I came back for a bit to get the latest on ChatGPT, and then noticed that, unsurprisingly, this place is crawling with demented Chinaphobes spreading whatever third-hand hearsay they can find about China. I'm vastly more knowledgeable about this subject than probably everyone here, and have tested my resources against way more capable critics, so sharing some disruptive well-chosen resources here and there isn't too hard.
The fact that the average stance here is something like "I'm not a Marxist, I don't like Marxism, I don't actually know much about Marxism, but I do know this: China isn't Marxist" is just hilarious to me.
If you actually care what China is, which it appears you don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia-idUSN1...
On the other,
>Fidel Castro argued that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries,” and in August 2014, he reaffirmed this sanguine outlook: “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”
>In May 2018, Professor Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, assuaged an anxious member of the audience at a Cambridge Forum: “I have to tell you that, from my understanding of China, it’s a very interesting social experiment, in the sense that at the local level or the regional level you now have a boisterous democracy, with popular success stories in overthrowing local authorities, local bureaucrats who have been corrupt.”
>Later that same year, before his 2019 ouster in a US-backed coup, Evo Morales said “I trust China very much. China has always accompanied us in many of our aspirations in the social, cultural, political and economic spheres” and that “China’s support and aid to Bolivia’s economic and social development never attaches any political conditions.”
>In 2020 the former Liberian Minister for Public Works W. Gyude Moore bluntly wrote “China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries, China is also our friend.”
>In 2021 Iran signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with China. Despite the vehement insistence of Western punditry, world consensus against China’s “tyranny” fails to materialize.
https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
It's a hard choice for completely politically illiterate people, I suppose!
Self-awareness is not your strong point. And your mix of conspiracy and partisan bile being challenged here is evidence this is a healthy online community, not the opposite. Perhaps you would feel better somewhere that confirms your beliefs instead of (rightly) mocks them.
I don't doubt that. Trolling is fun for lots of people.
Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1979), p. 43.
It's funny how i've said everything I need to say already. You aren't as complicated as you think you are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: it also looks like your account is on the verge of using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which ideology you're for or against, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do that. More explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Lest anyone think I'm scolding you out of some ideological bias: I've personally spent countless hours defending users who have advocated minority perspectives (including on China), even when they've sometimes broken the site guidelines. That's not because I agree or disagree but because I understand how difficult it is to advocate for a minority view on the internet. If you or anyone wants examples of how this has played out on China-related topics, I put some examples together for a user about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod.
So the problem isn't that you're arguing for a minority view. The problem is that you're doing it with snark and flamewar tropes and ideological talking points. From that point of view your comments in this thread have been abusive.
[editing... one minute...]
Oh and then there's "Dang is a totalitarian liberal thought policeman", "banned every single prominent right winger", "extremely left-winged", "most people on HN are liberals", "socialist hell-hole", "this site leans left", "leftist bots", "always politically left", "skews quite left", "Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda", "the level of wokeness is just absurd", "leftist ideological echo chamber", "run by radical leftists, so no surprise", and much much more! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
It doesn't mean they have, therefore, achieved some kind of enlightened balance.
The fact that you can cite a lot of angry right-wingers trying to pull discourse in their direction through whining just means there's a lot of right wingers posting here trying to form critical mass, as one would expect given the composition of America as a country.
You don't get more of those kinds of critiques from communists because 1) there's barely any communists here and 2) we don't argue like that.
Pretty fair modding, though. GJ.
However, "enlightened balance" is not the argument. The argument is that the left-name-calling comments are so isomorphic to the right-name-calling comments that there has to be a common mechanism underlying them. I even think I know what the mechanism is, but I'm too tired (and ok maybe a little too drunk) to type it out for the nth time. If you want to hear it, let me know; otherwise I'll spare you.
Edit: also, hold on a second: you did just argue exactly like that! ("Literally anything left-of-right-of-centre immediately gets flagged (if not outright banned by the mods)"), - which is what prompted me to dig up a few totalitarian-liberal-thought-policemans in the first place.