I think the port (and even just railways) argument is a little poor, imperialists absolutely build big and good ports so they can efficiently extract a country’s resources, and use railways to connect the inland mines and what not to the ports. Basically, both China and the west have built railways in the global south, but the real difference comes from when you look at a map of the railways built: the west has always built railways nearly exclusively from inland at the locations of mining towns and towns located near other valuable resources to heighten the efficiency of their resource extraction but China builds railroads from inland city to inland city and from port to port, making internal economic development easier and easier for the country.

yet another classic. you have displayed president xi as a beloved children’s cartoon character (that just happens to be yellow 🤔 ) what ever shall I do

all good no worries, tone can be very hard to show through text 😅

i see gordon chang taught you well my friend. I’m sure china will collapse for sure this time next year. wait sorry I know you don’t read books you must watch those yt channels that spam a vid every couple of days about china collapsing next month for the last however many years its been since that infinite money glitch was found

I think my comments have been too ambiguous then, I didn’t mean for anything I’ve said to come across as hostile in any way, I apologize. I’m a lemmygrad user, made this account because I browse through .ml at work and been meaning to make one so i can comment while there.

o7 happy to hear that!

All the computational resources the users tested the code base on must’ve been free.

fair enough I just think of direct monetary donations or something when I see financing like that but looking at like that isn’t incorrect

Identity politics from .ml?

I mean kinda? I normally expect people who hold sympathies towards hexbear to use an account on like lemm.ee so they don’t have to use more than one account to browse everything they want to see

I’m well past caring

you are crying about upvotes and downvotes you can’t say this when you’re doing that

Putin fucks male prostitutes.

in awe at this one, why would I care about this

nah sorry the general megathreads are mostly just people randomly commenting about their day and what not, I just meant you can just go in there and ask for someone willing to talk about some topic. Like, just say “I am a visiting liberal and would like to discuss XYZ that I don’t understand” and if someone responds you can go into detail about what you want to discuss. lemmygrad has a communism 101 comm that has heightened civility rules but your instance is defederated from grad.

don’t pretend like you care about that, your fellow chuds might find this comment on accident and you wouldn’t want to make them mad would you?

I had assumed you were a bog standard democrat but I apologize, didn’t realize I was speaking to someone who likes to watch “FEMINIST OWNED AND TRIGGERED!!!” youtube compilations

glad it managed to reach someone! If you want the best nuanced review of Stalin from anyone anywhere, you will have to read Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo (free pdf here!). It is well sourced, and also uses western sources that should be biased against stalin to make its arguments! review on the same site as the tankies article here: https://redsails.org/on-losurdos-stalin/

additionally, some other articles I highly recommend if you want to understand our position better:

https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
https://redsails.org/the-case-for-socialized-ownership/
https://redsails.org/concessions/
https://redsails.org/what-is-dialectics/
https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/

most of these are quite a bit longer, so sorry to flood you with them, but I’m always eager to share these excellent articles with anyone who will consider reading them!

riveting comment. truly, I’ve never read this type of comment before and now I’ve been owned!!!

I will now give the obligatory response: amerikkka is a dying empire and will not be able to stop China and socialism. die mad about it loser.

The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). [5] We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.

this is directly preceding it. Even if I accepted your frankly hilarious black book of communism death tolls, the argument here is that the soviet union and China still greatly improved the lives of the average citizen compared to what came before while facing huge problems that you would crumble upon immediately upon encountering, like imminent war from the west that they predicted and prepared for correctly. As far as your other claim, it’s not nearly so simple as you make it out to be:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/21/why-do-so-many-people-miss-the-soviet-union/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ebrd-transition-survey-idUSKBN1422U2/

edit: also, nia frome is a trans woman

lemmy.ca has both hexbear and lemmygrad defederated yes.

I’m a grad user not a hexbear user but views are pretty much the same, I’ll say here: it matters a ton in the thread and way in which you tried to do this. if you give the slightest hint that you’re asking questions in bad faith, they’re going to pounce on you, because communists online constantly have to deal with bad faith trolls. There are an extremely small number of communists in the west, we are outnumbered basically everywhere online and in real life, so we are naturally protective of the very few places where we hold the majority opinion.

I’m not gonna go looking for your interactions with hexbear to actually see but I’ll answer any questions you have right now. also, you haven’t been banned or had any action taken against you by hexbear mods at all. you could always pose respectful questions in one of their general mega threads, or in ask chapo

got it. for anyone else reading this: why exactly is jumping straight to mental illness as the source of any disagreement not ableist? Does someone who struggles with mental health get no say on literally any topic?

it’s not really making fun of it, more just a tongue in cheek joke about large arguments

i don’t think they really helped with the financing of lemmy, although their coders did/do make many valuable contributions to lemmy’s code base. out of curiosity, do you have an account on another instance? I’m surprised to see a sympathetic comment like this from an account on an instance that has them defederated

do you have an argument that doesn’t rely on ableism?