I’ve been writing under the assumption that the accounts that I gave the same name to would be connected (like a proto-federation thing), so don’t worry about that. I appreciate the concern, though.

I have criticized China, you can dig around on my Hexbear account if you really like and find that (@GarbageShoot)*, but China isn’t nearly as afraid of criticism as the “literally 1984” redditors say, it just has a practical sensitivity over issues of sovereignty that they fail to understand as part of a coherent ideology other than hyper-defensiveness (go figure, Redditors are politically illiterate).

China is a very diverse place with a wide spectrum of ideology – most of which I disagree with, going by rough estimations based on recent statements from their central committee. Speaking in terms of meaningful factions that have sway above the municipal level, I’d say they are much more diverse than the US in this respect, since the US is characterized more by the harshness of disagreement than the actual extremity of differences in overall policy. If we imagine Chinese politics on a spectrum from “Maoism” to “some hodgepodge of reactionary antiquarianism and desire to be a western vassal again, plus religious zealotry**” where the former is a 1 and the latter is a 10, our friend Xi seems to be at maybe a 4, I’m at about 3. I’m not a full-on ultra but I think there’s some right-deviation going on (not as much as in past decades, admittedly). Are you following?

It feels a little unfair to dismiss me as a “tanky,” I don’t think I called you names, but at least you aren’t being too mean beyond that. What do you mean “patriate”? That’s something that countries do, as far as I can tell.

*I am completely confident that you won’t actually find the remarks I’m talking about, but I think you’ll trust me that they are there.

**This last part is mainly among rightist minority groups rather than the Han Chinese rightists, who mainly stick to the first two categories.

Redditors will believe anything that supports “China bad,” even silly lies that were debunked decades ago. Here are some different testimonies from student leaders of the protests. You tell me what seems credible.

hmm, I guess it depends on your definition of disparage, but the thing is that even if I was out here in America hawking the most shameless bullshit, China wouldn’t do shit when I visited short of question me a bit harder in customs because arresting me for pretty benign actions I took in another country as someone with no affiliation with China would typically be considered kidnapping under international law. Of course, America calls most instances of its enemies arresting its citizens kidnapping, but China rarely arrests Americans (including when tourism to China was higher) or foreign citizens in general.

Reddit geopolitics work a lot better when they stick to vague insinuations and cartoonish hyperbole, because when you drill down and try to set realistic expectations based on the information available, it falls apart completely.

Lots of things happened in the square at that time, as the Chinese government discussed on TV the following days. One thing that did not happen was people dying, though some were struck with batons to force them to disperse after they declined to follow the demand to disperse (most left peacefully).

China is going to put me, an American in America, in jail using a game launcher?

Or, they simply lie and say that there is no genocide going on.

Even state department mouthpieces have walked back the lie of there being a genocide in Xinjiang. Leave it to Redditors to be to the right of the state department.

How is that relevant?

Also as a european, i don’t really care if the Data gets funneled to the USA or China, both equally bad imo.

This is super off-topic but since you have a more reasonable stance on this than I usually see in the wild, I need to ask: Do you truly think the US is no worse than China or are you speaking in terms of impact on your life personally? (the latter would be fair in this context too, just wondering)

That and they’re owned by China, so the chances of your data being funneled out to China is practically 100%

a) Tencent has a minority share b) what the fuck is China going to do with my data? Target ads a little more precisely the one time a year I go on newegg or whatever? Shouldn’t you be much more concerned about an entity like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft having that information? And it’s not like at least two of those don’t have a history of working with the US government and others, i.e. governments that actually impact your life.

The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world “polarization” obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of “correct beliefs” and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one’s views. It’s entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it’s quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic – though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President (“Two Corinthians”).

Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I’m sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and “radical” (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn’t need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

What would actually be useful is functional empathy and – god forbid – a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

Paraphrasing Lafayette, “If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5.”

If I was writing it, I’d probably say that the camps in America are “4+4 is 44” and “4+4 is 64”, with “4+4 is 54” being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).

legitimate western media articles

anti-NATO bullshit

Out of idle curiosity, do you self-identify as a leftist?

That people were killed in Tiananmen Square itself, that the soldiers were the first ones to kill, and that the death toll was something like 10,000. It gets played up on Reddit because of red scare propaganda and plain old chauvinism.

I wasn’t going to say that at first [simply because it’s a bit obnoxious] but since other people are courting drama and I was collecting links from another conversation so it’s convenient to do, so I’ll repost them here:

There was a great deal of violence and many students (along with other protestors, as well as the militants and soldiers) died, so I’ll mark each link with an appropriate content warning, though that’s mostly because the last one is rough, while the ones before it are unlikely to cause people issues.

First, here are video interviews with some of the former student leaders, the first one with Chai Ling actually being before the incident took place. There is some gunfire and yelling that a western news program uses for “ambience”, but nothing is shown. Chai Ling describes a bloody scene, though that specific scene is patently fictional (this is established by the others who are interviewed).

Next is an article which discusses the subject, partly quoting student leaders above. It describes violence in broad strokes but doesn’t have any pictures. It also talks about statements made by a British reporter who was there.

Third, here is secondary reporting leaked on documents from the US Embassy in Beijing and the actual report from a Latin American diplomat that was leaked. The latter revealing contains in its summary: “ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE.” (source text is all caps). There is very little description of violence, just mention of gunfire being present, people being wounded, etc.

{Caution} Lastly, here’s an article written arguing that the event is misrepresented in mass media. I link it mainly because it includes photographic evidence that is very difficult to argue with for reasons beyond it being difficult to look at. Graphic depiction of stripped corpses of soldiers that were strung up after death.

Obviously there’s more than this, but these were the links I collected recently. Chai Ling says things that are even more unhinged in footage I think they excluded from that excerpt of the interview.

Go set up your own instance and never raise this subject here again