How does “the majority of history” prove that this specific story is correct?

Or do you just mean, the majority of history proves your ideology correct, which means you now get to make all kinds of unsubstantiated claims without evidence and everyone’s just supposed to believe it?

Not pictured: a single source lmao. Your words mean nothing if you can’t back them up.

Nope, not all of them. Not because they didn’t happen. Because there’s too many to list in a week of non stop writing, which is about a week more than your bad faith requests deserve.

Awfully convenient how everyone always draws this arbitrary, bizarre moral line in the sand about how they can’t provide any evidence for any of their claims about China.

It’s not their job to educate you.

The problem is that folks see these things implemented in the past and say “let’s just do that.” Why can’t we take the good parts and think beyond the rest?

Of course we should! Every instance of socialism should adapt to the specific material conditions. There’s not much reason to think that socialism in developed countries would look the same as socialism is pre-industrial societies.

It’s just that in order to know what worked and what didn’t, it’s necessary to treat those projects as serious, earnest attempts at socialism and to be willing to point out both the positive and negative aspects. And doing that will immediately get you branded as a tankie by .world. Because in practice, tankie doesn’t actually mean that you defend everything any socialist state ever did, it means that you defend anything a socialist state ever did. Thinking critically and trying to learn from the mistakes from the past makes you a tankie.

Dronies have a pathological need to distance themselves from every attempt at socialism (except the ones that failed, which can be upheld as perfect since they never had to implement their vision), which renders them unable to look at the past from an objective standpoint. They are more concerned with making sure everyone knows that they’re “one of the good ones” than they are about studying and learning from the past. Tankies, otoh, are willing to own up to the facts and acknowledge that past projects were genuine attempts, even when they ultimately failed as the USSR did. Of course it would not have failed if it didn’t have its flaws. But you will rarely see a dronie pushing this angle or interrogating the reasons for the failure, because learning from its mistakes is too close to treating it as as serious and legitimate project - far better (and easier!) to just write off the whole thing and push for shit that has only ever existed in your head and has never been tainted by contact with reality.

Every fucking time.

millions more people genocided

That’s quite a claim. If the US is set to genocide millions of people, then as people at risk of being victims of that, surely we should be treating the US government as the primary threat to our safety, correct?

How about China is, in fact, a dictatorship for starters

That could be true. But I wonder, in general, what is the process for determining whether a country is a dictatorship or not, from the outside? China claims to be a democracy and holds elections, like just about every other country under the sun. Of course, not every country with elections is actually a democracy, but if we’re talking “hard facts” I think we need to be able to point to specific, objective things.

The Communist in “Chinese Communist Party” is just there for show.

Isn’t the Chinese Communist Party the single largest self-identifying communist party in the world? Shouldn’t that factor in, like, at least a little bit into our standards for what defines a communist party? Regardless, this is kind of just your subjective opinion, isn’t it? Again, what specific, objective standards are you looking at to distinguish between “real” communism and “fake” communism?

Can you point me to any member of these “huge groups of well known users” spreading bigotry, racism, and transphobia?

First rule of using Lemmy: If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

Ooh hard facts? I love hard facts! Which hard facts are you talking about?

This is woefully ignorant of reality. People are not immune to propaganda. It’s noble that you think most people are rational and politically informed, but that’s very clearly not the case. Rhetoric has been extensively studied and developed for literally millennia, there’s a reason.

Of course. Which is why effective propaganda and rhetoric is generally more sophisticated than just “our side good.”

80 million people voted for that.

More like 158 million.

No one has suggested that. Shifting a few degrees to the right isn’t supposed to win over Trump voters, it’s supposed to win over moderate conservatives that don’t care for Trump.

So… Trump voters.

What happened to caring about The Truth over all?

What happened to pragmatism over truth?

I don’t consider it true that everyone who votes for Trump is a fascist. There are plenty of reluctant Trump voters who are primarily motivated by negative partisanship, which is to say, voting against the Democrats.

When one side says their candidate is the Messiah, and the other side says their own candidate is deeply flawed, where does that push someone on the fence?

Probably the one that admits to their candidate’s flaws. The side claiming that their side is the Messiah can only reach people who are willing to believe that narrative. It tends to be very alienating to the average voter.

What’s baffling to me is that there seem to be a lot of people on the democratic side who simultaneously believe all kinds of contradictory things. Trump voters are all blindly devoted to their cult leader, but if we just shift a few more degrees to the right, that will win them over, somehow. Or, the key to winning elections is by winning over moderate swing voters who don’t feel attached to either party, and the way to do that is to demand blind devotion to our candidate while screaming that the other side is Hitler and anyone who even considers them is a fascist. It’s absurdity. And yet, no matter how many times these strategies fail, people refuse to learn from them.

I happen to come from a conservative family, and that made it immediately obvious that even the best attempts by someone like Biden or Harris to win over the right were doomed to fail, and the Dick Cheney strategy was absolutely not even close to “the best attempt.” The reason is that Biden and Harris look and sound like typical, mainstream democrats, who their entire political identity is built on opposing. Of course, my parents are always going to vote Republican, but the one person on the Democratic side I’ve ever heard them say they respect is Bernie Sanders. DNC strategists and their loyalists cannot comprehend this.

