• ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Yeah it’s annoying when any criticism of Occupied China results in them talking about America

        • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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          3 months ago

          Drag noticed something after the election: All the non voters say it’s not their fault, because Kamala is more to blame. They think blame is a limited resource. They think you can only blame either the DNC OR the voters, not both.

          It’s the same as with China. They think if America is bad, then China has to be good. If there’s evidence of China being bad, the counterevidence is that America is worse.

          Tankies think only one thing can be bad at a time. It’s the same with genocide, too. We can’t care about Ukraine and trans people and West Bank, because WhAt AbOuT gAzA.

          The tankie mind only has room for one single bad thing in each subject. Only one bad genocide. Only one bad empire. Only one bad politician. They can’t conceive of two things being bad at the same time. It does not compute. When they say they understand two things being bad, they’re lying. They can only understand it in short term memory. They can’t internalise it and apply it to long term memory. Fifteen seconds after they admit two things can be bad, they forget it. It’s like clockwork. “America and China are both bad… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15… China can’t be bad because America is bad! I’m not to blame for Trump’s win because Kamala ran a weak campaign! Gaza is the only genocide that matters!”

        • pressanykeynow@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Well given how Lemmy is mostly American ultra-leftwing it’s weird when they talk about changing China when they can’t even change their own neighbourhood, or even their own home.

    • Glide@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Gets it in one.

      There’s a reason everyone is currently demonizing liberal ideology instead of standing up for the rights that the conservatives are working to strip away.

      • Rooskie91@discuss.online
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        3 months ago

        Noooooo I want the empire that hides all the bad things they do so I don’t have to think about it while I drive my SUV and buy Starbucks!!! /s

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Idk man, I feel like a lot of us “America bad” people are from Europe and don’t support China or Russia either.

    • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      3 months ago

      Exactly! I’m so tired of being accused of being a liberal and/or a fascist every single time I note that China or Russia isn’t some perfect leftist utopia, but in fact just another empire that is a pain in the ass not only to other countries but also their own citizens.

      • kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 months ago

        China is a fascist ethnostate, Russia is another neoliberal capitalist state, North Korea IMO cannot be described as socialist, Vietnam is pretty cool but mixed and only partially socialist, Cuba is not great tbh just in general, Venezuela is horrible, the Nordic states are just Social Democrat states, Israel has multiple worker co-ops but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still a genocidal ethnostate, that just about covers all the tankie countries.

    • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      3 months ago

      Did you not read the meme? Imperialism is bad no matter who is doing it, and arguing over which empire is more ‘problematic’ is counterproductive, as we should oppose all empires instead of wasting all of our time and effort on getting on each other’s throats.

    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      And in doing so they may have pushed large parts of the Chinese-American community to the right. Tankies caping for the CCP were not a good look for the moderate immigrants who had been fucked over by the Chinese government in various ways.

    • You’re just repeating the meme.

      They are all bad, they are all part of the problems we face globally, and whatabouting “them” to avoid facing criticism of “us” only serves those in power by deflecting criticism of them.

    • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      Less problematic in some ways, more problematic in other ways. We shouldn’t be supporting the “less problematic” empire. We should be fighting any and all empires.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    It’s something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.

    The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.

    Death to monarchists!

    • currycourier@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I mean “atheism” is still a dirty word in politics, thousands of years after the prejudice against that started. Apples to oranges, sure, but just goes to show how long it takes for public opinion to shift sometimes.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 months ago

        [LONG RAMBLE]

        TLDR: Atheism wasn’t really regarded as a threat (other than the thing that USSR enforced) until the aughts and the New Atheism movement, at which point right-wing religious ministries turned from hating on other ministries to hating on atheists and secularists.


        Atheism has some fascinating recent history. In the 1970s and 1980s atheists were disregarded almost entirely since it was an asserted position mostly by hard-line scientists and philosophers. Most of the none population instead went to (or at least associated with) left-wing churches. My parents (my Dad who is a rocket scientist and was atheist except in name) joined my mom and I at the Church of Religious Science (later the Science of Mind Church) which is pretty darned lax and easy to accept as religions go.

        And the religious right (then, the Southern Baptist Church and the rising Evangelical movement) hated us and declared us false. They also did this to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (still regarded as a dangerous cult) and the Roman Catholic Church. John F. Kennedy got a lot of flack for being Catholic, and Republicans insisted he’d be beholden to the Holy See – and they tried to pressure him! – but he demonstrated he could serve the US as president and keep the Vatican at arm’s reach. Romney was still getting crap for his Mormonism in his 2012 presidential run, but it blended seamlessly into all sorts of other biographical anomalies that suggested character problems.

        I should add there was a pro-religion sentiment in the US that was really anti-USSR. Marx recognized religion as the opiate of the people a symptom that the masses were suffering from precarity or scarcity, but Marx was saying the response of the community should be to feed them and keep them free of want, and as the dispair fades the need for religious practice will fade as well. (We’re not sure if he’s completely right.) So Lenin and Stalin’s response was to ban religion, which didn’t actually address the issue, but it gave the US justification to push church-going in the mid 20th century as a thing that pinko commies didn’t do.

        Anyway, atheism became significant movement thing due to two factors. One was the new atheist movement which orbited Richard Dawkins and the top atheist guns. Dawkins motivation (as he tells it) was the 9/11 attacks, which showcased the power of religion as a force multiplier in violent conflict. But there was also a certain privilege that religious movements and religious institutions were given that secular ones were not, which was a favored topic of Douglas Adams. And so bringing atheist and secular organizations to equal status as churches was a big early goal of the new atheist movement.

        The other factor bringing the rise of popular atheism was the rise of the internet which allowed us all to actually talk about things and confront that a lot of us already had awkward relationships with our respective religious institutions. Myself, this was a period for me to naturalism, ruling out supernatural elements until one comes and bites me on the butt. (This is the dream for IRL ghost hunters, to have a poltergeist beat them with their own duffel. Pain is temporary but evidence lives forever on the internet!)

        That said the aughts marked the spread of atheism (and the consequential collapse of left-wing church attendance. Right wing church attendance has been falling less quickly but noticeably, and ministries continue to be in panic about it. And this was when anti-atheist pro-Christian and pro-Muslim movements (who absolutely don’t ally) started organizing to scare everyone how terrible we godless folk are, as if our interest in intellectual exercise and not the hypocrisy endemic to right-wing Christian ministries is what is driving parishioners from their pews.

        [/LONG RAMBLE]

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      See, they shouldn’t have gone with the First Order. They should’ve had the New Republic stamp out the Empire, only to create a new empire itself.

      • Jon_Servo@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Star Wars is supposed to be palatable to children, and my guess is that those types of politics muddy the waters too much for kids to grasp. Simplistic and clear “good vs evil” lines appeal to wider audiences.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    anti imperialist/colonial supporters when they find out that the entire timeline of human history is conquest, colonialism, and imperialism.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        possibly, but i think it’s a sort of fundamental problem. I would be curious if history/anthropology has any sort of knowledge on societies that didn’t have a hierarchical power structure within itself. But i’m guessing it’s very uncommon, if not unheard of.

        If humans could do a communal governance structure effectively, one would think it would have already been tried, and successfully implemented.

        Democracy is probably the closest thing we’ve ever had, but it’s still not perfect.

        I’m sure theres also a lot of psych and socio research on this as well.

        there’s also the question of whether it’s even possible to have a communal government structure in the first place, the world is incredibly complex, and politics is even more complex, doing things correctly is very hard.

        TL;DR i don’t think it’s possible, and i’m not sure it ever will, judging by how humans behave.