I hope it doesn’t come across like I am demanding sympathy. To me, it is more about recognizing appropriately the entirety of liberation struggle and avoiding falling prey to reducing it only to static characteristics, for lack of a better way to put it.

I think the most salient part of the point they’re making is that those protests/parades don’t have any positive material effect, that they are a pressure valve that protects the imperial core from more significant consequences. They’re acutely aware of the entirety of the global liberation struggle, and Western protest culture does not contribute positively to it.

To address the derisive tone of calling them ‘parades’… When people from the Global South give feedback or advice on this kind of thing, Western Leftists ignore them or patronize them. They dig their heels in and double down on the righteousness of their ineffective methods while a significant portion of them continue to uncritically agree with Capitalist media’s portrayal of any actual Socialist governments - In Pacific Asia, in the Sahel, in Latin America - as brutal dictatorships and problematic. Doing things like calling Western Protests ‘Angry Parades’ is a very effective filter when talking to Westerners to see if it’s actually worth discussing politics with them or if they’re more likely to yell at you for undermining the ‘Leftist Unity’ that was needed to get Kamala into the White House and save the world.

I watched Trumbo (2015) yesterday. Dramatised biography of Dalton Trumbo. Had no idea the guy who wrote Spartacus (1960) was a comrade but that makes a lot of sense.

Anyone got more info on Trumbo from a communist perspective? That his other big movie in 1960 was Exodus leaves me wondering if there were other less savoury influences to him coming off the writers blacklist than were shown in this film. But then I’ve not seen Exodus… it sounds like obvious Israeli propaganda but I have no idea.

Whenever I hear people posit that the US aggression against Venezuela is a distraction from the Epstien files, I can’t help but think it’s the other way around.

Whatever happens with the release of those files, the Capitalists don’t have a lot to win or lose from that situation. If by some miracle Trump actually faces justice, he’ll just be replaced by another puppet.

But with Venezuela, things can go really well or really badly for them. Venezuela’s fate is the issue that capitalists have a significant stake in.

“Shitty working conditions” is very subjective.

They’re allowed to go to the toilet.

And if you’re working in the city, you’re there by choice and moving back to a rural life is an option.

And you got free healthcare.

And the company has to provide boarding if you can’t afford your own place at city rental rates.

How does that all line up against working at an Amazon Fulfillment Center or Walmart?

What isn’t subjective is that shitty working conditions in China are improving, while shitty working conditions under neoliberalism are getting worse.

Something important to note about China’s private sector compared to Western liberal ones, is that it’s highly regulated, and because of that a lot of the disgustingly abusive ways that private corporations treat the public just doesn’t happen there.

For example, with ads in apps. It’s just accepted knowledge that with ‘free’ apps, you are the product and the app sells your data and/or attention to advertisers. In China that’s all extremely regulated: if you see an ad, it’s got to come with some kind of special offer or deal that benefits you, and not in bullshit “mark the price up and then discount it back down” kinds of ways.

So in the West the app sells your attention to the advertisers; in China the app sells access to you and the advertisers give you coupons and discounts (that automatically get processed by the app’s payment system) in exchange for your attention.

And the most important part is that if people report an ad, the government will be on the side of the public when it investigates, as opposed to the toothless reporting systems that nobody bothers with in the West.

The net effect of this, and many many other kinds of ‘authoritarian’ regulatory laws that don’t exist in the west, is that I’m not experiencing the same kind of enshittification in China as I am in the West.

Except in the picture on the left, someone’s actually reading it.

Something’s gone wrong if you’re looking in the node_modules folder.

Considering how LLMs work, you might be one of them.

Maybe not anyone here, but it’s nice to see people like Alice unafraid to say it in liberal spaces.

This was my read as well. His Stalinism is to us Marxism-Leninism, and his ‘true’ Marxism Leninism is to us Trotskyism.

If China had followed the kind of Leninism he advocates, of just relentless hostility to the West, it’d be as broken and hopeless as Russia is now.

I think the most powerful response to someone accusing China of peacefully coexisting with the West lies in three observations:

• The people that control the Western world clearly see China as a threat to them and want to destroy it

• AES and anti-imperialist states around the world are either explicitly protected by China from US hostility, or rely on China’s economic stability to survive the West’s economic hostility.

• Anyone who has actually been to mainland China will agree that the quality of life for workers is far, far better for Chinese than it is even for the Western labour aristocracy. The only exceptions are people who have an income stream based on maintaining anti-China rhetoric and internet debate bros who would ‘lose’ if they admit it.

Someone should deadpan organise a crowdfunding campaign to help Biden pay for his treatment.

https://youtu.be/4T0KrRJ0jTo

But also

https://youtu.be/N5dC-YlN_x8

Also remember that a lot of people, including Chinese, are boycotting this movie because of actress Gal Gadot’s pro-Zionist views. That is definitely a good thing.

If I have any criticism to level at Andy’s video, it’s that he didn’t mention this. The rest of his piece I feel in agreement with.

Anti-woke? Do people like the Snow White remake here?

I agree with everyone else in China regarding that movie (and I’m pretty sure the Black Panthers would have agreed): it’s performative virtue-signalling and blatantly insincere about it. It’s not real progress, and it’s clearly not reflecting real progress because the West is currently regressing. It exists for two reasons: to ease the Western left’s crippling levels of guilt from the centuries of horrific abuse they inflicted on Africans and their New World descendants, and to stir up the culture war bread and circuses.

It just smells extremely liberal to be attacking Andy Boreham (someone who’s made a career of defending China’s reputation from liberal hatemongering) for calling liberal culture war bait exactly what it is.

Is it an unpopular opinion to find the edit irritating? It represents a body image trope that belongs in the dustbin of history.

One of them thinks the US’s Xinjiang propaganda is real, one of them doesn’t.

Don’t forget Kissinger is still alive.

Have a gander at the people behind Brave Software. They’re all cut from the same silicon wafer as everyone else in the Silicon Valley executive biome. And the (lack of) readiness of the information about who is behind Brave is another tell in itself.

BayArea415 got unwanted attention because what he said was true and often incendiary. BadEmpanada wants attention so he says incendiary things that are occasionally true.

I think the fediverse should replace popular socmedia, but it will never be able to compete financially.

We’ve already got Bluesky, which is the same thing but controlled (and sponsored) by the usual suspects, poised to snap up any users that bail from twitter. And popular opinion favours Bluesky thanks to the positive coverage it gets compared to fediverse projects.

The fediverse in the form it’s in now will never replace twitter while the free market controls the distribution of users. They’ll always go to the places controlled by big money.

I think BlueSky is the bigger threat, to be honest.

If the fediverse population ‘clumps’ into mastodon.social and mastodon.social sells out, people will still be on the protocol so they’ll be able to transfer out.

But if BlueSky succeeds at replacing twitter and filling up the niche, less dedicated fediverse users will switch to the livelier site. That will be a far more devastating blow to the fediverse.

That said, I think it’ll survive either or both. ActivityPub taking over twitter instead of BlueSky would be good for the open, anti-monopoly internet cause, but I think it’ll continue regardless. The core communities are established.