As the comment there says, the surprise is that not every instance is blocked yet.
But I've seen hardly any Chinese on the fediverse, so they probably don't care that much. And it's not just that I've stuck to the English-speaking parts, there's been lots of Japanese and various European languages. I suppose even if it otherwise would have a chance to catch on there, Chinese users know that if it did it quickly would get blocked.
I've only seen Taiwanese on Mastodon, especially as they're leaving Twatter due to Chinese bot activity.
Wouldn't they just use a VPN? I know they're technically illegal in China but from what I've heard lots of people still use them regularly.
VPNs are not illegal in China. And one can use it to circumvent any restrictions.
Non-approved VPNs used to circumvent the great wall are absolutely illegal, though largely tolerated (and observed), but the authorities can and have used them as an excuse to bring people in.
Source: have actual been to China and played the whole "which VPN will work on which network" game many times.
I assume all vpn services accessible from china are run by government and they monitor the traffic
I feel like I should say that a VPN isn't a magic bullet. Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use. Given that the CCP monitors all of this stuff it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you run a VPN long or often enough without providing stating why that it'll either end up blocked or you'll end up in trouble.
Given that the CCP monitors all of this stuff it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that if you run a VPN long or often enough without providing stating why that it’ll either end up blocked or you’ll end up in trouble.
How do you know this? I have friends living in China that states otherwise.
As far as I know there are specific legal provisions for foreigners living in China in regards to VPN use, so what might be true for your friends isn't necessarily true for a regular Chinese person.
Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use.
Which is why Chinese users don't use standard VPNs, they use obfuscated proxies with protocols like Shadowsocks and V2Ray, which mask the tunneled traffic as innocuous HTTPS traffic.
That's a fair point, but what you are talking about isn't a "VPN", at least not as they're commonly known and understood. Please remember that my response was directed to a user whose comment boiled down to "Get a VPN, that will solve the problem." A regular VPN will absolutely not the solve the problem.
But using a VPN is not illegal in China… why would you even have to explain why you’re using one?
Seriously, I can find articles like that detailing different incidents in every major mainstream media source. So either all of them are lying to me -or- you are trying to gaslight me.
Guess which one I think is more probable?
The correct response to "you just posted propaganda" is not to try and find a source that says the exact same thing as the propaganda...
Like that's the moment you should stop and say to yourself "maybe I was lied to"
The correct response to someone claiming something is propaganda is to go find more sources for more and separate incidents. If you can find multiple sources showing that a situation has happened multiple times then it stops being "propaganda" and starts being information.
At this point I have a pile of independent sources documenting multiple different incidents that support my understanding of the situation. I'm still open to counter evidence but so far you haven't provided any.
I'm sure lots of people do, it's a big country. But for the vast majority I imagine that the risk of getting in trouble for it, plus the risk of the one you paid for getting successfully blocked, plus the difficulty of finding out which ones are allowed to operate only because they share all your data with the authorities, plus the cost, plus the usual difficulties in finding a good vpn outweigh any desire to communicate freely with foreigners.
any Chinese
💀
It's like when your dad doesn't love you
how will we ever recover from this epic pwnage 🥱
Everyone to the left of you is a russian/chinese bot; a child's guide to political discourse on the internet
It might be discussion of piracy/VPNs or something like that. China's got rules about that stuff too AFAIK. Maybe if one of the admins can read/write Simplified Chinese they could reach out to the relevant government bureau and request clarification.
I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media's self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.
In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.
Wow, stop saying sensible things. Be less correct. Thanks!
Please, someone tell comrade Stalin Xi that this is all just a terrible mistake!
some of the gymnastics in this thread are hilarious. critical support is a thing you can criticize china's various Ls while still supporting the chinese people.
Isn't lemmy.ml full of tankies?
I made an account a long while ago when it was the only instance with any content but I'm just a lurker looking for memes and tech news. Feeling like I should change instance these days...
lemmygrad is full of full-on tankies, the type who would willingly send birthday greetings to comrade Stalin while imprisoned in a gulag, lemmy.ml once was a default instance and thus has random folks on it but is admin-wise run by tankies and generally seems to serve as the preferred instance for lemmygrad folks to have alts on. Stay away from political communities there e.g. their worldnews community is a silly place. Hexbear is hit and miss, not so much hardened tankies there but wokescolds and random lefties who don't quite realise who they associate with, why that kind of social dynamics is no good. Might have some inane takes, occasionally prone to dogpiling, but at least you can have a conversation with them.
Using alt-right terminology should get you disqualified from any reasonable conversation.
What, the term "tankie"? A term coined within the Communist Party of Great Britain? The CPGP is alt-right, now?
Calling the term "alt-right" is just a quick way of telling me you're a tankie without telling me you're a tankie.
Oh. "wokescold" is another possibility but that's rather unlikely, while the right has appropriated "woke" I've never heard them use "wokescold" which is precisely used by people who know and understand the original meaning and simply want to call out certain problematic behaviours done in the name of, but not to the benefit of, wokeness.
