https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-30-years-of-deforestation-and-forest-growth-by-country/

  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago

    This article is nearly two years old. Also, I implicitly distrust any source which depicts Taiwan as part of the PRC.

      • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
        ·
        1 year ago

        I'm not sure why you would assume I'm American. I mean, you happen to be right in this case, but I'm still not sure why you'd assume that.

        Anyhow, there's an irony in your assertion that disagreeing with the position of one's government is "brainwashed."

        • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
          ·
          1 year ago

          Americans are very ease to distinguish based both on their political stances (which tend to be rather unique) and how they express them (which IS unique).

          Y'all are like those pickup trucks with LED lights. Once you realize they exist, you can't miss them.

          • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
            ·
            1 year ago

            Anti-China/pro-Taiwan sentiment isn't exactly unique to the US. I think you're alluding to an incendiary tone with respect to how you say Americans express their views, but that doesn't seem to quite fit so I'm a little lost there.

            • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
              ·
              1 year ago

              I mean, clearly people can tell that you're American, so maybe it's time for some introspection?

              • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                ·
                1 year ago

                You made an assumption and you've yet to expound on how you justified it beyond some vague assertion about American political discourse. Give me something to introspect on, then, for crying out loud.

                • fox [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Most countries that aren't America aren't inundated with anti-China rhetoric, so if someone starts spouting off about China (and especially Chinese civil rights, or uses the term "CCP") in English they're almost certainly an American.

                  Does China lag behind the west in terms of queer rights? Yes. We're critical of that but also recognize the grassroots initiatives within the CPC to change that, and support those efforts. Does China pollute more in raw numbers than America? Yeah, but they're also the global leader in green power production, so they're clearly working to fix the emissions problem, which we support. China also takes a non-imperialist stance internationally, which is far and away better than anything America has ever done internationally.

                  • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    so if someone starts spouting off about China (and especially Chinese civil rights, or uses the term "CCP") in English they're almost certainly an American.

                    This is Australia erasure.

        • ikiru@lemmy.ml
          ·
          1 year ago

          I'm not sure why you would assume I'm American. I mean, you happen to be right in this case, but I'm still not sure why you'd assume that.

          che-smile

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          You don't disagree with your government; you didn't know what your government's position was until right now.

          You still don't really know what your government's position is, otherwise you'd understand that here, as in many cases, there's an official stance for diplomatic relations and then a bunch of propaganda (for both domestic and foreign consumption) that undermines that official stance.

          • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
            ·
            1 year ago

            Bold of you to assume what I do and don't know about geopolitics. I'm well aware of the fine line that the US government walks, but I don't speak for the US government and my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime, and 2) that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign state which broadly speaking doesn't particularly want to be assimilated into the PRC. Where is the propagandistic angle here?

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime,

              lol

              Just because you agree with it doesn't mean it isn't propaganda

                • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  In totalitarian USA the racist police run over protestors with impunity and torture you at a blacksite for made up poverty crimes, president Xi please my people yearn for freedom

                  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    A disfunctional system isn't the same as a totalitarian one. Both are bad, yes, but they're not one and the same.

                    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                      ·
                      1 year ago

                      It's funny how when the US does something wrong, it's never a reflection on its essential character, and yet the fucking Four Pests Campaign or whatever is a fundamental reflection of the ideology of Chinese Communism.

                      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
                        ·
                        edit-2
                        1 year ago

                        "Ah whoops we killed a million people in Iraq, but you know, insert Churchill democracy quote while throwing tarp over one billion dead indians

                    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      1 year ago

                      Aw lol you think capitalism isn't supposed to function this way

                      One of the most sobering moments of my life was realizing that our system isn't "broken", it's functioning exactly as intended.

                • Dolores [love/loves]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  you're only allowed to call the PRC "totalitarian" or undemocratic if you condemn the "democracies" of the english speaking world. the US president isn't even the person who gets the most votes🤡

                  Taiwan does not "generally" have a stance against reunification, some independence parties are a bit more popular than they used to be, but them becoming a legally independent state requires vast constitutional and international changes no government has even begun to implement

                  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    I'm sorry, but there's no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith. The decidedly un-totalitarian nature of the US government is exactly why it's basically not functioning right now. There's plenty of valid criticism there, but to draw any sort of comparison to the Chinese form of government is insane.

                      • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                        ·
                        1 year ago

                        On the contrary, I think that totalitarian states are moreso the exception than the rule in this day and age. Hell, I wouldn't even group Russia in the same class. There are varying degrees of autocracy and the US president certainly wields more power than heads of state/government in many European countries, but it's just a bad faith argument to try to draw a comparison to it when speaking about a regime such as the CCP.

                        • carl_marks_1312 [comrade/them]
                          ·
                          1 year ago

                          I mean yeah one has a bourgeois state (US) and the other an proletarian one (PRC) so technically you're right in that it's not really comparable.

                          Do you know what hegemony means? And do you think it's a coincidence that you hold the same belief as the US state department?

