Do you know any liberal refutations of what you call myths about the PCP in this thread like there were of "Private Life of Chairman Mao"?

Our Gonzalite friend is wrong about an number of things, but there is real criticism to be made about Deng radically increasing poverty by undercutting the systems installed under Mao that brought poverty to low levels. The "Chinese miracle" was in many respects solving problems that it itself caused and is a sort of liberal historical revisionism, though of course the more contemporary extreme poverty eradication initiative made real headway that was not made under Mao.

I was late in checking up on things but I appreciate what you shared

I think some of it is liberal propaganda and Deng's reform was mainly useful for survival in capitalist encirclement, as it produced a massive degree of impoverishment for the common people early on.

You're failing to understand that the interest of "tankies" is in democracy being enforced by a proletarian control of the state. The copypastas you were getting were poor communication but they had a point.

The fact that you're comfortably arguing in parallel with blatant neoliberals should give you pause, or are you going to tell me they are less of a concern because they are not "authoritarian," because when people are richer than God and control immense swaths of production and politicians themselves while skirting regulation to fuck over the workers their class made desperate by enclosing the commons, that is not "authoritarian"? This whole thing seems kind of bankrupt to me as far as political theory goes. The mechanisms of control are diffused by various means into the economy and divided among the public/private sector, but if the private sector owns the public sector (and it does) you've got a class of kings who only half-pretend they aren't (Zuck deliberately getting that Caesar haircut is a tell).

There's just no point. Literally no one among the communists I've seen cheers on killing dissidents just because. Fascist collaborators, sure, but not mere dissidents. You're just inventing people to disparage.

Polcomp is an intellectually impoverished and politically illiterate system

Almost like "tankies" don't have some religious reverence for "authority" but in fact specifically believe it should be directed in a certain way . . .

Perfectly fair, but I specify in the second paragraph:

Specifically, do you have any criticisms of China’s contemporary culture? Its government? What are they?

I was talking about the government in the economic case.

Basically just give me anything that you can be persuaded to talk about

Incidentally, this is a great argument to China that they shouldn't back down.

What about a male prostitute?

They are vastly, vastly less common and this is just a poor attempt at a counterpoint because conservatives also dislike male prostitutes, but the answer is that to the socialist male prostitution also represents a problem. It is a smaller problem in absolute terms, but on a "per capita" basis it is of similar severity.

"If we just remove the context of the largest human trafficking disaster Europe has seen in 30 years, it makes sense to want to be a prostitute in Ukraine!" Ukraine is literally the worst place on the continent to be doing that right now, not that it's really the best place to do anything other than die.

You generally have a point but

and all three of those things being assumed as the only roles a woman would play in a war is just gross

??? Cooking and first aid are normal things for volunteers to do, male or female, it's not that she's a woman, but women seem to mostly have the good sense to not fly halfway around the world to get blown up as soldiers like some functionally-suicidal men did, even though there are certainly women on both sides of the war in combat roles.

Your reading comprehension isn't great. The problem isn't that this woman is a prostitute, it's that it's normalizing the framing of "these men at war need access to sex," which if you think about it for even a few seconds should raise red flags. If it is a "need," then it is "necessary" to a war effort that it is accounted for, and suddenly you see the implication of a military prostitution industry, the existence of which would be a threat rather than a boon to impoverished women because, for this industry to be supplied, the powers that be will be sure there's a minimum number of people who are desperate enough to sign up or else a good enough PR covering for what is actually slavery (such as corner cases of, to pick a totally random example, some woman flying halfway around the world to prostitute herself for free).

He shares a handful of views, but overwhelmingly is a psychotic cult leader and social chauvinist. You are unlikely to get anything but uniform hatred towards him here.

I can see that you took note of my commentary on word choice, but you seem to be discounting the idea of charity on the part of whoever runs this hypothetical indie media outlet (see lemmy itself) even as you accept the idea of the audience engaging in charity. Of course, there are scams like PragerU that run at a loss as propaganda outlets, but we can see that they do this by being bankrolled by billionaires.

The idea of a service being "illegitimate" when it is not trying to sell things is bizarre, since your argument seems to lead to the conclusion that "it is outside of the economic framework I have put forward" without explaining the basis for the hypothetical scam.

Didn't the US say that "Russia" attacking the plant (or using nukes) was the "red line" that they would consider to be an attack on NATO? It seems like this would be done by the Ukrainian hardliners (mainly neo-nazis) who find negotiation unacceptable but know that they can't win without other countries joining in directly.

It's plausible deniability so the admins don't have a pretext to hijack the sub from them. Most of the protesting subs either explicitly take this line or leave it to subtext.

I do not think there is anything to be gained by pretending that the issue of funding (and its sources) can just be ignored.

