Ok, idolize/glorify is different than praise. Go ahead and argue that point. I am interested in understanding the position.

They said they didn’t praise Stalin, you said that saying good things about Stalin is praising him. He disagrees with your definition. I don’t. I think you’re right. That’s praising Stalin. But I don’t see anything wrong with praising people for the good things that they did.

Further you didn’t say they should admit that they idealize Stalin, you said they should admit that they praise Stalin. There’s definitely a difference in those two words. You’re moving the goal posts again.

You think I am projecting that I have a problem with cognitive disaonance based on what evidence? I am not trying to get you cross some moral line like “admit to everyone here you’re just a dirty liberal who thinks Obama was a good guy”. I am engaging you and critiquing you. If you can’t tell the difference, I can’t help you yet.

And if you can read the thread, the thread you are replying to invokes Rule 6 which is what caused the commenter you are debating against to start this conversation about praise/deification/etc

Read

I am claiming that you pretend malaria and bad humors are both bad. One exists. The other doesn’t. You don’t seem to have the willingness to acknowledge that. The social credit score in China that effects individuals does not exist. Sure. You can say both the US credit scoring system and the nonexistent Chinese personal social credit score are bad, but that would be foolish.

You could be saying that the US credit score system and the Chinese social credit score that is used to manage negative externalities of businesses are both bad, but I would disagree with you.

But I am pretty sure you don’t know that the social credit score for individuals does not exist.

Rule 6 says “idealizing/glorifying”. A poster in this thread. Dogbert said the word “deifying” in this thread. Maybe you don’t think those are interchangeable. I could be convinced either way.

As for what I am talking about, the fact that Dogbert praises Stalin is apparently a problem for you. It is possible to praise people for the positive things they have done. Some people argue against that praise because they think the negative things the person has done are more important. Some people go so far as to believe it’s not possible a person has done anything praise worthy ever because of the bad things they have done and that therefore anyone praising them is clearly morally derelict and that their opinions no longer matter.

The fact that you are trying to paint Dogbert’s praising of Stalin as something he should “admit” is a way of drawing a boundary between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs, a form of thought policing, and also a way to create an echo chamber where you can’t be confronted with positions that challenge your own position and threaten some of the beliefs that you hold tied into your identity.

So what I am talking about is you, choosing to interpret Rule 6 as applying to a positive analysis of Stalin’s actions in office because you can’t really handle discourse that runs counter to an orthodoxy that you adhere to.

You said “you don’t know how much I considerer both systems” in another comment.

That’s pretty much all the back up one needs.

The social credit system in China does not apply to individuals. It was originally designed for businesses. A limited pilot in certain locales was applied to individuals. That pilot program was shutdown in 2019.

So sure, go ahead and consider both systems that actually really exist. Go ahead and claim that both things can be bad. Keep on pretending!

signs of the same authoritarian and imperialist cancer

China accounts for 75% of poverty alleviation globally

China has not dropped any bomb in 36 years.

China invented the social credit system in response to dairy producers cutting corners and poisoning people. It was punishing profit seekers that harmed the people. It then ran a limited experiment with some local governments to apply it to people. It did not go well, and the democratic will of the people was that the program should end, so it did.

China’s opposition to the West is a bare minimum requirement. The alternative is an integration with the West that subordinates the needs of the people to the needs of the Western elite. It doesn’t stop there, but it’s a necessary prerequisite.

Once that bar has been cleared, the next problem becomes one of defending against Western interference. One cannot be materially opposed to the West and not materially capable of defending against the West. So the second bar is whether the nation is capable of defending against the West. China is clearing this bar as well, but it includes authoritarian behaviors in order to stop covet operations. There is currently no known way to stop covert ops without use of authority.

From there each individual thing you want to discuss needs to be discussed on detail, but the overall picture is one of separating from the imperialist cancer and maintaining that separation and an attempt to build a space for healthier growth for which there are no models and there are not successful experiments that can be drawn from, which means creating sufficient space for experimenting and that means sufficient space for doing it wrong, and likey doing it wrong more often than doing it right for a significant period of time. (Looking at Mao)

No, tankies don’t see the same imperial cancer because it clearly isn’t the same imperial cancer

The Chinese government ended the pilot programs for social credit scores for individuals in 2019 because the Chinese people didn’t want it, so Xu Xiaodong is likely one of those examples where a local government running their implementation of the pilot overreached and the central government, responding to the will of the people, ended it.

That you critique China without researching it is aligned with the US State Dept. That you share lies about China (e.g. the social credit score) is aligned with the state department. That you don’t think there’s anything to discuss positively about the Chinese project aligns with the state department.

Oy, both of you are acting like the social credit score is real. It’s not. China implemented a social credit score for businesses based on how much harm they were doing to society and some provinces ran limited experiments with individuals years ago. It went very poorly and the government, being democratic, responded to the people and ended the pilots.

There’s another credit score that Alibaba offers which is opt-in only and it tracks your financial behavior (paying on time, paying back debts, not over borrowing in a short time period, etc) and it’s used to give financial incentives and discounts, but again is opt-in only.

You’re arguing the morality and alignment of something that only exists in Western propaganda. Read something, I am begging you.

No because France, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, and Germany are all problematic in the same ways, as are their colonies, former colonies, contributions to the body of work (like racism), and collaboration with the problems of today (Third Reich, NATO, etc). We could even include more European nations in the list for these same reasons.

Wait, admiring is deifying? Someone needs to update the rules. Sounds a lot more like you’re attempting to weaponize the rules to create a thought police regime so you don’t have to deal with your own cognitive dissonance.

