Amerikkka land of the jailed (But China is defo AuThOrITarIAn!!)
Amerikkka land of the jailed (But China is defo AuThOrITarIAn!!)
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liberals brain breaking
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China is indeed authoritarian, rich people cannot shape society however they want in China.
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Fun fact: It's actually possible for two countries to both be authoritarian!
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Indeed, one can be authoritarian towards workers and people all around the globe while other can be authoritarian towards their national and foreign capitalists.
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The US killed a million innocent people in Iraq just a few years ago, and is *currently * drone bombing several countries in ME and north africa, and is currently supporting the apartheid state of israel with billions of dollars in military aid.
The PRC has not been in a war since its skirmish with Vietnam in 1979.
The US has a network of > 800 military bases across the globe, and has been involved in regime change in nearly every country.
Which one is authoritarian?
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Uighurs
Tibet
Supporting Russia in Ukraine
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Look up the definition of authoritarianism. Bombing other countries is not the defining feature of an authoritarian government.
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"They can both be authoritarian"
"WELL USA INVADED IRAQ"
Lmao
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Both...
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We don't need anti-American propaganda, we already hate America, my guy
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Which one is currently genociding Uhygurs? Which one illegally annexed Tibet and Hong Kong? Both countries are authoritarian shit-holes.
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It's possible, but it's objectively not the case. Don't take my word for it though, it's what people actually living in China say.
- https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva%20images/Democracy%20Perception%20Index%202023.pdf
- https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
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"Authoritarian" is largely a meaningless term. All it really means is one group using force against another group, but it doesn't say anything about which group is which. In the US Empire, the capitalists use the state to crush the workers, and export genocide and chaos to the global south. In the PRC, the working class uses the state to keep the capitalists in check as they progress and develop along socialist lines. This stark difference in which class is in power is shown with immense popular support in the PRC:
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So you consider a state censoring all it's citizens from discussing certain words and topics to not be authoritarian?
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Better answer the survey correctly when you live in a country that has laws like "disagreeing with the government is a crime"
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In the PRC, the working class uses the state to keep the capitalists in check
The state used the police to crush the working class when they demanded the money from the banks that invested it in a runaway housing scam.
You are believing in a fantasy. There are countless countries around the world that are arguably more socialist than China without even calling themselves such. Quite frankly, I trust actions and numbers more than words.
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Can you please provide a source for the graphic?
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Meta argument: charts like this are basically useless.
I was raised in a very religious town. If you asked, the people in that town would say “my religion is a religion of love” “people should be as free as possible because it’s an extension of personal agency” and all the while they beat their kids and would rather die than let gay or trans people be themselves.
They can quote the scriptures and could likely write some pretty strong rhetoric implying they are loving and kind and caring, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the truth.
Point is that just because you get phrases pounded into your head doesn’t mean you truly believe them or even know what they imply.
If your country’s rhetoric specifically states that the government serves the people and says it over and over, regardless of the truth of that statement, people will have a tendency to select it. (Like if your government called itself the people’s republic…)
If you asked Americans and Chinese if they think personal freedom is important, you’d likely get the reverse pattern in your graph. Is this because America has more freedom? No, more likely it’s because the historical rhetoric we get exposed to emphasizes “freedom” whereas China’s revolutionary rhetoric was centered around “democracy”
If you asked Americans if they support socialism, you’d get lower bars than if you asked it indirectly. Just using the word socialism skews your metric.
People will say they support or don’t support concepts they don’t understand, or that they view in a different light than others. Does democracy mean more than two political parties? Does democracy mean no capitalism? Does democracy require freedom to spread information freely? Etc.
So once again these metrics are useless because I’d imagine most of these countries’ voters would disagree on what the statements even mean.
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Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren't allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between "hell yeah, my country is making my life great" and "there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble"? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I've personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn't want trouble.
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@KoboldCoterie
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I just gotta pop in and say: thank you, comrades, for absolutely making my morning by dunking on some capitalists' useful idiots.
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I don’t know what it is about this post in particular, but the threadiverse isn’t sending its best 🤷
Edit to add: Some of them were so angry that they broke out their alt accounts to downvote some more.
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I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There's no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don't recognize who made this platform and why.
I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that's good at least.
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Jokes on them, my instance ignores down votes. Lol
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How frequent are alt-downvotes?
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I'm kind of new to lemmy in general and judging by the other comments I want to ask: is lemmy.ml full of ultras? Or is that what you're talking about in saying they didn't send their best?
