Note to the haters: if you threaten me like you apparently threatened the poster of the other thread complaining about cm0002's multiple accounts which caused them to delete their post and their account and leave Lemmy, I will report you and repost screenshots of your threats publicly. If you act too egregiously, I will report you to law enforcement and/or my lawyer. I have legal insurance and am willing to use it. Be civil and let us have a civilized discussion.
I had noticed that cm0002 was a high-volume poster on Lemmy a while ago. After they cross-posted a few of my posts from lemmy.ml communities to other communities on other instances, I asked them about their motivation for doing this. They are open and public about their desire to draw traffic away from lemmy.ml and support away from Lemmy devs because they think that "tankies" are going to destroy the Threadiverse. I was having a decent, amicable discussion with them on direct messages, but as soon as I expressed that I was sympathetic to some of the political views of the so-called "tankies", I never got a reply.
Then the whole post about them creating accounts on pretty much every Threadiverse instance came up just yesterday (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45730651). While some people defended this type of activity as not being ban-evasion because they are not trying to hide being the same user, I feel that if nothing else, this makes it more difficult for moderators to review a user's posting history to spot a pattern of bad behavior. If someone reports one of the (dozens? hundreds?) of cm0002 accounts, a mod may see only a few posts from the reported account and not get a full picture of this user.
Finally, I started looking into their one-person crusade against Lemmy devs, lemmy.ml, and "tankies". I started looking at their claims more closely and didn't like what I saw. To me it seems like they are making many distorted or debatable claims and spamming the Threadiverse with these. I read their "megathread" (https://sh.itjust.works/post/37226752) of supposed evidence that the Lemmy devs, lemmy.ml, and "tankies" are bad, and think the whole thing is lame, flawed, and dangerous:
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First, notice that the majority of posts that they link contain only what they would like you to see, and not a link to the original thread where one would be able evaluate the context for what was said.
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Second, notice that even where screenshots are provided, what the list item claims was said is most often not what was actually said. In other words, distortions. Specifically, most of the items that are claimed to be direct quotes (based on the quote marks around them) don't at all appear to be actual quotes. I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that in many jurisdictions this would be grounds for a libel lawsuit.
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Third, most of the items that are not outright distortions are either exaggerations or debatable.
I personally feel that this crusade is more damaging to the Threadiverse than anything that they have complained about. I've been tired for a while of all the whining that I see here about "tankies" (Tankie Derangement Syndrome?), but have been holding my tongue. All this stuff from cm0002 is finally driving me to respond. Look, it's fine to have the beliefs of a liberal, conservative, MAGA, loyal supporter of the United States' imperial project, or a "tankie". Live and let live. Learn to accept that people who think differently from you may have legitimate and valid reasons for thinking that way, as much as you may disagree (except fascists). I wish people would learn to agree to disagree after a discussion reaches a certain point where it becomes clear that it's no longer productive. What's not fine is to relentlessly target and persecute other people and other instances (again, except fascists). This is why I call this a crusade, because it's nearly religious in nature. These people and instances haven't committed any crime. Threadiverse visitors don't deserve to be bombarded with all the whining and complaining that we often see. For all the complaining that I see about "Russian/Chinese bots", I sometimes wonder if many of the complainers aren't either intelligence or corporate agents trying to destabilize the Threadiverse.
My proposal: If nothing else comes out of this, I think that it would be beneficial to the Threadiverse if all instances added rules against disparaging, targeting, and persecuting other instances and users of other instances in general, especially if using false claims that border on libel, if they don't already have such a rule. If we want to see the Threadiverse be sustainable as a Reddit alternative in the long term, I think that this would be a useful step contributing to that.
Another thing: I think that most instances defederating the so-called "tankie triad" (hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml) is stupid to start with and damaging to the health of Lemmy and the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed), considering that at least Lemmy (and I imagine the others too) now allows users to block entire instances and allows admins to make this user-level block the default for new users. My instance, lemmy.zip, takes this default user-level block approach (for hexbear and lemmygrad) and I think that it's a reasonable way to handle any concerns about the "triad".
Anyway, I decided to look through cm0002's "megathread" (https://sh.itjust.works/post/37226752) that they keep spamming and make comments showing how just about every item on the list is flawed, in my opinion. I only looked through the supposed "noteworthy selection" since those have their comments about the item on the main list. I suspect that most people wouldn't look past that list and take it at face value. Note that most of them seem to indicate either problems with reading comprehension, malicious distortions, or lame complaints about random internet comments. There is no point in debating the items below with me. It's fine to debate the items above with me. Like I said above, learn to accept that people may think differently than you do and learn to agree to disagree.
