GarbageShootAlt2

I've been writing under the assumption that the accounts that I gave the same name to would be connected (like a proto-federation thing), so don't worry about that. I appreciate the concern, though.

I have criticized China, you can dig around on my Hexbear account if you really like and find that (@GarbageShoot)*, but China isn't nearly as afraid of criticism as the "literally 1984" redditors say, it just has a practical sensitivity over issues of sovereignty that they fail to understand as part of a coherent ideology other than hyper-defensiveness (go figure, Redditors are politically illiterate).

China is a very diverse place with a wide spectrum of ideology -- most of which I disagree with, going by rough estimations based on recent statements from their central committee. Speaking in terms of meaningful factions that have sway above the municipal level, I'd say they are much more diverse than the US in this respect, since the US is characterized more by the harshness of disagreement than the actual extremity of differences in overall policy. If we imagine Chinese politics on a spectrum from "Maoism" to "some hodgepodge of reactionary antiquarianism and desire to be a western vassal again, plus religious zealotry**" where the former is a 1 and the latter is a 10, our friend Xi seems to be at maybe a 4, I'm at about 3. I'm not a full-on ultra but I think there's some right-deviation going on (not as much as in past decades, admittedly). Are you following?

It feels a little unfair to dismiss me as a "tanky," I don't think I called you names, but at least you aren't being too mean beyond that. What do you mean "patriate"? That's something that countries do, as far as I can tell.

*I am completely confident that you won't actually find the remarks I'm talking about, but I think you'll trust me that they are there.

**This last part is mainly among rightist minority groups rather than the Han Chinese rightists, who mainly stick to the first two categories.

Redditors will believe anything that supports "China bad," even silly lies that were debunked decades ago. Here are some different testimonies from student leaders of the protests. You tell me what seems credible.

hmm, I guess it depends on your definition of disparage, but the thing is that even if I was out here in America hawking the most shameless bullshit, China wouldn't do shit when I visited short of question me a bit harder in customs because arresting me for pretty benign actions I took in another country as someone with no affiliation with China would typically be considered kidnapping under international law. Of course, America calls most instances of its enemies arresting its citizens kidnapping, but China rarely arrests Americans (including when tourism to China was higher) or foreign citizens in general.

Reddit geopolitics work a lot better when they stick to vague insinuations and cartoonish hyperbole, because when you drill down and try to set realistic expectations based on the information available, it falls apart completely.

Lots of things happened in the square at that time, as the Chinese government discussed on TV the following days. One thing that did not happen was people dying, though some were struck with batons to force them to disperse after they declined to follow the demand to disperse (most left peacefully).

China is going to put me, an American in America, in jail using a game launcher?

Or, they simply lie and say that there is no genocide going on.

Even state department mouthpieces have walked back the lie of there being a genocide in Xinjiang. Leave it to Redditors to be to the right of the state department.

How is that relevant?

Also as a european, i don’t really care if the Data gets funneled to the USA or China, both equally bad imo.

This is super off-topic but since you have a more reasonable stance on this than I usually see in the wild, I need to ask: Do you truly think the US is no worse than China or are you speaking in terms of impact on your life personally? (the latter would be fair in this context too, just wondering)

That and they’re owned by China, so the chances of your data being funneled out to China is practically 100%

a) Tencent has a minority share b) what the fuck is China going to do with my data? Target ads a little more precisely the one time a year I go on newegg or whatever? Shouldn't you be much more concerned about an entity like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft having that information? And it's not like at least two of those don't have a history of working with the US government and others, i.e. governments that actually impact your life.

I cannot conceive of how someone would find their ad-copy arguments convincing compared to the citations offered throughout the thread by others, myself included. Nonetheless, here's another [PDF], and another but again I want to point out that their arguments are worthless, so the sources are beside the point. Do people really believe again that the US was broadcasting to "combat Soviet disinformation" in the Cold War rather than merely promote its own agenda, including its own disinformation, along with casting doubt on whatever inconvenient things were said by the Soviets, accurate or not? Have we fallen back into such a pathetic level of naivety about US institutions because Trump's garishness made Democrats rally around the flag? Come on. It's literally openly an arm of US diplomacy and publishes "editorials" that are point-for-point the State Department line on any given topic, which makes sense because it's literally part of the State Department!

