Okay!

I mean, people ignorant of communism use this argument all the time, and they think it’s some argument to end all arguments.

Lemmy! I was a social democrat when I joined, but then I got exposed to all the communist and socialist arguments and why capitalism has zero saving grace, not to mention all debunks that helped my mostly Western ass (I’m Chinese but came to Canada as a kid) unlearn the propaganda. Thanks @dessalines@lemmy.ml and @nutomic@lemmy.ml!

Wait, I thought they were a tOtAliTarIan sTaTE cApiTalIsT gEnoCiDal aNtIcHriSt country!

Part 2

“Guns and gays… That could always get you a couple of dozen likes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html

Conservatives amplified Russian trolls 30 times more than liberals… users in Texas and Tennessee were particularly susceptible

Texas Man Arrested for Weed Died After Officers Pepper-Sprayed Him and Put Him in a Spit Hood

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgq7yb/texas-man-arrested-for-weed-died-after-officers-pepper-sprayed-him-and-put-him-in-a-spit-hood)

Texas Cop Kills 2 People, Allowed to Resign, Joins New Dept, Shoots Man on 2nd Day

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-found-not-guilty-deadly-shootings-joins-new-department/

Texas officer wins appeal of dismissal over feces sandwich

https://apnews.com/c76f863d591b436cb1b22f4e35718ebe

Texas officer sexually abuses 14 year old girl, receives no sex offender status

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Former-HISD-officer-admits-to-fondling-middle-11170371.php

Texas-based hate group source of 80% of all U.S. racist propaganda tracked in 2020

https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/m7zk8w/texasbased_hate_group_source_of_80_of_all_us/

---

In a reply, the same user posts the following:

Don’t forget “Libertarians” in JoeRogan arguing in favor of law “to require genital inspections of children” https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/n9bn2x/uforgottencalipers_explains_the_hypocrisy_of/

Or “Libertarian” Ben Shapiro riling up support for monarchy and Prince Phillip “simply because a monarchy was accused of racism and racism must be defended at all costs” https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/m0k6g0/when_was_ben_shapiro_pro_monarchy/?sort=top

Some of the 👌 Libertarian 👌 billionaires that fund him:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ToiletPaperUSA/comments/ln1sif/turning_point_usa_and_young_americas_foundation/

Holy crap why didn’t I consider that possibility? Totally makes sense.

Biden, are you OK?

So, Biden, are you OK?

Are you OK, Biden?

I personally think it’s important to post refuting evidence whenever fake news about China shows up, not to convince anyone in power or the media itself, but to help average people in the West get out of the propaganda trap. Maybe I’m just naive or a hopeless idealist, but based on what I’ve seen, many, maybe most people actually mean well and are concerned about the wellbeing of Chinese people when talking about “human rights issues” with China, and they’re genuinely misinformed because they’re constantly surrounded by anti-China propaganda. Those are mainly the people I want to reach with these rebuttals because they’re most likely to be pulled out of that propaganda trap, I know because I was once one of those people before I really started reading up about communism (which all started when I joined Lemmy, funnily enough).

So the comment I was going to respond to got removed (maybe a based moderator on Reddit?), but I found out after I had typed out my lengthy response, posted it anyway, got auto-removed by Reddit (think a link I posted was blacklisted, I doubt Reddit has the ability to figure out which comments are in defence of China) (edit: mod on /r/shitamericanssay confirmed, it got flagged as spam by Reddit) so I’m posting it here so it doesn’t go to waste. Hopefully my two RMB cents can be of use for anyone else who’d like to try and debunk this.

Excuse the snark in what you’re about to read, the person had called me an idiot and the Dessalines debunk list a communist shithole, and It’s currently 1 AM where I live, so I was more than a little agitated.

This is the thread in question

---

So the first two links showed drone shots of a Chinese prison. Okay? You know there actually is an ongoing problem with extremism in Xinjiang, right? You could also take some footage of a US prison and just claim that it was an extermination camp, there’s no proof in the videos that any of the people were or were not wrongfully imprisoned, so I think we should default to innocent until proven guilty on whether that was a concentration camp.