Don't fucking bullshit me, we both know that I was referring to wokescold. Tankie is a horrible fucking word but it way predates the alt-right.
I'll just quote Zena+Poppy on the term. You may not like it, you might prefer clinical analytical language such as "puritanical progressive" or whatever, but from the context I used it in (making direct reference to social dynamics) it should be obvious that I used it in that sense.
And, no, tankie is not a "horrible fucking word". It is precise and succinct, also, tankies hate it.
No it's not a matter of how "nice" it sounds, it's about the fact that it was created by nazis for a nazi agenda.
I have zero patience for people who side with fascism. Sorry for having basic standards of human decency.
it was created by nazis for a nazi agenda.
Source on that? I'm serious. I did a bit of googling and do see that the likes of Ben Shapiro have been using it, but that's definitely not where I have it from, and you'll also see plenty of left-wing uses of it.
I have zero patience for people who side with fascism.
I referred you to a quite precise definition of what I mean by the term. Can you explain to me how criticising the things encompassed by that definition would put me "on the side of fascism"? Fascists have come up with plenty of terms leftists use all the time, an obvious example would be the word "fascist". Allegiance to fascism, I'd say, cannot be inferred merely by use of some shared vocabulary, you have to go deeper than that.
In any case, and I hope you see the irony, going nuclear over the use of such a term, to drill down on syntax instead of semantics, is not unlikely to fit the wokescold pattern of behaviour. Depends a bit on how you do it but overall I'd say it's likely you'd hit at least some of the checkboxes Zena+Poppy are giving.
Nah I'm done. You're irredeemable. Go be a fascist somewhere else.
Indeed I'll stay an anarchist no matter how much tankies and/or wokescolds whine. Have a good day.
average sh.ithead. Fucking nazi instance.
If you mean communists that support capitalist states like China, then yes, unfortunately. Better than being around nothing but liberals or anti-communists though.
capitalist states like China
China isn't a capitalist state.
It totally is. Not by your pet definition maybe but millions of wage workers and stock markets say otherwise
"State capitalism with Chinese characteristics"
Aren't you that guy who argued with your own community and played the victim over the use of AI art because you didn't want to accept you were being an insufferable AI techbro who doesn't understand consent? Like I've seen trolls flex more to criticism than you did there.
EDIT: Wondered why they didn't respond and. Holy shit I just looked at the modlog for dbzer0 and you can't make this shit up
So you ARE a pedophile-nazi. Fucking love to see it. I will be adding your instance to my block list. If you see this: get help.
Define capitalism.
Capitalism is when markets. I am very smart.
I find that the most accurate definition is a society where the primary mode of production is wage work
Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled "tankies" these days obviously don't), but nowadays it's just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.
Nah, its not anticommunism. Its anti authoritarianisnm
All states are inherently "authoritarian" and enforce certain principles over others. What matters is if those principles materially prioritize workers over capitalists, which socialist states do.
You can't create a stateless, classless communist society from capitalism without a transitional socialist state that breaks the monopoly on force and propaganda that capitalist states have — specially in a world ruled by capitalist superpowers like the US which constantly coups and invades non-capitalist states. Thinking otherwise is just delusional and utopian.
No non-capitalist state will survive in the modern world if they don't sufficiently get rid of propaganda and deal with capitalist funded insurgencies, which capitalist states will label as "authoritarian"; they'd immediately be coup'd and overthrown by imperial core countries otherwise, as many socialist states have (Chile, Libya, etc).
And regardless, socialist states are a massive improvement over capitalist states when it comes to "authoritarianism" anyway, same as most other metrics. The US has 0.8% of its population in prison for example, while China has 0.1%. Similar stats on most metrics for the USSR vs USA; socialist Russia's human rights were also far better than capitalist Russia's, obviously.
You can’t create a stateless, classless communist society from capitalism without a transitional socialist state that breaks the monopoly on force and propaganda that capitalist states have — specially in a world ruled by capitalist superpowers like the US which constantly coups and invades non-capitalist states.
Ask the Zapatista. Yes, the US tried to get rid of them, couldn't, learned better and now is just letting them be. Rojava is an even better example as the US wilfully allied with them.
Figures if your revolution isn't centrally organised by Moscow or China post-McCarthy US doesn't actually care. Present-day US would've also let Cuba be SocDem, as was the original intent of the revolutionaries, instead of pushing them into alliance with the USSR.
The Zapatistas are cool comrades who fought off the US and other capitalist forces as all socialist projects have to. Different from most successful socialist revolutions in that it didn't establish a state (though it was managed centrally by the EZLN), but it has since succumbed to pressure from the government and cartels and has dissolved its municipalities last year — so it's not quite as successful of a revolution as those that establish a state, some of which have already managed to become nations of millions or global superpowers.