If it is full of ultras, do you know of an instance(?) that either critically supports AES countries or at least has more of a mixed set of users? I don't mind debate, but on every single comment it would get tiring.
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Anytime comrade 🫡
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Libs be like "this is a totally organic movement with broad local support"
Take a moment to imagine the absolutely demonic levels of McCarthyism that would be unleashed if it was discovered that BLM or the Green Party were headquartered in Beijing.
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Don't forget they also love Israel. Xinjiang avoided the fate of Gaza and all the people complaining about China being "heavy handed" there should just shut up.
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Holy shit
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They even have the same fucking graphic design style of the state department fam lmao how are gringos real
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Poor analogy. The US kills muslim people like they were rats. The secretary of offense is covered in tattoos glorifying the Medieval crusades and wrote a book titled "American Crusade" explaining the US is in a "holy war" agains muslims and China.
So "East Turkestan government in exile" is headquartered in the capital of the empire that is is in a bloodthirsthy fanatical war against muslims. This empire also has "must destroy China" as its foreign policy absolute priority.
Therefore, the corret analogy would be a separatist Jewish movement that wanted to take away a critical part of the USSR. And it is funded and headquartered in Nazi Germany. Who would believe them? The same people who believe the US is motivated by love of Muslims and only reluctantly funds a separatist movement to take away a critical part of China.
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US is in a situation where even the Chinese government can make fun of how undemocratic it is. I think this explains a lot.
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Nafo clown propagandists eating shit as usual.
Edit because you did an edit:
Authoritarian state
Wet water
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
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Responding to a federated comment because I don't have a .ml account:
Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren’t allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right?
There are eight other parties in the People's Republic of China other than the *CPC
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My favorite is the ICP
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There are a lot of communists on Lemmy, and communists tend to support socialist countries. Simple as that. Plus, in the current era where the US Empire is dying, China is presenting itself as a better trade partner for the global south, one focused more on multilateralism and not on imperialism.
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China has noodles though.
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Delicious noodles!
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Freedom with the most people in prison
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They're not always in prison, sometimes we let them do their forced labor outside.
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Agreed, the US prison system is legalized form of slavery
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Both are garbage. The US is just a bigger pile of garbage (for now).
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Hi, CIA
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Totally both are garbage. But from anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian perspective, US has always been garbage. Trump only removed the pretensions. I mean, Joe Biden affirmed that US will invade Holland if any Americans are arrested by the International Court there. So much for a country that purports rules based international order, if the most supreme power the world has ever seen confirmed that such rules and order don't apply to them.
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recently found out this is a shunned view on a lot of lemmy
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That is a camper van. Probably cozy tbh
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What does a totalitarian state even mean? Based on liberals, left communists, and anarchists, it's every socialist experiment that had lasted a great amount of time and accomplished better living standards for their citizens. 😂
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System of a Down - The Prison Song
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Lemmy.ml has a ton of communists, communists tend to support socialist countries 🤷
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At some point, you gotta dance with who brung ya. If, after over a century of experimentation, you conclude that every single AES state is as evil as the CIA tells us, there's not much socialism to support.
You also really need to jam your eyes shut and ignore the enormous improvements in quality of life, even in the face of adverse economic headwinds, in the surviving socialist block. "Ah, but I'm not free to shitpost on the Internet the same way!" is such sad metric for a country's success
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China is about as socialist as my shit is a bouquet of roses.
It's capitalism. It's always capitalism.
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Why does he wear military clothing? Can the ICE agents not also just wear civilian clothes?
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Being in uniform plus body armor and padding adds more to intimidation.
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yeah that increases the propaganda effect of this meme.
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Yes, true
Thank God that in China you can't simply be "disappeared", you won't be sent to reeducation camps, and you won't be slaughtered.
Right?
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Good thing you ate the capitalists’ propaganda onion and are now doing their work for free, contributing to your continued exploitation.
Meanwhile people actually are being disappeared in the US right now, and people actually are subjected to forced labor.
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Just more western propaganda to push the china bad narrative
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Correct, you won't.
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Yea yea yea, just keep parroting those liberal talking points ROFL
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How much have you travelled, lived and worked in China? How far outside the tier 1 cities have you gotten?
If you think every criticism of China is just liberal talking points, I assume the answers to those questions are all “not very much”.
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I'm not from the USA.
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What are we, a bunch of ASIANS?!
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in only one of those countries do jackbooted thugs roam the streets disappearing undesirables and it isn't China
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False. The US prison population (relative to total population) is more than five times superior to China's. US prisons are for-profit and lease prisioners to perform slave labor for other companies.
