China doesn’t pretend that their media is unbiased, though. There’s no aura of unbiased media in China.

What they “pretend” to be doesn’t matter, what matters is the thoughts they want to put on the people who read it, why they want to, and how many of them do read it. Any and all state media or state collaborative media tries to paint the state it comes from in a good light. This is not somehow more benevolent or less manipulative when it’s done by China, even if “it’s easy to circumvent” or “people know it’s biased”.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s head of global threat intelligence, is literally a US intelligence plant

According to its CEO and founder Ren, Huawei’s corporate culture is the same as the culture of the CCP, “and to serve the people wholeheartedly means to be customer-centric and responsible to society.” Ren frequently states that Huawei’s management philosophy and strategy are commercial applications of Maoism.

Ren states that in the event of a conflict between Huawei’s business interests and the CCP’s interests, he would “choose the CCP whose interest is to serve the people and all human beings”. Qiao and Marquis observe that company founder Ren is a dedicated communist who seeks to ingrain communist values at Huawei.

I wonder if WeChat and TikTok are any different, too.

Bing has 100 million DAUs worldwide. Reddit has about 55 million DAUs worldwide. LinkedIn has about 22 million DAUs in the US. Twitter has about 54 million MAUs in the US. Threads has about 8 million DAUs worldwide (though probably less now, lol). 1-5% penetration of total users in terms of usage is indicative of very high awareness.

Last October, China clamped down on some VPNs

So basically, it’s easy to do, but illegal, but it’s rarely persecuted? That’s a really weird policy.

No it’s not. Much like you aren’t a CPC shill/russian bot/whatever, no one commenting on a lemmy post is a psyop agent with a secret agenda to manipulate everyone. Those guys have the entire media, they don’t need to hire people to pretend to be redditors. Just because you believe it really really hardly doesn’t make it true.

I get what you mean, but the other guy brought up democracy as if it was the be-all end-all solution.

Yes. No democracy, no support from me. “But the US isn’t democratic!” Which is why I don’t support it either. Not sure if the other guy is the same.

Countries that disprove OP’s point about democracy being the solution

No country disproves that democracy is needed. “Benevolent dictators” (all dictators think they’re benevolent) die. If you think a dictatorship is doing well just give it a few years.

most urban people either know how to flip the firewall or know someone who can - it’s really not that hard.

“Yes they censor everything, but it’s easy to circumvent!” is not an excuse. How accurate is this really though? Do you have any sources to prove this is the case? Genuinely interested.

As if the large media organizations in the US don’t all cite reports from “independent think tanks” that are conspicuously all funded by the same billionaires and manned by “ex”-US intelligence.

Chinese news cite chinese think tanks, both entities funded by the chinese government. How is it any different? Doesn’t China have more billionaires than the US too?

followed by USA/capitalism works best and is only system that works (does not)

Neither me not the person you were responding to said this. They criticised China on something - you made up the “hence the US is good/only thing that works” line. You just assumed if anyone thinks anything slightly remotely bad about China it’s because they’re an evil idiot liberul!!!. It really is just a reflex for you people no?

It’s not about brains, it’s about the flow of conversation. Everytime someone calls out China on anything there’s always a bunch of people that immediately say “Ah yes because the US–” No one is talking about the US. No one is saying it’s any better. It being a shithole too doesn’t magically make China not one. If that is the only thing you have to say then you don’t actually have an argument, just the vibe that it’s le based epic AES wholesome chungus country and if they do anything wrong it must be propaganda or not actually done by them.

This not an argument. You can’t respond to “X is doing something wrong” with “OH AS IF Y IS ANY BETTER” when literally no one was talking about Y. You’re just trying to derail the conversation. If you’re going to defend China stick to your guts and defend China, don’t attack completely unrelated countries implying I must think they’re any better, they’re not.

At least most people in Russia and China can distinguish between the truth and the party line.

I am sure that most people in the country with the largest censorship firewall in existence know the truth any better. And before you say B-B-B-BUT AMERICA— Yeah they censor shit too. I hate both of them.

So… no, you don’t have an actual point to make.

Yes yes we know America is bad too, now do you have an actual point to make?

Thank you for being willing to engage sanely in the first place. <3

I am sorry for being agressive. I mostly assumed you thought the same things as the person you were quoting. I appreciate that you at least admit you aren’t well read enough, that’s more than most people I talk to.

I’m happy to receive some recs I can follow up on.

I really appreciate this too. Thank you. I think as a direct expanding on what I’m talking about, this essay is very good:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary

It’s available on video form too, but the video doesn’t have citations.

Here’s a good rebuttal of On Authority:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/london-anarchist-federation-the-problems-with-on-authority

A modern and a classical reading on how anarchists view authority and power:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-power

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-what-is-authority

Thanks for ignoring everything I said.

Look, I agree that it’s dumb to call yourself a socialist and have zero respect for most attempts at socialism, especially when your critique doesn’t come from anything serious but just parroting of cold war propaganda. I agree that these countries weren’t literally the devil, nor fascist, not “pretending”, that’s all fine.

But it’s still so dishonest of MLs to dig for quotes and smugly boastbout how “libertarians never succeed”. Even if we completely ignore all the very explicit and deliberate attempts at sabotage anarchists had to endure from their statist “comrades” (which we shouldn’t but we always casually seem to be forced to do in the name of “unity”), it doesn’t change the fact that vanguardist revolutions have all been incredibly flawed too.

You all are very often willing to recognize your failures, most of the people like you I have talked to seem to agree that at some point the revolution was “hijacked”, usurped, corrupted, lost aim, usually coinciding with a figure they don’t like taking over the revolutionary government and messing things up.

