Your understanding of Chinese infrastructure isn't rigorous if it's entirely based on some sensationalist viral videos of some places which look bad. Yeah, it's a massive country with a billion people, some of those places look bad in a video. I'm not happy about the bad construction you see there, nor the real estate speculation causing some of it (which isn't a communist feature).

You can find lots of videos of places in the US and Canada looking bad too, only it's like cops destroying the tents and property of unhoused people in the streets. But in response to those we might say "oh that's terrible, they should fix that" and not the "we gotta overthrow the authoritarian government" when it's about China.

Ah but they posted the Reuters article maliciously. In a scheming, tankie sort of way.

The US bombed and firebombed until there were "no more targets in Korea." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea Examine the primary sources if you like, they're decent. It was comparable to genocide.

And now we point and laugh at the DPRK for being less developed than the US-backed South?

Nearly half (46%) globally said that the European Union, United States and Nato were doing too little to assist Ukraine, while 11% said they are doing too much

I do think the paper is flawed but not useless. I wasn't really the one who posted it though, it's the primary source for this claim in the other article.

Sure, for what it's worth I could concede that a global majority might approve of support for Ukraine according to this data. Looking at raw data from: https://www.allianceofdemocracies.org/initiatives/the-copenhagen-democracy-summit/dpi-2023/

That figure may not be accurate however, especially because I can't see that they computed a weighted global total by population. They extrapolate to obtain each "nationally representative result" by taking into account the respondents' age, gender and education to mitigate selection bias. I have my doubts about extrapolating like that, but okay. The main problem is when you check the global total, it's just an unweighted average of all nations. Highlighted in orange: Top - unweighted average of all nations, Bottom - reported figure from the author

Each country has ~1000 respondents, so there isn't a proportional representation of each country based on its population - small countries (mostly imperial core, as it happens) have an outsized effect on the average.

I see this one a lot.

I seriously don't understand why so many of you dickride Russia, other than "west bad". The current Russian government is antithetical to so many of the values you claim to champion.

Seriously, who? Who is "dickriding Russia because west bad"? The current state of Russia is the result of the USSR's undemocratic dissolution and the subsequent shock doctrine, obviously it's antithetical to our values. Everyone knows that. People aren't being blinded by "west bad" - because they generally aren't literal children who can only understand the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. What they're doing is critically analyzing media and history.

Hate to employ the dreaded whataboutism, but it seems to me this critique applies more to the opposite side. You say people are "Slotting nicely into Russia's playbook", "parroting Kremlin propaganda". On their own, these are empty thought-terminators. You're not concerned about understanding reality, just about making absolutely sure you're 100% not on "Russia's side" of this issue, because they're the bad guys in this dichotomy.

I seriously don't understand why so many of you dickride the west, other than "Russia bad". The current western governments are antithetical to so many of the values you claim to champion.

mfw they close down the dog-kicking factory, destroying thousands of honest jobs

:deeper-sadness:

https://hexbear.net/comment/2175192

Putin does not care about the well-being of Ukrainian citizens

Of course not, he has never. He is acting in self-interest because Ukraine and the US are escalating violence. Do you remember the lethal aid Biden sent? Where do you think that lethal aid went? Who do you think it was shot at?

we’re teetering on Putin apologia and sharing RT news uncritically.

Putin is a corrupt bastard. I think many on this site cannot tell the difference between not viewing him as satanic vs licking his boot. I wasn't going to try to argue this until your post came up.

https://hexbear.net/comment/290125

So, China is clearly better than the US, considering that workers in BRI countries complain about price dumping, but countries in the American sphere complain about death squads. That said, we need to listen to workers and socialists who aren't in power. The NPA says they're getting shot with Chinese bullets. Workers in China still go on strike. Class struggle still exists in China, even if the state and party buffer it.

Here, I'll post an article as well, hopefully nobody "makes themselves scarce" because of it: https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/

we're just normal men... we're just innocent men