Fine, I'll admit, I have a problem. I hear obvious bullshit and I sort of automatically filter it out because it's clearly bullshit and nobody will buy into it, and then sometimes it turns out it was actually a Really Big Deal that I probably should have paid some attention to. Made that mistake with Bitcoin, could have been rich but noooo, I ignored it because it was obviously dumb as hell. Another example: I distinctly remember going "What is this Gamergate shit? It'll probably blow over but let me try to see if there's a point to it" and then I got a booty-call from my then-girlfriend that her roommate was heading out to class so I went up to her dorm room, and that was the last I really paid attention to gamergate until years later when it turned out to have become a whole thing. My eyes would just glaze over anytime I saw the word because I basically went "oh yeah its that bullshit that dumbasses were losing their minds over and nobody cares about, I ain't got time to pay attention to that shit" and then it turns out it was actually this major flashpoint for the rise of the particularly bizarre new far right dweebs we get nowadays.
I did the same thing with "tankies". Never heard the term until maybe 2017? and largely ignored it. It just seemed to be a nothingburger, some new term for a few terminally online weirdos who hated Communists, and I assumed they were just fascists because you know who hated the Communists the most? Nazis. But then it spread and more people started using it, and then applying it more broadly (even Bernard Brethren are tankies, apparently?) which meant that it was such a varied term as to have no meaning. And I basically wrote off anyone hating on tankies as some dumbass who wasn't worth listening to because they were too ill informed to have anything of value to say.
It's probably not all of a sudden but it's really dawning on me that this is not some flash in the pan that'll just go away. I've been expecting it to just burn itself out because it's so obviously on its face bullshit. But, fast forward and the term seems to have taken on a whole life of its own. So many people hate on "tankies". Even anarchists I know irl hate on "tankies". Supposedly radical leftists hate on "tankies". I went on a date with an anarchist who started ragging on "tankies" and I just left because what even is that shit? It's become so prevalent I feel I can't ignore it anymore.
Don't support the NATO proxy war that's grinding up Ukrainian lives? Ebil tankie. Don't support genocide in Palestine? Ebil tankie. Wouldn't vote for Genocide Joe or Holocaust Harris? Ebil tankie. Not racist against Chinese people? Ebil tankie. Think Cuba and Venezuela are cool actually? Ebil tankie. Don't like NATO? Ebil tankie. Post on Hexbear? Ebil tankie.
I didn't grow up during the Cold War so idk how AmeriKKKan society was about Communists, but I don't remember any of this level of prevalent rabid anti-Communism from liberals and even people who fancy themselves as so-called radical leftists in like, 2000 - 2015. This is getting absurd and frankly baffling. Not too long ago a bunch of these same people were saying socialism is cool, war is bad, black and brown lives matter. But now all of a sudden it seems like you actually apply those slogans and you're an "ebil tankie".
What makes it seem extra insidious is that basically all of this seems to feed back into supporting USAdian warmongering and imperialism. Like, what is a "tankie"? When you ask people they'll say "Authoritarian Communists" but it really just seems that they call anyone who isn't deepthroating the boot of the AmeriKKKan Empire a "tankie".
How did this happen? What is going on?
I would suspect a number of the super left wing people claiming Russia good are perhaps lying about their general political beliefs, and some also probably have been misled. It's very clear that the war was started by Russia, again, and it isn't the first second or I think even third time they've invaded Ukraine.
China is.. an interesting case. They've certainly done a lot of damage, but I also can't name a major country that hasn't. I don't think China is any worse than America, just different issues. It's probably better than America specifically right now.
I think a lot of the push back is from people who are unaware of just what the US has done, and the US has done a lot of shit and fucked with a lot of other countries, even their own allies.
If this seems a bit jumbled, I'm at work and the first half of this reply at least an hour older than the second half.
I appreciate the willingness to realise the latter, but I don't know what you mean by 'done a lot of damage'. There are very few, if any examples where China isn't a 'better' country than America:
In terms of domestically improving lives..
That's 850 million people lifted out of poverty in a few decades. Even China's "relative" poverty level is now equal to or better than the US'.
China is below the world average for incarceration rates. I assume you know the USA is still one of the highest.
