libs: this man will be the next hitler

also libs: I stand with trump after this appalling act

fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens

Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.

Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

i think it’s a fucking massive leap to characterize hexbear as a “pro-sexual harassment” environment. You can argue that they are overzealous in who they consider nazis sometimes, but multiple hexbears earlier in the thread did call /u/randint a nazi apologist for defending Adrien Zenz, so it’s clear they considered him a fair target. Hexbear users see hog posting as punching upward at privileged bullies and reactionaries they are powerless against in real life. You can dispute that view, you might even consider them delusional or self-indulgent, but I think it’s an enormous leap to conclude that they are generally in favor of sexual harassment of people.

I just saw it, you sent me this link:

https://hexbear.net/post/613387

which contains a screenshot of this comment:

https://lemm.ee/comment/3622601

where /u/randint complains that hexbear admin /u/TomboyShulk dismissed his complaints about three other comments, which he then links to.

The three comments are all from the same 22 day old thread, and his engagement with the thread starts here:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3829077

There are two pieces of context I think ought to be mentioned:

• “post hog” and other “post your dick” variants are a canned /r/ChapoTrapHouse response against any user who seems like an unusually odious or bad faith wrecker or reactionary, like a rebuttal to 4chan’s “tits or gtfo”. It started when a neo-nazi went on CTH to spout race science but was mocked into posting his dick, which defused the guy completely; at the time, the subreddit was getting a lot of people like that, and “post hog” became one of the go-to responses because it was low-effort and it shut them down. It bewildered and frustrated people who were there say awful things or make users feel unsafe.

• /u/randint has been on a crusade against hexbear for fucking weeks. He goes out of his way to stir shit and has explicitly admitted that his aim is to make the site look bad. Increasingly frustrated hexbears pointed out his bad faith engagement in the thread I linked. He goes about it in a bloodless, polite-sounding way, but he’s not there with good intentions. Only at the very end of the thread, deep in the exchange, did anyone give him the canned response, and it made him leave.

Can you give an example?

that’s pretty much only happening in China

Socialism means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules

Not quite! What you’re describing is “social democracy” — capitalism with safety nets, where production is still controlled by owners rather than workers. “Socialism” means worker control of production. If we want to be accurate with our terms, “Nordic socialism” should really be called “Nordic social democracy.”

“Communism” is more of a dream for the future. It refers to a classless, stateless society where everyone has what they need and no one is exploited. “To each according to their need, from each according to their ability.” No nation has seriously attempted this, because if you overthrow your rich capitalist overlords and then immediately dissolve your state, the next day you’ll be bombed and invaded and the rich capitalists will be right back in power. That, and also all successful socialist revolutions have occurred in very poor countries, and their first priority after the revolution is usually to rapidly develop and industrialize, which tends to require a strong central power.

In practice, when a state labels itself “communist” it means they are committed to achieving a communist future, and in the meantime to fending off capitalists while developing their economies, institutions, and cultural norms. The authoritarianism of post-revolutionary communist states is meant to serve those purposes.

Tax them how? With the government they own?

Modern life in wealthy capitalist countries is subsidized by massive wealth extraction from the global south.

deleted by creator

You work for your money. But the people making the big investments don’t.

healthy return

How is it healthy that some rich investor gets to play golf all day because he can afford to buy backhoes and hire people to use them? How is it healthy that he earns more money if he pays them less, or that he alone is in charge of resources that a whole community worked to produce? What is healthy about any of this?

What you are describing is the entire fucking premise of socialism: workers cannot afford the means of production, so production ends up controlled by a handful of wealthy capitalists with perverse incentives and no loyalty to the rest of the human race. An entire tradition of thought is dedicated to how unhealthy that is.

Cool link! Yeah I dig this stuff. It sucks that so often Brutalist buildings seem unloved. It’s a shame to see weeds growing on a beautiful monument like that. And Tallinn tower looks rad, this is the first time I’ve seen it.

Hot take but I also dig creative brutalist buildings like Boston City Hall and the Boston Government Services Building. I just like how permanent it looks, like cold war architects were reminding people to think of the future. But I’m probably in the minority.

It would be cool to spend some of my time gardening and landscaping to make the community look better. Having greenery around me and seeing public spaces that look cared for and lived in always puts me in a better mood. For that matter, we could bring back some of the skilled decorative trades and start embellishing buildings with stone and wood carving, tile work, tapestries, rugs, relief sculptures, and stuff like that. Maybe we could develop some new aesthetics instead of copying ostentatious old buildings. I just like when you can tell someone put attention and time into a building, and it’s not all disposable prefab that will get torn down in twenty years.

Most early Bolshevik policies were more situational than ideological. The main priorities were to repel threats and industrialize as quickly as possible. They expected to be crushed by industrialized capitalist powers unless they reached parity.

Cuba has an extensive democratic process. Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country.

I’ve read through the reproductive rights section of the report but only some of the citations, and I’m still looking for the interviews.

The OHCHR report does cite Zenz in citation #140 a few times, on page 19 and continuing into the footnote on page 20 of the pdf.

Citation #140 is for a statistic that in certain counties 10–20% of the adult “ethnic population” (the report’s words) were detained.

The footnote mentions Zenz’s name twice, but also mentions Xinjiang Police Files, which is Zenz again.

I’m still looking for the 40 interviews. It would be really interesting to hear what they have to say. Speaking before seeing them, I’m not sure I can have full confidence in them when I’m aware of so many instances where western governments and their allies have produced false witness testimony to justify foreign policy, e.g., the Nayirah testimony before the Gulf War, witness accounts of Iraqi WMDs before the Iraq War, fictitious witness accounts of a genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing campaign that obliterated the country, and a large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. This is how consent is manufactured. America is engaged in a trade war with China and hostilities are escalating in the South China Sea, and these activities require consent from legislators and the public. But I’m not going to discount the interviews either — it’s evidence that has to be stacked up with other evidence and then appraised as a whole.

heads up, that’s a different person, not me

The twitter thread (nitter is a twitter mirror) uses the same data Zenz uses. But also, you should consider reading the rest of it. Zenz was not saying he made a mistake or that he should have paid more attention, he was saying that about his critics. He then answered the criticisms with more statistical sleight of hand that he doubled down on.

SUMMARY OF THE STATISTICAL SLEIGHT OF HAND OUTLINED IN THE LINK.

The statistic Zenz gives — that “80% of net IUD insertions in China were in XJ” — is extremely misleading because the percent is not out of 100. Using his math, many provinces have percentages below 0, because we are comparing net values. When you add up net values for all of China, negatives and positives cancel, giving a small denominator.

(Xinjiang insertions - removals) / (China insertions - removals) = a nonsense percentage, potentially negative, potentially dividing by zero

If you add up Xinjiang, Henan and Hebei you get 210%

So it’s not just a simple mistaken wording, the statistic itself was fundamentally nonsense from the start.

To drive the point home: In 2014, per the twitter thread, Xinjiang net insertions were roughly the same as in 2018, but China net insertions were much higher, so Xinjiang’s percent was only 2.5% rather than 80%, even though there was no significant change in Xinjiang.

Which brings me to the next point: There is a time element to the story. Less-developed provinces, where access to reproductive health services is still expanding, will have more net insertions, because there are fewer older people removing old IUDs. But over the years, insertions and removals will balance out, and can even dip negative in aging populations that have had IUD access for a long enough time. An underdeveloped province that is still expanding reproductive health access will have more net insertions than other provinces. It is expected that provinces will have high net insertions early in that timeline.

What’s missing is the actual number of IUDs in Xinjiang, which would be illuminating.