This is why they use whole-process democracy in China, Cuba, Vietnam etc.

You nominate and vote for people in your community. People you actually know. You don’t have to be heavily informed about global politics or economics, you just have to know who in your community gives a shit, is trustworthy, and is willing. Whoever you vote for on your local council/congress, those people now have it as their full time job to study the working of the world, understand what’s going on, and keep your community’s best interests in mind.

Those councils/congresses group up and do the same process to form a council for the township, and then again for a county, and more tiers depending on the size of your nation, until you get a governing body like Cuba’s National Assembly Of People’s Power or China’s National People’s Congress.

Back down on the bottom tier, you’re talking to the people on your local congress all the time. They keep abreast of what’s going on for you and everyone else in the community to make sure they represent you and your wants and needs to the next level. You don’t just get a vote every couple of years, you have an actual voice. Literally, a voice. In Western lib democracy the concept of ‘having a voice’ has been so diluted and abstracted that it’s just a turn of phrase that means a vote every couple of years. In whole-process democracy, you actually have a voice.

Not sure about the thread title… the US’s grasp isn’t slipping: they’ve been taking every opportunity to yeet human rights into the sun from day one, when those pustulent bougie ‘founding father’ ghouls signed their declaration that metastesized the cancer of capitalism and damned us all to lifetimes of misery.

I’m really glad the mask is slipping, though.

I just assumed this place has a lower-than-average number of Westerners (but probably still a majority because of the site’s Lingua Franca) just because a massive number of Westerners who identify as leftists see the positive depictions of Stalin and the Kims, and the disdain for the US Democratic party, and then they flee.

I agree with all of this. I also really miss having access to CBD oil in Hong Kong as a means of pain management and anxiety control.

I might have recourse to better treatment for both pain and mental health in a socialist system, but Hong Kong remains capitalist and weed is an excellent coping mechanism for capitalism.

Toggle it here:

It’s a formality. It’s always been de facto a member of NATO anyway, in the same way that Belarus is firmly on the Russian side.

Yep. I know so many people that are curious about China but glaze over when I explain it directly or scoff when I show them something from Chinese media.

Does anyone know of any videos like this one, that explain the democratic process in China but aren’t by CGTN?

I don’t have any issue with CGTN myself, but there’s a large demographic of people that want to understand more about China who are still conditioned to doubt and reject anything coming out of a Chinese platform.

If every Leftist had to disprove every receipt to the satisfaction of every other leftist, well… it seems in the Anglosphere/internet left that’s already the case and it’s why the Anglosphere left is completely impotent.

Between the accusations of 1) not meticulously debunking other accusations and 2) guilt by association… yeah SerfsTV can fuck off.

They’re streamers, living comfortably in the imperial core earning money on a subscription-based model producing primarily entertainment-focused commentary. They have a conflict of interest in that they profit from drama because their ecosystem is constantly demanding fresh ‘content’ with no discernment about what the actual content is (to the extent that ‘content creator’ is the literal job description, it’s non-specific because at the end of the day the nature of the actual content doesn’t fucking matter to their business model) and their long-term earning potential is contingent on the things they make ‘content’ about continuing to exist.

Medhurst is regularly in the thick of it, doing actual journalism. And those condescending little shits have the arrogance to take a swipe at him and the “anti US-imperialist left” when that is the actual entire left once you carve away the privileged leeches that sit in the imperial core doing FUCK ALL and while talking down at the people putting actual blood and sweat in for the working class.

Yes I enjoyed composing this comment. Trash like the Surfs and most of DemSoc / reformist North American political streaming economy are utter fucking cancer. They capture the energy of discontent over there, spin it for a buck, and then direct it towards either the bullshit electoral system or keep it spinning in circles over divisive issues that will only be solved after working class liberation.

I can’t give anecdotal examples without doxxing myself. Just the more nebulous stuff, like Mainlander fashion sense. It’s pretty wild. Some of them have terrible fashion sense and they don’t care. Westerners and Westernized Hong Kongers are too self-conscious to wear the kind of ensembles that some mainlanders don’t think twice about. (edit:) and just to clarify: they wear what they like, they don’t care what other people think, they live in a society that doesn’t castigate them for it. They’re happy.

