I haven’t been on lemmy in a long time, so you are just missing the mark, but I don’t think you have a point even if you had grounding. Another very unimpressive attempt to be cool I guess. I assume you get a lot of unearned validation in your life.
The only infestation here is your racism and bootlickery of the west. You capitalist bootlickers are without a shadow of a doubt the most stupid, heartless, sociopathic people on the entire planet, you are in the same league as pedophiles, rapists, and murderers. You constantly prattle on about stupid horseshit regurgitated from the global capitalist Amerikkkan neocolonialist hegemonic fascist legitimately Orwellian “news” networks that are almost all affiliated with the U.S, with nothing even close to resembling empathy or an actual original thought.
“Tankie” is a racial slur, used to demean Marxists (most of which are people of color) for daring to have a spine, a heart, empathy, and not believing everything they read from Cracker News Network.
Everyone I know is racist, but they are all different races. 🥰
You’d be fucking surprised to learn that the west is one of the least racist societies. Hello, we actually have immigrants and diaspora from all over the globe?
Bootlickery of Europe? I am European. I’m licking my own boots.
Capitalist bootlicker? My net worth is 650k euros. I am a half capitalist. Half my income comes from labour and half from capital.
My country Belgium has some of the lowest poverty in the bottom 20%. Holy fuck you’re being disgusting trying to claim that hundreds of millions of people in Europe are the same as pedophiles.
I’m too lazy to read all the news, so most of this is original thought.
Tankies aren’t a race… it’s not a racial slur. It’s just a slur. It means that you will force people with your army and they have to do what you want while you think that the people are just all so dumb and don’t know that you forcing them down with violence is for their own good.
Tankies. Tanks. You drive tanks to make people do what you want. Oppression.
The fucking tanks stopped, both at Tinyman and at Hungary, you stupid ass cracker. Unlike tanks in the U.S. or Neoliberal Europe, that actually run over people.
Cracker isn’t a slur, it’s an accurate description, an attack on your character.
You denying Tankie is a racial slur just further proves my point.
I’m too lazy to read all the news, so most of this is original thought.
There is nothing original in there, what you’re chirping here is what i hear from the average european 😂 you’re a example of how the status quo ideology is reproduced through common sense.
It means that you will force people with your army and they have to do what you want while you think that the people are just all so dumb and don’t know that you forcing them down with violence is for their own good.
Do you ever critically read what you write? What countries does this overwhelmingly apply to? That’s rhetorical by the way, I know you won’t get it.
You’d be fucking surprised to learn that the west is one of the least racist societies.
Divine comedy. I must have imagined all of those wars of annihilation which are still going on right the fuck now and 300 years of colonialism.
Hello, we actually have immigrants and diaspora from all over the globe?
They, just like me didn’t come to the den of jackals because of how amazing your societies are, but to make money and escape the poverty in their home countries that Europe created.
Tankies. Tanks. You drive tanks to make people do what you want. Oppression.
So says the loyal citizen of western imperialism and honest to goodness capitalist.
Those of us in the west tend to be surrounded by liberals, if not worse, most of the time, so it’s not really a question of willing so much as it is a constant immersive reality, with much of it being owed to decades of organized violence and propaganda against not only communists, but the working class and colonized peoples in general. Behind your confusion that anyone would think how we do is enormous amounts of violence that suppressed liberation movements across the globe over decades and vilified anyone who would dare think the working class should be in power. It’s not dissimilar to what would happen if a narcissist successfully convinced you that their victim was actually the problem, just on a much larger scale and sometimes the very people who are part of the victimization are also convinced they are the problem and the system can’t be.
Well yes, if you’re a rich colonizer and don’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to the working class, colonized peoples, etc., then communists are in the opposition. No shit. It’s almost like being part of the exploiting class and wanting it to stay that way makes you opposed to people who don’t want to be exploited. At that point, we can call it communism or yodelayheehoo for all the difference it makes. You’re still on the asshole side of society.
How dare we buy goods, improve them and then sell them. How dare we sell our services.
Imperialism makes up for roughly 25% of the global north’s GDP, although I will need to check how much of that goes to Belgium.
Either way, the point is, the EU runs a large chronic trade deficit, which it has no real intention of paying back. This represents a transfer of real commodities from the periphery to the core, in exchange for euros.
These euros then either devalue over time due to inflation (a reduction in the liabilities of the EU economies), or businesses/banks in the periphery must invest these euros into the EU. Either they buy EU debt, place their money in an EU bank, or invest in an EU business. The net result is that the euros come back into the EU, where they can be spent or lent out again.
Effectively, the EU, like the US has significantly higher purchasing power due to its currency (proped up by incredible violence against middle easterners, who have to bear the burden of the petro currencies) than their own domestic production would normally afford them.
Add on to this the chronic suppression of global south wages and prices, and America and the EU are able to stretch their money far beyond what it should be able to last, at the expense of global south development of course.
Our economy is based on human capital. An educated work force.
But, a good attempt. Belgium was already wealthy before Leopold 2 ever lived. Our location made us a great place for trade. We were the 2nd country to industrialise.
If our economy depended on Congo, then our economy would have crumbled in 1965.
It’s 2025 and we’re one of the wealthiest places on earth.
You won’t be banned unless you stir shit. We still get liberals on our articles because being wrong doesn’t get you banned here, being obnoxious does.
