I just want to say that most communists/socialists are not in favor of china or other authoritarian “communist” regimes (any country where factories need suicide nets can hardly be called communist, even if you disregard all the other ways they fail at communist ideals).

Unfortunately tankies are incredibly loud and often well-organized. They are just authoritarian dickriders, no better than the imperialist they claim to oppose.

I am, by and large, in agreement with socialists on economic matters. But why do they always support China and Russia? Like wtf?

Socialist covers a pretty wide swath of political ideologies. Some of them buy into the old propaganda that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Xi, etc, were actually on the right track, and that we can only achieve some sort of utopia with extreme authoritarianism first. They’re generally no better than people on the right who fall into the Trump cult of personality. There’s a lot of denial on both sides.

The type of Socialists that are generally more sane and denounce those dictators for the monsters they were are the the Libertarian-Left ideologies, like Anarchists.

Far from all socialists are tankies but yeah, tankies are a maddening bunch of hypocrites for sure!

My view of the socialist position on China is that it is not “the Chinese state is good”, but rather “stop being mean to Chinese people”.

China is an empire, and socialists hate empires. But the US is also an empire (in that there’s a core that gets all the good stuff and a periphery that gets the good stuff extracted from it, which for the US is often places not technically in the country but in practice obligated to listen to it). So when the US comes in all scandalized and decides that what we really need to do to save people from the Chinese empire is to make sure that US companies don’t lose market share in GPU computing, and can manufacture solar panels at competitive prices, and that people get their short videos from Instagram Reels and not TikTok, the socialists are very suspicious. The net result looks a lot more like imperial protectionism and/or racism than a coherent anti-imperial program.

I’m not sure why this ends up as a socialist talking point? Maybe because the nonsense of the policies seems obvious? Maybe because it seems like warmongering and wars are terrible and so it must be stopped at once? Maybe just to get a break from telling people that they should probably make sure people have houses?

I’m pretty socialist and incredibly anti-authoritarian, so seems odd to me that socialist societies are pretty authoritarian. It should be the other way but I guess power hungry arseholes corrupt everything

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This is the real reason why Hexbear cannot be federated.
There has been a large push to redefine Marxists Leninists as ‘Tankies’. They are this associated with bizarre, reactionary micro-ideologies, uninformed cliches about supporting Russia, etc.
Any interaction with hexbear users would quickly dispel such ideas.
Communists do not ‘support’ Russia, - the Russian oligarchic state represents everything they despise. But these are people who are highly engaged with politics. And their worldview is a lot more nuanced than the average person, who doesn’t have any particular interest in politics and so will only pickup the general gist of mainstream narratives, and accept them without much criticism.
So for example, in relation to Russia, while Marxists do not support their war in Ukraine, they do recognise that Russia was baited into that war by the West, and by a Ukranian state that was captured by a minority of far-right fascists following the Maiden revolution. That is geopolitical realism, and has nothing to do with ideology. No Marxist supports the economic system or cultural bigotry of modern Russia.
Socialism naturally aligns with the humanist value systems that most people hold, and which Western countries claim to uphold even as their actions contradict them. It is essential for those who would uphold the status quo to shut out socialist voices and paint them as extremists. Your confusion - ‘why would people who extol equality and tolerance support inequality and intolerance?’ - is really answering your own question. They don’t.

China lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty in one generation. This is pretty impressive.

They always say the same opinions because it’s part of a massive astroturfing campaign by Chinese and Russian state actors. They’re both attempting to sow discord in the West and lay the foundation to ramp it up to interfere in the 2024 US election.

Do you remember what a shit show Reddit became in 2016? We’ve seen this exact pattern before, where a deluge of people with the same carefully calibrated opinions on everything appear out of the blue. They want to create the illusion that there’s some popular movement towards all these inane opinions, and you can even see from the comments on this thread. They’re using the same known troll tactics to push this (eg. “Just asking questions”).

This a good test of Lemmy’s moderation and federation model and will be indicative of how it fairs next year when these campaigns really ramp up. Good on the admins for taking this seriously and nipping it in the bud.

A prominent example you left out: American politicians and the billionaire-owned media don’t like when someone brings it up, but the man who more than anyone else has been hailed by the establishment as the embodiment of peaceful struggle for civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr, was a pro-union socialist and would have been as disgusted by the neoliberal hypocrites in charge of the Dems as the blatant racists of the far right

There’s a user down in the comments with a history of transphobic garbage bragging about not having been banned yet. Liberal inclusivity.

Try again boot licker. Literally a 5 minute google search disproves all your commie propaganda bullshit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state

As for public holidays, each country has there own. In the west most of them are either national days of recognition or religious in nature.

Ah yes, not unlike your glorious Soviet overlords right? I mean they have never invaded a middle eastern country and indiscriminately killed men, women and children.

That’s the thing about you communists, you seem to only ever remember the shit others have done and not your own.

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It is, but it’s necessary. Look up the “paradox of tolerance”.

Think of it like a social contract. If you don’t play by the “rules”, you’re not protected by those same “rules”. If someone is intolerant, it’s silly for that person to expect people to extend them the same courtesy that they themselves refuse to extend to others. Hypocritical, too.

It’s kind of like the free speech thing. Maybe you could talk about grass for days on end, but that wouldn’t mean that anyone would have to listen to you talk about grass for days on end.

why should people be prevented from questioning it?

They aren’t and they aren’t even being prevented from doing it on this very instance. There’s pleny of anti-western and anti-capitalist sentiment in here, particularly from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. My take away on this is that the Admins are defederating from hexbear due to their stated plan to propagandize the shit out of every instance in the fediverse. Who wants to deal with a coordinated army of tankies coming from another instance?

Yes, as “western countries” famously is not just the US.

Name a “non-western” state where you would like to live and enjoy their social security.