You misunderstood me. I’m saying that the US is an oligarchy as well.

Every capitalist country is an oligarchy. The term is used selectively for Russia, and you have specifically focused on its use re: Russia in this discussion.

the first part is your opinion

My correct opinion. Do you believe you are the first baby leftist I’ve come across that harbors these kinds of views? I am always part of the political education group in any org I am in. We have to root people out who are very confident in their chauvinism and isolate them from the others in some way, as they are very disruptive on top of being wrong. This is also why various baby-leftist-only spaces are so completely useless, they spend their time chasing phantoms and fighting people that do good work. This is also why the feds have historically supported Trotskyists and certain anarchist formations.

and the second part is not true.

It is true, I know where these claims come from. I recognize them.

I’m not being condescending, and I’m being equally patient replying to people who are just trolling

You are repeatedly broad-brushing “tankies” with bullshit and placing yourself in a position to argue with others despite clearly not doing the work of learning about the topic first. A cool guy once said, “no investigation, no right to speak”.

If you have to compare RT to the NYT, that says more than enough

I don’t know what that means.

I’m genuinely apologizing because I’m only skimming this as I’m getting sleepy. and it’s a lot to go through. I can tell you took effort so apologies.

No worries, I am not holding you to a schedule. Please take any amount of time to reply. I also won’t take it personally if you don’t reply.

It actually isn’t much effort, I am very fast at writing.

Re: West also bad, at times worse

I know and I agree!

Well that isn’t what I said, though. What I said about the West is that there is addressing the false perception of greater “free speech” in the West, which is, again, largely just chauvinism. You do not enjoy greater speech, you are just such a non-entity in terms of threatening the ruling interests. This is because those ruling interests keep you, along with the wider public, weak, docile, and hating their same enemies.

I am also highlighting the ruling interests, not the government. This is because in these places with allegedly more “free speech”, international capital is dominant and has control over your everyday lives. It controls whether you can house and feed yourself and it censors on a constant basis. Restricting yourself solely to government censorship is a rhetorical trick used by capitalists to pretend that corporate control over life doesn’t count as oppression. Where is the comparison to private censorship, where the “free press” is actually a corporate-censored press? Have you done a comparison between the accuracy of claims from the SCMP and NYT? Just pick Palestine, see how it serves you.

And in the case of China, it is for CCP interests. Holding elections every now and then doesn’t translate to the dictatorship of the proletariat as envisioned.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not specified as anything other than the proletarian class oppressing the bourgeois class because they gained power through revolution. The PRC regularly executes billionaires and uniquely reroutes funds to its people, and its poorest, to build material well-being for all, not just the richest, and certainly not just the higher-ups in the party.

By that logic, US democracy would be a dictatorship of the proletariat as well, since they hold elections every now and then.

The dictatorship of the proletariat does not have any governing structure specified whatsoever. It is something predicted by Marx to have certain attributes that are more about political economics, like using monopoly industry that is already centrally planned and wielding it for the good of the proletarians. Something that China has often done and is the explicit communist logic behind their conveyor belt strategy for requiring companies to have more party and government participation as they grow larger and more monopolistic.

I do not consider america really federal, since there is massive power concentrated at the top. Same for other “federal” states like Germany

Then I have no idea what your meaning is.

The reality of language is that people like op rely on the negative connotation of the definition I just gave.

Imagine of they just said, “advocating for” instead. Wouldn’t have the same impact, right?

First, before I respond point-by-point, I would like to point out thst you have ignored nearly all of my response. I offered you information, history, and context, in part because it is informative, but mostly because it provides you the opportunity to recognize (vocally or not) your ignorance of this topic and instead redirect your attention yo actually questioning your knowledge and opinions and doing some reading instead of lashing out or doubling down.

Instead, you are doubling down on seeking conflict and sharing, yet again, that your only knowledge of this topic is what you were recemtly told to believe by capitalist media propagandists. And that this is so superior to my knowledge that you don’t even need to acknowledge what I’ve said and can just continue on trying to be contrarian.

Do you think it would be fair to call your behavior insufferable, as you have called tankies? To be clear, I do expect an answer to this question.

Okay so violently beating down protesters is okay because it’s in the name of anticolonialism?

Oh, so you aren’t even really responding to what I said, which is about Westerners being outraged that China was governing China. I thought you might not understand what I meant by that, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Anyways this is a srraw man and I will ignore it.

This line of reasoning goes exactly the same as US imperialism. It’s always some harmful ideology that is enslaving the poor people of some place and they must be freed by being forced to join the empire.

You’re just talking to yourself about all of this. It has nothing to do with what I said.

