You need to understand that we’ve all been here 3 years already, we know each other, care about each other, have a real community with a real unique culture forged through bonds and laughs and drama and dumb shit. We have an actual community, not just a bunch of people that don’t know each other who press updoot and downdoot and generally just see one another as faceless individuals. We trust each other and genuinely like each other.
I genuinely hope that you can create something like it and come to care about the other posters around you in time. You should try to. Build something more meaningful than a reddit clone where everyone treats everyone like a bunch of faceless anons, build a real community.
Well to be honest, I really could see how you guys care for each other from your interactions on that post. Looking at https://hexbear.net, I think you really do have a real community. However most of the interactions are Schadenfreude—enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Among just the first 10 posts on the Local view, sorted by Active, there were 3 posts that were laughing at other people or telling everyone to be meaner to a specific group of people. If you think that a community centered around hating on others is good, then sure, go for it, but I’d rather have no community at all than a community like this.
What I like about Lemmy (and liked about Reddit) is exactly the fact that most people are faceless anons. This is also why I don’t dig Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter because they focus on the user, not on topics I’m interested in. I prefer being a faceless anon to posting about myself and reading about other people. Call me an incel or whatever, but I prefer having communities and friends in real life.
Not to mention the fact that your community has basically turned into an echo chamber of pro-China voices. Maybe both Reddit and the rest of Lemmy are echo chambers of anti-China voices too, but believe it or not, there actually are a few users that are pro-China on there, unlike on hexbear.net where there are no anti-China voices at all. It’s pretty obvious which platform is more of an echo chamber.
I don’t know or care how many people will be able to read this, but allow me to say something in Chinese:
Maybe both Reddit and the rest of Lemmy are echo chambers of anti-China voices too, but believe it or not, there actually are a few users that are pro-China on there, unlike on hexbear.net where there are no anti-China voices at all. It’s pretty obvious which platform is more of an echo chamber.
someone hasnt seen our weekly China struggle sessions
We only look monolithic to libs from outside because we close ranks against bullshit Western lies and propaganda. But there is ample disagreement here about China and many other topics, and we have it out with each other fairly frequently on the many topics we disagree on. We’ve come to refer to these arguments with one another as “struggle sessions.”
For example, it’s worth noting that we have anarchists here (among other non-Marxist-Leninist tendencies), who are often fairly critical of China when they have a chance to be, without annoying libs getting in the way of the discussion.
I realize you very much have a dog in the China-Taiwan fight, as it were, and I understand your reluctance to support the other side. But, while your island’s history is not littered with as many atrocities as that of my own nation (the US), you really ought to consider, as I and the many Westerners here have, that your country is not on the right side, and is in fact the bad guys. Chiang Kai-Shek was a monster, and any reasonable person should want to piss on his grave. The most effective way to do that would be to work toward reunification, the one thing he opposed more clearly than anything else.
Thank you for understanding my perspective. Chiang Kai-Shek did do many terrible things at that time, but Taiwan has changed a lot since then. There have been efforts to remove Chiang Kai-Shek statues. Some people have pushed for the “de-Kai-Shek-ification” of street names and other things that were named after him. Every year, on 28 February, everyone takes a day off from work to commerorate the incident that happened on 28 Feb 1947. Also the notion of retaliating against some historical figure by doing something he once opposed is weird. However, I am willing to support reunification if and only if either of the following conditions is met:
that the government currently ruling Taiwan is the one taking over
a new, democratic regime takes over both the Mainland and Taiwan
The government of Taiwan is allied with a genocidal evil empire (the US), and is capitalist, so that’s a non-starter because capitalism is destroying the planet.
And Western bourgeois “democracy” is nothing of the sort; the government of China is much more responsive to its people than the US or any other supposed “democracy.” (Hint: if the system always gives rich people what they want, it’s not democracy, it’s what we communists call a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.)
These are not points anyone here will concede, because your views on these issues are entirely clouded by Western lies and propaganda, unfortunately.
