YuccaMan

I was turning cartwheels in the street when I got a $30,000 life insurance settlement after my father passed. I would do some truly heinous shit just for the opportunity to lay my hands on 250 grand.

Hell, I dunno. This sort of thing got through to me eventually, maybe I'm hoping I can change minds myself.

That's not what he meant and you know it. He's making light of an obvious double standard regarding the standing in which we hold two sources with obvious national biases.

My pleasure. I hope it wasn't too rambling, my worst habit is to say in ten words what can be said with five.

If you'd like to know our reasons for doing that (or anyway, my reasons), they're twofold. First, even with the rise of China and the seeming return of global multipolarity, western countries continue to dominate world affairs, militarily and economically. It's simply a matter of scale; when they act up, it's likely to effect the lives of millions of people around the world, directly or otherwise. Second, most of us are ourselves westerners, and of those I'm betting most of us are from the the US. As citizens of these places, our first responsibility is to point out our own nations' crimes, both because of their widespread influence, and because of our proximity to them.

There's also the matter of communist countries being the subject of a truly absurd amount of western propaganda. We feel the need to push back against certain narratives about the supposed crimes of communist countries because we know many of them to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and at times outright fabricated. Most of us are close students of history, some of us like myself are even academic historians, and it can be frustrating to provide reams of evidence for our claims (or more often, counter-claims) and be met with accusations of whataboutism, rather than earnest engagement. It's why so many of us are quick to assume that the pushback we get is in bad faith, because it quite often is.

But anyway, I'm getting off track. Very few of us, I find, are unwilling to acknowledge the flaws, missteps, and yes, even crimes of actually existing socialist states, when they are well evidenced. For instance, I doubt many of us would defend the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, but we're equally unwilling to accept the Holodomor as an example of deliberate ethnic genocide because the common narratives surrounding it rely on fabricated numbers, misrepresentations of Soviet state policy, and Nazi propaganda, to say nothing of their denial of professional historical consensus.

Yes

For real though. It's hardly difficult to find a bunch of leftists arguing about China lmao

If you payed closer attention you'd notice that we have a range of opinions on China, and we don't all think everything they do is correct. That's what the term critical support means. It's a recognition that even socialist states are imperfect, as the nation state as an institution is fundamentally imperfect and will always and everywhere undermine freedom to some degree. But a state which is undergoing the transition to socialism, particularly one that's putting themselves in a position to undermine US imperial hegemony like China is, is well worth supporting, even as we acknowledge its flaws and contradictions.

What none of us will ever tolerate are accusations of genocide with one discredited religious fanatic as the source, or racist insults being hurled at their head of state, both things I've seen numerous times from users from other instances.

The CPC isn't genociding the Uyghurs Adrian Zenz, and you wouldn't give a crap even if they were. This is nothing but a convenient gotcha for you, you don't know a single Uyghur person. Don't know their names, their struggles, even their language, much less the language of the people you claim are genociding them. Which is why you're an intellectual hostage to the fabrications of a religious whackjob.

Bruh Amtrak sucks because there's extremely low rail density in this country generally and they don't own any of their own tracks, so the (relatively) few trains that they do run are always getting waylaid by freight trains. Also maintenance requirements for rail companies is incredibly lax, which results in poorly maintained tracks, which limits the trains' speeds. All of this is a simple public investment problem.

Really now, you can't come in here with complete ignorance of why a thing is the way it is and say authoritatively that it all sucks, even in countries I'm 100% positive you've never been to. All generalized from a single personal anecdote.

I mean I guess you can, you did just do that, but you really shouldn't. It makes you sound foolish.

And did you at any point ask yourself why they own these things? Why Netflix the corporate entity owns media it did not produce while stiffing the people that did out of just compensation? Or how that information slightly complicates the otherwise simple nature of property and theft?

The only mental gymnast here is you bud. The simple fact is, labor creates value, and Netflix has no part in that. I doubt they even put up any of their own capital in producing these shows.

What's legal is not necessarily what's moral, and there's nothing immoral about freely procuring an infinitely replicable digital product. If anything, it's immoral to enclose upon them and charge rents for them. No better than landlords, the big streaming companies, save for the fact that entertainment isn't vital for living.