FunkyStuff

If these things are so easily verified, why must we take your word for it? Why can't you just show us the evidence that you're correct and what we're saying isn't true?

Yeah, that one's 3 sentences. My bad. I've read it like 15 times. I don't think I understand your reasoning as to how I'm lying yet. You don't know that I'm not a bot and you don't want to talk with me. Fine. But you're saying that I lied, when it appears you didn't read what I wrote.

None of your comments have been longer than 2 sentences. The one you left replying to my long one explaining why I don't think it makes sense to call China authoritarian unless you also apply that label to Europe suggested that you didn't read my comment, yet you said that I am posting ignorance and lies. I am trying to understand why you think that I wrote lies and ignorant things without reading my comment.

The ability to preternaturally know when someone is lying to me without even hearing what they say sounds like a really cool superpower and if I could learn how you do that, it'd be great.

Okay, so you read my comment. Presumably that means you think I lied somewhere in that comment. What did I say that was incorrect?

Ok so you don't even read the comments of the people who reply to you but you know enough that you can determine this person isn't Chinese? Just because? You can literally check their profile and their profile on Hexbear, @QinShiHuangsShlong@hexbear.net

You didn't read my comment.

How is it fair to anyone reading your comments that you spend 20 seconds writing them (evidently that means you didn't read my response)? How's that fair to me? That's really disrespectful.

I've interacted with 5 - 7 Chinese users over Lemmy recently ish. Haven't been, but one of my close friends went to Hong Kong pretty recently and enjoyed their time.

Okay, I spent like 10 minutes searching my mind trying to fully understand where you're coming from and meeting you halfway by listing things I don't even believe to be true about China. If you can't engage with people who disagree with you under those circumstances, then what level of engagement did you expect?

Can you enlighten us as to how China is authoritarian in a way that Europe isn't? Because as far as I can tell, even if literally every single thing China is accused of by anyone is true, this is what their major crimes amount to:

• Killing 10,000 protesters in Tiananmen Square
• Imprisoning 1M Uighurs in Xinjiang
• Sterilizing, abusing, and killing some number of Uighurs in Xinjiang, I've never seen numbers accompanying this claim
• Suppressing Tibetan religious identity
• Lack of queer rights
• Not respecting Taiwan's sovereignty
• Suppressing political speech that goes against the government
• General religious persecution of several religious minorities other than those mentioned above; Falun Gong, Christians, other Muslims, etc
• Aggression toward their neighbors like India and the Philippines
• Support of Russia during their invasion of Ukraine
• Support of Myanmar during the Rohingya genocide

Let me know if I missed any.

Meanwhile, (mainly Western) Europe definitely has done the following in the past 50 years:

• Funded and supported Israel's genocide in Gaza, killing anywhere from 50,000 people per the Health Ministry to 500,000 per Donald Trump
• Mostly refused to recognize a Palestinian state until quite recently
• Exploited peripheral European states economically
• Continued to hold assets belonging to former colonies in the Global South
• Collaborated with the US to destroy the USSR and strip it for parts, causing one of the largest peace-time drop in life expectancy in history, and unleashing rampant economic and sexual exploitation
• Allow thousands of immigrants to die in the Mediterranean to prevent them from reaching the continent.
• Joined the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan
• Joined NATO actions to destroy the Libyan government, leaving the country in a state of utter chaos and making it one of the only places on earth with open air slave markets
• NATO actions against Yugoslavia and Serbia (granted, to intervene in a genocide, but in a way that was not done to intervene in the Rwandan genocide; this suggests the intervention was primarily motivated by an extractive, imperialist interest)
• Islamophobia; Hijab bans, rampant hate speech, racially stratified economies.
• Backsliding queer rights in some countries, total lack in others.

I think there's probably more I could go into, but I think that's at least enough to make my case. If you want to believe China is authoritarian because you believe every point in the upper half is true, then I won't stop you. But you're on some craaaazy wypipo logic if you think the points in the bottom don't mean that the same label ought to be applied to Europe.