From the Guardian article:

Drone footage has emerged showing police leading hundreds of blindfolded and shackled men from a train in what is believed to be a transfer of inmates in Xinjiang.

How is that evidence of genocide? Prisoners are blindfolded so they don’t know the routes, IIRC a common practice in many countries. I didn’t see any incidence of mistreatment or violence against prisoners in the short videos, and you can’t even see their faces clearly so how exactly do you determine if they’re scared or if they’re criminals or not (not that faces would help, since you can’t just look at someone and say if they’re innocent or guilty). As for “executed”, the Guardian article said nothing about their sentences. You just made that up.

I’ll also leave this here: https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab

And this: https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/07/05/xinjiang-and-uyghurs-what-youre-not-being-told/

Why did the EU refuse a visit to Xinjiang if they were so concerned?

Pakistan, a Muslim majority country, doesn’t have a problem with what’s happening in Xinjiang: https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/422970-pakistani-diplomat-narrates-visit-to-chinas-xinjiang

Neither does Egypt (also Muslim majority): https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/430738-egyptian-media-delegates-provide-a-detailed-insight-of-the-situation-in-xinjiang

Neither do most other other Muslim majority countries: https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/07/278860/arab-muslim-majority-countries-china-mistreatment-uighurs/

Why would Muslim majority countries, who would almost certainly support other Muslims on religious principle alone, even more than the US or EU members which are Christian majority countries, be okay with this? Have they not read the same reporting you have and then some? Are they stupid? Incompetent? Countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia aren’t poor either, nor do they depend on China as most of their GDP comes from oil on their own soil, if countries from the UK to Denmark to Sweden to Estonia to Poland can “afford” to “speak out” against China, so can they. Muslim majority countries have spoken out against US and European treatment of Muslims in both the past and the present so they’re obviously not afraid to defend Muslims in other countries, and the US isn’t exactly one to take criticism in stride and more embargo/bombing happy than China (seeing how the US is still doing it), so why don’t they say something about China if they really think there is a problem?

Over ten thousand Xinjiang Muslims make yearly pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia, would be a perfect time to defect if they were being killed off in China, no? I feel like Saudi Arabia would be a decent bet for a Muslim fleeing religious persecution.

In the wake of fake Uighur testimonials by a CIA operative explain why I shouldn’t be skeptical at the other testimonials in Western mainstream media?

All of these links were from the GitHub page I linked which you didn’t bother to read.

IIRC it’s a common practice in many countries.

The video is age restricted so YouTube forces you to sign in to watch it. Invidious can bypass that: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=ktE_3PrJZO0

deleted by creator

I didn’t even know about North Korea’s other political parties until I saw a toot on Mastodon by @nutomic@lemmy.ml. In fact I thought it was an absolute one-man dictatorship. Guess I got roped hook, line, and sinker by propaganda.

Top based comments on that video:

This one of those moments when you have the “oh shit everything I know might be false” really eye opening

South Korea’s manipulation and propaganda is like they’re a country created and backed by the USA.

Now I know, how Kim could feed his uncle/nephew/granny to the dogs. The answer is very simple: he didn’t.

A reply: it was originally a satire story by a chinese journalist, but media outlets took it to be true and it blew up (BTW does anyone know where I can find the original satire?)

Just hit me watching this that US has basically committed two genocides on northern Korea. Korean war and the arduous march.

It is also unbelievable how much you get gaslighted when trying to give a nuanced picture of DPRK.

Doesn’t this all play a little too neatly into the ruling-class narrative surrounding that country?

Maybe, but I feel like the communist party in Myanmar would have more accurate information than most people outside of the country.

This is likely because it’s using the .ml TLD, because it’s a free domain name and therefore spam filters see it as suspicious. I don’t think Lemmygrad is big enough for the staff at Reddit to even know about.

Just curious, do you consider the Amish a cult? I’ve heard a lot of arguments that they are because of their extreme religious views and how they disown anyone who leaves their commune.

Are the leaders of a worker-cooperative corporation considered union leaders?

Do you see the elected leaders of a worker co-op in a capitalist country also as workers, or are they still bourgeoisie?