If you’re Han, the ethnic unity law is fine. But if you aren’t, things get a little murky.

I assume you’re speaking from experience? Or maybe you’ve read some sociology research I haven’t seen. I’m sure you’re not just reading sinophobic “journalism” and regurgitating their talking points without verifying them first.

And how many genocides have happened in China since those countries you mentioned have been around? It isn’t zero.

The Han had one against the indigenous on the island of Taiwan, and one against Shaanxi. The Manchu had one against the Mongols. There were other smaller extermination campaigns by various ethnicities against other ethnicities over the last 600 years. But it’s important to understand that these are within the basin, making them effectively equivalent to intra-european ethnic conflict, of which there were about 8 major ethnic cleansing campaigns. So about on par with China.

Where things diverge is that while those intra-european campaigns were going on, the European blue ocean powers were also commiting genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonial atrocities against the rest of world in addition.

Every major civilizational basin saw intense ethnic conflict within their borders: China, Europe, Persia, the multiple hubs of Africa (e.g. the Sahel, the Nile valley, the Southern plateaus), and the various hubs in “the Americas”. They all produced ethnic violence within their civilization. Only the Europeans, by dint of their advancements in sailing primarily, brought that ethnic cleansing mentality to every continent on the planet and dominated 80% of the world’s population.

It’s not that the Europeans are inherently more dastardly or anything. It’s just that they went out and spread their violence before anyone. So when I criticize, for example, that the genocidal Europeans are the only ones with documented opinions on that Wikipedia page, that’s not to say they are inherently more violent than the Chinese, just historically more violent. It’s a problem of reality, not a problem of some mystical aspect of their being.

They officially recognize something like 50+ ethnicities and they do not have a legal concept of race at all.

I particularly love that “Other Interpretations” only includes the opinions of some of the most depraved and violent nations in the world:

• Belgium (Congo)
• Netherlands (massive slave traders)
• Australia (genocidal settler state)
• Canada (genocidal settler state)
• European Parliament (younger than the conflict that put the KMT in Taiwan under the protection of the genocidal Americans, also started life as a coal and steel community)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_2758_(XXVI)

Love it. Virtue ethics vs consequentialism, arguing that virtue ethics is about moral superiority and control

All chip executives look alike

You’re like an F1 car

Sure, but in the USA, we imprison more people per capita than the Soviet GULAG system did at its height. In the present day, only Cuba and El Salvador beat the USA in prison population, but only just barely and only in the last couple of years. China’s prison population is a tiny fraction of the US’s (again per capita).

But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that the USA also has a large parole system and a probation system, and most other countries do not. The probation and parole systems are systems by which the criminal justice system (court, police officers, state actors) surveil, monitor, audit, and direct the lives of citizens. And there are twice as many people on parole/probation in the USA as there are in prison.

Do that math for a second. El Salvador is running torture prisons for the USA and we are deporting people there. And our criminal justice system is managing 300% more of our citizens than El Salvador is.

What definition of authoritarianism allows you to say “I can own a gun and smoke weed” while state authorities manage literally 1200% more people than China does?

It’s non-sensical to me.

I don’t know why you were downvoted; you obviously put effort into articulating a position that you are working through. Maybe it’s because of the community you posted to?

Well, screw the downvoters. Thanks for laying this out. It’s good work. It needs to be discussed. You probably aren’t alone in your formulation.

What I would say is that your formulation has flaws that, if you are open to being wrong, or even just changing your understanding (and therefore your beliefs), then you’re going to find a path towards something that is more accurate

The challenge with developing that accuracy is that we generally experience that development as individuals. Especially in the internet media world, you raising your own consciousness is not a collaborative process for the most part, it’s an individual one. And that’s somewhat fine - mass consciousness raising is the aggregate of many individual consciousness raising. The problem, which I think your articulation points to, is that if you raise your consciousness and develop a more accurate set of beliefs, you become one of the people that previously you were resisting or critiquing. And if that’s true for you, then it’s true for all the very many people who think like you do now. If you raise your consciousness individually, then all the people who think like you now suddenly see you as someone who has it wrong.

