Liberal.world read political theory challenge: impossible!
Hexbears, famous for claiming the world is ran by Jewish bankers. It's a thing we do often and consistently. It definitely has happened and you can tell because this person made an image.
They absolutely have picked plenty of fights with me. They’re not fighting for rights, most of them want to be sexually dominated by dictator Xi Jinping.
They got us
The absolute amount of thirsting over Che here tbh.
@FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today is this just you whinging about your literal dozen modlog hits and the fact that somebody got sick enough of your bullshit to send you away for a month?
Show
Who defeated the Nazis? Westerners have been brainwashed into thinking that WW2 was a war against the liberal democratic west.
American hating but can’t bring themselves to admit the Soviets did the heavy lifting
Maybe there's a better metaphor but with lend-lease it's like, okay so if you loan a forklift to the workers who have to do the heavy lifting, you'll then try to take all the credit when they're done with the heavy lifting?
Tbh there's a bit of a case for the Brits since they held off the Nazis in western Europe until America joined the war, then acted as a base of operations for coordinating the D Day landings and they were also important in the North Africa campaign. But tbh Britain mythologises this way too much and I'm really sick of seeing the whole cottage industry this country produces of films about how we won the war
I've been on a big kick of any media that depicts nazis but doesn't mention the communists is probably very bad analysis lately.
Libs dot world just make shit up about us to post and be mad at.
Do they ever actually pick out highly upbeared posts and dunk on those? Somehow I doubt it
Heaven's no, they're too scared to actually visit Hexbear
They might come here and be forced to admit they're lying about us. That kind of cognitive dissonance can be hard to stomach
Thanks to Lemmy, I’m finding out people think socialism is a political agenda and do not understand that any political alignment, whether capitalist ,ommunist, and (in this case) ultra nationalist can have socialist values.
Absolutely birdbrains over there. Complete internalization of socialism meaning when the government does stuff.
"Capitalism can have socialist values"
-Someone with a brain the size of a pecan
I mean state capitalism enacted by a socialist government definitely can have socialist values. Values such as the nationalisation of land, banking, mining and/or industry.
That's obviously not what the person on Lemmy dot world was talking about though.
Oh yeah, I just immediately assumed they're doing the 'nordic socialism' thing, based off all the rest
Yeah and you also get state capitalism whose purpose is is to enrich private monopolies or support privatisation and imperialism, like France between 1950-1970 and the rebuilding of post hot war South Korea.
This label (state capitalism) remains vague and superficial so long as the specific content is not analyzed... Beyond this preliminary reflection, we must concretely describe the state capitalism in question by bringing out the nature and the project of the state concerned, because there is not just one type of state capitalism, but many different ones. The state capitalism of France of the Fifth Republic from 1958 to 1975 was designed to serve and strengthen private French monopolies, not to commit the country to a socialist path.
Korea and Taiwan are the only two successful examples of an authentic emergence in and through capitalism. These two countries owe this success to the geostrategic reasons that led the United States to allow them to achieve what Washington prohibited others from doing. The contrast between the support of the United States to the state capitalism of these two countries and the extremely violent opposition to state capitalism in Nasser’s Egypt or Boumedienne’s Algeria is, on this account, quite illuminating.
- Samir Amin, China 2013.
horseshoe theory is when two systems kill people
Motherfucker, I’m begging you to read a single book about us neocolonialism and the fight against gommunusm
We are federated with your instance, ask us about Tibet, Uyghurs, and Putin!
The Xinjiang thing is incredible. Noted genocide deniers literally the UN human rights office out there denying genocides, amirite liberals?
the craziest thing is all they have to do is lessen their rhetoric and it wouldn't be as blatantly absurd. But the absurdity is the point. It cannot be "hey this is prejudiced policing" it MUST be a super holocaust. Because if China is a rational actor then there is no excuse for completely shutting out any talk of compromise or coexistence
Right? There are legitimate critiques to be made of abuses and unjust treatment. Rounding up random people, detaining them for months, and making them sing bad nationalist songs? Wth? And there's important questions to ask about the counter terrorism actions by states, how public safety and stability should be weighed against the freedom of the people and their agency.
