1. If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
  2. Downvotes mean I’m right.
  3. It’s always Zenz. Every time.
  • 1 Post
  • 87 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 30th, 2024

help-circle


  • None of those links show me “praising” a genocide. That remains a bold faced, blatant lie.

    Tbh, I find that this sort of casual lying is so common in spaces like .world that nobody even seems to care. Maybe it’s a neurotypical thing, where you’re allowed to tell lies so long as you’re lying about the out group. Frankly, when people don’t even acknowledge such things as lies, I have to wonder if they’re even capable of being truthful or acting in good faith.

    Those “huge number of sources” I actually went through point by point. Here’s a book from the 1930’s called 100 Authors Against Einstein which presents “a huge number of sources” claiming that Einstein’s findings regarding General Relativity were wrong. Every one of them is wrong.

    Also, I’m amazed that you’d link that last one as if it makes me look bad. The person was caught in saying something wrong so they abruptly pivoted to completely unrelated topics in the most textbook example of Whataboutism that I’ve ever seen in my life, so obviously I refused to indulge them.

    Still waiting on a link for your original claim btw.

    Also btw I think your first link is to the wrong comment.


  • I’m happy to criticize China on its actual faults, but I’m not going to jump to conclusions based on inadequate or inaccurate information. The standard for evidence is much lower when it comes to criticizing China, most of the media we consume comes from Western sources, and people just don’t have firsthand experience and will believe just about anything, and so I may push back more simply because there is more bullshit to push back on.

    You accuse me of “mindlessly endorsing” everything they do, but there is stuff I criticize and when I don’t, I explain my reasons quite thoughtfully. What I don’t do is mindlessly criticize everything they do (or are accused of doing, or assumed to be doing, without evidence) which is pretty much the standard that people expect from me. There’s countless accounts on here that only ever criticize China and do so without providing explanations or justifications for it. They don’t even come up with any original quips, it’s all just lazily repeating “haha Winnie the Pooh” to each other with zero thought or analysis. Generally, these people could only name one or two events from Chinese history, and have no interest whatsoever in learning about or understanding their perspective, which makes having an intelligent discussion on the subject impossible.






  • That’s me.

    I find it pretty convenient how you can so distinctly remember me praising something, but you can’t remember anything else about that conversation that would allow you to find it in the search function. Are you sure we can rely on your memory? Because I don’t remember ever saying that and I’m pretty sure I would.

    Was this the same conversation where you were praising the Holocaust? I can’t provide any evidence that that happened because I don’t feel like wandering through your comment history, but I have a vague memory of you saying something like that, so I guess if vague memories are the standard of evidence we’re relying on, you’re looking pretty bad too.



  • Hahaha, are you saying that because it was you on the other end of that discussion?

    Not to my knowledge, but there’s no way for anyone to know what incident it’s referencing so it could be any conversation they had with anyone, or made up whole cloth. I say this exact thing every time I see someone claim something happened on the fediverse without providing a link 1 2 3, and I haven’t been wrong yet. And that’s not really surprising, why wouldn’t someone provide a link to something that made the other side look bad, unless it didn’t actually play out the way they claim?

    For example, when you say that I “praise the genocide of Uyghur people,” that is a lie, and it should be obvious that it’s a lie from the fact that you didn’t provide a link to it.

    I’d be happy to have a good faith discussion regarding China’s economic policies and how they relate to socialism. Just not with someone who I already know is going to lie, misrepresent whatever I say, and act in bad faith, as I know you will.


  • Is it actually that it happens in one country in particular, or is it that nobody makes a note of it when it happens in other countries because someone not being in the public eye for a bit is normal and routine, and it’s only because China is treated with suspicion that it’s considered noteworthy?

    Of course, I can’t even imagine the shitstorm that would happen if another country tried to demand that public figures in the US provide, not only testimony saying they were fine, but a detailed account of any time they were out of the public eye, to confirm that they weren’t being interrogated by the NSA and then forced to lie about it. It’s absurd, as you admit, it’s a conspiracy theory. There are so many actual real problems that have actual real evidence that I don’t understand why anyone would care about something that’s grounded on pure conjecture and circumstantial evidence.


  • We’re really entering into conspiracy theory territory here. Imagine if I monitored every public figure in the US and whenever one of them didn’t appear in public for a while, I automatically assumed that they had been abducted by the NSA, and when they later showed up and were fine, I concluded that the only reason they weren’t talking about it was because the NSA was holding their family hostage or something. Do you need any actual evidence to make conclusions like that, and is there any form of evidence that could possibly falsify such conclusions?

    It’s impossible to account for ever minute of every person’s life so it’s always theoretically possible that any time someone doesn’t have an alibi, it means that they’re being held in detention where they are also sworn to secrecy about being held in detention - but just because it’s theoretically possible doesn’t make it a reasonable assumption.



  • That’s perfectly fine, I just think it’s important to treat claims critically, and to understand what it actually means to say that someone has “disappeared” in this context - it doesn’t mean that their friends or family have reported them missing, it doesn’t mean that a reporter has checked their house and found it abandoned, it just means that they haven’t been on TV, and it requires a lot of assumptions on the part of the audience to conclude from that that they’ve been kidnapped or extrajudicially detained.




  • Western media talking about “disappearances” is always the funniest thing to me. If somebody just goes like a week without appearing on TV, they can say they “disappeared,” and the audience will immediately assume that they’re in some black site with a bag over their head. If they show up the next week and tell everyone they’re fine, then they have plausible deniability since they never actually said anything bad happened to them. Of course, then you’ve got your audience primed to believe that something’s up and can write another headline like, “Questions remain regarding the disappearance of so-and-so.” Once you get a name trending, it doesn’t matter what the facts are.

    I remember coming under fire from an irl friend over the “disappearance” of tennis player Peng Shuai… until she reappeared, and the International Olympic Committee confirmed that she was perfectly fine. The only evidence that anything bad had happened to her was the lack of a public appearance, but then, after making public appearances, the story didn’t die, instead each new appearance simply gave the media more to talk about, keeping it in the public consciousness and always insisting that “questions remain.”

    Of course, that’s not even mentioning all the times the media doesn’t just claim a “disappearance” but just outright lies about these things. If Business Insider can’t even muster up a “detained,” it’s pretty safe to assume it doesn’t mean anything. And of course, if someone says anything critical of the government, then they are immediately absolved of any and all suspicion of having committed actual crimes - absolutely zero investigation into the charges of corruption is needed for everyone to conclude with 100% certainty that they’re trumped up.

    I can’t wait to see how many downvotes I can get lmao.


  • Absolutely every country has different factions and inner workings, but in countries where there is a supreme authority, those are by and large null and void.

    That’s not true. Even in dictatorships, the person at the top still has people who they need to keep happy in order to stay in power. Nobody gets to or stays at the top on their own, what happens is that they’re supported in that position by whatever interests they represent. If someone comes to power in a military coup, for instance, they have to keep the military happy or they’ll get replaced.

    More to the point, it’s not just about who gets blame or credit for stuff, it’s about understanding the mechanics of a system, and the history, and the various material factors and interests that go into decision making.