All of a sudden, Europe now cares about international law?
Tatar_Nobility
joined 3 years ago
They've been playing this sectarian card for decades now. They only care about dividing Syria and weakening it regardless of who's in charge.
With boredom comes dedication and commitment. I recommend The Count of Monte Cristo. Long but very captivating.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that socialism is not a defined set of policies that gets to be uniformly applied in a vaccum. The trajectory even has historically varied from one socialist state to another. To attribute the accomplishments of the PRC to "capitalism" is inaccurate. What there is in China is a market economy that is predominated by public ownership and state-owned enterprises, which is nowhere close to capitalism.
You condemn the consequences of the early Maoist policies, and then equally condemn Dengist reforms. What's the point of critiquing for the sake of critiquing, whem there is no constructive effort on your part to properly assess and understand the material and historical circumstances that have led to China's development into what it is now, only being guided by emotions and a confident lack of theory. One recent book on the matter that I recommend is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer.
China has always and will always be imperialist
This is ahistorical and untheoretical thinking on your part. Imperialism is an advanced form of capitalism. An imperialist state is one that has saturated its domestic markets and as a consequence seeks to expand its markets and the reproduction of private capital overseas, by all means possible and most notably by force. China simply does not possess the features of imperialism. Prolewiki has a very informative article that explains the concept.
Until now, you've only indiscriminately sprinkled terms like imperialism and capitalism and fascism without much thought in the process, and so we've reached an impasse.
As to the Xinjiang matter, your views reflect those of the western propaganda machine. I've already mentioned above a FAQ compiled by Dessalines (yes, Lemmy's lead dev) which contains many articles and documents that may at the very least give a different perspective on this matter.
Yeah... I have to keep reminding myself not to get baited by bulshittery. Best thing to do is disengage and especially not reply back on a forum that is owned by google and tracks every activity and search you do. Not having a google account and using a third party client like invidious or newpipe definitely helped.
Why did the Chinese lose so many citizens fighting fascist just to adopt capitalism and produce more billionaires than the US this and last year while also being an obvious oligarchy. Why did all these innocents need to die just for China to become fascist themselves?
Capitalism and socialism are not some clear cut systems or categories that can be merely "adopted." They are modes of production that are dictated by the material and social relations of production in a given space at a given time. For instance, the transition from feudalism to capitalism did not occur neither swiftly, nor neatly nor universally; rather, capitalist bubbles existed at the epitome of feudal rule and did not expand until the favourable material circumstances emerged — abrupt demographic changes in the 14th century, colonialist ventures by private companies in American continent, and so forth. And even after capitalism became the dominant mode of production, feudalist relations of production still existed at the peripheries.
A similar perspective should be adopted in China. The existence of markets is not a core aspsct of capitalism; and regarding billionaires, the PRC prosecutes even more of them, in addition to the tens of thousands of millionaires who emigrate every year.
This is exactly what socialism looks like, a transitional stage that will bring forth a post-capitalist society once the international contradictions (Chinese millionaires) as well as external (US imperialist encroachment) are extinguished. Some policies may succeed, while others may fail and become lessons for future policymaking. But to call this anything close to fascism is treason to the working classes of the Global South.
Now they are openly committing genocide against Muslims.
Just ask yourself a simple yet important question: what does the PRC stand to gain from indiscriminately persecuting its own citizens and making them suffer aimlessly?
You can travel right now to Xinjiang and visit all of its towns and cities freely with total access and ease (as many tourists do every year), and you would see people openly speaking Uyghur, rituals and local events practiced publicly, and mosques operating normally. If you're adamant on believing what some white journalist from NYT or WSJ has to say instead of the locals and residents as well as tourists and independent, on-ground reporters, then this conversation should stop right here.
You can't compare China, who hasn't waged a single war in 50 years, to a genocidal entity like "Israel" that is being constantly aided by the US empire and defended by the western propaganda machine.
And regarding Xinjiang, you may need to look at the facts before throwing terms like "ethnic cleansing."
EDIT: I have to add how despicable and of ill nature it is to shift the conversation away from the issue at hand, i.e. the war crimes of the imperialist machine, and towards discursive topics.
I've seen this talking point thousands of times and when if pushed back against the conversation more often than not devolves into "US is the strongest nation in the world and can do whatever it wants!"
The yt comment section is a can of worms, no one goes there to have a sane intellectual conversation. Only ragebait.