China is a long way from perfect, no doubt, and not everything it does is golden. And apologies - not trying to infodump at you, but maybe I've communicated why we might argue it is actually miles ahead of America.
A lot of China issues are more internal, typically with a lot of sweatshops which even if the government doesn't want that, with a stupid huge population it's understandably a challenge. I am also aware that the US has basically prison slave labour and it's literally carved out in the constitution.
Last year I would've said censorship is definitely a weaker point for China but given the US right now ehh... Anything China has done on that is happening right now in the US.
China can be a bit shit to deal with on trade even as a country that does a ton of with them but current US is uhh.. definitely not better.
Trump has basically removed all of the good stuff about the US which just leaves the rest, and I'm gonna stop adding an extra line to each point because I'm sick of typing it but it does kinda kill each and every point because he's just so much worse.
China is very much trying to make sure Taiwan is China even though Taiwan doesn't seem to want that. In general China is a bit of a dick when it comes to boats on what they think is their water even if that's not super agreed (I understand many spots have many overlapping claims from multiple countries).
The shipping what is basically pure garbage globally is shit but not entirely China's fault, because maybe if some business owners hadn't decided that paying the minimum possible for things was a good idea we wouldn't be flooded with trash that morons requested.
Would have preferred much better cooperation with COVID but both in the US and where I live (Australia) there are definitely internal issues that also could have dealt with it.
It's harder for me to see what's actually going on inside China, I don't read or speak any language aside from English to know if everything is actually relatively fine in China, until I bother looking I mostly see my curated sections of news which while fairly unbiased, tends to not show the good things about anywhere. I don't know exactly how widespread the issues are, like the factories that are basically sweatshops. I know they exist, but a handful vs hundreds is a different kind of issue. I know people sometimes get conveniently disappeared, but I've heard of a dozen cases or so which is more normal than you'd think reasonable for most countries. If it's just that few, not good but not worse than others.
typing a lot does bad things to my brain because I keep rewriting shit, sorry for... That.
Directly comparing with the US as opposed to less fucked up countries does make China seem significantly better off, I guess because I'm from Australia where you could fairly argue we are much better, compared to most places really not just china, and I default to presume western = like me, and that's not the case at all especially with the US.
I hope that most of that makes sense, I've been typing this comment for like half an hour and writing out thoughts while trying to be coherent and not misunderstood is difficult.
Not bothered by the info dump, it's harder to respond to but you can't fit a ton of info into 40 words without losing a lot.
China does not have a lot of sweatshops.
Censorship is not a moral quantity, it is a tool. It can be used for good reasons, okay reasons, understandable reasons, cruel reasons, economic repressive reasons, purely reactionary reasons. If you punch a Nazi you are censoring them and I commend you for doing it.
Define, "a bit shit to deal with". What treatment fo you believe your country deserves?
China fought a civil war in the 1940s following the expulsion of imperial Japanese occupation. The communists won. The nationalists, i.e. reactionary capitalists, mass emigrated to Taiwan for a final holdout (they did genocidal things to the indigenous people there btw). The US intervened to prevent the communists from finishing the civil war and reuniting all of China. This was only possible because the US was also pressuring China via the invasion and later partition of Korea and China chose solidarity with their analogs there facing a much greater threat (the US). Since then, both the PRC and Taiwan have claimed all of China. The KMT claims even more than modern China, in fact. The civil war has never ended, it has simply reached a deadlock, with Taiwan serving as a US outpost and manufacturing center.
Public opinion is easy to sway, particularly on polls. We can say that the people of Taiwan don't want war and yet the US wants to use them to provoke China into war. We can say that they prefer the prior status quo of almost one country with two systems, i.e. easy trade and travel with their neighbor, to one of barriers and US propaganda against the PRC.
And what has the PRC done, exactly, to Taiwan?
China is exactly like every other country in having boats in waters that others complain about. Even some landlocked countries. Though it is far less rapacious, per capita, than most. Why are you singling out China?
These are the consequences of capitalism, not morons or China being bad. Capitalism forces owners to maximize profits any way they can and if that means a 10% cheaper item that breaks twice as much, well they don't care so long as their profits go up. Capitalism also creates a culture of commodity acquisition through the destruction of forms of socialization and self-actualization. So people adopt consumerist hobbies that appear to others as, "buying dumb garbage". China's explicitly stated strategy is to allow capitalist relations in a subset of its economy, particularly for export, in order to build up what's known by Marxists as productive forces. That to survive imperialism and imagine socialist transition, they need to be able to create all the products needed and to rope imperialists into dependency. It seems to be working, wouldn't you say?
