GarbageShoot

There were a bunch of defederations around that time, but I think blahaj was on their side. Granted, whoever did it it was a mutual feeling.

For what it's worth, HB and Blahaj mostly hate each other, too.

while lemmy.ml rules are mainly the job of the mods??? Congratulations, that's the dumbest thing that I've read today.

Comm rules exist in addition to instance rules. You know, like those where "knowing about anime" etc. might actually carry some importance. Your rush to do an own has left you speaking complete nonsense.

The reason passion is essentially irrelevant to the job is because the only way to earn more money and move up the corporate ladder is to have passion for acquiring the job above yours, not actually have passion FOR the job you are doing, which has been shown through corporate studies like Sears to be ironically detrimental to the operation of the organization as a whole.

The syntax here is ambiguous. Are you saying that passion for climbing is the detriment or passion for one's current job?

Trying to say that unhoused people have it good in New York compared other places in other time periods is reminiscent of slavery apologists acting like slaves had it good because they had housing.

It's even dumber than that. The idea that NY homeless have it better than even literal peasants in past ages is silly, let alone having it better than the landed gentry as that fucker implies. Peasants generally had a stable means of subsistence and weren't as liable to get maimed or killed by state actors for just existing.

I didn't want to jump there immediately, but there's definitely nascent fascism in the messaging when you really analyze it. If we are to say that wealth over time is a measurement of merit, what are old money families? People who just have hereditary superiority? Wouldn't racial disparities in income therefore also be racial disparities in merit? And the same for sex, gender conformity, etc. The hierarchy of income lines up with social oppression (because intersectionality represents the facets of class oppression), so they are basically claiming that the cishet white dudes have some sort of underlying superiority to everyone else (along with Jewish and East Asian people, so you can see why The Bell Curve is so popular among fascists).

I think it's too moralizing to say that someone isn't a good person because they are unkind when they are at the very lowest point of their mental well-being. There's a difference between fairweather kindness, which is fair to hold some disdain for, and "having a breaking point eventually," which I think is generally called "being a human," even for that 1% you mention.

"Shooting an Elephant" is also a cool look at how the imperialist mind reacts to decolonization and the idea of being irrelevant and powerless.

This is overrated by liberals trying to interpret Orwell as not being a reactionary. https://redsails.org/on-orwell/ See also: https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/

I think he has interesting things to say about language, but his social commentary is garbage.

I think it's silly to say that just 1% of people are good, though it is certainly true that the 1% suppress them.

His stance is intellectually flimsy, if it were just that you wouldn't need the least bit of help

Ideology is fundamentally a survival strategy. If he is being well-served by the status quo, you are extremely unlikely to argue him into an ideology that makes him less comfortable with his social position. The only reliable way of changing ideology is if the new ideology represents a better survival strategy to him than his current one.

I was friends for a long time with a guy whose success and grooming in a field [that he mainly got into due to his father's connections] inculcated a lot of libertarian-style ideology in him to the point that he sent me libertarian thinktank videos sincerely. In the end, he decided his explicit contempt for the poor was more important to him than me, despite everything we had done for each other in the past.

So yeah, everything this dude said was false, but it doesn't matter that it's false; It suits him. It's like a religious conviction (pick a religion you don't believe in), if it helps you navigate the world in a way that mitigates effort and stress to some extent, you'll keep believing in it and if it doesn't, you will drift away from it. There are studies debunking some of what he says, but you'd be hard-pressed to get him to engage with them, and ultimately he's more likely to just flip to a different version of libertarianism where the undeserving rich are "cronies" or whatever. Things like that rarely cause a fundamental change, and really only can if they are used as a catalyst for bringing him to an ideology that works better for him as a survival strategy.

And he can simply say "nah, the poor deserve starvation". That's part of the weakness of morality in political argument, and the reason that scientific socialism (Marxism) avoids such appeals.

You have two options for changing his mind and there is nothing in the OP to suggest they will work, but you might know things about him that will help: Either find ways that his ideology is failing to serve him (e.g. people who say things like this usually have self-worth issues) or give him new experiences that his ideology won't be convenient for, such as personally introducing him to hardworking buddies of yours who are poor.

Good luck

Neither of those are the question, the question is:

Is it propagating a negative view of China

And the answer is "yes". Independent of whether the statements are defensible or how I feel about them personally, that is clearly what those sentences are trying to accomplish.