The only reason we’re still here is because you keep coming back. You said your bye, I gave you my goodbye. But then you came back anyway because a) you’re petty as fuck as evident from the downvotes and b) you can’t stand someone, especially a socialist, talking shit about your autocratic wet dream, China.

Anywho, once again.

With the amount of false information, mental gymnastics, name calling and actual idiocracy I’m genuinely happy get be rid of you. France is fine, China sucks, fuck off.

I couldn’t care less about your capitalist friend being arrested. I guess it’s only western capitalists that you’re against, Russian capitalists you defend.

Why are you linking sources that are objectively false? Multiple times. And then you claim I’m clowning?

I’ll happily take the “fascist shithole” over the surveillance state that is China. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand, you believe authoritarianism to be democracy.

Of course you’re going to cherry pick the one sentence that fits your narrative. 🤡

You said is declining, article is clear its not actually declining. “YoU’rE cHeRrY pIcKiNg”

Bye.

With the amount of false information, mental gymnastics, name calling and actual idiocracy I’m genuinely happy get be rid of you. France is fine, China sucks, fuck off.

China and India started in roughly the same spot after WW2, and there’s an obvious reason why they developed very differently. India develops exactly the same way every capitalist country has developed. It’s quite obvious that the same things hasn’t been happening in India. The fact that you call yourself a socialist and don’t understand these things really says volumes.

Enlighten me.

Last I checked there’s plenty of foreign investment in capitalist countries like India. Yet, they’re developing in a completely different way.

Are they really? In what way?

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/what-do-about-eus-relative-decline-2024-04-22/ https://www.attali.com/en/society/virtues-of-work/ https://qery.no/social-and-material-deprivation-in-europe-2023/ https://www.ipsos.com/en/29-europeans-say-they-are-currently-precarious-financial-situation https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/01/12/nearly-half-of-europeans-say-their-standards-of-living-have-already-declined-as-crises-mou

For fuck sake, the title of the first article literally says relative decline as in the standard of living isn’t actually declining, and if you read the article it clearly states the household income isn’t increasing as fast as it was before.

Considering how many times you’ve linked an article and it’s complete BS I’m just not going to read any more of your articles. You link an article, find a suitable quote from the article that actually matches what you’re claiming and then I’ll bother to open the article, because if you can’t be bothered neither can I.

Absolutely hilarious how you continue to ignore where China started.

You’re comparing a country that was a developed country more than 50 years ago to a country that has been a developing country in the last 50 years. No shit one of them is going to show a lot of progress. It’s like comparing the progress a person does in the first 18 years of the life to the progress of someone from the age of 30 to 48.

Explain to us why we don’t see the same thing happening in India for example.

There’s a great article in HBR showing how India could become a significant global player by 2050 and what are the barriers that are preventing it. The same thing happening in India could be just a matter of time.

Explain why the standard of living in China is improving more rapidly anywhere or any time in history.

Foreign investment? Notice how the trend is almost identical with the household income you pointed at before

Meanwhile, also explain why the standard of living in Europe is declining.

Source?

It found that Chinese median wealth per adult, at $26,752, now outstrips Europe, where the average adult has a wealth of $26,690. The European figure takes into account the whole of the continent, which includes many less wealthy nations in its southern and eastern regions.

Yes, the average Chinese adult is richer than the average European by a whooping 0.22%. How about you read your own articles dumbass. It’s literally an example of China reaching the standard of the western world.

EDIT. Forgot to bold a certain part so we can get back to that when you eventually start complaining about numbers again.

What You have to look at is the progression over time, as I’ve explained this in the last reply. Evidently that went over your head. Household income is a perfect example here incidentally:

You’re comparing a country that was a developed country more than 50 years ago to a country that has been a developing country in the last 50 years. No shit one of them is going to show a lot of progress. It’s like comparing the progress a person does in the first 18 years of the life to the progress of someone from the age of 30 to 48.

You’re not proving China is somehow doing better than the western world, you’re proving that China is reaching the same standard as the western world.

Come back when you have an actual argument.

Yeah I understand how time works, that’s why I gave you list of sources that show historical progress over time. Not just a single event happening, but clear demonstration of long term trends. I guess that was just too complicated for you to wrap your head around.

So as long as I give you similar data about France your protest argument doesn’t count?

• Household income in the last 50 years can be found here

• I can’t find the data on people living for less than $1 but you had another point about extreme poverty as well so we’ll cover it there.

