FunkyStuff [he/him]

If you have to go back to the time where agriculture was first being developed to find a jump in quality of life comparable to what Communism brought to China, does that not show that Communism brought about an enormous improvement to the Chinese people? Even if it technically isn’t the most significant improvement in all of history (which is still kind of a fuzzy thing to quantify)?

And how is it relevant that they only improved the quality of life of their own people, beyond just being pedantic about the claim “largest increase of quality of life in human history”? Like, was it necessary for Mao to invade all the neighboring countries and modernize them too so they could qualify? Very strange way to move the goalposts.

• Monster or Liberator? by Carlos Martinez
• How did Mao manage to kill ~78 million people? by Godfree Roberts
• The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
• The Rise of the Chinese People’s Communes by Anna Louise Strong

I see you’re defending your heroes by parsing words and cherry-picking books and news and rallying your arguments (and propaganda) to defend them. I expected nothing less from you; it’s exactly the same thing a Trump supporter would do.

Meanwhile you do something a million times more honorable and simply refuse to confront new information, dismiss it all as propaganda, and say your opponent is equal to a Trump supporter (for what? for having principled stances that he backed up with multiple sources? How often do Trump supporters back up their claims with sources that aren’t PragerU videos or AI generated images?). You’re implying that Dessalines is being intellectually dishonest when he has done nothing incorrect in this conversation: he made a claim to counter your unsourced claim, cited his sources, and when you refused to learn anything at all he’s just calling you out for falling back on Western propaganda. Is any of that wrong?

This kind of post-truth nihilism is completely fruitless. If you dismiss evidence that contradicts your preconceived notions on the basis that evidence against other unrelated facts might also exist, then the only valid beliefs are the ones you already have. You’ve arrived at an epistemological position that rejects all new knowledge and positions all knowledge you already have as infallible.

Why not evaluate the claims and their evidence, instead of starting from the position that any defense of Mao is comparable to defending the Nazi Holocaust? Not to mention, if you did come across a group of Holocaust deniers, is this really the weak response you’d give them? Not even going to produce any evidence in support of your own claims?

Hi, I’m very concerned about violent imperialism. Can you explain how China fits that description?

Well, yeah, but there’s plenty of Jews that have olive skin or darker (especially Mizrahi, Sephardim) so surely they aren’t literally going at whatever agency gives the OK to new settlers?

What stops Palestinian Diaspora from just pretending they’re Jewish so they can go back home?

We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y

If your political program isn’t based on getting the power to stop imperialism, you’re not only complicit, but are stepping on a rake because the methods of imperialism will inevitably come bouncing back to exploit workers in the core.

Why? What’s your wisdom you’d like to share with us socialists outside of the imperialist countries?

looks like i am right and u are wrong, as always