• freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      The USA is less than 5% of the world’s population but has 24% of the world’s prisoners. Who is authoritarian?

      Prisoners in the USA produce over $11Bn worth of goods for for-profit corporations unde slave labor. Who has slave labor?

      The USA has camps that concentrate native Americans and South Americans into very small space where they die diseases of poverty and neglect. Who has concentration camps?

      The US Congress, upon revelations that the US military was spying on every single American citizen by recording every single phone conversation, text message, and all internet traffic, granted retroactive immunity to all the companies that helped the military do this. Who has an unfettered domestic spying apparatus?

      The USA produces almost nothing, yet, the per-capita carbon footprint of America is vastly larger than the per-capita carbon footprint of China. Who spews more carbon shamelessly?

      The purchasing power of the average Chinese person is higher than the purchasing power of the average American. In 70 years, China lifted 800 million people out of poverty. In those same 70 years, the US has gotten worse on life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality. Who exploits their people more?

      The USA sterilized black and brown women well into the 1970s under eugenics programs that they started well before the Third Reich.

      Everything you think you know about China has come from a wide array of news sources, all of which publish that exact same political line, and all the opposing viewpoints are crushed before they even make it to the editors. Forbes magazine is part of a media empire built by the fortune of the Forbes who built a financial empire funded by the Forbes who built a railroad empire funded by the Forbes that made his fortune selling opium to China when the British literally forced the Chinese to reverse their laws banning opium at gunpoint. Who controls their media?

      Your perspective is so thoroughly saturated with centuries of propaganda that you can’t even imagine the idea that it’s wrong. You literally don’t even know what would constitute evidence that you are wrong.

        • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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          10 months ago

          Seriously? Are that uninformed? Literally everything I said is well documented as massively larger on the USA side than on the China side. The USA has always had the largest prison population on the planet per capita, even during the height of the GULAG system in the USSR. There really is no way China is worse. Do some basic research.

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              10 months ago

              What are you talking about no one legally works for 10 cents? The USA prison population produces $11Billion in goods for for-profit companies under slave labor rules, guaranteed legal and constitutional by the very amendment that abolished private slavery. Privately operated prisons in the US use the world’s largest per-capita prison population as slave laborers. Any miniscule compensation the slaves earn they are required to spend buying services from the prison operators, who legally price gouge them on everything. Prisons charge prisoners between $100/day and $350/day to live in prison, which becomes legally binding debt after prisoners are released and failure to pay it back means jail time. The parole system is even larger, with even more people living under constant surveillance and their only responsibility is to get a job to pay back the prisons that held them there.

              In nearly every meaningful way the USA is more violent, more callous, more oppressive, more deadly, more negligent, more destructive, and more controlling than China.

            • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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              10 months ago

              What are you talking about no one legally works for 10 cents? The USA prison population produces $11Billion in goods for for-profit companies under slave labor rules, guaranteed legal and constitutional by the very amendment that abolished private slavery. Privately operated prisons in the US use the world’s largest per-capita prison population as slave laborers. Any miniscule compensation the slaves earn they are required to spend buying services from the prison operators, who legally price gouge them on everything. Prisons charge prisoners between $100/day and $350/day to live in prison, which becomes legally binding debt after prisoners are released and failure to pay it back means jail time. The parole system is even larger, with even more people living under constant surveillance and their only responsibility is to get a job to pay back the prisons that held them there.

              In nearly every meaningful way the USA is more violent, more callous, more oppressive, more deadly, more negligent, more destructive, and more controlling than China.

        • macabrett[they/them]@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          Correct, from the information given in the post above, it seems like America is doing it all on a much larger scale.

        • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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          10 months ago

          Seriously? Are that uninformed? Literally everything I said is well documented as massively larger on the USA side than on the China side. The USA has always had the largest prison population on the planet per capita, even during the height of the GULAG system in the USSR. There really is no way China is worse. Do some basic research.

      • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        This is really just common knowledge at this point.

        E: looks like the CCP has even infiltrated the mods of this community.

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          11 months ago

          Its actually all sourced from one single guy who has stated it is his mission from God to bring down China.

          It’s common knowledge because propaganda is incredibly effective.

          • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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            10 months ago

            one single guy who has stated it is his mission from God to bring down China.

            LOL what? Which guy is that?

            propaganda is incredibly effective

            That much becomes more clear to me every day. I didn’t realize there were CCP trolls in Lemmy already.

            • macabrett[they/them]@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              Adrian Zenz is the guy. You really should start looking into the sources for more articles you read about China (assuming you read past the headline in the first place). They pretty much all go back to him.

              I’m sorry you think I’m a “CCP troll”. I’m not. But I don’t think I’ll convince you, so have a good day.

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                10 months ago

                You really should start looking into the sources for more articles you read about China

                I do. I think it’s about time you gave it a try.

