It’s funny how deciding which side is truthful is based on which side you belong to. It’s also amusing seeing how people come up with myriads of proofs their side is right when the only true argument is “my interests go along with theirs”. And it’s tragic that both sides kind of tell the truth at the same time however contradicting it is…
You fool, you absolute bingus. You have fallen for one of the classic blunders, for I, in my infinite wisdom, know that all states are bad. And all equally so at that. 😎
Let’s be honest, no government is trusted and truthful.
Some are obviously worse than others, but to trust any of them blindly is stupid.
[murdering thousands of people] guys do you realize your leaders are as bad as mine? can you be serious? i’m trying to elect White Obama 3
What?
Theyre pointing out that youre false equivalencing
Oh is there a government that hasn’t killed its citizens? Do tell us of this utopia
Yep every government is exactly the same, Nazi Germany and Algeria are exactly the same, America and Iran are exactly the same, you are so fucking intelligent and will definitely accomplish things in the world.
So that’s a reason to trust some governments but not others? Very very on topic and on brand.
Oh that’s right, just YOUR selection of governments would never lie nope. Only the Americans ever lie lol
You trust fire to keep you warm when you’re camping, even after all the people it’s burned to death?
Trust is not a binary, and talking about “trusting” a government like I would trust a friend is classic liberal political illiteracy. Plants, animals, natural phenomena, laws of physics: I trust everything to act according to it’s nature, and in the case of thinking beings and organizations I trust them to act in their interests. If I know what their interest is, I can trust my predictions. Where those interests overlap, there is a basis for cooperation. This is why, for example, leftists are able to critically support groups like Hamas while liberals remain hamstrung by racist suspicion: leftists understand that despite the differences we have these groups can be trusted to act against our common enemy out of a shared interest in survival and self-determination. Liberals demand impossible perfection from resistance while tolerating outright fascism from their own side, but delude themselves into thinking they are “equally critical” of all sides. Nobody believes you when you do this.
Oh that’s right, just YOUR selection of governments would never lie nope. Only the Americans ever lie lol
Yet more projection from the “facts are Russian propaganda” people, the people who conveniently believe every atrocious lie their government tells about the designated enemy of the week when it’s important, only to turn around when it’s too late to matter and say “well of course I never believed that.” Opposing every aggression except the current one, pretending to be impartial while acting predictably as “reluctant” cheerleaders of empire under the Churchillian delusion that “our government is the worst, except for all the others”. It would be so much less disgusting if you would simply be honest with yourselves about being partisans for western empire like the rest of the right wingers, but instead you cling to this threadbare pretense of being above political struggle when anyone with eyes in their fucking head can see exactly what side you’re on. People might be less sick of you if you didn’t insist on endlessly projecting your bashful supremacist mindset onto people with actual morals and knowledge, who practice actual criticism instead of just cosplaying it.
Go read a single book and evolve out of the larval fascist stage your political development has been arrested at, and leave geopolitical analysis to the ideological adults.
Free Palestine.
I don’t trust any of these mfs, and you shouldn’t either
I can understand not trusting the US Empire, Israel, etc, but why not trust the PRC? I’d rather trust a socialist country with a functional democratic governance over capitalist countries.
with a functional democratic governance
I swear none of you guys have actually lived in China haha.
The Chinese political system is nepotism first, plutocracy second. Just like the US. The only difference is they’re much more sane in public. The benefits of a shame based society.
If anyone can beat 7 years in Kunming, let me know how I’m wrong.
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
The US Empire, on the other hand, has private ownership as principle, with top-down “democracy.” Candidates are pre-selected, and term limits ensure that even if a genuine socialist won, they would not be able to sufficiently change the system. It’s designed for maintaining the dominance of capital.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
Hey Cowbee, do you have a free/cheaper source for Boer’s Socialism is Power book? The epub and physical copies are $110 minimum.
See my name for my motivations for asking.
99/100 search the name and add pdf at the end then you can just covert to epub if you really need.
I don’t recommend purchasing it as an individual! I certainly haven’t, it makes sense for a party to do so but not individuals. Comrade @cenarius@lemmygrad.ml found a working link for a free copy here!