Are you willing to be infested by the vast majority in your area that think you tankies are batshit crazy? 👀
I would think the majority of our users have enough self esteem to not give a shit about the opinions of those who have done no investigation on any topic besides reading reddit memes or western news.
Wonder what the Chinese are able to read, when my wife was in Shanghai as layover before going back to Indonesia, she couldn’t use any western app. Even had to use WeChat.
When she tried to use VPN, her phone was useless for the whole time. Luckily she had 2 phones with her.
You can just get an e-sim before you go to China. And some VPNs do work. Also, what’s wrong with using WeChat? Everyone who has done their research before going to China knows that it makes things infinitely more convenient. When in Rome…
As for western apps being blocked, that’s not “dystopian”, it’s just a consequence of them refusing to follow Chinese law. There are still western apps that work, namely those that abide by Chinese law, such as the requirement to store Chinese user data on Chinese servers.
It seems to me that that is a common-sense requirement. I don’t want my data being owned by the US, yet because my own country does not have digital sovereignty like China and we have no alternatives to US apps, i have to live with that. I wish my government was more like China’s.
What China did is nothing unusual, they employed a type of protectionist measure to encourage the growth of their own domestic alternatives. This is a common thing for countries to do in industry, China just did it in the digital space. And it greatly paid off.
From some quick research: Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp, Signal, Yahoo!, Bing, Trip .com, Booking .com, all work in China for example. Waze probably works. A lot of the smaller ones do, it’s just the big ones that a) refuse to abide by Chinese laws, and b) would compete with the market share of domestic Chinese alternatives that are blocked.
By the way, if independent app developers want to launch apps in China it is possible to do so, they just need to go through the proper process: https://daxueconsulting.com/china-app-market/
And besides that, what’s wrong with using Chinese apps when you’re in China? Many of the big ones like WeChat and Didi apparently have a translation feature these days, so that you don’t even need to learn any Chinese (although it’s considered polite to learn at least a bit of the language of a country you go to visit… frankly i think it’s rude for native English speakers to expect everyone to speak English wherever you go)
WhatsApp doesn’t work in Shanghai, we had to use WeChat. Her emails also only went through after she left china. So Gmail is also blocked.
I’m not a native English speaker. I don’t feel comfortable using a language that I don’t control. Obviously I’m more comfortable with Dutch and English because then I can truly communicate how I want. Just far higher quality.
My wife has been learning Dutch for a year now, doing classes and has received her integration certificate quite quickly.
She still hasn’t spoken a word Dutch to anyone here in flanders. She doesn’t like how she sounds in Dutch. She’s embarrassed. So we talk in English all the time.
I don’t expect everyone to speak English, but it would be very useful for there to be one global language. English has the most non-native speakers globally.
Edit: your article states that foreign apps need to apply the great firewall of china.
I’m getting this feeling that china really wants all the information on their citizens.
Social media like lemmy is the way to go imo. No country owns the data.
Gmail is of course not accessible because Google is blocked due to refusing to abide by Chinese laws.
She’s embarrassed. So we talk in English all the time.
Nobody is going to stop you from speaking whatever language you want when you go to China. All i was saying is that you shouldn’t go to foreign countries expecting everyone to speak English. This is not exclusive to China.
I don’t expect everyone to speak English, but it would be very useful for there to be one global language.
But why does the West get to decide what that language is? Why shouldn’t, say, Spanish or Chinese, both of which have more native speakers, be the global language instead?
I’m getting this feeling that china really wants all the information on their citizens.
And the US doesn’t? Were you not paying attention to Snowden’s NSA leaks? Are you not aware that all US tech companies, especially the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. collaborate with the US government and it’s intelligence agencies?
What China is primarily interested in is its national stability and the security of their citizens. They are not going to open the door to massive psychological manipulation campaigns by foreign governments, or hand over their citizens’ data to US companies which may just as well be extensions of the intelligence agencies.
Just like the US isn’t happy with TikTok being so popular in the US (despite the fact that, unlike Google and co. in China, TikTok actually does abide by US law and even stores US data on US servers) and have been trying to ban it or fully control it.
when my wife was in Shanghai as layover before going back to Indonesia, she couldn’t use any western app
I used to think this was bad until recently we found out that the country I live in has its government data stored in American servers which could in theory be accessed by the Trump admin. Then I also realised that the entire continents IT infrastructure is hopelessly dependent on America, meaning we have no digital sovereignty and the Americans can spy on our data (which the NSA did, as was revealed in the Snowden leaks).
Imagine protecting your IT industries from international competition so you can develop digital sovereignty. Couldn’t be us (Literally, we are fucked here).
But you cannot deny that aiming at blocking VPNs is quite dystopian.
My only contact with Chinese people is buying their products. A shame, because they are 1,4 billion people that could impact the globe with their ideas.
Most rational people can and should argue that it’s not dystopian to block out trash and garbage. The real dystopia is having a global dictatorship that provides funding, support, weapons, and government mouthpieces that drowns out actual truth in a tsunami of horseshit, to psychologically abuse and gaslight the vast majority of a planet’s population. Especially when that nation has practically the entire world in a choking vice grip, and has done almost nothing beneficial for humanity, at least not without strings attached, and has invaded, sanctioned, couped and stalled human societal progress for centuries, and has the fucking gall to think of itself as the shining city on a hill, while completely misunderstanding the original meaning behind that phrase.
I’d fucking block all western webcrap in my country if I could. Wait, my country is already doing that. And it’s doing wonders to our society. Our infospace isn’t influenced by imperialist astroturfing (as much)
But you cannot deny that aiming at blocking VPNs is quite dystopian.
