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.

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.

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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.

So long as you have an excuse not to read, any pretext is fine

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.

(I am excluding illegal settler communities here)

Israel isn’t, you fucking idiot. There can be no removal of settlers unless we have the destruction of the state of Israel. That doesn’t mean pushing Jews into the sea, that means the former Israelis who don’t flee (as many will) are now living in a restored, non-ethnonational Palestine.

Palestinians don’t want people’s apartments!

Those in diaspora don’t want someone’s garden!

Broadly speaking, assuming they don’t need to live under siege conditions, they want their land back. That’s what movements like the March of Return were about. If it was your family’s house, then whatever mockery of the human condition was built on it by settlers is logically also yours. Talking about stealing gardens is especially goofy since it’s materially just a pile of fertilizer and dirt.

The fight is more about freedom than land.

This is such a convenient story because it lets you ignore all the historical injustice and Israel’s role as a settler-colonizer and look only at what is happening right now – Palestinians being penned in and bombed, where of course their first concern is not being bombed – and make that the whole issue. Remove siege conditions and suddenly they aren’t as concerned with their ability to migrate to Egypt, what a funny thing!

My comment was entirely drawing a line of distinction between the two. I don’t know how I can make it more clear.

Shit, I thought I deleted it in time after I realized that I misunderstood your implication. I read the insinuation in the opposite direction, that if this is reasonable then Israel’s evacuation orders are reasonable, because I’ve been so submerged in zionist bullshit lately. My apologies.

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Except for that one part where Israel gives you less than 10 minutes to grab your cat and daughter.

And then also bombs you in the designated safe zones, so really it’s nothing alike and minimizing civilian casualties is the correct way to prosecute a war, right?

It’s a critical element of the financialization of the economy that has lead to it becoming even more irrational and unstable than it was before. Easy example, look up stock buybacks. It’s not just that though, it’s the entire system of obligation to shareholders to deliver quarterly gains with no concern for employees or even the long-term health of the company.

That’s not at all what the quote is and neither is the top level commenter’s interpretation, and I think it not being these is pretty obvious if you read No Exit. The point that he was making (and this is putting it crassly because I know jack shit about his Heidegger-based phenomenology) is the presence of other people forces us to be self-conscious, to regard ourselves as the object of someone else’s perception and judgement. That’s why Sartre goes out of his way to say the room (their jail cell in Hell, effectively) had no reflective surfaces, so that the character’s perception of themselves could only come from the people they are stuck with (this doesn’t entirely make sense, but I am pretty sure it’s what he meant). You can read him talk about some of the premises informing this by checking out his writing on “The Look,” like is quoted below this comic.

So it’s a slightly obtuse point about intersubjectivity that people have turned into a cutesy way of talking about their own misanthropy. It’s probably more emblematic of the meaning of the quote how people in this thread, original commenter especially, are talking about silently judging people for this and that action.

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.