(Keep in mind that Chinese people do vote on their local government officials; those officials then vote on the officials one level up, and so on, all the way up the hierarchy. This is in fact fairly similar to the original form of government in the United States, in which Senators and presidential Electors were selected by the members of each state’s legislature.)
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Your comment has nothing to do with mine except for the common topic of Taiwan (and maybe democracy).
Anyways, in my mind, a real, functioning democracy is where people can directly elect their head of state, which is usually the president. In the US people are not voting directly for their president, so it is not great in terms of democracy. Take Taiwan as an example instead. The president is elected via popular vote, and so are the legislators and local officials. Doesn’t the fact that Chairman Xi can remain in power as long as the party would like bother you?
See the map below. This is the 2022 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index map. Notice how China, along with Belarus and Afghanistan, is dark red and Taiwan, Finland, and Switzerland are so green.
You gave two conditions for reunification that would satisfy you. I explained why both conditions are unworkable from the perspective of people here, myself included.
Also, directly electing the head of state doesn’t really mean very much. Sure the US president isn’t quite elected by popular vote, but with only a few exceptions (admittedly, historically significant ones), the winner has won both the popular and electoral votes. Biden, for example, won both in 2020. And yet shit still fucking sucks here, and ordinary people have absolutely no say in government. As such, I would argue that simple popular voting for an executive falls far short of a good standard for democracy.
By contrast, in China, yes, President Xi can continue as long as the Party wants him to. Is that so bad? Don’t you think the CPC would turn against President Xi if some scandal occurred that turned most of the Chinese people against him? Couldn’t his long tenure simply be the result of significant popularity (perhaps owing to his apparently fairly successful efforts to root out corruption)? Was it really so bad that FDR got four terms in the US presidency? (The answer to this last one is a resounding ‘no,’ by the way, in case you’re not well-versed on US history.)
Then there’s the reasoning behind the somewhat-less-open forms of democratic government employed in socialist countries like China and Vietnam (called “democratic centralism”): if they loosened their grip on power, the US and other Westerners would seek to do to the CPC and its leaders the same thing they did to Mossadegh’s government in Iran in 1953, to Allende’s government in Chile in 1973, to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, to Thomas Sankara’s government in Burkina Faso in 1987: kill them, destroy their government, and undermine all of the goals they worked for by allowing Western multinationals to move in and exploit people and resources to the maximum degree possible. It happens consistently to every socialist power that tries to play by the rules of Western Democracy. Did you think they were advocating this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts? No, it’s an ideology designed to allow maximal profit to capital.
As for your source, this is where Western lies and propaganda come in big-time. We have a meme here on Hexbear, “the same map,” which we roll out every time there’s an odious, right-wing Western source (and The Economist very much qualifies; it has a proud history that includes arguing in favor of slavery in the US during the Antebellum and Civil War eras) that puts out a map showing all the typical Western countries as “good” (by whatever BS metric the map supposedly indicates via color-coding, in this case “democracy”), and all the usual suspects as “bad.” I could go to the trouble of digging into the methodology used here and point out the many ways in which it’s flawed, but honestly I don’t really feel the need to do so; nothing The Economist says is worth so much as the paper it’s printed on.
Anyways, in my mind, a real, functioning democracy is where people can directly elect their head of state, which is usually the president
this is such a deficient view of democracy that it doesn’t even qualify as democracy in my book. the word means rule by the masses - in what way does electing a head of state, someone who is in no way obligated to respect the wishes of the electorate (cf US presidents and their inability to push legislation/policy supported by supermajorities of the electorate) constitute rule by the masses. merely electing someone passes the buck on from the masses onto singular, corruptible individuals. democracy means the democratic participation of the people in government and such a thing goes so much farther than mere elections for representative. compare Cuban democracy, where elected representatives are required to hold weekly, local office hours so constituents can come share their thoughts about policy and governance, to western “democracy” where most people have no clue who their elected officials even are or what policy decisions their representatives are taking.
dream bigger. you’re setting a very narrow horizon on human possibilities in the sociopolitical realm.
federation is kind of the new thing and being mean to libs is flavor of the week at the moment. people will get bored of it after a bit and we’ll go back to our normal posting.
