FunkyStuff [he/him]

If you have to go back to the time where agriculture was first being developed to find a jump in quality of life comparable to what Communism brought to China, does that not show that Communism brought about an enormous improvement to the Chinese people? Even if it technically isn’t the most significant improvement in all of history (which is still kind of a fuzzy thing to quantify)?

And how is it relevant that they only improved the quality of life of their own people, beyond just being pedantic about the claim “largest increase of quality of life in human history”? Like, was it necessary for Mao to invade all the neighboring countries and modernize them too so they could qualify? Very strange way to move the goalposts.

• Monster or Liberator? by Carlos Martinez
• How did Mao manage to kill ~78 million people? by Godfree Roberts
• The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
• The Rise of the Chinese People’s Communes by Anna Louise Strong

I see you’re defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it’s exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.

Meanwhile you do something a million times more honorable and simply refuse to confront new information, dismiss it all as propaganda, and say your opponent is equal to a Trump supporter (for what? for having principled stances that he backed up with multiple sources? How often do Trump supporters back up their claims with sources that aren’t PragerU videos or AI generated images?). You’re implying that Dessalines is being intellectually dishonest when he has done nothing incorrect in this conversation: he made a claim to counter your unsourced claim, cited his sources, and when you refused to learn anything at all he’s just calling you out for falling back on Western propaganda. Is any of that wrong?

This kind of post-truth nihilism is completely fruitless. If you dismiss evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions on the basis that evidence against other unrelated facts might also exist, then the only valid beliefs are the ones you already have. You’ve arrived at an epistemological position that rejects all new knowledge and positions all knowledge you already have as infallible.

Why not evaluate the claims and their evidence, instead of starting from the position that any defense of Mao is comparable to defending the Nazi Holocaust? Not to mention, if you did come across a group of Holocaust deniers, is this really the weak response you’d give them? Not even going to produce any evidence in support of your own claims?

Hi, I’m very concerned about violent imperialism. Can you explain how China fits that description?

Well, yeah, but there’s plenty of Jews that have olive skin or darker (especially Mizrahi, Sephardim) so surely they aren’t literally going at whatever agency gives the OK to new settlers?

What stops Palestinian Diaspora from just pretending they’re Jewish so they can go back home?

Hey, big fan of your comments, I think you’re doing great stuff here. Can I request you do a collab with Evidence? You may not have heard of her.

so interesting how hundreds of millions of leftists in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world (many of whom actually live in countries that had real, successful revolutions) are all apparently a bunch of idiots who don’t realize they’re being fooled, but the Westerners who have never had a successful socialist movement are the ones who truly understand the core of class struggle (and at the center of it all is “authoritarianism,” a very real thing that definitely doesn’t just describe the behavior of all states)

Actually my form of extremism is literally “indigenous people get sovereignty over their own land” so no, try again.

The reason many instances block ours is that the majority of Lemmy users are reactionary liberals from imperialist countries that really, really hate seeing anything that counters their narrative about being enlightened progressives. A huge number of you probably have made a myth in your mind that compared to your older, more culturally conservative relatives, you’re basically as compassionate and left wing as it gets. Then you interact with communists who point out how imperialism works and how you benefit from it, as well as the action that is necessary to end that exploitaiton, and it shakes you to your core that you aren’t as left as it gets. No, I can’t be out of touch, it’s the hundreds of millions of leftists in the imperial periphery who are wrong

To make it exceedingly clear: here you are, accusing us of not being able to escape liking authoritarianism, but your own liberal positions are currently either passively accepting or actively encouraging a genocide of 2 million people in Gaza. You might say you are opposed to that, but in practice you keep condemning the radical groups that actually are doing what’s necessary to end the genocide (i.e. the Resistance in the actual countries aftected and orgs like Palestine Action and the PSL in the West) because they’re “authoritarian leftists” or even worse, antisemites.

It was because of Ada moderating communities as well, and being (in her opinion), overbearing.

Wasn’t all of that done when some of the cis members of the community were getting extremely angry at Ada for the new pronouns moderation? Like, sure, they stated it wasn’t because of the new pronoun position, but it seems pretty clear that Ada embraced a position that was closer to the hardline pro-trans position of Hexbear and it pushed a ton of people away.

And yeah, we have them defedded because of chasers in their 196 comm making our trans users feel unsafe.

Yup, most likely. And it’s very ironic that they point to that when we got defedded over their admin trying to watch out for the interests of a moderator who would end up switching to a different instance when Ada took the same stances on pronouns that Hexbear had taken years earlier.

What instance was that? And Hexbear is something like 80% or maybe even 90% LGBTQ, while not being explicitly an LGBTQ instance, so what exactly does it say about us when Western, still mostly white, mostly liberal instances defederate us? That we’re suddenly queerphobic or that crackers be cracking?

hey buddy, sorry we’re too cool for you. believing in things is cringe (it’s extremism to call out other people for supporting genocide)

lol it’s so funny to accuse Hexbear of being a circle jerk when we are the ones that made all the reddit-like instances mald and defederate us the second they were exposed to perspectives that aren’t even exclusive to communists, but are widely held across the global South.

I grew up speaking Spanish, still speak it every day fluently, but mostly think in English because my high school and higher education was mostly in English + I started mostly consuming English media as a child.

You should be able to contact your admins so they purge your account. Purged accounts have all the content they ever published scrubbed from all databases on Lemmy. I’m not entirely sure how it works if there’s an instance that is defederated from your home instance after you post something and it gets federated to them, I assume it wouldn’t be deleted in that case so it would still be available online there, but certainly a lot harder to track down.

But you still can’t provide any evidence that white people are systemically oppressed in South Africa? As the comment you’re replying to says, most white people in SA live in formal housing in suburbs. They still actually have the property, land, and wealth passed down from colonization and apartheid. Their government isn’t really even challenging that, they still facilitate the exploitation of the black population, especially those far away from urban centers who work in mining and farming (as in the farmworkers, not farmers). If the white farmers themselves weren’t being attacked, most of us probably would’ve never heard about the inequality that still exists.

Just to make my point clearer, in Zimbabwe they actually took the land away from the Rhodesian settlers and gave it to revolutionaries, and even that wasn’t genocide per se.