https://vimeo.com/849363043

We can still make them go away right?

What irritates me with the echo chamber accusation is that it’s impossible to be in a communist echo chamber if you’re an anglophone. Liberal values and tropes are so baked into every aspect of Western society that it’s impossible to interact with English-speaking societies without being constantly bombarded by their horseshit and the harmful effects of it.

Communities like this one are less echo chamber and more like a sound-proofed booth to get some respite from the constant torrent of brain shitfuckery that comes with existing as an anglophone.

Yeah I saw it.

It’s good. And worth watching. But there are so many people on social media saying this is going to be revolutionary for the feminist cause.

You’re right about the corporate puff piece part. And the rehabilitation of Ruth Handler’s image like she was anything other than a cynical capitalist whose creation played a huge part in calcifying the concept of gender roles in generations of children that came after her.

Mattel signed off on the movie. It exists with their permission and approval. They are not going to start or enable a cultural revolution against their own interests, and if they reinvent themselves so that it is in their own interests, they’ll be doing it for profit, not for the liberation of women.

But fuck if anyone will listen to the skeptic’s take. This thread is the first discussion I’ve come across where saying negative things about the movie (not even saying it’s bad, just criticizing) doesn’t result in a dogpiling of misogyny accusations.

The face of feminism in 2023 is a fictional character and it’s copyright belongs to Mattel.

As far as pressure to not rely on the state, where does that pressure come from?

If you’re queer in China you want to live in one of the cities, because the queer culture is there; it’s more tolerant. Far more tolerant than the very conservative culture in most rural areas.

So if you’re born in the countryside or a small town but want to live in a city like Shanghai, you need to find a job in Shanghai and then pay rent for your accomodation in Shanghai - which is expensive. But pursuing a career in the city away from your hometown and family is very much an ‘opt-in’ thing. You’ve got to do it by yourself.

If things go badly for you and you want to fall back on the social safety nets in place for you… those are in your hometown. The government will set you up with cheap housing and find you a job and vocational training if you need it and do an amazing job at getting you off rock bottom and back into a place where you’re mentally, physically and financially capable of looking after yourself again.

But if the reason you left home is because you’re queer and wanted to be in a community where you could be out, you essentially have to get back in the closet when you go home. You have to give up on that city community. That’s a huge deterrent.

Of course it’s important not to generalize the whole of rural China as an equivalent to the US bible belt. It’s a massive, extremely culturally diverse country.

There isn’t really ‘human rights’ so much as ‘human needs’. People need to eat, and a government declaring in its constitution that people have the right to food doesn’t validate that need any more than saying they don’t have the right to food doesn’t mean they don’t need it. That’s a cultural and ideological difference that’s worth pointing out because liberals will say ‘China literally has no human rights’ as a gotcha when it’s really just a technicality.

Another way to put it:

• People have needs. Usually an unfulfilled need means death or unacceptable suffering.

• Liberal democratic governments bestow human rights on individuals to validate people’s needs, prohibiting themselves or anyone else from denying people those needs.

• Democratic Centralism (or at least China specifically) bestows responsibilities on organs of government to ensure people’s needs are met, requiring organs of government to provide for those needs.

So when you talk about someone’s rights, that’s things like the right to farm a certain plot of land, the right to build a house in your ancestral village, the right to demand a refund for a defective product. Meanwhile food, healthcare, shelter, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness are all needs, and when governments declare people have the ‘right’ to their needs, they’re just creating an extra layer of rhetorical complexity that allows them to avoid taking responsibility.

Sorry for such a long tangent to your question; I just really wanted to point out that technicality. But yeah so taking your question to mean the needs of the poor rather than their rights, China has improved tremendously from the poverty alleiviation scheme. Being out as queer is trickier though, because the organ of government responsible for a lot of your needs is your home province, while as a queer person you almost definitely want to be living in the cities. Unless your home province is actually one of the cities, you’re kind of under pressure not to rely on the state for help.

