Tell me you have never interacted with a gay person without telling me you have never interacted with a gay person. I trust gay people to tell me when they are uncomfortable with my choice of phrasing, not faceless CIA agents behind a screen who can claim whatever identity suits them at the time. Sounds like you need to work on some of that ingrained homophobia, my lad, because that specific kind of labeling words of the gay community as bad is extremely common in TERF circles as well. Whole struggle sessions have been had over the word Lesbian as a pejorative, of which I assume you have no knowledge of. Drag queens express their sexuality by saying some of the vilest shit imaginable and they have done more for the LGBTQ community than a bunch MLs pretending they are the vanguard of the revolution because they misunderstood Democratic Centralism is an organization principle during a revolution not just for funsies.

I could quote Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble on the subject but I won’t since it is beyond the scope of this thread. However, with Don’t Say Gay being popularized with Desantis’s campaign, challenging liberal puritanism is a responsibility of anyone who considers themself left.

Same kind of humorless dolts who inhabit left spaces on reddit and are a uniquely a product of reddit’s culture of total conformity. Leftblr used to make fun of them all the time. Speaking from my own experience, I am a tankie, or at least most would accuse me of being such. But I didn’t pass the Lemmygrad purity test, and they blocked my registration because I said gender is fake and gay on my application (gay used as a pejorative). Not saying I didn’t or deserve a warning but yeesh context matters. Which is my personal experience, but if they are that way toward other communists, they are going to be way harder on perceived liberals so most people don’t like seeing their posts day to day.

Nostalgia in part and desperation for some form of win. In 1991, the Soviet experiment dismantled itself, no thanks to the tireless efforts of its enemies, but what was once the world’s second superpower became little more than another colony of the West. Its wealth and gains for its peoples sold off to the highest bidder. Liberal academics called it the end of history for a reason.

But there is more to the issue. The Cold War proved there was no lie too great for the West to peddle to destroy its enemy. No boundary it would not cross. I’ve even read Gorbachev once cried in his car because Reagan would not shut up about the Star Wars project at a nuclear disarmament conference. A project we now know was little more than science fiction. Nazis in Ukraine? Read about Operation Bloodstone. They were present in the country way before 2014 and anyone with geopolitical knowledge knew it.

So with Russia it is because Russia, while not the Soviet Union, still occasionally stands up to the United States like the good ole days. This is amusingly a poor reading of Lenin, who made it very clear what his stance was on inter-capitalist conflict. There is nothing wrong with rooting for NATO lose though. Putin himself despises the Soviet legacy. He pulled pensions from the half a million red army women who served, describes Bolshevism as a stab in the back (not-so-subtle dog-whistle there) and only pays it lip services when he remembers most of his country wants it back.

China, on the other hand, is a harder one to explain. Much of what we learn about China in the West is just straight made up. And I mean it. The great firewall isn’t just a pejorative. It protects the sensitive ears of the West from China as much as it protects them from the West. This has been exacerbated by the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” which has the express goal of containing China.

Let me ask what wrongdoings of China are being defended? How far back you want to rewind decades of propaganda with the explicit goal of demonizing the country? Or are we speaking of more recent claims like Uyghurs? However, your question was why defend it. I’ll answer that one. Because China still considers itself on the path to Socialism. This isn’t a Russia situation. China still keeps its private sector locked in special economic zones and monitors them heavily. It still prioritizes common prosperity and has provided many third world countries an alternative to the IMF.

China’s road to socialism was always going to be different since it was … on the other side of the world, from where the theories of socialism were written. But Lenin himself described socialism as ascending a high mountain. It might take many tries. Even restarts to get it right but is better China handles its path its way than trying to conform to some stringent imagined idea of what socialism should be. Therefore it is worthy of defense.