If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they're lying.
Evidence or GTFO.
that clearly is not fascist
Lol, right. The people who were actively supporting genocide, holding alleged migrants in concentration camps, increasing the already bloated military budget to an all-time high, and trampling our rights with the continued use of mass surveillance, "clearly not fascist."
Even if they weren't, where the fuck do you think Trumpism came from? The status quo produced him and continuing to sleepwalk towards decline while shutting out any actual leftist vision makes fascism inevitable. The only possibility of preventing it is by forcing the democratic party to change, or replacing it altogether, even if it means making a "tough decision" and accepting the risks of a Trump presidency. Tactically, as well as morally, I made the correct decision and I will stand by that until the day I die.
Being an adult means accepting when you need to make tough decisions and sacrifice.
I did. Trump will be worse for me, but as any halfway decent person would understand, even death is preferable to committing genocide.
Being an "adult" in your mind means completely obliterating your conscience, becoming a twisted, evil being with no remorse, no concern for the lives of others, and engaging in the worst crimes imaginable.
No thank you, I will never become that, if I live to be 100, I will remain a "child." And you'd better get that fact through your thick head before you blow another election because you refuse to believe that anyone could actually stand by their moral convictions.
Growing plants to eat kills fewer plants than growing plants to feed to livestock which you then eat. The "plants' rights activist" argument is invalid.
I used to have a job processing used laptops from offices and you would not believe how many people put Apple stickers on Thinkpads and other non-Apple products. I guess for a lot of them it's like saying, "I'd rather be using a Mac," or it was just to be silly, I have no idea.
Yes, that's precisely why I didn't vote for either gradually escalating fascist.
The situation in Ukraine is complex, while the situation in Taiwan is purely hypothetical and can be dismissed without further comment.
In Ukraine, revolutionaries overthrew the government and banned opposition parties. Then, other revolutionaries decided they didn't like that so they overthrew their regional governments and tried to break away. The pro-Western side pretends that the revolutionaries they backed were completely organic and represented the popular will, while the pro-Russia revolutionaries were purely Russian proxies - and the pro-Russia side pretends the exact same thing but in reverse. The reality is that both sides have some degree of genuine popular support.
In any case, a civil war broke out between them, and after numerous ceasefire attempts fell apart, with cities in eastern Ukraine being shelled by artillery, the pro-Russia side requested Russian assistance.
Now, I don't think either side is fighting for anything meaningful, it's just about who gets to put their flag where. The Ukrainian people will suffer more or less equally under either government, but they are suffering much more in this pointless destructive war.
The only reason it's any of my business is because my government supported the overthrow of the previous government and helped bring in a new government that was unwilling to have free and fair elections, and is now providing military aid to said government. If we had simply stayed out of there from the start, I don't believe any of this would be happening.
As for Russia, while I'm not fond of their response to the situation by any means, to really condemn them I would need to suggest an alternative course of action. If they had stayed out of the war, then the people of eastern Ukraine would, at the very least, be shut out of any democratic process. Perhaps the best approach would have been to simply spend the money they've spent on war on a mass relocation effort allowing ethnic Russians in Ukraine to relocate within Russia, although I don't know that that's realistic or that anyone would agree to that. Or perhaps Russia should have simply rolled over and accepted this expansionism. I don't really know, it's not really my business.
Of course this whole mess goes back to Lenin giving Russian territory to Ukraine in the hopes that the ethnic Russians would be a stabilizing force on Ukrainian politics and would help build a bridge between Russians and Ukrainians. We are now living in the miserable future where that failed and backfired tremendously. Ideally, the USSR wouldn't have collapsed and we wouldn't be here in the first place. But no use crying over spilt milk.
All I know is that I don't want to be involved in it. If the Ukrainians want to fight Russia they can knock themselves out, more power to 'em. But if nothing else I can't see how it's possibly worth the cost when we have people here losing their food stamps.
If that's what being an "adult" means, then I pray that I die a "child."
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti will go a long way towards understanding my politics.
China seems to aspire to this same modus operandi. They seem to want to invade Taiwan in the near future.
"Seems to aspire to" "seem to want to" those are just other ways of saying that they aren't doing it, that there's nothing that you can point to that's in any way comparable to what the US has been doing for decades, if not since it's conception. You're just speculating about what you think might happen and saying that that hypothetical possibility makes them as bad as a country that's actually done that and worse.
It’s not that long ago that Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani were Republican mayors of NYC, but I think the last non-communist leader of China was decades ago. Before the PRC was established I would guess.