Sometimes measures need to be taken that take away convenience. The Chinese do have limited access to some western sites and apps but it has had a great effect on their technological and economical sovereignty and independence. Chinese platforms are thriving. The Chinese are actually in control of their own data. Can the same be said about our governments where we face a “vendor lock” by FANGAM which have their claws over our data?
It has also kept them away from toxic anti-China sentiment on western platforms.
My only contact with Chinese people is buying their products. A shame, because they are 1,4 billion people that could impact the globe with their ideas.
That’s strange because there are Wechat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, BiliBili and other Chinese platforms. If you really wanted to socialise with Chinese people you’d already be on one of those platforms and not writing such a cynic complaint. Still, I’ll assume good faith and recommend you to check out these platforms for yourself. Registering an account on XHS is very easy and it is definitely worth it. :)
Those platforms will be filled with mandarin instead of English.
If you consider this a problem, do you also believe that everyone should abandon their own language for English? Translation tools are available nowadays and their accuracy has increased a lot in recent years, so there is no need to use an intermediary language.
They need a global social media where they speak a language that people outside of their country understand.
XHS has a lot of content in different languages if that is what you seek. Otherwise, translation tools do a good enough job nowadays so they don’t even need to speak another language to communicate.
If china is so strict and such a large powerful entity, then I don’t wanna be there.
Is being strict bad? If you’re not strict you can’t enforce the laws and if you can’t enforce the laws you’ll eventually end up with a society which has normalised crime and believes that they can get away with it. “Authoritarian” is a very misused word and often used in western propaganda to refer to cultures which are more collectivist and law-obedient than us. Plato in the Republic, if I recall correctly, notes that sacrifices have to be made for the sake of the many because the common good is more important than an individual’s gain, and that thought is actually embedded in the Chinese culture.
Yes, but lemm.ee federates with virtually everyone out of principle, and no one is defederated from it. If you want access to everything, lemm.ee is a good choice. https://defed.xyz/check?software=lemmy&name=lemm.ee
Oh no, I’m so sorry that communities that are specifically designed for members of that community don’t specifically want people who aren’t a member of that community in them, the horror!
A wealthy white man (middle aged I presume) who believes he can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants.
Constantly gets kicked out or belittled whenever he decides to step out of his bubble. All because he keeps showing his asshole, which he also wants to lick.
That is a major reason why I was so miserable in online fora controlled by centrists or white moderates. They basically let neofascists spew almost anything and the moderators rarely intervened. (In fact, there was one moderator who got angry at me for reporting somebody for heterosexism.) The only reason that I wasted as much time as I did on those fora was that I simply had nowhere better to go.
It’s like watching a team of firefighters sit back and chill out when there’s a housefire right in front of them.
You were miserable because nobody really shared your opinions. Then you found a group that does.
Kind seeks kind.
Well, I don’t give a fuck what kind you are. Laissez faire. If you don’t want to talk to me, you fucking won’t. Because you don’t like me.
I don’t need to exclude you by force. Over time, you will simply no longer be speaking to me.
Excluding people limits growth. You don’t have a clue who you will end up liking in the long term. If you decide books based on the cover, ah whatever it’s your damn life.
More have defederated from us than we have defederated from. People here tend not to tolerate racism, bigotry or typical fascist rhetoric. Tearing down or sharing articles tearing down typical neoliberal narratives tends to attract attention from the typical “China bad, Ukraine good” groups which encompass a wide, wide circle for some “strange” reason.
I’m curious on why you’re banned from so many socialist subreddits.
👀 you’re pro china and pro Palestine, but you’re aware that China is against Islam and Muslims in Europe are quite against China (ulghur thing) and heavily pro Palestine?
My Turkish diaspora coworker won’t even buy anything from temu lol.
I’m banned from socialist subreddits because I would question their ideals and they said that their subreddits are only for socialists.
So basically when someone said something against mainstream policy (ironic), then that person would get banned.
I’m a social democrat. It’s rather funny that we’re the most left leaning liberals and socialists dislike us more for it.
China, North Korea, etc are all states that are providing weaponry and support to Hamas in their struggle against Israel; weapons from China being found for example. On top of that, they are also advocating for full statehood for Palestine and hosting a forum where members of Hamas can meet and the factions can discuss with each other. So that is objectively untrue.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the second largest organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The OIC released Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the non-OIC Member States in 2019 which:
Welcomes the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat’s delegation upon invitation from the People’s Republic of China; commends the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and looks forward to further cooperation between the OIC and the People’s Republic of China. (pulled this from DeProgram, original article: https://www.oic-oci.org/docdown/?docID=4447&refID=1250) In this same document, the OIC expressed much greater concern about the Rohingya Muslim Community in Myanmar, which the West was relatively silent on. (Which Meta helped fund and support an actual genocide there)
Even if you believe the deradicalization efforts are wholly unjustified, and that the mass detention of Uyghur’s amounts to a crime against humanity, it’s still not genocide. Even the U.S. State Department’s legal experts admit as much:
The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials.
One of the main proponents of these narratives is Adrian Zenz, a German far-right fundamentalist Christian and Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China has driven much of the narrative. He relies heavily on limited and questionable data sources, particularly from anonymous and unverified Uyghur sources, coming up with estimates based on assumptions which are not supported by concrete evidence.
