miz

we are refederated as of today

https://hexbear.net/post/4477962

removing this kind of watermark should be trivial now with generative so-called AI, right

Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “[Free Tibet]” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off,

from https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

if you put the soviet textbook on a thumb drive and take it to a print shop you can just print it out

btw it’s just shy of 30,000 miles now

https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

It’s always funny to me when Westerners can’t even conceive of why anyone would support the Chinese government. Imagine being a middle-aged Chinese person who watched all this happen. Within living memory, you went from the tail end of the century of humiliation, emerging from under the heel of Western hegemony, and now you’re a world superpower of unprecedented independence from that hegemony. For the first time in the history of the colonial world, a country of the oppressed has risen up by its own power to challenge the oppressors that have spent the past 400 years immiserating every non-white country on earth. They went from ox carts to high speed rail in one lifetime. From colonial humiliation, to unprecedented pride and dignity for the first counterhegemonic force outside the West in the history of capitalism. They can look around themselves and see several examples of countries like India and Myanmar that didn’t choose communism, couldn’t challenge the West, didn’t have a cultural revolution (it was a mixed bag of very good and very bad) and they can see, clear as day, where their path led them vs the path the West would have preferred for them. Vassalage. Poverty. Exploitation. Rural idiocy, as Lenin put it. The path the West still wants to put them back on.