Despite everything, I still miss compiz…

if this guy read literally any scientific journal in the last year he would not be able to say this

Precisely.

To me, laziness that involves doing a lot of work hardly qualifies as such.

If we do, we will fight to the last Taiwanese. You can count on that.

It’s not just a question of laziness IMO. Censorship can also take a lot of bureaucratic work. But it has a reliability advantage that counter-propaganda does not.

Plus, the domestic situation is more important than what some liberals in the global north think. They will always find a way to hate China if the geopolitical situation calls for it, including funding terrorist organizations to stoke a proxy war to help destabilize China and then blaming China for carrying out a successful and relatively humane counterterrorism campaign. There’s no winning with these people. All you can do is your best.

Counter-propaganda runs the risk of putting protest front of mind in the people because you’re talking about a protest. It requires constant work to keep it up. And it can engender suspicion more than censorship. In a situation where people are already indoctrinated like in the US, you have to do counter-propaganda, reeducation, or cultural revolution to clear certain things up. But it’s a lot easier to not need to do that in the first place, and that’s what censorship can sometimes accomplish.

Like Covid, if enough people take the bait and a meme begins to spread, censorship can stop working. In this case counter-propaganda can become the preferred strategy. Something similar happened in China where Covid became so contagious that zero-Covid became too expensive or difficult to keep up. Containment was breached such that it became untenable. In the case of Covid the result was about a million deaths in China. In a lot of cases, these are not small consequences. Moving on from censorship is likely seen as too risky with not enough upside, although this is only my speculation.

All current actually existing socialism is in a defensive stance. This is needed because of the history of bourgeois liberal democracies seeking to destabilize and collapse socialist states by any means necessary. Socialist states that didn’t do a good enough job of defending themselves are no longer with us largely because of such actions. This is precisely why government censorship exists in China, to help maintain the social order and ensure stability of the socialist state. Stability is especially valued in China for historical reasons. Other AES countries like Vietnam also censor things like hate speech or misinformation to some extent, including jail time for the worst offenders.

For Tiananmen Square specifically, there’s a huge misinformation campaign from Western countries about the events of the protest. If you go up to a random Westerner, show them the iconic photo of the man in front of the tank, and ask them what happened to the man, they will likely tell you that the man was run over. This is, of course, not what happened, and there’s video evidence to this effect. But the misinformation in the West is hegemonic and entrenched, and if it got around in the PRC, it would take a lot of time and effort to debunk it and not everyone would believe you anyway. So, for the Chinese government, they prevent people from bringing it up more than absolutely necessary by censorship. It’s not the ideal solution but it will have to do for now.

If that is enough to squick you out about MLism you should do some introspection about why that is. If you’re truly committed to revolutionary politics you may find yourself needing to do much worse than censorship in the future. It is necessary for revolutionary movements to strike a balance between achieving their goals and avoiding the worst excesses of revolutions. As we know from history, this can be quite a difficult balance to strike, especially if the people have had a boot on their neck for a long time and are full of righteous anger. We need people like you in our movements to rein us in, but not so much that the revolution fails and all of it was for nothing.

It’s probably censored because it’s a politically sensitive topic. From my reading, the article is meant to promote tourism and pride in national monuments, not to discuss history in detail. Mentioning those events is seen as encouraging social unrest.

this has to be fake. are there really people who don’t know the history of armies invading Russia in the winter?

Uranium isn’t as bad for wheat as it is for root vegetables like carrots and turnips. It could be an occupational hazard for those who are tilling the fields though.

we won’t rest until the price of an oil is $2,147,483,647.

What about birth defects???

I guarantee that is not going to be the only thing on offer.

Although, if you use it as a starting point and try to debunk its conclusions, you can often learn a little faster.

what’s with this wacky yellowcore background?

it would also be interesting to compare wages to cost of living somehow.

those noodles? you guessed it, made of rice.

That’s true, but it’s not always possible, especially if you live there like me.

Personally I think white rice is still a good choice as long as you stick to rice grown outside of the US. Rice grown in California can also be OK in terms of arsenic content.