I also agree with NATO needing to be dismantled, I dont agree with you that Russia is doing that. Look at trump and Putin, the invasion of Ukraine is not fighting against america or the NATO, its imperial landgrabing a non NATO state.

Objectively, NATO is the only reason Ukraine is still standing. No NATO = no war, Ukraine wouldn't even have had the 2014 coup if it wasn't for NATO.

And even if Putin would fight the NATO directly, I dont think this will benefit our class, we are the ones dying in the wars, hunger in the famines and getting arrested for fighting for solidarity amongst the international working class, a true change cannot come from a tyrann winning over another tyrann, it need to be a struggle by the people against the oppressors

Struggle against oppressors often does take the form of great tyranny and violence. That's just how struggle works. If NATO is destroyed NATO is destroyed, the moral character of the people who do it don't impact the material reality. Is any part of what you're saying here actually a true thing that can be verified through study of history, or are they just moral platitudes that sound nice?

If you dont condemn an imperialistic country invading its small neighbour, you fight for the oppressor. War is never good for the working class, if you justify people dying in imperialistic wars, you are a class enemie in my eyes.

I gave my thoughts on the matter of civilian deaths in the war in Ukraine. My contention is that Russia's invasion of Ukraine weakens NATO; I could just as easily say that your refusal to fight NATO makes you a class enemy, and the critical difference is that my position can be justified by observing the ways that NATO is involved in really oppressing the world; meanwhile your disagreement with me is based in moral categories.

About China:

What your friends told you, plainly speaking, is just incorrect. You definitely can criticize the Chinese government publicly and privately. You can protest, the protests against the pandemic restrictions are the reason they don't do zero COVID in China anymore. There's active Hexbear users from China who do criticize the country's policies and are sometimes a lot more critical than the rest of us. Seriously, check out @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net's posting history. You can hop on Chinese social media like RedNote to see what people are saying; there will be a lot of positive things but negative things too.

On the issue of surveillance, I think surveillance and privacy is basically just dead in the water except for enthusiasts at this point. It's all screwed, worldwide, it's just a situation that's completely beyond repair. Every country that has wide internet access has mass surveillance and the whole world is a police state. Bad situation all around. I'm not gonna try to tell you that it's better in China than in some other countries because that's just not good consolation, lol. But if you think that China is a country that has more mass surveillance than the rest of the world, that is mistaken.

They don't control the flow of information, though. That part is wrong. Talk with Chinese people, I encourage you. They aren't living in some kind of secluded little bubble, they know what's going on around the world. My honest opinion is that sometimes they have overly naive takes about what it's like to live in the West, like they don't know how bad it is over here in a lot of cases. But they are broadly pretty well informed.

A state where the working class is truely ruling needs a free working class who can freely from their opinion. This can’t be done in a surveillance state.

I take specific issue with this argument. I mean, if you put some stress on the word "truly" then I don't disagree. It's a bit of a purity obsessed argument, but not strictly false. But if you really think that the condition of being surveilled is itself reason to forget about the tremendous historical progress China has achieved for their people, even though that surveillance and all other forms of state repression are things that Chinese communists have been aware of as necessary parts of state-building, then I think you are more concerned with creating a utopia than real emancipation.

Also also: being able to vote doesn’t make a country socialist or “not capitalistic”, if it would america would fall into this category as well.

I agree, what I meant is that China has a democratic state and that democratic state's partial ownership of the means of production makes China a socialist country. Both parts are necessary. State ownership without any form of democracy can look like Saudi Arabia. Liberal democracy with a capitalist economy is, at best, social democracy like the Nordic countries.

And yet, what can Israel do without the material support of the country that makes its domestic weapons production capabilities possible? What can Israel do without the country that supplies its Iron Dome system? What can Israel do without CENTCOM? Without the power of the US dollar being maintained? Without Europe being greased up to act as one imperialist unit together with the US? Without US control of oil trade? Without US rigging of international institutions?

Can one meaningfully ever "control" someone that has that much leverage over them?

You're flattering yourself if you think the politicians of the US need to be blackmailed to carry out the material interest of the capitalist ruling class. They won't pay attention to you even if they stop cheating on you with Israel, their main girl is capital.