The World Uyghur Congress, headquartered in Germany, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, using funding to support organizations that promote American interests rather than the interests of the local communities they claim to represent.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) is part of a larger project of U.S. imperialism in Asia, one that seeks to control the flow of information, undermine independent media, and advance American geopolitical interests in the region. Rather than providing an objective and impartial news source, RFA is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, one that seeks to shape the narrative in Asia in ways that serve the interests of the U.S. government and its allies.
You’re objectively wrong and this is probably why you were banned for spewing straight up U.S State Department talking points that are easily debunked with a bit of research instead of full-heartedly accepting C.I.A/NED fronts like “Council of Foreign Relations” (maybe meant something long ago) and debunked with a variety of sources from even the claimants own yes-men and social researchers struggling to find evidence. U.N also did not find evidence of a genocide.
So. What are your sources that are stronger than a self-debunk from U.S foreign policy, the U.N and multiple independent news organizations that don’t have USAID money flowing through them?
China is so against Islam that for decades it has specifically acted to protect and preserve religious and ethnic cultures with the permission of village people and elders, and for over a decade plus has refused to blame Islam for separatist and terrorist attacks, and instead righfully blames foreign interference and religious extremism/fundamentalism, rather than Islam itself.
China hates Islam so much that the government bans anti-Islamic and anti-Uyghur racial slurs and sentiment, criminalizes language and actions that threaten to deny Uyghur identity as being part of China. China hates muslims so much that muslim-related minority groups for decades had been exempt from child restriction policies. China hates muslims so much that government spends untold billions of dollars preserving their cultural practices, customs and beliefs.
China hates muslims so much that they spent billions creating up-to date mosques with air conditioning and safer architecture.
Now if there would be any Chinese here, they could talk about their society :)
I don’t really care about islam that much, even though my wife’s family are quite islamic.
It’s more the diaspora Turkish girl at work that is against china. She’s Muslim and she thinks China is bad for human rights.
Now that’s all for her to handle.
I mean, she’s also against Jews so much that I had to tell her we won’t genocide jews 😂 she’s 24 and has quite the opinions. She even voted for the communists in Belgium.
Ah, I’d say my bad for not knowing much about china. But I don’t care, if Chinese don’t talk to me, then that’s their problem. The reason why they don’t talk to me is because they can’t.
There is Chinese here. There is Russians here as well. Once again, you’re talking out of your ass.
You keep bringing up anecdotes. A lot of anti-communists use eastern european anti-communism as an example of the failures of the Soviet Union as an anecdote. My family from E. Germany told me “What did capitalism do in a 100 years that communism couldn’t? Make us hate capitalism.”
My partner and their family are from China and the Philippines. They do not have negative opinions of their origin, despite part of the family being from a nation that is typically not as friendly in geopolitics.
With that said, anecdotes mean nothing. U.N found no genocide. Multiple sources from within the U.S foreign policy apparatus and top diplomatic lawyers say the “genocide” is an out-right lie after borrowing sources from a right-wing evangelical nut-job “Adrian Zens”. Multiple independent news agencies such as the Grayzone also found no evidence.
Also, I saw another thing earlier where you were crying about IP banning and DNS regulations as dystopian. When you have an entity such as the United States and it’s intelligence agencies…that is a good thing actually. Do you need a list of every color revolution and military intervention the U.S has done? The horrible fucking things it has done that would make nearly any other Empire pale? (Yes, even the British and Mongols.)
The British and Mongols weren’t injecting lysergic acid into the brains of children because they were scared a geopolitical rival was doing mind-control. (They weren’t and MKULTRA was umbrella name for a litany of programs that came afterwards)
Closest would be Nazis. Oh wait. Nazis were directly inspired by America.
If you don’t even know the name of the ethnic group then kindly keep your mouth shut. You have absolutely no evidence for any of your claims besides “uhhh Adrian Zenz said so…”. I’m so sorry, providing education and security in a minority region is so awful. Would you prefer they take the European model and start actually oppressing their culture? Sorry, teaching Uyghur culture to people in schools is so awful and evil.
people who live in a liberal bubble having their first exposure to outside ideas will never stop being hilarious
Oh nah, it’s just that I’m perma banned for years on Reddit on any socialist subreddit.
I’m amazed I’m not banned, that’s all
So it actually shows on my home feed ahaha
Are you willing to be infested by the vast majority in your area that think you tankies are batshit crazy? 👀
You can still see shit on your feed even when you are banned. It’s like you want to seem cool but are really just obviously a moron.
If you don’t interact on posts, then the algorithm shows you these posts less and less until it completely stops.
You seem like you wanna be cool but are really just obviously a moron.
Gijse sloeber
I haven’t been on lemmy in a long time, so you are just missing the mark, but I don’t think you have a point even if you had grounding. Another very unimpressive attempt to be cool I guess. I assume you get a lot of unearned validation in your life.
Someone doesn’t know how the Lemmy algorithm works….
I’m quite new to the app
So maybe don’t speak on things you know nothing about?
The only infestation here is your racism and bootlickery of the west. You capitalist bootlickers are without a shadow of a doubt the most stupid, heartless, sociopathic people on the entire planet, you are in the same league as pedophiles, rapists, and murderers. You constantly prattle on about stupid horseshit regurgitated from the global capitalist Amerikkkan neocolonialist hegemonic fascist legitimately Orwellian “news” networks that are almost all affiliated with the U.S, with nothing even close to resembling empathy or an actual original thought.
