If a lib reads this, they’re going to think “yeah, that is whataboutism.” We have to refute the idea that comparing countries is somehow bad analysis, not just mock the thought-terminating cliche they use.
I usually go with “comparing different countries’ actions is the foundation of international law” or paraphrase Parenti’s comment about how you don’t judge governments against utopia, you judge them against what they replaced (and their peers, too).
it’s only whataboutism when we’re criticizing Good Country. When criticizing Good Country’s current and recent actions, it’s appropriate and intellectual to always change the subject to be about something Bad Country did in the 50s.
not to mention that gdr made advances in that question before other countries, and nowdays cuba has the most advanced legislation regarding relationships, sexuality and family, and vietnam is getting there too.
I am disappointed that China is still behind in this regard. I don’t think anybody gets punished for it or anything. I think it’s just a cultural thing. But still.
sadly yes, they are having a hard time shaking off british colonial laws, even tho culturally is very open to homosexuals, trans and even non-binary, i do need to read properly if this stems from confucianism or taoist and other local religions.
i watch a guy that lives there, he says that basically the country is governed by old man, but the communist youth is coming in strong, so in the future in can expect advances.
The thing is they dont have daily wall to wall opinion pieces about how lgbt+ people are demonic.
They really dont have tabloid newspapers generating endless moral panics against minorties; so while legal protection is behind, people are just apatethic, they genuinally dont care about these things and co-exist with criticism lgbt+ people.
Its not perfect, but its also uniquely not violent either.
Could both these statements not be true? The 1937 Family Law did criminalize homosexuality and label it a bourgeois decadence.
But that doesn’t mean the west was any better if not oftentimes worse.
Correct, but I dislike that liberals point that out when the Western world has done the same. They are either ignorant of those laws or think liberalism and their politicians are allowed to get away with it. If we confront them, they always say that’s “whataboutism.”
yeah they always compare the west as it is now with communist countries 50-100 years ago, right after the revolution, in the middle of civil war and famine, encircled by capitalist aggression etc.
unsurprising really, if your analysis by definition doesn’t account for material conditions and is purely idealistic, nothing stops you from comparing societies from different time periods, on different stages of economic and technical development, etc.
plus soviet union being born from a very very crhistian country, and other like china or cuba, european colonies
*christian
also if you go far back enough, lgbt+ and poly relationships are completely normal till they discovered something called ‘feudalism’ from the west…
when liberals say the communist oppressed lgbtq people thing they mean it as a criticism of communism in comparison to capitalism, as in “the ussr under stalin had bad lgbtq legislation therefore capitalism is a better system” this is a rejection of that criticism because how could this possibly indicate that capitalism is better when the failure of communist in this particular case is that they werent better capitalist like they were supposed to be.
In USA, Supreme Court basically deleted federal legality of abortion because it hinged only on court precedent. But i had read that the federal decriminalisation of homosexuality, in 2003 no less is also based on court verdict. Libs do not mention this anywhere and didn’t answered when i asked, but can it also be deleted by SC or it did recived additional protections in law since?
i mean, the way the supreme court has operated historically (and especially in the last few years) means they can delete basically any law they don’t like, but you are correct that the decriminalisation of homosexuality is only based on a court verdict. many states never removed the relevant laws from their books, so they could in theory be enforced again if the court changes their precedent.
Thanks. Weird thing is that i read countless second coming of Trump doomsayers in the internet but not one of them even mentioned that possiblity. I had to think about it myself and i’m not even American so the ways US lawmaking works are really wierd for me.
Good post, as a queer person this is an interesting thing to talk about with other queer leftist/commie-curious people though. Rare Stalin L that we’ll learn and be better from.