frisbird
@frisbird@lemmy.ml
- Comment on why are all social medias based around western values? 1 week ago:
The reason homophobia is rampant in Africa is because of the West. European colonizers were the first to criminalize same-sex relations in Africa. Prior to that, there were small pockets of homophobia and transphobia, but Africa was predominantly genderfluid and sexually fluid, just like everywhere else in the world before Westerners came and fucked it all up.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
Yes. All of that money should be returned, plus interest and penalties, and THEN reparations needs to be paid and that’s JUST France. The US stole immense wealth from Haiti and needs to return it, with interest and penalties as well.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
This exactly. Once you start actually engaging with history in earnest, and breaking down the narratives we’ve been fed our whole lives, it becomes impossible to see the world in the same way.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
I don’t think Haiti is paying reparations to France any more. I believe Citi purchased the debt from France, and Haiti was paying Citi the reparations until 1947.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
Also, what the hell would it mean to you for one country to “care about” a continent? You’re basically doing the meme:
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
Holy shit? You think this history is whataboutism? The OP said “I don’t have a dog in this fight [because I am from Africa]” and the commenter said “[you should have a dog in the fight because of China’s behavior]”
Hello? Reading comprehension? How does establishing that OP should have a dog in the fight because of Western history in Africa become “whataboutism”?
This is thought termination at its finest
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
Are you literally just going to ignore the entire other half of the post asking about why people are anti-western and saying they don’t have a dog in the fight because they are from Africa? Are you that committed to attacking your political opponents that you can’t even see the words that aren’t about your desired debate position?
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
Anyone who disagrees with my worldview is a tankie
Who’s the tankie? The person saying that China hasn’t bombed anyone in over 35 years or the person saying “I don’t know why they hate the US so much” when the US attacked over 15 countries with tanks, bombs, drones, and missiles over the exact same time period. Might need to check yourself
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
China looks less bad in comparison because it hasn’t dropped a bomb in a conflict since 1989. It hasn’t fired on boat since 1988. The US criminal justice system manages 10x more people than the Chinese criminal justice system with more than double the recidivism of China China doesn’t engage in structural adjustment programs like the IMF does and they forgive billions in loans unlike the West. There are grandparents alive today who were subsistence farming when they were 5 and are now experiencing consumer robotics and self-driving cars. China looks good because of reality, not just because the US is recently doing bad things.
- Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here? 1 week ago:
I love that you think Africa’s dog in the fight is because China is strategically investing in Africa and chasing mineral and strategic resources when nearly every single African country’s borders were defined by the West, when entire countries were created and colonized by the West, when the US is actively bombing multiple countries in Africa and has been for decades, when the West was literally torturing, raping, kidnapping, murdering, and mass murdering Africans all over the content for centuries, when many African countries are economically subjugated by Western countries to this day by control over currency, predatory loans and structural adjustment programs designed to create dependencies, etc.
Africa’s dog in the fight between the West and Asia comes primarily from the West’s total subjugation of the continent.
- Comment on How do you explain protocol to a 5 year old ? 2 weeks ago:
Start with non-computer protocols. What’s the protocol at a restaurant?
Patron: Open the door and enter. Wait 1. If host currently busy Restaurant (Host): please wait. I will be right with you.
If host currently not present Restaurant (anyone): please wait, the host will be right with you.
If wait 1 times out Patron: excuse me, we’d like a table.
If host available and not busy Restaurant (Host): Hello and welcome. Wait 2 if wait 2 times out Restaurant (Host): how many are in your party?
Patron: Hello. We would like a table <state number of guests>.Or think about parliamentary procedure for bringing a motion to vote and voting on it.
These are protocols. They are all around us.
Computer networking protocols are so named because they are analogous. They define how to exchange information to accomplish a specific task. For IP, it’s a protocol for routing information packets across an unknown number of computers to a destination computer. For TCP, it’s a protocol for how a computer should send information packets and how a computer who is receiving those packets should acknowledge them.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
No, the networking layer connects the backend to the front end.
Think of it like a restaurant. You have back of house and front of house. Back of house is where the food is stored, prepared, and plated. Front of house is where customers enter, make a reservation, sit down, and place their orders. Waitstaff move orders from front of house to back of house and they move plates of food from back of house to front of house.
- Comment on Do you think all billionaires deserve to die? 2 weeks ago:
Billionaire is a role. They don’t deserve to die. The role deserves to be abolished
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Member_states_of_the_Arab_Leag…
22 countries? All of them? Including countries like Libya, UAE, and Saudi Arabia? No. That’s a really big claim and you’re going to have to provide evidence for it. I highly doubt all of them could be convinced to not break rank just because of some trade deals when Europe and the US and UN are deeply invested in pushing the narrative.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
www.cia.gov/…/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by a lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist’s power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely captain of a team
Source: The C.I.A.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
And is that definition one where absolute power is concentrated in a single individual or a small group of between 3 and 10.
