Wouldn’t be where we are right now

We’d be happily contributing to genocide in Gaza not suffering any oil price hikes smh

Go ahead reading your Tsarist fascist as much as you want, you’ll just get called out when you try to cry crocodile tears while doing it.

You could go ahead quoting Wikipedia:

UCLA historian J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn’s methodology that “such documentation is methodologically unacceptable in other fields of history” and that "the work is of limited value to the serious student of the 1930s for it provides no important new information or original analytical framework. Gabor Rittersporn shared Getty’s criticism, saying that “he is inclined to give priority to vague reminiscences and hearsay … [and] inevitably [leads] towards selective bias”, adding that “one might dwell at length on the inaccuracies discernible in Solzhenitsyn’s work”. Vadim Rogovin writes of the eyewitness accounts that Solzhenitsyn had read, saying he “took plenty of license in outlining their contents and interpreting them”. Both Rogovin and Walter Laquer argue that the book belongs to the genre of ‘oral history’.

Gulag Archipelago is a fiction work, though. You want documented information on the Great Terror, you can go to legit works like the Memorial foundation, no need to read fiction written by a fascist

Functional democracy needs those things:

No, nominal western liberal democracy pretends to have that checklist (I could go into details on how there’s none of that in the West). functional democracy means that, regardless of the mechanisms, the results are what people want. In this way, China is a lot more democratic functionally than what we have in the west by all polls of satisfaction with policy.

Turns out that when you have a powerful minority capitalist class with diametrically opposed interests to those of the majority, the majority of policy is passed against our interests!

If China is a democracy, what opposition parties and media not related to government are in there?

“If China is a democracy, why isn’t there the constant threat of a far right party destroying the economy and all social welfare, and why don’t they have tabloids propagating fake news?”

You’ve literally seen the televised collusion of all western media and parties defending the Isntreali genocide in Palestine and denying reality, and you still believe we have independent media and politicians

Everything you consume is propaganda and has an agenda, you just see this as propaganda because it counters the propaganda that’s already internalized and invisible to you

feddit.org I believe

Uygur genocide denial

Get off the CIA propaganda buddy, not helping your “leftism”. We’ve seen a televised genocide in Gaza and what it looks like, calling the Uyghur situation in China a genocide is insulting to Palestinians suffering actual genocide

It’s a useful shorthand, not a slur

I would argue that demeaning shorthand expressions used in a negative connotation against people who have been systematically discriminated, imprisoned or even assassinated, is an appropriate descriptor of a slur. Communism has been seriously repressed, from “milder” forms like McCarthyism in the US purging communists from all public life and condemning them to unemployment, to more direct methods such as literal extermination through forced labor and murder as in my homeland of Spain. All Marxists from Spain were either murdered or had to emigrate to Mexico or the USSR during the 1930s.

Again, you can admire their public transport without supporting the government

Exactly my point, and the reason for my original comment.

According to it, they’ve transitioned from putting uyghur in camps to putting them in prisons

Not really. They’re documenting the existence of prisons in Xinjiang, but there’s absolutely no evidence of mass imprisonment of Uyghurs based on their ethnicity or religion or any other grounds. Prisons exist in all countries, not exclusively in China, and China doesn’t have particularly high rates of imprisonment compared to countries like the US.

Then ignore the etymology and focus on the historical facts, what do you have to say about them?

Which is why I proceeded to explain you the history of repression and discrimination of communists in western societies.

That’s by definition of propaganda, though? The word “propaganda” doesn’t imply “false”, it just implies that it’s propagated with a political goal in mind

So, LFI had political hindsight? After seeing what’s happening with NATO in Palestine and in Iran, how on Earth do you think joining NATO was a good idea? Good job Finland and Sweden becoming Trump’s lapdogs and destroying your welfare state to buy more F-16s.

So you DO understand why I explained you my reasoning for criticising the word “tankie” used as a left-punching slur, and you’re just playing dumb instead of engaging with anything I said.

Why did you respond that to my comment then

Well, you’re making bad faith replies to words used to describe people who are consistently repressed under capitalism, so yes I’m responding to you

Now, if there were precedents of mass imprisonment, law abuse, discrimination, and outright murder of communists, my argument would hold. Oh, wait, the red scare happened, and McCarthyism, and mass executions of communists all over fascist Europe, and…

Or are you seriously pretending that this didn’t happen? You’re talking to a Spaniard, communists were systematically executed under the American-backed Franco regime. As for France, Operation Gladio was literally a plot of assassinations of communists

How on earth is a French politician from LFI a tankie, you’re absolutely ridiculous

The post brings it up in the context of a particular candidate’s opinions on China’s mode of government and civil liberties

A western lib (or bombie)'s propagandized opinion on China’s civil liberties, degree of democracy or mode of government are worthless if this person is not informed. I only focused the conversation on the public transit part because that’s what’s relevant to this community, but if you want to discuss how democratic China is in comparison to Europe, we can discuss the Podemos party in my homeland being destroyed by a state apparatus + private media manufactured plot of lawfare, we could discuss Alexis Tsipras not being allowed to enact the Democratic will of Greek people under threat of the Troika, we could discuss Berlin’s popular referenda of rent control being struck down by the highest court in Germany, or we could discuss Macron using emergency constitutional powers to raise the retirement age in France against the Democratic will of the people.