Dessalines - Head .ml admin - Head Lemmy Dev
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“Slava Ukraini” is considered a “Fascist slogan” - https://lemmy.world/post/36065538 - Debatable. It has a history of use by fascists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ukraini
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“NK is actually good, and anything counter to that is Western LIES” - https://lemmy.world/post/31595035 - Distortion. Note the quotes, making this appear to be a direct quote, whereas Dessalines doesn't appear to have written the quoted text on this linked thread.
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“The BBC is not a credible news source” - https://lemmy.world/post/35824465 - Debatable. First, it's a partial quote with no link to the original thread to get the context of the comment. Second, not credible is perhaps exaggerating a bit, but BBC news earns plenty of valid criticisms about bias. Here's a collection of many of the criticisms: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/BBC%20Bias%20Chp%203.pdf
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Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban - https://lemmy.world/post/32775563 - Distortion, debatable, and exaggeration. First, the comment used the slogan from item 1. Second, also note that it was a 30 day ban, which the lemmy.ml code of conduct appears to call a "kick" as opposed to a permanent ban.
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Open declaration of support for Russia - https://lemmy.world/post/27352415 - Distortion and debatable. Even though from what I've seen in the past I believe that Dessalines possibly supports Russia, that is not what the posted chart shows. The chart is not unconditionally supporting Russia. It's making the claim that if a person supports Russia (in the Russia-Ukraine conflict) AND Palestine (in the Israel-Palestine conflict), it means they "fully understands the core of international geopolitics, while if they support Russia AND Israel, they believe in "Social Darwinism" (i.e., the discredited idea that stronger countries are always right). In other words, the chart is absolutely not unconditionally supporting Russia.
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"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! - https://lemmy.world/post/30580167 - Distortion. Again a completely fake quote and again no link to original thread for context.
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Censoring criticism of China while allowing fellow “in-crowd” user “concentration camps were just reeducation camps and weren’t that bad” misinfo to remain - https://lemmy.world/post/26985447 - Distortion and Debatable. The first comment that was removed seemed to be criticizing the Soviet Union for having had "concentration camps" and the second post from the user removed for criticizing China for also having "concentration camps". Did the USSR have concentration camps? The first result that uses that term when I searched was literally the CIA website, and when you read the historical document there, it is clear that they are calling the gulags (prisons) "concentration camps". Regarding China having those (presumably referring to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang), Wikipedia itself calls them internment camps, similar to the Japanese internment camps in the US during World War II. Meanwhile, cm0002 complains about a comment using the term "shitlib", which is a criticism of someone's political philosophy, not being removed. The two are not equivalent.
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Censoring when users call out propaganda - https://lemmy.world/post/32776038 | https://lemmy.world/post/33416433 | https://lemmy.world/post/34051329 | https://lemmy.world/post/35919522 - Debatable. At least some of the removed comments seem to be purely anti-Russia ("Fuck russia!"). The others seem debatable on the basis that other instances' admins do the same or worse.
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Discussing winnie the pooh and/or the negatives of china is a 30 day ban - https://lemmy.world/post/35374967 - Debatable. This is pretty weaksauce to use as a reason to defederate one of the top Lemmy instances.
Davel - .ml admin
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Spreading anti-ukraine Russian propaganda - https://lemmy.world/post/34655572 - Misinformation. The article they're complaining about literally links to documents on the CIA's own website discussing their 1957 plans. Is it "Russian propaganda" to discuss historical facts?
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General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet - https://lemmy.world/post/27426510 - I don't even understand this one, plus again no link to original thread for context.
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“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” - https://lemmy.world/post/30673342 - Distortion. No link to original thread for context, no evidence that they wrote what is "quoted".
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Response to a valid report of “NK is actually good” as propaganda/misinfo https://lemmy.world/post/32627834 - Distortion and debatable. Once again, not actual quote and no link to thread for context. The meme itself is obviously shitposting, FFS.
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Removal of a credible article that was on the Uyghur genocide - https://lemmy.world/post/33205310 - Debatable. The mod removed a story that they saw as bigoted, possibly because of xenophobia. No link to original article or the cross-posted thread.
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It’s totally fine when Russia kills woman and children, war is war after all - https://lemmy.world/post/33224299 - Distortion. First, no link to thread for context. Second, they are distorting what was said. The actual quote: "Still not a genocide. There is no war where women, children, and other civilians don't end up getting killed."
Nutomic - 2nd in command Lemmy Dev
- Their continued transphobia - https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 - Debatable. No link to thread for context, and they were contrite in the screenshots.
