you know how people, especially on twitter, try and share their absolute dogshit takes without a care for humility, just unbribled stubbornness
everybody seem so full of themselves and I just can't bring myself to trust anyone unless they show a hint of doubt over their own thoughts, and that's flat out absent from most social media
idk, I don't think I did a good jb describing what I feel, it's hard to accurately put into words
but like, do you have stuff you usually keep to yourself, because like you know the thought isn't well rounded or something and you don't want to say something incorrect. or like interrogations about stuff you can't really answer by yourself
How many people actually know enough about China? Everyone here knows plenty of U.S. history (+ their own Western country if they aren't a yank) and can read, write and speak its language. Its culture is everywhere, people here follow its news and they roughly know the mentality of various U.S. population groups. Can anyone say the same about China? You'd have to live there in order to consume as much media about China the way we do about the U.S.
Personally, I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that I simply like China as a country
for all it's flaws and contradiction, I like reading about it, and I'm curious to see how it's gonna develop. I think I will eventually learn the language.
I know it is not any helpful for you, but it i a sentiment I wanted to share :)
there's at least one less now. they just nationalized the businesses of one for corruption and put him in jail
Ok? Western countries occasionally arrest rich people for blatant corruption as well.
when was the last time a western billionaire went to jail? and I ask that because we both know no western assets were nationalized
I think that fact is an essential check on anyone's optimism about China, but I don't think it settles the matter entirely.
You aren't the only one and I will admit my own reservations, but as I have decolonialized and removed myself from Western propaganda, those reservations have shrunk to the size of a thimble. I have capacity for critical support.
Have you gone and read what Deng Xiaoping said in his speeches? What do you have reservations about? Have you read what Xi Jinping said and upholds? Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is socialism. It is a socialism that develops within capitalism and uses it as a lever; it lets capitalists exist, but not control the economy. https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/ I think articles like these: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/to-uphold-socialism-we-must-eliminate-poverty/ say it all. A good review of China's Xi and the direction it is taking, for starters, and from the enemy's mouth, is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/i9l1v0/faith_in_the_coming_collapse_of_china_is_shaking/ Since it's from 'the economist', overlook any nonsense like "Nothing good, say critics at home and abroad. He has brought reforms that liberalised the economy to a halt and has smothered market forces, returning to a top-heavy state-dominated growth model which looks distinctly creaky. Private companies have rushed to set up party committees with an increasing say over strategy. Their once-swashbuckling bosses have adopted lower profiles. The title of a recent book by Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute, an American think-tank, sums up the worries: “The State Strikes Back”." In which 'nothing good' means 'nothing bad' because all he describes is literally stifling the right-leanings of the Party and society. Anyways, just pop around r/sino and read Deng and Xi as well as seeing how the market is controlled by the State and you'll see how 'Marxism changed China; China changed Marxism'. I think it's also important to mention that 2020/2021 is China's zero poverty target, while 2049/2050 is China's 'moderately prosperous society' target, which means a modern, developed to the extent of the great capitalist countries, in which everyone enjoys, yes, a moderately prosperous life, and is corresponding with the end of the first stage, aka socialism. Xi really talks about this and it's not just for show, you can tell he's read and he knows. Playing within capitalism is risky, and Deng knew it, but I think generally the direction they are going in is spectacular.
Lots of people wanting to decide whether China is good or bad, very few actual analyses that are relevant to their audience. I don't get the impression that people stanning or attacking China (on this site) have any damn clue what it's like, what the internal political workings are, what social currents are at play, etc. Just idealism.
They're just another empire, in the same category as the USA, really. In a few hundred years, we will probably view the 20th century as an unusual period, because it was a time of Chinese weakness. Should you support them because they are a rival to America? IDK I'm pretty sure America's dominance will naturally fade due to internal contradiction and changing world conditions, so I don't see why you would.