And since that's all complicated and nuanced and also draws western atrocities during the GWOT in to contrast with the PRC's counter-terrorism program in Xinjiang they have to scream Genocide and fervently never learn anything about the situation.
Bring me in on this discussion if they appear here!
I'm no Tibetologist but goddamn you're gonna have trouble finding a person who knows more about pre-annexation Tibet than me.
I got into it with a disaporic Tibetan recently online who didn't know shit about their ancestral country's history and they were playing the ethnicity card (because apparently you can only know about a particular if your parents were born in that country?) We had a back-and-forth, they dodged all the uncomfortable questions... you know how all of that plays out. But anyway, eventually I lost my patience and dished out a long insult that was extremely specific to Tibetan history & culture and to this person's particular brand of nonsense - I knew they wouldn't understand it and that it just looked like a string of weird references but if you happened to know your shit about Tibet then it would have come off as an absolute roasting.
What strange people.
I haven't seen anyone drag "Free Tibet" out for a walk in years.
I was there a month ago and it was fucking great. Free them from what?
Idk. I saw someone clap back on a China Bad free Tibet post saying something like 98% of Tibetans speak Tibetan, how many Indigenous Americans speak their languages and that's been painted on the inside of my skull every since.
Wait, were they arguing that because China didn’t commit cultural genocide like the US did, Tibet should break away, but native Americans don’t have that right because we erased their culture???
They were arguing that Westerns accusing the PRC of destroying Tibetan culture were naked hypocrites acting in bad faith, as there's ample evidence that the PRC has not destroyed Tibetan culture and Westerners should understand that by looking at colonized indigenous cultures in their own regions. Basically; The PRC supports Tibetan culture and that's obvious because Tibetans have retained their language, and it's ridiculous for Americans to throw these accusations when America shows so plainly what genocide really looks like.
That's a great point. Not to mention, it's still called Tibet; good luck finding literally anywhere in the US that is still called what indigenous peoples here called it (unless it's some bastardized anglo translation)
There were excesses that occurred during the re-annexation of Tibet and that included the damage to and destruction of monasteries but it was a low-key civil war, depending on your perspective and how you want to frame it exactly and tbh I don't really care for debating those the terms, and so of course you have the Tibetan elites sheltering in monasteries and the coordination and harbouring of insurgent forces in monasteries - it's not like Tibet had barracks or many other large, permanent buildings out there which people would use as bases of operations.
It's a pity that it played out that way and I'm sure that there were some monasteries that were sacked in reprisal or whatever. War is messy and soldiers aren't necessarily going to care deeply about defending and preserving sites of cultural significance. But by the same token, the Tibetan government at the time chose this path knowing that it would lead to war and they did it willingly so if you're going to talk about death tolls and destruction of monasteries then you also need to weigh the fact that the Tibetan government set the region on a course that virtually guaranteed this sort of death and destruction and they felt as though that was acceptable.
I like to think of myself as being pretty pragmatic about this stuff and I don't have any particular sympathy for proselytising religions or missionary work but if someone is going to decry the destruction of religious sites and the harm that caused Tibet then that's cool and all but this also happened in the Batang Uprising from 1905-1911 which targeted Christians and their churches (which was part of a larger violent struggle against Christianity in this era that gets referred to as the mission cases) but you don't hear people clutching their pearls over that.
What's that? You've never heard of the Batang Uprising and you think that they sorta had it coming because they were importing a religion and it was displacing Buddhism and possibly coercing or forcing people to convert?
Lol okay bro, I'll let the Bönpos know of your concerns about imported religions suppressing the other religions in Tibet and your opposition to the forcible suppression and conversion of other faiths to this imported religion. 🙄
(One of the most reviled figures in Tibetan history is a king who converted from Buddhism to the indigenous religion of Tibet, Bön. Thankfully a Buddhist monk assassinated this king and a famous travelling monk was invited to Tibet to restore Buddhism, which at that point was on the brink of being supplanted by Bön, so everyone* lived happily ever after.