Sure. But those communists have often had vastly different approaches. China saw extensive changes both economically and politically in the 80's and different leaders have differed on their approaches since then.
So the leadership of a single party is in their constitution. I don’t think that’s true in the US, or other western democracies.
You're right, it isn't. In fact, the US constitution doesn't say anything about political parties at all. That doesn't stop our political system from being dominated by two parties, because of the way things are set up.
The Chinese system operates off a different set of assumptions than the US system does. But the assumptions that the US system makes are fundamentally incorrect. So I don't see a reason to just broadly dismiss the entire Chinese system based off of it being described as a "one-party state." I for one, would prefer to live in a system where only the Democratic party existed and the Republican party did not. But moreover, I don't think you could accurately answer basic question about how the Chinese system works. Like, walk me through your picture of how someone becomes a mayor in China. Do you even have a picture?
Look, my politics are pretty simple. I see my government doing all this fucked up shit and I hate the people doing it, I want to get rid of them, ideally have them face justice, and then bring in new people who hopefully we won't have to do the same thing to. But apparently I'm not allowed to want that? Apparently I suddenly have to answer for every alleged bad thing anyone around the world has ever done. And I've been entertaining that crazy idea quite a bit more than it really deserves. Without getting into details, I can tell you that my own family was very negatively impacted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody I know has been negatively impacted (certainly not to the same extent) by China not having sufficiently democratic mayoral elections, or anything else China has done.
And again, I have absolutely no idea what purpose condemning the Chinese government is supposed to serve. I'm trying to solve problems that affect my own community. And if you think I have a moral responsibility to help liberate the Chinese people from their government, I mean, that's insane. Again, there's nothing I can do to bring down the Chinese government from the outside and even if I could I can not imagine any scenario where that would help the Chinese people.
I mean, if anything, shouldn't I prioritize, say, Saudi Arabia over China? How about before we go around taking aggressive actions against a government that the people overwhelmingly approve of, we just stop giving weapons to a literal monarchy? Like, I'm not even saying we overthrow them, just stop aiding them. If you want me to ignore my own people for the sake of people all around the world, I'm down, it's just that even if "Liberate Chinese people from the government they support" would be way, way down my list even if I put it on it. Why shouldn't it be?
Genuinely, why shouldn't it be? At a certain point, shouldn't I be questioning your motivations for constantly trying to redirect my justified anger and my own government towards my government's enemies?
“chinese hacking”
Christ, have you heard a single word I've said this conversation? Yes, China does hacking, Russia does hacking, the US does hacking, everybody does that kind of stuff. The difference is that China is generally limited to the kinds of bad things that every government is guilty of, whereas the US literally dominates the world by force, assassinating if not full-scale invading anybody they don't like. You keep coming up with this tiny trivial stuff to compare to things like the occupation of Afghanistan, which makes me think that you simply don't comprehend the scale of suffering that that entailed.
Sources like CNN and Wikipedia refer to China as a one-party state. I guess I’ll accept that this description is probably accurate, until I see news of China having national elections involving at least two competitive parties.
Actually, China has nine political parties.
It's kinda funny to say that in comparison to New York City, because you brought up Mamdani as if he had already been elected. In fact, he only won the Democratic primary. It's just that the Democratic party is popular enough in NYC that it's been more or less assumed that he would win. Of course, the incumbent Cuomo was also from the Democratic party, and yet there's significant ideological differences between them.
You might say that NYC is, functionally, a one-party city. Of course, meaningful ideological differences can exist within that party, with competitive races between them. But I suppose the fact that the Republican party technically also exists there is the thing that determines whether NYC has democratic elections or not. Is that how that works? Should I be thanking the Republicans for making the US a democracy instead of "one party state?"
It's very clear that you haven't actually investigated or thought about how the Chinese system works and are just repeating lines you've heard. A one-party system doesn't mean that the leaders of the party pick out who they want in each position and they run unopposed.
In my experience it seemed like uniforms were kinda another grift. You gotta buy everything just so from this specific place and you might never wear any of it again afterwards. I also got in trouble fairly frequently for accidentally having some part of my uniform out of order, which had more to do with forgetfulness or neurodivergence than anything.
At the same time, I didn't really feel like it interfered with my ability to think critically or independently, but that might just be me. I was always weird enough that anyone who would have bullied me over clothes would've bullied me over other stuff, and my head was in the clouds anyway so I hardly noticed what I was wearing.