                        • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
                          ·
                          1 year ago

                          regime such as the CCP

                          People would probably take you at least a little more seriously if you knew the actual acronym of the Communist Party of China. "Le ebil SeeSeePee" just outs you as a redditor, no matter what other gestures you might make toward the appearance of wordliness.

                    • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
                      ·
                      1 year ago

                      I'm sorry, but there's no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith.

                      "You have to agree with me or you're the one arguing in bad faith!"

                      • A person with no sense of irony.
                • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  "Totalitarian" is a buzzword with a hazy definition at best. Go ahead and substantiate it.

                  But my point is that using such a buzzword with no further explanation is a somewhat comical display of how propagandized you are for how thought-terminating your use of the word is.

            • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime,

              And how exactly did you observe that?

        • UlyssesT
          ·
          edit-2
          19 days ago

          deleted by creator

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          You aren't brainwashed, you are just enculturated to a very reactionary ideology. I actually agree that it's better to analyze them as separate countries for the purpose of something like this graph, but this thinktank (which, to be clear, is very Atlanticist, i.e. aligned with your geopolitical views) is almost surely gunning for having their little infographics be diplomatically palettable in hopes that they get used by important bodies.

          • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
            ·
            1 year ago

            I understand what you're saying here and I agree that that's what's going here, but making something "diplomatically palatable" is for all intents and purposes equivalent to appeasement and (in my view) automatically makes any other claims made subject to suspicion.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              I mean, Atlanticists are imperialists and should be condemned, but your view is rather unhelpful since it means the vast majority of statements connected to the UN since ~1980 fall under the same view. It's not like the PRC denies that the RoC government exists and effectively controls the island of Formosa, in our context it is just a rhetorical affectation to the effect of the RoC government not being legitimate, which is a pretty fair stance to take given the RoC's own positively absurd territorial claims.

              • ElHexo
                ·
                edit-2
                3 months ago

                deleted by creator

              • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                ·
                1 year ago

                The ROC's territorial claims are a side effect of the PRC's stance on Taiwan. I don't remember the exact details but essentially the PRC has previously declared that it would interpret any change in the ROC's territorial claims as a declaration of war. It's a matter of pragmatism.

                • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Uhh the RoC's territorial claims are a direct effect of their century-old hyper-nationalist stances that led to them losing a civil war against the peasantry of China.

                  Unless you think Mao somehow personally provoked them into declaring ownership over Mongolia?

                  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    The ROC has undergone a pretty big shift in its form of governance and general culture in the last ~50 years. Yes, their current claims are a remnant of their past as the government of mainland China, but given that changing their official stance runs the risk of provoking the PRC they're effectively immutable for the time being.

                    • carl_marks_1312 [comrade/them]
                      ·
                      1 year ago

                      You sound so gullible to believe a nationalist government will give up it's territorial claims on their own Accord lol

                • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Given that the civil war never technically ended, I'm pretty sure a "declaration of war" just reinforces the status quo.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Every single country on Earth except like seven (I only remember the Vatican and Paraguay) acknowledges that Taiwan is a dependent province of the PRC, including the USA and just about all of Europe.

      • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yes, but as you know in many cases it's for purely diplomatic reasons since acknowledging Taiwan's sovereignty means basically severing ties with the PRC, and most countries do far too much trade with it to make that in any way appealing.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Of course it's purely diplomatic, acknowledging countries is diplomacy. The end result is the same.

          • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            The end result here being the non-acknowledgement of Taiwan's de facto sovereignty, which is decidedly not a reflection of reality. I dare you to tell a Taiwanese person that they live in a dependent province of the PRC because other countries serving their own interests said so and see how they respond.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              The bulk of Taiwanese support the status quo, including that being their official diplomatic position, so I think it would go over better than you imagine. The diehard separatists are a minority faction.

              • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                ·
                1 year ago

                The status quo has broad support because it keeps the peace, and the Taiwanese people generally don't want to fight a war against China. That doesn't equate to the majority of the Taiwanese people holding the view that they're a part of the PRC and it should be fairly obvious that they don't believe nor want that.

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  You're the one that invited the thought experiment. I'm sure that is they were polled, they would also say that eternal youth and space travel would be nice, but they need to live in reality, and in reality the path they support is one where their official status as far as most international organizations are concerned is that Taiwan is part of the PRC.

                  You can't expect anyone to take you seriously when you are so blatantly trying to cherrypick concepts that support you and explain away those that don't.

                  I sure wonder how the descendants of the pre-1947 inhabitants -- those who survived the White Terror, I mean -- feel about this issue vs the blatant settler-colonial population of the "government in exile" shoe factory co-founded by the US

            • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              The reality is the Taiwan isn't broadly recognized as a sovereign country, so it doesn't wield the same authority as an independent nation in terms of international agreements, trade, etc. It doesn't have allies who would defend potential sovereignty, and it doesn't have enough guns or money to leverage itself as independent. That's way more important than some abstract discontent some people feel. At best you could say Taiwan is a Chinese client state.