*As long as they were Buddhist and part of the correct school of Tibetan Buddhism)Of course people will cry into their tea over the sacking of a monastery (only when it's done by the Chinese - intra-Tibetan Buddhist monastery sackings get an automatic pass) but they don't give a single fuck about how there are extensive and ongoing efforts to preserve and revive elements of Tibetan culture which were dying out or dead under the feudal order.
It's great that under the CPC Tibetan language is thriving but that's really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to efforts to preserve Tibetan culture.
On the other hand, libs will put their abject lack of dialectical thinking on display when you talk matters of Tibetan history and they'll express their deepest skepticism when you try to tell them that no, Tibetan Buddhism wasn't just this one single club where people held hands and tried to be nice to everyone but instead there were concerted efforts by competing factions to destroy, suppress, and convert rival factions and their practices and monasteries. Obviously this extends to Bön as well. They'll be utterly convinced that this couldn't possibly be true and sometimes they'll even try to convince you that you must be mistaken. Shit's wild.
My understanding is that the Lamaists were absolute monsters and earned everything they got with interest from their brutal treatment of the peasantry, and even the then they were treated pretty mildly. I'm not moved by western liberals "all religions must be accepted at face value and cannot be crushed because they're feudalist slavers" thing.
My take is that it's a bit varied. Tibetan Buddhism is basically the Catholicism of Buddhism - statecraft, absurd amounts of riches accumulated at the top, pretty brutal in terms of dealing with heretics and pagans, subsuming the local traditions and practices into their practices, preaching penitence and a life of austerity from atop gilded thrones and affording lavish lifestyles for the clergy, the institutionalised repression of nuns, taking a very simple and austere religion and turning it into lavish parades and ostentatious building and furnishings to wow people...
But then you also have some monks or lamas that are genuinely good people who do good work and aren't interested in personal gain or a life of luxury, just like what you can find in Catholicism.
You could make an argument that these people still support a fucked theocratic system and that they helped to maintain the good public image of the religious hierarchy and its excesses - I would find that argument compelling. You could also argue that these people were genuinely committed to doing their best by the people and I'd find that argument convincing too.
But yeah, there was tons of abuse and excesses generally amongst the Tibetan religious elite. Assassinations, coups, horse trading for political favours (reincarnations were pretty much exclusively recognised in wealthy and powerful families with the justification that lamas who had accumulated enough merit would be able to choose a "favourable" reincarnation; the contradiction implicit in such a justification being that a "low" birth means a life of immense suffering and deprivation but also it's a theological argument that people who were born as peasants deserved their station in life due to bad karma accrued in previous lifetimes [kinda sorta, but I'm not going to get right into the weeds on the Tibetan Buddhist theological position on how a human reincarnation was perceived because that's a long story]), conflict between schools of Buddhism as they vied for power...
[CW: CSA and SA discussion ahead]
...along with high ranking lamas sometimes taking "consorts", which was really just a religious justification for having a woman or a harem that were enlisted into sex servitude, and lamas taking peasant children (particularly boys) to be dancing boys - basically just a euphemism for child sex slavery.
There's a lot of dirt, both historically and in contemporary times, and that's just an overview of some of it - there's plenty more examples I can rattle off from the top of my head.
At one point I actually had a private audience with the most prominent Nyingma lama in the west at the time. The Nyingma school doesn't have a de jure head like the Gelug school has the Dalai Lama (again, kinda sorta but that's its own long and boring story) but this guy was definitely the figurehead of the Nyingma school in the west; maybe more like the star player of the team moreso than the captain. Anyway, of course all this shit kinda semi comes out about him being a sex pervert. And that's far from being the only case. Samye Ling monastery in Scotland, the first Tibetan Buddhist centre established in the west and known for being a place that attracts high flyer western celebs, is well known for being a hotbed of drug use and sexual abuses which goes right back to its co-founder Chogyam Trungpa.
