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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You sidestep everything else (so, do you retract the assumption of a gotcha?) which is … moving the goalposts fallacy.

    But let’s talk about the new goalposts. I did not set up the “test” in the first place. In the first place was a cheap moralistic finger wagging point about the tired cliché regarding supposed single issue voters refusing to back Harris. My “test” was precisely challenging the cheapness of that moralistic finger wagging.

    So no, I didn’t do anything “in the first place”.

    Any more bad faith one liner comebacks?



  • The moral argument I made is precisely this:

    Have you been doing any Palestine solidarity work or is gaza just a gotcha for you?

    That’s the fact, visible to anyone just a few posts up the thread. Nothing thrown away.

    From this you assumed that I was setting up a different kind of gotcha, where I would instantly dismiss as not enough anything the other party would say. That’s your assumption, not what I said. The fallacy you accuse me of requires your assumption, does not stand on what I wrote alone. That in turn is exactly a strawman fallacy.





  • The link works for me. What can I tell you, I’m literally debating shitty Chinese policies with user “stumu415” on a different sub thread here. Search for the string “IAGS” in the comments under this post. I’m tired trying to convince you I’m not an elephant when you continuously make bad faith assumptions and miscaracterise what I’m saying.

    Edit: if you’re denying the existence of mass incarceration system in the US (aka the carcéral state) you’re denying reality and absolutely giving the US a pass.


  • Things being bad or somewhat bad on the West is irrelevant in a discussion about whatever China is doing. One of the most infuriating things we Canadians say is the phrase “at least we’re not as bad as the US”. Fuck that.

    If mass surveillance is unacceptable in the West, it’s also unacceptable in China. No ifs and buts. That western surveillance is primarily commercial and secondarily political, whereas is China it’s the other way around doesn’t mean any of the two is ok.

    And no, censorship is not the same everywhere, that’s just false. We don’t all hide our history and of course free speech is part of the fight for that.

    That’s I guess my biggest suspicion with China as well, especially when it comes to labour. In China labour issues as seen as something for the state to manage through official unions. And I don’t buy the whole-process democracy thing. It’s too cooptive, too “harmonious”. Not buying.



  • To be clear, I am not denying those accusations against China. The Uighur genocide is recognized by the International Association of Genocide Scholars; one cannot cite the IAGS on Gaza and ignore it on Xinjiang. The mass surveillance is also real, the censorship around the Tienanmen massacre is silly Orwellian, and the strangulation of Hong Kong democracy is lamentable. The atrocious working conditions and the iron disciplining of labour is also all too real (I’ve had multiple discussions with Chinese people who bragged about how there are no strikes in China.)

    I was only trying to be fair and balanced, because as Westerners we are too often giving ourselves a pass: 1) China is a net positive for the green transition due to solar, at a time when the US is going full fossil fascist. And 2) it is a pole of stability internationally, in ways that the trumpist US and Israel-enabling EU have not been.

    Edit: typos and such






  • Le président du Faso s’est prononcé sur l’idéologie politique en cours au Burkina. « Nous ne sommes pas dans une démocratie. Nous sommes bien en révolution progressiste populaire. Il faut que tout le monde comprenne cela », a affirmé Ibrahim Traoré.

    Pour lui, aucun pays ne peut se développer dans la démocratie qui est « l’aboutissement ».

    « On passe forcément par une révolution et nous sommes bel et bien en révolution », a-t-il déclaré, tout en invitant les Burkinabè s’en approprier.

    Selon lui, la question de démocratie ou de libertinage d’action ou d’expression, n’a pas sa place. Elle débouche sur une « société de désordre ».

    « On ne fait pas de révolution dans le désordre, c’est impossible. Et nous allons faire régner l’ordre et la discipline pour que nous puissions progresser. Parce que les réformes sociales, économiques, politiques, idéologiques ont besoin d’ordre et de discipline. Et chacun a son rôle à jouer », a insisté le Chef de l’Etat.

    https://fr.apanews.net/news/nous-ne-sommes-pas-dans-une-democratie-capitaine-traore/

    So, basically what’s he’s saying is that the situation is too volatile for democracy, that they want to do certain reforms that require order. The concept of a provisional transitional dictatorship to stabilize things is not an aberration per se, in the context of a chaotic situation. In theory it could be reasonable.

    So far so good. One can debate his sincerity, can have different assessments of whether he’s right or not. That’s legitimate political debate.

    But the other things he said, equating democracy as such with crimes, that’s extremely alarming. The problem is that he’s making an ideology out of a necessity. He’s not saying “the country is not ready, we need to first stabilize and then democratize”. He’s saying that democracy isn’t even an horizon. And even worse he’s not even qualifying what kind of democracy he’s rejecting, he’s rejecting democracy as such. Really Existing Socialist countries at least maintain that they are higher forms of democracy. He’s done away with the concept altogether.



  • I was talking about the US carceral state, i.e., the inhumane American exception from the global norm that is considered “normal” in the US. The US system is slightly more intelligent than blanketly imprisoning a population. No. First the US marginalizes and impoverishes them, then over-polices them, then finds little justifications to label them criminals, then does the imprisonment. That this is entirely normalized and nuanced and cast as complex in a country that considers itself “a city on the hill” or whatever bullshit, is irrelevant. If China had Hollywood and good copaganda TV shows, they would have also convinced the world that their carceral system is normal.