Austria is very much right-wing too, so they’d be down for some anschluss action.

Of course it’s Hungary. What a sad state of affairs for the country whose brave resistance led to the term “tankie” being coined for the pro-Russian side.

The question is not whether their use is automatically a war crime, but whether the UAF would potentially use them as a war crime. Would you give them their nukes back?

The British Parliamentary Ministerial system combines the Legislative and Executive branches.

What leads you to believe this is accurate?

The supreme court is an altogether different branch of government so that comparison isn’t accurate at all, especially since commonwealth countries also have supreme courts.

Agreed. Ukraine’s thermite-launcher drones are terrifying enough. I’m not sure they have the restraint to avoid going too far with something like WP. Give them more F-16s instead.

That’s true, but I don’t know of a comparable position in the US. Perhaps a “cabinet” member, like the Secretary of State?

As to your point about favour-trading, that’s absolutely accurate, but I consider that more of an indictment of peerage in general. Within the bounds of the current system, for all its flaws, they are effectively colleagues, no?

Seriously, was blackface such a rampant thing in the aughts? It seems like everyone was doing it, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

Weeeeellll he borrowed it from a peer, so this isn’t as overtly bad as it may seem with that rather buried lede. For our American friends, this is as though the President’s son used an apartment lent to him by a Senator (of the same party as the President, no less). That’s arguably more of a co-worker relationship than anything, so I can absolutely see why they wouldn’t have though it improper. I myself am not sure that it is.

You have clearly never been to China. Bye.

Perhaps I should have used the term “sealioning” instead of bad-faith pedantry. When you come at people with trite gems like this one,

abolition of term limits, but you don’t explain how you think that goes against democratic control and operation

you make it very difficult for others to believe you’re interested in a genuine conversation rather that endlessly bogging down your interlocutor with minutiae and winning a war of attrition. Here’s a hard source for you. Enjoy, because I’ve finished wasting my time here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of “incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate”, and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. […] It has been described as “incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate”.

I have asked, repeatedly, for mechanical analysis. Any change in structure, drop in approval rates, anything.

This is rapidly devolving into bad-faith pedantry, but fine. I would point to the horrifically botched early response to COVID; ongoing suppression of protests on June 4th of every year; the crushing of dissent in Hong Kong; Xi’s very public sidelining of Hu; the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang; mass surveillance; Xi’s undoing of term limits; and the list goes on, but that should be enough to tide you over for now.

Then I suggest you explain why.

Because they are profoundly authoritarian, and become more so over time. You’re posting in a thread about China’s leader erasing a contrary voice from existence. I’m not sure how much clearer this could all be.

If you truly believe they are “working towards communism”, I don’t think any amount of evidence or differing interpretations of the data will sway your faith.

So your stance is essentially “real communism has never been tried”? Technically correct, I suppose, but what really matters is the actions of people who claim to be communists. I refer back to my first post in this conversation where I said “insofar as those labels are used today”. I can’t think of a single practical implementation of political systems by these self-proclaimed communists that makes me think “this is what Marx would have wanted”.

Exactly. I think that’s why we’re having difficulty communicating.

I can’t parse what you’re trying to say here. I suspect we’re talking past each other because you’re arguing from a purely academic point of view, rather than taking actual self-proclaimed communist states into account. Do you believe China is communist? How about the USSR?

I won’t reply to all that because you’ve either moved the goalposts or misunderstood my original point. To wit:

Critique of the Gotha Programme isn’t advocating for “authoritarianism,” nobody does.

Tankies are quintessentially authoritarian. That’s what I’ve been saying since the beginning. I agree that Marx doesn’t advocate for it, which is why I suggested he’d be repelled by tankies.

Can you elaborate? What “bottom-up” structures did he advocate for, and how, mechanically, do they differ from what modern Communists advocate for?

He constantly frames things vis-a-vis the freedom of workers and their having input in their government. Does that sound like China to you, or Cambodia under the Khmer?

When Marx advocates for Socialism, he does so on the basis of the Proletariat wresting control from the bourgeoisie via revolution, and maintaining absolute control via the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, just as the bourgeoisie and proletariat together wrested control from the Monarchies.

Sure, but what he didn’t advocate for is for a new form of aristocracy to emerge from within workers’ ranks. I think this was Bakunin, not Marx, but the dangers of “labour aristocracy” were already known at the time.

What have you read from Marx that gives you an alternate impression? Where are you getting the idea that Marx was in favor of decentralization over centralization, when he says the direct opposite clear as day in Critique of the Gotha Programme?

I’ve read David Harvey’s synopsis of Capital (because life is too short to read the whole thing), Gotha, and of course the Manifesto. I’m actually puzzled that you see Gotha as advocating for authoritarianism. He talks about the eradication of class and about how people should not be “ruled”. Both of those things are endemic to current-day communism. I just can’t imagine that Marx would look at the way the CCP operates and think that was an accurate reflection of his personal politics.

That isn’t my reading of him at all. He seems to me to advocate for “bottom-up” structures rather than the opposite, as tankies do. You just alluded to it yourself with his vision of an emergent system rather than something designed and imposed. The latter is what current-day communists believe, and as you just said, that doesn’t align with Marx.

I also didn’t say he based his views on an Overton Window at all. I said current-day communists have distorted communism so far beyond anything Marx would recognize that the Overton Window on what is considered communism has shifted far towards the authoritarian side.