If nationalization is scandalous violence for you, let me say I want him to get the french treatment.

China doesn’t pretend that their media is unbiased, though. There’s no aura of unbiased media in China.

What they "pretend" to be doesn't matter, what matters is the thoughts they want to put on the people who read it, why they want to, and how many of them do read it. Any and all state media or state collaborative media tries to paint the state it comes from in a good light. This is not somehow more benevolent or less manipulative when it's done by China, even if "it's easy to circumvent" or "people know it's biased".

Meanwhile, Facebook’s head of global threat intelligence, is literally a US intelligence plant

According to its CEO and founder Ren, Huawei's corporate culture is the same as the culture of the CCP, "and to serve the people wholeheartedly means to be customer-centric and responsible to society." Ren frequently states that Huawei's management philosophy and strategy are commercial applications of Maoism.

Ren states that in the event of a conflict between Huawei's business interests and the CCP's interests, he would "choose the CCP whose interest is to serve the people and all human beings". Qiao and Marquis observe that company founder Ren is a dedicated communist who seeks to ingrain communist values at Huawei.

I wonder if WeChat and TikTok are any different, too.

Bing has 100 million DAUs worldwide. Reddit has about 55 million DAUs worldwide. LinkedIn has about 22 million DAUs in the US. Twitter has about 54 million MAUs in the US. Threads has about 8 million DAUs worldwide (though probably less now, lol). 1-5% penetration of total users in terms of usage is indicative of very high awareness.

Last October, China clamped down on some VPNs

So basically, it's easy to do, but illegal, but it's rarely persecuted? That's a really weird policy.

No it's not. Much like you aren't a CPC shill/russian bot/whatever, no one commenting on a lemmy post is a psyop agent with a secret agenda to manipulate everyone. Those guys have the entire media, they don't need to hire people to pretend to be redditors. Just because you believe it really really hardly doesn't make it true.

That was also the day we realized how much nicer C was to C++

Absolutely. I went through a whole process of using less and less C++isms that everyone was recommending me as they just made everything so much harder, longer to compile, produce more unreadable errors, harder to organize… Until I eventually was just writing C but structs have functions.

Then I moved to Rust and I have not looked back.

How in the world did they think no one would notice? Aren't they a tech savvy company?

I get what you mean, but the other guy brought up democracy as if it was the be-all end-all solution.

Yes. No democracy, no support from me. "But the US isn't democratic!" Which is why I don't support it either. Not sure if the other guy is the same.

Countries that disprove OP’s point about democracy being the solution

No country disproves that democracy is needed. "Benevolent dictators" (all dictators think they're benevolent) die. If you think a dictatorship is doing well just give it a few years.

most urban people either know how to flip the firewall or know someone who can - it’s really not that hard.

"Yes they censor everything, but it's easy to circumvent!" is not an excuse. How accurate is this really though? Do you have any sources to prove this is the case? Genuinely interested.

As if the large media organizations in the US don’t all cite reports from “independent think tanks” that are conspicuously all funded by the same billionaires and manned by “ex”-US intelligence.

Chinese news cite chinese think tanks, both entities funded by the chinese government. How is it any different? Doesn't China have more billionaires than the US too?

followed by USA/capitalism works best and is only system that works (does not)

Neither me not the person you were responding to said this. They criticised China on something - you made up the "hence the US is good/only thing that works" line. You just assumed if anyone thinks anything slightly remotely bad about China it's because they're an evil idiot liberul!!!. It really is just a reflex for you people no?

It's not about brains, it's about the flow of conversation. Everytime someone calls out China on anything there's always a bunch of people that immediately say "Ah yes because the US–" No one is talking about the US. No one is saying it's any better. It being a shithole too doesn't magically make China not one. If that is the only thing you have to say then you don't actually have an argument, just the vibe that it's le based epic AES wholesome chungus country and if they do anything wrong it must be propaganda or not actually done by them.

This not an argument. You can't respond to "X is doing something wrong" with "OH AS IF Y IS ANY BETTER" when literally no one was talking about Y. You're just trying to derail the conversation. If you're going to defend China stick to your guts and defend China, don't attack completely unrelated countries implying I must think they're any better, they're not.

At least most people in Russia and China can distinguish between the truth and the party line.

I am sure that most people in the country with the largest censorship firewall in existence know the truth any better. And before you say B-B-B-BUT AMERICA— Yeah they censor shit too. I hate both of them.

So… no, you don't have an actual point to make.

Yes yes we know America is bad too, now do you have an actual point to make?

Vote with your wallet

When are we going to finally accept that this is nothing but a delusion? How many failed boycotts over and over will it take?

Why is it always the Save The Children Act and not the Erradicate Trans People Act?

Thank you for being willing to engage sanely in the first place. <3

I am sorry for being agressive. I mostly assumed you thought the same things as the person you were quoting. I appreciate that you at least admit you aren’t well read enough, that’s more than most people I talk to.

