“Basically” is a weasel word here. Give me a clearer standard before challenging me to falsify it. My point is merely that a general consensus between major outlets in America, Canada, Britain, Australia, South Korea, and Germany is not “basically everywhere” and in fact I suspect the general trend in media reception of “people whose interests its ideology align with like it, those misaligned dislike it” holds true here as well
GarbageShootAlt2
joined 2 years ago
And yet the examples discussed follow those bounds
Why would the government support one of its own appendages acting for decades against its own interest in public reporting? Can you show me a single case of it seemingly acting against the interest of the government to which it belongs? Because all I see on the front page right now is speculation on what Russia "Could Be Preparing", talking about how China's "Dismal Foreign Minister Reflects Turmoil", one about "Chinese Spy Ships" oh and the Chinese economy "Facing New Difficulties," along with a Russia/DPRK story. idk, it seems to toe the line pretty strictly.
I can give it the most marginal credit in terms of headlines for a few articles down the page
"As Taiwan Election Heats Up Young Voters Flock to Third-Party Candidate "
I'm surprised they aren't more defensive of DPP, but then reading the article I see that the angle is apparently attacking the KMT and taking the new third party, the TPP, as a viable alternative that is still generally following western interests and hilariously promises to promote a "color revolution" in Taiwan along with class third-positionist nonsense about "divisiveness" that liberals always seem to fall for. TPP seems most in line with the "de-risking" line favored by the Biden administration rather than the more extreme "delinking" or the left wing "actual diplomatic engagement".
"Cambodian Ream Naval Base Modernized by China Nears Completion: Defense Ministry "
I'm surprised this isn't framed in a more threatening manner, let's see how it opens:
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Cambodian officials say renovation work on a naval base in the coastal city of Sihanoukville is nearly complete, but U.S. officials have voiced suspicions the facility, being upgraded by China, will be used exclusively by China's military.
Suspicions about China’s intentions for the Ream naval base were raised after satellite imagery showed that a major pier capable of anchoring aircraft carriers had been constructed on the site.
There we are. The rest is slightly softer but continues a tone of fearmongering.
basically everywhere
Always the Same Map
And the person I responded to is arguing they’re all the same because, well, Journalism Bad I guess!
If you only consider corporate media and western state-run and state-sponsored outlets to be purveyors of "Journalism," then let me emphatically say yes, Journalism Bad.
"Actually being state-run is okay when our guys do it"
Before you whine, let me add that RT is a rag, though every now and then it has a good article and sometimes covering things western outlets refuse to is a good thing (like the recent-ish stuff with Seymour Hersh), but to say that VoA isn't notoriously propaganda or that BBC articles aren't mostly rightwing drivel is unhinged neoliberal bullshit.
(BBC does have some good TV programs, but those are fiction and documentaries, the news is awful)
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make by saying that people in China believe to be living in a democracy. So do the people living in liberal democracies, a system you yourself describe as a dictatorship. All that you’re proving is that people can be mistaken. Not which people - if any - actually are.
https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
If you even actually read the title of the article I had linked, you would see that by a survey at the same time most Americans described America as not being democratic.
As an aside, I wasn't using "dictatorship" in the way neoliberals do. In Marxism, it's a term used to describe who the ruling class is, so a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" is a society in which the ruling class is the bourgeoisie. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a society in which the proletariat (people who subsist by selling their labor) are the ruling class.
If you include freedom of assembly, free speech, a free press, free and secret elections and the other commonly valued parts of a western style democracy there’s really no question that China doesn’t even come close to qualifying.
Nonsense, there are plenty of protests in China, hundreds every year. There are also free, secret elections, it just follows a different structure from the style the US uses. Can you produce any credible evidence for people being punished for voting a certain way, or their vote being published in some inappropriate manner? Or do you have vibes and RFA editorials?
Free Press in the west is overwhelmingly the freedom of the rich to control the media and thereby what is published. These people also own the politicians, so to say this isn't government censorship is silly pedantry.
