Even from an anti-China perspective, this is a ludicrous statement. Xi has executive authority, but he only has it because he has the support of the Central Committee, which itself only has power thanks to the support of the rest of the national government. Xi is not a wizard who can make a billion people bend to his whims and he cannot wrestle them into submission. If you want to develop an anti-China position that is more useful (true or not), you still need to accept the basic fact that states are run by classes. So the question is, is China run by bureaucrats, private capitalists, or the people?

You don’t need to answer that to me. My point is just that autocracy in the sense of one person controlling the state is genuinely a myth, whether it’s Xi, Trump, Hitler, or King Henry. They were all supported by and ultimately needed to answer to their respective states’ ruling classes (which themselves subjugated at least one other class and might be working cooperatively with one or more other classes).

but I also say that I still don’t like the Chinese state because I don’t consider that (and ML in general) a form of worker-owned means of production (whether or not you agree)

“Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production” is a syndicalist distortion of socialism. Workers should control the means of production, as in their operation should be based on popular consensus, but “ownership” suggests something like cooperatives (or, you know, syndicates), which operate on the same market system and a permutation of petite-bourgeois races to the bottom that we see under capitalism.

The people must control the state, “win the battle of democracy,” and via their control of the state dictate what happens to the means of production. Specific ownership is a secondary concern, though I agree with what I assume your position is, that the bourgeoisie have been granted too much power and authority in China.

Are you a free speech absolutist? Can I post your address with a rough outline of your schedule and say that you deserve to be murdered? Not telling anyone to do it, mind you, merely that you “have it coming.”

I don’t think that I (or anyone) should be able to do that, though I also believe that the process for “restricting” speech in this manner should be arrived at democratically, i.e. society itself should decide what is and isn’t permissible to say. Am I authoritarian on that basis?

No, they are saying that you’re diverting a conversation from who is correct to whether or not your interlocutor was rude to you as a waiver for disregarding the substance of what they said. You can disagree, but presenting yourself as having not been courted appropriately is not going to be taken seriously.

I do actually agree with you that they should speak more gently. Their current behavior is a maladaptive coping mechanism from being inundated with literally thousands and thousands of Redditors who say mostly the same things and won’t flinch before likening them to a Nazi or something.

There is no genocide in Xinjiang nor, as the accusation used to go, in Tibet. Frivolously accusing an enemy of the west that it’s committing genocide, the crime of crimes, when those accusations mainly feed into narratives used to try to balkanize that enemy of the west does present a certain impression. I have no opinion on your character, but I would gently suggest that if you don’t have a strong opinion then it doesn’t make sense to go around making confident assertions, as you clearly did in the case of Xinjiang (because you surely know the argument being suggested by Cowbee and company is not that the PRC is committing genocide and that such a genocide would be good).

Your statement on Taiwan is perfectly consistent with how you characterize yourself, however we might disagree, because it was expressed as supporting a side in an issue where there is some consensus on what the sides represent, though obviously I and other communists will say that if you want an independent Taiwan, you I guess want a global revolution because in the current world there is no possibility for an independent Taiwan, like there is no possibility for an independent Tibet, because it will either be part of China or it will be controlled by the US.

I mean… I don’t really have to reply to literally anything else here. You’re actually insane.

How so? Perhaps you misread my comment (I think you missed the last “to”). Or you can just say that I’m mentally ill and therefore not worth the most basic level of conversation.

I think Trump’s pretty bad too, which is why I’m glad the Dems are prioritizing being strong opposition to him instead of capitulating (wait . . .) or getting distracted punching left at Mamdani over non-issues (shit . . .)

I think that Trump 2 is starkly different from Trump 1. I maintain my interpretation of Trump 1 and happily await someone explaining to me a basis for predicting Trump 2’s methodological shift. I personally really struggle to understand it unless it’s truly that his brain was broken by losing in 2020 and he became the Joker. Perhaps it’s just that the actual fascists finally were able to figure out how to more effectively control him/convince him to cooperate, since he was notoriously unruly and refused to defer to allies who knew what they were doing (and this is part of what made him so much less threatening from a long-term standpoint than he could have been, not that he didn’t present problems).