Hell yeeaaah. Thank you.
This is the first time I’ve seen Anna’s Library… It’s amazing, they even have digital copies of new books! I know how I’m going to spend my weekend. Thanks for this
No problem!
With all due respect, and apologies for not reading the book first (I will get to it when I have time). Have you just read the theory, or have you lived the implementation?
Because unfortunately, they can be different in practice. In my experience of the discussions I’ve had with my Chinese friends, and the amount of gossip I’ve heard about local political dynasties and KTV prostitutes, I think the ideal and the reality is very different. Something you could also say about the US.
China isn’t perfect, none of us pretend it is. I hear and partake in the gossip too, the stories about connections and KTV backrooms (and more you’ve probably yet to even hear of). But here’s the thing I’ve seen firsthand, especially when I visit family in the countryside: the villages that had dirt roads and no running water when I was a kid now have high-speed rail stops, 5G, and clinics that actually stock medicine.
And yeah, people complain, gossip, spread rumours. Of course they do, we’re human too. But the trust isn’t blind. It’s earned. When a pilot program for rural healthcare or poverty alleviation works in one county, they scale it to the province. When something fails, they tweak it or scrap it. You see it in the towns that went from abject poverty to being connected, electrified, and lifted up in a single generation.
Even the sources you’d expect to be critical can’t ignore it. Harvard’s Ash Center ran the longest independent survey of Chinese public opinion, interviewing over 32,000 people between 2003 and 2016. They found satisfaction with the central government at 95.5% in the final wave. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer put China at 91% trust in government, the US at 39%. These aren’t state media. They’re Western institutions. They see the same trend we feel on the ground.
That’s possible because of how our democratic system actually works. Democracy isn’t just about voting for different parties or the spectacle of elections. It’s about whether people are heard and whether their lives get better. If you think Chinese people aren’t being heard, or that the feedback doesn’t translate into action, you’re plainly wrong. The proof isn’t in the theory. It’s in the roads, the rails, and the fact that trust stays high even when the gossip is rampant (who doesn’t love a bit of gossip).
Thank you for that. I really appreciate this post and it resonates with me. I wouldn’t have stayed there for so long if I didn’t love it too. But I can’t deal with the rhetoric on .ml that acts like it’s a utopia with no justified dissent.
There is absolutely a functioning democracy, but it isn’t immune to nepotism or greed, just like everywhere else. It’s also capable of manufacturing suffering.
The two people who remain in my thoughts the most from my time there were the 80 year old couple who worked as parking attendants in my building so they could stay in a single room partition in the garage with a kerosene heater. This was in 2011, in the center of Kunming. Not one of the rural villages in the mountains. They could have been provided for but they weren’t. It’s not a utopia, but it is a great country full of wonderful people.
That couple in Kunming. No amount of progress erases that. They deserved better.
But, so much has changed since then. Even just since 2021. Housing market cooling down, 996 ruled illegal by the Supreme People’s Court, new protections for delivery riders rolling out in Zhejiang, Guangdong. And the corruption crackdowns, “Tigers and flies” clearly wasn’t just propaganda.
On .ml people seem tired of the constant negative spin on China, so they swing hard the other way. Sometimes too hard (though I’ve yet to see it too many times). And, even folks here can still slip into old “China bad” habits (seen a lot of this recently). Like saying China does nothing for the Global South when you’ve got the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, Gwadar Port, vaccine donations, debt relief and much more showing how patently false that is.
I’ll just say it plain. I think China’s model, the way we do democracy, foreign policy, the whole political economy, is the best working option we’ve got right now. Not because it’s perfect, but because it actually moves the needle for hundreds of millions. It’s not even playing the same game as the Euro-Amerikan hegemony that’s been exporting crisis forever. Why throw out the good, or spend all day demonizing it, when so much worse is happening way closer to home for most people on here. Stick in their eye vs a speck in mine, yknow?
Edit: a graph just to show how much things have changed
We have comrades within China who lived there most or all of their life, yes.
And I am unfortunately in contact with real Americans who won’t shut up about the glorious Trump regime too…
You do realize you’re using anecdotes to dismiss China, but don’t tolerate anecdotes that counter that? It’s almost like you already made up your mind.