You’re asking for a very tall order considering that, having listened to US news most morning for the past three years, I can’t recall of a single mainstream US or foreign news outlet that has done that. Not even DW does that from Berlin. I don’t think that’s how the mainstream news operates, tbh.

That's really the point of what people are arguing, that these are interested parties that clearly promote certain agendas pertaining to respective national interests. If you agree, then that's most of the meaningful discussion concluded, imo.

But if you ask, “do they report critical news on the US”?

Then the answer is yes. It’s largely criticizing Gov. Abbott’s move as unethical and dangerous, which is true. I even checked other largely unbiased news sites like NPR and their reporting is on par. (Don’t even try to pretend that NPR is another shill news outlet. Spare me the eye rolling.)

I am unimpressed. You are making the very common mistake of "critical of any individual or group within the US" being the same as "critical of the US". I can point you to a thousand stories of Orange Man Bad (a large portion of which are correct, albeit meaningless, for the record) from CNN or MSNBC, but that is because what they are doing is partisan reporting from within the frame of Republican vs Democrat politics. That the Dem-aligned outlets say the Republicans are bad and the reverse does not mean they are in any meaningful sense criticizing the US. In fact, this can easily result in whitewashing the US, as happened constantly under Trump, whether it was rehabilitating the war criminal Bush or indeed pretending VoA used to be impartial, a huge portion of these attacks rest on a framework that the object of criticism does not represent the agenda of the US and what its systems seek to preserve but is instead a rogue, an infection, or in some other manner foreign to or against those interests.

I honestly find your entire assessment more biased, nit-picky, and exaggerated than the article itself.

It's media criticism, and what I had to say was mostly regarding the overall argumentative arc of the article rather than trying to hit on small details out of context. Is my assessment at all incorrect? Obviously I included a sardonic joke about diplomacy being communist, but besides that.

Also, I'm not a fucking journo! I'm not pretending to be reporting on international news for the pure sake of keeping my audience informed on political developments, I'm just some asshole commenting. I also, unlike that journo, have a significant hostile audience that I am writing in the context of. That guy doesn't give a shit what China thinks of what he is writing. Your comparison is apples to oranges.

It’s the second time you act surprised that they didn’t meet your expectations of an overt propaganda channel.

Did you not see the five or so headlines that made up basically the entire front page? I talked about those first to establish a baseline (there was one neutral one and one on basketball that I left out).

Does it, though? I’m not saying it can’t be subtle, but let’s browse Newsmax or any of the extremist, domestic news outlets for a second and draw a comparison for what it really could be, and then reassess if it really fits the shoe.

This is an anemic argument and you show that you know it. No, it's not stormfront, but that's because it has an extremely different audience and a different set of liabilities than stormfront (and obviously a neoliberal ideology rather than a Nazi one). If you thought the argument you were saying was worth anything, then I can just say "What's your issue with Fox? OANN is way further out there. What's your issue with OANN? Breitbart is way further out there. What's your problem with Breitbart? It's a little edgy but nothing like the unhinged rants at InfoWars. InfoWars? Please, they look like liberals compared to stormfront."

These are different factions with different audiences, different styles, and different ideologies. Being able to point to something more vulgar is no defense, especially because -- as others have stressed in this thread -- that creates a huge, multi-layered bias towards establishment media relaying a centrist, neoliberal message! The place that happens to be America's political center has no particular reason to correspond with what an informed and "impartial" observer would conclude except by cosmic coincidence, because the American center (as with any country's political center) is historically arbitrary and constantly changing! We can't just tacitly assume that the establishment ideologies are what are most reasonable and the fairness of all other things must be measured against that. It's part of this myopia that I explained at the top of this comment about how people are so stuck in partisan shitflinging and those sorts of issues that they have no idea of what "impartial" could even mean! And I say this as someone who thinks there is no such thing as "unbiased," that there are stronger framings for what is theoretically a pillar of your ideology, which I oppose, than what you have put forward.

You cannot escape your own perspective, your own circumstances and interests, but you can do a better job than you currently are of stepping outside of the bubble of Mainstream American Political Discourse and investigating what people from other countries not aligned with the US say, or even a more serious investigation of what fringes within America say.

Oh, and out of pure spite, I will inform you that NPR is a zionist rag that does nearly whatever the Democrats want. It's laughable to call it unbiased, even if we pretend such a thing is real. They are partisan hacks and apologists for the neoliberal project with a progressive veneer faintly glossed overtop.