General Tankie user behaviour [note: this is about random users of lemmy.ml]
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“Propaganda is good actually” - https://lemmy.world/post/36162233 - Distortion and debatable. No link to thread for context. Partial quote taking it out of context. The actual full quote in the screenshot: "Anyone pushing their views is propaganda. Propaganda isn't always a bad thing, propaganda can be good, like antifascist or pro-communist propaganda, or it can be bad, like fascist propaganda."
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“The China censorship tool isnt actually censorship! And if it is, it’s actually a good thing a state has that much power!” https://lemmy.world/post/30010789 - Distortion. Again no link to thread for context, plus no indication that what they claim to be a direct "quote" was actually written by the person. Besides, this is a random user linking to a YouTube video.
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Rooting for Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war https://lemmy.world/post/29274763 - Distorion. No link to original thread for context, and screenshot does not say what this item claims.
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Spreading Russia talking points like the Ukraine invasion just being a “negotiating tactic” https://lemmy.world/post/27012640 - Distortion. No link to original thread for context. The article in the screenshot claims "Not enough to conquer Ukraine, the invading force was sufficient to persuade Ukraine to the negotiating table." That is not saying that they invaded only to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table, but that Ukraine came to the negotiating table as a result of the invasion. Different meanings.
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Biden is worse than Trump - https://lemmy.world/post/33631617 - Distortion. No link to original thread for context. What was actually written by a random user on the screenshot: "I'd argue Biden is worse. Trump is honest about being a terrible person. Biden pretends to be good."
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Uyghur Genocide denialism - https://lemmy.world/post/33873969 - Distortion. No link to original thread for context. Not an accurate summation of what was said.
I reserve the right to edit this post to clarify points and/or add additional thoughts.
How so?
Imagine you're talking with someone about science, and after a while they say they believe in a flat earth.
At that point, it's understandable to end the conversation. Because flat earth discussions have all been had, and anyone who believes in a flat earth in 2025 doesn't believe in science. You've identified a fundamental principal on which you disagree, and there can be no productive discussion.
I get the argument you're trying to make and I appreciate you doing so, but it sounds like you're trying to say that being anti-Western capitalist hegemony is equivalent to believing in a flat earth. Is that what you really believe, and if so, why? All evidence completely debunks flat-earth theory, so I understand why someone would disengage from debating with someone who believed that. On the other hand, most evidence makes Western capitalist hegemony look very bad, so why is it invalid to be against that?
I wasn't trying to say that being open to tankie arguments is the same as believing in a flat earth. I was only making the comparison to explain the sense of futility and exhaustion many people feel when they encounter an argument they've had so many times. There's a point where you recognize a fundamental difference in worldview, and that any further discussion is pointless.
Personally, I think western capitalism is bad and needs to be replaced. But I also think that anyone who denies the genocides recognized by the majority of the world is being willfully ignorant. Many people seem to have a very limited ideology of "everything western = bad" and believe that brutal regimes elsewhere are somehow perfect utopias, despite well-documented evidence of the contrary.
As I understand it, the term "tankie" specifically refers to people who deny or defend the brutal tactics used by communist leaders, often denying genocide. If someone tells me they agree with tankie ideology, I don't have much confidence that conversation about it will do anyone any good. So in that regard, I empathize and understand why the person you were talking to went quiet after that.
That makes more sense, thanks. I feel the same way about some discussions about this stuff.
Without trying to get into a detailed discussion about it, what genocides do you have in mind, so I have a better idea of how to think about what you're saying? The issue with "recognized by the majority of the world" is that it's a problematic concept nowadays, and perhaps always was. The West and specifically the people that control the West, very much control the narratives that we receive in the West, to manipulate the people for political purposes. Some things where people start screaming "genocide" are nothing that any average person would recognize as such, or have a much more nuanced story. I think a lot of the heated discussions around this boil down to disagreements about a) the supposed genocide claims being a lot more nuanced and generally less terrible than the narrative that the West tries to push, b) the idea of providing "critical support" for countries that may do some arguably bad things while fighting the Western capitalist hegemony and trying to build actual alternatives. Maybe some people believe that these countries are perfect utopias, but I think that most recognize that those countries and systems have flaws and have made errors (like all countries do), but that they are still worthy of that "critical support" because they represent the only alternative and resistance to the Western system that has any chance of working.