Actually the government response is extremely agile if it wants to be, but it absolutely will not rush social change because you literally can’t. All political power is vested in the National People’s Congress, and the NPC reflects the will of the people. The NPC or any organ of government it delegates power to serves the will of the people and that means it can’t tell the people to change their will. It can only influence through education.

But their response to COVID-19 shows how quick the government can be at responding to emergent situations. In a matter of days they were establishing quarantine rules and regularly refining them as their understanding improved, in a matter of weeks they were producing surgical masks and PPE in such vast quantities that they were exporting some, in a matter of months they had designed quarantine centers that could be built and in service in a few days.

Yes.

LGBTQ+ people tend to try to start lives in the cities, where prevailing attitudes are more progressive, where there’s a LGBTQ community and where there’s better surveilance (which means more safety). You also improve your chances of getting signed off on sex reassignment or gender affirming surgeries if you’re trans living in the cities, because the mental health impact of the social fallout from how your community will receive your change is a far smaller concern or eliminated entirely, and your family is less worried about getting stigmatized by their community (which is something that will affect them whether they support you or not) if nobody actually knows because you live far away and never visit home.

It will happen only very slowly, because China is huge with a vast rural population and the government will not force faster cultural change in a way that leaves people thinking they’re being pushed into accepting ideals they don’t want, no matter how wrong those people may be.

It’s going to happen generationally, via schools and media teaching each successive generation to be more accepting.

But on the bright side what that means is we won’t see massive reactionary surges repealing progressive laws like we’re currently seeing recently over trans rights in Florida or Roe v Wade across the U.S.

When China steps forward on progressive issues they might only be small infrequent steps, but it’s the whole country stepping forward and there will be no stepping back.

It’s frustrating when you compare it to Western standards, but when you consider that most of China are culturally conservative, the progressive movement is doing quite well for itself.

Yeah, this is another thing that liberals struggle to wrap their heads around.

Also it’s not just about building consensus, it’s about arriving at a compromise.

Take a situation where 52% of the country says “Let’s do plan X because it would benefit us in many ways”, and 48% says “if you do X that will harm us, we want to continue current implementation Y”:

Liberal democracies divide the nation over the issue and attach X and Y to parties A and B. Then you vote for A or B, and whoever wins gets to have their way and whoever loses gets a big fat bowl of “too bad, so sad.” The result? A nation divided, compatriots wishing death upon one another, partisan private media dehumanizing ‘the opposition,’ and oftentimes actual harm done to some of your people.

It gets to the point where it isn’t just about getting things your way, but people in your nation take actual pleasure in seeing other groups in their nation denied. This 👏 is 👏 by 👏 design. A brave and noble land of “Fuck you, got mine,” divided and easily ruled.

In whole-process democracy, taking an action that leaves 48% of your people completely disenfranchised (or even harmed) is completely unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to the 48%, it’s unacceptable to the government, and if it’s not also unacceptable to the 52% then you’ve failed to educate them. Instead of exacerbating any decision, a group like the National People’s Congress either tackles the issue directly or forms a committee for it. Instead of going straight to a vote they ask questions like “How is X harmful? Can we make it not harmful?” They’ll either synthesize a new plan Z at best or they’ll not change anything at worse. And then there’s a vote.

Everyone involved knows that genuine effort has been made, consulting with the best expertise the nation has available, to create plan Z. Citizens know that if they’re asked to compromise, whatever they’re asked to give up is giving to their compatriots more than it’s taking from them. If a proposal polls at a 60-40 split that doesn’t mean you push it through, it means you go back and find out how to bring more of that 40 on side. The vote is an official record of consensus; a formality in a successful and functioning government and a constitutional protection in one that has failed and become disunited.

No sentient, compassion-capable mind would choose the immediate line in the sand over the process of consensus. But that’s how fucked Western culture is, that protagonist, antagonist, conflict is seen as a better expression of government for and by the people than thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

ok but what are we not supposed to forget?

AFP: A coup happened in Niger, an African country. What’s your comment?

