That’s at least partially true, perhaps even predominantly, but there’s also the desire to have very lean distributions for containterization, and GNU is comparatively “bloated,” for lack of a better term.

The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote.[Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

China, in contrast, practices democratic centralism. And its no wonder that the Chinese people are very satisfied with their government, because their quality of life has been improving over the last few generations[2], while ours has been dropping over the last ~40 years of grinding neoliberalism.

Your understanding of China comes exclusively from the imperial core propaganda you & I have been exposed to our entire lives. You’ll never understand it in any other way unless you investigate outside of the bubble we live in.

China wouldn’t. Russia would if it had its druthers, but since it presently doesn’t, it presently won’t. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialist club, but that was rejected, because the US wanted Russia Balkanized & plundered instead. Russia has figured out it’s better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.

I don’t know how someone can confuse internationally illegal invasions of sovereign nations on the other side of the world which resulted in the deaths of over a million people with a domestic terrorism intervention that ended the deaths being caused by terrorist knifing sprees, bombings, and vehicular manslaughters. You’ve really got your head up your ass.

Yours is also full of “propaganda”, for the imperial core.

The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing religious extremist terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and once those efforts failed, it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop.

• The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
• The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
• Uyghur genocide allegations
• American Debunks All Major Western Propaganda on Uyghurs and Xinjiang
• US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
• A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China

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The blueprint of regime change operations

We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.

Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.

The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.

Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.

Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).

Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.

I’m happy when any state chooses China as a partner over the imperial hegemon.

• Are We the Baddies?
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• The blueprint of regime change operations
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

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(map is ~8 years old)

“Forward-defense ring,” a perfectly normal turn of phrase and not at all Orwellian Newspeak.

(map is ~11 years old)

Are you sad that Indonesia doesn’t want to become the United States’ pet?

Almost no predominantly-Muslim country—including Indonesia—buys the Uyghur genocide narrative, because they know it’s bullshit, because they talked to the Uyghurs themselves.
https://twitter.com/un_hrc/status/1578003299827171330

#HRC51 | Draft resolution A/HRC/51/L.6 on holding a debate on the situation of human rights in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of #China, was REJECTED.

The tariffs might be real, whichever ones benefit his toadies, because you’re right that he is the swamp.

I doubt he’ll actually kick that many immigrants out. Despite the rhetoric of the capitalist class, they actually want able-bodied immigrants, because they can exploit the hell out of their labor. The immigration rhetoric is largely kayfabe.

Naomi Klein wasn’t wrong about neoliberal/neocolonial shock therapy, but she was wrong to paint Sachs as the great villain of that story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWYZpF2ngnc

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Pro russia bot

The Russiagate conspiracy theories are evergreeen.

• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away

The protests against Yanukovych were peaceful until his regime turned on the protesters.

That is not what happened. It is now known that that was in fact a false flag attack by CIA-backed Banderite fascists. It is also now known that the “peaceful protest” was not entirely grassroots, but rather astroturfed.

But why am I wasting my time arguing with you when you’re obviously here for some reason to carry water for Russia?

But why am I wasting my arguing with you when you’re obviously here for some reason to carry water for imperialists? The US is aiding and abetting a genocide in Palestine as we speak, yet somehow you still think we’re the good guys (though, to be fair, I wouldn’t call Russia a perfect angel, either).

• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• Are we the baddies?
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• The blueprint of regime change operations
• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

Russia attacked a neighbor unprovoked

I just showed you any number of Western media sources on how it was provoked, but here’s another from Jeffrey Sachs: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

NATO has attacked NOBODY ever.

For just two examples, NATO bombed the city of Belgrade for 78 straight days, and it destroyed Libya.

Stallman, begging to be defenestrated.

All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

That’s not even true, because they don’t all have a GNU userland.

I mean, the US Democrat administration blew up its European partner’s gas pipeline, which is a casus belli, so it was already untrustworthy.

Henry Kissinger:

• America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
• It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.

I don’t know why there’s this one Rush fan who reliably downvotes any good news about socialist states. Maybe they don’t know how embarrassed Neil Peart was about his Ayn Rand phase.

It has unquestionably hurt the Ukrainian people the most.

stock up for itself to defend the next Russian incursion.

As long as NATO stops its incursions, I don’t see why European states would need to do that.

• George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard
• Jeffrey Sachs, May 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
• Jeffrey Sachs, Sep. 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine