420blazeit69 [he/him] @ 420blazeit69 @hexbear.net

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4 yr. ago

"Your parents should have beat you" -- classy

The countries who criticize China are a who's who of human rights abuses, starting with the U.S.

Go on any pro-Ukraine thread and you'll find tons of bloodthirsty comments calling for the killing of Russian soldiers (you'll often find variations of horrible stuff like "any Russian who isn't in open revolt is a fair target," too).

Do you disagree with this? Have you not seen all the pro-Ukraine threads on reddit and here the last few years?

And when a type of conduct is common but punished selectively, that's a sign that the ones swinging the hammer don't care about the conduct so much as they care about harassing the target. It's like the War on Drugs.

I assume these 37 countries are all China apologists, too?

Asking for evidence is not denial; ignoring evidence is denial.

Everyone knows Nazis who ask for proof of the Holocaust are full of shit because everyone learns about it at a young age. They're ignoring the evidence everyone is shown and dishonesty asking for more. The allegations of a Chinese genocide in Xinjiang are only a few years old, have been contested by a bunch of Muslim-majority countries, and after investigation the UN declined to label China's policies as genocidal. Not the same ballpark, not even the same sport.

Comparing Hexbear to ISIS = civil, polite, rational discussion

Posting a dumb emoji at a mean person = vile, reprehensible, beyond the pale

a thread that’s pointing out how weird it is to support LGBT rights on the one hand and support Russia and China on the other

I responded to a comment from a democratic socialist who took issue with support for AES states. LGBT rights were mentioned at the end of the comment as an example, not throughout the comment as its focus. Your initial question to me did not mention LGBT rights, so I didn't address them.

But let's address them now. First look at Cuba, which the U.S. demonizes as an authoritarian dictatorship and has waged a low-intensity war against for its entire existence. It recently passed, by nationwide referendum, a Family Code light-years ahead of anything the U.S. has at a national scale (note also that many U.S. states are busy stripping away LGBT rights, and gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. only by the profoundly undemocratic Supreme Court, which is likely to reverse its decision in the near future). The Family Code:

• Legalizes same sex marriage (some had been performed before the enactment of this law, by the way)
• Allows same sex couples to adopt
• Requires parents to be respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents, among other moves away from the view of children as parental property

This is on top of existing policies like guaranteed housing, which is a particularly sharp point of contrast to the epidemic of homelessness among LGBT youth in the U.S. Mind you I've used the U.S. -- the richest country in the world, one that claims to be a bastion of social progress -- as a comparison here, not Cuba's Latin American peers.

This is already getting long and I'm not as familiar with China, but from what I know China is not nearly as supportive of LGBT rights as Cuba, but also not nearly as hostile to them as the U.S. Same sex marriage is not recognized (although ceremonies do happen), but "couples have been able to sign guardianship agreements offering partners some limited legal benefits, including decisions about medical and personal care, death and funeral, property management, and maintenance of rights and interests." There's undoubtedly a lot more work to be done there than in Cuba, but again, the arrow is pointing in the right direction.

How are you defining "authoritarian" such that it does not mean "dystopian hellhole"? If the people who live there are overwhelmingly satisfied with their government, who are we to tell them they have it wrong?

...no?

My takeaway from the above passage is that running a state is not a frictionless process in the best of times, to say nothing of the difficulties of running a state under constant attack by the world's most powerful countries. You have to address real problems Iike:

how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted

Every single state has some answer to these problems, and every single state uses violence (or the threat of violence) against citizens who do not abide by the law. A state exercising its authority in this way is not de facto authoritarian (a term so loose as to be meaningless, but that's another conversation).

Another Parenti idea comes to mind: you can compare states to utopia (an impossible standard), to what came before them, or to their peers. Socialists of the kind I replied to (and once was) tend to compare existing socialist states to utopia, and imagine unsuccessful revolutions would have produced a utopia, hence they "support all revolutions except the ones that succeed."

There is at least one highly upvoted comment saying no one died

Just flipped through all the top-level comments and most of the thread and did not see one. Could you link to it?

Lmao Digg is somehow still around

https://digg.com/

The obvious solution here is we all leave our instances and join up there

The thing about civility and good-faith conversations is that street runs both ways. I'm glad to see a lot of that happening here, but I'm also seeing some folks who seem to think civility means "I can say whatever I want but a hint of anger on your part is a bannable offense."