China has also advanced massively in two decades. It doesn't just export cheap plastic things. Some of the finest and most durable products come from China.
This is also capitalism. The US and Australia are financialized economies premised on commercial rents and appropriate COVID interventions destroyed that model. The financiers demanded higher profits and their states relented. China and other socialist-run countries responded much more appropriately and millions of people would still be alive if others had their model.
Talk to people in China. Watch videos of normal people there doing normal things. It is a normal country with nice people.
Re: the news, focus on media criticism. What are the tropes being played up? Who wrote the article? Who is the editor-in-chief of the rag? What sources do they cite? Are they associated with the MoD? An NGO with MoD ties? Who pays them? Are they representative? When they call someone an expert, why should you believe them? And of course, to properly criticize you will have to acquire a lot of geopolitical knowledge to know when something said is simply false.
This is a chauvinist trope. Chauvinist media calls people in China "missing" with literally zero evidence. Those people regularly have to come out and say, "I wasn't missing, I was just living my life like normal."
But in the US, immigrants are being disappeared on a daily basis on camera.
Australia is a US lapdog. Remember AUKUS? Y'all are used to poke and prod China all the time and your MoD runs propaganda operations against China all the time.
Australia is also an Anglo settler state that is continuing its genocide against aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians still fear the state stealing their children over small and normal things, something that does happen and is a holdover from cultural genocidal boarding schools. Australia has not returned lands to the rightful owners and the height of its justice is a piecemeal appeal to tolerance and integration. Australians remain highly racist.
TIL that Russia did the pro-NATO Banderite coup in 2014 and told the new Ukrainian government to attempt to become NATO's forward outpost for some reason.
It is, in fact, the first time that the Russian Federation engages in warfare with Ukraine.
But hey, care to name any dates that you had in mind?
The PRC hasn't engaged in warfare since more than 40 years ago.
Also, 'damage done' to whom?
Seems the 'coup' in 2014 was caused by mass protests by Ukrainian people, and then a 328-0 vote to remove the previous government, although some parliament members either didn't show up or didn't vote. The counter protests supporting Russia were drastically smaller. Invading Crimea is an invasion. Also Donbas like a month or two later.
Damage is more than just war. In the same way that the US likes to fuck with people's governments, so does China. The US has definitely done damage to my country but you won't find a war that is US vs Australia. The US is just more successful at it because people think they are the good guys, regardless of reality, and kinda just let them get away with it.
Finding specific things for China is a pain because if you search it you'll find recent stuff that is just dickheads at news.com.au fearmongering about bullshit that doesn't matter and isn't China actually doing something.
General abuse of ocean territory rights, general human rights abuses with sweatshops and the like, along with the excessive control of the people. Releasing CFCs again, like we got rid of that shit for a reason if they could stop pumping it out that would be fantastic.
I don't know how to conclude this in a way that says I don't think China is the only problem for shit, they aren't the worst, the US at least currently is doing way more damage than China ever has and most countries do evil shit in a way that sounds reasonable so just deal with this shitty disclaimer that I'm not rewriting a fourth time because what I type will never match what I'm trying to say properly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
Russia openly interferes, the US tries to quietly interfere and then Russia leaks it. That's not exactly a good piece of evidence to say it was a coup. Funny that the US fucked up hard enough to have that ever leak though.
If enough of the population were on the Russian side the protest numbers would've looked very different, that's not the way the people chose.
By doing a coup d'etat, replacing the government, and pushing Russia to war. 'Quietly'.
Overthrowing a government in this manner is a coup d'etat.
Oh! I can play this game too!
'If enough of the population was on the side of trans people, the harassment of trans people wouldn't be happening. That's not what the people keep choosing'.
Or how about 'If enough of the population was on the Jewish side, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. That's not what the people chose'.
I can come up with more examples of 'the people' making 'choices'.
What's especially funny, is Eastern Ukraine, the majority Russian speaking areas, were very much against the coup.