The people in power in the West love the power the PRC has and do their best eroding the little power people here have to implement similar levels of surveillance and control where they don’t already exist.
Who says shit like that except maybe Trump? Can you identify politicians who do vs ones who demonize the PRC with bullshit charges?
As an aside, the idea of the PRC having more surveillance than the US or UK is comical. They have far better digital privacy protection laws and a lower number of CCTV cameras per capita than either country.
I think you don't realize that when the rich persistently saturate the media with bullshit ideas about countries like the PRC, it's only natural that people with no personal experience with the country typically will just go along with it over time because that's what allows them to parse information and operate in their environment with a lower level of conflict and cognitive dissonance.
Isn't it just so much more comfortable to believe that the western press was credible? Sure, they tended to either mandate or at least platform cheer leading for the invasion of an endless number of countries over false pretenses like WMDs or false flag attacks (second Gulf of Tonkin incident) or other atrocity propaganda, which of course is also championed in Congress. If you ask some reddit-ass user on Lemmy who has the better record for honesty between PRC media and US media, they will tell you without hesitation that it is US media even as they "disavow" the US, but they are still fundamentally operating based on vibes that come from western corporate media and for all their "disavowal", parroting exactly the stories the US State Department says about its enemies both directly and through its mouthpieces in the media.
You're just operating on inherited opinions from western propaganda: https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie seen in America and elsewhere is a genuine dictatorship, where speech is only free so long as it is meaningless and has no reach. In reality, speech is controlled by corporations and billionaires who publish what they want published and censor on their platforms unilaterally. The fact that it's corporations and not the government doing this is a distinction without a difference when these same corporations work with each other and control the government through lobbying, "consultant" positions, 6-figure "speaking fees", etc.
Now now, I asked you first ;)
But I would say that it was mainly the Chinese people who gave me that impression with their consistent and overwhelming approval of their government, and their majority view that it is indeed democratic. I know that any such heterodox claims will be dismissed out of hand, but I'll still give you a shot.
Yes, it did, though vestiges still remain. That's what the French Revolution overwhelmingly was, the bourgeoisie claiming power over the old feudal nobility and the monarchy (as anything but a figurehead). Also the American revolution and many others.
They resemble each other because they are in all cases the "owning class" claiming the seat as the "ruling class", just as the slaveholders of classical antiquity and the patriarchs of pre-historical agrarian/pastoral societies.
It's kind of a tangent, but in explaining the concept of equality, Lenin discusses some of the differences between feudalism and liberal capitalism in a letter here.
There are places such as Thailand and Bhutan where the struggle is still alive between the two modes of production, but those are the very rare exceptions to the global order of liberal capitalism (in various forms) vs whatever you want to call the theocratic capitalism of Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. vs the state socialism of the PRC, Cuba, etc.
Footnotes first:
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It's hilarious to imagine what kind of Marxist retains the magnitude liberal brainworms you display there. Would you like to tell me what sect you identify with? I'm just fascinated to find out, since your line of reasoning is completely against ML ideology. Are you one of Richard Wolff's spawn, maybe?
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I'm sure you feel like a big boy but I'm familiar with the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate, don't worry
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What the hell are you talking about here? The Gilded Age was a ~30 year period in America following the Civil War where the government went full classical liberal on its non-regulation of the economy, which produced all the famous robber barons like JP Morgan, from which we inherit the classic image of such figures, which went on to inform basically every political cartoon ever along with the mascot of Monopoly. It spawned or popularized immensely infamous practices such as "company towns" and "scrip", along with its own genre of literature (see Stephen Crane). It's fine to not be educated on such matters but it's literally the most well-known era in American history other than the Great Depression or a war (back when America's domestic society was even culturally involved in wars).
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N/A
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Whoops, no citation, not even a name. Don't give a shit. CTH moderated itself pretty well, the admins just hated it (and the neoliberal userbase of broader Reddit).
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I never called TD people Nazis. This is an irrelevant tangent, what I was talking about was the nature of reactionary cesspits in general, not Nazis specifically. I don't care what flavor of reactionary someone is, I don't like any of them.
