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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of "ML" (read: Dengist) influence. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme. Please post agitprop here)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Try to use alt text or image descriptions to allow for greater accessibility
(Please take a look at our wiki page for the guidelines on how to actually write alternative text!)
We encourage alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
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0.5.1 Style tip about abbreviations and short forms
When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
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- af = AF
- ok => OK
- lol => LOL
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- bs => BS
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- cia => CIA
- nato => Nato (you don't spell it when talking, right?)
- usa => USA
- prc => PRC
- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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Yes they’re from 3 Lemmy instances, one of them being yours.
It's so crazy that I've never met one then, only people with takes that are nuanced and are based on non-CIA approved sources (although I really think this only applies to Xi, I've never seen a single person supporting Putin)
Seriously though, I think you're pre-emptively blocking out what people are actually arguing just because you perceive it to be russian or chinese or whatever propaganda. Almost everyone I've talked to/seen has had reasonable takes that are based on evidence, and a huge part of that is asking why they believe what they do instead of just screaming "TANKIE" at them
Yeah. I haven't seen a single person actually praise Putin, because he has not achieved a single thing worth of defense and praise in all of the years he's been Russia's leader.
Xi however is a different case. His country is doing very well on many metrics and is threatening to overtake the US hegemony on the world stage. Around the time when China seemed to start catching up to the West, you started reading about how China literally was 1984 irl.
Outfits connected to the same US that is the single biggest reason for everything bad in the middle East and the Islamic world started condemning China for islamophobia. These same US based outfits also condemned China for worker abuses, despite the fact that their country was built on the backs of slaves, and still utilities the labour of millions of undocumented immigrants. That's not to speak about how prisoners are used as cheap workforce in America.
The US and its propaganda arm has spewed so many lies and destabilized so many regions that I simply cannot trust anything they say about any other country -- especially not a well-positioned rival. Why is China the eternal Big Bad? The same atrocities the Chinese are accused for have been committed by many allies to the yanks, with comparatively non-existent backlash and critique. The US lies to accomplish its strategy goals, something that even the blindest US shill can't deny. Is it that unbelievable that they would lie about China?
Then you look at China and see a nation that isn't only threatening the US position as the world leader, but also doing much more in service of its people than all American presidents since Reagan combined. You notice how narratives about "social credit scores" are exaggerated beyond parody without any criticism in Western media, and your trust to the West's judgement of other nations starts to falter.
Why would I believe the US and its rhetoric about China? I know they don't give a single fuck about human rights, they just want to "win". To me, it's more likely that the majority of whatever China is accused of doing is exaggerated or simply untrue.
That's what leads me to "defend" the country. I'm not Chinese, I don't live there and I gain nothing by being positive to them. However, westerners talk about China with such racism that I simply refuse to partake in. Westerners are also guilty of far uglier crimes and should therefore just zip it.
I also love to see that there exists a government that can jail billionaires and force them to pay their fair share to the people from which these leeches get their riches. In the US, you're supposed to eat a rich man's shit with a grin.
That's not actually true. Putin first two terms coincided with super high oil prices which brought in a shit ton of revenue. His administration used that money to stabilize the ruble and ensure consistent payments of state wages and pensions, which for the decade prior had been totally chaotic and people were not just angry but in serious economic precarity. That alone earned him a massive amount of popular support. Basically, he presided over a decade of standard of living increases that had seemed impossible before he was elected.
China and the US has some of the same issues, and also issues more unique to both.
The US takes on imperialism and human rights.. Or rather lack thereof is a shared value with China.
The US and Chinese economies are both relatively fucked, based on financial speculative growth and has limited upwards possibility for their youths. Look at the American GenZ hate towards work and reciprocated reaction from employers, look at the laying flat movement in China. Which is banned to even mention on social media.
Go to any major Chinese (Tier I and II) city and your first reaction will leave you in awe. Everything looks great on the surface, but how do you achieve cheap motorcycle deliveries within minutes? By having a large, lost, low class of workers. Selling their time for peanuts, barely able to scrape by. Potentially being shipped medicine by parents, as seen in a Danish travel programme recently.
The US has the same kind of gig economy, but not nearly to the same psychopathic degree China does.
Both economies have fucked up rural areas, just like most of the world, low key forcing people to move towards population centers to find work - Said centers ends up flooded with labour.
International human rights abuse? Yeah the US is worse, but that's most likely due to the US being everywhere.
Domestic human rights abuse? If you think the UK or US is censored, learn Chinese and visit their social media. A picture of Winnie the pooh? Gone. Mentioning laying flat? Deleted.
Then we have the Uyghurs, Hong Kong not being respected for the one hundred year lease initially agreed upon, stole the Dalai because they can't accept Tibet isn't Chinese.
International conflict, 9-dash line, no signs of wanting to finalise the Chinese civil war still ongoing with Taiwan, continued support of Russia despite them being behind the bloodiest current war on our planet.
Not to talk about the AI cold war the two states are running at the moment, neither side has dared to say it publicly and neither side have shown any signs of wanting to stop the ongoing cold war for the betterment of our planet.
Is the US the good guys? Nah.
I'm personally growing more and more annoyed with my own government and the EU as a whole not being willing to take a harder stance against the US. Trump made the blunder of a lifetime, but the Hormuz is still closed instead of trading energy in Euroes - Benefitting everyone but the US. The world economy would had taken a rollercoaster ride, but it would benefit all of us long term.