Tbf this is a very unusual time in the websites history due to the federation, and sorting by hot or new or, uh, “all time - month” will look very different.
It’s also just false that there are no anti-china people. For example, we have a weird Khrushchevite who says that he and only he is the one good head of state to hold office at any point from 1950 to now.
You can also find plenty of people who have criticisms of China (myself still included) but just hate the bullshit western articles that get shared on lemmy.ml or whatever. Between
a group where 98% of relevant users are vehemently anti-china and 2% are for, but there is a profound consensus among the 98% that mediabiasfactcheck.org is a good website and the BBC is objective in its coverage of China as it puts out absolute pablum articles against it
Vs 2) a group where (let’s just say) 100% of the user base at least supports China over America but they are able to have real discussions about journalistic epistemology and media bias that doesn’t equate “unbiased” with “bipartisan”.
I think 2 is a lot less of an echo chamber because the presence of people with absolutely moronic and uncritical responses to media are not a substantial indicator of something succeeding in not being an echo chamber. Consensus within a finite population is a real social phenomenon and the vast majority of people can be reasoned with over time.
Edit: “but you just like your own media!”
Look at what we actually talk about. There is some use of Chinese or sometimes Russian press for reference, but the focus is overwhelmingly still on western sources because you can find a lot of useful information even in spite of the author’s intentions much of the time, and no one is using some Chinese NGO as a fucking measuring stick for what source is objective and what isn’t (and Russian media is automatically criticized, but that is an aside).
Ngl, right now the lib dunking is the like, idk, thing we’ve been doing now that hexbear has been released onto Lemmy. Personally I haven’t really been doing much of that myself except for dunking on some I saw being homophobic in someone’s replies.
But yeah in general we’re not as like universally pro China as we seem from the outside, ngl I’m like more hesitant to be all in for China than some of the other users on this site, it’s just that when it comes to arguing with libs we don’t split from the general hexbear line
But yeah there is a strong sense of community on hexbear, these people helped me understand and come to terms with being trans, the OP of this thread is actually mutuals with me on mastodon and in discord DMs with me and we’re in a discord for trans communists together. She’s given me a lot of really helpful advice and explained a lot of theory to me, and she (and several other hexbears who follow me on fedi) helped me get past my alcoholism. Like I’ve also seen some of the users here manage to crowdfund to avoid homelessness, get hrt, money for food when they can’t work due to an injury, get medical necessities they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford and the like
@[email protected] I want you to read this.
You need to understand that we’ve all been here 3 years already, we know each other, care about each other, have a real community with a real unique culture forged through bonds and laughs and drama and dumb shit. We have an actual community, not just a bunch of people that don’t know each other who press updoot and downdoot and generally just see one another as faceless individuals. We trust each other and genuinely like each other.
I genuinely hope that you can create something like it and come to care about the other posters around you in time. You should try to. Build something more meaningful than a reddit clone where everyone treats everyone like a bunch of faceless anons, build a real community.
I love you all
lol they chose instead to post this comment to someone who was arguing with me. I’m honored tbh
Well to be honest, I really could see how you guys care for each other from your interactions on that post. Looking at https://hexbear.net, I think you really do have a real community. However most of the interactions are Schadenfreude—enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Among just the first 10 posts on the Local view, sorted by Active, there were 3 posts that were laughing at other people or telling everyone to be meaner to a specific group of people. If you think that a community centered around hating on others is good, then sure, go for it, but I’d rather have no community at all than a community like this.
What I like about Lemmy (and liked about Reddit) is exactly the fact that most people are faceless anons. This is also why I don’t dig Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter because they focus on the user, not on topics I’m interested in. I prefer being a faceless anon to posting about myself and reading about other people. Call me an incel or whatever, but I prefer having communities and friends in real life.