Despite my memeing, I honestly am unsure of why we should uphold the legacy of Stalin. Like his theoretical contributions aren't groundbreaking, his statescraft wasn't amazing, the economic gains he contributed probably would have come from any Leninist in his position, even the war effort wasn't him single-handedly taking on the Nazis. I dunno but he just seems banal at best and honestly kinda shitty at worst. Def have an open mind about him but....well meh honestly.
What you’re basically correctly doing is removing the “great man of history” aspect out of the narrative, never a bad idea.
One helpful exercise is -- instead of asking if some person/country/policy is good in a vacuum -- asking if it was good compared to what came before it, if it was good compared to what else was happening in the world at the time, and if it was good compared to other realistic options. The basic premise is you can't go from a terrible society to a utopia overnight, so we really should be judging people/countries/policies on how much they move the ball forward compared to how much they realistically could have moved the ball forward.
For Stalin, this would mean comparing the USSR under him to Imperial Russia and all the problems created by WWI, something like ~17 capitalist countries invading, and the Russian Civil War (in short, none of this was a good time); comparing the USSR under him to contemporary peer countries (other major powers in of the period, with some allowance for the fact that they were more industrialized and didn't go through post-WWI invasions and civil wars); and comparing his actions to what else he realistically could have done.
I don't think he comes out looking too bad after that sort of analysis, especially if one looks at the positives and not just the negatives.
Sometimes I wonder if I jump to violence too quickly, wouldn't surprise me given my history, but the only people who ever call me out on it are complete turn-the-other-cheek pacifists. Leads me to think "of course they would say I'm too eager to start swinging, they think violence is never ok". Makes it hard to tell
Well that was rambly as fuck...
Well that was rambly as fuck…
Real Joe Biden energy right here
You need more "c'mon mans" in there. Just giving some notes here.
I'm not from the states, so this all feel all the more alien to me, but I really feel you. I see a lot of contradicting POVs online, and I can only assume it's even worse irl
The 90's weren't the end of history
My fashion sense strongly disagrees
Like you think the whole leftist idea of communism could come into fruition but be an impermanent thing or like you think there would be a different thing that people would symbolically call communism out of pattern association?
But how can the endgoal of communism have any contradictions if it is, at least in theory, the ultimate system? That's what boggles the mind, like the very concept of it just seems so utopian that if it had any contradictions then it wouldn't be real communism, it would have to be something else.
OK, so I will ask questions and see if I get a better understanding of it.
Communism is not the ultimate system nor an end goal, just a possible next step.
It seems to me that if a communist society is classless and the moving force of history is class conflict, then communism does mean the end of history.
New contradictions will always appear when old ones wither.
It is my understanding that contradictions arise from class conflict and that a communist society is classless and therefore cannot have contradictions. Like in your example, the contradictions arise from the conflict between two classes of masters and slaves, sharecroppers and plantation owners, segregated whites and blacks. In communism you're not gonna have that so you're not gonna have contradictions. Is this a misunderstanding?
I think it's probably possible. I'm completely certain we can't just replace the state with nothing. I have ideas what could replace it, but I'm very, very uncertain about those.
I'm just spitballing but a "state" in Marx's terms is explicitly a tool of class control, is it not? I think that opens up the door for, like, free associations of people in the higher stage to build institutions that were might call a government but Marx wouldn't call a state? I might be wrong here tho
A state is an entity with a monopoly on legitimate violence, which uses that monopoly to create and enforce laws.
Getting rid of the state is a good thing, but power still exists and has a tendency to concentrate, and the natural outcome of this in agrarian civilizations seems to be states. There needs to be some other method of allocating power, which is resistant to concentration, or we end up in this same mess again.
Is that Marx's definition, though? Did he work from Hobbes' definition? Seems like the kind of thing Marx would be pretty specific about. Anyone in here read theory that can tell us?
Marx considers the state to be the tool of class oppression, under capitalism the bourgeoisie uses the state to oppress us. Under socialism we will use the state to oppress them. In Marxist thought the state "withers away" as it is no longer needed as a tool of oppression. Once we are free from class, the state ceases to exist in that sense. However, it would still exist for its administrative and organizational purposes, Marx no longer considers it a "state" because it's not being used for oppression and infers no political or class advantages on its members. The person you are replying to is using the state in more of an anarchist sense.