I’m happy to receive some recs I can follow up on.

I really appreciate this too. Thank you. I think as a direct expanding on what I’m talking about, this essay is very good:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary

It’s available on video form too, but the video doesn’t have citations.

Here’s a good rebuttal of On Authority:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/london-anarchist-federation-the-problems-with-on-authority

A modern and a classical reading on how anarchists view authority and power:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-power

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikhail-bakunin-what-is-authority

Thanks for ignoring everything I said.

Look, I agree that it’s dumb to call yourself a socialist and have zero respect for most attempts at socialism, especially when your critique doesn’t come from anything serious but just parroting of cold war propaganda. I agree that these countries weren’t literally the devil, nor fascist, not “pretending”, that’s all fine.

But it’s still so dishonest of MLs to dig for quotes and smugly boastbout how “libertarians never succeed”. Even if we completely ignore all the very explicit and deliberate attempts at sabotage anarchists had to endure from their statist “comrades” (which we shouldn’t but we always casually seem to be forced to do in the name of “unity”), it doesn’t change the fact that vanguardist revolutions have all been incredibly flawed too.

You all are very often willing to recognize your failures, most of the people like you I have talked to seem to agree that at some point the revolution was “hijacked”, usurped, corrupted, lost aim, usually coinciding with a figure they don’t like taking over the revolutionary government and messing things up.

The supposed “strong state that crushes all opposition” being taken over by the reformist opposition and then the capitalist one in the case of the USSR and Leninists. The market reforms of Deng in the case of China and Maoists. But you all never seem to ask yourselves the question “Why was that allowed to happen?”. Why am I supposed to put my trust in some authoritarian bullshit solution specifically justified as a means to protect the revolution when it failed at doing so? Why do you have to be so smug and condescending at me for not trusting in things that didn’t work?

Why do you instead of learning from the mistakes in your methods that most of the time you yourself recognize and trying to come up with new ideas and systems for the current age, insist on still clinging to material analysis of the world of a hundred years ago as the gospel, the sole undying and absolute truth on how to Make Socialism, merely saying “it’ll totally work right this time” instead? Why do you insist on mocking and “”“dunking”“” on anyone who refuses to do that?

They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.

This is all completely false. It genuinely is just lies. You can disagree with the explanations, but to claim there literally aren’t any is just ignorance and a complete lack of good faith. Look, if you’re a socialist in the internet, you probably have dealt with confidently incorrect liberals whining about strawmen that you don’t believe, because they haven’t read anything about it - and it’s probably been incredibly frustrating. So why do you never think twice before doing the same thing with anarchists?

I’m always told to read Lenin and a ton of authoritarian essays and I always do in good faith, but it’s extremely rare for me to ever be afforded the same honour, and then all the conversations I have end up with people telling me shit like this and me having to explain anarchism 101 to them because they genuinely don’t actually know anything.

No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

I am also always told to be charitable and nuanced about the failures and mistakes of vanguardist revolutions, but no one ever has the same honour with anarchist ones.

The thing is most of the people who say they’re making educated guesses are actually just being deliberately dishonest to plant dislike for a geopolitical rival in the population. And obviously Chinese state media is being dishonest too. You don’t have to pick one over the other.

Again with this. Wikipedia can’t be neutral. Nothing can be. Neutral doesn’t exist.

There is absolutely no way to be “politically unbiased” when talking about things. Being “neutral” just means being in favor of the status quo, which is not neutral at all. There is no third position, you either oppose or support the way things work right now. Bias is completely inescapable.

If you want to get an “unbiased” view of something, the only real thing you can do is to read many sources biased against both outlooks and compare and contrast. What you end up with will still be biased though, just by virtue of what you select to care about and not.

People who claim to be neutral and unbiased only say it because they think it makes them look more credible, or they have deluded themselves to be able to think they’re somehow more rational than everyone else. There is no way to not be biased as a human being.

It’s not just about the inconvenience though. Windows is paid. It’s at least 100 bucks. It’s not even “free but you are the product” like Google drive or whatever. Yet it still abuses you, controls you and exploits you, and you have to do tons of workarounds for it to not get in your way. Most of them are always temporary, as a new update reenables everything again or directly circumvents the workaround you used.

If you are locked into the ecosystem, then I do agree that it’s annoying that people think moving to Linux is seamless. It wasn’t for me, it even cost me money since I had to buy an AMD gpu for things to work well + another GPU to passthrough to a windows VM and still use Clip Studio. But if someone only uses their computer for things that can be done seamlessly on Linux, and they genuinely dislike and are against all the bullshit Windows always does, it’s worth it to tell them there is a viable alternative, and what they heard about “you have to use the command line for everything meaningful!” or “everything breaks all the time!” hasn’t been true for years.