The redesigned mosques remind me of the Kaifeng synagogue, which is quite unlike any synagogue that I have ever seen. If you told me that it was a Confucian or Taoist monastery, I would have believed you.

I don’t see how a Union that prevented another Polish famine and helped reconstruct Poland was worse than an anticommunist empire that exterminated at least 1.8 million Poles in a settler-colonial project and would have annihilated millions more had the Axis won, but then again, I have nothing against Poles either. Sorry that you have no respect for your own people, I guess.

I understand that this is mostly posted/read by young Americans, rather privileged and removed from the subject matter.

Guess what, I can still find Poles like @Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml and @PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml who aren’t anticommunist at all. You want a fucking medal or something? You aren’t anything special.

https://www.cbr.com/disney-animators-why-refused-work-tron

A.I.-generated imagery is likely going to affect traditional art in the same way that knitting machines affected hand knitting.

Wikipedia’s intentional distortion of the Holocaust.

The Soviets instituted the death penalty for possessing an antisemitic book.

Soviet policies lead Transnistrians to resist antisemitism, even during Axis occupation.

The Red Army had the highest number of Jews of all the Allied armies.

I’m disappointed that you are offering a low-quality source like the Financial Times for these serious accusations, and the shoddy reporting is apparent in the article itself:

In many areas, officials have told current and retired civil servants that their benefits will be taken away if they worship more than a few times per year, according to Hui human rights campaigner Ma Ju.

Which officals? Which current and retired civil servants? And why is the only source for this ‘a US-based campaigner for Chinese Muslim rights’? The lack of corroboration should be worrying. Relying on pseudonymous sources is usually not good reporting, either, as they have as many credentials as a common rumourer.

The conclusion is also confusing:

Two years later, these remarks were formalised into the government’s “Five-Year Plan on the Sinicisation of Islam”, which set out to standardise Chinese style in everything from Islamic attire to ceremonies and architecture, and called for the “establishment of an Islamic theology with Chinese characteristics”.

Hui Muslims like Mohammed still fear a possible future without Islam in China.

So, wait, Beijing wants to destroy Islam by… reforming it? I guess that that could be possible in some way, but the article does not explain how.

That being said, I don’t want to dismiss every claim in this article at face value, like restricting religion to adults (which, honestly, might be for the best), but if I believed that Beijing was trying to eradicate Islam then I would be dissatisfied with this article’s quality.

Although this does make me wonder if there are Chinese Muslims consenting to or even ordering these reformations. Perhaps @yogthos@lemmy.ml or @davel@lemmy.ml could inform me on this if they would be so gracious.

I know… but the grumpy leftcom in me still prefers the strict criteria.

Paradoxically, I think that most ultraleftists would roll their eyes at me anyway for having a mostly positive view of the People’s Rep. of China.

Does anybody appreciate it when I avoid emphasising an oppressor’s nationality, or is it really irritating?

I’d be especially interested in reading a German’s, Italian’s, or Japanese’s feedback on this.

These are some of the reasons why I would argue that it is wrong to place the People’s Rep. of China in the category of a generic capitalist country. I actually consider the Chinese economy to be presocialist, but the evidence that I have seen suggests that capital, the law of value, and generalised commodity production are all steadily shrinking in terms of prominence and importance, which is the opposite of what we would expect to find under a typical capitalist régime (id est a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

but whyyyyyyy do you trust Chinese sources??? huh???

Adivina quem teve a ideia de colonizar Palestina.

What are you talking about? Every single information source in the United States is always constantly talking about how great the PRC is, whether it’s in schools, on television, on websites (especially Reddit), on the radio, from think tanks, and so on. A perspective like ‘China also invests in genocide and mass detention, torture, surveillance and rape’ should blow your mind away: nobody has ever said that before! How can you read that and remain unpersuaded‽

Oh. That is a good point. You really showed us how wrong we were. I wish that I were as smart as you.

Have you asked any physicians to vouch for you?

His analysis of fascism was nothing great either.

It’s just another attempt to deliberately confuse people.

The right did it when we went after Milo Yiannopoulos, claiming that we were only targeting him because he was a gay Jew (which was very obviously not the reason). Some rightist dullard several years ago said that an interviewer only rolled his eyes at her because he was sexist. Now we’re seeing the right misportray our anticolonialism as ‘antisemitic’ and coming up with these horseshit reinterpretations of our very simple demands.

I think that they know that these are all bold-faced lies. They tell them in hopes of confusing innocent people who may be unacquainted with the contexts. Anybody with a fully functional brain can tell that calling a cissexist bore a ‘heinous loser’ is very obviously not an example of misogyny, but the context gets lost in the game of telephone that anticommunists love playing.

I miss the days when antisemitism was accusing Jews of being avaricious, dishonest conspirators responsible for nearly every bad thing that happens. Now it’s all boring stuff like saying ‘from the river to the sea’, ‘ceasefire now’, and ‘maybe sending children to a military detention center isn’t a good idea’.

In 1939, the legal expert, Ernst Rudolf Huber, declared: ‘Asking people to vote is intended to strengthen the Führer’s position vis-à-vis the outside world and to be a clear demonstration of national unity. However, it is the Führer who continues to incorporate the true will of the nation.’ Hitler was not, therefore, bound by the results of the votes.

[…]

The [German Fascists] kept speaking of ‘true democracy’, ‘improved democracy’ (Goebbels), ‘better’ and ‘simpler democracy’ (Hitler), or of ‘genuine democracy’. During the 1934 plebiscite, the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, asked: ‘Where in the world is there a country that is ruled so democratically as Germany?’ Hitler liked boasting, above all in the presence of foreigners, of the ‘40 million Germans’, who stood ‘united behind him’; he was not prepared ‘to take any action without having reassured himself of the people’s trust’.

In August 1934 he told foreign correspondents: ‘Every year I take the opportunity to submit my authority to the approval of the German people. […] We barbaric Germans are better democrats than other nations.’ The official justification for the ‘Plebiscite Law’ of 14 July 1933, which was designed to facilitate the ‘consultation of the people’, stated that this was simply a procedure based ‘on old Teutonic legal forms’.

(Source.)

I think that we all hand out permanent bans too easily. It makes sense for obvious ragebait accounts and spambots, but for users who are socially awkward or in need of reeducation, a permanent ban is just too long. That is a measure much better suited for lost causes. I can ask @Alaskaball@hexbear.net to consider reducing your ban (maybe to a week or something), but I can’t promise anything.

I agree that something like the Shoah is extremely unlikely to befall Jewish people again, and seeing so many false alarms over antisemitism would make anybody feel cynical. I take antisemitism seriously and even I have to say that they’re wearing down my morale. It’s like attending a hotline but receiving dozens of calls everyday from little kids over trivial problems.

That being said, some Jews (especially the Charedim) face harassment from individuals, and occasionally the violence becomes lethal. Nearly seven years ago a neofascist stabbed Blaze Bernstein to death, and of course there was the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting later that same year. I know that those aren’t the most recent examples, but it is plausible that the ordinary incidents usually go unreported because the victims don’t expect the authorities to do anything.

Personally, though, I think that the focus on antisemitism is too narrow. Jewish people have plenty of problems, and some will tell you that antisemitism is not even in the top five. They have varying responses depending on where they live: pollution, inaccessible healthcare, want of transportation, want of worker’s rights, or even settler-colonialism (it affects one Puerto Rican Jew whom I know), to name only a few examples. Treating antisemitism as Jews’ only problem is inaccurate and uncreative.