Whenever I hear liberal friends comment on a Mainlander’s dress sense it pisses me off. Those same hypocrites will watch Western high school movies where the nerd/loser/outcast is portrayed as achieving some sort of triumph when they stop caring about other people’s judgement, when in reality in a liberal environment they’d get relentlessly bullied to the point of having their self-esteem damaged to a degree that they’d never recover from.

Galloway is based as fuck. Can’t quote him on the internet though because of his Catholic position on Trans issues, and in this culture if you’re wrong about one issue everything else you say is invalid.

He’s been fighting for workers and speaking truth to power since before most internet leftists were born. Never gave an inch, at the cost of his parliamentary career, and almost at the cost of his liberty when the US tried to take him down over his rabble rousing against the Iraq war.

People need to study the speeches he gives. Even if you disagree with me about him, and even if you disagree with him about Trans issues (I do), his oratry should be study material for anyone who wants to make a compelling case.

As someone who lives on the border of East and West, do you see less of this culturally within the Eastern mindset?

The difference is palpable. Not just between locals and newly-settled Mainlanders, but also between affluent, Island-side locals who tend to be more heavily westernized, and the more rural people in the New Territories - with the difference becoming more subtle in the New Towns and Kowloon.

Tired. Playing peacemaker amongst my family, playing peacemaker at work, and between my friends. This Western culture we’re steeped in prides itself in tolerance but it’s the complete fucking opposite. People justify cold hatred on the basis of the slightest disagreement. There are days I think humanity deserves to end. Let other life live in peace without us.

It’s pretty clear that while both parties claim sovereignty, their strongest common ground is that the US doesn’t belong there.

while further eroding America’s already poor reputation in the region.

bwahahaha this is understatement on the level of the “African countries feel exploited by the West” line in that other lib article a while back. They’re so full of shit.

It tickles me that liberals call for “free and fair elections” in Russia, when that would mean the United Russia party would march straight back into officf. And if they adjust the meaning of “free and fair elections” to prohibit voting for United Russia, the Communist Party would be next in line.

They’re already so divorced from reality that China could build a space elevator and start developing a low-orbit tourism industry and libs would look up at the platforms in the sky and the livestreams and explain to you how it’s all fake with deadpan sincerity.

I mean it’s reddit. Liberals will invite themselves into every corner, openly or posing as something else, and start barfing their nauseating rhetoric everywhere in an attempt to ‘correct’ everyone else… and subreddit admins have to let them in, or the sub becomes 🌟problematic🌟 and quarantined. And that’s okay for the Deprogram. It exists to educate liberals as much as to entertain comrades.

Nobody likes the feeling of a liberal’s cold, viscous saliva sticking to their ear lobes, but at some point you do have to come in contact with them if you want to deprogram them.

I like the ‘pipeline’ they’ve established. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not, and it’s more of a network than a line, but they’ve each got different styles and palatability to different demographics.

Someone who might watch JT’s videos but gets turned away by the aesthetic, tone or subject matter of Yugo or Hakim may well end up listening to the latter two after several hours of ‘the boys’ bantering with one another.

AITA for having nukes? The only guy who’s ever used one has hundreds of them, keeps telling everyone in the neighbourhood that I need to be destroyed and camps outside my yard all the time, aiming at my house.

Oh sorry it didn’t work. It’s frustrating when online payment platforms do that. The number of websites that I can’t buy things from because they demand a postcode in the billing address 🤦‍♂️

One hurdle with Chinese is access to native content from within the West. I don’t have any tips for this, I’m afraid.

For Putonghua, try Bilibili. China’s answer to youtube. Might have to use a vpn depending on your location.

There’s also echinesesong.com which is just tons of Chinese songs with lyrics pinyin, 汉字 and sometimes English translations. Use an ad blocker for that one.

For anyone wanting to learn, I recommend an app called HelloChinese.

It’s similar to Duolingo in many ways, but goes above and beyond. Phrases are individually recorded instead of stitched together by a synthesizer. They go out and get volunteers on the street to record some lines. Every unit has a 15-minute podcast attached to it.