My understanding of the term "tankie" is a little broader than that. I don't think it's specific to genocide, but it allows for the idea that socialist and communist leaders have sometimes had to resort to harsh and perhaps heavy-handed tactics to maintain their system in the face of a constant barrage of threats and attacks from every possible direction. From what I understand, it specifically started being used in reference to the USSR sending in tanks to quash a worker revolt in Hungary(?) in the 50s(?). A revolt about which we just recently(?) got evidence that the CIA was involved in.
Thanks for your reply and explanation of your points.
You believe that all the anti-West countries are secretly the good guys, and are working together. The vast majority of people, smart and dumb, believe that's crazy, and any open-minded read of real history and news will illustrate it. Even in the countries in question.
It's less out there than flat earth, but mostly because physics is really precise and self contained in a way geopolitics isn't. In both case the point seems to be to go against the consensus, not find the truth.
Very imaginative and creative.
Which is to say, you're lying and making shit up.
Everyone reading who's not in the club is going "yeah, of course". You can deny it if you like, not OP.
This is demonstrably untrue, the OP pointed this out in point 5 above: the admin's post was saying that supporting Russia AND Israel amounted to having a social darwinist view of the world
Hexbear also routinely shits on russia for being a capitalist reactionary hellscape.
I'm subbed to most if not all of their comms and I will routinely come across things like this. it's pretty clearly shitting on the CPRF for going along with the war.
The
emoji is imparting 'lenin would have shot everyone in this room', I have to imagine that includes Putin. One of their news mods is said 'If you're a communist party and Putin is praising you, you're not a communist party.'
But Deng is a cool anti-imperialist - to the point where saying billionaires aren't very communist gets you instabanned. And also somehow Modi, despite the fact the two nations were recently sending people to bash each other with sticks over territory.
I remember back in the day there was dispute over if Assad is cool, if Assad or the actually-socialist Kurds were cooler, and if Daesh is cool too. Interesting to hear Hexbear has a carveout for Russia. .ml, at least, definitely posts TASS all the time.
There's no carve-out for Russia specifically, if you're making actual criticisms instead of dropping "vuvzela communism no iphone tiennamen square" etc
here's another one for China: That’s what Socialism with Chinese characteristics actually mean - building Socialism through Neoliberal principles. ... The rule that a country should run a trade surplus to balance its budget is unequivocally neoliberal, and an imperialist tool to strangle the Global South.
^ The post is critical of China in case it's unclear.
literally never seen this there, though if anything it's all been the western camp people acting like it's suddenly OK to have the ISIS guy running syria
Not sure what you're trying to say about Modi, here's a post from last week pointing out how they're blackmailing people for support featuring
Oh, the pro-Daesh guys were pre-Lemmy. Back when they actually had a de facto state and were fighting the Kurds.
What about .ml? I know for a fact you can't trash talk China there.
Another russian on lemmy.ml shitting on the current state of Russia and saying that they doubt china can improve it
Okay, but I've been banned before for saying billionaires aren't communist, and Dengism is just capitalism. I'd send a link, but it must be too old now, and all I can find are the previous time's I've mentioned it.
From the looks of things you got a temp ban, probably a few days at most, for saying "that dude's a dengist, he's going to repeat any nonsense china says", which is pretty rude to assert and if you hadn't been making it about a specific user it would not have been removed.
China may have billionaires, but they also seem keep them way more in line, and execute way more of them, which I think is overall a positive sign.
I have plenty of criticisms of them, but just being like 'china has billionaires' is up there with the other cliches I listed earlier.
It's such a cliche that there's even an article linked years ago pointing this out
Ah, SDF must have been down at the time and I was on the alt.
You're right, that is ruder than I remembered, because I said "nonsense", although I'd still argue that's mild, and the point was to clarify what was going on to someone confused. The dude was indeed a Dengist - that's not a derogatory term.
It's a cliche because it's an obvious problem with the claim, regardless of how much spin and quote mining is put into it. I learned something from this ban, because Dengism used to be a fringe position within Western socialism. Not so on Lemmy.
I'm gonna go back through some of my other testy exchanges just to make sure I'm not crazy. Pro-NK, pro-China, pro-Russia, pro-Assad. Pol Pot has been been kicked around too, although not directly to me. I will have to pick through the waves of insults and rude gifs that always come with a visit from Hexbear.
You really are just a pathological liar, huh?
No.
If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they're lying.
Here's me getting instabanned for saying billionaires aren't very communist, to someone confused as to why OP would say they are.
Now do Modi and Daesh, liar.
And everyone in my hometown agrees I'm going to Hell, who gives a shit.
Just because you have an in-group that believes your lies doesn't make you less of a liar. It just means your lies have more spread, liar.
And see, that's the real point of the community. You can be one of the very few Ascended Ones that knows the real truth they don't want you to know.