Go and read sources, check how most Chinese people consider their government democratic according to western NGOs (so you can’t blame the government for bias/meddling), same as with Vietnam, and how low western liberal democracies score in the same reports. Check statistics of the insane material harm that Japan and western regimes did to these countries, and how they still recovered, how China lifted 800 million out of poverty, how their lives keep getting better day after day while most people in our countries infrastructure is crumbling down. Or how most Chinese people own their homes, while most of us can only hope to own a house if we come from wealth or got enough support and luck to end with a very well paid job (and a mortgage that we’ll pay for years to come).
I have never lived in China, no, but the textbook I provided is an overview of the real systems that exist, flaws and all, combined with the theoretical reasoning for the structures and the reasons they have changed over time, their history. That’s why I added that socialist democracy is imperfect, but it stands in stark contrast to the utter failure that is capitalist democracy, and I listed the reasons why.
The Anna’s archive link on that page is dead unfortunately, I’ll try to find it but do you have one handy?
Memes aside, you know it’s all propaganda though right?
Even if you want to gloss it up as the “the revolution protecting itself” the PRC isn’t going to go out and admit “there’s flaws in our system”, much less “our government is run by a bunch of horny greedy assholes just like everywhere else”.
–edit–
Though I agree the damage those assholes can do is limited by the system much more than the US which is a failed state.
https://annas-archive.pk/md5/ea6c2ecd42016998e92dcd1b5e6e57f2
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml link is identical aside from new domain 👍
I don’t have a link, unfortunately.
Either way, the PRC does admit to flaws and problems. The method of criticism and self-criticism is applied in China. Further, the government isn’t run by a “bunch of horny greedy assholes.” Corruption exists to a certain degree, but the CPC regularly cracks down on this, rather than allowing it to flourish. It seems, above all, that you’re letting your distrust of government in general cause you to magnify problems in China beyond their real existence in order to equate it to capitalist states.
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Lol this has the vibe of “Just FYI, don’t try to fight those trained kiclboxers”
What’s wrong with Marxism? Why not engage with Marxists? Further, I know many Lemmy.ml users are anarchists or even liberals, we aren’t all communists.
Thomas Jefferson raped a 15 year old girl and enslaved her offspring. Scream this at every American you meet. Now that’s proper propaganda
All American media is Israeli owned propaganda now thanks to Ellison
Not Liberals, simply stupid and ignorant people which believe everything what mainstream media say. With a cultured and informed people, the USA would be a full democracy and Trump in jail since years.
No, this cannot exist in capitalism, and it is not a problem of culture, but the mode of production.
Or even if it’s American but leftist, because if it indicts the antifascist bonafides of the Democratic party then it must be dastardly Russian lies
If someone is supporting democrats, they are not a leftist
Lemmy right wing. Not liberals.
Liberals are anti trump. Only right wing people support trump.
As if Trump supporters are the only ones this meme applies to. Western liberals are just as bad in that regard
Then again, what are these democracts doing to stop “Trump”? Ive yet to hear a single democrat talk about Trump as they do of Iran.
Liberals are right-wing.
Not in the U.S they aren’t. They are progressives. Not necessarily anti capitalist but they are fully social progressives.
Please explain how a social progressive is the same as a neo Nazi.
Definition
Noun
a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare. “she dissented from the decision, joined by the court’s liberals”
a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise
Now libertarian is a different story.
But you can all Google the definition of both because there seems to be a lot of people who are promoting that liberals are right wingers. And that’s literally the opposite of what they are.
Yes I understand the middle has shifted. But that’s normal and has always happened throughout history.
Liberals are not conservative. They are against misogyny, bigotry,racism.
Which is what the right stands for.
Their opinion on capitalism does not make them Nazis.
Liberals are Democrat voters. Not Republicans.
I mean the word “libtard” is the rights slur against liberals.
Obviously they don’t like liberals. Because they don’t share ideologies.
For fucks sake. Must be psyop to try to convince everyone liberals are right wing.
