From what I’ve seen, there’s a big divide amongst the tankies. There are those who are basically Stalin MAGA, base their political opinions on Soviet aesthetics and don’t consider much the practical implications of their actions. Some simply lash out against mainstream liberal ideology and others are just trolls.
Ane the other camp is made of people who read a lot of communist philosophy and are absolutely convinced the only way to achieve an equal society is by forcing everyone into it. This has its own problems, but they at least have an internally coherent ideology.
That’s not to say I agree with either camp. Their ideology promotes a vanguard party which can quickly spiral into “some are more equal than others”. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. But I do understand where the second camp is coming from. I think the path to a better world lies in trade unions and people coming together to defend common interests.
When they are actively censoring and banning people who make critical comments about the PRC, the USSR, or even present day Russia, I don’t care where they come from.
I was banned from lemmy.ml myself for saying something about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
How did this even happened? How can anyone not right-wing ban for opposing Putin’s oligarchs like Usmanov, Roldugin, Rotenberg, Yakunin and Putin himself?
I was just banned from leftymemes because I was having a conversation about Democrats. They essentially said that the Democrats suck because they don’t want to sink the levels of depravity of the Alt-Right. I pretty much said, whatever happened to “Be the Change you want to see?” They want a government that works together. You can’t do that be being savage, raving, lying lunatics like the Alt-Right.
Apparently that’s enough to get you banned by the Alt-Left. Fuck them
You got banned for a month because you posted an off topic anti-China meme in the thread looking for moderators of the memes sub with the text “Why, so you can censor some more posts critical of China? The modlog of this sub is absolutely ridiculous:”
The ban expired a month ago so I guess feel free to go back.
E: after more carefully scrutinizing the images in the modlog, you posted a screenshot of people being banned or having posts removed for posting gore and debunked sinophobic stuff.
It depends on what you mean by “including Tiananmen Square”. The narrative that you see among many westerners is so detached from reality it’s on the same level as flat earth or climate change denial, but no tankie would deny that hundreds of people died in clashes between police/military and violent activists on the night of June 4 1989.
Oh, is there a 97% consensus among historians that the western narrative of Tiananmen is wrong the same way that 97% of studies indicate climate change is real and human caused? Are there entire fields of study that only exist because of the agreement that the western narrative of Tiananmen is wrong like plate techtonics for the spherical earth? Do we have constant access to the physical evidence of the CCPs claim like we do with satellites that can only work with a spherical earth?
Even assuming you are being hyperbolic, your statement is outrageous on its face.
Did you not see the other commenter in this thread saying that not a single student protester died?
Also I love the attempt to shift the blame by “clarifying” that it was “violent activists” that died and not more neutral terms like student protesters or citizens demanding democracy.
Quick question, if the CCPs actions were so clearly justified and good, why does China spend so much energy and money trying to keep their citizens in the dark about it?
Every account by reporters that were in or around the square at the time of the incident concurs with the official CPC narrative. The wild conspiracy gesturing came later, when hundreds of deaths (equally distributed between protestors and military/police) turned into thousands and then tens of thousands of innocents gunned down en masse. People on reddit will tell you that the PLA crushed thousands of people with tanks and hosed their remains down the storm drains - those are the claims that I’m referring to that are on the level of climate denial or flat eartherism.
Also I love the attempt to shift the blame by “clarifying” that it was “violent activists” that died and not more neutral terms like student protesters or citizens demanding democracy.
The first act of violence was a truck with unarmed soldiers in it getting firebombed. Doesn’t get much more violent than that. By all accounts from those in the square however, the overwhelming majority left peacefully after the violence started in streets surrounding the square, which is why I feel a distinction between violent activists and the majority is worth making.
The CPC also doesn’t try to keep their citizens in the dark about it. Everyone knows it happened. That copypasta that you think will instantly get a Chinese person banned from a CS:Go lobby doesn’t actually do that.
Tbh, I’m embarrassed to say that I thought that people were run over by tanks until I saw someone arguing it on Lemmy and I went to look up accounts by Western reporters there at the time, including the guy who took the tank man picture. So even if the “tankie” instances are right on this subject, they probably shouldn’t ban people, but should disseminate correct information instead.
I think there were two links to the gore page people post and a couple of responses saying you couldn’t even talk about tiannamen square.