Cuba be SocDem, as was the original intent of the revolutionaries
"Social democracy" back then just meant socialism. The Bolsheviks who established the USSR were also "social democrats"
And your fantasies of the US ever letting a US-backed military dictatorship be overthrown and develop are funny, specially when it's currently committing a genocide in Palestine and not even letting them get rid of a western colony.
Rojava is a decentralized capitalist region
And the USSR was a centralised state capitalist system. China has even left the "state" part behind and is nowhere nearer abolishing class than it was at the start of the revolution. It actually regressed in that regard.
But, fine, call Rojava that if you will. Just shows how you can't see any possible roads to communism that don't involve the failed experiment that is state capitalism.
though it was managed centrally by the EZLN
The EZLN does not manage centrally. The EZLN is not even a governing body. It's a decentralised milita that councils tasked with matters of military security. It is those councils which are the governing body, not the EZLN. Rojava operates alongside the same lines, though details differ because cultural, material, and other differences.
I know it might be incomprehensible to you: A literal army, with all the capability it could wish for to order the local population around, sat down with the local population and told them about their ideas. The population then told them about theirs. They discussed, mutually refined their ideas until there was a consensus on how to move ahead, leading to what you see now. No shot was fired, noone was sent to gulag. They've also been capable of large organisational reforms, deliberated to consensus, implementation happened just a couple of months ago.
Maybe you should set aside some time and actually study those regions, not just read tankie cliff notes about how they supposedly work, or don't, or are secretly authoritarian, or whatever.
The Bolsheviks who established the USSR were also “social democrats”
The Bolsheviks were never democrats and the French social democrats still call themselves communists. But that's rather besides the point: The Cuban revolution was in the late 50, by then the split between SocDems and communists (both liberal and authoritarian) was not just done it had hardened. Heck the revolution ended in 59, after the word tankie had been established, which was 56, in direct reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
The point I'm making here is that Fidel & Co came to the US, said "We're eyeing doing something like your European allies are doing and want to be friends, you know, unions, welfare, worker's rights", the US said "nope, can't have you not be slaves to Bacardi and United Fruit you're our colony after all", Cuba said "never mind then we thought we could be friends then we'll go with our second choice, the USSR". The USSR, then, demanded from their allies a heavily authoritarian slant, so Cuba adopted it, in the interest of national survival not out of preference. Which is also why they are by far the furthest along among the surviving ML states when it comes to democratisation. Vietnam is second, with quite some distance, China makes no moves in that regard and North Korea, well, North Korea is only ever getting worse, not better. Oh, Eritrea. Same.
Rojava, Zapatistas? Sorry, but Anarchists can form States without hierarchy
Zapatistas flexed and built a centralized structure it because they weren't getting anything done.
Why would State Capitalists allow discussions about actual communism? God forbid he people get it into their head to form trade unions..
I can't quite tell if this is a parody, the trade union bit makes it seem sincere, but the self-importance to think that lemmy is too left for China to allow is just amazing.
What is left about China? They literally murdered people for demanding the right to establish trade unions (see Tienamin Square)
see Tienamin Square
I'm looking it up, and I don't see any "Tienanmin Square". Could it be "Tiananmen Square" that you're thinking of? The one protesting government corruption? Where unarmed soldiers were burned alive? Where Christian sickos were trying to get students in the line of fire to create atrocity propaganda? Surely there must be some confusion here!
Yes, one of their demands was the right to establish trade unions.
Were the trade unionists the ones immolating unarmed soldiers and stringing up their corpses?
Seriously if that shit happened in the US, the national guard would call in an A-10 gun run on the crowd
The US is a plutocracy. What's your point?
What type of society do you think would allow you to burn other people to death and string up their corpses? Is it one that you think would be an improvement over modern China?
point is focus your criticisms on your own society that's 1000x worse than even the most exaggerated crimes about China, cracker. Chinese people aren't children and they can handle their own country in their own way, they don't need some forum poster condescending to them and you don't need a warped preoccupation with a country that probably has nothing to do with you
I stand in solidarity with all oppressed people everywhere, and I will do more than just criticize oppressors
Do you have anything but the most condescending and one-sided "solidarity" for a people who support their government?
I dont stand in solidarity with people who support oppressors, no.
Fortunately most people do not support their government.
January 6th already happened but no consequences did. The US will only deploy violence if the movement is left of whatever their crazy idea of center is.
i'm sure Chinese people need patronizing crackers from the west to instruct them on what communism actually is
What? I stand with the Chinese people against their oppressors. Criticism of an oppressive State is not criticism of its victims.
...how often do you interact with Chinese people? Whenever I go back home to Wuhan I don't really see much oppression happening.
almost no one in China feels that their state is an oppressive force, they feel the opposite. The government has more than a 90% approval rating. The overwhelming majority of Chinese people view their society as legitimate and socialist. If you had any interest in democracy at all you'd respect this perspective instead of imposing your own
Lol
That's about the level of response I'd expect from a lib to inconvenient facts
Lol you think everyone who criticizes Capitalist governments like the US and China are liberals?