Not to mention the fact that your community has basically turned into an echo chamber of pro-China voices. Maybe both Reddit and the rest of Lemmy are echo chambers of anti-China voices too, but believe it or not, there actually are a few users that are pro-China on there, unlike on hexbear.net where there are no anti-China voices at all. It’s pretty obvious which platform is more of an echo chamber.
I don’t know or care how many people will be able to read this, but allow me to say something in Chinese:
身為台灣人，我實在是很難接受這麼多事不關己的外國人在那邊鼓吹中國統一台灣，在那邊七嘴八舌的說「中國要怎麼侵犯中國領空」、「又是中國飛機飛過大陸然後台灣在那邊叫叫叫嗎」之類無知的話。你住台灣嗎？住中國嗎？知道中國是怎麼樣文攻武嚇台灣嗎？知道聽中國外交部發言人成天嚷嚷著台灣是中國神聖不可分割的一部分是什麼心情嗎？不妨換位思考吧，要是你住在一個被後起的政權逼到一個小島上的國家，天天聽到新政權在說小島也是他們的，脅迫其他國家不可以承認他為主權國家，你會作何感想呢？唉，我不想再多費唇舌跟你們這些會講英文的小粉紅爭論了。
someone hasnt seen our weekly China struggle sessions
What is the weekly China struggle session?
We only look monolithic to libs from outside because we close ranks against bullshit Western lies and propaganda. But there is ample disagreement here about China and many other topics, and we have it out with each other fairly frequently on the many topics we disagree on. We’ve come to refer to these arguments with one another as “struggle sessions.”
For example, it’s worth noting that we have anarchists here (among other non-Marxist-Leninist tendencies), who are often fairly critical of China when they have a chance to be, without annoying libs getting in the way of the discussion.
I realize you very much have a dog in the China-Taiwan fight, as it were, and I understand your reluctance to support the other side. But, while your island’s history is not littered with as many atrocities as that of my own nation (the US), you really ought to consider, as I and the many Westerners here have, that your country is not on the right side, and is in fact the bad guys. Chiang Kai-Shek was a monster, and any reasonable person should want to piss on his grave. The most effective way to do that would be to work toward reunification, the one thing he opposed more clearly than anything else.
Thank you for understanding my perspective. Chiang Kai-Shek did do many terrible things at that time, but Taiwan has changed a lot since then. There have been efforts to remove Chiang Kai-Shek statues. Some people have pushed for the “de-Kai-Shek-ification” of street names and other things that were named after him. Every year, on 28 February, everyone takes a day off from work to commerorate the incident that happened on 28 Feb 1947. Also the notion of retaliating against some historical figure by doing something he once opposed is weird. However, I am willing to support reunification if and only if either of the following conditions is met:
The government of Taiwan is allied with a genocidal evil empire (the US), and is capitalist, so that’s a non-starter because capitalism is destroying the planet.
And Western bourgeois “democracy” is nothing of the sort; the government of China is much more responsive to its people than the US or any other supposed “democracy.” (Hint: if the system always gives rich people what they want, it’s not democracy, it’s what we communists call a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.)
These are not points anyone here will concede, because your views on these issues are entirely clouded by Western lies and propaganda, unfortunately.
(Keep in mind that Chinese people do vote on their local government officials; those officials then vote on the officials one level up, and so on, all the way up the hierarchy. This is in fact fairly similar to the original form of government in the United States, in which Senators and presidential Electors were selected by the members of each state’s legislature.)
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Your comment has nothing to do with mine except for the common topic of Taiwan (and maybe democracy).
Anyways, in my mind, a real, functioning democracy is where people can directly elect their head of state, which is usually the president. In the US people are not voting directly for their president, so it is not great in terms of democracy. Take Taiwan as an example instead. The president is elected via popular vote, and so are the legislators and local officials. Doesn’t the fact that Chairman Xi can remain in power as long as the party would like bother you?
See the map below. This is the 2022 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index map. Notice how China, along with Belarus and Afghanistan, is dark red and Taiwan, Finland, and Switzerland are so green.
(Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index)
You gave two conditions for reunification that would satisfy you. I explained why both conditions are unworkable from the perspective of people here, myself included.
Also, directly electing the head of state doesn’t really mean very much. Sure the US president isn’t quite elected by popular vote, but with only a few exceptions (admittedly, historically significant ones), the winner has won both the popular and electoral votes. Biden, for example, won both in 2020. And yet shit still fucking sucks here, and ordinary people have absolutely no say in government. As such, I would argue that simple popular voting for an executive falls far short of a good standard for democracy.
By contrast, in China, yes, President Xi can continue as long as the Party wants him to. Is that so bad? Don’t you think the CPC would turn against President Xi if some scandal occurred that turned most of the Chinese people against him? Couldn’t his long tenure simply be the result of significant popularity (perhaps owing to his apparently fairly successful efforts to root out corruption)? Was it really so bad that FDR got four terms in the US presidency? (The answer to this last one is a resounding ‘no,’ by the way, in case you’re not well-versed on US history.)
Then there’s the reasoning behind the somewhat-less-open forms of democratic government employed in socialist countries like China and Vietnam (called “democratic centralism”): if they loosened their grip on power, the US and other Westerners would seek to do to the CPC and its leaders the same thing they did to Mossadegh’s government in Iran in 1953, to Allende’s government in Chile in 1973, to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, to Thomas Sankara’s government in Burkina Faso in 1987: kill them, destroy their government, and undermine all of the goals they worked for by allowing Western multinationals to move in and exploit people and resources to the maximum degree possible. It happens consistently to every socialist power that tries to play by the rules of Western Democracy. Did you think they were advocating this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts? No, it’s an ideology designed to allow maximal profit to capital.
As for your source, this is where Western lies and propaganda come in big-time. We have a meme here on Hexbear, “the same map,” which we roll out every time there’s an odious, right-wing Western source (and The Economist very much qualifies; it has a proud history that includes arguing in favor of slavery in the US during the Antebellum and Civil War eras) that puts out a map showing all the typical Western countries as “good” (by whatever BS metric the map supposedly indicates via color-coding, in this case “democracy”), and all the usual suspects as “bad.” I could go to the trouble of digging into the methodology used here and point out the many ways in which it’s flawed, but honestly I don’t really feel the need to do so; nothing The Economist says is worth so much as the paper it’s printed on.
this is such a deficient view of democracy that it doesn’t even qualify as democracy in my book. the word means rule by the masses - in what way does electing a head of state, someone who is in no way obligated to respect the wishes of the electorate (cf US presidents and their inability to push legislation/policy supported by supermajorities of the electorate) constitute rule by the masses. merely electing someone passes the buck on from the masses onto singular, corruptible individuals. democracy means the democratic participation of the people in government and such a thing goes so much farther than mere elections for representative. compare Cuban democracy, where elected representatives are required to hold weekly, local office hours so constituents can come share their thoughts about policy and governance, to western “democracy” where most people have no clue who their elected officials even are or what policy decisions their representatives are taking.
dream bigger. you’re setting a very narrow horizon on human possibilities in the sociopolitical realm.
It’s more of a community centered around catharsis and commiseration, and occasionally changing people’s minds who are open to it, but go off
Edit: oh yeah and comradeliness ofc
federation is kind of the new thing and being mean to libs is flavor of the week at the moment. people will get bored of it after a bit and we’ll go back to our normal posting.
