@Smackyroon only ukranian and european flags should be in the top side lol american flag should deffo be in the lower side

"America is Russia getit?"

Americans see something American happening Americanly in America: what are we, a bunch of ASIANS??!?!!?

What we do with our butts is none of your business

Or even if it's American but leftist, because if it indicts the antifascist bonafides of the Democratic party then it must be dastardly Russian lies

"Teehee i support multiple nazi armies, u mad?"

Yeah!

Lmao just saying words, truly everyone is 12 now

Very fitting name lmao

All American media is Israeli owned propaganda now thanks to Ellison

If we were to look at basic leftist theory they always regard liberals as non left. The argument is that liberals just protect the liberties of the priviledged class, typically the wealth owning class. They treat the workers like wage slaves, throwing them a bone to keep them quiet, but when historically being forced to choose between having the workers attain same level of liberties, the liberals always chose to surpress that, break unions or even multiple times directly allow fascist overtake.

you are right that in us this is presented as opposition, but any serious leftist will categorically deny that as absurd. One good indicator is for example how the genocide in gaza is bipartizan or even the war in iran. They protect same interests. They do not serve the voter.

Arguably, all parties within a liberal democracy are liberal in ideology. Republicans are just the right wing of that liberal system, Dems are to the left of the repubs but both still liberal. In Australia the leading conservative party is quite literally called The Liberal Party.

Not Liberals, simply stupid and ignorant people which believe everything what mainstream media say. With a cultured and informed people, the USA would be a full democracy and Trump in jail since years.

I don’t trust any of these mfs, and you shouldn’t either

Liberals are not conservative. They are against misogyny, bigotry,racism.

So right-wing Female supremacists, Trans supremacists and Afro-supremacists.
That's your problem there.

If all of them are complacent with rampant problems in liberal democracies like:

• Campaign fraud
• Worker exploitation
• Imperialist propaganda
• Bribes
• Blackmail
• Inside trading
• Usury
• Private gambling institutions
• Landlords
• Consumer good poisoning
• Monopolized rent consumer goods

Then THEY'RE NOT LEFT-WING!

And the US hasn't had a left-wing party, not even a social democratic one, since the 1990s,
as social democratic parties only seem to thrive if there's a socialist nation to look up to
and the Soviet Union fell apart as it lacked resources (coal) to do anything against the US petrodollar scheme,
That's why Bill Clinton had been called a Repubic-lite during his reign
and Obama never delivered on his "Hope & Change".

The only semi-left-wing ideas I see coming from US contemporaries "progressives",
is that they're pro-green, because that at least will help people have the resources to go left in the future.

The right stands for a ruling merchant class and a gatekeeping judicial class.
The judicial class has noble ideas for itself as a ruling class,
but they need campaign money in order to be elected as a ruler,
which the merchant class has in spades, but want their favorable laws for them to be implemented in return.
And thus the merchant class becomes the ruling class and the judicial class their gatekeepers.
That's what the right-wing stands for, unless they're even more regressive
and long for a kings and priests to rule over them.

Centrists, social democratic wing like FDR, try to curb the power of the merchant class,
but a true left wing will replace it with a ruling engineering class and gatekeeping scholar class that will
replace liberal democracy with a people's democracy that can focus on creating a classless society,
because only a people's democracy can tackle the issue of campaign fraud,
which is systemic in a liberal democracy.
And this systemic problem becomes larger and larger the more a society automates
as it causes the power of merchants to be more and more concentrated.

The US democratic party is only slowly returning to become a social democratic party
with Zohran Mamdami firmly in the democratic socialist side.

But looking from the outside, the US is like the Star Control II Ur-Quan alien race, where the US democratic party plays the role of the Kzer-za that wants the rest of the world/galaxy enslaved and the US republican party playing the role of the bloodthirsty Kohr-Ah that wants the rest of the world dead. The only thing missing in the US is a civil war between the two.

Let's be honest, no government is trusted and truthful.

Some are obviously worse than others, but to trust any of them blindly is stupid.

You got it backwards, the US has been hell to the rest of the world for decades (and to their own indigenous population much longer than that). Modern Russia only exists because the US sabotaged and illegally destroyed the USSR, even though the people living in it voted for it to remain. Then they got Yeltsin elected by blasting propaganda and misinformation, and after their legislature didn't want him to unilaterally destroy the country, he sent fucking tanks to it. All of this happened because of US meddling, that's the "democracy" and "freedom" they brought to Russia and elsewhere.

with a functional democratic governance

I swear none of you guys have actually lived in China haha.

The Chinese political system is nepotism first, plutocracy second. Just like the US. The only difference is they're much more sane in public. The benefits of a shame based society.

If anyone can beat 7 years in Kunming, let me know how I'm wrong.

With all due respect, and apologies for not reading the book first (I will get to it when I have time). Have you just read the theory, or have you lived the implementation?

Because unfortunately, they can be different in practice. In my experience of the discussions I've had with my Chinese friends, and the amount of gossip I've heard about local political dynasties and KTV prostitutes, I think the ideal and the reality is very different. Something you could also say about the US.

We have comrades within China who lived there most or all of their life, yes.

The Anna's archive link on that page is dead unfortunately, I'll try to find it but do you have one handy?

Memes aside, you know it's all propaganda though right?

Even if you want to gloss it up as the "the revolution protecting itself" the PRC isn't going to go out and admit "there's flaws in our system", much less "our government is run by a bunch of horny greedy assholes just like everywhere else".

--edit--

Though I agree the damage those assholes can do is limited by the system much more than the US which is a failed state.

And I am unfortunately in contact with real Americans who won't shut up about the glorious Trump regime too....