“Tankie” is a racial slur, used to demean Marxists (most of which are people of color) for daring to have a spine, a heart, empathy, and not believing everything they read from Cracker News Network.
Everyone I know is racist, but they are all different races. 🥰
You’d be fucking surprised to learn that the west is one of the least racist societies. Hello, we actually have immigrants and diaspora from all over the globe?
Bootlickery of Europe? I am European. I’m licking my own boots.
Capitalist bootlicker? My net worth is 650k euros. I am a half capitalist. Half my income comes from labour and half from capital.
My country Belgium has some of the lowest poverty in the bottom 20%. Holy fuck you’re being disgusting trying to claim that hundreds of millions of people in Europe are the same as pedophiles.
I’m too lazy to read all the news, so most of this is original thought.
Tankies aren’t a race… it’s not a racial slur. It’s just a slur. It means that you will force people with your army and they have to do what you want while you think that the people are just all so dumb and don’t know that you forcing them down with violence is for their own good.
Tankies. Tanks. You drive tanks to make people do what you want. Oppression.
Cracker is a racial slur though ahahahhaha
I’m not reading your word salad.
The fucking tanks stopped, both at Tinyman and at Hungary, you stupid ass cracker. Unlike tanks in the U.S. or Neoliberal Europe, that actually run over people.
Cracker isn’t a slur, it’s an accurate description, an attack on your character.
You denying Tankie is a racial slur just further proves my point.
There is nothing original in there, what you’re chirping here is what i hear from the average european 😂 you’re a example of how the status quo ideology is reproduced through common sense.
Do you ever critically read what you write? What countries does this overwhelmingly apply to? That’s rhetorical by the way, I know you won’t get it.
Divine comedy. I must have imagined all of those wars of annihilation which are still going on right the fuck now and 300 years of colonialism.
They, just like me didn’t come to the den of jackals because of how amazing your societies are, but to make money and escape the poverty in their home countries that Europe created.
So says the loyal citizen of western imperialism and honest to goodness capitalist.
Where did you come from
Those of us in the west tend to be surrounded by liberals, if not worse, most of the time, so it’s not really a question of willing so much as it is a constant immersive reality, with much of it being owed to decades of organized violence and propaganda against not only communists, but the working class and colonized peoples in general. Behind your confusion that anyone would think how we do is enormous amounts of violence that suppressed liberation movements across the globe over decades and vilified anyone who would dare think the working class should be in power. It’s not dissimilar to what would happen if a narcissist successfully convinced you that their victim was actually the problem, just on a much larger scale and sometimes the very people who are part of the victimization are also convinced they are the problem and the system can’t be.
I very much like my country (Belgium).
Median net wealth of 250k euros per adult.
My people did things the right way. The communists are in the opposition. Have been, will be.
Well yes, if you’re a rich colonizer and don’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to the working class, colonized peoples, etc., then communists are in the opposition. No shit. It’s almost like being part of the exploiting class and wanting it to stay that way makes you opposed to people who don’t want to be exploited. At that point, we can call it communism or yodelayheehoo for all the difference it makes. You’re still on the asshole side of society.
Oh my, so Belgians are all oppressors?
How dare we buy goods, improve them and then sell them. How dare we sell our services.
Lil question. How will Nigeria fare when the world all uses renewable energy? Their main export is oil. Their economy depends on it.
Leopold would like a word with you.
Imperialism makes up for roughly 25% of the global north’s GDP, although I will need to check how much of that goes to Belgium.
Either way, the point is, the EU runs a large chronic trade deficit, which it has no real intention of paying back. This represents a transfer of real commodities from the periphery to the core, in exchange for euros.
These euros then either devalue over time due to inflation (a reduction in the liabilities of the EU economies), or businesses/banks in the periphery must invest these euros into the EU. Either they buy EU debt, place their money in an EU bank, or invest in an EU business. The net result is that the euros come back into the EU, where they can be spent or lent out again.
Effectively, the EU, like the US has significantly higher purchasing power due to its currency (proped up by incredible violence against middle easterners, who have to bear the burden of the petro currencies) than their own domestic production would normally afford them.
Add on to this the chronic suppression of global south wages and prices, and America and the EU are able to stretch their money far beyond what it should be able to last, at the expense of global south development of course.
Global south is such a vast place. Let’s just choose a country. Indonesia. They are developing quite well.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/idn/indonesia/poverty-rate
In purchasing power, it has been improving. Western companies are quite present in Indonesia.
By fighting for and winning their sovereignty, south east Asians were able to develop despite western exploitation.
Although this came at the cost of long working hours and huge amounts of spilt blood.
“The right way”
Our economy is based on human capital. An educated work force.
But, a good attempt. Belgium was already wealthy before Leopold 2 ever lived. Our location made us a great place for trade. We were the 2nd country to industrialise.
If our economy depended on Congo, then our economy would have crumbled in 1965.
It’s 2025 and we’re one of the wealthiest places on earth.
Deepthroat that boot, colonizer
You won’t be banned unless you stir shit. We still get liberals on our articles because being wrong doesn’t get you banned here, being obnoxious does.
I would think the majority of our users have enough self esteem to not give a shit about the opinions of those who have done no investigation on any topic besides reading reddit memes or western news.
Wonder what the Chinese are able to read, when my wife was in Shanghai as layover before going back to Indonesia, she couldn’t use any western app. Even had to use WeChat.
