I don’t pretend to know everything about Leftist theory, but it doesn’t seem complicated.

Well at least you can admit that much. But that admission, while surprising to no one here, essentially invalidates the rest of your following comment, not to mention most of the others you’ve posted in this thread. You don’t have to know “everything” but you do have to know something about the topic you’re trying to speak on, which you’ve made clear you don’t. You don’t seem to know anything about leftist theory, and saying “it doesn’t seem complicated” reveals that is in fact the case. It’s like saying “I don’t know everything about biology, but it doesn’t seem complicated.” It’s just a vapid statement on its face.

There is a certain well known phrase that you should consider taking to heart: “No investigation - no right to speak.” In other words, if you haven’t bothered to take the initiative and time to learn about the topic you’re trying to expound on, don’t try to expound on it. All you will do is reveal your ignorance and make people who HAVE taken the time and done the work to educate themselves roll their eyes at you in frustration, which is exactly what has happened here. Go read some books (at the very least) and then come back. You call yourself an anarchist but you don’t even know what actual anarchist thinkers and theorists have accomplished, discovered, argued for, etc beyond slogans apparently. If you want to have even the tiniest hope of developing a credible, realistic, non-batshit political framework for yourself, let alone one you advocate that other people should adhere to, you are going to have to learn about the others that already exist, particularly those with centuries of hard work built upon by many individuals not just through their own education and intellectual rigor, but also through literal application in the real world. At the absolute very fucking bare minimum least you need to “lurk more.”

Did I hit a nerve ?

Ah, “hit a nerve,” the age-old adage of the smuglord redditor child. No, you merely took a shit on the floor, and just because the adults in the room were disgusted by the stench, that doesn’t mean you were onto something.

Is the existence of absolute power itself not a restriction
I just don’t see how dialectical materialism is consistent with unchallenged and unjustified power.

Well there’s your problem. Did you even read the rest of what Cowbee said in this thread, explaining much of how governance in China actually works? You come here basing your questions around this false assumption of “the existence of absolute power,” when no one in China has absolute power, rather power is vastly more evenly distributed there than in liberal “democracies.”

The fact that there is a single party is not (as western propaganda would have you believe) evidence of “dictatorship,” but instead functions as a bulwark preventing reaction and the destruction of the revolution by capital - something I would hope you would be able to recognize even with a very basic understanding of dialectics. There is no reason the will of the people can’t be enacted via a single party that exists to ensure it is their will and not that of capital that rules, indeed it makes more sense to have a single party when the rule of the people is the goal.

Consider how the approval rating for their government across the population of China, well over a billion people, is above 90%! And now consider the U.S. with it’s “two party” system, where both parties represent the interests only of the political donor class (capital) and the government is largely despised by the population. The power there is concentrated in a small number of ultrawealthy bourgeoisie and it is continuously getting worse, more and more concentrated, while the people of the US are losing more and more of their so-called rights every day.

Yet you frame your questions under this base (and false) assumption of “unchallenged and unjustified power” in China without even considering how power is constantly challenged there (see Cowbee’s explanation further up of the many direct elections in China) and through that challenge, its justification is consistently being reestablished.

Since people here seem to disagree

Since people here have seen all this sinophobic propaganda countless times already and thoroughly debunked it all, you’re going to go ahead and confidently spew tired, gullible U.S. State Department talking points and lies to be debunked yet again for the umpteenth time because you’re either painfully naive and depressingly uneducated or you have an explicit pro-U.S. anti-China agenda you’re desperately trying to spread.

Yeah, we know, dronie.

Xi Jinping does not “look like” Winnie the Pooh at all. It’s not some universal truth you are only making an innocent observation of. The entire reason the connection exists is because of a racist meme depicting Xi as Pooh and Obama as Tigger. I’m going to trust I don’t have to explain the racism of the Obama depiction, but only for the sake of brevity not actual confidence in your understanding.

But as for Xi, there really is no resemblance beyond the extremely racist stereotype of Asian people being “yellow” which is itself only a thing in racist circles because white supremacists had to make up a color scheme to categorize and otherize ethnicities that were not part of the in-group, despite the fact that many Asian people are “whiter” in actual skin tone than that of countless pinkish hogs and dead salmon gammons, Asian people and all the people “of the Orient” (more racism) are yellow according to the pathologically racial-category-obsessed white supremacist.