Right so my original point - that you could have a governmental body without class oppression after the class war - is fundamentally correct?
This is more or less how Marx, Engels, Lenin etc. viewed it. Whether it's fundamentally correct is hard to know, because of the nature of our interconnected world it's impossible for the state to wither away while other countries remain capitalist so we have no frame of reference. To Marx this was very much a thing that would have to be solved once it happened, he didn't spend a great deal of time writing on what communism could or would actually look like. Preferring to focus on the now and the past for analysis. I know this sounds a bit wishy-washy sorry, but yes you're correct in that is how Marx viewed it.
My best idea is a network of narrowly defined task-specific trust/expertise hierarchies (you trust your doctor's expertise on health, your doctor trusts someone else as a bigger expert, eventually there's a panel of medical researchers that set the policy all the doctors are following). There are so many different ones of these structures that there's no room for one to start growing new responsibilities and powers for itself.
The phenomena on social media you mentioned where where everyone proclaims their opinions (whether wrong or not) with full confidence is so disorienting. If you can't scrutinize them because you don't know either or you aren't paying attention, one naturally tends to agree with someone speaking with authority. Having hundreds of anonymous people do this to your brain in the span of an hour over text makes it so hard to call bullshit. I mean I still do but thinking about it now makes me realize I have no strategy for it. Idk how many stupid opinions or falsehoods I've swallowed whole on Reddit.
UBI is a compromise. So is universal health care. It's still good, imo. And I think universal health care, where it's implemented, has generally made people more amicable to further social programs, not less. But uncertain, as always!
Most UBI proposals in the US are attempts to defund social programs. You get money directly, but it's less than what the programs were worth. The UBI proposals that involve dumping social programs get more capital funding behind them, and thus more visibility.
It's entirely possible to design a good UBI program. Hell, it's possible to force something within spitting distance of market socialism with just UBI + graduated wealth tax. But the underlying power dynamics don't go away just because we found a way to phrase something in terms of taxes and credits. If a program gives workers enough of a social safety network that it becomes easier for them to use strike bargaining, capital will resist it - it doesn't matter whether it's government health insurance or just giving people enough money to live on. The rhetoric and justifications might change, but the actual objection is still about power.
So I don't think which of UBI or M4A or universal food stamps or whatever is a huge difference strategically. You'll get as good of a program as you have the bargaining power to force the program to be good, regardless of which. Maybe you'll get a few fence-sitters on your side if you pick their favorite, but gathering up enough bargaining power in the first place is the more important part of the question.
If less people work, than striking is a less effective political tool. This may or may not actually be an issue.
We (as in Westerners) should oppose sanctions and support the Korean peace process as one between North and South Korea, without any American interference.
Going further than that is silly.
I think it's also reasonable to believe that basically anything we hear about the DPRK from American media is propaganda. I don't need to know what the reality of the situation is to know I'm being lied to about it.
Why would "going further than that" be silly? Like, you should learn about countries and their socialist projects. Who cares if you can't get some super specific insider look at the "negatives". You can at least learn about the major things the government does. They have their own news site with English translations.
Obviously learning more about North Korea is fine, I never opposed that. I meant going further in terms of support. From all I've read about it (mostly The Korean War: a History and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea), post-1994 famine North Korea has lost almost all semblance of socialism.
How? Like what has it done to "lose its semblance of socialism"? Point out something specific. There isn't even a trace of capitalist exploitation in anything I've read about the country.
Well yeah, I support peace in Korea and ending sanctions of course. Thats a no brainier.
