• HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      because they don’t have political freedom. there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”

      And the West definitely, absolutely has that

      • architect@thelemmy.club
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        1 day ago

        To be fair i speak my mind in a disrespectful way daily of the shit stained leader of the usa. They just let me do it.

        • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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          18 hours ago

          Lol try actually advocating against him. They let you speak until the instant they think you might change something and have gotten really good at gauging that.

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 days ago

        i mean yeah, literally, look at how the Iranian regime is allowed to post its anti-US propaganda lego movies on Twitter.

        edit: nvm that was a bad take.

        • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          Look at how many people have been arrested and jailed for saying “From the river to the sea”

        • culprit@lemmy.mlOP
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          2 days ago

          Guess you haven’t been following the news lately.

          Yet just as these creative expressions of national resistance reached peak global influence, YouTube jumped in. The platform suspended the Explosive Media channel under baseless allegations of policy violations, effectively silencing a powerful voice of dissent

          What followed was a transparent smear campaign by Western media outlets, led by the BBC, aimed at discrediting the creators and justifying the censorship. Their goal was clear: to silence any narrative that dared challenge the official US-Israeli framing of the aggression.

        • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          Yeah, how amazing that I can see anti-US propaganda Lego movies whenever I want. That’s what will ignite the revolution that makes our lives better, really some serious dissent that can conceivably lead to real change here.

          Shitposts and memes about dissent to satiate the mases while all the real political discourse by activists with any real chance of accomplishing anything are censored and criminalised. Look at what happens to journalists objectively covering Iran, Israel, ICE, you name it. Look at how the protestors against oil pipelines or police racial violence are treated. So much freedom of speech for those people.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      You know nothing about China’s political system except the white-supremacist tropes you’ve ingested about it.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      p.s.

      Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

      but no again tell me about how the level of political freedom you have differs meaningfully between western societies and China

    • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      FYI the thing about a central guy in charge has always been a myth, even since Stalin’s time:

      What happens with China is essentially you have local committees for things like small towns and villages, where anyone can run for office. Then those many small councils form the pool of candidates for promotion to larger regional and federal committees, forcing would-be bigwigs to work their way up from the bottom. I believe the DPRK uses a similar system.

      I hope this hasn’t come off as hostile, since I know these conversations can get contentious fast. But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors we often get around here, so I figured I’d try and add constructively instead of tear down.

      • mlc894@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Do you have a source for this that isn’t an easily-generatable png? I’m having trouble finding it.

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 days ago

        But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors

        hehe thanks, i try to be.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          The opposite. From here:

          Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

        • m532@lemmy.ml
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          1 day ago

          My system is clearly the best, and its a shithole of corruption and nepotism. Therefore all other systems must be even corrupter and nepotister, otherwise my system wouldn’t be the best Q.E.D.

          • Einskjaldi@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            It’s sad that if I literally see ml I assume the truth is inverted. But even then, you assume too much, it’s good advice to always assume you’re talking to someone smarter than you so you make your argument clear and simple.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              7 hours ago

              Why do you immediately assume communists are the opposite of correct? Not to hyperbolize, but taken to the logical conclusion this is just a belief in fascism.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      china gets shit on because they don’t have political freedom; there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”. it’s just one committee making all the decisions and you can go to jail for disagreeing.

      what if actually it’s more like you need to know what the fuck you’re talking about in order to Be Political (which involves joining the party and by its nature excludes capitalist roaders and compradors attempting to bring back capitalist systems) and then democracy happens within that party

      instead of like a big nameless Committee made up of a hivemind AI like intelligence that just Dictates

      maybe that’d be better than having two bourgeois parties (or dozens of bourgeois parties in Europe/etc) owned by bourgeois interests effectively negating the existence of democracy by ensuring that all “democratic” institutions, by consequence of bourgeois influence over parties, operate at their pleasure

    • jankforlife@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      china gets shit on because they don’t have political freedom; there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”. it’s just one committee making all the decisions and you can go to jail for disagreeing.

      Not even true, common CIA talking point. They don’t disagree with their government because 99% of China’s citizens are extremely happy with their gov, not because they’ll be arrested.