You don't disagree with your government; you didn't know what your government's position was until right now.

You still don't really know what your government's position is, otherwise you'd understand that here, as in many cases, there's an official stance for diplomatic relations and then a bunch of propaganda (for both domestic and foreign consumption) that undermines that official stance.

How about firsthand testimony that can be corroborated. If you've ever been in court for anything, it's standard to not simply take whatever story you hear at face value.

So point to a story you're saying is true, then show how it can be corroborated (by video? by documentation?). Show how there is no realiatic alternate explanation. Explain how your corroborated story amounts to genocide, and isn't just a story about someone being arrested, for instance.

There totally aren't actual Uyghurs who have told their own stories or anything like that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart

Just because someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Do you think cops ever lie when they testify?

99% of the time, calling someone a genocide denier is just burden shifting. Genocide is a crime; you have to prove it happened, you can't simply assert it did and then smear anyone who asks for evidence.

We have spy satellites that can read a license plates and genocides, by their very nature, leave a lot of evidence. If there were a genocide in Xinjiang we'd have what we see in Palestine: tons of documentation in a wide variety of news outlets about crimes against civilians and actions like UN officials resigning in protest.

China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.

https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/entertainment/theme-park/characters-meet-pooh/

So there's a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you?

The quote from the article was:

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities.

You characterized this as:

china admits soldiers gunned down over 300 people

As @robinn2@hexbear.net pointed out, a significant number of Chinese soldiers were also killed (and not killed by gunfire). "Fatalities" includes deaths on both sides, but you (and this is an easy mistake) read this as only referring to civilian deaths.

This sort of precision is important. First, it highlights that this was not simply a one-sided affair; these were not wholly peaceful protesters. Second, the kind of factual slippage you (mistakenly) engaged in is how, over 30 years, an event where 30+ soldiers and 200+ civilians died in a messy confrontation becomes a clear-cut massacre of tens of thousands, where tanks crushed peaceful protesters and [inset whatever other salacious, invented details you've heard with the mythological version of the story].

Note that this last point is not mine, but is from the Columbia Journalism Review article.

The One True Centrist

Yeah, I don't think a lot of folks really grasp how large and active Hexbear is.

BTW thank you for the civil conversation.

The "it is fair to say that the USSR stance was no different than the stance of the United States during the same time" stance would get a lot of agreement on Hexbear. We'll go to bat for the many good things the USSR did, but we're more than happy to criticize it (or China, or Cuba, etc.) where appropriate. One of the most-cited books on Hexbear -- Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (big recommend, by the way) -- has at least a whole chapter (maybe even a whole section, can't remember) on criticisms of the USSR.

Super jealous you've been to Cuba -- hope I can go one day!

You're right, it wasn't relevant to you in particular. You got that comment because of the context surrounding this thread. Say you run a book club or game group and lots of people are chronically late, annoying you. One day a new member shows up a little late with a legit excuse but you fire off a snide comment to them in your frustration at the overall situation. They didn't deserve that, you were a little quick on the trigger, but can you see how the larger context affects what was said?

I also agree that you aren't brigading. The Hexbear users here came to this thread the same way you did, and they aren't brigading, either.

I would not enjoy it if a large group of alt-righters suddenly federated with us and became a very vocal presence, even if a large number of their users were often polite, because I am so strongly opposed to those politics.

There is a difference between occasionally annoying people who generally want good things and occasionally annoying people who generally want bad things. One example:

• Alt-right opinions on immigrants in the U.S. range from "let's immediately deport millions of people and create an even more deadly southern border" to "we should exterminate those [slurs]."
• Hexbear opinions on the same subject range from "we should have an open border, a guaranteed minimum for all U.S. residents, and we should end the imperial meddling that causes so much immigration in the first place" to "yes and the imperial core owes untold sums in reparations to the Global South."

Maybe you disagree with both, maybe you get annoyed by people talking about both, but one is fundamentally genocidal and the other is fundamentally humanistic.

Your stance on the Russia-Ukraine war is more or less the consensus on Hexbear.

It takes considerable time and effort to re-think beliefs you haven't interrogated for a while, regardless of how you eventually come out on the. Good on you for taking some steps in that direction.

What is the purpose of forums if not to talk to each other? Activity is a good thing, especially in the infancy of the fediverse.

From many Hexbear threads on the topic of LGBT rights in the Soviet Union (and Warsaw Pact countries), here's my understanding:

• The pre-Soviet Russian Empire criminalized homosexuality.
• The first Soviet constitution "decriminalized" it in the sense that it wiped away the laws of the old Empire and instituted new ones that did not include criminalizing homosexuality. I don't personally think (and I think this is the Hexbear consensus) that was an intentional choice; it probably just got left out because it wasn't a priority in the midst of a revolution, civil war/invasion by a half dozen capitalist powers, and the monumental task of building a modern state (and the first socialist state) out of the ashes of WWI and late-feudal Russia. Note that plenty of legal scholars would disagree on the theory that legislative bodies write laws (or don't) very deliberately.
• Stalin re-criminalized homosexuality. Zero people on Hexbear support that, and I'm not aware of any existing socialist state that does, either (the CPC line on Stalin, for instance, is "70% good, 30% bad").
• In the 80s, some Warsaw Pact countries (possibly just East Germany) were on par with or ahead of the West on LGBT rights, policies that came to an end with the dissolution of the USSR.
• Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state likely more corrupt and undemocratic than even the U.S., and I've seen no Hexbear user defend it, much less its reprehensible stances on LGBT rights. What you will see, however, is discussion of Russia's actual intentions (not propaganda like "Putin is a mustache-twirling villain who does bad things for no reason") and its role as a counterweight to NATO hegemony.

It's also important to consider the USSR's stance on LGBT rights in context of the rest of the world -- they were still wrong to oppress LGBT people, but no one else was doing much better, which indicates those bad policies were not some unique aspect of socialism. Cuba, for instance, just passed a Family Code that has LGBT protections far ahead of anything the U.S. has at a national scale, and the public support programs of socialist countries (housing, education, labor protections, etc.) are significant benefits for any marginalized community even if not expressly intended as such.

You're coming into a thread after it has 1000+ comments, which itself is subsequent to a lot of informal discussion. There's context here.

Part of that context is repeated accusations of Hexbear users brigading. The concept of brigading has its own issues, but to whatever degree it's a real problem, users from other instances dropping in because a thread pops up in their feed (as you presumably did) is not brigading. Users from many instances have said they aren't always sure where they are in every thread post-federation, and Hexbear users have said that, too.

It's important to remember that the Settlers critique of the U.S. is not shared by AES states.

It's how we got MAGA, ISIS, etc. Their ideology accepts summary executions in the street.

What exactly did you mean by this?

"Your parents should have beat you" -- classy