It gives loads of additional material to practice on in addition to the core teaching units. I used to use a combination of Duolingo and a reader app called ‘The Chairman’s Bao’ which offered graded texts, but HelloChinese does both and it’s so much better when the two are coordinated.

I can’t recommend it enough.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

Not specifically about the transition to fascism, but extremely informative about the mechanics of it.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr0JU8OOrK4jstKMexoCa8fQXYOquitKw

I don’t think they’re still active. They used tonhave a separate channel but there’s a link to a playlist of all their stuff in the video description.

I remember back when Metal Gear Solid 4 came out, and the characters going on and on about military industrial complex and PMCs. And me thinking there’s a grain of truth to the military industrial complex but the rest is just kind of sci-fi fantasist world building.

I should go through that game again.

Western media has a habit of distorting Chinese spokespersons, so here’s the source (full transcript) if anyone wants to verify what was said: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/202303/t20230314_11041208.html

“The latest joint statement issued by the US, the UK and Australia shows that the three countries, for their own geopolitical interests, have totally disregarded the concerns of the international community and gone further down the wrong and dangerous path.”

Especially considering that ‘万岁’ (wàn suì), the part that means ‘long live,’ was previously used only for royalty, similar to how ‘your majesty’ is reserved for a ruler in English.

Hope you feel better

Apart from a regular hammer and sickle?

I’ve been messing with the idea of getting 全世界人民大团结万岁 done somewhere. Translates to “long live the great unity of the world’s peoples” and it’s on the right side of Tiananmen’s facade.

Another one is ‘Made in Hong Kong * Decolonized in China’. Or maybe ‘deprogrammed’ instead of ‘decolonized’ or something like that.

Also ‘take is aisy’ or ‘nothing that is human is alien to me’ for Engels and Marx respectively (although the latter isn’t originally Marx, I think it reflects a facet of ideology that appeals to me).

undefined> Also they become so baffled when they get lost in the woods and die that there are thousands of videos on YouTube of people crying over conspiracies that must be happening in the park.

Oh is this where the legends about bigfoot and yogi bear come from?

Evil in deed, or evil in the morals of its soldiers?

I’ve never been. Seen it on TV and thought it might be nice to visit but I don’t want to get shot by racists or police or a wandering Dick Cheney. What’s it really like?

Nah that was never normal. This example sparked outrage, it was waaaay out of line and emboldened by the civil unrest at the time.

It actually might have been a good thing, because it got people asking , “if that’s out of line, where is the line?”.

Now we have a line. And a lot of teachers are terrified of it and portray it as overly-draconian, but that’s because they’d grown so used to slinging microaggressions toward mainlanders, mainland culture, and mainland government.

But it’s the same kind of line that everywhere else has. Promote good values. Don’t promote sedition. Don’t cheerlead for the foreign government that wants to destroy yours and subjugate you.

“The Enemy is portrayed as both weak and strong.”

One of Umberto Eco’s telltale signs of fascism.

Oh hold on. That middle collage image has had the script flipped on it. It’s from a sex education textbook, a section about sexual abuse. They educate kids about this stuff in primary school. Top two are pictures of inappropriate behaviour, bottom left has had the pervert with a camera cropped out.

Bottom right I have no idea but the book those other three are from is based as fuck. Other pages from that book that liberals won’t be so quick to share are the pages about respecting homosexuality and asexuality, and that it’s wrong to shame people for choosing not to marry or follow other social norms. It runs completely against the Western narrative about what sex education is like in China.

In Hong Kong, because of the joint declaration, socialist values and SWCC aren’t required in the education system. HK is specifically protected from such communist brainwashing. 😏

Instead, the HK Education Bureau now requires teachers to promote virtues such as love for justice and social justice, caring for and protecting the community, helping each other, sharing, collectivism… yep, no socialism here. 🫡

My liberal teacher friends are fuming about it. They can’t do things like that infamous river comparison worksheet anymore. So unfair! Waaaa.

They’re free to leave any time they want, of course. They could go back to their free-er, liberal, home countries… but they’re still here, cashing the (huge) paychecks and not worrying about the mortal safety of their kids on school days.

Deprogram a liberal and a fascist is aborted.