The supposed “strong state that crushes all opposition” being taken over by the reformist opposition and then the capitalist one in the case of the USSR and Leninists. The market reforms of Deng in the case of China and Maoists. But you all never seem to ask yourselves the question “Why was that allowed to happen?”. Why am I supposed to put my trust in some authoritarian bullshit solution specifically justified as a means to protect the revolution when it failed at doing so? Why do you have to be so smug and condescending at me for not trusting in things that didn’t work?

Why do you instead of learning from the mistakes in your methods that most of the time you yourself recognize and trying to come up with new ideas and systems for the current age, insist on still clinging to material analysis of the world of a hundred years ago as the gospel, the sole undying and absolute truth on how to Make Socialism, merely saying “it’ll totally work right this time” instead? Why do you insist on mocking and “”“dunking”“” on anyone who refuses to do that?

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.

This is all completely false. It genuinely is just lies. You can disagree with the explanations, but to claim there literally aren’t any is just ignorance and a complete lack of good faith. Look, if you’re a socialist in the internet, you probably have dealt with confidently incorrect liberals whining about strawmen that you don’t believe, because they haven’t read anything about it - and it’s probably been incredibly frustrating. So why do you never think twice before doing the same thing with anarchists?

I’m always told to read Lenin and a ton of authoritarian essays and I always do in good faith, but it’s extremely rare for me to ever be afforded the same honour, and then all the conversations I have end up with people telling me shit like this and me having to explain anarchism 101 to them because they genuinely don’t actually know anything.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

I am also always told to be charitable and nuanced about the failures and mistakes of vanguardist revolutions, but no one ever has the same honour with anarchist ones.

It’s not just about the inconvenience though. Windows is paid. It’s at least 100 bucks. It’s not even “free but you are the product” like Google drive or whatever. Yet it still abuses you, controls you and exploits you, and you have to do tons of workarounds for it to not get in your way. Most of them are always temporary, as a new update reenables everything again or directly circumvents the workaround you used.

If you are locked into the ecosystem, then I do agree that it’s annoying that people think moving to Linux is seamless. It wasn’t for me, it even cost me money since I had to buy an AMD gpu for things to work well + another GPU to passthrough to a windows VM and still use Clip Studio. But if someone only uses their computer for things that can be done seamlessly on Linux, and they genuinely dislike and are against all the bullshit Windows always does, it’s worth it to tell them there is a viable alternative, and what they heard about “you have to use the command line for everything meaningful!” or “everything breaks all the time!” hasn’t been true for years.

If you hate being used by Windows so much, you really should try an alternative, unless you’re a professional that uses software that just can’t run on Linux at all, chances are you can get most of what you use a computer for working fine. In return you get freedom, privacy, choice, performance.

Or if you hate it but are too reluctant to change for whatever reason, that’s totally fine, but just say that. Don’t spread misinformation about Linux.

It’s worth it to be FOSS to take three weeks to get your Arch install just the way you like it.

Literally no one ever says this. Just use Fedora. Almost completely seamless. There’s a KDE version if you want to have the same workflow as windows without configuring anything. You don’t have to use firefox, brave or ungoogled chromium are FOSS too.

Sure, have a great day.

I would rather not say for privacy. But my country of origin is irrelevant to my points. I do not support it in any way and I try to rely on it as little as possible, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s also not a colonial power at all.

Sure, that’s a valid and respectful question.

I would say the biggest example is social democracy. There is no denying it brings great improvements to quality of life and general happiness. They are obviously not enough to us radicals, but they do exist. Greater healthcare, greater education, greater prison systems, less homelessness, etc etc etc. But we of course know the dark side of all of that. The colonialism and “soft power” behind it. We know that, because it is still ultimately capitalism, it doesn’t eradicate the misery, it just hides it away. It makes other people have it instead of them. And we also know all of those nice things are merely concessions given by the ruling class that can easily be taken away at any time. Thus, if such a system brings improvements through means like those, I don’t care how great the improvements are, I don’t support that system.

We can also use what I’m saying to refute the fascists who say “oh, at least the trains came on time” “oh, at least everyone had a house” “oh, at least there was less crime”. Rather than going into the long and most probably ultimately pointless task of proving none of those things were historically true to the person saying them, I prefer to simply say “I don’t care. Even if that was true, if it was achieved with fascism I don’t want it.”

Give me a specific reason, and we can talk about it. I can’t really reply much to such a generic statement.

Hey, thanks a lot for the respectful reply.

I don’t really understand what kind of point you’re making, though. There are plenty of economic and political systems that can reach all the development and improvement to quality of life and literacy you want, yet they do it through horrible, brutal and harmful means. You yourself would be opposed to attaining these things you’re talking about through colonialism or slavery, or even through capitalism as I’m sure you’re also against social democracy like I am. My argument is that the means communist countries used to get to these ends are bad enough that I don’t care about the ends they reached. Just like I would never care about the ends reached by colonialist means.

I am not denying capitalist countries didn’t suffer from the same problems or didn’t commit the same or even more attrocities. This doesn’t excuse anything though. I am opposed to these things by principle, no matter who does them. And I’m not going to pick between two systems that do the things I’m against all the same, but one leads to prosperity quicker. I’m not playing that game.

You don’t know their quality because you refused to engage with them on principle. You locked yourself into your own safe little bubble and found an excuse to dismiss anything that challenges you. You just have to say it’s “extremist propaganda” and you can stay safe. If you wanna do that go ahead, but to then be smug to others and tell them to educate themselves when you’re unwilling to even listen to the positions of the people you’re arguing against is incredibly dishonest. Who do you even think you’re fooling?