133arc585 @ 133arc585 @lemmy.ml

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You didn't answer what I asked.

You said that capitalism by definition leads to imperialism. I asked how socialism by definition precludes imperialism.

A more accurate title and thesis would be "How the West's historical amnesia took everyone for a ride".

The West has made a very concerted effort to ignore the historical and geopolitical context (and misrepresent it where it must mention it) surrounding the situation. The conflict did not begin in 2022 by Russia. The only way the West has managed to gain and hold support has been by deceptively misrepresenting the reality of the situation in order to rally everyone around a perceived Evil. They don't bother describing what the people in the actual territories that asked for Russian support want. They don't bother describing how Ukraine has bombed its own people. They don't bother to describe how, partially due to Ukraine's abuses, several regions voted to join Russia. They don't bother to describe how Russia was invited by those fighting for their homes and families against Ukraine. They don't comment on how millions of Ukrainians have chosen to immigrate to Russia since Ukraine bombed its citizens in 2014. They don't dig in to why the majority of the global population supports Russia here.

This is not Russian imperialism or colonialism. This is not Russian aggression. The attempt to describe it that way is dishonest and, unfortunately, most people don't care enough to actually inform themselves so this portrayal catches on rather easily.

The Western media has taken advantage of the fact that very few people are informed about historical context, and that most people don't care about context. The Western media has taken advantage of the fact that people like to be united against a Big Evil, in a fully black-and-white way, devoid of any context and nuance.

China is a socialist state so by definition cannot be

Can you elaborate on that? I agree that China is not imperialist, but I don't see how socialism by definition precludes that possibility.

If you truly think this is a display of Russian aggression I genuinely doubt that you have any historic view on the geopolitics of the region. The conflict did not appear out of thin air in 2022. The situation is more complex than "Russian aggression"; in fact that's not even a part of the picture. Russia is responding to requests for assistance after Ukraine began bombing its own people in 2014. Many of these people voted to join Russia after this disgusting display by Ukraine. Before 2022 most of the combatants against Ukraine were regular people fighting for their homes and families. These people realize that Ukraine wants to bomb their homes and Russia is offering to fight alongside them. On the weekend before the SMO began, there were 2000 ceasefire violations in the Donbass. Between 2014 and 2022, 1 million Ukrainians immigrated to Russia because of the abuse by the Ukrainian government. And since the operation began in 2022, another 1.3 million immigrated. The people in these territories that Ukraine has zero regard for view the support they are receiving from Russia positively: they invited Russia in to assist them, and they are somewhat reliant on Russia to protect them from Ukraine.

I know life is a lot easier when you don't muddy things with context. I know that it's a lot easier to be righteous in your condemnation of a world power because they're "evil" and an "aggressor" than it is to acknowledge that the situation is more complex. I know that it's a lot easier to go along with what Western media says than to be informed and hold your own opinions. I know it feels nice to rally with everyone against a perceived enemy. I know it feels nice to feel that your country (and military) is finally doing something good for once. But you can't let wanting to feel good stand in the way of reality. The Western media has done a hell of a job propagandizing this war, attempting to remove any historical and geopolitical context, in order to gather and maintain support. Think honestly: how much historical and geopolitical context have you seen, especially from popular media sources? How much more effort is spent on raging about current "evil deeds" than understanding the desires of the people in the actual territories that have asked Russia for help?

Please read, and inform yourself. Life is less black-and-white than "Russia evil".

So what's the conclusion as to what's happening?

As I wrote about in a thread a couple weeks back (here, here, and here), this should have been fine, and was fine on paper.

According to official statements it was going to be diluted, before release, to a level that was even lower than what Fukushima NPP put out while operational. Then it was going to be released at a rate that maintained this concentration.

Did Japan lie? Did it not dilute how it said it would? Was it a technical failure and dilution did not occur at the level they said it would, or was it released too fast at the dilution level they set? Was there not testing at release time/site?

Olga is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion”, telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.

Russia, Donbass, and the reality of the conflict in Ukraine

The OP put a non-paywalled link in the post body.

It is disturbing how righteous you feel in your ignorance.

If France does that we will beat their ass.

I wish I could say this response is surprising, but it's really not. When you can't win by diplomacy, reasoning, and discussion, and when you feel that you have the right to punish other countries for being sovereign, you resort to force and "beat their ass".

Do you believe France is sovereign, can make their own decisions, and can act in their own best interest, and are fully competent and able to do so? Or do you not believe they have the right to be sovereign and you (whoever "we" is) have the right to force them to align with your interests? If they end up in any agreement with China, it was their own decision and they did so because it benefits them in some way; do you feel you are permitted to punish them for that?

It seems you're right. I will edit that part of my comment. But I will point out: I wasn't making a statement that one was worse than the other. I made the point that they're similar in ranking and like I said, even if you reverse ranking order they're still just as similar. And, since they were middling in their ranking like I originally said, if you invert the sorting, they're still middling.

Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107.

I'm not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it's 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn't do. My point was they're similar and middling in the ranking.

Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.

This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn't that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it's decreasing. The fact that it's steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they're facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You'll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the "free market") in part because the issue doesn't address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn't magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.

Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.

The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn't publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren't doing what they said they would. You're confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There's a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it's because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn't have so much support for the party.