              Countries don't exist because some people feel like they should be one. I could ask you to talk to a Texan secessionist and tell them their cause is hopeless.

              I will tell a person living in Taiwan they live in a province of China, sure. I don't care. Their government is the remnant of the defeated nationalist faction and I have no sympathy for it. I have way more sympathy for the Gaoshan and other indigenous Taiwanese people who aren't represented well. Taiwan will hopefully get reabsorbed into the mainland within my lifetime.

                • mar_k [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  What do you think about sources having depicted the Donetsk People's Republic as a part of Ukraine?

                  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    1 year ago

                    Apples to oranges, the DPR and LPR moreso puppet states of the Russian Federation than sovereign state in their own right. The same isn't true of Taiwan (despite its ties with Western states aiming to protect their interests in the region).

                    • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
                      ·
                      1 year ago

                      You really dodged the question there.

                      Also Taiwan is as much a puppet state of the USA.

          • Clever_Clover [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            yes, obviously the UN and WHO are controlled by the evil see see pee

            • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
              ·
              1 year ago

              I mean, you're not that far off given the PRC's permanent seat on the UN's security council, but you know full well that most states and the WHO have a vested financial interest in not pissing off the CCP.

              • Clever_Clover [she/her]
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                uh, buddy, you're aware the US has that too right? like, by your own logic the chinese cannot control the UN any more than the US can, and I'm purely using what you've said, no other needed information about the history of what the UN says and sides most of the time with needed.

                • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  I was poking fun at your sarcastic comment; I don't genuinely believe that China nor the US controls the UN any more (or any less) than their role in the geopolitical landscape would dictate.

          • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
            ·
            1 year ago

            The obvious intention is to somehow "prove" that Taiwan is a part of the PRC. It's a really common tactic by people trying to push the CCP's worldview.

        • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          glasses-off Online CCP apologist starter pack right here.

          glasses-on wahhh reality doesn't line up with what i believe in

        • Grimble [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          "CCP apologist" lol so what. We live in a whole world of countries and ideologies you can't just expect everyone to talk like Americans

          • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            CCP apologist" lol so what.

            I object to the term because the CPC has nothing to apologize for.

          • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
            ·
            1 year ago

            No, but this type of rhetoric goes hand in hand with Chinese nationalism and I frankly detest nationalism in any form. It spurs non-constructive, bad-faith discourse and in more extreme cases leads to literal genocide. Nazi Germany, present-day Israel, the Xinjiang province... The list goes on and on.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              Didn't you get the memo that it's now a "cultural genocide" in Xinjiang because the feds who constructed the worldview you are spoonfed realized a narrative of "literal genocide" was rhetorically unable to cope with the lack of evidence?

              • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                There are firsthand accounts of human rights abuses taking place against the Uyghur people on Xinjiang. The Chinese fucking government reported a 60% decline in birthrates in certain Uyghur-majority regions in the province between 2015 and 2018. If that doesn't scream forced sterilization then I don't know what does.

                Also, cultural genocide is still genocide definitionally.

                • duderium [he/him]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Show me the pictures dude. The genocide’s been going on for decades and western tourists have been free to visit Xinjiang during that period, so it should be easy to find Gaza-style devastation there, right?

                • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Also, cultural genocide is still genocide definitionally.

                  Not according to the Western diplomats who argued against cultural genocide being included in the UN Genocide Convention but... Go off?

                • brain_in_a_box [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  There are firsthand accounts of human rights abuses taking place against the Uyghur people on Xinjiang.

                  There are first hand accounts of human rights abuses taking place against Chinese people in the USA, I guess America is genociding the Chinese.

                  he Chinese fucking government reported a 60% decline in birthrates in certain Uyghur-majority regions in the province between 2015 and 2018. If that doesn't scream forced sterilization then I don't know what does.

                  Imagine trying to make this argument in a serious court.

        • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          wow you really are so brainwashed that literally nothing could change your mind because you aggressively seek to ignore reality when it doesn't match up with what you think you know

        • Flaps [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          How do you want people here to take you seriously when this is how you react to someone providing extra info regarding the UNs position when it comes to Taiwan

    • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      The unofficial consensus between the KMT/PRC was that Taiwan and China are one country. The NED-funded DPP has been trying to break that status quo, though.

      • HexaSnoot [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        What's the NED and DPP? I've been staying away from the news. I'll look them up in the future.

        • Catradora_Stalinism [she/her, comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          NED is the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization founded by the CIA specifically to allow them to publicly fund any org they please. If its funded by the NED, its controlled by the CIA.

          DPP Is the newer ruling party of the rogue chinese province of taiwan. they're idiots trying to claim governance over the mainland.

        • zerfuffle@lemmy.ml
          ·
          1 year ago

          DPP is Taiwan's current governing party. Rather tight ties with the US government funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Also, I implicitly distrust any source which depicts Taiwan as part of the PRC.

      Show

      What did the RoC Marine Corps do to you?

    • CarmineCatboy [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      that's a healthy way to distrust the US and chinese governments i guess