If anything, perhaps things like that biased my thinking in a libertarian direction, out of rebellion. It's very easy to think that way when you're young, and tired of parents and teachers telling you what to do.
My mind works differently from most people's and my experiences may be atypical. But when I googled for studies I found mixed results, it doesn't appear that there are conclusive results showing a correlation between uniforms and academic performance.
In any case, I think it's that big of a deal. It is messed up, generally speaking, how little control kids have over their lives in the US and how people's intrensic motivation is often killed off and they're pushed around by extrensic motivators, rather than cooperating with what they actually want. I would say that uniforms can potentially contribute to that larger problem.
That's one person in a mayoral position. The overall direction of the country is something that we don't have a choice in. Mamdani can make buses free or whatever because that doesn't really threaten the elites, at best, it inconveniences them.
We also haven't seen what he'll actually do in office. Obama promised to reign in the overreaches of mass surveillance and did no such thing, for example. AOC recently voted in favor of sending military aid to Israel.
Do you pay attention to mayoral races in China? Or do you just assume that they must be undemocratic and that all the candidates are bad without a second thought? I'll admit, I don't, because I have little reason to. But if there were a Mamdani-like figure in China's politics, do you really think you'd hear about them?
It seems to me like you keep trying to make a rule from the exception. Zohran is notable precisely because he's an exception. Taiwan, likewise, is an exception to China's general approach to foreign relations. The general trend is that the rich exert a ton of influence over the US government, which pushes it in the direction of trying to dominate every corner of the globe, usually through force. Of course, I've mentioned some of the most recent and blatant examples, but spin a globe, put your finger on a random country you've never heard of, and look into that country's history. You'll almost always find the US doing something nefarious. You simply can't say that about China.
Fair point. Here in Europe though, Russia is probably a bit more worrying. E.g. I’m not surprised that Poland wants to take a firm stance of supporting Ukraine, because Poles are probably worrying that their land might be invaded if Ukraine is taken over by Russia.
My perspective on that is that I'm not really convinced that Poland's government is really that much better than Russia's to the point to be worth fighting for. They're both right-wing capitalist governments that don't seem to do a lot for their people. If I were a Pole, or a Russian or Ukrainian, and the government tried to draft me to fight, I'd probably just flee. Is the average person's life really going to be that different? A government is only worth fighting for if it actually does things for the people (or if the enemy is genocidal like the Nazis).
As for China, maybe we would disagree, but I think they really want to expand their power, even if that means stamping on people’s rights…
Of course. Every country, or at least every superpower, gets there because they're willing to play the game, because they have their eye on the ball. That's just the way the world works, realistically.
But China's approach is mostly about winning the peace. China expands through economic investment and the production of goods. Every year, more and more small countries that used to be neutral are turning towards China and countries that used to be oriented towards the US are becoming neutral and dealing with both. Colombia, for example. Because the US is at best neglectful of these countries, at worst, it's outright hostile, it maintains and expands control through outright invasions, bombing campaigns, funding insurgencies, covert regime change, and freezing assets. Every time it does this for the sake of controlling one country, a hundred countries see it and wonder if they're next. In the past, they had little choice but to tolerate it, but now that China is a viable challenger, they have options.
Multipolarity restricts the abuse any country can commit, because of the option of turning to an alternative. Likely, part of why China offers more generous and less restrictive deals is simply because they're trying to break into the market.
China is not my ideal system. Tbh, my ideals might be incompatible with achieving superpower status. But China makes it more likely that something closer to my ideals could be implemented in smaller countries around the globe, and, having been tested and proven in that context, those policies could spread further.
But ultimately my point is, you don't make it to the top without stepping on people's toes sometimes. You might say, "Well then maybe you shouldn't try to make it to the top," and that's a valid point, but someone's going to be on top, and the further up that person is from everyone else, the more ruthless they probably had to be to get there - and the more they are able to act with impunity. If you're trying to bring the top down to a lower level, that is not achieved by primarily focusing on the top's main rivals or competitors.
for one thing it might be good if China had political freedom and democracy
It might be good if the US had political freedom and democracy too.
I don't really know how to evaluate how democratic a system is, from the outside. China has elections, and the government has a high degree of support (according to Western polls). It's true that the system is dominated by one party but there were also reforms made to allow more ideological diversity to exist within the party than previously. Not having lived there, I find it difficult to evaluate.
