• ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          We aren’t going to tolerate intolerance in this instance. I personally don’t have a problem with communists. But I do have a problem with authoritarian communists. If you think me making this distinction is acting in bad faith, then you might run into more issues than just me here.

          • I personally don’t have a problem with communists. But

            Sounds like you have a problem with communists, or do you think that the country with the biggest army, police force, and imprisoned population (disproportionately of racial minorities) is somehow not authoritarian?

            • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              We have a federal presidential constitutional republic or FPCR in the US. It has three branches of government at the federal level that ideally work as checks and balances on each other. Then there are many subordinate state governments that act as a means of delegating responsibility for the federal government. Our representatives in federal, state, and local governments are democratically elected and ideally should represent the majority of the population. We the people rule in America. The US is not without its flaws, but we are a democracy.

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                The PRC has the same three branches of government, including a President at the head of the executive branch, and a constitution that lays out their roles (more thoroughly than the US does the power of the judiciary), and it also holds direct elections for municipal offices. Neither country directly elects its President, as the PRC has elected officials vote and the US has the Electoral College say “just trust me bro” before giving the election to the other guy half the time (based on elections this century).

                • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  We can see how the electoral college votes, just as we can see that China’s elections are a sham. Loyalty to Xi is the only thing that matters in Chinese politics now.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    We can see how the electoral college votes, hence why I wasn’t worried about asserting that it just hands the votes to the other guy half the time, because if you are going to have a popular vote anyway, there’s not much cause to just tip the scales in the direction of land owners unless you were against democracy.

                    Have you ever made the slightest effort to investigate China’s elections? Or do you just believe what the western press tells you about them? There’s that saying that there is no need to burn books if you can just persuade people not to read them and we have here a demonstration why.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            You might run into more issues than just this thread by casually tossing out the “authoritarian” label like you did on Reddit where the groups in question couldn’t defend themselves

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Defend what? I don’t think the parallel you want to draw works quite as well as you think. My point is that Redditors can cast stones in their ignorance at people who they would struggle to string a whole sentence together to describe without buzzwords because they know jack shit about what those people actually think. Western communists are typically quite familiar with the ideology of liberals.

                • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  Defend what?

                  ourselves

                  they know jack shit about what those people actually think

                  I’m interested to learn more about what those people actually think.

                  Western communists are typically quite familiar with the ideology of liberals.

                  I’m not sure how they can be if they think everyone to the right of them is a liberal.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    But defend yourselves from what?

                    Not everyone to the right is a liberal, people like theocrats exist, but the whole of mainstream American society is neoliberal (with influence from those evangelical theocrats), which is a subset of the larger political-philosophical category of liberalism. We can point to some differences between Republican and Democrat, but they are overwhelmingly of style and PR, not the substance. There are very specific issues, like abortion, where you can pretty reliably see differences, but even here the difference is overstated and this is evidenced by the fact Obama didn’t even try to codify Roe when he got elected and had Dems controlling congress.

                    Why is this? Well, I think you can avoid needing to offer people a carrot if you can just offer them not getting the stick, but if you make them secure then they’ll start asking for carrots. But that’s personal speculation.

                    More important is the overwhelming consensus seen on a variety of issues when you look at their actions. Biden has over and over had the chance to let Trump-Era executive orders simply die, but he has repeatedly signed on to their continuation or even expansion. All the power that Trump unfortunately wielded in office to push EOs and theoretically to veto seems to have evaporated when they touched old Joe’s hands. Why is that? It can’t be ignorance.

                    I knew people who thought Joe would be less hawkish on China, since that is traditionally the role of Republicans, but he in fact has been more hawkish! He has done a better job of stabilizing relationships with America’s North Atlanticist allies, but the imperial policies under Trump and Obama have continued aside from pulling out of Afghanistan (which Trump began working on but was too much of a coward to follow through on, we need only see the media backlash to Biden doing so to understand why).

                    I’m interested to learn more about what those people actually think.

                    Then consider speaking of them less presumptuously