If it walks like a liberal and talks like a liberal, it's a liberal.
She's literally correct; studies from even anti-Chinese partisan sources can't help but find that satisfaction with the government is overwhelming. While you treat anti-imperialist movements like this sitting from your home in the imperial core, you're not a revolutionary or helping anybody build towards anything better, you're an active hindrance. Feel free to imbibe the actual opinions of people in China so you can understand the conditions there and not just your cracker conditioning. It's not perfect, but overthrow would be far; far worse.
(this is unrelated but I've only been going by she for a little while and it felt kinda nice to be called she like that, thank you.)
To be fair, .ml bans you pretty quickly for discussing anything outside of a pretty narrow stripe of Marxist Leninist orthodoxy as well.
I don't consider myself a Marxist, Leninist, or communist of any stripe and haven't had a problem so far. I'm far enough left that I refuse to call myself a liberal, but I suspect the folks who consider themselves Marxists probably think I'm too far right to self-identify as a leftist. (Although I do.)
Shitload of downvotes a time or two, but that's about it. I just wanted to be on a Lemmy instance that was honoring the fedipact, and preferred it to have an instance ethos to the left of mine rather than to the right of it.
I like it here.
Hats off, from a Marxist.
I don't think that's a fair criticizm. After all my dumb ass hasn't been banned (so far).
This is just a meme everyone repeats until they believe it.
Not only did I not stick to ML orthodoxy while I was there (I'm more of a peacenik anarchist at heart), I wrote some fairly rude things when I found out how insane some of the tankies on lemmy can be. I hadn't expected such people to exist in reality, I had thought it was just a caricature invented by enemies of communism or something. Nonetheless they did not ban me or complain at all when I said that sort of thing.
Eventually I left because their list of blocked instances got too long for my taste.
Eventually I left because their list of blocked instances got too long for my taste.
Ah I didn't know about this - how can I see that list?
Any social networks that have non-censored participants are. Usually, China's presence in social networks outside of its borders are for propaganda purposes.
The Western 'free' population is one of the most information censored/restricted populations in the world, and yet they are flabbergasted that China and many many other nations won't allow propaganda from western oligarchs into their country. It doesn't matter that an information firewall is the single most important military defense against the Capitalist information war. That's btw why the western world are propagandizing their population for 'free speech', so we all can see that wevil China don't want free propaganda, sorry, speech.
The most amazing and Incredible is how hateful attitudes can be bought for a few propaganda dollars in the western for profit information market. So western people actually believe all the hateful things the western oligarchy says about China (and ALL the other enemies of the oligarchs).
How convenient and completely coincidental that the western population have the same opinions about nations and world leaders as the top elite.. Could it be that.. nooooo.. no no.. Western news are the BEST, and no Capitalist elite would lie about something like that to their own population, oh no no..
Yes, that's a perfectly good explanation for why they need to block wikipedia, deviantart, archiveofourown, github, bandcamp, lemmy.ml, and mastodon.social: they're all just fronts in the Capitalist Information War
wikipedia
Katherine Maher used to be the CEO of Wikimedia. Her resume is riddled with US military-industrial complex:
Largely unwittingly. Most of us are labor aristocrats of the imperial core who have been propagandized our entire lives in liberal imperialist ideology.
Then there’s the media.
Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the NYT, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR (here’s Katherine Maher again) and PBS. These are just ones I know off the top of my head. The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion.
A couple more I can think of: CNN’s Anderson Cooper was born into money and interned at the CIA. MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who was also born into wealth, was Obama’s and Biden’s press secretary.
Reporter: [REDACTED] Reason: Breaks Community Rules
As the comment there says, the surprise is that not every instance is blocked yet.
But I've seen hardly any Chinese on the fediverse, so they probably don't care that much. And it's not just that I've stuck to the English-speaking parts, there's been lots of Japanese and various European languages. I suppose even if it otherwise would have a chance to catch on there, Chinese users know that if it did it quickly would get blocked.
I've only seen Taiwanese on Mastodon, especially as they're leaving Twatter due to Chinese bot activity.
Wouldn't they just use a VPN? I know they're technically illegal in China but from what I've heard lots of people still use them regularly.
VPNs are not illegal in China. And one can use it to circumvent any restrictions.
Non-approved VPNs used to circumvent the great wall are absolutely illegal, though largely tolerated (and observed), but the authorities can and have used them as an excuse to bring people in.
Source: have actual been to China and played the whole "which VPN will work on which network" game many times.
I assume all vpn services accessible from china are run by government and they monitor the traffic
I feel like I should say that a VPN isn't a magic bullet. Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use. Given that the CCP monitors all of this stuff it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you run a VPN long or often enough without providing stating why that it'll either end up blocked or you'll end up in trouble.