But I can tell you that the American system is certainly not democratic. We have tons of untraceable dark money going into campaigns, our system is designed to only allow two parties, both of which are corrupt and serve the interests of the rich, polls consistently show overwhelming dissatisfaction with congress regardless of who's in charge, people are being abducted off the streets without due process, taken to secret prisons (such as the one at Guantanamo, which has existed for decades under both parties), etc.
How am I supposed to worry about what's going on in China? I have bigger fish to fry, don't you think?
wanting to take over Taiwan
It's just saber-rattling.
trying to expand their global power
Through diplomacy and voluntary trade deals? I don't see a problem with that. If that was how the US went about things, I'd feel pretty differently about the US than I do.
making friends with other world leaders who want to expand their power
I don't really see "making friends" as being imperialist. China's foreign policy is, generally speaking, to stay out of political questions and trade with everyone. This isn't a perfect position, but it's at least a degree of separation from imperialism.
In some situations that might be true but I think it depends. In some cases, the ruling class of your own country might be investing in a military which protects you, while a foreign government might want to invade your country and oppress you.
Yes, in some situations, I agree. This is a perspective argued by other theorists like Franz Fanon, who's position was that developing countries escaping colonialism have more to worry about from foreign colonizers than from their domestic "bourgeoisie," who are still relatively poor.
This is also why the CCP formed coalitions with the KMT in order to repell the Japanese fascists (and previously, to put down the warlords that emerged following the fall of the Qing). Likewise, the USSR condemned strikes that took place in the US during WWII, because defeating the Nazis was more important.
But these are exceptional cases, where either the class dynamics are different from developed countries, or where a truly existential threat exists, such as Germany and Japan in WWII. Of course, since WWII, US politicians have attempted to compare every conflict to it and to argue that there's an existential threat, even when it's completely absurd, including Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.
We can argue about the merits and flaws of China and Russia, but neither of them represent an existential threat to me as an American. Pretty much the only thing that does present an existential threat, imo, is the rise of fascism domestically. And that threat is caused by declining economic conditions, perpetuated by maintaining status quo policies. And the only options we are offered in the existing political system are to maintain those policies and sink further into decline, or to move closer to fascism directly. This makes the rise of fascism inevitable, unless victories are won by the working class to, at minimum, extract the necessary policy concessions to restore stability and stave off decline. Therefore, in my position, class conflict should come before anything else.
It is technically possible to make a smart gun that cannot shoot its owner or a family member.
Is it? That's an interesting idea if it exists. I assume it would involve a camera with facial recognition. But I'd have to look at it before I really form an opinion. It wouldn't stop it if the camera was pointed at anywhere besides the face, or if it was shooting through, say, a piece of paper.
We can get rid of our obsolete guns
When you say, "can," if you mean that people would have to, I think you could run into a lot of the same backlash I was talking about. Probably would have better luck with a voluntary exchange, turn in your old gun and get a free smart gun sort of thing. I imagine the gun nuts would still find reasons to hate it, but hey, could save some lives.
So you have nothing and just want to be preachy and condescending, got it.
And what's your solution?
Door-to-door gun confiscation? That's not a policy, it's a declaration of war. Do you wanna be the one going around to every redneck's house saying, "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to take your guns away?" And if you start a war, who do you think is gonna win: the side with guns or the side without?
Banning gun sales? Too late, they're already too widespread. The only thing that does is lock in the current situation, where the right has guns and the left (mostly) doesn't.
If I'm stuck in an elevator with a Nazi, best case I have a gun and he doesn't. Next is neither of us have guns. Next is we both have guns. And worst is he has a gun and I don't. That's where we're at right now. If a right-winger with 5 guns can't buy a 6th, it doesn't matter, but if a leftist with zero guns can't buy one it does.
Of course, both of those options go directly against the constitution and would be impossible to implement without an impossible supermajority or stacking the Court. And if you violate procedure you delegitimize the government, which is kind of important if you're planning to fight a civil war.
So what's left? Ineffectual, half-assed solutions that accomplish nothing other than pissing people off and make them panic-buy more guns.
Go ahead, walk me through what you want and how you'd go about it. I'm all ears.
So, people should be more responsible with their firearms. Like the user you replied to is.
Which is why it's a good idea keep them in a safe instead, yes.
Yes, we would be. Just on a different time scale, perhaps, but the conclusion is inevitable either way. The only chance of averting that conclusion is by demanding an alternative.
I won't admit fault when I'm correct, that doesn't make me an idiot.