All American media is Israeli owned propaganda now thanks to Ellison
Or even if it’s American but leftist, because if it indicts the antifascist bonafides of the Democratic party then it must be dastardly Russian lies
Let’s be honest, no government is trusted and truthful.
Some are obviously worse than others, but to trust any of them blindly is stupid.
I don’t trust any of these mfs, and you shouldn’t either
I can understand not trusting the US Empire, Israel, etc, but why not trust the PRC? I’d rather trust a socialist country with a functional democratic governance over capitalist countries.
with a functional democratic governance
I swear none of you guys have actually lived in China haha.
The Chinese political system is nepotism first, plutocracy second. Just like the US. The only difference is they’re much more sane in public. The benefits of a shame based society.
If anyone can beat 7 years in Kunming, let me know how I’m wrong.
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
The US Empire, on the other hand, has private ownership as principle, with top-down “democracy.” Candidates are pre-selected, and term limits ensure that even if a genuine socialist won, they would not be able to sufficiently change the system. It’s designed for maintaining the dominance of capital.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
With all due respect, and apologies for not reading the book first (I will get to it when I have time). Have you just read the theory, or have you lived the implementation?
Because unfortunately, they can be different in practice. In my experience of the discussions I’ve had with my Chinese friends, and the amount of gossip I’ve heard about local political dynasties and KTV prostitutes, I think the ideal and the reality is very different. Something you could also say about the US.
China isn’t perfect, none of us pretend it is. I hear and partake in the gossip too, the stories about connections and KTV backrooms (and more you’ve probably yet to even hear of). But here’s the thing I’ve seen firsthand, especially when I visit family in the countryside: the villages that had dirt roads and no running water when I was a kid now have high-speed rail stops, 5G, and clinics that actually stock medicine.
And yeah, people complain, gossip, spread rumours. Of course they do, we’re human too. But the trust isn’t blind. It’s earned. When a pilot program for rural healthcare or poverty alleviation works in one county, they scale it to the province. When something fails, they tweak it or scrap it. You see it in the towns that went from abject poverty to being connected, electrified, and lifted up in a single generation.
Even the sources you’d expect to be critical can’t ignore it. Harvard’s Ash Center ran the longest independent survey of Chinese public opinion, interviewing over 32,000 people between 2003 and 2016. They found satisfaction with the central government at 95.5% in the final wave. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer put China at 91% trust in government, the US at 39%. These aren’t state media. They’re Western institutions. They see the same trend we feel on the ground.
That’s possible because of how our democratic system actually works. Democracy isn’t just about voting for different parties or the spectacle of elections. It’s about whether people are heard and whether their lives get better. If you think Chinese people aren’t being heard, or that the feedback doesn’t translate into action, you’re plainly wrong. The proof isn’t in the theory. It’s in the roads, the rails, and the fact that trust stays high even when the gossip is rampant (who doesn’t love a bit of gossip).
Thank you for that. I really appreciate this post and it resonates with me. I wouldn’t have stayed there for so long if I didn’t love it too. But I can’t deal with the rhetoric on .ml that acts like it’s a utopia with no justified dissent.
There is absolutely a functioning democracy, but it isn’t immune to nepotism or greed, just like everywhere else. It’s also capable of manufacturing suffering.
The two people who remain in my thoughts the most from my time there were the 80 year old couple who worked as parking attendants in my building so they could stay in a single room partition in the garage with a kerosene heater. This was in 2011, in the center of Kunming. Not one of the rural villages in the mountains. They could have been provided for but they weren’t. It’s not a utopia, but it is a great country full of wonderful people.
That couple in Kunming. No amount of progress erases that. They deserved better.
But, so much has changed since then. Even just since 2021. Housing market cooling down, 996 ruled illegal by the Supreme People’s Court, new protections for delivery riders rolling out in Zhejiang, Guangdong. And the corruption crackdowns, “Tigers and flies” clearly wasn’t just propaganda.
On .ml people seem tired of the constant negative spin on China, so they swing hard the other way. Sometimes too hard (though I’ve yet to see it too many times). And, even folks here can still slip into old “China bad” habits (seen a lot of this recently). Like saying China does nothing for the Global South when you’ve got the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, Gwadar Port, vaccine donations, debt relief and much more showing how patently false that is.
I’ll just say it plain. I think China’s model, the way we do democracy, foreign policy, the whole political economy, is the best working option we’ve got right now. Not because it’s perfect, but because it actually moves the needle for hundreds of millions. It’s not even playing the same game as the Euro-Amerikan hegemony that’s been exporting crisis forever. Why throw out the good, or spend all day demonizing it, when so much worse is happening way closer to home for most people on here. Stick in their eye vs a speck in mine, yknow?
I have never lived in China, no, but the textbook I provided is an overview of the real systems that exist, flaws and all, combined with the theoretical reasoning for the structures and the reasons they have changed over time, their history. That’s why I added that socialist democracy is imperfect, but it stands in stark contrast to the utter failure that is capitalist democracy, and I listed the reasons why.
The Anna’s archive link on that page is dead unfortunately, I’ll try to find it but do you have one handy?
Memes aside, you know it’s all propaganda though right?
