They would disagree because “lots of people are liberals.” Which is, ironically, a common defense a lot of cults use to justify why they aren’t a cult.

The “Call centre” script is pretty fascinating though, reminds me a lot of creationists. You can show them evidence of transitional fossils, biology experiments demonstrating evolution in a lab, it doesn’t matter. They’ll ask for specific evidence, then when presented with it, find some excuse to ignore it, like tone policing or attacking a source for being “illegitimate” or “biased” without even reading it. And when they can’t do that, they’ll just ignore the responses and only interact with the people hurling insults because they can dismiss that much more easily than a reasonable argument.

That’s an interesting idea. I’ve said something similar irl, that there’s a bourgeois script.

There’s no point arguing with someone who goes into it by default. Especially family members. Not everyone uses it, but for those who do, the only end point is an exchange of insults.

Good examples are reactionary TV ‘news’ presenters. They aren’t interested in the argument or evidence, only providing their audience with another example to confirm their pre-existing worldview. There’s always another quip, another reason why they don’t have to consider a new idea. It’s infuriating. But when you can recognise it, you’ll save yourself a lot of intellectual hardship and emotional pain.

It really is treated as a “sin” to be ignorant of something in the west. Personally, I love not knowing something, because it means I get to learn something, but again, education in the west is treated as “that thing that happens when you’re 6-18 and no other time.” and refuse to ever try to educate themselves as adults.

Especially the prejudice, it’s always that we need to save Chinese people from their government, it’s always some extension of the white man’s burden couched in softer language

Rent-free, just as Mao intended

And all their users don’t realise that the reason those censoring instances look more like Reddit is because Reddit had a campaign to censor all radical speech. It’s not rare because radical speech isn’t popular, it’s rare because it’s hidden and crushed.

Would you talk me briefly through setting up your own instance? Do you just run it when you want to go online or do you need to stay connected with a 24/7 self-hosted server? Don’t answer these questions if it means sharing details that would compromise your security.

Reminds me of https://existentialcomics.com/comic/148

“A spectre is haunting the Young Hegelians: the spectre of my glorious beard.” “I thought we agreed not to do the spectre thing anymore”

Edit: Fixed typo

We are not “Pro-Russia”, this is a bad faith label that is used to smear us. We SUPPORT Russia in the current conflict against Nato and the west. Which is what any principled anti-imperialist would do.

Can’t tell if this is supposed to be a “tankie red fash lol” dig but I’ll take it in good faith anyways.

We uphold socialism here, not that socialist states are/were perfect places, but that they are/were legitimate attempts at building worker states, and demonstrably improved the lives of their citizens. Liberals (we use that to mean anyone from a nordic soc dem to moderate republican, or even unserious anarchists) really really don’t like this. The accuse us of “genocide denial” or just being “delusional” for questioning the dominant western narrative

It’s an instance for Communists, specifically Communists who support AES (actually existing socialism). In short, we think that the USSR and PRC (among others), while not perfect, were legitimate attempts at building Socialism and better than Capitalism as it exists in the West.

Other people don’t like that because, to them, Stalin was just Red Hitler and Xi Jinping is literally committing a genocide right now. Neither are true.