I suspect OP won't last long, because they seem to actually care.
You can describe literally any perspective as a conspiracy theory if you just lie about it enough.
If that's the game you want to play instead of having a real discussion, then fine:
You worship Kamala Harris as a divine being who will show you the true path into the holy kingdom, but only if you shun the nonbelievers and keep your eyes pure from the treasonous heresies of the left.
Deny that it's a religious cult all you want, ask anyone in my communities and they'll know what I'm talking about. See how that works?
If we had a real discussion, it would go like me sending evidence NK isn't a great place, and you telling me the CIA planted it all. Or at least, that's how it usually goes. Either I actually am in the most boring spy novel ever, or that's conspiracy talk.
Do you want to talk about North Korea on the condition you can't just say things are definitely fabricated without evidence? I don't have a huge trove of stuff ready, but it won't be hard to find, because there's a lot of defectors and a lot of imagery.
I'm happy to have an evidence-based discussion about whatever you like. Only, against my actual beliefs and not shit that you make up about me/us and then spread around in your circles to the point that you forget you made it up and start thinking that it's actually true.
To start with, I don't believe that the DPRK is "a great place." I'm just willing to refute blatant misinformation about it, even if that leads to me being accused of "defending" it or of conspiracy theories about me being some kind of secret agent, paid to promote it.
I would prefer that we have a conversation that's based on people's actual, stated positions. If you want to claim that I'm a delusional conspiracy theorist, then point to what I've actually said that leads you to believe that. Not stereotypes and myths that you've seen passed around in your in-group that have nothing to do with me.
This is from observing entire instances. Maybe you're lost, that's fair.
Soo, last I checked (pre-Gaza), North Korea had the highest rates of malnutrition in the world, and most of their population received an education mainly about loving the regime. Their elections are not secret ballot at all, are just approve or disapprove, and I'm certain using the dissent box has implications. They're vastly poorer than their southern neighbors despite being indistinguishable at the time of the Korean War. Meanwhile, their leadership lives in luxury. I see no redeeming qualities there, and it would have been better if they'd lost and just gritted their teeth through the junta years. Oh yeah, and they regularly threaten to burn down cities elsewhere with everyone inside if they don't get their way.
Anything wrong there?
Not a single source in the whole thing is the first thing wrong.
Hey, me too!
Interesting! You're "certain," are you? Where does that "certainty" come from, exactly? Evidence? Or does it just "feel true" to you, based on vibes? Does it just have that certain quality of "truthiness," to it? Does "feeling a different vibe than you" make someone a "conspiracy theorist?"
The Korean War was far more devastating to the north than the south. But that's not especially relevant, in fact, the north recovered and did rather well for itself. However, it's economy was closely tied to the USSR, and when it collapsed the DPRK became both economically and diplomatically isolated.
Any country that's cut off from global trade is pretty much condemned to poverty. This is a big part of why Vietnam introduced reforms that would make it more amenable to the West, and likewise with China. But of course, you hate them too, despite taking a different direction and being more successful, don't you?
Do they? Do you have a source?
Oh yes, they're so aggressive and threatening! Let's just ignore the part where the largest military exercises in the world are conducted by the US on the border, a recreation of the time they invaded and slaughtered a bunch of them and dropped chemical weapons everywhere.
But no, the US, with the largest military force in the world, larger than the next 9 countries combined, that has been in a constant state of war all across the world, installing fascist puppet regimes, that US, needs to live in terror of this tiny poor country an ocean away. Very rational and sane.
No sources, because it's a quick reply made up of what a lawyer would call "common knowledge".
You write well for someone with minimal education. Now who's lying?
Gonna gloss over the things verifiably in the picture, as opposed to just obvious?
This is why I'm rationing my time.
Why? I don't think that's universally true. Nor do I think it wasn't self-inflicted here - anything to keep the peasants from rising up.
Here you go. I'd go with HuffPost, but there's a paywall.
Here's a picture of him with the source, who definitely wouldn't take my call:
There's enough elite defectors to paint a pretty good picture as well. It's less a normal dictatorship, and more a resource colony for people who spend a lot of time in China or on private islands, at this point.
Also, does Kim Jung Un look malnourished? The malnutrition being another thing you just ignored.
Hate's a strong word. China's a nationalist autocratic bully, but the US is going in that direction too now, and most historical nations that can be, are. Even the genocide is hardly unique.
They're higher on the shitlist than Iceland, though.
Cool. North Korea still sucks.
I think that's enough for today.