Post martial law, none of these countries were dictatorship by that definition. Not a single one of the people the West calls a dictator had absolute power outside of either the revolutionary war period or the crisis of WW2.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
Sorry. I made a typo and have just corrected it. Yes, it looked like you were saying that only MLism called for a DotP.
The idea that implementing a DotP was brutal is a narrative. Brutal compared to what, is the question. Because what all of those revolutions have in common is that the ruling class was already extremely brutal. The DotP reversed the brutality and made it very obvious to people because it wasn’t interested in masking it. But the reality is that all the DotPs saved more people than it killed.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
You were the implying that bad things would happen to the diplomatic observers from the Arab League if they didn’t parrot the required Chinese propaganda.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
So when the CIA said that Stalin wasn’t a dictator but rather a captain of a team, and when the entire constitution of the USSR allowed for recalling of politicians, and when they built very complex voting systems that dwarfed anything the West has ever done? And when Stalin tendered his resignation 3 times and the bureaucracy rejected it three times? And when he died owning almost nothing and as a national hero? And when Kruschev took office despite being deeply opposed to Stalin and leading a faction that opposed Stalin’s faction?
Remember that Kruschev was appointed the same way every prime minister is appointed, by election from all the other ministers in the central committee.
The central committee was in turn elected by delegates who in turn were elected by the people.
So no, the USSR was not always a dictatorship. But more to the point, it was less authoritarian than the USA
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
You have a misunderstanding. Your first comment stated that Marxism-Leninism calls for a DotP. When confronted with Marx’s position, you said that ML and Marxism are not the same, indicating you believe that Marxism does call for a DotP. This is incorrect. Marx coined the term in 1850 when he was writing about the French Revolution.
Yes, Lenin produced the first functioning theory of revolution and found himself in the conditions for revolution to actually occur. And what he found was that the revolution was immediately under siege from the West (even the US invaded) and that the previous power structure was willing to engage in terror campaigns to destroy the revolution. This has been demonstrated to be the way revolutions always go, and in fact is how prior revolutions, like the French and the American revolutions went, and the Haitian revolution if you want a non-white example.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
Clearly you think that dictators are whoever the US says is a dictator. Chavez, Maduro, Xi, Putin, Kahmeini, Stalin, Kruschev, and on and on. Never mind that all of these people entered office through competitive politics with multiple possible contenders. Never mind that they all failed to obtain some offices they strove for. Never mind that they operated within full blown bureaucracies with rules of law, regulation, standard procedures, and distributed control over massive swathes of the government. Never mind that these governments have various factions, some have various parties, all with electoral mechanisms both popular and ministerial much like European democracies have.
Fidel Castro immediately after the revolution was a dictator - his dictates were law. Lenin immediately after the revolution was a dictator - his dictates were law. Mao immediately after the revolution was a dictator - his dictates were law. But after the revolution? Outside the periods of martial law, normalcy returned to every single one of these countries with peaceful transitions of power through constitutionally defined mechanisms.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
You clearly have never seen the direct and lengthy criticisms of China produced on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. We debate over this all the time.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
Yes, because China is well known to assasinate diplomats and family members of political opponents in dozens of countries around the world…
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
And in those 70 years, at the height of the GULAG population, they still didn’t come close to the USA’s domestic use of authority. The USA, just considering prison population, imprisons more people per capita than nearly any other country in the world, and more than the USSR did. But that’s just prison population. The USA is also the only country in the world that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars per day just to be in prison. At least in the GULAG system every prisoner made minimum wage for the labor they did and they came out of prison with a savings account. The US also uses prison slave labor to produce over $11B annually in profits for the state and private corporations.
But again, that’s JUST prison population. The US also has the largest parole system in the world and it’s 2x bigger than the US prison system. People on parole are monitored, surveilled, and controlled by the state. They have to work to pay back their prison debts and the state “garnishes their wages” or, said another, way steals their money. The US has the worst recidivism rates in the world as well.
So when you say the USSR was authoritarian for 70 years, are you also willing to say that the US has been authoritarian for decades as well? Or is it different because people get to vote for whoever will preside over the expansion of the prison system?
Not to mention police budgets. If you combined all the local police budgets across the country it would be the third largest military in the world. The NYC police budget is larger than the DPRK’s military budget including their nuclear program. The ICE budget expansion makes federal police another military-equivalent putting them in the top 10 largest militaries. So the the US holds number 1, number 3, and number 7ish of the largest militaries in the world, 2 of whom it uses domestically and it’s not authoritarian?
