Amerikkka land of the jailed (But China is defo AuThOrITarIAn!!)

Fun fact: It’s actually possible for two countries to both be authoritarian!

“Authoritarian” is largely a meaningless term. All it really means is one group using force against another group, but it doesn’t say anything about which group is which. In the US Empire, the capitalists use the state to crush the workers, and export genocide and chaos to the global south. In the PRC, the working class uses the state to keep the capitalists in check as they progress and develop along socialist lines. This stark difference in which class is in power is shown with immense popular support in the PRC:

The US killed a million innocent people in Iraq just a few years ago, and is *currently * drone bombing several countries in ME and north africa, and is currently supporting the apartheid state of israel with billions of dollars in military aid.

The PRC has not been in a war since its skirmish with Vietnam in 1979.

The US has a network of > 800 military bases across the globe, and has been involved in regime change in nearly every country.

Which one is authoritarian?

I just gotta pop in and say: thank you, comrades, for absolutely making my morning by dunking on some capitalists’ useful idiots.

I don’t know what it is about this post in particular, but the threadiverse isn’t sending its best

Edit to add: Some of them were so angry that they broke out their alt accounts to downvote some more.

This is your brain on black-and-white thinking

How frequent are alt-downvotes?

Yep, used to be very frequent. They’re easy to spot because they’re either no content accounts, or old accounts, with maybe 1 comment per month. We permaban them as they add nothing of value.

old accounts, with maybe 1 comment per month

Isn’t that just lurking behaviour?

ew a China apologist

Look up the definition of authoritarianism. Bombing other countries is not the defining feature of an authoritarian government.

Lemmy.ml has a ton of communists, communists tend to support socialist countries

Uighurs

Tibet

Supporting Russia in Ukraine

Better answer the survey correctly when you live in a country that has laws like “disagreeing with the government is a crime”

Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread in China, these findings highlight that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. Satisfaction and support must be consistently reinforced. As a result, the data point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.

Understanding CPC Resiliance

The CPC does restrict the speech of capitalists, yes. However, the reason the people support the CPC is because of dramatic improvements in living conditions, not fear of the state.

At some point, you gotta dance with who brung ya. If, after over a century of experimentation, you conclude that every single AES state is as evil as the CIA tells us, there’s not much socialism to support.

You also really need to jam your eyes shut and ignore the enormous improvements in quality of life, even in the face of adverse economic headwinds, in the surviving socialist block. “Ah, but I’m not free to shitpost on the Internet the same way!” is such sad metric for a country’s success

The data from this article is up to 2016. Things have changed quite a bit since the COVID crisis.

The data from the source I provided on perceptions of democracy is from 2024. The Ash Center Study proves that this isn’t a recent thing, the CPC has broad support and successfully maintains it. Here are even more sources on the matter.

You have a hypothesis but no evidence that it actually matters.

I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There’s no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don’t recognize who made this platform and why.

I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that’s good at least.