How do you know this? I have friends living in China that states otherwise.
As far as I know there are specific legal provisions for foreigners living in China in regards to VPN use, so what might be true for your friends isn't necessarily true for a regular Chinese person.
Which is why Chinese users don't use standard VPNs, they use obfuscated proxies with protocols like Shadowsocks and V2Ray, which mask the tunneled traffic as innocuous HTTPS traffic.
That's a fair point, but what you are talking about isn't a "VPN", at least not as they're commonly known and understood. Please remember that my response was directed to a user whose comment boiled down to "Get a VPN, that will solve the problem." A regular VPN will absolutely not the solve the problem.
But using a VPN is not illegal in China… why would you even have to explain why you’re using one?
https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3095201/man-punished-using-vpn-scale-chinas-great-firewall-and-watch-porn
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/vpn-punishments-05212020103537.html
Lmao South China Morning Post and Radio Free Asia are literally propaganda mouthpieces for the CIA
Fair enough.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chinese-man-arrested-after-making-1-6-million-from-selling-vpn-services/
That one details several such cases and includes links to local coverage from Litchi News from one of them.
Then there's this showing that the CCP banned unregistered VPNs in 2017. It's partially why they prosecuted the people in the previous article.
https://www.neowin.net/news/china-will-block-vpn-access-for-individuals-companies-must-register-with-the-government/
If you don't like that then here's The Guardian with a separate incident:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-sentenced-to-five-years-jail-for-running-vpn
Seriously, I can find articles like that detailing different incidents in every major mainstream media source. So either all of them are lying to me -or- you are trying to gaslight me.
Guess which one I think is more probable?
The correct response to "you just posted propaganda" is not to try and find a source that says the exact same thing as the propaganda...
Like that's the moment you should stop and say to yourself "maybe I was lied to"
The correct response to someone claiming something is propaganda is to go find more sources for more and separate incidents. If you can find multiple sources showing that a situation has happened multiple times then it stops being "propaganda" and starts being information.
At this point I have a pile of independent sources documenting multiple different incidents that support my understanding of the situation. I'm still open to counter evidence but so far you haven't provided any.
I'm sure lots of people do, it's a big country. But for the vast majority I imagine that the risk of getting in trouble for it, plus the risk of the one you paid for getting successfully blocked, plus the difficulty of finding out which ones are allowed to operate only because they share all your data with the authorities, plus the cost, plus the usual difficulties in finding a good vpn outweigh any desire to communicate freely with foreigners.
💀
It's like when your dad doesn't love you
how will we ever recover from this epic pwnage 🥱
Everyone to the left of you is a russian/chinese bot; a child's guide to political discourse on the internet
Does anyone know a reliable site for checking? This is just a random one I found: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=lemmy.ml
lemmy.world seems to not be blocked. I have no idea how they make these decisions 🤷
Edit to add: FWIW Wikipedia has a short list of test sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China#External_links
Seems like hexbear.net is blocked as well
But chairman Xi what about our emotes!?
Oh SHIT THE LAYOFFS GOT TO US
Well yeah, why wouldn't China block a site full of libs?
Interesting. It wasn’t when I tested it yesterday or several weeks ago using this: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=hexbear.net
But I have no idea if these tools are any good. This one seems to indicate that it’s accessible but very slow https://www.dotcom-tools.com/china-firewall-test/
It might be discussion of piracy/VPNs or something like that. China's got rules about that stuff too AFAIK. Maybe if one of the admins can read/write Simplified Chinese they could reach out to the relevant government bureau and request clarification.
I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media's self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.
In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.
Wow, stop saying sensible things. Be less correct. Thanks!
Please, someone tell comrade
StalinXi that this is all just a terrible mistake!some of the gymnastics in this thread are hilarious. critical support is a thing you can criticize china's various Ls while still supporting the chinese people.
Isn't lemmy.ml full of tankies?
I made an account a long while ago when it was the only instance with any content but I'm just a lurker looking for memes and tech news. Feeling like I should change instance these days...
lemmygrad is full of full-on tankies, the type who would willingly send birthday greetings to comrade Stalin while imprisoned in a gulag, lemmy.ml once was a default instance and thus has random folks on it but is admin-wise run by tankies and generally seems to serve as the preferred instance for lemmygrad folks to have alts on. Stay away from political communities there e.g. their worldnews community is a silly place. Hexbear is hit and miss, not so much hardened tankies there but wokescolds and random lefties who don't quite realise who they associate with, why that kind of social dynamics is no good. Might have some inane takes, occasionally prone to dogpiling, but at least you can have a conversation with them.
Using alt-right terminology should get you disqualified from any reasonable conversation.
What, the term "tankie"? A term coined within the Communist Party of Great Britain? The CPGP is alt-right, now?
Calling the term "alt-right" is just a quick way of telling me you're a tankie without telling me you're a tankie.
Oh. "wokescold" is another possibility but that's rather unlikely, while the right has appropriated "woke" I've never heard them use "wokescold" which is precisely used by people who know and understand the original meaning and simply want to call out certain problematic behaviours done in the name of, but not to the benefit of, wokeness.
Don't fucking bullshit me, we both know that I was referring to wokescold. Tankie is a horrible fucking word but it way predates the alt-right.
I'll just quote Zena+Poppy on the term. You may not like it, you might prefer clinical analytical language such as "puritanical progressive" or whatever, but from the context I used it in (making direct reference to social dynamics) it should be obvious that I used it in that sense.
And, no, tankie is not a "horrible fucking word". It is precise and succinct, also, tankies hate it.
No it's not a matter of how "nice" it sounds, it's about the fact that it was created by nazis for a nazi agenda.
I have zero patience for people who side with fascism. Sorry for having basic standards of human decency.
Source on that? I'm serious. I did a bit of googling and do see that the likes of Ben Shapiro have been using it, but that's definitely not where I have it from, and you'll also see plenty of left-wing uses of it.
I referred you to a quite precise definition of what I mean by the term. Can you explain to me how criticising the things encompassed by that definition would put me "on the side of fascism"? Fascists have come up with plenty of terms leftists use all the time, an obvious example would be the word "fascist". Allegiance to fascism, I'd say, cannot be inferred merely by use of some shared vocabulary, you have to go deeper than that.
In any case, and I hope you see the irony, going nuclear over the use of such a term, to drill down on syntax instead of semantics, is not unlikely to fit the wokescold pattern of behaviour. Depends a bit on how you do it but overall I'd say it's likely you'd hit at least some of the checkboxes Zena+Poppy are giving.
Nah I'm done. You're irredeemable. Go be a fascist somewhere else.
Indeed I'll stay an anarchist no matter how much tankies and/or wokescolds whine. Have a good day.
average sh.ithead. Fucking nazi instance.
If you mean communists that support capitalist states like China, then yes, unfortunately. Better than being around nothing but liberals or anti-communists though.
China isn't a capitalist state.
It totally is. Not by your pet definition maybe but millions of wage workers and stock markets say otherwise
"State capitalism with Chinese characteristics"
Aren't you that guy who argued with your own community and played the victim over the use of AI art because you didn't want to accept you were being an insufferable AI techbro who doesn't understand consent? Like I've seen trolls flex more to criticism than you did there.
EDIT: Wondered why they didn't respond and. Holy shit I just looked at the modlog for dbzer0 and you can't make this shit up
So you ARE a pedophile-nazi. Fucking love to see it. I will be adding your instance to my block list. If you see this: get help.
Define capitalism.
Capitalism is when markets. I am very smart.
I find that the most accurate definition is a society where the primary mode of production is wage work
Why my definition is pet?
What a depressing view of "socialism" you have.
That’s not what they mean
So classic anti-communism then.
Lol
Also no
Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled "tankies" these days obviously don't), but nowadays it's just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.
Nah, its not anticommunism. Its anti authoritarianisnm
All states are inherently "authoritarian" and enforce certain principles over others. What matters is if those principles materially prioritize workers over capitalists, which socialist states do.
You can't create a stateless, classless communist society from capitalism without a transitional socialist state that breaks the monopoly on force and propaganda that capitalist states have — specially in a world ruled by capitalist superpowers like the US which constantly coups and invades non-capitalist states. Thinking otherwise is just delusional and utopian.
No non-capitalist state will survive in the modern world if they don't sufficiently get rid of propaganda and deal with capitalist funded insurgencies, which capitalist states will label as "authoritarian"; they'd immediately be coup'd and overthrown by imperial core countries otherwise, as many socialist states have (Chile, Libya, etc).
And regardless, socialist states are a massive improvement over capitalist states when it comes to "authoritarianism" anyway, same as most other metrics. The US has 0.8% of its population in prison for example, while China has 0.1%. Similar stats on most metrics for the USSR vs USA; socialist Russia's human rights were also far better than capitalist Russia's, obviously.
Ask the Zapatista. Yes, the US tried to get rid of them, couldn't, learned better and now is just letting them be. Rojava is an even better example as the US wilfully allied with them.
Figures if your revolution isn't centrally organised by Moscow or China post-McCarthy US doesn't actually care. Present-day US would've also let Cuba be SocDem, as was the original intent of the revolutionaries, instead of pushing them into alliance with the USSR.
Rojava is a decentralized capitalist region with no plans of being socialist/anarchist/etc whose leadership allows the US to use it as a imperialist proxy and military base in the region. Of course the US likes that lmao; the US National Security Council calls it another "israel" in the region.