Are you ready to have an actual conversation or are you so deep into liberalism that you can only imagine fighting and winning rather than questioning your own ignorance?

I don’t get where you’re trying to take this conversation. You don’t have to prove to me that some things about China are great. In this comment alone you admitted three times that China isn’t perfect. Which means, China should be criticized.

Let’s say you go to a bar and there are some Nazis at the next table. You hear them say, “and fuck those communists, they will get what is coming to them”. Are you going to go over there and say, “yeah, fuck those tankies! They’re insufferable authoritarians”? Because all that means is that you’re going out of your way to validate Nazis trying to kill communists and aligning yourself with them. When someone says, “what the fuck, punch those Nazis, don’t validate them” are you going up say, “ergo, communists should be criticized”.

Your entire social context is those Nazis in that bar. And your criticisms aren’t even informed, they’re the bullshit spread by the Nazi propagandists. And then you tell everyone you’re on the left.

If you ever spent time among communists, you would find they are very critical of China. But their criticisms are differemt from yours becsyse yours are warmed over cold war talking points and uncritical readings of the media. And they are intentional about their outward criticisms, becayse again, our entire social context is the Nazi bar.

Like any other nation state. And I am saying, there are shills who run around and won’t let anybody criticize China because for some reason they got emotionally attached to a nation state

Nonsense. Speak to and of the tankies right in front of you right now. What, exactly, are we doing?

Everybody who says they don’t want to deepthroat Mao’s shlong for breakfast gets called a liberal.

Hey look it’s that homophobia I mentioned liberals doing in another comment. You asked me what a liberal is, well there you go. A liberal us, for exple, someone that attacks China for not having legalized gay marriage but then uses homophobic insults.

Do self-crit.

Any and all words uttered by a human that has even looked at the US on a map is liberal slop, and everything coming from the Russian state department is gospel. And I call those people tankies. That’s all I’m saying.

You do tell a lot of vague stories but they have no relation to what people are actually doing.

It is not coincidental that you ignored the vast majority of what I said, as it was concrete history.

Define liberal please because I don’t like being called one.

Liberalism is the dominant ideology of capitalism, it is a wide set of social and political views that serve capitalism through the absorption of bourgeois attitides and its primsry vehicle of political legitimacy is bourgeois democracy, like parliamentarianism. Every person living under capitalism has absorbed some liberalism, including every anarchist and communist. But those who critically engage sufficiently can shed the label because they understand the system sufficiently and work against it.

You are repeatedly exoressing a litany of thoughts rooted in unexamined liberalism. One that is usually retained by baby leftists in Western countries is racism and xenophobia. They will see the value of organized labor and social justice but cannot tie it to imperislism and fall in line with who the Capitalists tell them is their enemy

What do you think of people who say it’s hypocritical for queer people to support Palestine? Because to a socialist you sound like that when spreading imperialist pinkwashing against China.

In the same way that some people will shill for billionaires or for some billionaire-owned company, aka a corporate shill. People who fail to see that (capitalist) companies are just a way to extract profit.

A shill is someone paid to profess to have views other than their own. People shilling for a product makes sense, it is an old salesman tactic.

Who do you think is paying me to be right about China all the time?

In the same vein, some people fail to see that nation states are just instruments of power.

On the contrary, every communist that has ever existed knows this. We write about it all the time. Projecting this liberalism onto communists is just telling on yourself.

Some are better than others in different ways of course, but I get real itchy when people jump to defend a nation at the first smidgeon of criticism. I hate nationalism.

Existing in the real world as we do, your “anti-nationalism” is really just nationalism in favor of Western powers, despite your professibg to be against them. You repeat their talking points! What do you think the outcome is of uncritically repeating sinophobic or russophobic falsehoods? Why do you think we are even talking about those two countries? It is because US empire has decided to focus on them as targets of derision and marginalization.

What, exact, nationalism are you pushing back against? What is making you itchy? Because all I see are people defending China against piss-poor talking points.

Funny, I was just telling @Cowbee about how the tankies I see on here are insufferable & impossible to converse with.

I would say the people here are being very patient with you, as you are spreading xenophobic views out of ignorance and recycled imperialist think tank talking points while also being condescending. You don’t get pushback on that by liberals because they agree with you but anyone on the left would be embarrassed to be associated with it.

The appropriate response for someone not generously giving you their time would be to call you, among other things, a liberal and then go on with their day.

But I’ll bite. First of all, I don’t appreciate the strawmen. I’m not saying that there is a lot of tankies, nor that they are here now suddenly

Liberals suddenly learned the word tankie. Why do you think that is? Rather than a straw man, I understood this as a fact we could all accept.

