Don't worry, Biden and Harris are working tireleasly on a ceasefire!

The Apartheid Defense League has dropped a tactical "extremism" label. How do you respond?

I'm very critical of American imperialism but I fail to see how the US is using Ukraine to hurt Russia.

The US and its proxies have constantly escalated using Ukraine as a proxy for over a decade and since the war started they have continued this pattern. There is no path to victory for Ukraine. If the RF wanted to end it they could run mass bombing campaigns like NATO members do. They are making the opposite calculation: that the status quo of a military meat grinder for Ukraine is better for the RF. Given that one of their goals is a demilitarized Ukraine, there is some logic to this idea.

It has been painfully obvious that Ukraine cannot win from the beginning. Nobody trying to escalate, provide Wunderwaffe, etc really things Ukraine will win, that is just not what any serious person thinks. This is also why there is such an intense and absurd propaganda campaign to say that Russia is losing more people and equipment, with the source nearly always being Azov Batallion, the UA MoD, or a combination of the two. They need to sell the public on the idea that Ukraine just needs your support and dang it they mogjt pull this thing off!

So then, if UA can't win and the heads of state know they can't win, what is their logic? What is the angle on who benefits? Well, the singular common thread of brinksmanship with Ukraine as proxy has always been to try anf peel Europe away from economic integration with Russia and to instead keep it in the EU bubble, with more American integration. And, lo and behold, look at how Europe has destroyed its own industry and made itself even more dependent on the US. This has the added effect of isolating Russia from Europe. While Europe still buys their fossil fuels from Russia, trade overall is way down.

In addition, there is the simple calculus that it requires manpower and productive capacity to wage war, capacity that could be directed elsewhere. Iran would likely have more and better air defense systems if Russia weren't focused on Ukraine.

At no point does the suffering of the Ukrainian people enter the equation. There are no anti-war voices on the mainstream media about this aside from self-serving right wing "this is not our problem" rhetoric.

The fault always lies with the invader, Russia did this to itself. If I see someone getting stabbed and throw him a knife, implying I'm using him to hurt the other person attacking him is silly. Russia can leave anytime.

There are few countries thst tolerate a civil war on their border targeting the ethnicity of your own country, let alone an encroachment of the primary aggressor military force around the world couping them, let alone that neighbor remilitarizing despite agreements and not honoring their agreements. This is geopolitics, not a bar fight. War does not occur in a vacuum, it has a material basis. One does not need to justify war in order to understand that this did not occur in a vacuum and there is blame to go around.

I do agree tankie is thrown around far too much, I've been called one myself just for talking shit of the military, even though I never mentioned an other country or a political idealogie.

Yeah it's really just a way for national chauvinist liberals to quiet their own cognitive dissonance. I also think it's extra funny when a Trotskyist gets called tankie, since they invented the epithet.

The spread of the word as well as the constant villainization of China seems like prep for red scare 2.0, so we can have the population support bombing villages full of civilians (again).

Yes the US is trying to decouple on its own terms. Its constant attempts to provoke the PRC with Taiwan is also similar to what they did to Ukraine. To have the consent of their population to sacrifice their own well-being and justify whatever military action might occur, they will needs to be more racist and xenophobic towards China. It may not be Taiwan. It might be Korea or Myanmar. But constant escalation and provocation is the US game. Maximalist, relentless foreign policy pushing towards war and death.

I thought I was having one.

No, you are being self-serving and selective in your responses and have dropped straw men repeatedly. Rather than respond to that when called out, you are just straight-up ignoring most of what is said in response. I don't care if you are "busy", you can just not reply and stop saying large swaths of bullshit if you don't have the capacity to continue. Nobody is making you behave like this.

And again, you have ignored most of my reply. Including the part where I pointed out that you had ignored my reply, and why I had provided that context in the first place. No acknowledgement from you that any of that has happened. I don't think it is expecting too much that you demonstrate the most basic aspects of good faith engagement.

I’m just disagreeing with you on some things and you somehow seem to think that means I’m not engaging. I’m trying.

I have no idea what you're talking about. What do you want me to do with you when you just omit most of what I've said and ignore it? Do you want me to treat you like someone that is doing that intentionally (i.e. bad faith) or like someone too unaware of what is happening to know that's counterproductive? How do you treat people that act that way?

Woah no and I’m sorry if I’ve given the impression I would do something like that. I consider marxist-leninist communists to be misguided comrades, and I hope you can think of me the same way.

You are doing something like that. You are mindlessly repeating anti-China propaganda, anti-Russia propaganda. The Nazis are your entire social context. They provide consent for the maximum pressure campaigns. They support the coup following Euromaidan, the non-implementation of the Minsk agreements. If you say any of these things to liberals, they only understand it as a confirmation of their racist and xenophobic views in support of domination. And again, they are largely falsehoods or otherwise presented in an absurdly biased fashion.