So to all the commenters who want to argue against your inaccurate beliefs, we’re missing a an opportunity to do something different here. Whether David’s beliefs become more accurate is far less important than whether people like David en masse develop more accurate beliefs.

So I want to ask you, David. If we can convince that your beliefs are inaccurate, but not try to impose our beliefs on you, 3 questions:

1. how would you go about developing more accurate beliefs?
2. how could you do that in community with others who are like-minded with you?
3. how could we support you and your community in more safely and more effectively exploring these domains and raising your consciousness?

Discussion forums like this have a few modalities for raising individual consciousness: memes, debate, ridicule, and information sharing. Mass consciousness raising happens by virtue of doing these things in public for others to observe happening, or by using information sharing to organize deliberate communities of collaborative consciousness raising (like reading groups).

But if you could get 3 other people who thought the way you do, how would you go about collaborating with them to raise your consciousness together to get more accurate beliefs about the world? What would help you get there? What challenges do you face? What’s in the way?

Because I agree with you - nearly everyone you and I come in contact with are in the same group of people suffering under the same structural system that harms us and we all suffer together and we will all liberate each other together. The main difference is the difference in our understanding of the world and how we all relate to eachother and the world. If we can come together in order to co-produce a more accurate understanding, then we can be a lot more effective even in the face of differences in belief and opinion. We need movement towards more accurate shared beliefs.

You mean the PLA?

Two great insights, thanks for writing this and I am glad you survived this far.

The first great insight is that a lot of the people who join the military do so because of the almost unconditional suite of benefits that, as you point out, would be available to everyone under socialism. That’s such an interesting framing of an often “throw away” comment about the military being socialist. We all understand that we need these things.

The second great insight is that it could/should be a social design that we ensure that people operate the machinery that provides these benefits, placing them in proximity of hardship, both to bear witness to the suffering that we need to alleviate and to bear witness to the effort and contributions required to alleviate that suffering.

That’s a fusion of “from each according to their ability”, “propaganda of the deed”, and literal construction of a social fabric.

I hope you’re able to find peace and a place where your efforts bear fruit for all of us.

Omg, the Korean was absolutely not justified in any fucking way at all. It was an absolute out and out genocide, where half the Koreans were occupied by racist violent American rapists and if you opposed that your own government killed you in mass murdering purges to please their occupying masters, while the other half of the Koreans were bombed back to literally living in caves and then we attempted to starve all of them from the day of the armistice to today.

Facts

They didn’t sell drugs on the street. But they did take over the British cash-cropping system of opium production in Asia and ran large scale trafficking operations.

Congress people want to know what their actual constituents think

Not according to the evidence.

https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

The amount of banning and comment removal Rose has done on that post is comical

What!? And let our military shrink to only 600% the size of the next largest military ?

Oh look, a lemmy.world user who’s never wondered why fascism has only ever emerged from liberalism. Shocker.

You’re so funny. You do realize that for 100 - 150 years after every Euro-liberal revolution the masses of people were destitute while the elite became insanely rich? You think the robber barons were an anomaly? Why do you think the labor movement happened? It wasn’t because people were well taken care of.

Meanwhile in every communist revolution mass poverty alleviation was the primary driver of economic organization, ending centuries of famine cycles, lifting 100s of millions out of abject poverty, and it only took them between 10 and 30 years to establish the industrial and economic base to do it. In the USSR rent was less than 10% of person’s income. In China, a child laborerer on a rice farm in 1949 is today sitting in a car that park itself.

Stalin came from poverty and ethnic minority, became the most powerful man in the USSR and died with almost nothing to his name except some clothes and few pieces of furniture.

Would I prefer a system that governs for the benefit of the masses? Absolutely.

What’s funny is that you are so adamant that having a vote in a liberal democracy matters so much that it’s evil to not have exactly the type of voting system from liberal democracy, and yet that self same voting system is exactly what allowed the oligarchs to maintain and grow their power for 250 years without anyone ever being able to stop them.

Yes, I would gladly abandon this farce of a democracy for something that actually helped the masses instead of the system that protects the opulent minority from the will of the majority (to use the words of American founding father and 5th president James Madison).

Wow. You literally just described voting in liberal democracies founded by land-owning white supremacist men who sought to hoard wealth without the masses having any power to stop them