Lemmy has a strong tendency to criticize the US, and a lot of the critiques of certain issue with the US are valid. However, I started getting really tired of opening comment sections in innocuous and non-political posts only to see that someone somehow found a way to criticize the US in it. At first, I started thinking that maybe some Lemmy users are really unhappy and find criticizing a something stronger helped them feel better as if standing up to injustice was a passion of theirs. But, we don’t see them do that with other targets, just the US. The more I notice and think about it, I’m starting be suspicious that some of those users and comments aren’t authentic, but made to create divisiveness in the West and reject the US entirely. In other words, they may be Russian, Chinese, et al. agents working to feed a stream of propaganda in order to further cause chaos and lack of unity in the West as we have seen them do before.
Anyone else think about this?
This is what I’m thinking the game plan is:
- Criticize something obviously unjust that the US has done. Ignore that all other major powers have also committed atrocities.
- Link and liken it to other US matters & behaviors
- Paint the US entirely as evil so that nothing the US can do is just
- Attack anyone that supports anything out of the US (we are between here and #3 above)
- Create a black-and-white model of geopolitics: US vs everyone else. EU and Russia on the same team lol
- West fragments as US and EU relationship dwindle from pseudo-populist movements (e.g. MAGA)
- Pick specific countries in the EU to start alienating and repeat the cycle
- ???
- Profit in special economic zones
North Korea really is amazing isn’t it?
A grain of salt? More like a truckload.
How is China is any way closed communication? Don’t answer.
Because the CCP will come arrest you if you do?
Because they’re just dealing brain dead slop
The great firewall exists. They have to use euphemisms to get around the censors.
Yes that doesn’t equal closed. Tiktok is censored but a lot of recent US movements have spread via the app
If you can’t criticize authority I don’t find that to be an open Internet. TikTok doesn’t exist in China. Try to say Trans rights are human rights on Douyin and see what happens.
Try to say trans rights are human rights to any American official. Stop with the whataboutism, red scare, racism. Just say you’re stuck in the Cold War. Any liberal when you say anything about China positive acts like a child.
I think it’s great that the standard of living in China has increased by leaps and bounds over the past 50 years. I think it’s not great that they censor their internet so heavily. I also think it’s pretty lazy of you to paint me as a racist just for not agreeing with you, but go off.
Exactly, you’re getting it.
Your wasteful sarcasm aside, what China has done for its people economically and for standard of living is unbelievable. Continue your whataboutism though
That may be true as long as you are on party line.
Bro thinks 1.1 billion people work for the government.
He’s not wrong on that point though.
Open dissent will be quashed and make you, at best, a social pariah very quickly.
The guts and persistence of groups/individuals like the '89 Mothers is astonishing and worthy of a lot of respect.
I mean, if by those metrics alone you mean to tell that it’s a great country, 1940’s Germany must really appeal to you. After all they did an economic miracle no one thought possible and the standard of living of their citizens increased dramatically. Who cares that they murdered millions of people, those were not REAL citizens, right?..
The PRC has big problems, that it is Guantanmo-ing or arresting and using as prison slaves at least three ethnic minorities for thought crimes is an atrocity.
But the huge increase of living standards for all Chinese citizens, including those of persecuted minorities when they’re not being locked up for ideological reasons is almost unbelievable.
Over a billion people have gone from not having plumbing to having indoor toilets, heating/cooling systems and access to modern health care in the space of 50 years.
I’ll reply to this with a quote from C. K. Lewis:
Hence why I compared it to he economic miracle of Nazi Germany.
The ethnic repression outside of Tibet is relatively new.
Most of it was sudden access to international capital as a new market with Deng’s reforms and becoming the manufacturing hub of the world (with all the pollution and poor work conditions that came with it)… Unless your argument is that all people living in authoritarian regimes are functionally slaves in which case that’s hyperbole that I think does a disservice to slavery be it chattle or the more traditional kinds (and note that the pyramids weren’t built by slaves unlike the Great Wall).
Edit: I’d also dispute the economic miracle of Nazi Germany. They built up an economy based on sacrifice and war prep, but it ran out of steam in a handful of years and was close to collapse before the war even began. Even allowing for a collapse of the Chinese economy sometime soon, that’s orders of magnitude more successful with objectively less murder and ethnic cleansing (per capita) than the Nazis went for.
Stop the lib whataboutism. The only response you can have when you hear China did something good right?
I’m not opposed to there being good stuff in China, but the economic miracle of China was built on top of slave labor and repression. It’s easy to get an economic miracle if you’re willing to sacrifice part of your population, which is why I have the Germany example since that’s exactly what was done there.
Overall China is getting better, and in a couple of generations they might be a relatively nice place to live, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that people there today are as free as people living in a democratic nation.