The first is clear what it is, I’d call the second one sinophobic because it’s patently untrue and is basically an anti-china buzzword now. Idk why mods did what they did.
Genuine question, is criticism of the Israeli government, even based on falsehoods or misunderstandings, antisemitism?
To say that reference to a historical event that the CCP doesn’t believe happened the way the west does is sinophobic is on the same level. At best you’d have people with unjustified animus towards the government of China but not its people. After all, is the claim that the people of China collectively slaughtered those student protesters demanding reasonable changes to a corrupt system or that the government did so?
Genuine question, is criticism of the Israeli government, even based on falsehoods or misunderstandings, antisemitism?
It isn’t inherently but it definitely can be. It’s absolutely possible to criticize Israel’s government in an antisemitic way. In the same way, you can look at anti-Japanese posters from WWII that have racist charicatures and recognize and criticize the racist element, while acknowledging that Imperial Japan was absolutely vile.
No subject of this conversation is saying “gosh, I get my information from sources which disagree with the Chinese governments official statements”.
The thing referenced in the modlog was a couple of people saying you can’t even talk about tiannamen square in China, which is false.
The reason why I would call it sinophobic is that that statement reifies the lie that Chinese people don’t understand their own history, wouldn’t defend themselves against an unjust government and would simply accept not being allowed to discuss events that happened in their living memory or else suffer punishment.
It would be like suggesting that my American government won’t let me talk about January 6 or I’ll be thrown in prison, except that there’s not the context of centuries of imperialist racist propaganda painting Americans as fundamentally lazy and subservient owing to our skull shape.
Which is what would make claiming Americans can’t talk about January sixth false, but not racist.
And it’s what makes claiming Chinese people can’t talk about tiannamen square false and racist. Since we’re talking about Chinese people, sinophobic.
The thing that makes those stereotypes racist is that during the British empires rule over parts of China and the period of time when the west as a whole received a big Chinese diaspora (using the broadest language possible here to include literal slavery), those stereotypes were used to justify mistreatment of Chinese and other people based on their race.
I don’t think it makes someone necessarily a Nazi when they say racist stuff, but it’s important to recognize.
I have a hard time imagining you didn’t understand the question but I do understand why you wouldn’t care to answer it. Just in case there is a language barrier or some other reason why you didn’t understand a basic English sentence, I’ll try putting it in simpler words:
Is it antisemitic to disagree with the Israeli government or their position on historical events?
The analogy here is that animus against a government says nothing at all about animus towards a people. Even if you are correct about the West having animus towards the government of China, that doesn’t equate to animus towards Chinese people. You can certainly argue that their is racist animus, but the example of that couldn’t be disagreement with the government’s position in the same way that disagreement with the Israeli government’s position is not evidence of antisemitism even though antisemitism is a real thing that exists.
people saying you can’t even talk about tiannamen square in China, which is false.
I’d be curious to read any sources you have for this claim. Why would the government ban information about the event in addition to arrests and intimidation towards people who want to memorialize the anniversary of the event? Would it be ok for the US to ban information about J6 and arrest people who wanted to organize a protest in remembrance? (Setting aside the morality of the changes sought by the J6 protesters vs TS protesters, they both have a basic human right to protest and hold memorial events)
The reason why I would call it sinophobic is that that statement reifies the lie that Chinese people don’t understand their own history
So, again the claim you are responding to is about the Chinese government’s position on TS. As you just said a moment ago, the claim is that you can’t talk about TS because the government doesn’t allow it. Why does the government want its citizens to not know about TS? As you say, their own history?
As an analogy, racists in America say that black people are inherently more violent than white people. Is it racist to acknowledge the objective fact that black people are arrested for violent crimes in disproportionate numbers? Does that statement say anything at all about the inherent nature of black people? Can we not even talk about poverty being the root cause of crime and the systemic racism in the criminal justice system without it being racist?
In the same way, if the government of China is trying to hide information about their history, is calling out that government action racist? If so, then you have just given a blank-check to the CCP.
wouldn’t defend themselves against an unjust government
Maybe you kind of missed the whole point of what the West says happened at TS, but the student protesters were doing exactly that when the PLA got sent in. That’s kind of the whole point. The protesters were there to defend themselves and their fellow citizens against an unjust government when they were violently quelled by that very government.
would simply accept not being allowed to discuss events that happened in their living memory or else suffer punishment.