Even if you want to gloss it up as the “the revolution protecting itself” the PRC isn’t going to go out and admit “there’s flaws in our system”, much less “our government is run by a bunch of horny greedy assholes just like everywhere else”.
–edit–
Though I agree the damage those assholes can do is limited by the system much more than the US which is a failed state.
I don’t have a link, unfortunately.
Either way, the PRC does admit to flaws and problems. The method of criticism and self-criticism is applied in China. Further, the government isn’t run by a “bunch of horny greedy assholes.” Corruption exists to a certain degree, but the CPC regularly cracks down on this, rather than allowing it to flourish. It seems, above all, that you’re letting your distrust of government in general cause you to magnify problems in China beyond their real existence in order to equate it to capitalist states.
I love it! ha ha!
Dumb fuck is dumb
Cope liberal
Thomas Jefferson raped a 15 year old girl and enslaved her offspring. Scream this at every American you meet. Now that’s proper propaganda
Lemmy right wing. Not liberals.
Liberals are anti trump. Only right wing people support trump.
Liberals are right-wing.
Not in the U.S they aren’t. They are progressives. Not necessarily anti capitalist but they are fully social progressives.
Please explain how a social progressive is the same as a neo Nazi.
Definition
Noun
a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare. “she dissented from the decision, joined by the court’s liberals”
a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise
Now libertarian is a different story.
But you can all Google the definition of both because there seems to be a lot of people who are promoting that liberals are right wingers. And that’s literally the opposite of what they are.
Yes I understand the middle has shifted. But that’s normal and has always happened throughout history.
Liberals are not conservative. They are against misogyny, bigotry,racism.
Which is what the right stands for.
Their opinion on capitalism does not make them Nazis.
Liberals are Democrat voters. Not Republicans.
I mean the word “libtard” is the rights slur against liberals.
Obviously they don’t like liberals. Because they don’t share ideologies.
For fucks sake. Must be psyop to try to convince everyone liberals are right wing.
Liberalism and conservatism are both offshoots of economic liberalism, favoring the rights of private property owners. Read a book
Arguably, all parties within a liberal democracy are liberal in ideology. Republicans are just the right wing of that liberal system, Dems are to the left of the repubs but both still liberal. In Australia the leading conservative party is quite literally called The Liberal Party.
If we were to look at basic leftist theory they always regard liberals as non left. The argument is that liberals just protect the liberties of the priviledged class, typically the wealth owning class. They treat the workers like wage slaves, throwing them a bone to keep them quiet, but when historically being forced to choose between having the workers attain same level of liberties, the liberals always chose to surpress that, break unions or even multiple times directly allow fascist overtake.
you are right that in us this is presented as opposition, but any serious leftist will categorically deny that as absurd. One good indicator is for example how the genocide in gaza is bipartizan or even the war in iran. They protect same interests. They do not serve the voter.
Liberals are not conservative. They are against misogyny, bigotry,racism.
So right-wing Female supremacists, Trans supremacists and Afro-supremacists.
That’s your problem there.If all of them are complacent with rampant problems in liberal democracies like:
- Campaign fraud
- Worker exploitation
- Imperialist propaganda
- Bribes
- Blackmail
- Inside trading
- Usury
- Private gambling institutions
- Landlords
- Consumer good poisoning
- Monopolized rent consumer goods
Then THEY’RE NOT LEFT-WING!
And the US hasn’t had a left-wing party, not even a social democratic one, since the 1990s,
as social democratic parties only seem to thrive if there’s a socialist nation to look up to
and the Soviet Union fell apart as it lacked resources (coal) to do anything against the US petrodollar scheme,
That’s why Bill Clinton had been called a Repubic-lite during his reign
and Obama never delivered on his “Hope & Change”.The only semi-left-wing ideas I see coming from US
contemporaries“progressives”,
is that they’re pro-green, because that at least will help people have the resources to go left in the future.The right stands for a ruling merchant class and a gatekeeping judicial class.
The judicial class has noble ideas for itself as a ruling class,
but they need campaign money in order to be elected as a ruler,
which the merchant class has in spades, but want their favorable laws for them to be implemented in return.
And thus the merchant class becomes the ruling class and the judicial class their gatekeepers.
That’s what the right-wing stands for, unless they’re even more regressive
and long for a kings and priests to rule over them.Centrists, social democratic wing like FDR, try to curb the power of the merchant class,
but a true left wing will replace it with a ruling engineering class and gatekeeping scholar class that will replace liberal democracy with a people’s democracy that can focus on creating a classless society,
because only a people’s democracy can tackle the issue of campaign fraud,
which is systemic in a liberal democracy.
And this systemic problem becomes larger and larger the more a society automates
as it causes the power of merchants to be more and more concentrated.The US democratic party is only slowly returning to become a social democratic party
with Zohran Mamdami firmly in the democratic socialist side.But looking from the outside, the US is like the Star Control II Ur-Quan alien race, where the US democratic party plays the role of the Kzer-za that wants the rest of the world/galaxy enslaved and the US republican party playing the role of the bloodthirsty Kohr-Ah that wants the rest of the world dead. The only thing missing in the US is a civil war between the two.
Liberalism is right-wing because it supports capitalism. It isn’t the only right-wing ideology, but anyone calling themselves “progressive” that opposes moving on from capitalism to socialism is in fact holding progress back from where it needs to go.