• The income of the poorest 20% in France is in line with China. Can’t link you the exact data but you can put it together in the same databank you referenced.

• Amount of people living in extreme poverty in China and France

• Home ownership is great in China and this is one place where France (and most western countries) can’t compete with.

• I’m not sure how concrete usage matters here so I’m just not going to look for that data.

• In terms of rail usage France seems to be doing just fine. In fact France seems to be doing pretty well in the public transit area

Unless you really want to hammer in on the housing based on what you’ve shown France is doing as well as China.

Nah, that’s just a simplistic straw man you keep building instead of addressing what I actually said.

I’m just building on what you’ve said. If you feel like it’s a strawman, it’s because that’s the arguments you’ve given me.

Except I didn’t ignore the wider context, I addressed your points and explained my position clearly.

Nope. If anything you ignored what I asked and gave me, at that point, irrelevant shit that you’re now trying to make relevant.

Projection will always be the way of the liberal I suppose.

Does that mean you’re calling yourself liberal? Because you’re projecting I’m a liberal but I’m a socialist.

I’ve literally linked you a bunch of sources showing how living conditions in China have been improving consistently over many decades. Your article isn’t a counterpoint to that.

Meanwhile, Cuba is under draconian blockade by the US, and despite that having an obvious impact on the standard of living every poll shows mass support from the public for the government in Cuba. France, on the other hand, has no such excuse. It’s one of the richest countries in the world that’s been plundering the Global South through colonialism.

First of all, do you understand how time works? Your bunch of sources are years old, my source is months old. Maybe years ago everything is was fine, now it’s not.

But more importantly, you said civil unrest is an indication of a bad democracy and you brought up those two countries as examples of good democracy. Your excuses might explain why there are unrest, but they don’t invalidate the unrest. There’s still unrest in those countries which means a) unrest is not an indicator or b) those countries are not examples of good democracy.

You’re such a sad troll.

What if I’m dyslexic? What if my phone auto corrected it and I didn’t notice? Why did I continue talking about it like I meant the other thing? It was an honest mistake on my part, but what is your excuse? Anyone actually paying attention would’ve questioned how did we get to “tangible benefits”. In fact that’s how I noticed my mistake in your response because unlike you I was actually paying attention to what you were saying. How do you excuse ignoring the wider context of what I was saying and focusing solely on the one thing that’s out of place? I can’t think of a single excuse where you don’t come out as a bad actor, which is probably why you’re name calling me instead of accepting fault. The sad troll here is you, getting caught with your pants down.

Nice to see how little you’re paying attention.

Nah, it’s public unrest coupled with continuously declining living conditions and the government ignoring the demands from the people that shows the government isn’t working in the interest of the public.

The articles I linked both said declining living conditions are the reason of protests. When it comes to Cuba the government suppressed the unrest with force. China protests have worsened in the last year. Looking at how fast you responded you probably didn’t even open the links. Nevertheless, your criticism applies to those countries as well

And I accidentally misspelled tangible leverage. I never meant to say tangible benefits and I think context-wise it should’ve been obvious I meant the term you originally brought up. But you only skimmed my comment for keywords so you could dump your prepared copy paste because there’s no way you found those examples with sources within 6 minutes, you had those ready to throw out.

I guess you’re just a mouthpiece afterall.

So public unrest is an indication that the government doesn’t represent the interest of the public? Seems like your examples of fine democracy don’t represent the interest of the public either, protests on the rise in China and protests in Cuba.

Where are their tangible benefits that you defined so vaguely you might as well have not defined them at all? Please specifics this time, not this vague BS.

What is shows is that western implementation of the concept of democracy is such that it does not represent the interests of the working majority. Western democracies are class dictatorships where the capital owning class makes the decisions and dictates to the workers. This is precisely what we’re seeing happening in France right now.

You want to expand on that? Considering Ensemble and National Rally (with its far right allies) make up 301 seats out of the 577 seats (and for the lazy, 289 is the minimum to have the majority). If Ensemble had allied with NFP they’d have 339 seats which is more than with the far-right, but not significantly more. Had the left “won” I don’t see how you couldn’t make the same argument saying it’s bullshit.

Meanwhile, authoritarianism is a largely meaningless term. Every government holds authority by virtue of having a monopoly on legalized violence. What actually matters is whom the government is accountable to. When the working majority has no tangible leverage then their voice can be easily ignored. That’s why Macron is able to do what he is doing. The issue is with the way the system is implemented.

