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China courts Germany's far-right populist AfD
(www.dw.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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China is a democracy
President for life doesn't sound democratic.
Term limits that silence the will of the people don't sound democratic to me
Neither does censoring criticism of the government and proxy depictions of it.
Imagine for a split second that the strongest government in the world is constantly attempting to cause the overthrow of your legitimately popular government, despite it being popular and significantly beloved by almost all people there. This external, most powerful government in the world tried to cause unrest in every possible way, including funding all opposition groups and organizations regardless of their violent/genocidal intent (e.g. Falun Gong, Islamic terror groups) and cause unrest on your borders (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Korea).
What do you do? When good faith polling shows that you're popular and fulfilling the needs and desires of your country's working class but a foreign press tries to speak about the terribleness and need for overthrow, do you just let that happen with more money and propoganda than you can possibly provide to support yourself? Or do you censor the BS and report to your population that these images/ideas/orgs are actually subversive and attempting to change the government they legitimately love.
In this hypothetical situation, what do you propose? Allowing the propaganda but claiming it's wrong has failed in many projects, and resulted in massacres once fascism won (Chile, Indonesia). Just trying to set up a wall of no information works for a bit, but info can cross anyways (USSR). Allowing limited access if you search for it but not allowing it's widespread propagation is the method of china. A VPN allows you to see it all, but it can't be spread too widely before it is stopped from being viral.
Do you have a better solution? Because this is how China presents itself and how the Chinese population sees it
What's that got to do with China?
Oh I think he's talking about FDR, the most popular president in U.S. history and one consistently ranked amongst the best
And in hindsight, not such a great person. Or at least had a lot of negatives to go along with his positives. Probably best to hard code not only a term limit, but an age limit on elected officials. I'm tired of the world being run by geriatrics. Culture seems to be consistently 20 year ahead of government.
Term-limits are blatantly anti-democratic and age limits are clumsy, but a cognitive evaluation and probably an MRI would be good for rooting out cases of cognitive decline.
There is an informal age limit in China and Xi is still below it, though just barely. I'm curious if he'll go for another term after crossing it. I think he understands that he needs to retire sometime -- no one wants to become a late '60s Mao.
Unlike in China, the people here actually have the right to vote. That right does not exist in China
What are you talking about? Of course the people in China have a right to vote.
Honestly, how did you come to be so confidently incorrect about this? You would have to have done no research at all to think the people of China don't vote, but a normal person who has done no research about a subject will have the humility not to assume they know what they're talking about.
It's okay to admit you don't know something. Like the other person said, Chinese people can vote
Learn yourself so that you can make informed opinions
It's better to have no knowledge than negative knowledge (knowing "facts" that are completely wrong because of a gut feeling assumption rather than any evidence or research)
🤡
How high are you right meow?
Do you not know what the structure of China is?
Serious question, do you? When I criticise the US I do so from a position of knowing how power works between its three branches of government, how the senate works, how local governance works, how elections work, how the courts work. Do you know how China conducts any of these? Do you know how they govern 1.6billion people?
It's a one-party state with all candidates chosen by the party.
It may wear the skin of a democracy, but it is not a democracy.
This is the vaguest description ever and it's not even correct with the vague points. There are multiple parties, and given that there are multiple parties the candidates certainly aren't chosen by one party.
How are candidates chosen? Who elects them? When are elections held? What is the structure of the elections?
Do you know any of these things? Serious question. Have you ever investigated and learned this topic thoroughly? You know how the US system works I assume, I bet you vaguely understand some other systems too, like parliamentary ones such as the UK (or not, could be wrong). Have you ever actually investigated the topic or have you just passively repeated vague statements made by other people who are also passively repeating vague statements about it?
If you want me to I can in fact give you a fairly good summary of how the Chinese system actually works. But do you even want to know? Are you actually open to learning?
I've investigated Chinese Democracy thoroughly and vastly prefer Use Your Illusion II or Appetite for Destruction
Can't beat the classics but the only Chinese Democracy is a surprisingly good album!
Democracy is when you vote between red man and blue man, both of whom have the same policies.
And both are funded by the same Bankers, Weapons Makers and Resource Extractors
Though, in fairness, red man is actively hostile to LGBT people, migrants, and women whereas blue man is content to let LGBT people, migrants, and women suffer via apathetic neglect instead.
Truly a vibrant political system.
Democracy is when The People Decide if trans people should exist but the tax rate policy is written by the rich
Weird how democracy didn't stop the genocide of the Native Americans, or the Aboriginal People of Australia, or the First Nations. I guess "true democracy" has just never been tried.
Let's topple all fake democracies. China's red-blue man owns US's red and blue men anyway.
Two Jews meet on the U-Bahn in 1935. One is reading a Nazi newspaper. His friend asks him "how can you read those outrageous lies about us?!" He replies "If I read a real newspaper, its persecution this and deportation that. But in this paper? We own all the banks, the movies, the government!"
Classic but red flag (lol) conspiracy theory vibes in this context. Jewish people owning China or vice versa? Either way fits more in line with qanonists
God could the point go over your head harder. That user wasn't engaging in a conspiracy theory that Jews on all the banks movies and government, they were comparing your apparent belief that the Chinese government controls the American government to those antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Also zero points in an argument with a bunch of people who can't downvote
Whooooosh lol 😉
Would someone actually create a "your apparent belief" in their mind from that
You know what, it's not even apparent, you explicitly stated it:
There's actually a looong leap from the known China-sponsored politicians to antisemitic cabal conspiracy theories
Not really, no.
That tells a lot of those who think that
I think that in 30 years you'll be considered the anti-Semite of this age, honestly. Sartre once famously claimed something like "if the Nazi didn't have the jew, they would have created him."
Sartre, for all his faults, understood that fascism always needed the external and periphery, whether defined geographically or ethnically, in order to sustain itself through expropriation. Who this was doesn't matter as much as that this group is defined as having more than it deserves for bad reasons and is therefore justifiable as a victim of violent expropriation. The values represented have become more progressive™ in that you believe China owns American representatives in order to mistreat Muslims or something. But materially it's identical to "Judeo-Bolshevik" antisemitism
Here's a bite-sized analysis from a guy who's pretty good at this:
https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1495054681579692035?t=gmJyzLx5go9hZWcFJkt5fw&s=19
I remember fascists have been calling antifascists fascists for a long time but "the anti-Semite of this age" is definitely one of the most despicably hateful derogatory things I've seen in a while.
Edit: no, I do not open links from Musk's alt-right-landia
Did you seriously read this as saying the Nazis were right?
I don't know who would read that
I much prefer all those two or three party states where the candidates are chosen by their respective parties on the marching orders of the capitalist class
lmao dog you shoulda just said "i don't know anything about that, why don't you tell me?"
it still would have taken you zero effort and you'd have avoided embarrassing yourself
According to their respective peoples, China has an infinitely more vibrant and responsive democracy than the United States.
I'd hate to think you'd be so blind to the irony of saying such a thing as 'wearing the skin of democracy' if you were living in the west.
Either way I'd be ashamed to act like you have and speak despite having such ignorance about the Chinese system of democracy.
So you don't know the structure
the representatives are chosen by their parties in most countries, including the US. the difference is that in western "democracies" there's two or more parties all representing the same interests - those of the capitalist class - posing the electorate with a false choice. how is this improvement?
Democracy is when the people hate their government and the more they hate it the more democratic it is
Not at all. You?