420blazeit69 [he/him]

The quote from the article was:

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities.

You characterized this as:

china admits soldiers gunned down over 300 people

As @robinn2@hexbear.net pointed out, a significant number of Chinese soldiers were also killed (and not killed by gunfire). “Fatalities” includes deaths on both sides, but you (and this is an easy mistake) read this as only referring to civilian deaths.

This sort of precision is important. First, it highlights that this was not simply a one-sided affair; these were not wholly peaceful protesters. Second, the kind of factual slippage you (mistakenly) engaged in is how, over 30 years, an event where 30+ soldiers and 200+ civilians died in a messy confrontation becomes a clear-cut massacre of tens of thousands, where tanks crushed peaceful protesters and [inset whatever other salacious, invented details you’ve heard with the mythological version of the story].

Note that this last point is not mine, but is from the Columbia Journalism Review article.

Yeah, I don’t think a lot of folks really grasp how large and active Hexbear is.

BTW thank you for the civil conversation.

The “it is fair to say that the USSR stance was no different than the stance of the United States during the same time” stance would get a lot of agreement on Hexbear. We’ll go to bat for the many good things the USSR did, but we’re more than happy to criticize it (or China, or Cuba, etc.) where appropriate. One of the most-cited books on Hexbear – Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (big recommend, by the way) – has at least a whole chapter (maybe even a whole section, can’t remember) on criticisms of the USSR.

Super jealous you’ve been to Cuba – hope I can go one day!

You’re right, it wasn’t relevant to you in particular. You got that comment because of the context surrounding this thread. Say you run a book club or game group and lots of people are chronically late, annoying you. One day a new member shows up a little late with a legit excuse but you fire off a snide comment to them in your frustration at the overall situation. They didn’t deserve that, you were a little quick on the trigger, but can you see how the larger context affects what was said?

I also agree that you aren’t brigading. The Hexbear users here came to this thread the same way you did, and they aren’t brigading, either.

I would not enjoy it if a large group of alt-righters suddenly federated with us and became a very vocal presence, even if a large number of their users were often polite, because I am so strongly opposed to those politics.

There is a difference between occasionally annoying people who generally want good things and occasionally annoying people who generally want bad things. One example:

• Alt-right opinions on immigrants in the U.S. range from “let’s immediately deport millions of people and create an even more deadly southern border” to “we should exterminate those [slurs].”
• Hexbear opinions on the same subject range from “we should have an open border, a guaranteed minimum for all U.S. residents, and we should end the imperial meddling that causes so much immigration in the first place” to “yes and the imperial core owes untold sums in reparations to the Global South.”

Maybe you disagree with both, maybe you get annoyed by people talking about both, but one is fundamentally genocidal and the other is fundamentally humanistic.

Your stance on the Russia-Ukraine war is more or less the consensus on Hexbear.

It takes considerable time and effort to re-think beliefs you haven’t interrogated for a while, regardless of how you eventually come out on the. Good on you for taking some steps in that direction.

What is the purpose of forums if not to talk to each other? Activity is a good thing, especially in the infancy of the fediverse.

From many Hexbear threads on the topic of LGBT rights in the Soviet Union (and Warsaw Pact countries), here’s my understanding:

• The pre-Soviet Russian Empire criminalized homosexuality.
• The first Soviet constitution “decriminalized” it in the sense that it wiped away the laws of the old Empire and instituted new ones that did not include criminalizing homosexuality. I don’t personally think (and I think this is the Hexbear consensus) that was an intentional choice; it probably just got left out because it wasn’t a priority in the midst of a revolution, civil war/invasion by a half dozen capitalist powers, and the monumental task of building a modern state (and the first socialist state) out of the ashes of WWI and late-feudal Russia. Note that plenty of legal scholars would disagree on the theory that legislative bodies write laws (or don’t) very deliberately.
• Stalin re-criminalized homosexuality. Zero people on Hexbear support that, and I’m not aware of any existing socialist state that does, either (the CPC line on Stalin, for instance, is “70% good, 30% bad”).
• In the 80s, some Warsaw Pact countries (possibly just East Germany) were on par with or ahead of the West on LGBT rights, policies that came to an end with the dissolution of the USSR.
• Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state likely more corrupt and undemocratic than even the U.S., and I’ve seen no Hexbear user defend it, much less its reprehensible stances on LGBT rights. What you will see, however, is discussion of Russia’s actual intentions (not propaganda like “Putin is a mustache-twirling villain who does bad things for no reason”) and its role as a counterweight to NATO hegemony.