I always get so much second hand embarrassment from clueless liberals trying to condescendingly explain their poor understanding of politics to vastly more knowledgeable people. It’s like watching a primary school student lecturing their teacher that all cats are female and all dogs are male.
Must be psyop to try to convince everyone liberals are right wing.
Easier to imagine conspiracies everywhere than to accept the political consequences of supporting enslavement and genocide
No liberal supports that.
Literally none.
Give me a source that says they do.
They are all anti Israel. Hell, half of the right wing conservatives are also anti Israel.
Dawg you guys OPENLY VOTED for genocide not even 2 years ago, is your memory that poor? Biden/Harris oversaw the incineration of countless thousands, supporting it the whole way, arming it, repeating disgusting blood libel about Hamas mass rapes and 40 beheaded babies to justify it, and sending riot cops to beat us down when we protested.
Some leftists were reading out the names of murdered Palestinian kids at the DNC and these liberal freaks fucking plugged their ears and/or laughed because they know they crossed the rubicon, they know they’re fucking nazis.
You actively voted for a pro-genocide candidate, you hemmed and hawwed, equivocating and condemning resistance until the evil was undeniable, and then you fell silent, and now you’re pretending to have always been against this. As the Arabic saying goes, you killed the victim and now march in his funeral. You made your bed, now you must lie in it
I never voted for genocide.
I only voted for Kamala to keep trump from getting elected.
How are you blaming me for genocide. ?
As if I had any power over that.
I’ve been aware of Palestine being taken over for almost 2 decades.
But I had zero power to do anything about it.
Are you responsible for everything your government does?
One post ago you were saying, and I quote “No liberal supports [Genocide]. Literally none.”
Now you’re trying to pivot to “well I don’t personally support genocide (though I did vote for it”
Liberalism is right-wing because it supports capitalism. It isn’t the only right-wing ideology, but anyone calling themselves “progressive” that opposes moving on from capitalism to socialism is in fact holding progress back from where it needs to go.
That’s a moot point.
I agree capitalism will stop progress.
But if these individuals support social progress, even if they incorrectly believe it can be achieved within capitalism, this does not make them Republicans.
The distinction between left and right in the U.S is democratic and Republic ideologies.
Social progressives vs traditionalists.
Support for capitalism is not the dividing line. It never has been.
You can all pretend liberals are the cause of all your problems.
The right wing is the actual cause of our slip into fascism. They worked to get their own people into every seat. Plenty of blue maga. These are not actual liberals. They only ran as Dems to get elected.
The right wing conservatives are the ones stripping women of rights. Of trans peoples rights.
It’s sure as fuck not the liberals.
I’ve given multiple definitions of liberals from multiple sources and you all just pretend that’s not the definition.
That your personal definition is the “real” one and call anyone who disagrees as uninformed.
I can use Google. Apparently you cannot.
You don’t get to just make up your own definition and push it and pretend that everyone else , all other sources are wrong.
And besides.
Instead of blaming liberal progressives who push for civil rights , environmental controls, and taxes on the rich, you should consider what it is that you have contributed to this country by pretending to be better than the people actually advocating for these progressive changes.
What have you done to make this country better?
You remind me of those Christian fundamentalist who think they are better than everyone else because they stick to rules they made up.
Honestly it all feels like you all must either be grifters or infiltrators.
No one believes this b.s that liberals are the problem right now.
We all know it’s the conservatives. The Republicans. The right wing and especially the alt right.
You’re confusing effect with cause, and as a consequence are mis-analyzing the key issues here. Fascism is rising because imperialism is decaying, and austerity is being brought home. It isn’t rising abstractly, but due to concrete material conditions. Perpetuating capitalism perpetuates the rise in fascism, so liberals, like it or not, are ineffectively fighting fascism by supporting the very system that gives rise to it.
As for what I do personally, I organize with a communist party, one that focuses on unionization, striking, protesting, and educating the working classes. I don’t sit on my hands for years at a time waiting for the next genocidal democrat to vote for, but instead make political activism a part of my life. Trying to claim that leftists are all infiltrators or grifters for having principles and coherent political analysis is absurd.
I never disagreed with the capitalism problem. It’s at the root and until it’s addressed, it will inevitably lead to ruin. You won’t get any argument from me there on that one.