Analyzing the successes and failures of the Soviet project is not deifying. Admiring specific leaders for specific accomplishments is not deifying.

Holy shit did you just include the total fucking destruction of Libya, one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, and turning it into an open-air slave market as “linear forward progress”?

This is why we can’t have discourse. You don’t understand history, you aren’t analyzing anything, you’re just trying to take specific events, strip them of context, and force fit them into a narrative structure that makes you feel good.

We can do “linear progress” for all the presidents.

Gee Dubya did a huge amount of good for AIDS prevention and treatment, malaria prevention and treatment, and tuberculosis prevention and treatment. He led the largest expansion of medicare since its creation. He led the Amber Alert system. He led SOX. He created the largest protected maritime area in US history.

We can do this for every president. In your formulation, we would have to take every change every president did and then attempt to build a system of quantification to establish net progressive trajectory. Which is prima facie foolish.

The reality is that there is one project - EuroAmerican empire - and there are multiple constituencies that need to be managed for the project to continue. Domestically, there are two large groups of voters, driven by different psychosocial factors, and these two groups of voters are managed by two parties. Within those two large groups of voters are different subdivisions and these are kept in-group with different politicians within the party.

Outside of the voters we have what effectively are the subalterns. Indigenous Americans are managed first and foremost through violence, then through assimilation. As they become stronger in their resistance, the empire needs to respond. If the empire went full violence, one large group of citizens would resist. If they went full integration and reconciliation, a different group of citizens would resist. It is not measure of progressive politics that Deb Haaland became secretary of the interior but rather a measure of the progress of the resistance to EuroAmerican empire in that it has forced the empire to create some representation. That representation will cause reaction from a large portion of the polity, and it will sharpen the contradictions inside the empire, which will cause backlash and conflict.

This is the context for Bush as well as Obama. There are international constituencies, and they all live under the weight of the empire. Some, like Western Europe, are collaborators - nowhere near capable of resisting th empire, but willing to play the game in order to retain their wealth and way of life. Others - like nearly all of Africa - are neocolonial subjects where wealth has been extracted for centuries and continues to be extracted. For every dollar of aid the West sends to Africa they extract between 7 and 15 dollars. That is important context for any analysis of what people call “progress”. Bush’s contributions to both disease and to Medicaid are concessions to constituencies in exchange for political support and compliance, in order to create the operational space to continue the project of EuroAmerican empire.

And you are proof that this strategy works. Obama expanded the drone program immensely, became the first president to deliberately order the and oversee the killing of a US citizen on foreign soil, collaborated with many of the same political elite that you think are ruining the US today, and yet, you want to fight for the rhetorical space that the Ds need to continue doing it.

You look at Biden’s participation in the genocide against Palestine, in Kamala’s participation in mass incarceration, in their use of solitary confinement on children at the border, on the continued war mongering globally, on the continued use of torture, of their total fecklessness in the face of a clear and present neonazi danger, and you are out here trying to convince people, in your own free time, of the Democratic party’s worthiness of votes, and you are willing to fight against anyone that would say otherwise.

The two parties are obviously not the same, because that would be functionless. The parties are different precisely because they appeal to different constituencies that differ from each other psychologically, morally, economically, and culturally. But they both serve the same program and that program is a terrible, violent, oppressive, extractive, racist, misogynistic, and unsustainable program. There is no resistance to this program in American politics. The resistance only exists outside American politics - in indigenous communities, in budding socialist movements, in global socialist and non-aligned nations.

What you think of as progress in America is nothing more than the management of resistance from the risk of domestic resistance.

Not a single word in the article even hints at psyops.

Sorry I didn’t realize you changed the subject so that you could steer the conversation towards absolving the USA of its centuries-long violent, racist, genocidal, jingoistic psychosis by blaming it on Russian psyops.

My bad.

Sorry. What thread do you think you’re on right now?

Oh, I see. You just added psyops to the thread by saying you think NATO isn’t good at psyops on a thread about cyber warfare.

Look, let’s just end the discussion. I don’t need people getting confused about which of us is the fool.

This is such a strange world view. It’s as though you think politics and society are on a linear track and they can only go forwards or backwards and any progress in your preferred direction is preferable because the other direction is diametrically opposed to the only other option which is sliding the train the other direction.

That’s not how any of this works. No, Obama did not move the country in the right direction. Obama continued the violent brutal genocidal policies of the USA, continued reinforcing the dominance of the owners over the workers, and continued the domestic policy of bread and circuses for the working class to avoid unrest.

Romney being worse than Obama would have been LITERALLY the same program with different details.

Obama was LITERALLY the same program as Bush with different details.

You never said the word psyops in any of these comments. What the fuck?

If things have gotten worse in the last 15 years, I’m certain it is because of the state of the American psyche and not because of some foreign propaganda.

A, that’s not cyber warfare. That’s cyber propaganda. B, Americans don’t need foreign influence to be racist misogynist violent jingoistic bigots.

The US literally invented the Internet. It controlled all of the technology for years. It codeveloped it with the military. Every single major tech company has deep ties to the US military. Many of US tech companies are actually spinoffs from military projects. And US tech dominated the global market. And the tech companies are installing backdoors at the behest of the military (Snowden leaks).

The embargos/sanctions against Russia likely creates tons of opportunity for Russia to develop alternative technologies so they are less dependent on US persistent threats, I mean product.

Guaranteed the NATO countries, especially the US and UK, have been engaging in offensive cyber warfare against Russia for over a decade, at least.