I’m just saying that I, myself, in my own experience, have seen people shilling for China or even Russia, acting like it’s a fucking utopia.

What tankies have you seen that treat Russia like a utopia? What tankies have you seen that treat China like a utopia? I think you are just revealing your owm straw men, and all you have seen is people appreciating asoects of either country. And by the magic of chauvinism, any praise for any aspect of “the enemy” is an uncritical endorsement. Liberals going down this path will often throw in some homophobic ibsults about Putin or Xi.

Russia an oligarchy, just with a different structure than most Western countries.

Russia is capitalist. It is only called an oligarchy because Westerners are racist towards them and need different words for the same thing when the Slavic brainpan does it. This is you uncritically absorbing that racism. They control our thoughts through language, framings, and what is discussed vs. not discussed.

China is a government that rules over billions of people. That is, by definition, evil.

It obviously is not.

No amount of America Bad makes China or Russia good.

America Bad both describes the position of the US as the globsl seat of capital and imperislist power and is intended to get people like yourself to have sone persoective, as you are deeply propagandized towards America-centrism.

In terms of propaganda sources, for example just take a look at Russia Today.

RT is, generally speaking, more reliable that the NYT. So what of it?

One thing that is different is the lack of government-critical sources available from China, also Russia. Freedom of Speech in the West is wobbly, but in China and especially Russia it is even worse (from everything I’ve read).

What have you read?

Your freedom of speech is tolerated in the West to the extent thst it doesn’t threaten ruling class interests. The ruling class already owns all of the papers and TV channels and think tanks, they drown you out. You can never hope to push socialism through their apparatus. That is how effective their cemsorship already is: you’re told you have freedom of speech and then deplatformed. If you get a little louder, you might get a platform on occasion, but will then will still be drowned out by “competing” views.

And if you fly too close to the sun, you will get direct government censorship. Ask Germany how “free speech” is going with regards yup Palestinian solidariry. Ask comrades in the US how free speech is going with Samidoun declared a terrorist orgsnization. Ask a former Black Panther for free their speech was while being soued on snd martyred by the feds and cops.

If you actually do anything that matters, if you truly challenge the ruling powers in the West, you will need to be realistic and expect oppression. The idea that you have free speech is just pure propaganda.

Re: China go on Weibo you will find plenty of criticism of the government. The idea that you can’t criticize the government in China is xenophoboc propaganda.

Re: Russia: okay, but what is your point? There are bad things that happen in Russia so… their role against US imperialism is bad? Because that tends to be the only thing supported by “tankies”. The Russian Federation is a capitalist project created by capitalist revanchist shock therapy on the USSR that killed 7-10 million people. The West created the RF, its “oligarchs” are hust centralized capitalists like in othet countries in Europe, except the West continued to exclude Russia from the imperisl core, attempting to force it into the periphery (extraction snd poverty). What you see today is a regional capitalist power that is respinding to that. One where the national bourgeoisie are dominant rather than the international bourgeoisie, due to circumstances imposef on them. As a consequence, they often align against Western imperislism.

This is a lovely segue into our China sidequest, and while I agree on the definition, I have doubts on how public the public sector really is. The way that national election results look and the way vocal dissidents or political opposition are treated does not give me the idea that the people truly have all the power here.

Which is to say, you don’t actually know anything about it. Public means state-owned, by the way. Do you believe they aren’t actually owned by the state?

Capitalism concentrates power in the capitalist class. This class can then subvert democracy, resulting in oligarchy.

This has the false premise that the historical course of capitalism is to enter spaces that were already “democratic” in the bourgeois democratic sense. This is not true. Instead, capitalism itself gained power through the replacement of feudalistic giverning powers (like monarchies) with structures they could control, compatible with their ideas of “progress”. In short, they created bourgeous democracy. They were already in control. The question of concentration of capital changes the words but not the fact of who is in control.

In a similar way, central planning concentrates power in the central government, which actually makes it even easier to abuse that power.

In countries run by socialists, central planning is an exercise of power that already exists. The power is maintained through the oppression of competing classes and, traditionally, party bureaucracy.

I don’t know what it could possibly mean to say it is “easier to abuse that power”, it is so vague and decontextualized thst it just sounds like something you’re makinh up on the spot. Socialists endeavour to speak in terms of concrete realities and draw conclusions from them. What is your standard of abuse? Of power? How are you comparing these things?

btw central planning is not unique to countries run by socialists. Highly concentrated capitalism also has central planning aspects, as do their governments in times of emergency. But it is, in that case, central planning for bourgeois interests.