Maybe you don’t know much about how authoritarian governments operate. If the punishments exist and are sufficiently terrifying you can keep most citizens from believing the things you don’t want them to, or at least from speaking those thoughts in public. And again, the whole point of the anniversary protests in HK that China went in to shut down was that they were there to reject not being able to discuss those things when China took control of the government. Is it just a coincidence that those protests don’t happen anymore or could it be that the fear created by the government’s actions against protesters have succeeded in their goal for the most part?
Again, this entire conversation is about the actions of a government. Whether or not they overlap with racist tropes isn’t relevant to the truth of the claims. Acknowledging that the treatment of Palestinians is unjust and genocidal is not antisemitic even though there is a stereotype that Jews lie. Acknowledging that the treatment of TS protesters was unjust and murderous is not sinophobic even though there is a stereotype that Chinese people don’t fight for their freedoms.
I went back before you replied and double checked thinking “surely that wasn’t what happened” and you’re right, it was an image of the modlog with a bunch of removed posts of gore and sinophobic stuff.
If you want to block an entire instance of users the tools ought to exist in .nls version of lemmy.
I really like your first point! Second one is a little tricky. It’s not just a fluctuation with an individual, but rather the difference between groups. Bottom line, the consistent definition depends on your own exposure to it, if you’re not going by what others claim to be “is the most frequent.”
I think there are two major forms of inconsistency that matter most.
When the parties in a conversation use different definitions for a word, they will just argue in circles. They may both have good points but neither party will understand the other. That’s often fairly easy to resolve, “I can understand your point if we use your definition of X. We can also see how my point stands if we use my definition of X. How about we call them X1 and X2 so we don’t get confused?”
When one party uses different definitions of the word it’s fair to ask them to pick one or to be explicit about when they’re shifting definitions. When someone says, “I believe Y because X is TRUE and I believe Z because X is NOT TRUE,” they’ve introduced a huge logical hole which needs to be addressed.
That’s a no true Scotsman argument.
There are plenty of actual tankies here. In fact, the Lemmy software is created by tankies and one of the larger Lemmy instances is run by them.
From what I’ve seen, there’s a big divide amongst the tankies. There are those who are basically Stalin MAGA, base their political opinions on Soviet aesthetics and don’t consider much the practical implications of their actions. Some simply lash out against mainstream liberal ideology and others are just trolls.
Ane the other camp is made of people who read a lot of communist philosophy and are absolutely convinced the only way to achieve an equal society is by forcing everyone into it. This has its own problems, but they at least have an internally coherent ideology.
That’s not to say I agree with either camp. Their ideology promotes a vanguard party which can quickly spiral into “some are more equal than others”. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. But I do understand where the second camp is coming from. I think the path to a better world lies in trade unions and people coming together to defend common interests.
When they are actively censoring and banning people who make critical comments about the PRC, the USSR, or even present day Russia, I don’t care where they come from.
I was banned from lemmy.ml myself for saying something about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
How did this even happened? How can anyone not right-wing ban for opposing Putin’s oligarchs like Usmanov, Roldugin, Rotenberg, Yakunin and Putin himself?
West bad, not-West good
That’s literally all they care about.
If you push them they yell “just joking bro” or ban you immediately.
I was just banned from leftymemes because I was having a conversation about Democrats. They essentially said that the Democrats suck because they don’t want to sink the levels of depravity of the Alt-Right. I pretty much said, whatever happened to “Be the Change you want to see?” They want a government that works together. You can’t do that be being savage, raving, lying lunatics like the Alt-Right.
Apparently that’s enough to get you banned by the Alt-Left. Fuck them
You got banned for a month because you posted an off topic anti-China meme in the thread looking for moderators of the memes sub with the text “Why, so you can censor some more posts critical of China? The modlog of this sub is absolutely ridiculous:”
The ban expired a month ago so I guess feel free to go back.
E: after more carefully scrutinizing the images in the modlog, you posted a screenshot of people being banned or having posts removed for posting gore and debunked sinophobic stuff.
Debunked sinophobic stuff like what? In my experience, that category includes anything critical of China, including Tiananmen Square.
It depends on what you mean by “including Tiananmen Square”. The narrative that you see among many westerners is so detached from reality it’s on the same level as flat earth or climate change denial, but no tankie would deny that hundreds of people died in clashes between police/military and violent activists on the night of June 4 1989.