I am confident that you are not a comrade yet. You are a liberal that likes some of the things they've heard leftists say. But you can't be a comrade without shedding your liberalism and actually getting involved and learning theory. It is painfully clear that you have not done those things. You might become a comrade eventually, but your confidence despite ignorance will be a serious roadblock, you may never actually get there until you learn how to do some self-crit and ask questions instead of fighting.

How is that homophobia? I think you’re construing something here.

You do not see how treating sucking a man's dick is used homophobically? Did you grow up on Mars? Its context as an insult is straight guys telling other straight guys to do a gay thing. I don't think you need me to explain this to you. I think if you stepped back and actually did the self-crit I just told you to do, you could figure it out yourself. So go do that. Stop making excuses and stop fighting pointlessly and do some thinking.

It is not coincidental that I skimmed this comment as well because it is really fucking long. sorry

It is not very long. It takes 3-5 minutes to read and I have given you no deadlines. If you can't respond to direct criticisms, maybe you aren't ready to have these discussions. I think that is probably the case. You should go do some reading and self-crit and come back with questions.

gonna stop reading right here since I’ve stated I’m anticapitalist and it feels like going in circles.

Anyone can call themselves anything. Are they always correct?

If you deigned to keep reading, condescending liberal, you would find that I explained how this works.

sorry but can only answer so many of these huge comments in a day. If there’s an argument you really want me to engage with please let me know

No. You can reply to what I said if you want to discuss this topic or you can acknowledge that you aren't ready to discuss these things. This is not asking very much. I'm not asking you to read a book. It is about 3 average-sized paragraphs worth of text. I am not holding you to a deadline, either. But you can't just dance around in bad faith and expect patient responses.

First, before I respond point-by-point, I would like to point out thst you have ignored nearly all of my response. I offered you information, history, and context, in part because it is informative, but mostly because it provides you the opportunity to recognize (vocally or not) your ignorance of this topic and instead redirect your attention yo actually questioning your knowledge and opinions and doing some reading instead of lashing out or doubling down.

Instead, you are doubling down on seeking conflict and sharing, yet again, that your only knowledge of this topic is what you were recemtly told to believe by capitalist media propagandists. And that this is so superior to my knowledge that you don't even need to acknowledge what I've said and can just continue on trying to be contrarian.

Do you think it would be fair to call your behavior insufferable, as you have called tankies? To be clear, I do expect an answer to this question.

Okay so violently beating down protesters is okay because it's in the name of anticolonialism?

Oh, so you aren't even really responding to what I said, which is about Westerners being outraged that China was governing China. I thought you might not understand what I meant by that, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Anyways this is a srraw man and I will ignore it.

This line of reasoning goes exactly the same as US imperialism. It's always some harmful ideology that is enslaving the poor people of some place and they must be freed by being forced to join the empire.

You're just talking to yourself about all of this. It has nothing to do with what I said.

Are you ready to have an actual conversation or are you so deep into liberalism that you can only imagine fighting and winning rather than questioning your own ignorance?

I don't get where you're trying to take this conversation. You don't have to prove to me that some things about China are great. In this comment alone you admitted three times that China isn't perfect. Which means, China should be criticized.

Let's say you go to a bar and there are some Nazis at the next table. You hear them say, "and fuck those communists, they will get what is coming to them". Are you going to go over there and say, "yeah, fuck those tankies! They're insufferable authoritarians"? Because all that means is that you're going out of your way to validate Nazis trying to kill communists and aligning yourself with them. When someone says, "what the fuck, punch those Nazis, don't validate them" are you going up say, "ergo, communists should be criticized".

Your entire social context is those Nazis in that bar. And your criticisms aren't even informed, they're the bullshit spread by the Nazi propagandists. And then you tell everyone you're on the left.

If you ever spent time among communists, you would find they are very critical of China. But their criticisms are differemt from yours becsyse yours are warmed over cold war talking points and uncritical readings of the media. And they are intentional about their outward criticisms, becayse again, our entire social context is the Nazi bar.

Like any other nation state. And I am saying, there are shills who run around and won't let anybody criticize China because for some reason they got emotionally attached to a nation state

Nonsense. Speak to and of the tankies right in front of you right now. What, exactly, are we doing?

Everybody who says they don't want to deepthroat Mao's shlong for breakfast gets called a liberal.

Hey look it's that homophobia I mentioned liberals doing in another comment. You asked me what a liberal is, well there you go. A liberal us, for exple, someone that attacks China for not having legalized gay marriage but then uses homophobic insults.

Do self-crit.

Any and all words uttered by a human that has even looked at the US on a map is liberal slop, and everything coming from the Russian state department is gospel. And I call those people tankies. That's all I'm saying.

