Secretary-General, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
- The Economist, 2021: At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low
- Bloomberg, 2024: China’s Energy Use Per Person Surpasses Europe’s for First Time
- Monster or Liberator? by Carlos Martinez
- How did Mao manage to kill ~78 million people? by Godfree Roberts
- The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
- The Rise of the Chinese People’s Communes by Anna Louise Strong
I see you’re defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it’s exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.
Meanwhile you do something a million times more honorable and simply refuse to confront new information, dismiss it all as propaganda, and say your opponent is equal to a Trump supporter (for what? for having principled stances that he backed up with multiple sources? How often do Trump supporters back up their claims with sources that aren’t PragerU videos or AI generated images?). You’re implying that Dessalines is being intellectually dishonest when he has done nothing incorrect in this conversation: he made a claim to counter your unsourced claim, cited his sources, and when you refused to learn anything at all he’s just calling you out for falling back on Western propaganda. Is any of that wrong?
It is nice to see the western propaganda machine start to fail. I never thought I’d see the general public recognize Israel is a genocidal settler apartheid state until the last couple years, even though the propaganda machine has been working overtime for it. Hopefully other areas in propaganda start to crumble as well.
Born to early to explore the cosmos, too late to explore the world, but just in time to see the fall of the US empire propaganda machine 😁
Nah, we’ll be able to explore the cosmos my friend.
For all the orientalists below:
If that’ supposed to be funny, I don’t get it.
The meme assumes the Western context. We don’t trust the US government because of the centuries of violence and exploitation. We had to go looking for that information because it is minimized and buried at every turn by the compliant national media.
On the other hand, the supposed abuses of the Chinese government are loudly broadcast at every turn. You’ll find if you go looking outside of Western sanctioned sources that all of those criticisms are absurd fabrications.
Therefore, someone in the western context who says they don’t trust the US or China is trusting the US media for information about China but not about the US itself. Does that help?
Yeah, I think it does. But I still don’t get it why the man in the third image is with nearly closed eyes. Is he answering the question by mimicing a Chinese face, meaning China told him not to trust what China says?
I’m a little confused because the comic only has two panels? Additionally, in the second panel the character’s eyes are still round not any other shape - I don’t see squinting at all? (If you were trying to draw a head that small with eyes that were squinting, you would use angled lines, not circles)
In any case, I believe the interpretation of the comic intended by the creator is: “Panel one represents what Western liberals say about China. Panel 2 represents the media environment they swim in”
If you see only 2 parts of the image, that means your ISP sucks and it doesn’t load the entire image.
Description: Eye squinting happens when the eyelids are compressed together serving to constrict the eyes. It can sometimes occur in just a fraction of a second before disappearing.
In One Sentence: Narrowing the eyes is due to physical or emotional pain.
How To Use it: When you do not like what is being said or seen, simply narrow your eyes. This tells others that you do not like what you are seeing or hearing. You may perform this eye language in brief within just fractions of a seconds. While people may not consciously perceive the signal, it will likely still register subconsciously. If the person for whom the cue is intended, notices, they may revisit their proposal and add additional incentives to ease your negative judgment.
Context: General.
Verbal Translation: “What I’m seeing is causing me emotional or physical pain and to prevent all that negativity from coming into my body I’m going to squint and block to resist.”
Variant: See Anger Facial Expression, Hand To Eye Gesture.
Cue In Action: a) A person will wince when reading objectionable portions of a contract. b) She winced when the student missed the correct note on the piano. It caused her visceral pain.
Meaning and/or Motivation: An eye blocking form of body language designed to prohibit distasteful images or even thoughts from being received at full view. Narrowing eyes indicates contempt, distaste and anger. A person will not only squint from seeing objectionable sights, but also negative thoughts or sounds.
Wincing falls into the category of microexpressions since it can happen in only fractions of a second before disappearing, yet it remains full of meaning.
its a decade old meme template, the third slide is him getting mad for being contradicted.
He’s saying anyone that claims to not trust the West nor China only distrusts China because they were propagandized by western news sources.
I don’t find that particularly compelling because I think assuming someone’s information diet and discarding it in order to invalidate their view is lazy. I’ll leave it at that so I don’t get put in timeout.
The face reminded me of the style of the face pictures for Psycho Patrol R. I doubt that any one picture is exactly the same, but the style is similar enough to remind me. https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1907590/ss_97de425d644d8a91b36a76e87a82ad9b647c95bc.600x338.jpg https://store.steampowered.com/app/1907590/Psycho_Patrol_R/
Noooo my heckin wholesome Lemmy propaganda don’t you dare have any other opinion than USA#1 here or else me and my liberal friends will call your love of gross, dirty and smelly foreigners and make homophobic jokes about you having sex with Putin
Dont forget the racist sinophobic “jokes”
Literally everything OP posts is from RT or a similar Russian mouthpeice. I am - and I’m being serious here - stunned by the level of doublethink on display. I would say they’re a bot, but I think even a bot would be like, “nah, this is too much - no-one is this much of a cretin”.
well they have 61 posts within a month, all of them being controversial topics/political opinions. no matter ypur political affiliation. this IS straight up bot behavior
yet his comments sound pretty human, LLM? bot-human combination? maybe just a dude being paid? idk
Or… It could just be a dude. Sometimes it’s just that simple.