But before I get too tangential, I’m explaining all this to show you how thoroughly you’ve absorbed that background racism with shit like “it’s not my fault he looks like Pooh!” Yes, yes it is your fault you are choosing not to examine your internalized racism and fall back on a racist trope as some simple matter of fact when it’s clearly not.

And speaking of things taken as simple matter of fact that are bullshit, the whole “banning of Winnie the Pooh in China” is just more Sinophobic lies easily proven as such, with things like this. Oh shit, what is a whole Winnie the Pooh themed ride doing at a Shanghai theme park?! Call the See See Pee immediately and report this heinous crime against censorship so their social credit score turns negative!

the real primary goal of the project is to coopt and destroy the only corner of the internet where communists have any sense of sovereignty.

If more lemmy users, mods, and of course the devs are made aware that this is the piefed goal using the strategy you just described (and I very much agree with you that it is), is there anything in particular that can be done to try to counter it? Other than spread awareness, of course.

This is unironically the big moral dilemma presented by so much western entertainment media it’s nauseating. “Would you pRoTeCt yOuR FaMiLy even if it meant the world/everyone else would die?” and the correct moral position, after much soul searching and garment rending is usually presented as: “Yes, fuck the world, you gotta protect you and your own above literally ALL else.” And it’s always so contrived, with such manufactured scenarios to ignore the fact that in the vast majority of both real and imagined cases, the better option for the world is also going to be the better option for your family. But constantly pitting the individual and their immediate family’s interests over the well being of the community and society is fundamentally necessary to maintain the capitalist mode, so they gotta keep reinforcing that false dichotomy as some kind of universal conundrum that is best answered by being as self centered as possible “for your family.”

Or maybe try telling it to all the people of color shot by cops from 2020-2024, or the kids in cages that never went away when a Democrat was elected president but just silently forgotten about and suddenly ignored by the same media that had been using them for cheap political points during election season, or the thousands of people in NOT brand-new concentration camps but the ones that have existed the whole fucking time. Or are you saying that none of that shit mattered then since your blue team was in the big boy chair, but only matters now that a cheeto is office and it was a white person that got executed by the bipartisan fascists this time? Despicable.

That’s just not voting but with extra steps.

So voting for who or what we actually want is the same as just not voting. Got it. We HAVE to vote for fascists we’re opposed to or our vote is meaningless.

Sounds like a pretty fucking airtight argument for not voting then, dipshit.

The original version of this meme was problematic but my god this version of it is spot on accurate. And it still would be accurate for countless other things that could be put in the Biden/Trump speech bubble. Despite what Democrats pretend, and how they like to (ineffectively) play the role of opposition to Trump, they are fine with 90% of what he does, he just does it without any deference to the liberal theatrics of “law,” with too much bombast instead of fake personal difficulty making “hard choices,” and because he’s not on team Blue. Granted, there are a few significant things I think it’s safe to say would not have happened under a Democrat president, but vanishingly few of those are things they wouldn’t have wanted to do.

Uh, what? Look at the context of this post, jackass. The meme is trying to portray Russia as a misunderstood good guy

The flag of Russia isn’t even in the meme, “jackass.” The flag of the USSR is, though sadly it hasn’t existed for a few decades now. Like most clueless liberals happily drowning in propaganda, you are falsely equating modern capitalist Russia with the USSR.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that even modern Russia (whose flag appears nowhere in this image, genius) was wholly justified in entering the civil war that had already been ongoing inside Ukraine on behalf of the eastern regions of Ukraine whose civilians were being slaughtered by the Ukrainian government’s militias. But I admit that it’s hard to keep a straight face when talking to someone who uses NATO buzzwords like “unjustified foreign aggressor” because I keep having to facepalm.

You’re assuming libs apply their racism consistently rather than in whatever way immediately suits their interests. “How can you accuse me of hating black people, I loved Obama!” -countless libs.

As much as anyone on the left should agree that the fall of the Soviet Union was a horrible, tragic event for workers there (if not worldwide), I think many if not the majority of Social Democrats and even a few who like to call themselves Anarchists, would deny that fact as vehemently as any capitalist. Western hatred for the USSR runs deep. Chomsky is a perfect example, and there are droves of supposed “lefties” who readily side with him on insisting that “The collapse of USSR was victory for the working class.”

Here is a video of Chomsky from 2020, before the connection between JE and Chomsky had been revealed. He gets a little indignant and defensive about Epstein, interesting flavor info.