不知道你在这种语境撤这些有的没得民众感情道德绑架理念是几分意思
又没人提倡武合，大家反对的是丑国名面上打着自由民主的旗暗地里进行借刀杀人的参与和干扰东亚地区地缘政治的伪君子行为。湾湾就是美帝独裁梦的弃子，不要说两岸了，这点连这论坛上的老外都很清楚，何必在这装惨诉苦呢
殖人眼里应该只要不是资的本走狗就是粉红吧
首先，謝謝你回覆我。
或許我是在不自覺間道德綁架他人吧，但事實便是他們道德層面上作得不夠好（這樣講好狂妄，但算了）。他們有一半的人是提出了證據和清楚的論述，這種我欣賞。但另一半可就不是了，他們反而是不斷重覆台灣是中國此類的言論，沒有個踏實的理由，或是刷幾個醜得要死的 emojis（而且還超大！）加上一些沒什麼價值的字就走人。
的確沒人提倡武合，美國也確實有些過度干涉其他地區的局面。美國未來可能真的會放棄台灣，但是「獨裁」這兩個字不適合套在美國上吧。美國有一個不受法律約束、擁有無限威權的統治者嗎？美國好歹也有個選舉，姑且不論是否造假，有個選舉就不能說是獨裁吧。習近平才是獨裁者吧。就算台灣真的是美國「獨裁夢」的棄子，這也不是我不必訴苦的理由吧，更不是我在訴苦的事啊！何況我並不是裝慘，是真心對十六進位熊們感到失望。
不知道我哪裡讓你從感覺是個殖人（剛剛還得特地去查這是什麼意思），但我不覺得我的思想有受到任何其他國家殖民。
另外，希望你之後可以不要再用「灣灣」來指稱「台灣」，聽起來很輕蔑。
没有调查就没有发言权，起点如此不同会让沟通很积累，更何况你的口气也没谦虚到哪去。这也就是为什么另一半人不愿意和你正常交流，属于你这意识形态的人外网上真的多到已经懒得理了。我劝你还是去了解了解美帝进百年的政治历史吧，或许你会有所收获。要推荐的话可以在贴里问
其實我還真的不太暸解美國的歷史，我的了解只限於不少英國人移民過去，和原住民起了些衝突，又內戰了幾次，變成現在這樣。我會去了解一下的，到時候再來回你
Tbf this is a very unusual time in the websites history due to the federation, and sorting by hot or new or, uh, “all time - month” will look very different.
It’s also just false that there are no anti-china people. For example, we have a weird Khrushchevite who says that he and only he is the one good head of state to hold office at any point from 1950 to now.
You can also find plenty of people who have criticisms of China (myself still included) but just hate the bullshit western articles that get shared on lemmy.ml or whatever. Between
Vs 2) a group where (let’s just say) 100% of the user base at least supports China over America but they are able to have real discussions about journalistic epistemology and media bias that doesn’t equate “unbiased” with “bipartisan”.
I think 2 is a lot less of an echo chamber because the presence of people with absolutely moronic and uncritical responses to media are not a substantial indicator of something succeeding in not being an echo chamber. Consensus within a finite population is a real social phenomenon and the vast majority of people can be reasoned with over time.
Edit: “but you just like your own media!”
Look at what we actually talk about. There is some use of Chinese or sometimes Russian press for reference, but the focus is overwhelmingly still on western sources because you can find a lot of useful information even in spite of the author’s intentions much of the time, and no one is using some Chinese NGO as a fucking measuring stick for what source is objective and what isn’t (and Russian media is automatically criticized, but that is an aside).
Ngl, right now the lib dunking is the like, idk, thing we’ve been doing now that hexbear has been released onto Lemmy. Personally I haven’t really been doing much of that myself except for dunking on some I saw being homophobic in someone’s replies.
But yeah in general we’re not as like universally pro China as we seem from the outside, ngl I’m like more hesitant to be all in for China than some of the other users on this site, it’s just that when it comes to arguing with libs we don’t split from the general hexbear line
But yeah there is a strong sense of community on hexbear, these people helped me understand and come to terms with being trans, the OP of this thread is actually mutuals with me on mastodon and in discord DMs with me and we’re in a discord for trans communists together. She’s given me a lot of really helpful advice and explained a lot of theory to me, and she (and several other hexbears who follow me on fedi) helped me get past my alcoholism. Like I’ve also seen some of the users here manage to crowdfund to avoid homelessness, get hrt, money for food when they can’t work due to an injury, get medical necessities they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford and the like
TL;DR: we have a real sense of community on