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I know it's beating a dead horse at this point, but this whole Prigozhin situation made one fact crystal clear: American dissident right (and "anti-nato left" by extension) is extremely solipsistic, much more than other factions in American culture war. Just take a look at some of those takes which are prevalent among this crowd
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Essentially, their model of the world looks like: here we are, honest god-abiding Americans, and then there are "elites" — Biden, Hillary, DNC, Podesta, Bill Gates, World Economic Forum. How then do you view something that lies outside your usual experience and ideology? If you are dumb, you deny it altogether:
"Ukraine War is fake, all of it is CGI, Zelensky and Hunter Biden siphon gajillions dollars from American taxpayers to buy mansions in Bahamas"
For those people Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Finns, Prigozhin, Zaluzhny, Macron, Scholz, ... do not exist.
If you are smarter, you align yourself with perceived enemies of the elites: Putin, Xi, Orban, .... You say things like:
totally oblivious of cases like this
https://zona.media/online/2023/06/22/sko
being a regular occurrence in Russia, when a girl is sent to prison for putting anti-war slogans on price tags in a shopping mall. Of course they'll have prepared a long list of grievances with "elites" that are intended to persuade you that whatever happens in the US is much worse than repressions in Russia or China. And, sure enough, all of it "glownigger propaganda" anyway.
You might say: "Well, I don't care about anti-Putin Russians, unfortunate pro-Putin Russians who became victims of the regime, neutral Russians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, ... all I care is that my children don't get castrated and turned into trannies". Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
Whatever patience I had with American "anti-establishment" right-wingers, it ended. I guess Hanania is the only one I keep reading/listening at this point.
I’d say letting your children get castrated so that someone somewhere might be saved from some kind of oppression (real or perceived), is a pretty cucked choice.
How are these the only two choices?
They're not, I'm merely questioning the implied correct choice in the dilemma suggested by the OP.
I was paraphrasing a poster from several weeks back, when they defended British pilots defecting to Chinese. They essentially said that they would rather defect to China than be a subject of trans-friendly anti-white policies of the West. Though they dismissed human rights violations by Chinese as propaganda, and also claimed that the situation with human rights is better in China than in UK. Another example of solipsism.
Who the hell knows. Have you ever been to China?
Defecting to China is not a good idea for them anyway, though.
Would having been to China change anything? You don't expect a short visit would instantly expose to you all the complications and intricacies of politics in the billion-sized country, do you? If they have concentration camps, do you expect them to give you a tour on demand? If they torture and murder people for political reasons, do you expect them to show it to you, because they do it for every foreigner who comes in and asks? If they suppress dissent, do you expect them to just admit it to you, once you land in Beijing airport? If you don't see any of that in a 14-day guided tour, would you be ready to say all the people who lived there their whole lives and complain about such things are dirty liars, because you've been there and haven't seen any of that?
That's right. Now, would you expect to gain insights on the complications and intricacies of their politics by reading western media?
Well would you be ready to say that all the Chinese people who deny these things or find them implausible are dirty liars?
Thinking one can answer these questions without any sort of reliable insider information source is delusional. I don't have them; do you?
By reading only Western media, you can't. By reading all kinds of media - including, but not only, Western - you can make some progress towards it.
If they are in China at the moment, or their relatives or family are - no, they are probably just afraid. Justifiably, I may notice, as we have examples of people persecuted for saying things the regime does not like. I wouldn't call a dirty liar a person that says something he knows to be not true, but also knows if he says the truth he'd risk his life and maybe the lives of others. I'll rather call him a victim. If they are outside China's control - I'd have to look into them further to determine whether or not they are liars, so it'd go on case by case basis. If they say there are no human rights violations in China - they are liars for sure, as there are documented examples of them. If they say the specific violation did not happen - it may be true, or they may be mistaken, or they may be lying, again - case by case.
Answer definitely? No. Get to a high degree of certainty? Yes. Just as it is done with all other things we can not observe or perceive directly - by carefully collecting, evaluating and filtering available pieces of circumstantial evidence, until a general picture starts to become clear. And then updating this picture once new pieces of evidence come in. Current picture suggests China is under a totalitarian fascist regime which has a complete disdain for anything called "human rights" in the West (I'm not sure there's such concept in China at all?), routinely prosecutes dissidents and anybody who dares to contradict the party line, operates concentration camps and performs multiple atrocities.
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Yep. Solipsism. "Do I even know whether anything aside from me exist? Planets? Viruses? Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall of China? Forcible sterilizations under One Child Policy? Probably all lies of MSM, we will never know"
We probably supported that (not literally AFAIK, but I doubt that we were opposed) given that our NGOs were prodding India to do the same.
Anti-natalist policies were all the rage at the time, with South Korea's arguably looking like the biggest retrospective "whoops". Amusingly, even an Islamic theocracy couldn't stop their bureaucrats from being influenced by Ehrlich.
In case of India there is a share of direct responsibility — but the West couldn't significantly influence China's policies, not during Mao's rule, not after that. Aside from infecting Chinese leadership with harmful memes, of course, which then were turned to 11 due to totalitarian nature of China. But we don't blame Germany for being a place of origin of Marx, whose ideas caused death of millions.
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