Did you maybe forget to paste the link for this? I’m assuming it’s probably this one, but if there’s another I’d like to see it. In this one, Chomsky first defends Epstein (and his own relationship with Epstein) by citing how it’s a foundational tenant of western law that a person who has “served their sentence” is then absolved or “the same as everybody else” as Chomsky puts it. Which is amusing in itself coming from someone who supposedly is such a critic of how asymmetrically that law punishes the weak and powerless vs the rich and powerful. He then does an actual whataboutism by basically saying “well David Koch was even worse, and he also gave money to MIT where I worked. Did anybody say anything about that?” Ok then, Noam, would you go have brunch with Koch on his private jet too, or are you saying that’s where you draw the line? I wish the interviewer, who was obviously dissatisfied with his answers had been less deferential to Chomsky.

But if I found out my best friend was hanging out with Jamie Dimon, Donald Trump, and Alan Dershowitz, as well as a cavalcade of notorious villains and literal monsters

I was surprised to learn how close Epstein and Steve Bannon were. Not at all surprised by the connection, but if you read the ongoing conversations they had, they were like a couple of teens gossiping with each other over the phone every night. I do wonder exactly how aware he was that his good buddy Epstein was besties with, as you said, notorious villians and literal monsters (like would Chomsky still be ok if Epstein had been good friends with David Koch for example?), but I doubt Chomsky was as in the dark about it as his fans would like to think. He was aware that Epstein had at least in the past, if not currently was outright human-trafficking children for SA on his private island, but apparently he did his time, and that makes him “the same as everybody else.”

It really is an illuminating example of how interconnected so many of the so-called elite really are, even those whose public personas would make us think they could be nothing but bitter enemies. My personal vibes-based belief is that it’s a soft form of class solidarity.

Its government came to power as a result of a US-backed coup, for starters.

edit: For the record, I upvoted you because your question is fair and valid if you don’t know the history and context of the situation. And the western media where many people understandably (if sadly) get their information from will never provide that history and context. That is why we get these confidently ignorant people coming into threads like this gobsmacked that anyone can deny what they see as the obvious truth of Russia’s “unjustified invasion by a foreign aggressor.”

Not at all comparable. And as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, testing rival airspaces with fighter planes has been a common even banal tactic used by a number of country’s airforces, certainly including the US who has employed it countless times.

Even if a person were to concede, as you are insisting, that the US does not = NATO (though for all intents and purposes that is effectively true, let’s set that aside for now), then that doesn’t change the fact that when you said:

The only country NATO invaded was also invaded by Russia.

You were demonstrating a complete and shameful lack of historical knowledge. That statement is just a ridiculous, ahistorical lie. Formally, undeniably, admittedly even by NATO, these following countries have been invaded by NATO: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan (the only one you seem to be aware of), and Libya. And NATO as an organization admits to “indirect participation” in the invasion of Iraq.

So set aside your other petty derailment arguments about NATO not technically being the US and acknowledge that you were full of shit even before Iran, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba were brought up.

Edit: Ok, I guess you can’t acknowledge it, I see now that you were banned. Well I wasn’t holding my breath you were going to anyway. lol

Isn’t that all rUzZiAn DiSiNfOrMaTzIa though?

omg… That must mean ChatGPT is a Russian agent bot!

wtf, I love ChatGPT now?

This post is the one I was referring to when I used the word mandate, a post made by someone I believe was an admin at the time, but maybe not. But I also talked to someone at the time from there who was a frequent commenter in places like the lemmy c/worldnews comm and they were very angry about having their posts and comments removed, while others were banned. I checked the modlog and sure enough. I’m really not trying to stir shit, it’s just something I’m sincerely curious about because it seemed so… off brand to me, to use a lib phrase.

Honest question, I thought hexbear had a mandate against “lionizing Luigi Mangione,” but I have been seeing more hexbear users like u/QuietCupcake even in this thread posting emojis that I thought would have gotten them removed or worse last December. Is that why OP is posting it here with an .ml account even though (forgive and correct me if I’m wrong comrade) you’re mostly a hexbear user? Did the mods there ever acknowledge the absurdity of that rule and roll it back, was it just quietly forgotten, or is it still selectively enforced? Don’t get me wrong, I think hexbear is mostly a great instance that I often comment in solidarity with, but I was surprised to see what seemed like an extremely uncharacteristic liberal position they took on that.