So many people adhere to this overly simplistic ideological model as if it’s just a truism - that the things people support are more or less innate characteristics randomly developing from birth and the combination of those things makes everyone fall someone on a one dimensional spectrum from left to right, and everyone votes according to who’s closest to them ideologically. And so the only way to win is to assume the far left votes will fall in line behind you while you move right to appeal to the centrist swing voters. But that whole model is bullshit, and it has been proven to be bullshit time and time again.

A large part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s able to present himself as an outsider. Moving right and shaking hands with Cheney, trying to be like, “See, the whole political establishment hates Trump,” merely reinforces Trump’s credibility as an outsider while also tying Harris to the disastrous policies including the War on Terror. The failure of the Bush administration is a part of why conservatives turned to Trump in the first place! It’s insanity.

If you wanna win by peeling off Trump voters, the best way to do that is by targeting people with libertarian values and running on isolationism and staying out of foreign entanglements. But that would require actually doing that, or at the very least, it would require not painting everyone who disagrees with your interventionist policies with the same brush of being a “Russian bot.” Alternatively, you can say, “screw Trump voters, we’ll win by mobilizing the base,” but that would require adopting popular leftist policies that would hurt their donors’ profits.

So, being unwilling to actually play the game, all that’s left is to put forward the same platform of interventionism and neoliberalism that has simply outlived it’s moment and does not have enough adherents to win.

I happen to believe in a little something called “The Truth.” I don’t believe that everything I say should have to serve an immediate strategic purpose. In fact, I don’t think it’s at all sensible to even set a strategic purpose until you have first clearly identified and laid out the truth. Even if the truth is inconvenient or counterproductive, I’m not really interested in a political project that’s based on ignorance or deception.

If the truth isn’t enough to get people to back your political project, then perhaps your political project isn’t worth backing. Regardless, it’s likely the truth will come out eventually, at which point you will lose credibility to the opposition. And if the left doesn’t speak out for fear of hurting the democrats’ chances, then the only opposition will be from the right.

Furthermore, people having correct political ideas and a clear understanding of the world is more important than any election, which is of secondary concern. A person’s political actions (or lack thereof) do not end at the ballot box, and when a person has correct ideas they are more likely to participate in productive actions and avoid harmful ones. Collective action, boycotts, protests, etc have more capacity to effect change than a political system designed by slaveowners explicitly to subvert the popular will.

Are you trolling?

Why did he constantly talk about how the attacks were politically motivated? What is the basis for claiming that he was motivated by religion?

Worst performance since the Republicans took California but hey who knows, could’ve been even worse somehow if they did anything differently. Clearly the right play is to learn absolutely nothing from this. Even the really obvious stuff like the fact that virtually everyone in the country hates Dick Cheney’s guts with extremely good reason.

Also is it still hindsight if a bunch of people were screaming that it was a terrible move before it blew up in her face? Because that kinda seems more like foresight.

I give it like a 40% chance of global thermonuclear annihilation and a 60% chance of chaos and warlordism, probably with a decades long US occupation on the justification of preventing nukes from falling into the hands of whoever this week’s Al Qaida is.

I don’t know which of those two statements is more ridiculous. Liberals can absolutely not be trusted with stuff like protecting your grandma’s medication. For example, look at what Starmer did as soon as Labour got in power for the first time in ages, he ended winter home fuel subsidies and Labour’s popularity has plummeted.

In general, liberals are privileged elites who believe in the system because it works for them. If you ever find that the system has failed you, if you ever find yourself in need of a couch to sleep on, you’ll find out exactly how “reliable” people like that really are. Liberal politicians are even worse, being completely bought out by corporate interests, while liberal voters merely fail to hold them accountable.

Communists, meanwhile, are responsible for the vast majority of global poverty alleviation in the world - 700 million lifted out of poverty in China, according to the World Bank. Cuba has the highest number of doctors per capita in the world, and regularly sends them abroad for humanitarian aid. At one point, early in Covid, Vietnam offered to provide masks and supplies to the United States. Before, each of these countries had incredibly backwards, reactionary regimes with incredibly low standards of living, but once the communists took over, rather than “burning everything down,” they built schools and hospitals and infrastructure, and improved the quality of life for the vast majority.

In the US, the Black Panthers, who were constantly demonized as being these evil radicals who just wanted to burn everything down, are the reason why kids have food to eat at schools. Because they identified a need in their community, they recognized that kids were going hungry and were unable to learn and wound up stuck in a cycle of poverty, so they started a free breakfast program. The cops broke in and literally pissed on their food, they went door to door claiming it was poisoned, that they were just trying to teach kids to hate white people, and so on. When that didn’t work, finally the liberals caught wind of it and figured if the government provided those meals, it would stop the Panthers from using it to promote themselves, and that’s how it became a national program. They never would’ve done it without a bunch of scary black Marxists with guns doing it first, and using the opportunity to promote their ideas.

Lmao “running him over?” The video shows him walking away completely unscathed, after they let him into the tank to talk. The tanks were also leaving the square, not entering it. That’s also not where the term comes from.

Famously loyal and trustworthy liberals will never deliberately betray you lmao. Just hope they never find out if you have to break a law the fascists draw up to protect yourself or others 🚔🚔🚔