(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it's ranking; inverting the sort order doesn't make the countries less similar, and since they're middling, inverting the sort order means they're still middling. I didn't make a claim that one was better than the other).

It's available for free on a popular "scientific research paper file sharing site"[^1] if you search for its title.

[^1]: The founder of which just won an EFF Award a couple days ago!

The point is not how you feel about it. The point is the reality of the situation: despite whatever protest or complaint people had, it had no bearing on the actions of the USA and no punishment was brought on the USA. As such, the USA calling for punishment on someone else is hypocritical. It wants to pretend to be the world's police while simultaneously being the biggest crime boss, and it deserves to be called out for that.

The reason people keep bringing up Iraq is not for some "whataboutism". It's simpler and more significant than that: it shows a hypocrisy, and double-standards. It's not that people are saying "what Russia is doing isn't bad because the USA did bad" (that is whataboutism, by the way); they're saying that the USA's (and the world's) feigned outrage over Russia is hypocritical because of what the USA has done. Nobody held (or intends to hold) the USA to account for what it's done, yet everyone is demanding Russia be torn apart, torn down, everyone tried for war crimes, etc. It's a double-standard. If the USA had been held to account for what it did, then people wouldn't be saying "but Iraq" (and if they did, that truly would be simple whataboutism). But until there is fair application of standards, it's fair to call the USA on its hypocrisy when it wants to pretend to be the world's police while simultaneously (ironically, in line with behavior of actual police) causing tremendous harm itself.

You're taking an overly specific definition of lynching and framing the situation wrong, and coming to a bad conclusion.

A court's refusal to punish it, in nearly every case, is tacit support. They aren't saying "please, lynch!" but they're saying they won't punish lynching.

This also easily fits any definition of lynching that's not so restricted so as to only include "hanging black people from trees in town squares".

My issue is that you said they're capitalist. They're not. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It's not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn't mean it's capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn't mean it's socialism. When I said they're structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism's purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism's purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn't use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There's also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.

I also don't know what you meant about a "strong central government" not making them communist. That seems like a strawman. Nobody would say that a strong central government makes it communist, or a lack of a strong central government means it's not communist. "Strong" with no other qualifies is also not very useful: do you mean tough and resilient, or do you mean controlling?

I weighed calling them socialist, but it seemed… unhelpful when what i was trying to highlight that the unemployed youth are relying on family, and not the state.

This is a trap that people keep falling in to. Just because a socialist country doesn't do "good thing X" doesn't mean it's not socialist. No system is perfect; the difference is that the CPC makes strong plans, sticks to them, and publishes progress reports to address the problems that do arise. Should the state be taking the burden here where family currently is? Perhaps. But it's failure to do so doesn't mean the system isn't socialist. Again, I'll repeat my earlier statement: being "socialist" is a statement that is about the purpose of the government and the relation of the government to its people; it is socialist if it is for the benefit of the people en masse. Being "socialist" is not a statement of a utopic ideal antithesis to capitalism.

If you truly are willing to read about this, the book I mentioned is a good overview of China as it exists, as an implementation of a socialist society, at a level that does not require previous knowledge of theory or of China. Being intended for a foreign audience, it makes a concerted effort to address common misconceptions held by those outside of China about China. It's also very heavily sourced: each chapter ends with several pages of citations used in that chapter, including primary sources from CPC members, official government documents, analysis and critiques, and "historical"/foundational texts.

Wow. Reading through those Descriptions is rough. Many of them involve the cop lying with verbal testimony not matching bodycam footage. One I saw was after the guy was already restrained, he bit the cop's finger, so the cop shot him. Others show that they are looking for (or will make up) any excuse to shoot: one person had a lighter in their hand which caused the cop to shoot and kill them. It's honestly disgusting that people will go out of their way to defend this system. I guess that's a level of privelege that I just don't understand; how can you possibly be sure you'll never be in such a situation with a lying, murderous police officer?

Fully sourced means my statements were sourced, not that it was dripping in sources.

Also, the book I cited is not propaganda. Please don't resort to calling everything that posits an alternate view propaganda.

From the Springer page on the book,

Roland Boer is a professor in the School of Marxism Studies at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.

So he has a degree in and is a professor in the exact subject he's talking about, from a respected University:

Dalian University of Technology (DUT) [...] is a public research university located in Dalian, Liaoning, China, with an additional campus in Panjin, Liaoning. [...] Formerly called the Dalian Institute of Technology, DUT is renowned as one of the Big Four Institutes of Technology in China. [...] As of 2022, DUT was listed as one of the top 400 global universities in several major international universities' rankings

Moreover, it's not some random publisher or some guy's PDF on the internet. It's published by Springer which, if you have done any academic reading in almost any field, you will know that Springer content is high-quality and trustworthy. In fact, at a lot of the university libraries I've been in, some subjects (maths, especially) are probably three-quarters Springer publications,

Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing.

If you say falun gong organ harvesting didn’t happen, why don’t you (or other people in this thread that keep denying it) provide any source to prove your point instead of downvoting?

How do you expect someone to prove a negative? What sort of evidence would you like that proves that something didn't happen?

No, and to paint everything this way serves to delegitimize alternatives to capitalism. China is not capitalist, they are socialist. They have their own problems, because no system is perfect. But there are alternatives to capitalism, and not everything is "secretly capitalism in disguise".