The Zapatistas are cool comrades who fought off the US and other capitalist forces as all socialist projects have to. Different from most successful socialist revolutions in that it didn't establish a state (though it was managed centrally by the EZLN), but it has since succumbed to pressure from the government and cartels and has dissolved its municipalities last year — so it's not quite as successful of a revolution as those that establish a state, some of which have already managed to become nations of millions or global superpowers.
"Social democracy" back then just meant socialism. The Bolsheviks who established the USSR were also "social democrats"
And your fantasies of the US ever letting a US-backed military dictatorship be overthrown and develop are funny, specially when it's currently committing a genocide in Palestine and not even letting them get rid of a western colony.
And the USSR was a centralised state capitalist system. China has even left the "state" part behind and is nowhere nearer abolishing class than it was at the start of the revolution. It actually regressed in that regard.
But, fine, call Rojava that if you will. Just shows how you can't see any possible roads to communism that don't involve the failed experiment that is state capitalism.
The EZLN does not manage centrally. The EZLN is not even a governing body. It's a decentralised milita that councils tasked with matters of military security. It is those councils which are the governing body, not the EZLN. Rojava operates alongside the same lines, though details differ because cultural, material, and other differences.
I know it might be incomprehensible to you: A literal army, with all the capability it could wish for to order the local population around, sat down with the local population and told them about their ideas. The population then told them about theirs. They discussed, mutually refined their ideas until there was a consensus on how to move ahead, leading to what you see now. No shot was fired, noone was sent to gulag. They've also been capable of large organisational reforms, deliberated to consensus, implementation happened just a couple of months ago.
Maybe you should set aside some time and actually study those regions, not just read tankie cliff notes about how they supposedly work, or don't, or are secretly authoritarian, or whatever.
The Bolsheviks were never democrats and the French social democrats still call themselves communists. But that's rather besides the point: The Cuban revolution was in the late 50, by then the split between SocDems and communists (both liberal and authoritarian) was not just done it had hardened. Heck the revolution ended in 59, after the word tankie had been established, which was 56, in direct reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
The point I'm making here is that Fidel & Co came to the US, said "We're eyeing doing something like your European allies are doing and want to be friends, you know, unions, welfare, worker's rights", the US said "nope, can't have you not be slaves to Bacardi and United Fruit you're our colony after all", Cuba said "never mind then we thought we could be friends then we'll go with our second choice, the USSR". The USSR, then, demanded from their allies a heavily authoritarian slant, so Cuba adopted it, in the interest of national survival not out of preference. Which is also why they are by far the furthest along among the surviving ML states when it comes to democratisation. Vietnam is second, with quite some distance, China makes no moves in that regard and North Korea, well, North Korea is only ever getting worse, not better. Oh, Eritrea. Same.
Rojava, Zapatistas? Sorry, but Anarchists can form States without hierarchy
Zapatistas flexed and built a centralized structure it because they weren't getting anything done.
Why would State Capitalists allow discussions about actual communism? God forbid he people get it into their head to form trade unions..
I can't quite tell if this is a parody, the trade union bit makes it seem sincere, but the self-importance to think that lemmy is too left for China to allow is just amazing.
What is left about China? They literally murdered people for demanding the right to establish trade unions (see Tienamin Square)
I'm looking it up, and I don't see any "Tienanmin Square". Could it be "Tiananmen Square" that you're thinking of? The one protesting government corruption? Where unarmed soldiers were burned alive? Where Christian sickos were trying to get students in the line of fire to create atrocity propaganda? Surely there must be some confusion here!
Yes, one of their demands was the right to establish trade unions.
Were the trade unionists the ones immolating unarmed soldiers and stringing up their corpses?
Seriously if that shit happened in the US, the national guard would call in an A-10 gun run on the crowd
The US is a plutocracy. What's your point?
What type of society do you think would allow you to burn other people to death and string up their corpses? Is it one that you think would be an improvement over modern China?
point is focus your criticisms on your own society that's 1000x worse than even the most exaggerated crimes about China, cracker. Chinese people aren't children and they can handle their own country in their own way, they don't need some forum poster condescending to them and you don't need a warped preoccupation with a country that probably has nothing to do with you
I stand in solidarity with all oppressed people everywhere, and I will do more than just criticize oppressors
Do you have anything but the most condescending and one-sided "solidarity" for a people who support their government?
I dont stand in solidarity with people who support oppressors, no.
Fortunately most people do not support their government.
No you don't
January 6th already happened but no consequences did. The US will only deploy violence if the movement is left of whatever their crazy idea of center is.
aww muffin so sorry you're still seething western color revolution failed
i'm sure Chinese people need patronizing crackers from the west to instruct them on what communism actually is
What? I stand with the Chinese people against their oppressors. Criticism of an oppressive State is not criticism of its victims.
...how often do you interact with Chinese people? Whenever I go back home to Wuhan I don't really see much oppression happening.
almost no one in China feels that their state is an oppressive force, they feel the opposite. The government has more than a 90% approval rating. The overwhelming majority of Chinese people view their society as legitimate and socialist. If you had any interest in democracy at all you'd respect this perspective instead of imposing your own
Lol
That's about the level of response I'd expect from a lib to inconvenient facts
Lol you think everyone who criticizes Capitalist governments like the US and China are liberals?