Chinese government is not transparent

How so? Tell me how the Chinese system works for, say, someone working to get a hospital built in their town.

nor federal enough

This sounds like America-centrism. There is nothing inherently democratic about federalism and it is often antidemocratic. If you are in the US, do you applaud the electoral college?

for me to call it democratic or owned by the people.

Tell me which other peripheral countries hsve done so much for their people. Tell me who has alleviated so much poverty, built so much infrastructure, and by their own hand rather than imperialism and capitalist ventures. The proof is in the doing.

If China is so great

Are we having a discussion of geopolitics or a schoolyard gossip fight?

then why does it feel the need to dictate over Hong Kong

Why do you have strong opinions about this topic when you clearly do not know any history about China?

China, more specifically the Qing Dynasty, was colonized (mostly by the British) through a series of imperialist ventures thst included the Opium Wars. The result was the designation of Hong Kong, already an existing Chinese city, as a British imperial trade hub where resources and wealth extracted from the rest of the country was traded, as well as later serving as a finsncial hub for the rest of the imperialized region. But, to put it simply, the British stole Hong Kong in 1841-1843.

When China threw off all of its imperial masters in its national liberation fight against the Japanese, it then had a civil war due to the KMT attacking the communists. Obviously, the communists won. As part of this, they reclaimed Hong Kong just a little over 100 years after it was stolen, but using the legal definition that had been imposed by the British, who had given themselves a 100-year lease that ended in 1997.

Hong Kong is a Chinese city that was colonized by the British and is being reintegrated, as yiu would expect from a sovereign country. You claimed elsewhere that you are against Western hegemony, but this is a crystal clear example of anticolonial action and you’re siding with the colonists that write breathless propaganda about how unfair it is that China is governing a Chinese city.

and Taiwan

Again, just basic history. When the communists were reconsolidating their country, they were also expelling KMT forces. At the end, the KMT looted wealth and cultural artifacts and fled to Taiwan, where they set up a military dictatorship and began oppressing the indigenous people there. The PRC was set to invade Taiwan and finish their civil war, but the US set up a blockade and the PRC opted to vow a later return rather than force the Americans out. The first question you should have is why the US was meddling in their civil war.

Both the PRC and the KMT have long held that the civil war has never ended, with the PRC claiming Taiwan and the KMT claiming all of msinlsnd China and also Mongolia. The PRC holds a consistent line of reunification being the end goal.

The US uses Taiwan to harass the PRC and wants to use it to escalate tensions. It may even try to turn it into another Ukraine, doing everything it can to push China over red lines militarily until it finally decides that Taiwan is an intolerable threat just a few miles off its coast and very close to Shenzhen. If that happened, would you yet again go after the target if US imperialism like your masters tell you to, calling it an unprovoked aggression? Would you have new names for people that correctly blame the US for using their proxies as puppets to harass other nations? The US is already trying to derisk from Taiwan by exportinh its chip production facilities but it isn’t going well because the US is so finsncislized that it can’t barely build productive capacity at even 10X the cost of elsewhere.

Does China have gay marriage?

This is another example of why someone would call you a liberal. Pinkwashing imperialist takes. What is your logic on what is permitted to be done to other countries if they don’t have a legal recognition of gay marriage? On what basis do other cultures need to mirror your own preferences in order for them to be free of your chauvinism? Any real county will have reactionary elements, some old, some new. Your country, and you, have reactionary elements.

There is a populsr struggle for gay marriage in China and it is going pretty well. It is mostly jist old people who are against it. You should exoect to see it legalized in the next decade or so. But you will have had nothing to do with thst, as your contribution here is to sneer at the entire country for not doing what this Westerner baby leftist demands.

Incidentally, if the CPC did force through legalized gay marriage and it elicited some negative response, like protests, you can be certain this would be characterized as an authoritarian overreach and how dare they disregard the will of the people. Some “socialists”, huh!?

Trans rights perhaps?

China has better trans rights than your country, most likely. It has less transphobia to begin with, had major out and truly popular trans celebrities before the US did, and provides gender-affirming care of all kinds in a way that is truly accessible for the vast majority of people. Compare this to the US where trans kids are often exiled by their families and given no support, leading to high rates of homelessness, hard drug use, and death.

China does not have the same culture wars as the US, it doesn’t have the same need for capital to create and maintain marginalization to distract from material decline. China is materially advancing and ending extreme poverty.

I’m not saying China is as bad as the West claims it is. I’m just saying it’s not something to get wild about.

But you don’t seem to know anything about China. Why have an opinion at all? Why not hold your tongue until you have done some reading or talked nicely to Chinese people?