Looking at the context of this conversation (why are you even back here? why did you even remember it? did you think this was a great chance to gloat about how Momala would have made everything okay?) I think it’s more productive to try to understand how Republicans generally have taken this hard right shift, and it’s not because Trump is a wizard who can make everyone do what he wants, we have seen him come into conflict with the Republican establishment many times before, but they are backing him on a lot of the more fascist policies (with the exception of some of the courts). It’s also worth noting that the Democrats, infamously Schumer, are extremely capitulatory to him, and obviously some fascist policy was done under their lead, like with Gaza, but remembering discourse from when I was writing, I can infer that you were arguing that the extermination of just the Palestinians was the lesser evil, so I guess that doesn’t matter. Anyway, my original point is that the threat isn’t coming fundamentally from Trump, but from the Republican Party and neoliberalism generally, and I see no reason to think that is less true now.

In my personal life, I’ve actually been really pleasantly surprised to see former “lesser evil” types realize that the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed because they are ultimately collaborators with the Republicans who will never, ever actually solve the problems producing fascist threats (and also do really awful things in their own right). I think they learned the correct lesson from the last several years, but of course diehards remain and will act like this is a moral victory for them somehow, when Kamala was adopting Trump 1 policy and even worse and Dems keep saying “we lost, I guess we weren’t reactionary enough” and shifting ever-further right.

I truly hope that one day you realize that the Dems are more opposed to genuine leftism than to Republicans and have and will work to suppress it while protecting the Republican establishment. If you truly hate Republicans and not just Trump in particular, you need to look beyond the Dems and beyond the tip of your nose (a single election cycle).

This newspaper has a hard on for downplaying north Korean aggression.

Such a fucking chickenhawk you are. “Aw, these authors want to BUST MASSIVE LOADS all over KOREAN STRONGMEN. They want to be TOPPED by KIM JONG UN!” literally just because they want the peaceful reunification of their nation instead of a war for the US to have effective control of a land border with China.

This author makes every possible attempt to downplay North Korean aggression, blaming it on SK or the US every time.

From what you share I see quoting activists and trying to defuse stories that seem very improbable because there is a long history of SK and US media just making shit up about NK and it being gobbled up uncritically. But please, tell me about unicorns and state-mandated haircuts, it’ll be a good use of both our time. The kids eat the rats and the rats eat the kids.

Edit: Oh, but to answer the main question I missed:

It’s gotten to the point where Korean intelligence officials are telling reporters to hold off on relaying reports about North Korean troops from Ukrainian officials until they receive third-party confirmation

Because it’s talking about intelligence officials talking directly to reporters, my feeling is that it’s an anonymous source, though it should definitely have made this clear.

That would be irrelevant because it’s not SK’s “free press,” it’s their government agents issuing this warning.

Seoul is right in the headline.

And in the article (right at the top, repeatedly) it’s not SK press, it’s SK intelligence agents saying this. The headline wouldn’t say “Seoul” and then have it be a private entity; “Seoul” is a metonym for the SK government. People only conflate individual institutions with the government when it’s China and some Chinese business does something stupid but not illegal.

Bernie is a bastard, but I think it’s backwards thinking to blame voters rather than candidates. In a nominal democracy, it’s the job of the candidates to appeal to people to get votes. If there is any merit to this idea, we must conclude that the failure was the Harris campaign for not generating the confidence needed to vote for her – which is a very expected outcome when you’re running as reactionary a campaign as she did, calling the wall a “good idea” and so on.

In most lemmy instances, the default feed is a mix of that instance’s and popular threads from other instances. Participating in such a thread that you find spontaneously is therefore not anything resembling “brigading,” even if other people on your instance also see it spontaneously and participate.

and very nearly succeeded

How can you say this? Do you think that there’s some artifact in the Capitol that grants the power of Legitimate Governance? Do you think a dipshit protest-turned-walking-tour where the cops only saw fit to fire on like one person and only a couple of cops were killed by the rioters is enough to reverse an election in the country that is the global superpower? The country that overthrows governments abroad with much greater violence every few years?

Is it possible that a couple of politicians would have been beaten to death? Yeah, in a somewhat different world, but the rioters did not begin to approach doing anything in the same dimension as a “successful coup”. There was no connection between what they did and what a group would need to do to take over the country, and imagining there was even anything in the Capitol that could be used for a bit of leverage (like if some pols got caught), that still wouldn’t be a coup and the feds would send SWAT in to blow some brains out.

It’s just classic American aggrievement politics, the hogs put on a show for you so now it’s “1/6” like it’s a new 9/11 combined with the fucking burning of the White House in 1814. It was never going to amount to anything on the magnitude that you’re asserting, or even several orders of magnitude below it. There is no conflict in which like 6 people die (multiple from rank stupidity) that can connect even notionally to the outcome of overthrowing the most powerful country in the world!