When you have the time, I'd check out Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. I'm going from memory a bit, but the basic thesis is:

• Journalists need access to powerful people to succeed at their job
• Powerful people can and do revoke access to journalists who are too critical
• Journalists who lose access have a much harder time and many leave the profession
• Journalists who stay around (the ones most willing to act as stenographers of power) eventually become editors
• These editors, via hiring and promotion decisions, act as another filter on journalists who are too critical of power
• All major media outlets also happen to be owned by a shrinking number of conglomerates, who further limit criticism of not just the companies that make up those conglomerates, but government institutions/personnel who share the conglomerates' interests

I think there are also some YouTube summaries out there if (like me) you find it hard to do a lot of long-form reading.

Do you think it's realistic that over time your fellow Hexbears could engage in civil discourse without resorting to name calling and posting giant images of pig anuses?

Most already do, they just also have the "post PPB at someone who is being hostile or bigoted" gear. I think as our instances feel each other out a bit more we'll see more of the good stuff and the disagreements or misunderstandings won't be viewed with such a short fuse.

This has to run both ways, though. While your instance is in general more polite than ours, there's still plenty of hostility, it's just not quite as blatant. Think of "Midwest nice" rather than some stereotypical asshole from the Northeast.

I'm a democratic socialist myself... I thought no reasonable, modern socialist would support a brutal, authoritarian country like those two.

This was me a few years ago! What changed my mind was Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (not a PDF link, but there are tons of free PDFs on that page). This passage in particular stood out to me:

The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

That was me! I bought in to socialism at an ideological level, but I had not addressed the hard questions of how a socialist society might actually be run in a world of capitalist encirclememt. I found that my then-opinions fit pretty well with "support every revolution except the ones that succeed," which made less and less sense the more I thought about it.

It's a very short book divided into sections that are easy to jump back into. Because "throw a book at you" leftists are annoying, he also has a ton of lectures on YouTube that cover many of the same points. I'd be happy to shoot you some links or just discuss the main ideas if you're interested.

You are saying the builders of Auschwitz are no different from its liberators.

Did I say no one was killed? Does China?

When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.

When Hexbear users challenge U.S. Tiananmen Square propaganda, we're challenging the fable (the author's word) that has been built around the event. Wild, salacious stuff like "tens of thousands of people were ground under tank treads until they were paste and then soldiers hosed them away." As the author notes, parts of that fable are constantly repeated by the very definition of mainstream press despite no basis in reality.

You are not getting accurate information about this event. The only questions are what actually happened and where else these prestige media outlets are wrong. WMDs come to mind for some reason.

There was nothing to deflect from; all you said was "I already addressed this." You're doing reddit stuff right now.

Tell that to the most respected journalistic institution in the U.S.; it's not some random Hexbear user who wrote that.

I'm glad you read the entire article, though. This is the part I find much more important than mythmaking over the specific location:

When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.

That's an exaggeration by a few orders of magnitude! From one of the most prominent U.S. reporters on one of the country's most prominent news programs! Doesn't that raise your eyebrows even slightly?

From the commies and hack pollsters at The Harvard Kennedy School of Government (PDF link)

The most striking feature of our survey’s data since 2003 is the near-universal increase in Chinese citizens’ average satisfaction toward all four levels of government... Even in 2003, the central government received a strong level of satisfaction, with 86.1% expressing approval and 8.9% disapproving. This high level of satisfaction increased even further by 2016, but such increases were minimal because public satisfaction was already high to begin with. By contrast, in 2003, township-level governments had quite negative satisfaction rates, with 44% expressing approval and 52% disapproving. However, by 2016, these numbers had flipped, with 70% approving and only 26% disapproving.

I find it impossible to square data like this with the narrative that China is some dystopian hellhole.

Genocide is a crime. In most modern criminal proceedings (certainly international ones, which is most relevant here), the burden of proof is on the party claiming a crime has been committed. Meeting "why do you think there is a genocide here" with "this is genocide denial" is the equivalent of a prosecutor telling a defense attorney "your client is guilty of all these murders, how dare you even think about asking a single question about the case?"