When she tried to use VPN, her phone was useless for the whole time. Luckily she had 2 phones with her.
You can just get an e-sim before you go to China. And some VPNs do work. Also, what’s wrong with using WeChat? Everyone who has done their research before going to China knows that it makes things infinitely more convenient. When in Rome…
As for western apps being blocked, that’s not “dystopian”, it’s just a consequence of them refusing to follow Chinese law. There are still western apps that work, namely those that abide by Chinese law, such as the requirement to store Chinese user data on Chinese servers.
It seems to me that that is a common-sense requirement. I don’t want my data being owned by the US, yet because my own country does not have digital sovereignty like China and we have no alternatives to US apps, i have to live with that. I wish my government was more like China’s.
What China did is nothing unusual, they employed a type of protectionist measure to encourage the growth of their own domestic alternatives. This is a common thing for countries to do in industry, China just did it in the digital space. And it greatly paid off.
Which western apps work in China where the majority spoken language is English?
Is Lemmy allowed in china?
From some quick research: Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp, Signal, Yahoo!, Bing, Trip .com, Booking .com, all work in China for example. Waze probably works. A lot of the smaller ones do, it’s just the big ones that a) refuse to abide by Chinese laws, and b) would compete with the market share of domestic Chinese alternatives that are blocked.
By the way, if independent app developers want to launch apps in China it is possible to do so, they just need to go through the proper process: https://daxueconsulting.com/china-app-market/
And besides that, what’s wrong with using Chinese apps when you’re in China? Many of the big ones like WeChat and Didi apparently have a translation feature these days, so that you don’t even need to learn any Chinese (although it’s considered polite to learn at least a bit of the language of a country you go to visit… frankly i think it’s rude for native English speakers to expect everyone to speak English wherever you go)
WhatsApp doesn’t work in Shanghai, we had to use WeChat. Her emails also only went through after she left china. So Gmail is also blocked.
I’m not a native English speaker. I don’t feel comfortable using a language that I don’t control. Obviously I’m more comfortable with Dutch and English because then I can truly communicate how I want. Just far higher quality.
My wife has been learning Dutch for a year now, doing classes and has received her integration certificate quite quickly.
She still hasn’t spoken a word Dutch to anyone here in flanders. She doesn’t like how she sounds in Dutch. She’s embarrassed. So we talk in English all the time.
I don’t expect everyone to speak English, but it would be very useful for there to be one global language. English has the most non-native speakers globally.
Edit: your article states that foreign apps need to apply the great firewall of china.
I’m getting this feeling that china really wants all the information on their citizens.
Social media like lemmy is the way to go imo. No country owns the data.
It is possible that WhatsApp doesn’t work in China. I only did a very brief search online to answer your previous question and some people appeared to say that they could access it without a VPN: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windscribe/comments/1cckjjt/whatsapp_works_in_china_without_a_vpn/
Gmail is of course not accessible because Google is blocked due to refusing to abide by Chinese laws.
Nobody is going to stop you from speaking whatever language you want when you go to China. All i was saying is that you shouldn’t go to foreign countries expecting everyone to speak English. This is not exclusive to China.
But why does the West get to decide what that language is? Why shouldn’t, say, Spanish or Chinese, both of which have more native speakers, be the global language instead?
And the US doesn’t? Were you not paying attention to Snowden’s NSA leaks? Are you not aware that all US tech companies, especially the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. collaborate with the US government and it’s intelligence agencies?
What China is primarily interested in is its national stability and the security of their citizens. They are not going to open the door to massive psychological manipulation campaigns by foreign governments, or hand over their citizens’ data to US companies which may just as well be extensions of the intelligence agencies.
Just like the US isn’t happy with TikTok being so popular in the US (despite the fact that, unlike Google and co. in China, TikTok actually does abide by US law and even stores US data on US servers) and have been trying to ban it or fully control it.
I used to think this was bad until recently we found out that the country I live in has its government data stored in American servers which could in theory be accessed by the Trump admin. Then I also realised that the entire continents IT infrastructure is hopelessly dependent on America, meaning we have no digital sovereignty and the Americans can spy on our data (which the NSA did, as was revealed in the Snowden leaks).
Imagine protecting your IT industries from international competition so you can develop digital sovereignty. Couldn’t be us (Literally, we are fucked here).
It’s true that it all has pros and cons.
But you cannot deny that aiming at blocking VPNs is quite dystopian.
My only contact with Chinese people is buying their products. A shame, because they are 1,4 billion people that could impact the globe with their ideas.
Most rational people can and should argue that it’s not dystopian to block out trash and garbage. The real dystopia is having a global dictatorship that provides funding, support, weapons, and government mouthpieces that drowns out actual truth in a tsunami of horseshit, to psychologically abuse and gaslight the vast majority of a planet’s population. Especially when that nation has practically the entire world in a choking vice grip, and has done almost nothing beneficial for humanity, at least not without strings attached, and has invaded, sanctioned, couped and stalled human societal progress for centuries, and has the fucking gall to think of itself as the shining city on a hill, while completely misunderstanding the original meaning behind that phrase.
It’s dystopian to think that everything outside of one country is trash and garbage.
Your subjectivity got in the way so quickly, so I can just tell you that you’re being irrational.
Globalism is the future. Social media like lemmy can help with that tremendously. Everyone is welcome. I wonder if Chinese can access it.
You’re projecting and strawmanning
Not outside, but inside. Most countries are fine, but then there is America.
