Thank you for all your work.
sane leftists generally simply discount tankie talking points out of hand
how is this sane? tankies might well be wrong, but I don't see how they're obviously wrong. the west does lie about its enemies. a million iraqis died on a lie in our lifetimes. i'm not here to fight a court case, i just find the dismissal baffling.
Thanks for this write-up. Great link to send people.
you don't think it's nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?
it's anti-competitive, which goes against the "no one group is in charge" spirit of the fediverse. Beehaw is a large instance with a lot of sway.
The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.
eh, 12/10 is more informative than 2
I think you can see how many instances an instance has defederated from here, in the "Bl" column https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. scroll down to All Lemmy Instances
beehaw has defederated from 352 other lemmy instances, including two of the largest - lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I would be cautious about settling in there.
the American invasion of Korea killed 20% of the population and leveled 80% of the buildings - over 1.5 million died - and now the nation responsible annually conducts the world's largest military exercises on the north/south border.
also some of the more outrageous stories and defector testimonies about north korea have turned out to be false, like the "all men are required to get haircuts matching kim jong un" story, which turned out to be unsourced claims from radio free asia, and contradicted the equally unsourced bullshit story that men were forbidden to get the kim jong un haircut
Hey there, thanks for asking!
I took an ambien a little while ago so I'm gonna keep it short, but I just wanted to make sure you got a deeper response tonight
China is a complex place with its share of problems, but we also have to acknowledge that we're not getting an honest or unbiased picture in western news media. The same people who manufactured the Iraq WMDs hoax have been controlling China narratives in the west for decades.
In this post I'm gonna focus on Tiananmen because I have bookmarks for it. Hopefully someone else will tackle the Uighur genocide allegations, but in the meantime I can leave you with this page someone sent me with links and info on the Uighur situation in Xinjiang — the short answer is that most of what we hear on Uighurs and Xinjiang is hearsay from sources with demonstrable links to US intelligence agencies, like Radio Free Asia. Anyway, on to Tiananmen.
In short, the Tiananman Square massacre never occurred. Around 200–300 people did die in violent clashes elsewhere in the city (more on that in the next paragraph) but no one died in the square itself. It has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history. Wikileaks published secret diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square. That was in 2011, didn't even make a dent. Numerous western journalists, many of whom were in present at Tiananmen, have acknowledged that no one died in the square itself [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and some have expressed regret for their complicity in the false narrative that took hold. Many (perhaps all) of these journalists are otherwise critics of the Chinese government. Hou Dejian, one of the main Tiananmen protest organizers, who was there all night, has acknowledged that no one died in the square, and numerous other organizers have agreed with him. These people are still critics of the Chinese government. A Spanish film crew was present in the square all night and filmed students peacefully leaving the square at dawn. Hong Kong television aired that footage, but to my knowledge western media never has. I don't imagine this is accidental.
As for the violence elsewhere in the city, it was mutual. Both sides were armed, and both sides suffered fatalities. The fighting actually began two days earlier, when civilians attacked unarmed soldiers. (CW: DEATH, GORE) Multiple soldiers were burned alive and their burnt corpses strung up in nooses. Some soldiers were lynched. Others were beaten (Note: you can't beat someone up if they have a gun). Vehicles were molotov'd with people still in them.. This was the first violence to occur, and it was committed by the civilians against the soldiers. Other civilians intervened in some cases to drag soldiers to safety. Two days later, similar attacks were carried out, setting fire to vehicles with people in them, only this time the soldiers were armed and prepared to fight back.
I'm about to pass out, but I wanted to at least mention western intelligence involvement before I do. Check out this article showing that even in 1989 journalists knew about CIA and NED involvement in the protests. Their involvement shouldn't be a surprise. Color revolutions and regime change are one of the main functions of the CIA. I would argue the Tiananmen incident was an attempted color revolution that failed. Pretty sure I have more sources elaborating on this angle but I want to sleep.
Here's one more article, wasn't sure where to put it: Tiananmen: the massacre that wasn't
was it ridiculous for people to doubt that iraq had wmds?