Communism looks good on paper

and looks even better in the real world

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    24 hours ago

    Brother, CIA shenanigans in Xinjiang sucked.

    Previously:

    The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing Salafi terrorist into Xinjiang, and once its efforts failed, it made lemonade out of its lemon by concocting and promoting a genocide narrative.

    The only countries pushing this narrative are the “always the same mapimperial core countries, which just so happen to be largely the same ones supporting Israel’s genocide.

    Almost no predominantly-Muslim country buys the Uyghur genocide narrative, because they know it’s bullshit, because they talked to the Uyghurs themselves.
    https://twitter.com/un_hrc/status/1578003299827171330 #HRC51 | Draft resolution A/HRC/51/L.6 on holding a debate on the situation of human rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of #China, was REJECTED.

    Previously:

    Genocide is more than just killing, it’s the deliberate destruction of a people including its culture and institutions.

    (a) Show me the Uyghur bodies

    (b) Show me the serious bodily or mental harm

    (c) Show me the conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part

    (d) Show me the measures intended to prevent births within the group

    In accordance with China’s affirmative action policies towards ethnic minorities, all non-Han ethnic groups were subject to different laws and were usually allowed to have two children in urban areas, and three or four in rural areas.

    (e) Show me the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group

    violent incidents in East Turkestan

    I wonder where those Salafi terrorists came from? Oh right: the US, UK, and Israel organized, funded, and trained them, as they did Al Qaeda and the various flavors of ISIS/ISIL, including the “moderate rebels” that just took over Syria. The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent.


    Relatedly, US shenanigans in Hong Kong five years ago and in Beijing in 1989 also sucked.

    Previously:

    The UK’s 99 year lease to subjugate the people of Hong Kong ended, a lease which had been forced upon Imperial China at gunpoint during the century of humiliation. Hong Kong reintegration after the lease expired was a foregone conclusion. The last minute, US-backed attempt at color revolution failed. It was the so-called “revolutionaries” who brought the brutality, by the way.

    Previously:

    I’ve already asked another commenter this but it’s valid here too: Would you class the western oppression of dissent to be on the same level as that famous student protest in China?

    Only someone misinformed about the 1989 protest and US/CIA/NED-orchestrated, murderously violent riot would ask this, which to be fair is 99% of Westerners.


    Edit to add: The link to images from Beijing is broken because Reddit has since censored that entire subreddit.

    • StonksDiff13@lemmy.today
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      23 hours ago

      Holyy shit that’s a lot of reading. I got through a lot of it so far and honestly, I’m reaching a point where I don’t think I’m smart enough to have any real commentary. I will say the sources are pretty questionable. One of the sites you listed has a .cn address so it’s directly controlled by the Chinese government lol. Medium and YouTube and a website claiming to be an independent journalist…

      This is probably a conversation for another time, but what if we’ve entered a period where no information I have or you have is plain fact? It’s increasingly likely. We could be both horribly wrong with no other way to prove anything except what is happening with the 5ft circle around us. It makes sense if most media available is controlled by two opposed governments trying to influence their people a certain way that neither have good intel.

      It makes sense to me that a country attempting to unify itself in terms of language, economy, politics, etc. would be harsh and even persecute minority religions. It has happened everywhere in history. But it also makes sense the US would deploy destabilizing propaganda and assets into all foreign nations.

      Anyways, I’m fine admitting this is beyond my paygrade as a socio-economic and political enthusiast.

      I’ll concede on the idea that neither of us were there and both of us believe our sources are correct.

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        23 hours ago

        I don‘t expect you or anyone to turn an instant 180º away from a lifetime of understanding. It took me well over a decade, first because I had to look into most of it myself, and second because it took a lot of evidence for me to accept them and reject the many layers of unexamined priors I’d grown up with.

        Another place to start, rather than diving head-first into the China question, is the history of propaganda, which developed starting in the early 20th century in the US.

        Previously:

        But muh Media Bias/Fact Check says it checks out!

        https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/contact/

        Dave M. Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. Dave currently works full time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.

        Van Zandt is some hobbyist who was in the right place at the right time: the “post-truth” moment of Clinton’s loss to Trump and the string of Russiagate conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts and the Cambridge Analytica hysteria.

        The whole concept of the “left” or ”right“ “bias” being inversely correlated with factualness is garbage. These kinds of graphs, which try to convince us that centrism equals factualness, are garbage:

        The core bias of corporate media is the bias of the capitalist class, but people like Van Zandt don’t seem to understand this.

        The inner workings of corporate media were explained about forty years ago in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
        A five minute introduction: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine


        Previously:

        I said “these kinds of graphs,” of which there are many https://duckduckgo.com/?q=media+bias+chart&iax=images&ia=images

        But you’ve sparked an idea for an interesting project: use MBFC’s API to create one of these graphs from their own data. Doing a little googling, it seems that scripts and data dumps aren’t hard to come by.

        I think armchair media analyst Dave M. Van Zandt is going on vibes. I don’t think he understands corporate & think tank media. Does he know who Walter Lippman or Edward Bernays were, or what the Council on Foreign Relations (“least biased” 🤡) is or made note of its prominent media members? Does he know about the Powell memorandum or the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy?

        No results found for site:mediabiasfactcheck.com "manufacturing consent".

        I’ve seen The Grayzone debunk the New York Times’ lies many times, and yet:

        Also, in what universe is the neoliberal, anti-labor NYT center-left? And if the Grayzone in the ultraviolet territory, where does that leave the explicitly Communist Monthly Review, outside of MBFC’s Overton window? Surprise, it’s to the right of it:


        Previously:

        The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.

        The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

        This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

        The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

        None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.

        • StonksDiff13@lemmy.today
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          22 hours ago

          Wow I’m discovering we’re more alike by the second. I’m certainly in my personal journey of discovering truth beneath the corporate fed slop. I unsubscribed to NYT in 2017.

          I have thought for years that many people bounce their minds between the left and right extremes only to falsely convince themselves the middle must be the reasonable place to be when in fact the truth or ethics are on a different spectrum entirely.

          I’m thankful my brain has a natural tendency to know logic and morality that aides my search, but you’re right. It’s questioning everything from the beginning just to have a starting picture. Propaganda from childhood forward. History written by the victors.

          Manufactured consent is the hot topic amongst some of my friends at the moment. We’ve abandoned all “sides” in US politics searching for a solution to the ever strengthening tyranny of evil.

          Thank you for sharing these sources and information. I’ll happily research further.

          • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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            21 hours ago

            I’m very happy help if I can. I try to give people a leg-up so it doesn’t take them years & years like it took me.

            Edit to add: China does have its problems/contradictions, which are fine to critique, but first one has to sift out the propaganda-fabricated problems from the real ones.