Let's start with the most revealing thing you said:
You asked if there was anything you said that I disputed. Now you're complaining that I "ignored" some of your points. Why? That just means that I didn't see anything to dispute. Usually, I don't take issue with people, you know, not disagreeing with me.
But you do. Why? Because, even after I called you out for it and insisted that we argue based on what I actually say, you're still trying to argue against this strawman invented in your little liberal gossip circles I'm supposed to give a shit about - that I think the DPRK is "great." All I said is that I will refute misinformation about it. Are you telling me that what you said was misinformation? Is that why you're upset I didn't disagree with it?
Honestly, I should have pressed you for a source on that, but I know how anti-intellectual y'all are and how averse you are to providing sources, how you see yourselves as better than everyone and act like everyone should believe whatever you say, just because you said it, and I decided not to twist your arm about it.
Next, let's move on to the most infuriating thing you said:
Only a KKKlanadian could manage to say something so arrogant, condescending, and chauvinistic while phrasing it to almost sound like a compliment. Please just call me a slur.
You don't know shit about my upbringing or educational experiences. You know who else wrote well? Fredrick Douglass. I guess that means that fucking slavery wasn't that much of an impediment to the education of the victims, if one of them managed to write as well as Douglass. No need for black colleges!
You've just defended and endorsed the worst schools in the worst parts of the US, because you're so confident that I'm "lying" despite not knowing where I went to school. You don't even know when it was!
One of my earliest childhood memories is dressing up as the "great hero" Robert E. Lee to give a presentation on the Civil War, or as we called it, "The War Between the States," or, if we were feeling cheeky, "The War of Northern Aggression." But that's A-OK with you! I'm a "liar" for saying it was bad!
And that's not even touching on the implication that everyone in DPRK must be some illiterate backwards savage.
Yeah, the difference is that one of those countries threatened to annex your country and has also abducted random people off the street to perform fucked up mind control experiments on, and the other one is the one you're obsessed with.
You wanna know what I actually think about Korea? I don't. I don't give a shit about it. They haven't done shit to me so I don't wanna do shit to them. But you libs are so far up your own asses that you think you're on some "civilizing mission" where they need white people to come in and teach them about freedom and democracy (which in practice always seems to look like dropping agent orange on their mothers and then stealing all their resources). And you hate me and have to purity test everyone and interrogate their views on Korea because if they're not on board with your colonialism, it means they're a race traitor, and that just drives you up the wall, doesn't it?
Yeah, you don't wanna stick to what I say, I won't stick to what you say, US simp.
So much for calm, polite discussion.
I know what you're thinking, that's just tone policing, but it was in OP and is the whole reason I bothered with this thread. Usually Hexbear and friends are against actual conversation as a concept. Like other things I've experienced that first-hand.
Use whatever tone you want, I may just decide not to talk to you, since digital turd flinging is a waste of my time.
Ah, so you agree. See, only mentioning what you disagree with was unclear. Maybe you're afraid to say it explicitly, because you'll get banned, because "NK is great" is the actual party line.
So, that's racist - and exactly what I was guessing you meant - but it doesn't say anything about the quality of what you learned about math and reading. I think it's out of touch that you'd compare a racist school in America to conditions in the third world. Where I have family.
Oh no, the elites go to the best schools.
No, I'm perfectly fine with actual conversation. What I'm not fine with is:
bullshit,
lies,
and more bullshit.
You're utterly uninterested in "actual conversation." You're just here to try to score points against a strawman, and to make shit up and argue in bad faith, and defend all sorts of absurd, nonsense positions just on the basis that they let you score points. The fact that you do so while maintaining a front of politeness in no way makes your engagement any less bad faith. Fuck off.
K.
That's not at all what I believe. What I believe instead is that any entity that counters the Western capitalist hegemony deserves support unless it is proven to be doing the wrong things and/or for the wrong reasons. Consensus sometimes is not the truth. I happen to believe that Western capitalist hegemony is one of the worst things to happen to the world in the last few hundreds of years. That goes against the Western consensus, but it is the truth in my view and in the view of many others around the world, especially in the Global South.
If you consider the entire world, the ideas in the West (that the West is right and good) are the minority opinion. It's only Westerners who believe those things. If you consider recent and current events, this is evidenced by the fact only the West supported Israel and Ukraine from the start and mostly continues to do so, while most of the rest of the world stayed either neutral (mostly regarding Ukraine) or came out against one side (mostly regarding Israel).
Sure, I recognize that every country and every culture has flaws and bad people, but the West is the principal part of the world which has weaponized their flaws, bad ideas, and bad people against the entire planet. There may be other outlier examples, but the West has outdone them all, by far.