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                  10 months ago

                  Right on, I did it and I found a lot of things leading back to Adrian Zenz. I’m glad we’re on the same page now.

                  • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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                    10 months ago

                    Just like that, hey? Good thing you invested as much time into that as you did coming to troll the readers of this thread.

        • Jack.@lemmy.mlM
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          10 months ago

          I get paid 100000000 Xi bucks every time I remove a post. Obviously Lemmy is the most important social media platform in the world that China needs to control at all costs. The communists have even banned brainrot racism on this subreddit.

    • guitars are real@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      For the record, though, any nation-state that got big did all of that. That is literally what industrialization has more or less always looked like. The US used to run sweatshops and disappear/murder activists of any kind, especially the ones who pushed back against the pennies-an-hour sweatshops. It wasn’t until the 20th century that US courts even started reading the First Amendment to mean the government had an obligation to not fuck you up just for your political beliefs (see this title since that’s a larger historical argument than can fit on Lemmy).

      You don’t get social freedom and rights in an industrial society until it hits a very high point of development. This has been true of more or less anywhere.

      While we could argue China should have looked for a better way to develop, the United States also helped create an international system in the middle of the 20th century where the only real option was to aggressively industrialize in an even worse way than the US did, or just be subject to outright neocolonialism (and then develop your industry also in a bad way, also likely without rights, and then not have a rounded enough economy to do anything other than be exploited by richer countries), and then, when China decided to just take a heavy state-led path that employed capitalism and tools of standard industrial nation-building to set themselves up as a powerful capitalist nation-state, like they were “supposed” to, Western countries, the US in particular, bought in hard and financed everything they’re now recoiling against.

      China’s great sin, in this context (and while I’m being slightly sarcastic there, sure, the way they’re industrializing/running shit is bad), was choosing to use their enormous land-mass, resource base, and population to not just be on the very bottom. If America/the West had wanted to see the world industrialize better and more humanely, they should have tried at literally any point to help the world industrialize better and more humanely. At this point, it’s a little absurd for Westerners to complain a situation they created and financed extensively for decades.

        • guitars are real@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          I don’t know that I justified it, just pointed out a basic historical truth about industrialization. With a shred of historical context it’s trivial to turn the conversation from “ew China evil” to “is it possible to industrialize without this shit?” which is a question anybody should have been asking from the very beginning.

          At the end of the day, lambasting China for doing all the things industrializing nations have always done, without offering a concretely better, alternative path for industrialization, and simultaneously demanding they achieve a similar level of development as the West without doing anything the West did to get there, is honestly just pointless. The West imposed a competitive market system based on the preposterous violence of industrial production on the rest of the world, and are now going to be collectively hoisted by our own petards over the next few decades.

          If we wanted them to industrialize without shit like ethnic homogenization/genocide/systematic exploitation of labor/everything else, we might have tried blazing a path to economic development that wasn’t based on those things.

    • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      That’s why it costs significantly less to import virtually everything from the opposite side of the planet.

      This is not true. It’s so cheap to get the goods here because Canada and USA subsidizes the freight services from taxpayer money.

    • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      The USA is less than 5% of the world’s population but has 24% of the world’s prisoners. Who is authoritarian?

      Prisoners in the USA produce over $11Bn worth of goods for for-profit corporations unde slave labor. Who has slave labor?

      The USA has camps that concentrate native Americans and South Americans into very small space where they die diseases of poverty and neglect. Who has concentration camps?

      The US Congress, upon revelations that the US military was spying on every single American citizen by recording every single phone conversation, text message, and all internet traffic, granted retroactive immunity to all the companies that helped the military do this. Who has an unfettered domestic spying apparatus?

      The USA produces almost nothing, yet, the per-capita carbon footprint of America is vastly larger than the per-capita carbon footprint of China. Who spews more carbon shamelessly?

      The purchasing power of the average Chinese person is higher than the purchasing power of the average American. In 70 years, China lifted 800 million people out of poverty. In those same 70 years, the US has gotten worse on life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality. Who exploits their people more?

      The USA sterilized black and brown women well into the 1970s under eugenics programs that they started well before the Third Reich.

      Everything you think you know about China has come from a wide array of news sources, all of which publish that exact same political line, and all the opposing viewpoints are crushed before they even make it to the editors. Forbes magazine is part of a media empire built by the fortune of the Forbes who built a financial empire funded by the Forbes who built a railroad empire funded by the Forbes that made his fortune selling opium to China when the British literally forced the Chinese to reverse their laws banning opium at gunpoint. Who controls their media?

      Your perspective is so thoroughly saturated with centuries of propaganda that you can’t even imagine the idea that it’s wrong. You literally don’t even know what would constitute evidence that you are wrong.

    • YeetPics@mander.xyz
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      10 months ago

      No no no, clearly you’re suffering under Western propaganda. In China there is zero crime and everyone gets a golden car on their 15th birthday. It’s true and If you disagree you’re a propaganda chicken. (/s)