You do tell a lot of vague stories but they have no relation to what people are actually doing.

It is not coincidental that you ignored the vast majority of what I said, as it was concrete history.

Define liberal please because I don't like being called one.

Liberalism is the dominant ideology of capitalism, it is a wide set of social and political views that serve capitalism through the absorption of bourgeois attitides and its primsry vehicle of political legitimacy is bourgeois democracy, like parliamentarianism. Every person living under capitalism has absorbed some liberalism, including every anarchist and communist. But those who critically engage sufficiently can shed the label because they understand the system sufficiently and work against it.

You are repeatedly exoressing a litany of thoughts rooted in unexamined liberalism. One that is usually retained by baby leftists in Western countries is racism and xenophobia. They will see the value of organized labor and social justice but cannot tie it to imperislism and fall in line with who the Capitalists tell them is their enemy

What do you think of people who say it's hypocritical for queer people to support Palestine? Because to a socialist you sound like that when spreading imperialist pinkwashing against China.

In the same way that some people will shill for billionaires or for some billionaire-owned company, aka a corporate shill. People who fail to see that (capitalist) companies are just a way to extract profit.

A shill is someone paid to profess to have views other than their own. People shilling for a product makes sense, it is an old salesman tactic.

Who do you think is paying me to be right about China all the time?

In the same vein, some people fail to see that nation states are just instruments of power.

On the contrary, every communist that has ever existed knows this. We write about it all the time. Projecting this liberalism onto communists is just telling on yourself.

Some are better than others in different ways of course, but I get real itchy when people jump to defend a nation at the first smidgeon of criticism. I hate nationalism.

Existing in the real world as we do, your "anti-nationalism" is really just nationalism in favor of Western powers, despite your professibg to be against them. You repeat their talking points! What do you think the outcome is of uncritically repeating sinophobic or russophobic falsehoods? Why do you think we are even talking about those two countries? It is because US empire has decided to focus on them as targets of derision and marginalization.

What, exact, nationalism are you pushing back against? What is making you itchy? Because all I see are people defending China against piss-poor talking points.

Funny, I was just telling @Cowbee about how the tankies I see on here are insufferable & impossible to converse with.

I would say the people here are being very patient with you, as you are spreading xenophobic views out of ignorance and recycled imperialist think tank talking points while also being condescending. You don't get pushback on that by liberals because they agree with you but anyone on the left would be embarrassed to be associated with it.

The appropriate response for someone not generously giving you their time would be to call you, among other things, a liberal and then go on with their day.

But I'll bite. First of all, I don't appreciate the strawmen. I'm not saying that there is a lot of tankies, nor that they are here now suddenly

Liberals suddenly learned the word tankie. Why do you think that is? Rather than a straw man, I understood this as a fact we could all accept.

I'm just saying that I, myself, in my own experience, have seen people shilling for China or even Russia, acting like it's a fucking utopia.

What tankies have you seen that treat Russia like a utopia? What tankies have you seen that treat China like a utopia? I think you are just revealing your owm straw men, and all you have seen is people appreciating asoects of either country. And by the magic of chauvinism, any praise for any aspect of "the enemy" is an uncritical endorsement. Liberals going down this path will often throw in some homophobic ibsults about Putin or Xi.

Russia an oligarchy, just with a different structure than most Western countries.

Russia is capitalist. It is only called an oligarchy because Westerners are racist towards them and need different words for the same thing when the Slavic brainpan does it. This is you uncritically absorbing that racism. They control our thoughts through language, framings, and what is discussed vs. not discussed.

China is a government that rules over billions of people. That is, by definition, evil.

It obviously is not.

No amount of America Bad makes China or Russia good.

America Bad both describes the position of the US as the globsl seat of capital and imperislist power and is intended to get people like yourself to have sone persoective, as you are deeply propagandized towards America-centrism.

In terms of propaganda sources, for example just take a look at Russia Today.

RT is, generally speaking, more reliable that the NYT. So what of it?

If China is so great

Are we having a discussion of geopolitics or a schoolyard gossip fight?

then why does it feel the need to dictate over Hong Kong

Why do you have strong opinions about this topic when you clearly do not know any history about China?

China, more specifically the Qing Dynasty, was colonized (mostly by the British) through a series of imperialist ventures thst included the Opium Wars. The result was the designation of Hong Kong, already an existing Chinese city, as a British imperial trade hub where resources and wealth extracted from the rest of the country was traded, as well as later serving as a finsncial hub for the rest of the imperialized region. But, to put it simply, the British stole Hong Kong in 1841-1843.

When China threw off all of its imperial masters in its national liberation fight against the Japanese, it then had a civil war due to the KMT attacking the communists. Obviously, the communists won. As part of this, they reclaimed Hong Kong just a little over 100 years after it was stolen, but using the legal definition that had been imposed by the British, who had given themselves a 100-year lease that ended in 1997.

