Perhaps you haven’t heard of the war and only noticed a lot of mentions of Ukraine recently. Actually, that’s because there’s a war there, that’s why people keep bringing up Ukraine or showing their support for Ukraine, alternatively for Russia. The war is about USA imperialism, where the USA wants to do imperialism towards Russia and Russia is stopping them. So that’s how those things are related. Ukraine is the battleground, and the USA is using Ukrainian humans as weapons. It’s a very horrible situation.

Extreme violence is still violence. Industrial violence on a massive scale is still violence. You are advocating for violence, terrible violence, and then getting upset someone else advocated for comparatively mild violence.

Maybe they just want to get rid of them. The west seems to mind Nazis a lot less than losers.

The problem with the RFA source is the CIA funding, not that it’s in English. It’s pretty disingenuous to try to imply Newizu is pro-Putin or anti-imperialist, or anti-west or anything else that would qualify as a separate bias or agenda.

state capitalism with red paint (CCP)

You know so much about them you haven’t even seen their name written out in English once.

The vast majority of (Let’s use Vietnam as an example) is proletariat. So the vast majority of people are dictating terms to a small subset with different class interests. It’s nothing like the dictatorship in, let’s say the Netherlands, where a small group of capitalists dictate terms to the large body of proletariat, and the bourgeois political apparatus mediates in favour of bourgeoisie class interests. There’s no corruption taking place, just the necessities of market economics.

This dictatorship will naturally “dissolve” when there are no more other classes (bourgeoisie et all) to oppress, since it will no longer serve the proletariat’s interests.

Holy shit my opinion is literally earth shattering??

That’s a cute Grievous

So exactly the same then. Sep 11 conspiracy theorists also believe the attack happened. They just don’t attribute it to terrorists but the local government. Which is exactly what June 4th conspiracy theorists believe. And from experience, obnoxious foreigners are usually June 4th conspiracy theorists, because those conspiracy theories are pushed by western propaganda outlets like Radio Free Asia and BBC. They sometimes also believe they drove over people with tanks and shot people in the square. Same with Uighurs. Maybe you just wanted to talk about Uighurs or Xinjiang, but the conspiracy theorists believe Uighurs are being oppressed, and obnoxious foreigners are more likely to be conspiracy theorists. Even if you aren’t a conspiracy theorists, obnoxious foreigners usually are so at a certain point people just stop engaging.

If you’re an obnoxious foreigner who only wants to talk about Hitler in Germany, you’ll get similar responses. Or I know you said stop using USA a comparison, but in this case it’s a very easy and apt one. If you only want to talk about how the WTC attack was an inside job in the USA as a foreigner, you’ll get similar responses. It doesn’t mean they accept your version of events, just that it’s awkward to talk to you about it. Or I guess a similar one but back to Germany. If you’re a yank who wants to commiserate about how fucked the GDR was with someone who lived in the GDR, they’ll give you one half-arsed rebuttal then ask to change topic.

Is the government as accountable as in democracies like the Nordic states or Switzerland?

Bruv everyone in Norway wanted 10 politicians jailed last year. All that came from it was memes about how “I’m sorry I didn’t know corruption was illegal” is a laughable excuse and then it was memory-holed. The only person punished was one of the journalists and they shuffled some things around to reduce transparency. One criminal resigned but she got an emotional distress payout and is still at AP.

You should use your insights to conduct your more scientifically based study. I’m sure the CIA will be happy to fund you if you explain it’ll refute Harvard’s 95% claim.

You wrote “Chinese Taipei is not a place name.” and I hadn’t noticed your name appear multiple times in the comments so I figured someone just genuinely didn’t know Taipei is referring to the city rather than being some random Olympics-only moniker. And then with that second comment I just enjoyed being a pedant. Then when I did notice you had multiple comments I decided I should stop being rude because you weren’t being rude.

There isn’t really anything to disagree on. We (leftists) aren’t oblivious to the fact Taiwan has (not full but significant) practical independence from China, and many of us are not even against them receiving de jure independence as long as they aren’t allowed to host USA-controlled weapons. What I was trying to stress is that Chinese Taipei is a fine descriptor whether you support the PRC or ROC, since it’s the Chinese city of Taipei, or even if you want Taiwan independence, it can still currently represent a team of Chinese people living in Taipei.

The hostility you see in the comments isn’t because people want to deny Taiwanese their agency. Independence is stupid, and reunification under the PRC is absolutely what’s best for the proletariat on Taiwan, and the rest of China, but it shouldn’t happen without their popular support. What we’re against is rocking the boat or god forbid, a war starting. The situation is currently workable for everyone. China gets their forced security guarantee because they legally own the land and the government on Taiwan is mostly left alone. The PRC doesn’t blockade or sanction Taiwan over trade or financial issues. Every time they sanction them it’s because of a direct military transgression and they’ve all been temporary. The PRCs whole strategy for reunification is just outpacing them in quality of life. Despite what western media claims, China is not being provocative. So stories creating the conditions for military conflict scare and anger us.