Actually learn stuff about the country. Everything major about it is great. The only thing that puts people off is Kim being the leader or whatever but who cares? He's just a figurehead guy who is in the spotlight because of western media, not because he's such an important part of the government. The DPRK has a planned economy, a five-million member civilian militia that is rooted in the party, lots of free things like housing and education. There is almost nothing to actually criticize about the country without learning about minutiae. They're probably the "most socialist" country in the world right now. And they were even able to make nukes lol, like who can even do that these days? And correct me if I'm wrong, but it is now the oldest existing socialist country in the world, isn't it?
Yeah, I suppose it is. Unless you maybe include this weird Belarus place which I didn't even realize claimed to be socialist until like last week or something.
Woah, it is, I was about to say it is the PRC, but the DPRK was founded in 1948. Impressive.
Would anyone really choose to do certain unpleasant but necessary jobs (garbage collector, janitors, farm labor in places where it hits 110°+ regularly) if it weren't a matter of life or death? Like, some jobs need to be done and can't yet be automated, but how much would you need to pay someone to willingly subject themselves to them? Or are there actually people out there who enjoy (or don't mind) doing those jobs?
If I was paid a decent wage, I would be a janitor or a garbage collector in a heartbeat, i don't find cleaning and maintenance work all that boring, and garbage collection is a half day job
A lot of those jobs could be made more pleasant with a good standard of living and low hours. I genuinely like cleaning bathrooms and carrying heavy objects; wouldn't want to do that 8 hours a day for barely enough money to exist in our society, but a few hours a day and my current standard of living? Yeah.
I hate farm labor but I assume it's someone's jam.
I like digging holes and day drinking so it's either farm labor or field geology for me.
People would do jobs because they serve their community.
In capitalism, automation keeps costs down. Under socialism, it reduces the amount of work necessary to achieve the same result.
No one would have to spend 40 hours a week doing it. Imagine the amount of labour necessary for our standard of living, divided amongst the numbers of available workers. Consider how much of out "economy" is just bullshit industries like finance, marketing, consultation, etc. I'd spent 4 hours a week doing almost anything, if it paid the same as 40, and let me spend the rest of the week fucking around.
Like woofwoof, I sort of enjoy handling filth. I can see myself working full-time janitor in our utopia. When I was working fast-food, I was handling most of the gross stuff, because my coworkers didn't like to, and hearing them sigh in relief was enough for me, honestly
They don't have to be done under the brutal conditions of capitalism. Look at farm labor - those jobs would probably still suck but they would suck a lot less if you weren't busting your ass on threat of being fired and you could take a break and just hang out in the shade or in the A/C and drink somethin cold and had a standard of living like a computer programmer
•
Imagine if jobs were actually rewarded in proportion to the effort they took, rather than according to how much institutional power it gives the worker. WoofWoof91he/him/any pronoun•
What are you, some kind of communist? Owlhe/him/any pronoun•
A lot of those jobs could be made more pleasant with a good standard of living and low hours. I genuinely like cleaning bathrooms and carrying heavy objects; wouldn’t want to do that 8 hours a day for barely enough money to exist in our society, but a few hours a day and my current standard of living? Yeah.
I hate farm labor but I assume it’s someone’s jam. PureIdeology•
I like digging holes and day drinking so it’s either farm labor or field geology for me. WoofWoof91he/him/any pronoun•
If I was paid a decent wage, I would be a janitor or a garbage collector in a heartbeat, i don’t find cleaning and maintenance work all that boring, and garbage collection is a half day job
This made me rememember a great passage from Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread' that says exactly the same: It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a scientific laboratory And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory work is better; it is easy to introduce small ameliorations, of which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because the most absurd waste of human energy is its distinctive feature.
Nevertheless, now and again, we already find some factories so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day and if every one had the possibility of varying it according to his tastes.
Look at this factory, unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. It is perfect as far as regards sanitary and intelligent organization. It occupies fifty English acres of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner’s cottage, and the glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In this factory are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much as twenty tons; and when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace, whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do not guess its presence save when its great jaws open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who now here, now there, open a tap, causing immense cranes to move by pressure of water in the pipes."