But many still think socialism can exist in a regulated capitalist society.
Neither of us thinks so, but I can understand why some do think that’s possible. And I’m not going to criticize them for all the problems that are caused by this when there are other groups at a much greater fault.
Socialism in capitalism has semi worked (let me explain what I mean by “worked”,) at a surface level. And especially looks promising when being viewed remotely.
For instance an American may look at Sweden and say "look how well socialism is working there ".
And it looks like it is working. Free healthcare. Equality. Better educated.
But you and I know it’s unsustainable and will always be in decline because that’s how capitalism works. It demands sacrifice after sacrifice. Profits must continue to increase. Finite resources must be used faster than they can regenerate. And this of course is not sustainable long term.
But many people don’t see this aspect of things. They just see that things in Sweden look much better than they are here. And they see socialism working. Dare I say “perfected” from the perspective.
Not everyone is capable of following cause and effect long term. Or tracing back problems to their sources.
So. This is getting long but. I study psychology. My area is perception and cognition but I’ve also studied social.
To make a short as point as possible. For a society to exist cohesively, most members need to be “sheep”. It’s the only way they will cooperate and collectively follow rules.
But a society needs people who challenge things. Or progress never happens.
If you have too many of those types, they all think they know best. And they all just fight constantly.
The masses will follow whichever one appeals to their existing ideals the most.
Existing ideals that are a product of the environment they grew up in.
I do think there is a level of personal responsibility here that is real. But at the same time I acknowledge that most people are incapable of going very far from the cultural ideas they were raised with. Liberals want a better world. They just can’t let go of capitalism because they were raised in capitalism and they can’t imagine it any other way. They are ignorant of where capitalism leads.
This doesn’t mean they deserve to be lumped in with the anti-social fascist on the right.
They aren’t the same.
Liberalism and conservatism are both offshoots of economic liberalism, favoring the rights of private property owners. Read a book
Support of private property does not make someone right wing. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. And it’s not a criteria listed anywhere on any definition.
I mean if you’re under feudal relations supporting capitalism makes you progressive, but right now we’re operating under socialized production with capitalists constraining production around exchange value so yeah supporting maintaining capitalism is right wing. Let socialized production benefit society.
Must be psyop to try to convince everyone liberals are right wing.
a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare.
for who? progressive in what sense? welfare for who, what are thy trying to solve by giving who assistance? Please try to think. You can’t just parrot what you read on dictionaries. you can’t just trust people.
If you keep living like this people will keep lying to you, you’ll keep falling for it because of your naivete. If you keep letting other people decide how to live your life someone will take advantage and they will make sure there’s nothing you can do to stop them, nothing but complain on the internet about how miserable your lie is and how other people need to fix it for you.
Not in the U.S they aren’t.
Wrong.
Liberals are not conservative. They are against misogyny, bigotry,racism.
So right-wing Female supremacists, Trans supremacists and Afro-supremacists.
That’s your problem there.If all of them are complacent with rampant problems in liberal democracies like:
- Campaign fraud
- Worker exploitation
- Imperialist propaganda
- Bribes
- Blackmail
- Inside trading
- Usury
- Private gambling institutions
- Landlords
- Consumer good poisoning
- Monopolized rent consumer goods
Then THEY’RE NOT LEFT-WING!
And the US hasn’t had a left-wing party, not even a social democratic one, since the 1990s,
as social democratic parties only seem to thrive if there’s a socialist nation to look up to
and the Soviet Union fell apart as it lacked resources (coal) to do anything against the US petrodollar scheme,
That’s why Bill Clinton had been called a Repubic-lite during his reign
and Obama never delivered on his “Hope & Change”.The only semi-left-wing ideas I see coming from US
contemporaries“progressives”,
is that they’re pro-green, because that at least will help people have the resources to go left in the future.The right stands for a ruling merchant class and a gatekeeping judicial class.
The judicial class has noble ideas for itself as a ruling class,
but they need campaign money in order to be elected as a ruler,
which the merchant class has in spades, but want their favorable laws for them to be implemented in return.