Anyway, most of your post is just listing informal fallacies and I have no interest in entertaining high-school level bullshit when it's tediously rendered, so I'll just pick out a few more parts:
Just to clarify, my point of the laissez-faire comparison is not that using that term makes you a libertarian, but that it was interesting how it corresponded to the very libertarian-like ideology you expressed in your arguments. More on that later.
even if we disregard that this is a big “chrust me” (anecdotal evidence does not lead to meaningful conclusions - bring data or arguments, otherwise you’re just calling your reader gullible/stupid with this sort of anecdote)
It's ridiculous to dismiss cth out of hand as an "anecdote" when it represents years of interaction on the website with what was, for a period of a bit more than a year, the largest extremist community on the website and easily, easily the most active. Treating it as a though it were a single data point equivalent to other extremist subreddits would in fact be warping the information available against what would be a reasonable representation of its magnitude. TD is the only stronger example due to how long it was active unless you want to get into the old Reddit Lore of fatpeoplehate or whatever.
The admins are not your parents. “ADMINS, I CAN’T CONFRONT THE NAZI BY MYSELF” is not support to marginalised groups, it’s to act like a Reddit baby. A kid sees the ant in the kitchen and says “MUM! I SAW AN ANT! KILL IT!”; the adult crushes it.
Also, stop dealing with marginalised groups as if they were “fragile little things, who can’t defend themselves unless big admin patronises them”. That’s perverse incentive - you’re disempowering them. You might have “good intentions” doing so but perhaps you should pave Hell with them.
This -- and how you talked about the Nazi bar issue before -- is a strange case of equivocation that seems almost deliberately obfuscatory. If I could crush the mosquito myself, I would, but because this is a forum and I am merely a normal user, I cannot and the community cannot ban them. The admins are the only people who have that power, so the best course of action (since a poll would be open to manipulation and those fuckers at beehaw wouldn't even blink before doing so) is to have admins use their power with the consent of the governed and for the governed to become ungovernable if the admins act unilaterally against the popular consensus.
In a similar way, patrons running the Nazis out of the bar would be illegal on many levels. The owner is the only one who is legally protected in doing so because it is his property, so he can pick up his bat and say in so many words "Leave or I will consider you a trepasser and beat you to a pulp" where a patron would be easily charged with a crime for making such a threat. Now, could the patrons act illegally and take things in their own hands anyway? Sure, but just like the difference between real futball and a Fifa video game, breaking the law in reality is possible while breaking the rules in a "programmed space" generally isn't. I could hypothetically strike a Nazi with a hammer, cops be damned. I cannot ban a Nazi here if the site does not give me permission, it literally just can't be done.
I fully support arming minority communities in real life. There is no way to smuggle a banhammer to a non-mod.
Also, the idea that supporting minorities is "babying them" is just asinine. Sitting by as they are attacked is not an example of being an ally, and forcing them to fend for themselves in the interest of what may as well be "protecting their honor as warriors" doesn't do shit except consign them to miserable lives of fighting in their own defense no matter how successful they are. That is why, in civil society, the main thing social minorities typically fight for are legal protections that make it so they can avoid those fights or make them easier to win! Black people in general don't seek to repeal the 1968 Civil Rights Act because the concept of a hate crime is "patronizing" to their ability to ... what? Go catch racial aggressors on their own? Fuck off with that "the Democrats are the real racists" shit. The Democrats are indeed real racists, but so are Republicans.
By the way:
perverse incentive
Are you really going to tell me you're not some kind of Hayekian? Between your general lines of reasoning, your sophomoric list of wikipedia fallacies, and turns of phrase like this, you really, really seem to be a libertarian.
I think people find it pointless because you're surely going to dismiss counterexamples as edge cases and remembering all the various horseshit we've seen over the years to compile it and then be told we're cherry-picking is not how anyone wants to spend their free time, so it's much more efficient to work from first principles. I'm sure I couldn't quote some old Soviet news article to you, could I?