more adventures on rednote mostly because it’s entertaining how mad people get when i talk about it :3 /halfjoke
this was posted 12/31 btw so i don’t think “the mods haven’t gotten to it yet” is a real thing
#le is common in parallel to the anglosphere’s #wlw which i think is adorable
my number one qualm with little red book so far is there is no native translation like tiktok has. lots of google translate is necessary to get the social media to social :P
necessary disclaimer: fuck the CCP and all the real violence and repression they do. just want to give credit given where due, and so far here im just seeing a lot of assumptions with no evidence? so im gonna post what my experience is :) i welcome all to do the same
From what I’ve seen, a lot of queer people are afraid to be themselves there. Some may even experience backlash and threats of violence for being LGBTQIA. There’s a lot of hostility to us across that entire nation tbh.
On top of that, there is constant scrutiny with mass state surveillance. Queer and POC may be silenced or even face imprisonment for expressing themselves. And don’t forget that nation’s concentration camps, genocide, torture of political prisoners, and barring people who don’t toe the party line from residency and citizenship.
Oh wait, that isn’t Red Note. That’s the USA and my small town.
Damn u got me at the first half ngl
I mean…that’s both vampiric superpowers. China and the US.
There’s no such thing as a benevolent state, to be honest. Nations and borders only divide and subject us. Every day, I feel more sure that we need to build communities in spite of states and to do what we can to disrupt and abolish them, so thank you for mentioning this glaring example.
However, I will say when we in the US point at China, we’ve got three fingers pointing back at us. Pretty hypocritical of us, and largely racist.
I meeaannn… of course the US has an imperial bone to pick with the other imperial nations. So the same attitude and conditioning to “other” the competing nations applies equally to Russia and china. So I think I have to disagree on your point that there is inherent racism in the china conditioning. Does racism get borne out of the antagonistic relationship? Of course. But everything said about china is said equally (at least in spirit) about Russia.
And you’re absolutely right, there is no benevolent state. A state’s first and only goal is to sustain itself and secondly to increase is standing. And I’m def with you that we need to not let borders come between the global working class.
My whole point is there is a tendency on the more communist-leaning left to reverse the conditioning by just swinging all the way to the other side. “The US is bad, china/Russia is better.” They’re both equally imperialist, they’re both equally exploitative, and they’re both equally heinous. It’s absolutely a mistake “western” leftists make to embrace the other superpowers in an attempt to denigrate their own. It’s necessary to remove that lens when we discuss these kinds of issues to see the entire picture, because swinging to the other superpower nations and embracing them as better is such a limiting (and incorrect) way to think about it. It’s a simplified first step in realizing your home nation is wrong. Going against them for being wrong should not mean embracing their equally wrong counterparts.
I mean, the US is pretty substantially worse than China, by almost any metric.
And if you think it’s not a racial issue with China, I think you have some investigating to do. You obviously haven’t spent time on mainstream White Supremacist platforms such as reddit, Facebook, or the comments threads on any mainstream news article. Oh wait, I also see it here on Lemmy. There’s a constant othering of Chinese people in a way there’s not of people in Russia. (I even find it curious that Russia seems to appear out of nowhere in any conversation about China for no apparent reason, hmmmm… now why is that?)
That’s why Xiaohongshu/Red Note has been so illuminating for people. It’s been nice for me. Answering questions about each other’s languages and judiciously sharing pictures and videos has been cool, but I already know and talk to people from China, and my dad taught social studies. For many people, this is their first realization that we’ve been fed racist propaganda all our lives.
Now yes, people could react by romanticizing the state of China itself, after seeing the many ways in which it is better than the USA, but they will learn. And I hope the most important lesson they learn is that, as you said, states are made-up tools of the oppressors that only exist to divide and subject, to protect the state for the state’s sake, at our expense. Always at our expense.
So you’re pointing to exactly what I said was the anbsolute user end result of the American conditioning system and saying it’s the conditioning itself. Americans are racist by socialization. But it takes a personal effort to make sure you see past that and overcome the racist socialization. That’s not the conditioning itself.