Black people and indigenous people have been trying to tell the rest of the world just how authoritian the USA is. Maybe the issue here is that you’re part of the privileged group of people who just don’t experience the authoritarianism all around you.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
“Tankies” didn’t come from a Western imperialist state
The term “tankie” was invented by UK leftists to criticize other leftists for their support of the USSR’s use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution and later in the Prague Spring as well
If you believe that the UK isn’t a Western imperialist state, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to see if you’re interested in buying
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 4 weeks ago:
We all know what that means to them, with Stalin topping the list.
- Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism? 1 month ago:
Yeah. You come across like a person who knows how to navigate the world effectively. Good luck to you!
- Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism? 1 month ago:
This is a lot of propagandistic bullshit. The USSR was the second-best fed country in the world according to the CIA. And they did it by lifting up the bottom and literally eliminating the nobility. Meanwhile the US was the first-best fed country in the world with a much worse poverty and homeless problem.
The USSR also didn’t force people out of university to do physical labor or face a firing squad. The USSR landed a dozen of remote probes on Venus before anything even remotely resembling that was possible in the West. They had incredible academics and research in all fields and that outpaced the West in tons of ways. They absolutely had academics and strong education for people.
The fact that you’re so wrong, and so obviously wrong, should not be a moment of anger and resistance but a moment to go read about things that contradict your current beliefs and an examination of not only how you came to believe those things but what it says about potentially other beliefs you have about communism and politics in general
- Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism? 1 month ago:
Real talk. They are not different ideologies. At all.
The reason the words are used interchangeably is because they are, in fact, interchangeable. Any distinction between the two terms is entirely context dependent and one should never assume that anyone you’re talking with shares the same distinction you have for the terms.
We can understand why first linguistically.
Social-ism is the ideology of “social” ownership of the material wealth of society. This is opposed to “private” ownership.
Commun-ism is the ideology of “communal” ownership of the material wealth of society. This is also opposed to “private” ownership.
What is the difference between “social” ownership and “communal” ownership? Nothing. There is no definitional difference between these two words at this level. This is the beginning of the source of your question
We can then understand why they are used interchangeably from a historical perspective.
When Marx and Engels were producing their critique of capitalism and their writings on the type of society of that would come after it, they described that future society as one in which the wealth of society was managed, effectively, as a commons. That means social/communal ownership. At this time, not they nor anyone else in the tradition was making a hard distinction between these terms and they were using them interchangeably.
So they are used interchangeably today for linguistic and historical reasons.
And then we have historical-linguistic reasons. Lenin saw these two terms being used interchangeably and he decided to give them separate definitions. But these definitions were Lenin’s definitions and no one else’s. Some people adopted them, some didn’t, and some adopted them and then later changed their mind. However, it is very important to note that he did not use the terms to distinguish between two different ideologies, he used them to distinguish between two different organizations of society. A communist party, according to Lenin, is a political party that seeks to build communism. There is no such thing a socialist party that means something different than a communist party. But a society is socialist first and then later it becomes communist, despite a continuity of the communist party. Lenin said a socialist society is a capitalist society that is becoming communist and a communist society is one that has achieved communism.
But then the political backlash hit the EuroCentric world (which includes the US). The Nazis were vehemently opposed to communism, but the workers in Germany associated socialism with a movement for a better life. So the German elites made communism the enemy and a taboo, but then the National Socialist party formed. They said “socialism is when workers get what they want” and they promoted better lives for workers to get their support, but they also said “communists are the enemy”. So now we have socialism and communism being framed in a way that is ideologically distinct but in a completely disingenuous and manipulative way.
This sort of perversion continued for a while all over the white world. Communism was “bad” but “unions are socialist” and red scares had to work with the ways in which the communist parties branded themselves as communist instead of socialist. The words kept twisting under the torture of social manipulation in order to obfuscate revolutionary politics.
And now we live in a society where people think socialism and communism are legitimately distinct ideologies, and people believe socialism is fine but communism is just too far, and people believe that communism is a defined phenomenon (moneyless, stateless, classless) with distinct boundaries and a country is either communist or it’s not and that no country has ever been communist.
You are right to ask this question, because you are living a very obfuscated context. But there is no simple answer to your question that is satisfactory. The simplest and most accurate answer is “there is no difference and you can use them interchangeably”. Going beyond that requires engaging with the history and the discourse and it takes a lot of time and effort.
- Comment on Is Hades hard to beat? 2 months ago:
No. There are much much much harder games to beat. Hades is quite accessible compared to the other games in the market past and present. It gets easier with the meta progression, and then you find a combo that works for your play style and you stop acting randomly and focus. Once you’re in the mental stage where you get how things work together, and you understand what weapon really works for your play style, you’ll be able to beat it. Keep at it. It is worth it. It’s not insanity.