Then there's all kinds of shit with the Dalai Lama - it used to be popular in airport bookstores and those shitty pop-up bookstores in B-tier malls to have all sorts of books written by the Dalai Lama when in reality he was just leasing his name and image to anyone who was willing to pay for it and he didn't have a hand in writing any of that shit. Or how he rode the wave of islamaphobia and sinophobia in the west amongst his followers while peddling the softer end of doomsday cult bullshit (not Alex Jones-style weapons grade doomsday cult but still). Or when a biographer interviewed him in India and noted that in his quarters there was a rifle - upon being quizzed about this and how it would be perceived by others, the Dalai Lama assured the biographer that it was just an air rifle that he used to scare away birds of prey (hawks? I forget...) while feeding pigeons. How you square the idea that an air rifle is going to shoot far enough to spook a hawk, how pigeons are just going to be hanging around feeding when there's a hawk lurking nearby, how an expert marksman like a Buddhist monk with coke-bottle glasses is going to spot a hawk before the birds do and how he would spot a hawk before it was within striking distance... that's all a matter of faith, I guess?
With "just a simple monk" like this, who needs politicians?There's a big culture of pissing on people's boots and telling them it's raining in Tibetan Buddhism, or maybe more appropriately, pissing on people's heads and calling it a prayer wheel.
It's a rotten religious hierarchy, just like every other one to exist. There are some good people within it, there are plenty of awful people in it. If someone gets a lot from Tibetan Buddhism or they have a beneficial relationship to a lama then I'm glad for them but I have a pretty dim view of Tibetan Buddhism because of how it functions, especially historically, and what happens within the Sangha and how that gets excused and covered up.
I have zero patience for westerners who have this naive, idealised notion of Tibetan Buddhism being literally the ATLA Air Tribe because that's just a fairytale which sells books and speaking tours and shit like that.
have you considered that some people could WANT to be slaves under a feudal class system???
Especially since there was a couple months of viral videos about Tibetan Serfdom and the Dali Lama sucking on some kids tongue.
It's like pulling out a Woodstock 94 shirt, a relic of the past.
I like how lemmy.world has managed to herd almost all of the
freaks on the fediverse into one place. It's Greatawakening . win for Blue Anon.@FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today You're using fascist talking points and embarrassing yourself
It amazes me that libs think that "ACkCHyuaLLY, nAZI StandS foR naTional SOcialisT 🤓" is some groundbreaking, novel, unheard of "secret" fact that not everybody knows already.
We all know what the fuck Nazi stands for. This isn't news. In fact, it's so not news that it's all right-wingers talk about whenever Nazism is brought up.
Unlike rightists, we just don't take what a white supremacist dictator dubs his party at face value because fuckers like Hitler are the kind to lie and manipulate words to serve their evil goals in whichever way seems best to them.
There’s a German cartoon from 1931 called “Das Firmenschild” (literally translates to “the company sign”), which picks up on exactly the supposed socialist character of the Nazi being a ruse to dupe disaffected workers. This shit was obsolete in 1931.
It's this one? It's a good illustration of how incoherent the Nazi party name sounded. National Socialist German Workers' Party. It has 2 left wing signifiers and 2 right wing. It would be like if I named a party in America the "Liberal Republican Conservative Democratic Party against MAGA and Wokeness." Actually now that I type that out that's exactly the kind of party that basic American liberals would want.
I've noticed that liberals (including those in the linked thread) are aware that nazis are only appropriating the term socialist to trick people into thinking they're good and credible. Instead of denying it as you say, they instead use it as a springboard into the point that tankies/AES are doing the exact same cynical appropriation with the terms socialism/communism.
I vibe with that to a degree but libs aren't usually the kind to say shit like "MLs aren't real socialists!!!".
Either way, it's a shitshow over there. They definitely have too many brainworms to handle.
Hey @FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today this you?
Why are you so obsessed with us?
Also why do you support Ukrainian Nazis?