That's a long way of agreeing they are the good guys, with room for exceptions whenever it gets too hard to defend.
How do you feel about the fact non-Westerners hate each other at least as much as they hate the West? Your community is full of Westerners, because those of us who actually have family outside know better then to make it more than just another faction.
Lmao! "You just blindly defend anyone who's against the West, except for the people who you don't defend."
That's very debatable, but I recognize that there are many divisions around the world at every level. Breaking up the Western hegemony would still be an improvement, because at least it wouldn't be one small group dominating the entire rest of the world. It would be much easier to either fight with or come to a mutually-beneficial or at least neutral understanding with a neighbor of the same size than to try to fight against one group that spends more on their war machine than most others combined, has military bases in the majority of the world, again more than all others combined, and has intent to dominate the rest of the world. In other words, it would be monkey vs. monkey rather than monkey vs. 800-pound gorilla intent on subjugating monkeys.
If you have the chance, travel. You'll notice a distinct lack of Westerners standing around and cracking the whip most places. If anything, they're building wells and handing out vaccines.
It's arguably the strongest faction, although China's also up there. But, there's still plenty of sovereignty to go around.
Oh, I've traveled plenty and lived in more than one country. You seriously believe that there are more Westerners building wells and handing out vaccines around the world than there are trying to control other countries militarily and economically in order to extract as much wealth from them as they can? If you do believe that, I'm not sure that we will get anywhere with our discussion.
China's barely getting started. Although they are very strong economically, they pale in comparison in terms of projecting military force or trying to control and manipulate other countries. I just heard a couple days ago that just the US has over 700 military installations across over 80 countries, while China has like 2 or 3. Also, the US has been involved in overthrowing dozens and dozens of governments around the world since World War II, many of them democratically elected.
When China becomes the 800-pound gorilla and shows the intent to subjugate the entire world, I will be glad to argue against them instead. I'm not inherently for China or Russia or anyone else blindly. I at least try to judge countries just like I judge people, based on their actions and nothing else.
More in terms of what? TBF I'm from a relief work background, but it seems to me that most Western institution don't care enough to send people at all. We colonised, we left, we're sorry but not that much. If there's something we want local middlemen are cheaper.
If you go by money maybe you're probably right, although I'd question if extraction is really the goal - Afghanistan had nothing we wanted other than Osama, and then not even that. (Although the French seem to be up to no good sometimes)
That includes the period where black people literally couldn't vote. Don't you think the West has changed?
To pick an example on this side of the Cold War, obviously the US and a few select friends fucked up Iraq for no reason, but then again lots of people fucked up each other within the non-Western world. Russia is doing a whole lot of that right now.
The West at least cares about human rights and democracy in the abstract. And, at this moment in history, anyone else that does is probably friendly with the West. Isn't that worth something, if our actions are, at worst, just as bad?
More in terms of numbers of people and money. I think the West still cares about their colonies and neo-colonies a lot. Consider the number of Western military bases around the world, plus the number of intelligence analysts and operatives from every Western country still actively trying to control and manipulate large portions of the world, plus Western corporations with large presences around the world, still extracting wealth to this day. I agree that much of it is outsourced to local middlemen, but I feel that there's still much more people applied to these ulterior motives than toward legitimately helping the world.
I think Afghanistan was a rare exception because of Osama, like you said. Most other Western interventions around the world are for extracting oil, minerals, heck, even fruit.
With regard to foreign policy? I really don't think the West has changed much. The US, UK, and other Western countries are still interfering with other countries to this day, with no legitimate reason to do so.
Compare the Wikipedia lists of foreign interventions by the US, France, China, and Russia sometime. It's not even a race. The West has lapped the other powers while they were getting started out of the gate.
I think we have finally arrived at the crux of the issue. The West cares about human rights and democracy mostly for propaganda and as vehicles to expand their power and interfere with other countries. The West has overthrown democratically-elected governments and installed human-rights violating dictators plenty of times, up until recently, and will continue to do so while they can. For all of Russia's and China's internal ills, and I know there are a lot of them, they pale in comparison to the West in terms of the ills that they have brought upon the rest of the world outside their borders.
Not as much as you'd think, honestly. For things like resources, there are corrupt deals that get funneled through places like Saychelles, but if you actually look at the savings that come out of it it's like pennies on the Western end. They're really screwing the global poor for nothing. Meanwhile, the low-end manufacturing jobs are popular because they tend to pay better than anything else available, and are arguably lighter work than going out in the fields; nobody's really losing there.