If it walks like a liberal and talks like a liberal, it's a liberal.
She's literally correct; studies from even anti-Chinese partisan sources can't help but find that satisfaction with the government is overwhelming. While you treat anti-imperialist movements like this sitting from your home in the imperial core, you're not a revolutionary or helping anybody build towards anything better, you're an active hindrance. Feel free to imbibe the actual opinions of people in China so you can understand the conditions there and not just your cracker conditioning. It's not perfect, but overthrow would be far; far worse.
(this is unrelated but I've only been going by she for a little while and it felt kinda nice to be called she like that, thank you.)
To be fair, .ml bans you pretty quickly for discussing anything outside of a pretty narrow stripe of Marxist Leninist orthodoxy as well.
I don't consider myself a Marxist, Leninist, or communist of any stripe and haven't had a problem so far. I'm far enough left that I refuse to call myself a liberal, but I suspect the folks who consider themselves Marxists probably think I'm too far right to self-identify as a leftist. (Although I do.)
Shitload of downvotes a time or two, but that's about it. I just wanted to be on a Lemmy instance that was honoring the fedipact, and preferred it to have an instance ethos to the left of mine rather than to the right of it.
I like it here.
Hats off, from a Marxist.
I don't think that's a fair criticizm. After all my dumb ass hasn't been banned (so far).
This is just a meme everyone repeats until they believe it.
Not only did I not stick to ML orthodoxy while I was there (I'm more of a peacenik anarchist at heart), I wrote some fairly rude things when I found out how insane some of the tankies on lemmy can be. I hadn't expected such people to exist in reality, I had thought it was just a caricature invented by enemies of communism or something. Nonetheless they did not ban me or complain at all when I said that sort of thing.
Eventually I left because their list of blocked instances got too long for my taste.
Ah I didn't know about this - how can I see that list?
Click on the Blocked Instances tab: https://lemmy.ml/instances
A lot of the blocks are due to spam attacks from instances that have (or had) open registration.
Thanks!
https://lemmy.ml/instances
Thanks!
Any social networks that have non-censored participants are. Usually, China's presence in social networks outside of its borders are for propaganda purposes.
The Western 'free' population is one of the most information censored/restricted populations in the world, and yet they are flabbergasted that China and many many other nations won't allow propaganda from western oligarchs into their country. It doesn't matter that an information firewall is the single most important military defense against the Capitalist information war. That's btw why the western world are propagandizing their population for 'free speech', so we all can see that wevil China don't want free propaganda, sorry, speech.
The most amazing and Incredible is how hateful attitudes can be bought for a few propaganda dollars in the western for profit information market. So western people actually believe all the hateful things the western oligarchy says about China (and ALL the other enemies of the oligarchs).
How convenient and completely coincidental that the western population have the same opinions about nations and world leaders as the top elite.. Could it be that.. nooooo.. no no.. Western news are the BEST, and no Capitalist elite would lie about something like that to their own population, oh no no..
Yes, that's a perfectly good explanation for why they need to block wikipedia, deviantart, archiveofourown, github, bandcamp, lemmy.ml, and mastodon.social: they're all just fronts in the Capitalist Information War
Katherine Maher used to be the CEO of Wikimedia. Her resume is riddled with US military-industrial complex:
Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO
Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing
Largely unwittingly. Most of us are labor aristocrats of the imperial core who have been propagandized our entire lives in liberal imperialist ideology.
Then there’s the media.
Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the NYT, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR (here’s Katherine Maher again) and PBS. These are just ones I know off the top of my head. The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion.
A couple more I can think of: CNN’s Anderson Cooper was born into money and interned at the CIA. MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who was also born into wealth, was Obama’s and Biden’s press secretary.
You’ve been subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
I fucking love that guy. If you're reading this, please never stop reporting.
Is there someplace we can contact to change this?
Lol
Yea its "taiwan.is.not.a.country@bestcountry.cn"
Must be a new anti-白左 legislation of some sort.
谢谢习大大, 爱国者们掌握了局势, 没有共产党就没有新中国
Slight nitpick(a)
You wrote 西 (xī) which means west. You probably meant 习 (xí), referring to the president.
Also in "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China" you wrote 金 (jīn) which means gold, when it should be 就.
HA thank you, I'm still learning to properly use my pinyin engine and identify correct characters
Can confirm, I just checked. When I first moved to China hexbear wasn't blocked but it is now. Lemmygrad is still unblocked though
Oh, and a fun fact - I know of a few porn sites that you can view in China without a VPN 😆
So you can still participate on wider lemmy by finding or spinning up your own instance?
Lemmy brings good drama as this thread.
Isn't most websites?