In addition to the other good responses you have, most of the early communist thinkers (not sure how this idea holds up today) beloved that under communism, workers would change roles pretty often, that one week you might be working in administration, then in a factory, then somewhere else.
It was part of the reason that marxists argue that after a long enough period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “state” as we understand it would cease to exist - if every worker is also a member of the administration, with people constantly moving in and out, then essentially everyone is the state. And if everyone is the state, it’s no longer a state (because in this analysis the whole point of a state is for one class to subjugate another class, like the bourgeois state we currently live under exists to subjugate the proletariat).
All this is to say, in a future communist society someone might be like “oh man, I’m on garbage collection this week!”, but it wouldn’t be your indefinite, soul crushing existence.
that one week you might be working in administration, then in a factory, then somewhere else.
Yeah, but you know, skills and experience are a thing
in some cases most leftists would argue they can be a detriment - the more people that stick around working in administrative positions, the more the bureaucracy grows and ossifies.
I’m not an expert on the matter, but I’d say the thinkers that were putting forward these ideas were of the opinion that under communism we’d be working with an educated and organised proletariat, capable of building individual and organisational knowledge to the point where any member of the class could easily jump from one role to another. At least in terms of the day-to-day running of society and production, obviously you’d need medical specialists, but even in that industry, your average worker could do admin or maintenance etc.
Now if you want to have a conversation about whether that was perhaps idealistic/utopian thinking on their part, that’s another matter. I could see the argument on both sides, but the idea that a liberated working class, organising and educating itself, couldn’t reach that level of general skill isn’t completely unrealistic. And although we try to remain materialists, on some level leftists have to have SOME idea that things can be better in the future, otherwise why the hell are we even bothering, lol.
Even if you could get every worker to be skilled in the use of every tool, or machine, or computer program or whatever else for every job, skills get rusty if you don't use them. And with experience comes speed, someone who has fixed trucks for years will be faster at it than someone who has done it for a week.
Even things like cleaning, which some (incorrectly) see as a no skill job, benefits from experience. Have you seen someone who rarely cleans floors try and mop something? It takes them ages and they usually mop themselves into a corner.Ok, but if you have a section of society that spends their lives mopping floors, and a section of society that spends their lives making lofty decisions about everybody’s life in that society, you have essentially just created a new form of class society. How do you square that circle?
Ok, but if you have a section of society that spends their lives mopping floors, and a section of society that spends their lives making lofty decisions about everybody’s life
Dunno how the fuck you got that from what I said
I haven't started reading it myself yet, but I think Towards a New Socialism addresses this and other related topics. The authors have made it available for free online. I'm probably massively oversimplifying but I think authors show pretty definitively you can use a combo of labor vouchers and socially necessary time plus a sort of "market" for jobs based on necessity and whether there's enough people working on it. Basically you get central planning without the command and authoritarianism associated with "making" people do work they don't want to.
Legitimately everything. Almost.
I think that a philosophical position of accepting deep uncertainty is the most humble and correct way to go about the world. Anyone who claims to have all the answers wrapped up in one neat little package is lying—to you, and to themselves.
The world is stochastic, and complex, and the future is inherently unpredictable. While we are probably safe to believe firmly in some basic truths, they should be few in number and constantly, honestly re-evaluated.
Be wary of those who are extremely certain, because they likely haven’t done much meaningful self-crit lately.
Species have a right to exist. Beings have a right to their basic needs. Much more becomes difficult to say with certainty, so it’s better not to try, and to accept that us short-lived beings cannot possibly develop entirely comprehensive understandings of the huge, massive world in the little time we are given.
:af-heart:
Whether human beings can ever actually live together in large-scale settled societies without class distinctions.
I've heard a 70-something anthropologist argue that human nations can't exist beyond ~20,000 people; anything more than that becomes mass society, in which class is inherent 🤷♂️
In a recent chapo episode Adam McKay talks about reading that Homosapiens beat Neanderthals by using storytelling to organize more people. I think a lot of theorizing about socioeconomic structures is trying to do a similar thing but with class, so I think that 20,000 number is not fixed, in the same way.