And thus the merchant class becomes the ruling class and the judicial class their gatekeepers.
That’s what the right-wing stands for, unless they’re even more regressive
and long for a kings and priests to rule over them.Centrists, social democratic wing like FDR, try to curb the power of the merchant class,
but a true left wing will replace it with a ruling engineering class and gatekeeping scholar class that will replace liberal democracy with a people’s democracy that can focus on creating a classless society,
because only a people’s democracy can tackle the issue of campaign fraud,
which is systemic in a liberal democracy.
And this systemic problem becomes larger and larger the more a society automates
as it causes the power of merchants to be more and more concentrated.The US democratic party is only slowly returning to become a social democratic party
with Zohran Mamdami firmly in the democratic socialist side.But looking from the outside, the US is like the Star Control II Ur-Quan alien race, where the US democratic party plays the role of the Kzer-za that wants the rest of the world/galaxy enslaved and the US republican party playing the role of the bloodthirsty Kohr-Ah that wants the rest of the world dead. The only thing missing in the US is a civil war between the two.
Any supremacist is not, by it’s very definition of being discriminating, liberal.
Liberal is against bigotry of any kind. That’s a core foundation. It supports equality.
Why are you under the impression that only white racist are alt right and all other kinds are liberals?
That’s not how that works.
You can hate whites. Mexicans. Jews. Men, etc. Any support of group discrimination is right wing by its definition because liberals specifically is against bigotry.
It’s fun watching you define liberalism out of existence. You’ve already made it so the Democrats and their supporters aren’t liberal by your own definition
My formative childhood years were spent listening to “good, non-bigoted” liberals talk about “killing terrorists” who “hate democracy” because of their “tribal culture”.
Really. Cause that sounds like Republicans rhetoric.
No, the Republicans were simply repeating the phrase “glass the middle east” with their eyes rolled back in ecstasy. Compared to that, the Victorian-era racism of liberals trying to
bring civilizationspread democracy got a pass for sounding slightly less hitlerite. This dynamic may sound familiarAnd sadly the democrats post 9/11. We’ll that just lifted the mask off. Been more like since Korean War
Liberalism can claim to stand for whatever, it’s still a fact that liberal governments participated in wars, invasions, regime change operations, economic warfare, genocide.
Liberalism obscures the systemic nature of problems by focusing on and promoting Individualist ideals. The reason liberalism is in crisis is that it doesn’t work, not that it’s not implemented correctly.
That doesn’t make it right wing. It makes it a failed left ideology.
If being in favor of financial capitalism doesn’t make you “right wing” nothing does lol
Arguably, all parties within a liberal democracy are liberal in ideology. Republicans are just the right wing of that liberal system, Dems are to the left of the repubs but both still liberal. In Australia the leading conservative party is quite literally called The Liberal Party.
What people call themselves and what they actually stand for are not necessary the same.
Labor party in Britain is a good example.
Often party names start from historic ideologies that change over time.
Other times, a misleading word is used to intentionally obfuscate what their party /group / organization is doing.
It’s common in the U.S to give bills and laws that fuck the people over the most names like “citizens United”. Or “the save act”.
When these both are destructive to the people.
If we were to look at basic leftist theory they always regard liberals as non left. The argument is that liberals just protect the liberties of the priviledged class, typically the wealth owning class. They treat the workers like wage slaves, throwing them a bone to keep them quiet, but when historically being forced to choose between having the workers attain same level of liberties, the liberals always chose to surpress that, break unions or even multiple times directly allow fascist overtake.
you are right that in us this is presented as opposition, but any serious leftist will categorically deny that as absurd. One good indicator is for example how the genocide in gaza is bipartizan or even the war in iran. They protect same interests. They do not serve the voter.
This is your opinion. That’s not the definition in various online resources.
You don’t get to make up definitions whenever you like to push your narrative.
Jesus christ you have a dog’s brain
“Hey you are being treated as an animal”
“Um that’s not what my master says, stop telling lies”
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“Teehee i support multiple nazi armies, u mad?”
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Lmao just saying words, truly everyone is 12 now
What we do with our butts is none of your business
Yeah!
Very fitting name lmao