They did look different in the eastern portion of the country. In Odessa the Nazis literally burned protesters alive and shot them for trying to escape the conflagration.
Your perception of this is entirely driven by CIA propaganda.
Odessa is pretty fucked up and the deputy mayor, Gordienko and anyone else who caused the further march on the camps definitely should be in jail.
So, we are in agreement that NATO and Ukrainian leadership should face justice. Good.
The Banderite murderers were elevated by the coup, not brought to any kind of justice. They are the people in photo ops against "Russia's war of aggression" with black sun tattoos and via Azov they have produced the internal propaganda that has filtered down into your comments here.
Why do you suppose they didn't see any consequences? It couldn't be that the government the perpetrators helped to install approved of those actions and immediately brought Nazi formations into the military, could it? I mean it's not like the government that they support are steadily erasing Soviet names from public spaces and replacing them with Banderas and other fascists, because that would be the kind of thing an objectively fascist government would do. It's all just totally isolated incidents that had nothing to do with anything else.
Victoria Nuland was literally talking about which successors they would choose.
And who cares about the aesthetics of "interference"? What matters is what is actually sought, with what power, in what interest, and to what effect.
I didn't know Victoria Nuland and other higher-ups of the USian empire were 'Ukrainian people' who were merely protesting. I suppose, you will also consider members of the Ukrainian government who participated in that and organised that as merely 'Ukrainian people' 'protesting', as well.
By the way, why were they 'protesting' purely after the the government opted to not accept a bad deal with the EU, and why were they so fond of Bandera, and why were they picking who will be in what position in the government weeks before the finalisation of the coup?
Ah, so you are just going to try to invent a bullshit reason to demonise the PRC.
The PRC has also not engaged in coups like the ones in Ukraine, Brazil, etc. or invasions like those of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Palestine, etc., nor has the PRC engaged in the IMF-style debt-entrapment, contrary to the popular myths that your empire likes spreading.
So, no, this 'so does China' is unwarranted there.
You are extremely uninformed about these topics.
Because Australia is a settler colony in the imperial core.
Also, it's incredible to present white European Australians as victims in this regard when they are literally colonisers.
Because the PRC simply hasn't been doing what you claim it has been doing. Whenever somebody tries to claim that the PRC are these malicious demons, if one looks at actual investigations of such topics, one finds things like 'The UN finds no evidence of such-and-such' and 'We have examined if the PRC engages in debt-trapping and have found that that does not happen', etc.
HAHAHAHA.
Gods forbid the PRC has agency in its waters.
Oh, not any specific ones, just vague 'general' ones that you can't point to? Meanwhile, when Australia invades everywhere with its NATO buddies, it's all fine and dandy to inflict the worst abuse on people there, including kidnapping and torturing people, I take it?
The PRC has been one of the few places on this planet to improve people's standards of living in the past couple of decades or so.
Ah yes, a white European coloniser is going to complain about their (former) colonies being forced to have worse living conditions than what labour aristocracy at home enjoys.
Meanwhile, your empire literally has child labour.
Not to mention that this 'sweatshop' thing is likely yet another myth meant to demonise the PRC, but I haven't looked into it myself, as your empire seems to have stopped making those accusations a while ago. Probably because nobody with a brain is buying those anymore.
Oh no, not the vague 'excessive control of the people'. This is totally so much worse than white European Australians invading everywhere and torturing people. /s
You mean the thing that was being made there illegally? And which the government cracked down on?
Oh? What are the abuses, exactly? Are you familiar with maritime territorial claims and what they tend to look like? The history of island disputes? The nature of shipping lanes in the region and how this intersects with US imperialism? Who otherwise controls sais shipping lanes, de facto, and why?
Where did you learn of these "abuses" and did you read the sources critically? Did you ask whether you should take the Director of the US National Defense Maritime Research Organization (etc) at their word?
And here you see how human rights have become a diluted tool for chauvinist thinking. Can't even be specific! What human rights abuses? How do they compare to others countries'? What is the government response? Why did they happen? No, no, don't ask such questions, right? The important thing is that you've terminated thinking with a negative view of China. This is the essence of the "tankie" epithet, it is the left-punching insult of chauvinist incuriosity.