Western wealth comes from other Western wealth, for the most part. Solid institutions, high education rates and lots of capital, which allows all kinds of complicated industries to exist. That got started on colonialism and slavery, but it doesn't need it to exist now.
I'm also involved in politics. There's legit ideology there, just like there was legit ideology in the Soviet Union.
Although the far right is a different beast, obviously. These days the US is a lot like a second China, from a Canadian perspective.
What are you thinking of there? I can't really come up with anything past the 80's. Some leaders will blame the West for their own domestic protesters, but it's always BS. If the US couldn't find one guy for that long they certainly can't whip up an entire nation.
To the rest, I'll say we both know the earlier history, and I'd probably agree the West needs taking down a peg circa 1920. The Cold War is a bit murkier, because the USSR liked a good puppet or intervention as well.
Okay, I don't have numbers to back up my claim, but the strong impression I have is that any country that tries to implement any government system the US doesn't like or especially if they try to nationalize some industry or make their markets or their resources more difficult for American companies to access get swiftly overthrown, either overtly or covertly. The only reason to take a step like that would be if those companies had a sweeheart deal in the first place, i.e., wealth extraction.
Sure, I don't doubt that many people who get into for instance the State Department have legit ideology. But the fact remains that the foreign policy of the US has remained fairly stable across multiple administrations from both parties, which essentially amounts to saying "promoting freedom and democracy" but in actuality promoting expanding military power around the world and expanding economic power as a result of that military presence at just about any cost.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_United_States and https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/united-states-involvement-in-other-countries
Those are only the ones that we know about, which is very likely a fraction of the recent ones because most of this stuff is secret and will continue to be so for 50 years. I don't agree at all that it's always BS. If you're talking about Bin Laden, that's a completely different kind of case that's unrelated to intelligence efforts to manipulate other countries and also because as far as I know the US didn't have any presence in Afghanistan before 9/11.
US-friendly governments keep coming to power in different places, especially in Latin America, and often under contentious circumstances. Do you think that that keeps happening because the people of those countries love the US? I would be more inclined to believe that the CIA was involved in overthrowing governments when those governments claim that than not. Because it's happened dozens and dozens of times in the last 80 years. There's a strong pattern there, almost like a habit.
Here's a good quote from that Wikipedia article:
My sense of the Cold War examples is that they happened in places that were on a kind of knife's edge already. Like Chile - there was an existing underfunded, previously influential and endogamous military that didn't need to much encouragement to take down Allende, electoral mandate be damned. They managed to gain influence across a lot of Latin America at the time, but there's no comparable place now. In modern areas with unstable governments, the US has been losing ground this decade, as opposed to running the show.
If the US was secretly replacing otherwise-stable governments all over the world, it would take vast numbers of people all over and be much too hard to perfectly to cover up. France's program in north Africa ended up an open secret, for example. You don't need it to explain anything either; so, it's not supported by Occam's razor. And obviously, how could I falsify that idea? This is when it starts feeling like arguing against a conspiracy theory. Every thing you can say against it gets twisted into evidence for a successful coverup.
There's been open interventions like Iraq and Libya, and legitimate controversy about them, but neither of those guys were remotely elected (which is what I was asking about). Intervening in the sense of throwing their weight around in lesser ways definitely happens, both in secret and in open, but China is also notorious for it, and has even taken a couple swings at Canada deep in the US sphere.
My point there was just that a lot of the decision makers believe they're doing something noble (and the rest just want to get re-elected). At least in my country, which is culturally very close to the US, foreign policy isn't a deliberately self-serving enterprise. (Although the fascist/"far-right populist" movement obviously goes in exactly that direction, and claims it's a virtue)
The first example I was thinking of there is Venezuela. Conditions in the nation are really bad, there's been mass migration out of it, and it's not hard to find a Venezuelan that hates Maduro and friends. He can say it's the CIA planting people, but even if you agree that none of the situation is actually his fault, it's not the CIA - people do blame the current government. Same story during the Arab Spring. Really, dictators will usually say an enemy manufactured any civil unrest, and the US is the obvious choice for some of them. Others blame local rivals, and historically Jews were popular.
Also, Maduro is still in charge of Venezuela, which goes back to the knife's edge thing. The US appears to be gearing up for an open armed invasion to dislodge him, because just the considerable public support for the opposition and whatever clandestine programs weren't enough.
Interesting, I might have to read that. In my head the banana republic coups worked like half the time, but maybe that's just because nobody talks about the failed ones.
One of the worst thing the right has done is be so fucking stupid that they make liberals assume anyone who disagrees with them for any reason must also just be stupid.