I propose no such thing! Quite to the contrary, what I am saying is that you are not scrutinizing the question enough. Specifically, the biases that all corporate media has towards promoting the idea of the near-monopoly on "legitimate journalism" held by corporate media and friendly state media, as well as promoting the institutional powers and corporate backers upon which they ground their business. I likewise think people shouldn't rush to accept state-funded media as being "independent" when they have largely demonstrated a deep-seated bias towards promoting the interests of their state sponsors. This is not a coincidence!

People that are invested in getting stories that are against the interests of the country they are in must first recognize that it's an uphill battle more complicated than the consumer lifestyle bullshit offered by the sources that -- thanks to their capital giving them immense brand awareness -- make themselves "easy to come by".

While it’s undeniably true that subscription-based services spend a lot of resources on keeping people subscribed, they will have a very hard time accomplishing that goal without providing what their customers want in exchange for that. That doesn’t guarantee even slightly that what their customers want will be accurate information, as you demonstrated amply with your Alex Jones, Crowder, and Breitbart examples.

Tell me, does anyone who follows a news source not profess that they want "accurate information"? From CNN to Epoch Times to Breitbart to Yahoo News (funny how underrepresented the left is in major western news sources, by the way), does anyone say "Oh, I don't care if it is accurate." No, of course not! And yet, it should go without saying that people clearly have a bit more going on than that for a source like Breitbart to have success. Of course, once we establish some people are acting against their professed desire for accuracy and are happily being fed bullshit, this also brings oneself into question.

So if it's not merely what they say they want, what do people actually want?

Let me take a slight detour: What is ideology? A set of beliefs regarding both values and empirical facts, I think everyone can agree on that. What is the basis for the adoption of ideology? This is much more contentious, but I think the most foundational element of this has only one good answer: Ideology is a survival strategy.

Ideology is a huge topic, theoretically infinitely huge, between the immense weight of the historical record, the epistemically infinite possibilities for the future, and the stipulatively infinite number of different values someone can choose, and the endless ways these can relate to each other in various forms of inference. People don't have time for that, and yet in their desire for meaning and connection (along with being directly instructed to) there is pressure from an early age to develop an ideology, so they use what they virtually always do: heuristics, preconceptions in the form of perceived correlations generalized so as to be all-encompassing to their subject matter. This makes it much easier to develop at least a rough ideological framework, but it does not help determine which simplified ideological tenets they ascribe to. This, again, can be explained as a survival strategy: People become enculturated to groups that they are attracted to, and they fall into such groups for material reasons, whether perceived opportunity for gain, promise of security, or being spurned by other groups, all with an immense bias towards locality.

In short, ideology is functionally a way to relate to society on the basis of what is the most profitable or convenient. Capital-T "Truth" is only relevant insofar as it directly impacts one's own living conditions, and even then it might take up an antagonistic role (see antivaxxers).

So, returning to the original topic of media consumption, I would like to advance the thesis that people want media that comports with their ideology, which means media that they find convenient or profitable for navigating their day-to-day lives. Whether the media advances ideas that are capital-T "True" is not relevant if it is functionally very distant from someone's life in either geography, chronology, or social grouping.

But if they are going to be around regardless of what anyone else wants, then they are both much freer to provide accurate information and much freer to completely ignore what would, in a more personal setting, be regarded as important social cues that they are being unhelpful. You can’t “vote with your feet” if they tie you down and chop off your legs!

I don't follow the second part, but I think I've demonstrated that the media being "free" to provide accurate information doesn't mean very much to the information that they will provide. They can do great research, but their vested interest is mainly what amounts to pandering to the ideology of their target demographics.

Sure, but a lot of manipulative people of all walks of life use those tactics, frankly because they often work. Another common tactic is to say “you need to be open minded” and “listen to all viewpoints”, but then when confronted with a viewpoint that differs significantly from theirs, they start lobbing insults and shaming people for disagreeing. Unfortunately, I often see that behavior from people who describe themselves as “leftists”, but who a lot of other self-described “leftists” would probably insult and dismiss themselves as “tankies”.

I don't see how this is relevant other than finding a way to bring Tankie Discourse^tm into this, which I think we can really do without for the time being unless you'd like to use it to construct a more relevant argument.

I look forward to what else you have to say.

Complete aside, Citations Needed is a cool podcast that is free

I'm unfamiliar with two of those, but I know BBC and NPR quite well. I'd be careful with believing that state media is "independent" just because it's written down somewhere that it is. Whatever they might say, it's still the government providing a great deal of their funding, and that same government can raise or lower the money they get.

The BBC is notoriously slanted to the right, but I think gets its reputation laundered somewhat by American Democrats because the American center if much further to the right than Britain's. When you see how the Tories have attacked them so viciously for having a "left bias" (which is bullshit), it seems reasonable to guess that part of this drift is self-preservation of the organization at the cost of its usefulness to people other than Tories.

NPR toes the Dem line slavishly, inviting to some extent attacks from the right (as Dem-aligned corporate news also does) but rarely even acknowledging that there is a left beyond them (as Dem-aligned corporate news also does).