Well I can’t speak for others, but I’m on lemmy.ml because the instance says it’s “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”. And in my experience that pretty much checks out, for all the talk I see from others about how it’s a den of authoritarianism and whatnot the actual amount of that I see on the actual instance is minimal. Yeah moderation sucks sometimes, but so it does on most every other instance though. Their approach to defederation seems to be avoiding it, and I don’t have to see any Nazi stuff or shit like that, so I’m good for now. Pick your poison.

The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.

Well if you look a bit closer at the history of the cold war you will find that “the West”, mostly in the form of the CIA, destroyed a lot of nascent communist or even just social democratic governments worldwide through covert means, and sometimes even militarily. In the face of such a threat you are basically forced to become even more authoritarian, if you want your communist government to survive that is. So “the West” instituted a process of selection through political (and military) pressure if you will. Hence why there are no surviving liberal communist states left to discuss.

Anyway, I don’t think there is much of consensus here on lemmy.ml whether these countries are good or bad (or even something more nuanced). What I think often happens is that someone voices “critical support”, as in they say something like “Iran has a right to self-defence” although they don’t agree with everything else Iran does, and someone from another instance comes along to read it and confirmation-biases that into “typical lemmy.ml user, fully supports that theocratic regime”.

I mean just look at the straw man you build in your OP, supposedly I’m supporting the Islamic regime in Iran, and the anti-Islamic regime in China!? Bit of a stretch there mate…