Define tangible leverage.

TLDR: democracy is fine, western implementation of the concept is not

Interesting to see where this non-western fine democracy exists.

If anything it shows that authoritarians will choose what keeps them in power rather than what’s best for the people. The left didn’t get the majority, it was roughly a 3 way split between the left, center-right and far-right. The government would’ve been with the left and center-right or center-right and far-right. The former would’ve been better because it would’ve represented a bigger portion of the voters but the latter was also viable from the perspective of democracy.

However the choice was largely up to Macron (and his party) and he’s definitely more autocratic than democratic. His decision is what ultimately threw the left under the bus.

Tldr: Democracy is fine, authoritarianism is the issue.

You got it because it’s not the US telling Ukraine to fight for the last man, it’s Ukrainians deciding to fight for the last man. If they believe they can achieve something more who are we to question it.

Opposing sending more men into the meat grinder just means you’re in favor of Ukraine surrendering to Russia, who are now the actual fascists.

Trump would have a running chance regardless of who the democrats pick would be, the electoral college and republican party have made sure of that.

That’s like saying 14 lashes is more favorable than 15 lashes.

And the denazification claim was a stupid one in the first place because how does Russia verify that Ukraine is denazified? If Ukraine kicks out of the government all the suppose nazis, is Ukraine denazified? What if they all denounce nazism. Does that count? What’s stopping Russia from putting more people in their “nazi” list? It was a vague demand and shouldn’t have been a demand in the first place.

Online casinos are also tech. The devops in the article literally says they set up proxies to continue operating in countries where their main domain is blocked. I know the core domain of casinos are very regulated, but I doubt the entire tech aspect of online casinos are regulated. I imagine there’s plenty of fuckery to do there.

Also casinos will throw out people who benefit too much at the expense of the casino. The casino benefitted too much at the expense of Cloudflare and refused to share the profits, so Cloudflare did what any casino would do and kicked them out.

Based on what? NATO gave non-expansion assurances to USSR and Russia has been pretty adamant they are not the successor to the USSR. There’s no reasonable explanation why NATO shouldn’t have expanded into the former soviet states. After all those states wanted NATO to expand there.

Maybe Russia should’ve done a better job being a partner to the former soviet states. With the exception of Belarus Russia doesn’t have any positive relations in eastern europe, and even Belarus is a huge exception because Lukashenko can’t stay in power without Russia. The only former ally Russia had was Ukraine and we all know how that went for Ukraine. Russia is a huge threat to the sovereignty of those countries and Russia has had zero interest in having good relations with those countries. Is it really any wonder those countries fled under the banner of NATO? I don’t think so.

Also Russia is the top promoter of NATO. The article mentions how Sweden and Finland have maintained neutrality for over half a century. They could’ve joined NATO any time they wanted and they didn’t. But then Putin threatened both countries and within months both countries decided to join NATO. You have to go into some conspiracy theory mode to ignore the obvious cause and effect here. I will say with 100% certainty that if Russia had not invaded Ukraine and Putin had not threatened Sweden and Finland then neither country would’ve taken any steps towards joining NATO. Because why should they, why take the obligations if there’s no threat to defend yourself from?

In fact let’s not forget that prior to the Ukraine invasion the sentiment was moving towards whether NATO is even necessary anymore. Maybe 10 years from now NATO would’ve dissolved all by itself. But we won’t know that now because the invasion of Ukraine has been a signal to countries that NATO is still necessary. Russia’s actions are keeping NATO alive.

If Ukraine is of any indication the only thing NATO has done to Russia is prevent them from invading the Baltics and Poland. Do you really think that’s a bad thing?

Yeah, no. There’s really not much value lost when blocking both Lemmygrad and Hexbear. Lemmygrad is straight up insanity, it would go down as the greatest satire instance if not for the fact that they actually believe the shit they’re saying. And the loudest users of Hexbear are just hypocrites. They completely justify brigading other instances in the most offensive way possible and cry wolf when they get blocked, only to turn around and ban anyone who even remotely questions their ideology on their own instance. Blocking either is the equivalent of blocking a far-right instances, because they’re all extremist.

And this is coming from a socialist who has not blocked either instance. In fact I’m more likely to get blocked by them because despite being supposedly ideologically adjacent we have very little common ground, and they don’t take kindly to someone questioning their actions or beliefs.