Well, unless it’s like a judicial coup or some other situation where people are exercising their political power directly, to be fair. But it’s not like Trump was doing the smarter thing and using executive orders to lay the ground for toppling the government, and even then there are so many barriers he’d need to get over that he didn’t even have the cognitive capacity back then to grapple with.

It’s been happening a lot longer than that, that’s a classic misspelling.

Most of the camps were liberated by the Red Army. I don’t see why you feel the need to say “Evil Nazis” unless it is to mock the idea of Nazis being very evil.

The Soviets did actually have a plan to move the Jewish refugees who were refused homes abroad into a designated Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, but the plan fell through for reasons that I don’t really understand. Maybe just because the land they chose wasn’t good or there was just more momentum behind the project to colonize Palestine (which the USSR supported at a critical juncture before going back to opposing for some reason).

In the modern day, I hate the idea of injecting such a reactionary population of millions into a country that has a more lively left than most (though yes, the left has never controlled the Federation and has its own issues besides) when the Israelis could either carve out a part of Germany for themselves or be put in some of the other reactionary shitholes in Europe like England and Italy, where they probably wouldn’t make the politics any worse than they already are.

The highly racial framing you are using is one that even Hamas rejects. Palestine is an Arab country in the sense that it’s mostly Arab, it is not Arab in the sense of being an ethnostate like Israel. Likewise, the point of conflict here is not that the Israelis are Jews, but that they are former colonizers, aside from the second-class citizen Arab (etc.) Israelis. Jews do alright in Palestine right now.

Even if it just stopped there, the fact that there would be some hate crimes as blowback from the genocide committed by Israel is a much smaller and more manageable problem than having a rogue state launching hellfire missiles indiscriminately at cities.

But I think there are other factors to consider, first among them being that people of Palestine have the much more important jobs of a) reconstruction and b) the extensive trials that will be required, along with their associated fact-finding missions. There’s a lot of shit to do and most of it is for the direct benefit of Palestinians, plus any spite they have can be satisfied by the just convictions of countless Israeli criminals. It’s not like they are some racist savages who won’t be satisfied until the last Jew has been bled dry, contrary to their hasbara depiction. Overwhelmingly, what they want is to live in peace, because so many of them have spent their whole lives living under violence.

So nothing about this seems like it would be an equivalent problem to leveling one of the most densely populated cities in the world, plus all the other shit that is going on. It is, in function, just a refusal to allow any blowback Israelis caused to actually hit them, no matter how many Arabs get slaughtered in the meantime.

I do agree with the other commenter that it would be good for some NATO-sphere country or countries to set aside land and migrate out those non-criminal Israelis who want to leave, but that’s almost certainly not ever going to happen. I acknowledge that it’s possible, but the use of Israelis to these states is as a ranks of a militarist state terrorizing its neighbors. What use would Israelis be to the imperial project in Alberta, Canada?

The donors – the domestic owning class – were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it’s been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they’ve always had, it’s just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.

It’s not a matter of what the owning class “believes” as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are interest groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.

Third parties are never even mentioned in the article. Is all left criticism of Harris “vote-third-party slop”?

What a coincidence!

This is one of those things where we all know what it means but you have deniability if someone calls you out on it. Just say what you mean instead of resorting to dogwhistling.

That polling was mentioned immediately in the article, but it then points to the wealth of issues where the headline is true.

Well, I would argue that that is like 95% where their votes are coming from, basically “This is still the ‘left’ option, I guess,” rather than believing in any sort of positive vision on the part of the Democratic Party (it doesn’t have one).

However, politics isn’t just a 1-dimensional spectrum where things neatly slot into whatever is closest. The fact that they are lurching rightward, the apparent contempt they have for the left, the lack of any meaningful similarity between what a left-wing person wants and what the Democrats will even acknowledge is real (like action on the genocide in Palestine), means that what you are taking as similarity is in many cases difference. Just saying “Fuck you, vote for me because the other guy is worse” is really not a good strategy for getting votes unless you are holding getting votes as secondary to pandering to donors.

Like, do you think a new Republican candidate could just be blatantly pro-choice and not lose one or two dedicated blocs of the Republican voting base, just because “he’s still the farthest right”? Of course not, democracy doesn’t work that way. If you don’t support people on the issues they care about most, a good number of them will tell you to go to hell while the others roll over as always.