China is not only freer than Trump's US, it is freer than Obama's or Clinton's US.
By the way, US elections have only two viable parties by design. Billionaires control the media and campaing funding. The system allows two choices for the people:
- Republicans: the entire world, including its natural resources and its people, is the private property of 100 persons.
- Democrats: Agreed! But we impose gender quotas on this 100-persons elite. This makes us democratic (TM).
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Shit redditors say 😂
If the US acted more like China y'all could actually be the best country in the world like your delusional population believes.
Rising standards of living, life expectancy, housing for everyone, affordable healthcare and fresh produce. What horrors, they don't even poison themselves with hormone burgers bro.
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What on earth do you mean by "totalitarian?" China's a democratic country, if the US was acting more like China we'd actually have good infrastructure, manufacturing, democracy, and a coherent plan for the future. Sadly, the US isn't a socialist country.
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maybe we should hold a vote to defederate from them
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Oh no! What ever will we do without the libs!
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They're right, cry about it
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Pure projection
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Does the liberal mindset have no bottom to the ChInA BaD narratives it can spin?
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We are not all like this. I think this meme is stupid too.
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Yeah every one I’ve come across in the last few days have sounded like children. Or maybe they didn’t train hard enough on their language skills at troll camp
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China? The US is currently more compeeting with North Corea respect freedom and human rights.
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Why believe 1953 America about Korea?
Why believe 1965 America about Vietnam?
Why believe 1975 America about the USSR?
Why believe 1991 America about Iraq?
Why believe 2001 America about Iraq (again)?
Why believe 2003 America about Afghanistan?
Why believe 2014 America about Syria?
Why believe 2023 America about Palestine?
Why believe 2025 America about Korea?
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and who supports north korea?
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Yes, both countries have serious problems. At least Americans can discuss theirs openly.
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Tell that to Malcolm X, MLK, or Fred Hampton
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And it’s not like those were one-offs, COINTELPRO was crazy in scope and did massive damage beyond just the murders.
It’s not like that’s all in the past either, just look at how the Palestine protests were handled as well as the Floyd protests.
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At least Americans can discuss theirs openly.
Lol have you seen what's been happening to pro Palestine protestors? BLM protestors? Anti Trump protestors? Julian Assange? Edward Snowden?
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Those against the Iraq war, or Vietnam war...
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You're free to discuss anything you want as long as it doesn't actually threaten the status quo in any way lol
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Just don't demand or try to enact real lasting change
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You are free to protest as long as we can tuck you in the corner and ignore you
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So do Chinese citizens, though. The state exerts control over private media and the speech of wealthy capitalists, but there's broad diversity in political thought and discussion.
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Chinese too, and openly in the US currently not so much. People in China are heavy controlled by the Gov, but they have more civil rights and services as citizen in the US
Complete list of banned books in the US. (Autoscroll enabled, due to the hugh amount of those, stop/start with mouseclick)
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/a45012950/banned-book-list/
US Freedom and Human rights only exist in Fox News.
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Complete list of banned books in the US
Lmao what? Do you know what "banning" a book means? It's just not on offer in schools or a library for that specific state. It's completely normal to just buy it for yourself and there are even organizations dedicated to distributing banned books.
It's hilarious to try and dunk on America with this of all things. Media restricted/censored in China is entirely unavailable. It's actually very interesting how the censorship manifests in daily life, but I imagine any .ml reader will discard those anecdotes (or any verifiable reports) and try to redirect back to the West somehow.
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People in China are heavy controlled by the Gov, but they have more civil rights
You guys are completely brainwashed if you believe this. They can't even form a union or strike.
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Chinese average citizens can freely discuss what they want, the "disappearing" is just western propa
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Sometimes. For now.
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both are. have fun fighting eachother in the mud.
All states are authoritarian, in that they are instruments by which one class oppresses the others. What this doesn't say anything about alone, though, is which class is in power. In the US Empire, the capitalists are in power, and use the authority of the state to crush workers when workers rise up. In the PRC, the working class is in power, and the state keeps capitalists in check and appropriates their capital gradually.
The only way out of authoritarian control by any class is to get rid of classes entirely, which requires full collectivization of production. China is actively building towards that, the US Empire is opposing it. Until we get to a classless society, it's better for the working class to be in charge.
In other words, class struggle will continue to exist even after the proletariat takes control. All of the tensions from class struggle continue to exist, only they are resolved in favor of the working class. This is what "authoritarianism" looks like, class conflict expressed in state response.
"the working class" meaning the (one) party tho, lol.