It’s a nation state (a far too big one at that), which are by definition tools of oppression.

Sure, but what of it? Do you think we are in a position to have a societu free of oppression, including nation states? With you and whose army?

Socialists must build revolution in the real world, with what is materially in front of us. Tell us how you would, say, end China’s status as a nation state without it just getting immediately recolonized, probably by the country in which you live, work, and to which you contribute.

It is your repetition of radlib talking points to punch left.

Per the origins of the term, a tankie is a communist that supported the Soviets wuelling the Hungarian 1956 uprising. It was an insult concocted by British Trotskyists, who also consider themselves communists.

The modern use of the term is just a liberal sentiment leveled against anyone that doesn’t fall neatly in line with US Empire’s vilification campaigns. If you dare to say that Russia has material motivations that are a counter to those of the US rather than being a kingdom run by a madman that just loves killing, you are a tankie. If you don’t want Ukraine used as a proxy for the US to hurt Russia, regardless of how many Ukrainians die, you are a tankie. If you treat the PRC as country filled with normal people living normal lives rather than the dystopian nightmare it’s falsely depicted as, uou are a tankie. If you know anything at all about Dengism, you are a tankie.

Really, the liberal position on both countries is premised on orientalism and it is never a surprise when the criticisms inevitably turn into vague tropes. And when this laziness is called out, well, it’s time to deploy a tactical tankie reference. I definitely don’t care about being insulted, these situations are really just a way for the other person to give themselves an excuse to stop thinking or engaging.

Yet again begging liberals to understand what the word “shill” means.

The first source for this claim: https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1895632/

On June 29, 2023, a briefing on arms supplies to Ukraine was held at the UN Security Council at Russia’s initiative. The civil society briefers Russia invited included journalists Max Blumenthal (USA) and Chay Bowes (Ireland).

They provided facts about the Kiev regime using Western weapons to deliver strikes at civilian facilities in Donetsk and to send subversive groups into the Belgorod Region. They supplied evidence that billions of US taxpayer dollars have been invested in the corrupt schemes of fuelling a war against Russia in which Ukrainians are being used as a tool. They concluded that the Western elites and defence industries were the only ones to benefit from the escalation of the conflict.

Oh no, not journalists providing information at a public briefing! Don’t they know it’s time to do baby’s first McCarthyism!?

Sounds like you just can’t defend your own comment. You’re all talk when it’s time to call people names but this is your entire response to me? lmao

I hope you can someday have the courage of your convictions, “anti-authoritarian”.

Don’t forget the material basis for these shifts! While The Discourse of “practical” truangulating centrists tends to show this rightward path, it is because (1) they were already fundamentally reactionary, they tend to just use this logic as an excuse for why they tolerate far-right positions, and (2) the right is supported by the ruling class to address some of the “problems” it creates, like a marginalized underclass that wants enough income to feed their children, housing, and safety from violence.

The shift right is not driven simply by debate or ideology, but by the arenas where degradation in material conditions due to capitalism meet the ruling class’ need to deflect blame to the marginalized (who they can reap larger profits from) to placate the less marginalized. Racism, nationalism, and extermination campaigns are created and maintained for the interests of capital, with the common people being pushed and prodded to fall in line with repeating the (usually ad hoc) new or recycled scapegoats and underclassrs. Wouldn’t want you to point blame in the right direction!

This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude

They’re not depicted as rude, they’re depicted as an know-it-all eager compromiser that ends up working for the forces of reaction because they have no real principles or red lines.

close-minded

That is generally the attitude of “centrists” and people that go out of the way to congratulate themselves on “being practical” by triamgulating. If they were open to actual principles they eould no longer be triangulating on them, and triangulating is their primary commitment.

genocide supporter

Like virtually every Democratic member of Congress and both of their presidential candidates? Anyone tolerating that is indeed complicit. It does not require any mental gymnastics to acknowledge this.

posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China

No!!! I almost passed out when I read that. You’re telling me there are good aspects of a designated enemy of empire!? Impossible.

Open-minded btw.

sometimes pro-Russia propaganda

Not another designated enemy!!! I almost died when I read this.

and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.

Is this supposed to imply something bad about them?

Car sales on the RF are up something like 50% over last year and last year had relatively normal numbers.

The RF’s central bankers keep trying to tank their economy but it isn’t working because of all the direct investment required to offset sanctions. They are maxing out debt costs, basically, trying the neoliberal “fighting inflation” strategy that does the exact opposite most of the time. It makes them precarious economically despite how well they’re doing but for a very different reason than “sanctions are working”. If they kicked out their neoliberals it would be smooth sailing.

Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.

You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.

Will do!