People need to realize you can use alternatives

    • Gray@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of “Orientalism”. Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.

        • Gray@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There’s also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here’s the Axios article they banned a user for posting.

            • Gray@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

              • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.

                I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.

                Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.

                I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

                This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:

                1. How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?

                2. How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?

                Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.

                China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.

                I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.

        • Arcaneslime@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I recognize you, you’re an old head around these parts, you were there during my battle with that one CHEF_KOCH fuckface, I like you.

          That said, you’ve been here at least as long as I have, semantics regarding the word “shill” aside you know this place is (kinda was) a majority State Communist, or “Tankie,” echo chamber, and they pushed it relentlessly. It’s why you only ever saw me in c/linux, I don’t like political evangelism to the degree it used to be found here. C’mon lol.

            • Arcaneslime@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Because as I understand it Marxism is a stateless society, but most of the people here were supporting State Communism, so not Marxism.

                  • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    This seems like a non-sequitur. Anyway, since audiobooks are still too much, let me just give a basic summary:

                    Marxists are not anarchists or communalists. Marx saw the failure of the Paris Commune and of the Utopian socialists and sought to create a theoretical framework that could be used in conjunction with practical political programs to resolve class struggle over time, which he predicted would ultimately produce a stateless society. This transitional society, to contrast with Marx’s name for liberal capitalism – the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie – is referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

                    “State communism” is, uh, just made-up as far as I can tell. Marxists support the destruction of dictatorships of the bourgeoisie and their replacement with dictatorships of the proletariat. Generally they would like to see a stateless society one day, but they understand that a simple commune would get steamrolled the instant it became politically important enough, so they are principally concerned with making states democratic in a truer sense of the word than liberal democracy – which is de facto controlled by the rich – in order to end “capitalist encirclement” and make things like communes more viable.