I will not defend Stalin and I will not defend the CCP. Just because capitalism isn’t good doesn’t mean that we have to glaze imperialist states. Ask Ukraine and the Baltic states how good they had it during the USSR; my point being that pro-USSR sentiments are largely just pro-Russian propaganda.
China is doing some good nowadays, but it still definitely has corruption. There are still billionaires, polluted air, capitalistic factories—which have terrible working conditions and sell cheaply made carcinogenic products, they’re building AI data centres—some of which will boil the water temperature, bans citizens from accessing a lot of websites, etc.
I even decided to join a solidarity website and it mentioned f**cking Kim Jong-Un as a leftist figure ffs 💀. Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is. The site had no mention of actual decent examples like Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King Jr, or even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Edit: did not know that Proudhon was a bigot. My bad; thanks immensely for telling me.
When we see a tankie, we laugh and point, then we move on. There’s no talking them out of it. I grew up in the USSR, they don’t believe my experience. Laugh then ignore.
The problem with the “laugh then ignore” philosophy is that many who are attracted to power do so to abuse that power.
As such, I keep running into moderators of leftist spaces on Lemmy who smack me for calling out abuses of the CCP, USSR, and DPRK. Specifically, lemmy.world/c/latestagecapitalism, lemmy.ml/c/memes, and one other that I can’t remember and can’t find because they deleted all of my comments on their community.
When you have seas of downvotes and bad faith arguments combined with moderators brutally cracking down on dissent, it makes leftists look ridiculous to most. I (and apparently OP) are then frustrated enough to be compelled to spread the word that not every socialist is engaging in good faith. I don’t know if that’s more damaging to socialism than what they do or not, but it’s the truth.
TL;DR: Echo chambers suck.
There’s nothing a woker-than-thou hates more than someone speaking from their own lived experience.
I imagine someone fairly well-off and someone in grinding poverty may have different lived experiences in the same economy.
True, but the lived experience of the well-off person is almost never the experience I’ve seen disregarded. It’s usually trans people, especially trans people assigned female at birth and, more rarely, trans women/ people assigned male at birth who have lived as women for decades, people from former Soviet countries, and people living in abject poverty who’re told their personal experiences are a psyop.
Privilege is relative, below a certain threshold. Everyone thinks they’re worst off. Truth is, they’re coming for all of us, and it’s no use any of us throwing another under the bus, when our turn to be sqashed is inevitable. Best to work together to permanently disable the bus.
This doesn’t really have any relation to what we’re talking about here right now.
It’s the crux of the matter.
It’s nonsensical fluff unrelated to what is being discussed.
I try to point out the errors, block and move on. I usually only succeed after a round or three.