QuietCupcake [any, they/them]

I honestly would have thought it was a bit making fun of dipshit libs if they hadn’t gone mask off in other comments and proving once again the validity of the “scratched liberal” saying.

Those are copy cat sites. Fuck the Guardian but no, they’re not “lying.” Fmovies has been shut down for weeks now.

To be clear, where I was using the word “them” I meant the ruling class, not people in general. I see how some of my sentences weren’t worded well.

Bringing the ruling class into it… I don’t get it.

The idea that humans and human progress are inherently destructive is a lie told by the ruling class because getting people to believe it benefits them. Among other things it absolves them of their own crimes of destruction while simultaneously blaming the rest of us and our positive traits for those crimes. Somewhat ironically it’s a lie that helps lead to more destruction. See my other response to u/Sagittari.

Maybe could’ve done without the “The fuck are you on?” though I guess

To me it’s honestly a disgusting thing to claim that human progress and creativity is all based on destruction when in reality it’s the exact opposite. I don’t think my response was at all over the top given how harmful of a sentiment I think that is.

This stuff matters. Our biosphere is facing destruction at human hands but not because of our desire to create and build things, not because of our ability to express ourselves through our ingenuity to shape stone and wood. Those are not “destructive traits” but profoundly constructuve attributes. The destruction on the scale that it’s happening now to both the environment and much of human culture is because of, like I said, a social pathology that’s rooted in a system that rewards greed instead of trying to prevent it. It is a pathology that tries to equate greed and destruction with the creative aspects of human nature… just like the comment I responded to was doing. It’s a lie. Even if someone who has fallen for it may be well-meaning, they’re still perpetuating a very harmful (and destrctive!) misconception. So I think it deserves a strong, even emotionally-charged critical response.

The fuck are you on? “Destroy” stone? There is a vast gulf of difference between altering something, including in creative and constructive ways, and “destruction.” Most of us know the difference today and our ancestors certainly knew the difference. Human labor is in general a constructive force even if it can be used to destructive ends. Saying that “our willingness to destroy is the trait that powered our rise” is ahistorical nonsense and anti-human drivel. But it sounds an awful lot like the lying justifications the small subset of the current ruling class likes to use as an excuse and justification to exploit us and actually destroy our environment for the sake of their own narrow profit and greed. But that’s no more of a universal human trait than any other disgusting pathology that a select few are afflicted with.

What you’re doing isn’t realism, dipshit, it’s denialism.

I really hate to admit it, but I do use amazon quite a bit. It’s not “like me” to use a company or service I despise, despite the truth of “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” some businesses are just so evil that I feel it is wrong to support them in any way, even at the cost of convenience.

Here’s the situation though. I rely on foodstamp benefits to be able to afford food. Amazon allows me to buy food in bulk online with my ebt card. I also have a disability that makes it prohibitively difficult to go to the grocery store as often as I would need to, and bulk buying online also stretches the benefits I get much further than regular grocery visits. Walmart and Target also now allow ebt cards for online food shopping, but they didn’t used to, and they are evil as well!

I rationalize using amazon by telling myself that since mostly the only thing I get from them is food via ebt card, then it’s really just money going straight from my state government to amazon, and my state government (just like most others) gives amazon free money anyway, so I may as well get something out of their capitalist sweetheart deal too.

It was not a “massacre.”

Then post articles that say that and not articles that refute your own point.

Even the title of the first article I posted is “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’” It’s in the url for chrissakes. This is beyond a failure of reading comprehension, it’s a failure to even look at words.

It was not. a. massacre. It is not at all pedantic to point this fact out. Especially when people, following a blatantly propagandist narrative line, incorrectly call it that.

My choosing those two sources specifically among the thousands of others that was to point out how ridiculous it is to ban someone for “denying a massacre” when even mainstream western news sources (in addition to the BBC as was mentioned in the comment that caught that user the ban lol), including one of the most famous mouthpieces for the U.S. government’s foreign policy, likewise “deny” that it was a massacre and likewise would have been banned according to the silly mod’s standards. Those articles did not at all refute my point, they clearly made it, as should be obvious to anyone able to follow this thread.

Well said.

Another very illustrative example of this kind of deferral and obfuscation played by liberal democracies with their use of authoritarianism is the continued use of literal slave labor specifically in the US, which is even enshrined in the constitution. The sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) comes from shifting the term slavery into euphemisms for prison labor. A slave population of “prisoners,” the vast majority of whom are People of Color, mostly black people, as is the slavery tradition, who are actually pipelined from their schools to prison, and criminalized for engaging in the only means they have of economic independence. The authoritarian slave drivers will tell the general populace they are “bad people, felons” and deserve to be sequestered away from society to live solitary lives doing hard labor for no pay (2 cents an hour doesn’t count as pay.)

There is nothing more “authoritarian” than having actual slaves, which is the major reason the prison-industrial complex exists in the US and has more prisoners (read: slaves) than any other country in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita by a ridiculously large margin. That is capitalist-style authoritarianism.

And there were many soldiers who were also killed as well, the first of which were not even armed but were lynched. There was absolutely fighting in the streets in the surrounding area, and no one denies that people did die. But it was a mutually armed struggle, not a massacre. Calling it a massacre distorts the reality and paints a distorted picture that is beneficial to the west and especially the current anti-China narrative.

The fighting I mentioned above was also heavily instigated and pushed to happen by westerners with a vested interest in harming China who were there to rile up protesters and encourage them to do violence, but then left in helicopters when fighting did start. Some of these instigators have openly admitted this and now live happily in the US. It was not a “massacre.”

Come on.

Calling the Soviets, the people who liberated the concentration camps and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty one of the “most brutal regimes in history” is literally Nazi propaganda. Stop repeating Nazi propaganda.

lol, is this the comment that made some midwest.social mod go buck wild banning you from every comm they could? This is where you (checks modlog notes) were “denying a massacre”? Mod who did that: please make sure to ban not only other users who mention what the BBC says, but also that you remove any posts that link CBS News and the New York Times for their tankie propaganda massacre-denialism!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html

There it is, @ringwraithfish^ !

You have nothing to feel guilty about. Pirating is literally the more moral thing to do.

Sounds like your daughter is at just the right age to start learning a new language? (Half joking)

Contradictions intensifying, then.

It wasn’t because the fascists thought they were fighting Jews (in this case), it was because most of the Chechen soldiers were Muslim, who also have prohibitions on using or consuming pigs. It was of course typical nazi-style petty racism, but it was specifically about targeting Muslims.

Not everyone in the audience is that.

For sure, and I hope it didn’t look like I was implying that. It’s why I made a point to say that “some of us reading” appreciate your commentary. The “lying, willfully ignorant” thing was referring specifically to Unruffled and empireOfLove who you and robinnn were replying to respectively. The long process of questioning propaganda and the widening cracks that you describe is similar to my own experience, and I even commented recently about how the purpose of debating people in these online threads is rarely to change the mind of the person you’re arguing with, but rather to speak to the audience and plant the seeds that their doubt will hopefully grow from over time.

It’s not that they “don’t have the balls” to do the right thing, it’s that they have a vested interest in doing the wrong thing. The US isn’t just failing to prevent genocide or punish those responsible, they are helping to conduct it.