Oh, is there a 97% consensus among historians that the western narrative of Tiananmen is wrong the same way that 97% of studies indicate climate change is real and human caused? Are there entire fields of study that only exist because of the agreement that the western narrative of Tiananmen is wrong like plate techtonics for the spherical earth? Do we have constant access to the physical evidence of the CCPs claim like we do with satellites that can only work with a spherical earth?
Even assuming you are being hyperbolic, your statement is outrageous on its face.
Did you not see the other commenter in this thread saying that not a single student protester died?
Also I love the attempt to shift the blame by “clarifying” that it was “violent activists” that died and not more neutral terms like student protesters or citizens demanding democracy.
Quick question, if the CCPs actions were so clearly justified and good, why does China spend so much energy and money trying to keep their citizens in the dark about it?
Every account by reporters that were in or around the square at the time of the incident concurs with the official CPC narrative. The wild conspiracy gesturing came later, when hundreds of deaths (equally distributed between protestors and military/police) turned into thousands and then tens of thousands of innocents gunned down en masse. People on reddit will tell you that the PLA crushed thousands of people with tanks and hosed their remains down the storm drains - those are the claims that I’m referring to that are on the level of climate denial or flat eartherism.
The first act of violence was a truck with unarmed soldiers in it getting firebombed. Doesn’t get much more violent than that. By all accounts from those in the square however, the overwhelming majority left peacefully after the violence started in streets surrounding the square, which is why I feel a distinction between violent activists and the majority is worth making.
The CPC also doesn’t try to keep their citizens in the dark about it. Everyone knows it happened. That copypasta that you think will instantly get a Chinese person banned from a CS:Go lobby doesn’t actually do that.
Tbh, I’m embarrassed to say that I thought that people were run over by tanks until I saw someone arguing it on Lemmy and I went to look up accounts by Western reporters there at the time, including the guy who took the tank man picture. So even if the “tankie” instances are right on this subject, they probably shouldn’t ban people, but should disseminate correct information instead.
I think there were two links to the gore page people post and a couple of responses saying you couldn’t even talk about tiannamen square.
The first is clear what it is, I’d call the second one sinophobic because it’s patently untrue and is basically an anti-china buzzword now. Idk why mods did what they did.
Genuine question, is criticism of the Israeli government, even based on falsehoods or misunderstandings, antisemitism?
To say that reference to a historical event that the CCP doesn’t believe happened the way the west does is sinophobic is on the same level. At best you’d have people with unjustified animus towards the government of China but not its people. After all, is the claim that the people of China collectively slaughtered those student protesters demanding reasonable changes to a corrupt system or that the government did so?
It isn’t inherently but it definitely can be. It’s absolutely possible to criticize Israel’s government in an antisemitic way. In the same way, you can look at anti-Japanese posters from WWII that have racist charicatures and recognize and criticize the racist element, while acknowledging that Imperial Japan was absolutely vile.
I don’t understand or care about your question.
No subject of this conversation is saying “gosh, I get my information from sources which disagree with the Chinese governments official statements”.
The thing referenced in the modlog was a couple of people saying you can’t even talk about tiannamen square in China, which is false.
The reason why I would call it sinophobic is that that statement reifies the lie that Chinese people don’t understand their own history, wouldn’t defend themselves against an unjust government and would simply accept not being allowed to discuss events that happened in their living memory or else suffer punishment.
It would be like suggesting that my American government won’t let me talk about January 6 or I’ll be thrown in prison, except that there’s not the context of centuries of imperialist racist propaganda painting Americans as fundamentally lazy and subservient owing to our skull shape.
Which is what would make claiming Americans can’t talk about January sixth false, but not racist.
And it’s what makes claiming Chinese people can’t talk about tiannamen square false and racist. Since we’re talking about Chinese people, sinophobic.
The thing that makes those stereotypes racist is that during the British empires rule over parts of China and the period of time when the west as a whole received a big Chinese diaspora (using the broadest language possible here to include literal slavery), those stereotypes were used to justify mistreatment of Chinese and other people based on their race.
I don’t think it makes someone necessarily a Nazi when they say racist stuff, but it’s important to recognize.
I have a hard time imagining you didn’t understand the question but I do understand why you wouldn’t care to answer it. Just in case there is a language barrier or some other reason why you didn’t understand a basic English sentence, I’ll try putting it in simpler words:
Is it antisemitic to disagree with the Israeli government or their position on historical events?
