The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote.[Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

China, in contrast, practices democratic centralism. And its no wonder that the Chinese people are very satisfied with their government, because their quality of life has been improving over the last few generations[2], while ours has been dropping over the last ~40 years of grinding neoliberalism.

Your understanding of China comes exclusively from the imperial core propaganda you & I have been exposed to our entire lives. You’ll never understand it in any other way unless you investigate outside of the bubble we live in.

Try to mention Tienanmen square anywhere

You can in fact mention Tienanmen square in China. The idea that you can’t comes to you from Western propaganda.

• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• Columbia Journalism Review: The Myth of Tiananmen
• 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989
• How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning
• [Carl Zha’s] Memories of Tiananmen Protest

Yours is also full of “propaganda”, for the imperial core.

I’m happy when any state chooses China as a partner over the imperial hegemon.

• Are We the Baddies?
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• The blueprint of regime change operations
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

.
(map is ~8 years old)

“Forward-defense ring,” a perfectly normal turn of phrase and not at all Orwellian Newspeak.

(map is ~11 years old)

Are you sad that Indonesia doesn’t want to become the United States’ pet?

These arguments are so straw man that they give me hay fever.

So should the “paper of record” New York Times[1][2][3].

I expect trustworthy news to be hard to come by, because the capitalist class—which runs these countries[1][2], owns the media, and funds the NGOs—doesn’t want us to have it. They want us to have media biased in the service of themselves, the capitalist class of imperial core states where we happen to live. Huxley was right.[1]

Once upon a time, when union membership was much larger in the US, the labor movement had media of its own. Unions published their own papers. That’s something we need to get back.

MB/FC is worse than random, so rolling dice would be better. MB/FC & Poynter reliably favor imperial core corporate, NGO, and state-affiliated media.

I don’t know a shortcut to media literacy. Inventing Reality or Manufacturing Consent are good starting places.

I just block the bot, because MB/FC is garbage.

idk

You really don’t.

If you say so, Hasbara rag.

Just like last time, everyone stopped reading a while ago, including me.

This is a semantic matter. No socialist state has ever claimed to have reached the stage of communism, including China. But some socialist states—including China—have been/are run by communist governments/parties, which claim to be working toward reaching that stage.

Has Russia broken international law with an illegal invasion of Ukraine?

Why are you unable to answer a simple yes or no question put to you a dozen times?

It’s not that I’m unable—as I have already answered—it’s that I choose not to restate it in the format you demand, no matter how many times you nag me. You’re just making a fool of yourself with this harassment.

Correct. Lemmy has as many Russian trolls as it has NAFO trolls: approximately zero.

“Troll” does not mean, “anyone who disagrees with me,” and “Russian troll” does not mean anyone “anyone who disagrees with me with respect to the Ukraine proxy war.”

I’m starting to think you’re hoping that, by being rude & annoying enough, someone will ban you, so you can then blame Russian trolls! Russian trolls! Russian trolls! Or maybe you’re just like this.

$ curl -s 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/modlog?limit=50&other_person_id=8274625' \
> | jq 'pick(.removed_comments, .banned_from_community, .banned, .removed_posts) | keys[] as $k | .[$k] | length' \
> | paste -s -d+ - | bc
43
$

That’s not it works. Vegetarians aren’t following in Hitler’s footsteps. If two people were to have similar stances on something, they didn’t necessarily come to it in the same way, or one from the other. In fact, they don’t even necessarily hold similar stances for similar reasons.

That you don’t think Russia broke international law by invading Ukraine.

I said no such thing.

Remember when you kept threatening me that you’re gonna ban me off of a whole instance because I downvoted a comment of yours?

That’s not what happened, either.

Oh… it’s my stalker again.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say I’m pro-Russian, and why would I care what Trump says or thinks? He’s a clown who bullshits and contradicts himself all the time.

Did you get here from the ’90s in a time machine?