Ya, that’s interesting! I’d only offer that Homo sapiens didn’t so much beat Neanderthals, as co-exist and interbreed for thousands and thousands of years before ‘pure’ Neanderthals went extinct :)
And I think the point this anthropologist was trying to make is that there’s an evolutionary unit called a ‘nation’, which is different from how nations are modernly conceptualized in the age of nation-states
The premise is that true 'nations' are federalized inter-personal relationships. Like, how in the ‘nation’ called Canada, there were ~500 Indigenous nations. The state-building process of colonial canada required nationalism, so it generated a false sense of nationhood that couldn’t possibly, truly exist across so much space, and so many disparate people. Not in terms of a ‘federation of real human relationships’ sort of way. Which is why people ae so extremely different in different regions, with fundamentally different politics, language, and cultural worldviews.
That’s the theory, anyway. That, just as there’s a limit on how many people a human can have relationships with, so is there a limit on the size of a ‘nation’. Which is why there are distinct ‘national’ identities throughout the state of California say, or even the boroughs of New York, and why there seems to be so much conflict between the 20,000 ‘nations’ that make up the united states.
It’s largely a pedantic argument around what ‘nation’ means, I suppose, but I think there’s some value in it :)
The Soviet Union managed to get pretty close to that didn't they?
I guess it's also important to distinguish between economic well-being (poverty, etc.) and class. There were definitely places in the USSR that were much poorer than others, but were there people who had more inherent power other than politicians and people famous for their work?
Ahh, yes, the pitfalls of intellectual honesty when debating against ignorant confidence! Much of the course of history has been defined by that dynamic, haha
The whole age of consent discourse has been thoroughly fucked by libertarians wanting to fuck kids, and there’s so much to dissect there.
The big thing is, there are all the contradictions of American Puritanism. Children are to be sheltered, innocent, asexual snowflakes. But they’re also sexualised to hell and back, especially at the boundary of 17-18.
It reminds me a bit of the whole drinking age thing. America has a huge drinking culture, but it’s really puritanical about when you can start drinking. Just giving a person under 21 alcohol is a crime. For them to have it, again, is a major no-go. Yet in other countries, NZ in particular, it’s normal for kids to try their parents’ alcohol, or to experiment in high school. Some parents even buy their kids alcohol, and it’s legal for them to do so.
But just raising it is, again, weird af, because no one wants pedo apologia in their community (except libertarians), and a whole lot of the potential discourse can veer into that really quickly.
There’s also the (honestly ridiculously high) amount of CSA around, and no one wants to subject CSA survivors to that sort of discourse out of the blue.
The fact age of consent laws have become so taboo to talk about among left circles is pretty stupid, imo. There is still a lot of work to be done about them in America specifically and the fact it is so taboo really makes dealing with that injustice a much harder task.
In "commiefornia" the "left dreamland" they still dont even have romeo and juliet laws meaning an 18 year old having sex with a 17 year old can be charged with a crime - it's extremely dumb and basically leaves children at the mercy of the police state for doing things that are absolutely normal for teens to do. Then the fact they were charged with a "sex crime" makes it even more taboo and the facts dont even end up mattering. This has been a thing for literally decades and still there has been no real political will to change it which is disgusting.
Legal adulthood is largely nonsensical in general - the amount of things that are technically criminal either before or after an arbitrary number (which is largely inconsistent) feels designed purely to control and oppress. I have a friend who lost his scholarship and got into legal trouble for being behind the bar at a party with a bunch of college kids at it. Every single person there was an "adult" but not the arbitrary number deemed adult adult and so he was punished for it. The leeway the police have with the amount of charges he could have gotten is some psycho shit as well - his entire life could have been ruined over a generic party entirely of adults.
I wont even get into the cringe "wokeness" of some on the left when it comes to like 5 year age gaps between 20 year olds because those people are as moronic as the people who write these laws. Puritan cringe shit.
The fact age of consent laws have become so taboo to talk about among left circles is pretty stupid, imo.