And I brought up Russia because they’re the “axis” sister superpower to china. I brought it up to make the comparison because in the US, the conditioning is very much that those two superpowers are the “other side” to the US/EU. The spirit of the antagonistic conditioning against those two countries is incredibly similar.
Again, what I think you’re doing is confusing the end result with the conditioning. In the great pyramid of US messaging, we see the exhaust. The conditioning is going on in the fuel injector. Alllll of those twists and turns and mechanisms means that messaging is funneled through so many different hands and rich people with own motives before we really get a chance to experience it. To confuse what we see on a day to day basis, especially today in our social media age, with US conditioning is a very misinformed way of seeing it, I think. All of the echoes of that conditioning anre altered and ricocheted by every person is passes through. Our daily experience is all happening after the exhaust has been expelled. And you’re attributing it all to the US messaging as if we experience top-down, highly controlled, streamlined communications. We just don’t.
Are we experiencing the greatest propaganda machine ever invented? Probably sounds crazy for me to say after everything I’ve just laid out, yes, we are. But media just doesn’t work like you’re making it out to work. I don’t mean any sleight against you, but it’s a really immature way of thinking about the world around you. I’m sorry if that seems like a pointed remark, I don’t mean it to. It’s the most common type of thinking—and I mean the first step in starting to question the world around you. And—again, no offense—communism tends to be that first step too. A lot of us took those steps when we were first getting our feet wet in the greater world around us at like 13, where some take it much, much later. And in the US, that “much much later” came for however old people were around 2016.
China has no LGBT marriage rights and no protections against discrimination, how is that better? How is having fewer rights to be myself the preferable option in your view?
You really have your head in the sand if you think the US state is protecting us and can say this within the month that bipartisan anti-trans legislation was signed, not to mention all the bills that have been introduced that are poised to set us back further than Stonewall era.
Now please stop making me defend the Chinese state. I hate the government of China as I do any state lol. I just think it’s a far better system than the US government by almost any metric.
China still has fewer protections than theUSA. Pretending otherwise is foolish. The laws are easily available for you to compare.
If you think China is a far better system ypu haven’t lived in an authoritarian culture…yet.
I would rather personally mail a copy of my data from my phone and other devices as well as my DNA and medical records directly to Xi Jinping himself and a second copy of said data to Hamas than give a single dollar to a corporation or politician in this illegitimate genocidal settler colonial nation that’s contributed nothing but harm to the world.
Also, you kinda need to move past this Red Scare bullshit. It’s not the 1950s. I was literally just chatting with my new friend in this so-called “authoritarian regime.”
BWAHA you had me in the first half ngl 😆😆
You might appreciate this.
This guy asked people on Red Note if it’s ok to be gay, and I laughed at the response:
Now ask if you can be in a gay marriage in China (nope).
Ask if it is completely legalto be fired just because you are gay (yup).
China isn’t good on LGBTQ+ rights
Neither is the US. Have you been paying any kind of attention?
We had to throw bricks, go to prison, and die in public to get what little we have in spite of the state, and the second we got the tiniest shred of equity, they’re working on oppressing us even more than before Stonewall.
You’re talking to someone who’s been explicitly terminated from a job explicitly for being gay. Legally. With no uncertain terms that was the reason.
Not to mention my queer ass will just fucking die next time I can’t afford life-saving healthcare.
I can get gay married in the USA. There currently are legal protections against discrimination in the USA. The USA is without question a better nation for LGBT+ rights than China.
You have legal recourses available to ypu in the USA if your claim is true. There are none in China.
Healthcare is not free in China either. It’s almost as if theyare really terrible at pursuing leftism.
China doesn’t have millions dying each year from lack of access to healthcare, and every single person on Xiaohongshu is learning how shockingly bad it is here in the USA, while we are unlearning the Red Scare propaganda we’ve been fed. I suggest you join us.
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