The analogy here is that animus against a government says nothing at all about animus towards a people. Even if you are correct about the West having animus towards the government of China, that doesn’t equate to animus towards Chinese people. You can certainly argue that their is racist animus, but the example of that couldn’t be disagreement with the government’s position in the same way that disagreement with the Israeli government’s position is not evidence of antisemitism even though antisemitism is a real thing that exists.
I’d be curious to read any sources you have for this claim. Why would the government ban information about the event in addition to arrests and intimidation towards people who want to memorialize the anniversary of the event? Would it be ok for the US to ban information about J6 and arrest people who wanted to organize a protest in remembrance? (Setting aside the morality of the changes sought by the J6 protesters vs TS protesters, they both have a basic human right to protest and hold memorial events)
So, again the claim you are responding to is about the Chinese government’s position on TS. As you just said a moment ago, the claim is that you can’t talk about TS because the government doesn’t allow it. Why does the government want its citizens to not know about TS? As you say, their own history?
As an analogy, racists in America say that black people are inherently more violent than white people. Is it racist to acknowledge the objective fact that black people are arrested for violent crimes in disproportionate numbers? Does that statement say anything at all about the inherent nature of black people? Can we not even talk about poverty being the root cause of crime and the systemic racism in the criminal justice system without it being racist?
In the same way, if the government of China is trying to hide information about their history, is calling out that government action racist? If so, then you have just given a blank-check to the CCP.
Maybe you kind of missed the whole point of what the West says happened at TS, but the student protesters were doing exactly that when the PLA got sent in. That’s kind of the whole point. The protesters were there to defend themselves and their fellow citizens against an unjust government when they were violently quelled by that very government.
Maybe you don’t know much about how authoritarian governments operate. If the punishments exist and are sufficiently terrifying you can keep most citizens from believing the things you don’t want them to, or at least from speaking those thoughts in public. And again, the whole point of the anniversary protests in HK that China went in to shut down was that they were there to reject not being able to discuss those things when China took control of the government. Is it just a coincidence that those protests don’t happen anymore or could it be that the fear created by the government’s actions against protesters have succeeded in their goal for the most part?
Again, this entire conversation is about the actions of a government. Whether or not they overlap with racist tropes isn’t relevant to the truth of the claims. Acknowledging that the treatment of Palestinians is unjust and genocidal is not antisemitic even though there is a stereotype that Jews lie. Acknowledging that the treatment of TS protesters was unjust and murderous is not sinophobic even though there is a stereotype that Chinese people don’t fight for their freedoms.
Way to turn OPs meme into a slam-fucking-dunk.
Turn around and find a new thread if you’re not gonna honestly communicate with others 👌
deleted by creator
I went back before you replied and double checked thinking “surely that wasn’t what happened” and you’re right, it was an image of the modlog with a bunch of removed posts of gore and sinophobic stuff.
If you want to block an entire instance of users the tools ought to exist in .nls version of lemmy.
Idk tbh, I never block anything.
deleted by creator
No you didn’t.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Where’s your source?
When a term becomes an insult, it’s very difficult to use it as anything other than an insult.
I more often see “tankie” used to decribe anti-war liberals than pro-war leftists.
There are two useful tests when evaluating the value of words like this:
Do people use it as a form of self-identification? If they do, that’s probably the real definition. If they don’t it’s probably just an insult.
Does the word have a consistent definition? If the definition frequently shifts to suit the needs of the speaker, it’s probably not a real definition.
I really like your first point! Second one is a little tricky. It’s not just a fluctuation with an individual, but rather the difference between groups. Bottom line, the consistent definition depends on your own exposure to it, if you’re not going by what others claim to be “is the most frequent.”
The second one is definitely a bit trickier.
I think there are two major forms of inconsistency that matter most.
When the parties in a conversation use different definitions for a word, they will just argue in circles. They may both have good points but neither party will understand the other. That’s often fairly easy to resolve, “I can understand your point if we use your definition of X. We can also see how my point stands if we use my definition of X. How about we call them X1 and X2 so we don’t get confused?”
When one party uses different definitions of the word it’s fair to ask them to pick one or to be explicit about when they’re shifting definitions. When someone says, “I believe Y because X is TRUE and I believe Z because X is NOT TRUE,” they’ve introduced a huge logical hole which needs to be addressed.