The US doesn't need the Kurds anymore after Assad got deposed. So they were betrayed in favor of the new puppet president.
1
Considering suicide? You might want to read Cioran's “The Trouble with Being Born” before doing so.
(lemmy.ml)
I was browsing Reddit (anonymously) the other day when I stumbled upon a curious post. A suicidal person writing their final words and thanking the people who messaged them. I remember them writing something along the lines of:
I know it will be painful at first for my parents, but on the long run it will be a relief for them since they no longer have to carry the financial burden of a 24 year old failure.
It strikes me how a young individual can hold such grim ideas in their mind. And what's more upsetting is the futility in convincing them otherwise, that their life has just started and they have so much to live for, not to mention the immense pain and suffering they will bring to their circle of people. Of course, I don't know what this person has went through in order to reach such irreversible stage, but I still firmly believe that, for the most part at least, nothing justifies the act of suicide. This conviction stems not from a moralistic point of view, but rather from a very simple and benign concept: that of curiosity.
I remember reading Emil Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born many years ago, not being able to comprehed how the author had such a laissez faire attitude towards life.
The book consists of short aphorisms dealing with the themes of death, suicide, the meaningless of life and so forth. Cioran's writing is very nihilistic. It expresses the many feelings and ideas shared by suicidal individuals; of failing to grasp the meaning of life, or the fear of not living up to expectations, the remorse of existing in the first place. By reading The Trouble with Being Born at face value, one might believe that Cioran was hanging on a thread between continuing his depressing life or ending it all right after his ink dries. Yet, it may surprise the inattentive reader that Cioran died at the old age of 84, having lived a mostly stable life—with the exception of dealing with chronic insomnia, which influenced his writing. Indeed, he even made sure to be as healthy as possible in his later life so as to not accelerate his timely death. So, what gives?
The source of the author's disquietude, as the the title of the book, stems from the problem with being born, precisely that we are not given a choice in our own birth. We are thrown into the world without any clear guide on how to live life. To Cioran, every object from which a person tries to derive some meaning, is a mere distraction, and the only thing which prevails is the inevitability of one's own death. This fact alone is surely to bring anxiety to the intellect, as one tries to cling to some intrinsic meaning and to certain expectations we have of our destiny.
Cioran writes, “I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me.” Expectation and ambition imply that there are successes and failures. Success further invigorates the metaphysical framework of meaning we have built for ourselves. Conversely, failing to achieve our ambitions or to be up to our expectations provokes a critical hit to said framework. What then happens when we are hit with a succession of relentless failures in life, when this facade of meaning shatters completely and we are left with the approaching abyss of death? To many, the logical step at this point would be to simply take one’s own life. But here exactly where the common thread between Cioran and the suicidal nihilist ends.
To Cioran, all of our ambitions are, as already mentioned, mere delusions and distractions to our looming death. Yet, paradoxically, that there is no point to live is more so a reason to persist on living. As much as there is no meaning to life, there is equally no true way to living life. Failure is the purest form of being human:
This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.
In other words, by embracing failure, one becomes liberated from the expectations they or society have set. One lives life as it comes without preconceived expectations or prospects; one lives life as a curious mystery waiting to unfold.
What's the point of commiting suicide when life will eventually end? As Cioran writes, with a sarcastic tone, “it’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” You are already born, it is a fact, so you might as well live your life to its natural end.
To go back to the claim I set at the beginning of this monologue, what prevents one from committing suicide should be curiosity to the many more experiences, interactions and, most possibly, fuck ups that life will bring before them. Not hope for a better future, but a relentless curiosity to what might come next, however inconsequential it may be.
I will end this monologue with one last quote from the book, which hopefully someone in need gets to read; it goes as such:
Astounding, the number of hours I have wasted on ? the “meaning” of what exists, of what happens…. But that “what” has no meaning, as all serious minds know. Hence they devote their time and their energy to more useful undertakings.
view more: next ›
I'm almost done with For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. I've quite enjoyed reading it and was surprised by the complaints of some people online regarding Hemingway's writing style. The book indeed reads like it was literally translated from Spanish, but it was a creative choice given that the plot is set in the Spanish civil war. Hemingway navigated censorship of profanity in a humorous way by replacing slurs like "fuck" and "shit" with "muck," "obscenity" and "unprintable." Also, the protagonist's inner dialogues are insightful.