Nothing says “fragile worldview” quite like claiming everybody who disagrees with you is paid to do it
now, how do you know my world view? i never mentioned wether i agree or disagree, only that the shown behavior is what i would calssify as bot behavior
I don’t need to know your worldview because I recognize your defense mechanism. Nobody who accuses dissenting opinions of being bots ever has a well thought out worldview. You know as well as the rest of us, deep down, that you’re not identifying bots or paid users. You’re just incapable of creating a coherent argument against people with other politics, and this is your “out” to avoid coming to grips with it.
ohhhh are you sure you wanna say that? because based on tge “comrade” in your tag, and your description we seem to have exactly the same political opinions😬
You could agree with me completely and still be incapable of defending your worldview. I didn’t stutter, I said I don’t need to know your worldview and I meant it.
you are right, cause my worldview doesn’t matter. i see thibgs i attribute to bots, so i assume bot.
and what i wad referring to in my previous comment was you saying i couldn’t have a well thought out world view, which -assuming we have the same- would mean you don’t either. yet unlike you, i dont start defending everything that resembles my world view. i explained in previous comments why i thought it was a bot, yet you still assume that i just cant handle a diffrent opinion (which you have as flimsy of evidence as i have that they are a bot btw.)
Bot technology these days is crazy. Posting two whole posts a day?! No human is capable of that.
while a person is capable of that, tell me how many people post even once a day. most people never post, mor active users post like once a week. posting twice a day is either chronically online, or a bot. and judging by the fact that everything they post is controversial and political, a bot seems more likely
Do you sincerely believe that there are government bots on this tiny, niche website?
nah, i wouldn’t be surprised if it is a troll tho.
A troll that literally just posts news stories?
Can you really not believe that some people just have different political opinions to you?
believing that might require some kind of examination of their own beliefs, and they know for sure those are held up by rickety vibes and baling wire
Well you’ve posted more than that; so I guess we should ban you for being a bot.
No, lol. Being more online is more likely. Lemmy is filled with politics.
but not every post twice a day
Most of the posts you see are from people that post a ton of times per day, 2 a day is fine.
completely ignoring thaf we are talking about political posts specifically
mor active users post like once a week.
You just posted multiple times in this thread, what are you, grok??
i in fact didnt post at all today, i commented.
So people who comment a lot about politics aren’t bots, but people who post threads are? Break that down for me, Columbo.
Nobody posts, this whole website is a psyop, you’re all actually six hundred mes in a trench coat and I’m actually a hallucinating LLM
Two (non-white-supremacist) posts a day?!!? Total bot behavior.
/s
Entrance exam to get into the fediverse:
/s
“No U” says terf island
Oh damn you’re still doing the bot thing?
copium level: estonia
Whataboutism
Does feddit have screening questions on sign up to make sure people signing up are actual fascist?
feddit
I would say they’re a bot,
not a bad guess probably. just a week or two ago was when I noticed them posting frequently very suddenly, and before that I haven’t seen their name anywhere.
When you have to resort to attack your opponent by using their post history you know that either you lost or you dont have any real argument.
I don’t disbelieve it but it doesn’t mean OP is wrong.
ingests ‘facts’ and narratives from seemingly different sources that just happen to be financially backed/owned by the same small group of people
no logical filtering or processing takes place before regurgitating them
“I’m a free thinker who does their own research!”
Meanwhile, the worlder preferred “bastions of journalism”:
I am sorry but since when is German left leaning public broadcast the same as fox news?! I understand that sometimes some topics are generally over- or underreported, but putting these next to each other is nonsensical.
public broadcast
Or, as we call it when it’s a non-white country: “State propaganda outlet”
Funny that you tie that to the skin color of the people. Most people including me make the distinction based on the following criteria:
- Does the government have direct control over the broadcast?
- Is the channel allowed to criticize the government?
- Is founding decided by the government?
- Are you at risk for not having the same stance on a topic than the government?
In the case of Germany, all of these are not true. In the case of authoritarian regimes, they are. That is the key difference.
- Always 2. Never 3. Always 4. Always
Germany just lies about its media
The government obviously has some influence, that is undeniable. But it’s limited and saying that they don’t criticize the government is just wrong. You can watch many channels on YouTube. You can look at it yourself. They do that and it is undeniable too. Also, the government is prohibited by law to decide the founding. They have minimal influence on the total budget, but they can’t decide who gets how much.
The government obviously has some influence, that is undeniable. But it’s limited
How limited? As limited as they themselves claim?