Mao Ning: We are closely following the development of the situation in Niger, and have noted the statements by the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States on this. China calls on relevant parties in Niger to act in the fundamental interest of the country and its people, solve differences peacefully through dialogue, restore order at an early date, and safeguard the overall peace, stability and development of the nation.

From Ministry of Foreign Affairs Regular Press Conference 2023年7月27日

That’s the most recent published official comment on the matter on the MFA website.

but I feel we ought to engage, just a little.

I agree with pretty much everything you said; I think where we differ is in how engaging just a little should be done.

We each of us has a finite amount of effort to give, and in my view one of the biggest factors in how fruitful that effort will be is who you spend that effort on.

I think that Liberals who have taken it upon themselves to troll, sealion, castigate or enlighten us are one of the worst kinds of people you can spend that effort on. The Liberal mindset has a staggering amount of inherent arrogance, and when that’s paired with a determination to either vex or ‘save’ you, you’re better off sowing seeds on concrete than trying to turn them around. They already decided they were right long ago. And they’re certainly not going to give any credence to a list of sources or an FAQ, if they even bother to look at it.

I don’t disagree that we have a responsibility to educate, rather I think we have an additional responsibility to be discerning about who, when, and how to reach out with that education. It’d be interesting to see how many of us that converted from liberalism were set down that path by arguing with a Marxist compared to how many of us were prompted by questions, doubts and contradictions raised from reflecting on our material conditions.

I’m not sure if I’m being pragmatic or bitter, but I’m of the view that they’re not worth the effort. Liberals that are of the kind of mindset that would be willing to listen and reconsider their convictions won’t be found amingst the types that come into these kinds of places swinging Xinjiang and Ukraine around like a hammer. The kinds of liberals that do that will dig in and be stubborn, and would rather double down and make asses of themselves than admit to any mistake. And more importantly, those kinds of liberals are in the imperial core, where they have no real political agency because they can’t change the system from within and refuse to do it from without. Their opinions don’t matter, there’s no material difference to the work of AES states whether those liberals are class conscious or not. I mean it in the most pragmatic way possible when I say they aren’t worth the effort. Education effort should be spent on people at the periphery, in Africa and South America, where the fronts of this ideological struggle are and where changing someone’s mind could affect how they vote, and the cases they make in support at their local elections.

The ‘dictatorship’ thing is so fucking frustrating. It’s like they’re climbing out of their tent slums and running around their broken, crumbling cities looking for a way to eat and clothe themselves for another day, and then saying that our government are unelected tyrants that don’t give a shit about us. It’s fucking pathetic. The racism happens there, where they assume we lack political agency and are too stupid to see it or do something about it, before it happens anywhere else. It’s so hard to not hate Western Liberals.

🎶 The tankies call us on our bullshit

🎶 So we just block them and ignore

🎶 Their reasons, we don’t really listen

🎶 We just shout ‘Holodomor’

that power and success that the world has helped them develop

Fuck that guy. Nobody helped China. China had to swallow its pride and give up its dignity for decades, becoming The West’s sweatshop removed, at the cost of its own environment and so many of it’s peoples’ happiness, to become the powerhouse it is now.

Everyone that takes a step back and looks at the big picture can see China’s rise wasn’t out of the generousity of others but by patiently manipulating the West’s greed and ego. The only people that refuse to look or refuse to admit it all happen to be white or mentally colonized. go figure.

Yeah that’s why I thought I should ask 👍

Western media has been spinning UFO nonsense hard recently, and it got a lot of traction when a former US intelligence agent said under oath that the US is in possession of alien bodies.

Not adding this link as a source, but more as a sauce: https://twitter.com/PopCrave/status/1684247875276922880

One of the things you often hear liberals accuse ‘tankies’ of is being TERFs and/or transphobic or homophobic… even though communities like this one have a large amount of LGBTQ+ representation. So I put it in there because it’s something that really shows how they don’t actually know us at all and just make up whatever fits their model for a villain.

I made a thing for that too:

https://vimeo.com/849363043