I’d fucking block all western webcrap in my country if I could. Wait, my country is already doing that. And it’s doing wonders to our society. Our infospace isn’t influenced by imperialist astroturfing (as much)
Which country do you live in?
A Global South country
Sometimes measures need to be taken that take away convenience. The Chinese do have limited access to some western sites and apps but it has had a great effect on their technological and economical sovereignty and independence. Chinese platforms are thriving. The Chinese are actually in control of their own data. Can the same be said about our governments where we face a “vendor lock” by FANGAM which have their claws over our data?
It has also kept them away from toxic anti-China sentiment on western platforms.
That’s strange because there are Wechat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, BiliBili and other Chinese platforms. If you really wanted to socialise with Chinese people you’d already be on one of those platforms and not writing such a cynic complaint. Still, I’ll assume good faith and recommend you to check out these platforms for yourself. Registering an account on XHS is very easy and it is definitely worth it. :)
Those platforms will be filled with mandarin instead of English.
They need a global social media where they speak a language that people outside of their country understand.
If china is so strict and such a large powerful entity, then I don’t wanna be there.
Singapore is authoritarian as well, but it’s a city. Can flee to Malaysia or Indonesia in a 2 hours trip.
If you consider this a problem, do you also believe that everyone should abandon their own language for English? Translation tools are available nowadays and their accuracy has increased a lot in recent years, so there is no need to use an intermediary language.
XHS has a lot of content in different languages if that is what you seek. Otherwise, translation tools do a good enough job nowadays so they don’t even need to speak another language to communicate.
Is being strict bad? If you’re not strict you can’t enforce the laws and if you can’t enforce the laws you’ll eventually end up with a society which has normalised crime and believes that they can get away with it. “Authoritarian” is a very misused word and often used in western propaganda to refer to cultures which are more collectivist and law-obedient than us. Plato in the Republic, if I recall correctly, notes that sacrifices have to be made for the sake of the many because the common good is more important than an individual’s gain, and that thought is actually embedded in the Chinese culture.
We’re not the unwilling ones: https://defed.xyz/check?software=lemmy&name=lemmygrad.ml
Ah, I see this because the lemm.ee I’m on is federated with the LM one. I see.
Does this mean I cannot see any posts of the defederated communities chosen by the mods from lemm.ee?
Yes, but lemm.ee federates with virtually everyone out of principle, and no one is defederated from it. If you want access to everything, lemm.ee is a good choice. https://defed.xyz/check?software=lemmy&name=lemm.ee
Brilliant then, thanks for the info
lol fair enough, and most of us have developed a pretty thick skin at this point :)
All great then, anarcho capitalists had more impact on me because they refused to ban opposition. So they didn’t limit publicity of their ideals.
The isolationist/purist route always baffled me
Does pure germ theory disgust you too? Does the pure scientific method baffle your simple mind?
Hahahahahaa okay buddy
I’ll take that as a yes.
Just as a suspected
You jumped from something as subjective as politics to something as objective as science.
Like, come on. It’s funny!
You would care about objectivity
Oh no, I’m so sorry that communities that are specifically designed for members of that community don’t specifically want people who aren’t a member of that community in them, the horror!
I’ve never had the desire to exclude people. Live and let live.
Then stay in your own space, it’s not that hard. And bragging that you wouldn’t exclude Nazis isn’t really a very good look
I go where I please
Unsuprized. Assumption of access is a hallmark of colonizers.
You sound like an insufferable loser, oh wait, you are!
A wealthy white man (middle aged I presume) who believes he can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants.
Constantly gets kicked out or belittled whenever he decides to step out of his bubble. All because he keeps showing his asshole, which he also wants to lick.
Life truly is a comedy.
That is a major reason why I was so miserable in online fora controlled by centrists or white moderates. They basically let neofascists spew almost anything and the moderators rarely intervened. (In fact, there was one moderator who got angry at me for reporting somebody for heterosexism.) The only reason that I wasted as much time as I did on those fora was that I simply had nowhere better to go.
It’s like watching a team of firefighters sit back and chill out when there’s a housefire right in front of them.
You were miserable because nobody really shared your opinions. Then you found a group that does.
Kind seeks kind.
Well, I don’t give a fuck what kind you are. Laissez faire. If you don’t want to talk to me, you fucking won’t. Because you don’t like me.
I don’t need to exclude you by force. Over time, you will simply no longer be speaking to me.
Excluding people limits growth. You don’t have a clue who you will end up liking in the long term. If you decide books based on the cover, ah whatever it’s your damn life.
I think it’s more like watching a bunch of arsonists wearing firefighter uniforms stand back and relax watching
More have defederated from us than we have defederated from. People here tend not to tolerate racism, bigotry or typical fascist rhetoric. Tearing down or sharing articles tearing down typical neoliberal narratives tends to attract attention from the typical “China bad, Ukraine good” groups which encompass a wide, wide circle for some “strange” reason.
I’m curious on why you’re banned from so many socialist subreddits.
👀 you’re pro china and pro Palestine, but you’re aware that China is against Islam and Muslims in Europe are quite against China (ulghur thing) and heavily pro Palestine?
My Turkish diaspora coworker won’t even buy anything from temu lol.
I’m banned from socialist subreddits because I would question their ideals and they said that their subreddits are only for socialists.
So basically when someone said something against mainstream policy (ironic), then that person would get banned.
I’m a social democrat. It’s rather funny that we’re the most left leaning liberals and socialists dislike us more for it.