I think it's a good tactical choice to just leave that alone until we're a hell of a lot closer to socialism. One thing that can kill outsider political movements is trying to push every possible policy change at once instead of focusing on a few of the most important ones, getting that done, and building from there.
so, never?
You act as if putting children in prison for having sex is a touchy subject when in reality it is something that isnt done in literally every other developed country in the world. Romeo and Juliet laws are the least controversial thing there fucking is and still people like you pretend it is some extremely taboo subject. You are exactly the person I was talking about.
In America they can and do charge children with "manufacturing child pornography" for sending pictures of themselves to other teens. Something a majority of the non-incel teen population has done at some point. This is not a reality in even America-lite Canada as it has been very obviously decided that is not the intention of anti-child sexual abuse laws. This is not a taboo subject. Stop treating it like it is.
You act as if putting children in prison for having sex is a touchy subject when in reality it is something that isnt done in literally every other developed country in the world.
There are a lot of things that are touchy subjects in the U.S. even though they're ordinary everywhere else in the world. That's what we're working with.
In America they can and do charge children with “manufacturing child pornography” for sending pictures of themselves to other teens.
This is bad and we should fix it, but it's one narrow corner of the topic and -- realistically, in the U.S. -- you still have to handle it delicately.
High school kids who have naked pictures of themselves on their phone are committing a felony. Let that sink in.
Absolutely! There are a lot of topics that go by that I don't comment on, even if I do read the threads, on here or on Twitter. It's not necessary to have a take on absolutely everything! Sometimes it's because I don't know enough on the topic, sometimes it's not worth it (China struggle sessions are masturbatory without the post-cum clarity, sorry folks), sometimes because I can't come up with a good phrasing right at that moment.
And that's ok. That confidence you see online is one of the worst habits social media has given people. Loud & confident, with no margin for doubt, is for some reason "inherently correct" to people. Social media makes it worse because there's no verbal doubts or tone of doubt to pick up on.
It gets frustrating, particularly if you recognize a flaw in their statement. After all, they seem so confident. What if they're right and you're wrong? Are you really gonna be a "well ackshually" person? But what if they're giving out bad info, that damages the group he's trying to support? It can get nerve wracking.
I appreciate folks putting qualifiers into their statements, like "as far as I'm aware", "AFAIK", "I could be wrong", etc. If nothing else, it's far more welcoming of discussion. And I appreciate folks willing to say "Oh, I'm wrong, thanks for the info!"
Look for people who seem willing to admit they're wrong or that write in a less declarative manner on social media, and follow them. Because I'm listening to a French Revolution podcast, I'll suggest Mike Duncan as a good example of someone who has a good, welcoming tone to their tweets.
Ah, Comrade Xi. Once, when I was 'too young, too simple, sometimes naive' I thought he was a full-blown capitalist managing the Party (or rather, that the Party itself was) and killing dissidents or whatever propaganda was thrown at him. But honestly, I've realised China is simply the most successful socialist state as of date. For a quick rundown on Xi's actions, check this (highly Western perspective, so you'll find every two paragraphs the guy who wrote the article for 'The Economist' chimes in and says 'this is bad because, uh, China bad and censorship'): https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/i9l1v0/faith_in_the_coming_collapse_of_china_is_shaking/ Honestly, I think he's just returning to Deng. Check Deng's complete works in here: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/ Stuff like these https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/to-uphold-socialism-we-must-eliminate-poverty/ I think he needs to be read more, he's misunderstood, but he applied Marxism perfectly and China developed incredibly fast, faster than even the USSR, and won't fall, the Chinese will not sell out, poverty is near zero (2020/2021 is the target for zero), the crisis never affected China as they did the USA or other global powers, and so much more.
But yeah, I do doubt. I always do. I'm always searching for more. Sometimes I think I'm being too optimistic, but honestly I like to trust the Chinese leadership because it's the only one we've got left regarding big countries that can actually make a change, and I feel they're going in a right direction.