Sweatshops are the workshops of the poor and exploited. They are usually in service of imperialists, literally owned by companies like Target, and they operate in more exploitable countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia. When thinking of sweatshops, you should direct your anger at the OECD imperialists that own and run them. Understand that the countries with them operate under incredible pressure from imperialists, often including coups by said imperialists to install capital-friendly leaders.
China has generally done away with sweatshops. They have automated and industrialized. There is still difficult work and long hours, but the image you have in mind is likely chauvinist on multiple levels.
Again, incredibly vague. This is an arbitrary yardstick, you could say this about literally any governance structure of any size. I have seen "horizontalists" disrupt meetings because they thought the existence of open committees / working groups in an organizing space was "authoritarian". Who knows what you're talking about, though it again rings the bell of orientalism.
Okay so the situation you're complaining about is that some companies were releasing CFCs and then the Chinese government cracked down on it, reversing this. That's what makes you bigoted towards China? Is this the "excessive control of the people" you were talking about?
Can you describe what damage has China done in concrete material terms and to whom?
Huh? AFAIK Ukraine was part of Russia until Lenin had it created as its own republic. There was some fighting with the Black Army during the Russian Civil War, against both the Whites and Reds. After that, I don't think Russia has had any conflicts with Ukraine until now. I know Poland seized some territory during the Civil War.
Maybe I'm wrong? But obviously yeah Russia invaded Ukraine this last go around, even if they were antagonized by NATO's 2014 coup.
I double checked and this appears to be #3, so I overestimated. Crimea first, Donbas second, and now basically all of it.
The Crimeans wanted Crimea to be a part of Russia and not aligned with NATO, as evidenced by stuff like attempted secession from Ukraine in the 90s, anti-NATO protests in 2000s, polls conducted by NATO organisations before and after the referendum.
Even if you're going to count Crimea seperately (ultimately it's part of the same conflict) I don't know how you're counting Donbas and "now basically all of it" seperately, there hasn't been any sort of pause in hostilities between them.
So what you're saying is that the 2014 coup wasn't a coup (despite it's planners being caught on tape) because the votes were overwhelmingly in one direction, but Crimea voting by 94% to join the Russian Federation was an invasion despite there being no battles? Interesting, I wonder what analytical lens you used to arrive at these two conclusions
What "damage" are you saying the Chinese government has done, exactly?
China has damaged the Burgerlander's faith in their own superiority, resulting in massive psychic damage to the Westoidian brainpan.
this is like having a 9/11 done to all 300 million Americans every day.
the damage is incalculable.
You must believe history began in 2022.
Yeah no in 2014 Russia can fuck off too.
your racism aside 2014 was a CIA coup, this is all downstream from USA fucking with Ukraine. They've been doing it since the 1950s starting with Project Aerodynamic. Here's a link to the CIA's own public documents about their project to relocate nazis and banderites back to Ukraine to try to create a fascist breakaway state: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL.%201_0118.pdf
There was no racism in that. If you think 'Russia can fuck off' = an issue with the Russian people, that's on you, I just have an issue with invading armies killing tons of innocent people and committing a ton of war crimes.
Took a look at the link, looks like the US did about what Russia did, which is significant interference in a foreign government. As a defence of Russia, it doesn't really work because Russia also does that. Only one of these countries openly invaded and killed a bunch of civilians and is continuing to do so.
I don't really know what you mean by trying to create a fascist breakaway state though. I thought you might mean when they split from the USSR as a whole but after some research that doesn't seem to fit. The cia doc doesn't clear it up a whole lot, and i presume over time the operation has changed a bit if it is indeed still going.
what exactly do you think you're talking about here
Sending fascists to Ukraine to cause Ukraine to try to split from the Soviet Union. It took a lot longer than they hoped, they got their fascist coup in 2014.
I think I'll have to do a lot more research on the fall of the USSR to properly reply to that and it's almost 1am
This statement is true of the vast majority of the western left. A good start I would recommend is Stalin a History and Critique of a Black Legend. I would also recommend Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds and the Overthrow of Communism.
While it's good that you acknowledge you need to do more research, I think you should sincerely examine why your immediate response to being proven incorrect about US involvement in Ukraine is to leap to an unfounded assumption that Russia must have always been doing the same thing. That's been programmed into you by western chauvinism.
You must believe history began in 2014