China, North Korea, etc are all states that are providing weaponry and support to Hamas in their struggle against Israel; weapons from China being found for example. On top of that, they are also advocating for full statehood for Palestine and hosting a forum where members of Hamas can meet and the factions can discuss with each other. So that is objectively untrue.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nato-arms-industry-cold-war/
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the second largest organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The OIC released Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the non-OIC Member States in 2019 which:
Even if you believe the deradicalization efforts are wholly unjustified, and that the mass detention of Uyghur’s amounts to a crime against humanity, it’s still not genocide. Even the U.S. State Department’s legal experts admit as much:
The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/
Who is driving the Uyghur genocide narrative?
One of the main proponents of these narratives is Adrian Zenz, a German far-right fundamentalist Christian and Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China has driven much of the narrative. He relies heavily on limited and questionable data sources, particularly from anonymous and unverified Uyghur sources, coming up with estimates based on assumptions which are not supported by concrete evidence.
The World Uyghur Congress, headquartered in Germany, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, using funding to support organizations that promote American interests rather than the interests of the local communities they claim to represent.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) is part of a larger project of U.S. imperialism in Asia, one that seeks to control the flow of information, undermine independent media, and advance American geopolitical interests in the region. Rather than providing an objective and impartial news source, RFA is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, one that seeks to shape the narrative in Asia in ways that serve the interests of the U.S. government and its allies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/
Truckload of sources.
You’re objectively wrong and this is probably why you were banned for spewing straight up U.S State Department talking points that are easily debunked with a bit of research instead of full-heartedly accepting C.I.A/NED fronts like “Council of Foreign Relations” (maybe meant something long ago) and debunked with a variety of sources from even the claimants own yes-men and social researchers struggling to find evidence. U.N also did not find evidence of a genocide.
So. What are your sources that are stronger than a self-debunk from U.S foreign policy, the U.N and multiple independent news organizations that don’t have USAID money flowing through them?
China is so against Islam that for decades it has specifically acted to protect and preserve religious and ethnic cultures with the permission of village people and elders, and for over a decade plus has refused to blame Islam for separatist and terrorist attacks, and instead righfully blames foreign interference and religious extremism/fundamentalism, rather than Islam itself.
China hates Islam so much that the government bans anti-Islamic and anti-Uyghur racial slurs and sentiment, criminalizes language and actions that threaten to deny Uyghur identity as being part of China. China hates muslims so much that muslim-related minority groups for decades had been exempt from child restriction policies. China hates muslims so much that government spends untold billions of dollars preserving their cultural practices, customs and beliefs.
China hates muslims so much that they spent billions creating up-to date mosques with air conditioning and safer architecture.
Now if there would be any Chinese here, they could talk about their society :)
I don’t really care about islam that much, even though my wife’s family are quite islamic.
It’s more the diaspora Turkish girl at work that is against china. She’s Muslim and she thinks China is bad for human rights.
Now that’s all for her to handle.
I mean, she’s also against Jews so much that I had to tell her we won’t genocide jews 😂 she’s 24 and has quite the opinions. She even voted for the communists in Belgium.
Ah, I’d say my bad for not knowing much about china. But I don’t care, if Chinese don’t talk to me, then that’s their problem. The reason why they don’t talk to me is because they can’t.
There is Chinese here. There is Russians here as well. Once again, you’re talking out of your ass.
You keep bringing up anecdotes. A lot of anti-communists use eastern european anti-communism as an example of the failures of the Soviet Union as an anecdote. My family from E. Germany told me “What did capitalism do in a 100 years that communism couldn’t? Make us hate capitalism.”
My partner and their family are from China and the Philippines. They do not have negative opinions of their origin, despite part of the family being from a nation that is typically not as friendly in geopolitics.
With that said, anecdotes mean nothing. U.N found no genocide. Multiple sources from within the U.S foreign policy apparatus and top diplomatic lawyers say the “genocide” is an out-right lie after borrowing sources from a right-wing evangelical nut-job “Adrian Zens”. Multiple independent news agencies such as the Grayzone also found no evidence.
Also, I saw another thing earlier where you were crying about IP banning and DNS regulations as dystopian. When you have an entity such as the United States and it’s intelligence agencies…that is a good thing actually. Do you need a list of every color revolution and military intervention the U.S has done? The horrible fucking things it has done that would make nearly any other Empire pale? (Yes, even the British and Mongols.)
The British and Mongols weren’t injecting lysergic acid into the brains of children because they were scared a geopolitical rival was doing mind-control. (They weren’t and MKULTRA was umbrella name for a litany of programs that came afterwards)
Closest would be Nazis. Oh wait. Nazis were directly inspired by America.
Do you lick your own asshole?
What in the world is “the ulghur thing”?
Ask her 😂 concentration camps guiding Muslim Chinese into being traditional han-like Chinese. Something like that.
Impacted something like a million people or something. Idk, it’s been in the news some years ago.
Let’s Google 🤨
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-muslims-repression-genocide-human-rights
Uyghurs, not ulghur whoopsiedaisy
If you don’t even know the name of the ethnic group then kindly keep your mouth shut. You have absolutely no evidence for any of your claims besides “uhhh Adrian Zenz said so…”. I’m so sorry, providing education and security in a minority region is so awful. Would you prefer they take the European model and start actually oppressing their culture? Sorry, teaching Uyghur culture to people in schools is so awful and evil.