Hong Kong is a Chinese city that was colonized by the British and is being reintegrated, as yiu would expect from a sovereign country. You claimed elsewhere that you are against Western hegemony, but this is a crystal clear example of anticolonial action and you're siding with the colonists that write breathless propaganda about how unfair it is that China is governing a Chinese city.

and Taiwan

Again, just basic history. When the communists were reconsolidating their country, they were also expelling KMT forces. At the end, the KMT looted wealth and cultural artifacts and fled to Taiwan, where they set up a military dictatorship and began oppressing the indigenous people there. The PRC was set to invade Taiwan and finish their civil war, but the US set up a blockade and the PRC opted to vow a later return rather than force the Americans out. The first question you should have is why the US was meddling in their civil war.

Both the PRC and the KMT have long held that the civil war has never ended, with the PRC claiming Taiwan and the KMT claiming all of msinlsnd China and also Mongolia. The PRC holds a consistent line of reunification being the end goal.

The US uses Taiwan to harass the PRC and wants to use it to escalate tensions. It may even try to turn it into another Ukraine, doing everything it can to push China over red lines militarily until it finally decides that Taiwan is an intolerable threat just a few miles off its coast and very close to Shenzhen. If that happened, would you yet again go after the target if US imperialism like your masters tell you to, calling it an unprovoked aggression? Would you have new names for people that correctly blame the US for using their proxies as puppets to harass other nations? The US is already trying to derisk from Taiwan by exportinh its chip production facilities but it isn't going well because the US is so finsncislized that it can't barely build productive capacity at even 10X the cost of elsewhere.

Does China have gay marriage?

This is another example of why someone would call you a liberal. Pinkwashing imperialist takes. What is your logic on what is permitted to be done to other countries if they don't have a legal recognition of gay marriage? On what basis do other cultures need to mirror your own preferences in order for them to be free of your chauvinism? Any real county will have reactionary elements, some old, some new. Your country, and you, have reactionary elements.

There is a populsr struggle for gay marriage in China and it is going pretty well. It is mostly jist old people who are against it. You should exoect to see it legalized in the next decade or so. But you will have had nothing to do with thst, as your contribution here is to sneer at the entire country for not doing what this Westerner baby leftist demands.

Incidentally, if the CPC did force through legalized gay marriage and it elicited some negative response, like protests, you can be certain this would be characterized as an authoritarian overreach and how dare they disregard the will of the people. Some "socialists", huh!?

Trans rights perhaps?

China has better trans rights than your country, most likely. It has less transphobia to begin with, had major out and truly popular trans celebrities before the US did, and provides gender-affirming care of all kinds in a way that is truly accessible for the vast majority of people. Compare this to the US where trans kids are often exiled by their families and given no support, leading to high rates of homelessness, hard drug use, and death.

China does not have the same culture wars as the US, it doesn't have the same need for capital to create and maintain marginalization to distract from material decline. China is materially advancing and ending extreme poverty.

I'm not saying China is as bad as the West claims it is. I'm just saying it's not something to get wild about.

But you don't seem to know anything about China. Why have an opinion at all? Why not hold your tongue until you have done some reading or talked nicely to Chinese people?

It's a nation state (a far too big one at that), which are by definition tools of oppression.

Sure, but what of it? Do you think we are in a position to have a societu free of oppression, including nation states? With you and whose army?

Socialists must build revolution in the real world, with what is materially in front of us. Tell us how you would, say, end China's status as a nation state without it just getting immediately recolonized, probably by the country in which you live, work, and to which you contribute.

Per the origins of the term, a tankie is a communist that supported the Soviets wuelling the Hungarian 1956 uprising. It was an insult concocted by British Trotskyists, who also consider themselves communists.

The modern use of the term is just a liberal sentiment leveled against anyone that doesn't fall neatly in line with US Empire's vilification campaigns. If you dare to say that Russia has material motivations that are a counter to those of the US rather than being a kingdom run by a madman that just loves killing, you are a tankie. If you don't want Ukraine used as a proxy for the US to hurt Russia, regardless of how many Ukrainians die, you are a tankie. If you treat the PRC as country filled with normal people living normal lives rather than the dystopian nightmare it's falsely depicted as, uou are a tankie. If you know anything at all about Dengism, you are a tankie.

Really, the liberal position on both countries is premised on orientalism and it is never a surprise when the criticisms inevitably turn into vague tropes. And when this laziness is called out, well, it's time to deploy a tactical tankie reference. I definitely don't care about being insulted, these situations are really just a way for the other person to give themselves an excuse to stop thinking or engaging.

Yet again begging liberals to understand what the word "shill" means.

This is completely unrelated, but now is a good time to get into shooting paintball guns at pieces of circular glass about 2 cm in diameter.