It’s also important to consider the USSR’s stance on LGBT rights in context of the rest of the world – they were still wrong to oppress LGBT people, but no one else was doing much better, which indicates those bad policies were not some unique aspect of socialism. Cuba, for instance, just passed a Family Code that has LGBT protections far ahead of anything the U.S. has at a national scale, and the public support programs of socialist countries (housing, education, labor protections, etc.) are significant benefits for any marginalized community even if not expressly intended as such.

You’re coming into a thread after it has 1000+ comments, which itself is subsequent to a lot of informal discussion. There’s context here.

Part of that context is repeated accusations of Hexbear users brigading. The concept of brigading has its own issues, but to whatever degree it’s a real problem, users from other instances dropping in because a thread pops up in their feed (as you presumably did) is not brigading. Users from many instances have said they aren’t always sure where they are in every thread post-federation, and Hexbear users have said that, too.

It’s how we got MAGA, ISIS, etc. Their ideology accepts summary executions in the street.

What exactly did you mean by this?

“Your parents should have beat you” – classy

The countries who criticize China are a who’s who of human rights abuses, starting with the U.S.

Go on any pro-Ukraine thread and you’ll find tons of bloodthirsty comments calling for the killing of Russian soldiers (you’ll often find variations of horrible stuff like “any Russian who isn’t in open revolt is a fair target,” too).

Do you disagree with this? Have you not seen all the pro-Ukraine threads on reddit and here the last few years?

And when a type of conduct is common but punished selectively, that’s a sign that the ones swinging the hammer don’t care about the conduct so much as they care about harassing the target. It’s like the War on Drugs.

I assume these 37 countries are all China apologists, too?

Asking for evidence is not denial; ignoring evidence is denial.

Everyone knows Nazis who ask for proof of the Holocaust are full of shit because everyone learns about it at a young age. They’re ignoring the evidence everyone is shown and dishonesty asking for more. The allegations of a Chinese genocide in Xinjiang are only a few years old, have been contested by a bunch of Muslim-majority countries, and after investigation the UN declined to label China’s policies as genocidal. Not the same ballpark, not even the same sport.

Comparing Hexbear to ISIS = civil, polite, rational discussion

Posting a dumb emoji at a mean person = vile, reprehensible, beyond the pale

a thread that’s pointing out how weird it is to support LGBT rights on the one hand and support Russia and China on the other

I responded to a comment from a democratic socialist who took issue with support for AES states. LGBT rights were mentioned at the end of the comment as an example, not throughout the comment as its focus. Your initial question to me did not mention LGBT rights, so I didn’t address them.

But let’s address them now. First look at Cuba, which the U.S. demonizes as an authoritarian dictatorship and has waged a low-intensity war against for its entire existence. It recently passed, by nationwide referendum, a Family Code light-years ahead of anything the U.S. has at a national scale (note also that many U.S. states are busy stripping away LGBT rights, and gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. only by the profoundly undemocratic Supreme Court, which is likely to reverse its decision in the near future). The Family Code:

• Legalizes same sex marriage (some had been performed before the enactment of this law, by the way)
• Allows same sex couples to adopt
• Requires parents to be respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents, among other moves away from the view of children as parental property

This is on top of existing policies like guaranteed housing, which is a particularly sharp point of contrast to the epidemic of homelessness among LGBT youth in the U.S. Mind you I’ve used the U.S. – the richest country in the world, one that claims to be a bastion of social progress – as a comparison here, not Cuba’s Latin American peers.

This is already getting long and I’m not as familiar with China, but from what I know China is not nearly as supportive of LGBT rights as Cuba, but also not nearly as hostile to them as the U.S. Same sex marriage is not recognized (although ceremonies do happen), but “couples have been able to sign guardianship agreements offering partners some limited legal benefits, including decisions about medical and personal care, death and funeral, property management, and maintenance of rights and interests.” There’s undoubtedly a lot more work to be done there than in Cuba, but again, the arrow is pointing in the right direction.

How are you defining “authoritarian” such that it does not mean “dystopian hellhole”? If the people who live there are overwhelmingly satisfied with their government, who are we to tell them they have it wrong?

…no?

My takeaway from the above passage is that running a state is not a frictionless process in the best of times, to say nothing of the difficulties of running a state under constant attack by the world’s most powerful countries. You have to address real problems Iike:

how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted

Every single state has some answer to these problems, and every single state uses violence (or the threat of violence) against citizens who do not abide by the law. A state exercising its authority in this way is not de facto authoritarian (a term so loose as to be meaningless, but that’s another conversation).

Another Parenti idea comes to mind: you can compare states to utopia (an impossible standard), to what came before them, or to their peers. Socialists of the kind I replied to (and once was) tend to compare existing socialist states to utopia, and imagine unsuccessful revolutions would have produced a utopia, hence they “support all revolutions except the ones that succeed.”