comrades, the Protracted People’s War against the liberal hive and haven for bigoted chasers that is lemmy.blahaj.zone has succeeded! blahaj has fallen! or at least fallen off.
really tho, i just checked in on their site to see how its been since defederating. that was only 3 days ago btw! it feels like its been a week lol. their daily user count has fallen by over 1/6th since defed. and while this could be attributed to less traffic during the work week, the posting situation there is abysmal. in the past 24 hours, 78% of the posts came from c/196, making it difficult to tell that their instance is a dedicated queer space. and while they have gained ~30 users since defederation, we have gained over 200! its pretty much just 196 at this point.
while its sad to see a queer space fail, i suspect its for the best. i hope all the anti-capitalists there find their way here, as many already have. especially the trans folk there, its genuinely sad that they feel like they have to accept chasers in their space in order to have a community that accepts them. that is the difference between liberal tolerance and socialist liberation— tolerance allows for objectification and marginalization, while liberation demands dignity and equality. may all the blahaj gender diverse who oppose capitalism find their way to c/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns!!!!
stuff like this are the best “dunks” the 196 reactionaries can manage:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2042262
this meme is weak and displays their ignorance. you cant have a conversation with ppl like the OP. they will just bombard you with thought-terminating cliches. gulag gulag! Uyghurs! hologramodor! no food! purges! NKVD KGB Stasi! free Tibet so they can have their wholesome slaves again! Taiwan is a legitimate state!
countless hexbears would be willing and even enthusiastic to have a good faith, respectful, nuanced discussion about these topics with them. but they dont want that. they want to roll in their own shit like a pig with massive balls. the good ones will find us, or other socialist spaces. but for such a small instance, there are too many scratched and soon-to-be scratched liberals for us to do any good with federation.
Alright, this is another one of those things where I feel like I only know half the story and so instinctively take the side of whichever old imperialist-capitalist propaganda I haven't yet unlearned. My impression was that Taiwanese leftists overwhelmingly want to not be part of China, and this is partly because the only claim to Taiwan that China has comes from pre-revolutionary settler-colonialism. Which is to say, that Taiwan is a legitimate country, even when the ROC rule of the island is not legitimate, if that makes sense.
I had a Taiwanese friend once. Online. Seven years ago. We were never close and only ever chatted about conlangs. This makes me a certified expert on strait politics who is incapable of having wrong opinions. Worship me for I am correct in all things.
There’s a complex split in views which you can view as a spectrum from
2 & 3 are basically the same in practical terms - kick the can down the road and let the situation develop peacefully, trade with China and develop relations while maintaining full de facto autonomy for now.
2 & 3 are overwhelmingly the most popular stances with roughly equal splits over the long term, the plurality position see-saws between them over the decades.
1 & 4 are not popular, to the point of being fringe with single digit support in most polls.
There has been a surge for (1) over the past maybe five years, but this has declined rapidly over the recent election cycles and this picture was complicated by the fact the politicians who align with (1) were also riding a wave of disgust with corruption by the KMT which is basically (2) and (3), so plenty of (2) started voting for (1) out of dislike for KMT corruption. But this wave seems to be rapidly receding, ironically enough because (1) was beating the drums of war with China in politically opportunistic fearmongering that it scared plenty of (1)’s back into the status quo (2) camp, largely benefiting the KMT. It also didn’t help that (1)’s had a major corruption scandal of their own.
Really the main driver of local politics is corruption rather than independence. Independentists will beat the drum of war to create a sense of crisis and nationalism, seeking to wedge (2) away from (3) but this tends to happen most when (1) is doing badly politically or when a major US weapons deal is being made (that’s not a joke.)
(4) usually sees 5-10%.
The idea that Taiwanese are itching to declare independence right now is not well supported by polling over time. By far the most popular position has been some form of maintaining the status quo, with a split between the long term goal of unifying and the long term goal of formalizing independence.
The current situation makes Taiwan a kind of giant Hong Kong colonial possession of the USA as a military base just off the coast of China. A sustainable peace for Taiwan would require ejecting the US military presence because that’s an untenable threat to China.
I think the mainland Chinese would be happy with a one-country two-systems arrangement that sees Taiwanese autonomy enshrined constitutionally while giving control of the island for purposes of defense and foreign policy to China. That seems the best practical outcome to me.
Thank you for the detailed response, this is very interesting.