And yet, still zero evidence 🤔

The claim I’m disputing is that people would deny that this is happening, not that they’re insufficiently critical according to your standards. I’m not interested in evaluating that purely subjective claim (a discussion in which the goalposts could easily be shifted all over the place), what I’m interested in is disproving the objectively false claim that lemmy tankies deny this specific story happening.

The fact of the matter is that the person I responded to lied. That’s all I’m saying. And for pointing out that objectively true fact, rather than anyone who disagreed supplying evidence, they just downvoted me, because apparently they think popularity is a substitute for truth.

Posted it myself, just now, just for you.

To be clear, what you’re suggesting is that stories that the Chinese government is actively talking about would be censored on lemmy.ml. Let’s see if that’s true! Can’t wait to find out!

Well, since we have a disagreement about what’s true, then there’s one surefire way to settle it, right? Evidence. If you’re saying that I’m lying and rejecting reality, surely you can point me to evidence that I’m wrong, right? So link me to the comments you saw of people denying this story.

Oh wait, you can’t, because it didn’t happen. Because y’all make shit up about us all the time and never have the receipts, because fundamentally, we believe in basing our beliefs on evidence and you do not.

Nobody’s denying this, there’s plenty of Chinese sources reporting on it.

Funny how even when you actually have a true story to talk about you can’t resist making shit up.

Right, because you’re doing zero analysis of the economic or political structures involved and playing fast and loose with terminology.

There are other monarchies in the world today that do hold political power. That doesn’t mean that they’re governing over a feudal system. The noble system I described is one of the defining characteristics of feudalism.

That’s both not true and also not what I asked. The UK has a king and noble family, does that make it a feudal system?

Does North Korea have the noble class I described? Do you have any evidence that such a class exists?

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Neither of those countries returned to a feudal system. Where are the nobles, with entrenched legal privileges, with titles passed down on a hereditary basis, commanding their own armies? What a ridiculous claim.

Name one time when that’s happened.

“And the Trump administration kept to the pact, reducing U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, even though the Taliban continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership.”

So should the withdrawal have been stopped at that point? Exactly how much longer do you think we should’ve stayed in Afghanistan?

And that criticism was always bullshit. There’s no “right” way to retreat, it was always going to play out the way it did. Journalists criticized it in bad faith, because it generated clicks and because they never actually opposed the war, because again, war is great for clicks. In reality, what happened when the US pulled out was the culmination of 20 years spent doing nothing to stabilize the country and only making the Taliban stronger.

But go ahead then, armchair strategist, and describe to me what specifically could’ve been done differently about the withdrawal that would not have resulted in things playing out the way they did.

Opposing the withdrawal is the same as supporting the war. The withdrawal was one of the only good things Biden did in his whole career and liberals will never forgive him for it. Worse yet, you want to allow Trump to claim credit for it when Biden’s the one who actually saw it through and had to deal with the flak from it.

Liberals will criticize ending a pointless 20 year war and somehow still not realize that they’re jingos.

I didn’t say the relations were good, but they were certainly a lot better 5 years ago.

I’m glad that the US has suddenly started caring about labor rights and the well-being of Muslims, and I’m sure that it’s just pure coincidence that it happens to be aligned with criticizing and fear-mongering it’s largest competitor.

There are plenty of poor countries with worse conditions than China. Major multinational corporations set up shell corporations to run their sweatshops and if they get exposed they say, “We had no idea,” maybe pay a tiny fine, then set up another company to do the exact same thing. Many of these countries are in the US’s sphere of influence, and many have to sign away control of their own domestic policies as a condition for entry into the global marketplace, while their resources, stolen by force by colonizers, remain in foreign hands.

Why isn’t the US concerned about their labor conditions? I’ll tell you why: because one of those cases means giving more money to rich corporations in the form of defense contracts, and the other means restricting the ability of rich corporations to exploit the poor. All the bombs the US is building will do nothing to improve the conditions of anyone living in China, while there are plenty of people who the US could be lifting out of poverty if it cared to.

The sudden decline in relations was not because the whole US just woke up one day and decided to start caring about the conditions of laborers in China, which used to be much worse than today. Don’t feed me that nonsense.

Not a dude, and the US got along much better with China, until around 2019 when the wars in the Middle East were winding down and the US needed a new justification for defense contracts, and when it needed to shift blame for botching COVID. That’s when all of a sudden everyone started hating China for no other reason than the news said to.

The US chose to saber-rattle with China before the war in Ukraine, which destroyed any possibility of this that might have existed. China was never going to agree to diplomatically isolating Russia when it would so obviously be next.

Fair, and people in swing states get inundated with ads as it is. Mostly I’d say it’s more useful for mobilization than persuasion, like if you get a text reminding you when voting day is maybe someone makes it when they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Ideally, volunteers could mean quality over quantity, less automated spam asking for money and instead actual humans responding to concerns and answering questions. Even more ideally, that could be paired with voters’ concerns being elevated and the party actually responding to them. The goal is to improve the quality of the campaign’s voter outreach, in whatever form that outreach takes.

I’m not a fan of Biden myself but I still think it’s worth discussing general electoral strategies.