China isn't perfect, none of us pretend it is. I hear and partake in the gossip too, the stories about connections and KTV backrooms (and more you've probably yet to even hear of). But here's the thing I've seen firsthand, especially when I visit family in the countryside: the villages that had dirt roads and no running water when I was a kid now have high-speed rail stops, 5G, and clinics that actually stock medicine.

And yeah, people complain, gossip, spread rumours. Of course they do, we're human too. But the trust isn't blind. It's earned. When a pilot program for rural healthcare or poverty alleviation works in one county, they scale it to the province. When something fails, they tweak it or scrap it. You see it in the towns that went from abject poverty to being connected, electrified, and lifted up in a single generation.

Even the sources you'd expect to be critical can't ignore it. Harvard's Ash Center ran the longest independent survey of Chinese public opinion, interviewing over 32,000 people between 2003 and 2016. They found satisfaction with the central government at 95.5% in the final wave. Edelman's 2022 Trust Barometer put China at 91% trust in government, the US at 39%. These aren't state media. They're Western institutions. They see the same trend we feel on the ground.

That's possible because of how our democratic system actually works. Democracy isn't just about voting for different parties or the spectacle of elections. It's about whether people are heard and whether their lives get better. If you think Chinese people aren't being heard, or that the feedback doesn't translate into action, you're plainly wrong. The proof isn't in the theory. It's in the roads, the rails, and the fact that trust stays high even when the gossip is rampant (who doesn't love a bit of gossip).

Thank you for that. I really appreciate this post and it resonates with me. I wouldn't have stayed there for so long if I didn't love it too. But I can't deal with the rhetoric on .ml that acts like it's a utopia with no justified dissent.

There is absolutely a functioning democracy, but it isn't immune to nepotism or greed, just like everywhere else. It's also capable of manufacturing suffering.

The two people who remain in my thoughts the most from my time there were the 80 year old couple who worked as parking attendants in my building so they could stay in a single room partition in the garage with a kerosene heater. This was in 2011, in the center of Kunming. Not one of the rural villages in the mountains. They could have been provided for but they weren't. It's not a utopia, but it is a great country full of wonderful people.

What benefit does trust bring?

Doesn't a democracy function better under scrutiny? Acting like China is a paradise because it's better than the US is like pretending the Greek economy in 2007 was rock solid because it was better than Zimbabwe's.

Nobody here thinks the US is anything other than a shithole (I hope). But glazing the Chinese government like this is just giving them room to be worse, not better.

You do realize you're using anecdotes to dismiss China, but don't tolerate anecdotes that counter that? It's almost like you already made up your mind.

Go and read sources, check how most Chinese people consider their government democratic according to western NGOs (so you can't blame the government for bias/meddling), same as with Vietnam, and how low western liberal democracies score in the same reports. Check statistics of the insane material harm that Japan and western regimes did to these countries, and how they still recovered, how China lifted 800 million out of poverty, how their lives keep getting better day after day while most people in our countries infrastructure is crumbling down. Or how most Chinese people own their homes, while most of us can only hope to own a house if we come from wealth or got enough support and luck to end with a very well paid job (and a mortgage that we'll pay for years to come).

Can you make your trolling more funny at least?

That couple in Kunming. No amount of progress erases that. They deserved better.

But, so much has changed since then. Even just since 2021. Housing market cooling down, 996 ruled illegal by the Supreme People's Court, new protections for delivery riders rolling out in Zhejiang, Guangdong. And the corruption crackdowns, "Tigers and flies" clearly wasn't just propaganda.

On .ml people seem tired of the constant negative spin on China, so they swing hard the other way. Sometimes too hard (though I've yet to see it too many times). And, even folks here can still slip into old "China bad" habits (seen a lot of this recently). Like saying China does nothing for the Global South when you've got the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, Gwadar Port, vaccine donations, debt relief and much more showing how patently false that is.

I'll just say it plain. I think China's model, the way we do democracy, foreign policy, the whole political economy, is the best working option we've got right now. Not because it's perfect, but because it actually moves the needle for hundreds of millions. It's not even playing the same game as the Euro-Amerikan hegemony that's been exporting crisis forever. Why throw out the good, or spend all day demonizing it, when so much worse is happening way closer to home for most people on here. Stick in their eye vs a speck in mine, yknow?

Edit: a graph just to show how much things have changed

using anecdotes

I lived in China mate.

It felt like living anywhere else. I saw poverty daily but I lived a good life with other middle class people. People love their families, pray for more money and love a good drink. They praise the government when a new train station is built, but everyone in my district wasn't happy because we were below the river that the government had arbitrarily decided divided which buildings were given permits to be built with heating and which weren't, so we froze in winter.

I loved my electric scooter, I nearly died every day on the roads. The best meals I ever had were at the Buddhist temple where everything was vegetarian. You paid if you could so those who couldn't could have a free meal.

I've also never seen so many elderly people forced to work to avoid hunger and homelessness. From the bicycle parking attendants to the elderly couple who lived in a partition in my buildings garage.

Every country has lifted people out of poverty over the last 100 years. Do you really think Chinese people don't pay for their houses?

Don't confuse my criticism of China with an endorsement of America or capitalism. Just a counterbalance to the delusion I see in these threads.

Fair. Thanks mate I know it took thought to write that. I'll digest if for a while.

@orc_princess what trolling? Im agreeing w you I thought at least and you with me lol

Must be psyop to try to convince everyone liberals are right wing.

Easier to imagine conspiracies everywhere than to accept the political consequences of supporting enslavement and genocide

Yeah, who even put that guy in charge??

As if Trump supporters are the only ones this meme applies to. Western liberals are just as bad in that regard

I always get so much second hand embarrassment from clueless liberals trying to condescendingly explain their poor understanding of politics to vastly more knowledgeable people. It's like watching a primary school student lecturing their teacher that all cats are female and all dogs are male.