On the capitals. They’re not equivalent to US-state capitals. They’re supposed to be the centres of political power for the people who live in each autonomous region. While undoubtedly Beijing is the capital, or centre of political power for the whole country, that doesn’t negate the regional governments’ power. You said the biggest city is the capital, right? But the biggest city financially in the USA is New York, and culturally it’s Los Angeles. And in terms of population they’re #1 and #2 too. But the capital of the USA is the centre of political power. China aims for a higher level of autonomy than the USA does, partially because they’re more committed to democracy, but also because the material conditions necessitate it. Beijing just isn’t as good at administrating autonomous regions as they are themselves.

Yes but the USA has a PPP GDP PC of 76400 G–K$ and China has 21500 G–K$. How can you in good faith compare those?

(Life expectancy for Mexico, marginally richer per capita than China is 70. Life expectancy for the Philippines (poorer pc than China) is 69.)

The fact that China is in the same ballpark should be evidence enough that their policies are more people-orientated. The fact that they’re ahead despite the huge disadvantage should be a huge point of shame for the USA, not something to be dismissed with saying the gap is small.

I hope I don’t sound rude but it really sounds like you only consider WaPo trustworthy when it’s convenient for you.

That’s not quite what they’re saying. They’re saying WaPo is also subject to censorship and coercion, so their word holds more weight when it’s a topic where they might be penalised for publishing. If you don’t think there are any Chinese sources that can publish things critical of China, then you can still follow carl_marks_1312’s methodology in part by finding articles from sources with a free press but geopolitically aligned with China.

Sorry, I don’t understand how that makes this any less trustworthy?

To us, Adrian Zenz automatically means you can dismiss the evidence. The person you’re talking to went in with that assumption, and then was lambasting you for not noticing such an obvious and glaring problem with the article. So that’s where the disconnect comes from. Of course without that assumption the comment doesn’t make sense.

Zenz is a garbage person, but more importantly he’s not reliable. He’s verifiably been caught lying several times. The tweet you commented on is out of context. I don’t know what the context is, it probably doesn’t change what’s being said, but without reading the context I can’t know if it’s a justifiable thing to say. Perhaps it was. Perhaps he was explaining Nazi mentality without trying to justify it. It doesn’t matter. Zenz is a bad source because he’s a liar primarily. He uses bad science and statistics, he makes wild inferences, he pretends not to notice mistakes that he must’ve noticed, etc. He only ever cites circular sources. That is to say media reports of his own publishings.

I’m very invested in this and have spent a lot of time looking for photographic evidence. I can’t find any. And it’s a horrible search to be honest, there’s a lot of harrowing photos online. But at this point I’m completely confident in believing the concentration camp story is a hoax.

Ah but Taiwan is a special municipality and has it’s own government. So this is expected actually. China is actually in a weird situation where there is a rebel government that controls a portion of the country, and they claim their capital is Nanjing. But because the regular government controls Nanjing they have a temporarily administrative centre in Taipei, since it’s the only large city under rebel control. So Taipei is just a capital in China, specifically the capital of Taiwan municipality, but isn’t the capital of China. China actually has many capitals. Hohhot, Lhasa, Nanning, Ürümqi, Taipei, Yinchuan and Beijing. (According to the rebels, it’s only Nanjing).

This is kinda besides the point of whether Taipei is a place or not though. You’re right, it didn’t say it’s in China. You need to click on the article for Taiwan or read further down for that. That’s why I mentioned that it has multiple place-names, so you could look those up on a map. They really should’ve mentioned where the city is, I think that’s pretty standard for an encyclopedia article on a city.

Yes, no problem.

Here’s the html file https://wormhole.app/axLbP#d8Ae7EO14jLvN5h-TF1l5A

I also fixed the link.

I actually already knew where you found that photo. But it’s simply mislabelled on Wikipedia. This is where the image is from. https://web.archive.org/web/20180820154817/https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1564669932542581&wfr=spider&for=pc

This is the earliest upload of that image known to me. It’s from a regular prison in Xinjiang where convicted criminals who went through a legal trial are incarcerated. It’s not related to the de-radicalisation program that the western media calls cultural genocide and suspect is happening in concentration camps.

Edit: New link.

But it does? I mean it’s a long article, I’m not going to read the whole thing for something this uncontroversial, but I’ll back up my very factual assertion with evidence from the opening paragraph.

Taipei (/ˌtaɪˈpeɪ/),[4]

This implies Taipei exists, thus backing up my assertion that “Taipei is” and “is”.

officially Taipei City,[I]

Since it’s named Taipei city, this is circumstantial proof that Taipei is a city.

is the capital[a]

Capitals are cities, this backs my assertion that Taipei is a city.

and a special municipality of Taiwan.[7][8]

Taiwan is a location in China, this backs my assertion that Taipei is a city associated with China if you combine it with the rest of the sentence. Technically it could still be somewhere else.

Located in Northern Taiwan,

This means that Taipei is on Taiwan, so now the information presented has changed from being associated with to being inside of.

Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about 25 km (16 mi) southwest of the northern port city of Keelung.

This provides specificity in case there are multiple places named Taiwan, since we now also know it’s close to Keelung which is also in China.

Most of the city rests on the Taipei Basin, an ancient lakebed. The basin is bounded by the relatively narrow valleys of the Keelung and Xindian rivers, which join to form the Tamsui River along the city’s western border.[9]

This doesn’t provide additional information for my purposes, but they reiterate that it’s a city and in proximity to locations in China.