You can watch many channels on YouTube.
Who do you think funds the high-budget Kurzgesagt and PragerU videos? Who do you think controls YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, search algorithms, and censorship?
Please look into cultivating real media literacy, not the dumbed-down version they teach in high school.
So, a bunch of vague, unquantifiable, vibes based criteria, that, in practice, always end up meaning:
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Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world today, known for employing folks that need to pee in bottles to comply with Amazon’s inhuman procedures or face losing their jobs, buys The Washington Post
“They will hold the truth and journalistic integrity in high regard, and I can certainly trust them to prioritise them before financial gain and anything that can be done to achieve it.”
I SWIM IN THE SEA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Everybody Sucks Here
Only the right-wing neolibs of world and their ilk, I find the users of ml and hexbear to be quite nice
I was referencing nation states in general, not a subsection of the working class. Don’t get me wrong, rightoids are unbearable. I wish I could vacate this planet and leave them to play their shitty reindeer games with each other.
These institutions (nation states) garner a level of devotion much like religion, regardless of their ideology. Tribalism.
Nation states path to power is the capability to muster greater standing armies then other more decentralized ways of life. That is why the working class is so heavily divided through these imaginary lines on the globe.
Yeah, so nice they’re chill with gay, trans and asexual rights getting obliterated in russia
Tankies are fuckin pathetic lmao
Downvotes are pro russian trolls
Search engines are free. Russia criminalized gay, trans people and asexuals (the only country that specifically criminalizes asexuality iirc). You’re “defending” a fascist state lmao
Libs can’t fathom that the leftists actually do not actually support the capitalist, oligarchal state of Russia.
bruh u unironically post rt content
Of course, someone has to post against the dominance that is western
propaganda“media”Your comment got like 10 downvote from 2 year old no content accounts. The redditors are here on the fediverse to correct the record.
The solution to that isn’t to post even more blatantly state controlled media just with a different flavor of boot sole.
Come on now.
Nearly all media is state controlled. Even privately owned media companies because both the media and the state are just tools the owning class uses to maintain power. They share the same interests. There are some coalitions of reporters and journalists that have relative independence but even they must cooperate with the interests of the owning class or risk being shut out of key resources necessary for their reporting and therefore their income. The goal is to read reporting from all sources with the interests of the producers of that source in mind. You can read RT and get reliable information on some subjects just as you can read the kyivindependant and get reliable information on some subjects. Emphasis on some. It is unfortunately up to the reader to filter through bias, a skill that is suspisciously not taught well in our education.
Nearly all media is state controlled. Even privately owned media companies because both the media and the state are just tools the owning class uses to maintain power.
More info on this:
I really gotta read Chomsky and Herman’s book on that subject
After reading On Chomsky I really can’t suggest reading him.
I actually preferred Inventing Reality from Parenti
I haven’t given it a try yet, I’ll have to give it a read.
Parenti my beloved. Will be adding that to my list thank you
OP is so anti-anything that is said in Western media that they genuinely believe Putin, Xi and Kim are the perfect humans and there’s nothing wrong in any of their countries and they’re perfect utopias.
They’re either a moron, brainwashed or a paid actor. I can’t decide which.
Politics must be so easy when you just lazily strawman everyone who disagrees with you, before writing them off with an equally lazy adhominem.
I haven’t strawman’d them, they literally say China, Russia, Iran and DPRK are great and the West is bad continually. There’s no nuance to their position. At no point have I seen any post or comment from the OP that says “you know what, there’s some good and bad on both sides and maybe we should strive to find the balance in our perspectives” (though I will admit, I haven’t specifically gone through their post and comment history to seek it out).
It’s also not an ad hominem if I believe the person either doesn’t understand what they’re saying/doing or they’re intentionally saying/doing things because they’re themselves propagandised or being paid to say/do it.
I haven’t strawman’d them
Oh? Please point to where they said “Putin, Xi and Kim are the perfect humans and there’s nothing wrong in any of their countries and they’re perfect utopias.” Because that sounds like a huge fucking strawman.
It’s also not an ad hominem
Refusing to engage with the substance of their point and dismissing them as “either a moron, brainwashed or a paid actor.” is basically the definition of an adhominem.
the west will never forgive China for liberating themselves, it is a dangerous precedent that should be chastised at all costs.
the wasp nest has really come out in the comments here 🤣
hah! you aint’ kiddin, focused on real-life stuff for a bit and came back to a 40+ inbox 😁 😆
Well done comrade
Usians don’t like being told that their stolen land nation started by slave owners who then held a “freedom revolution” so these oligarchs to have to pay taxes while tge rest of their population does, isn’t such a great place after all.
they come with pitchforks out whenever china is framed remotively positive, straight up reinforces the meme lol
ITT: people saying “the US and China both seem bad” and being told that they obviously just want to kiss America square on the lips because China has never done anything bad ever
Lazy strawman