Both the Chinese, American and Russian leadership is a cancer to the planet, and more countries should recognise them as such
How is that a defend of the US?
A post directly asking to distance from the US.. Is a defence of the US? Like what.
Nah you're right. Sorry
Finally, someone that's reasonably and logically minded, between so much polarized people.
Xi may be doing things well, but with a truly distopic fine-print beyond every single good thing.
"But at what cost??" ass take.
Copy-paste because I have things to do:
Lol, so you don't understand the first thing about how China's government works, and you take everything the US State Department and billionaire-owned media say at face value. That says a lot about you, but not much about material conditions in China.
The only freedom China lacks is the "freedom" to be a lazy parasite getting fat off the labor of others. But I can see why that would be concerning if you take the Epstein class and their pet "journalists" seriously when they assert that the freedom to exploit is the only real kind of freedom so obviously China's an authoritarian hellhole.
I'm not taking that from the U.S. I'm just being consistent. The U.S. is good? Hell no, they're fucking shit. That means that China's good, automatically? Not, they're fucking shit too. It's as simple as that, I hate both because they're simply the polar opposite of good.
If you say China is bad too, but you can't provide any source for "China Bad" other than the US State Department and Billionaire-owned media, then you clearly don't think China is bad "too" because you're happy to take the word of the US that China is bad.
I genuinely don't believe you know even the most basic things about how China's government is organized and who gets a say. I say that because you obviously don't even know the name of the single party when you whine about it being a single party state, and because you think that them being a single party state has any bearing on how their government is organized or the amount of freedom enjoyed by their citizens.
Maybe start with that and come back when you know anyfuckingthing at all about the subject under discussion.
I have explained everything with a lot more details in other comments. Read them before you hastily conclude that I don't know what I'm talking about, because I'm not gonna repeat myself again and again to people that polarized; you're falling into a non-sequitur fallacy from a fallacy of appeal to ignorance and a fallacy of the straw man.
Doesn't seem to be showing in your profile, got a link?
It wasn't that hasty, you made it pretty obvious, but I still waited til you removed all doubt.
And now I'm starting to think you don't know what any of those things mean either, since none of them apply here. But when you come back with that link that totally exists that shows you've ever demonstrated a single bit of knowledge about China's government, you can also explain how anything I said meets the definition of those fallacies, and we can all have a good laugh.
Do you apply the same scrutiny to whatever western country you twerk for?
Where you take that conclusion from? I'm not saying that western governments are better, but that both (western and eastern) are shit.
Yes ofc. Keep moving the goal posts :D
such as..?
Their "houses are for living, not for speculating" slogan. China's government might be actually doing something with that... Just to by the other hand harden their mass control and mass surveillance even more; not for anything they have one of the biggest — if not the biggest — regional firewalls (maybe just behind North Korea's one) — the GFW. Then also they have "Reeducation Camps", and all that stuff that any good fascist dictatorship has. Not to forgive Xi Jingping image cult.
So yeah, at what cost? It's at the cost of their freedom. Oh, and China has other parties outside the Chinese Communist Party? To think, ladies and gentlemen.
Fair points I guess, but I'd like to point out that a lot of these were made as defensive measures against outside interference and aren't actually all that different from stuff NATO countries are doing right now. Their mass surveillance isn't driven by corporations trying to extract every last penny off of you, which is more than what any NATO country can say. You can also just get a VPN in China and access the outside internet relatively easily. And what Xi Jinping image cult? I'm pretty sure that ended with Mao. There are also other political parties in China BTW, although they only serve advisory positions to the CPC. Not saying any of this stuff is good, of course, just that it's not that much worse, or in some cases even better, than rival countries. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about China can explain this better.
Yeah, I'm not saying that NATO or the US are better, but I'm trying to push back against the polarized, totally pro-China folks who are only following a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" rhetoric, thus becoming blind to all of China's major issues.
For example, another point is that the entire economic boom in China is driven by an enormous working class that is heavily overexploited by the State yet rendered invisible for convenience, and that is barely compensated with less than the cost of a piece of candy for that labor.
I wouldn't be so sure. You need much more than that (as far as I remember, a specific form of DPI bypass, sometimes the use of multiple VPNs at once [which are hard to find and download because their sites are blocked within China's territory], sometimes even Tor or another overlay network or mixnet [such as Nym, I2P, Hyphanet, or Freenet], and a lot more stuff that I don't recall precisely because it's far beyond my current technical knowledge).
Can you name a few? I'm asking honestly, not out of malice or to be combative; I'd like to know more about that, tbh, because it's hard for me not to be skeptical about that claim.
Do you remember the whole thing with the Winnie the Pooh picture? Well, sort of that. Only a person who is egocentric, egolatrized, and narcissistic enough to instigate a cult of personality would actually ban something like that, and do it the way he did it. Also, you don't have to go that far — look at the streets and you're going to see photos and pictures of Jinping everywhere. And yeah, I know that it's quite normal for a politician to display photos of himself in public areas, but not on that scale. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about; I'm from Venezuela, and both Chávez and Maduro had (and Chávez still has) a huge cult of personality, and everything aligns with Jinping's imagery.
"at what cost" lol