The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world “polarization” obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of “correct beliefs” and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one’s views. It’s entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it’s quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic – though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President (“Two Corinthians”).

Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I’m sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and “radical” (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn’t need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

What would actually be useful is functional empathy and – god forbid – a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

Paraphrasing Lafayette, “If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5.”

If I was writing it, I’d probably say that the camps in America are “4+4 is 44” and “4+4 is 64”, with “4+4 is 54” being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).

I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.

I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.

Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.

I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:

1. How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?

2. How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?

Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.

China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.

I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.

legitimate western media articles

anti-NATO bullshit

Out of idle curiosity, do you self-identify as a leftist?

That people were killed in Tiananmen Square itself, that the soldiers were the first ones to kill, and that the death toll was something like 10,000. It gets played up on Reddit because of red scare propaganda and plain old chauvinism.

I wasn’t going to say that at first [simply because it’s a bit obnoxious] but since other people are courting drama and I was collecting links from another conversation so it’s convenient to do, so I’ll repost them here:

There was a great deal of violence and many students (along with other protestors, as well as the militants and soldiers) died, so I’ll mark each link with an appropriate content warning, though that’s mostly because the last one is rough, while the ones before it are unlikely to cause people issues.

First, here are video interviews with some of the former student leaders, the first one with Chai Ling actually being before the incident took place. There is some gunfire and yelling that a western news program uses for “ambience”, but nothing is shown. Chai Ling describes a bloody scene, though that specific scene is patently fictional (this is established by the others who are interviewed).

Next is an article which discusses the subject, partly quoting student leaders above. It describes violence in broad strokes but doesn’t have any pictures. It also talks about statements made by a British reporter who was there.

Third, here is secondary reporting leaked on documents from the US Embassy in Beijing and the actual report from a Latin American diplomat that was leaked. The latter revealing contains in its summary: “ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE.” (source text is all caps). There is very little description of violence, just mention of gunfire being present, people being wounded, etc.

{Caution} Lastly, here’s an article written arguing that the event is misrepresented in mass media. I link it mainly because it includes photographic evidence that is very difficult to argue with for reasons beyond it being difficult to look at. Graphic depiction of stripped corpses of soldiers that were strung up after death.

Obviously there’s more than this, but these were the links I collected recently. Chai Ling says things that are even more unhinged in footage I think they excluded from that excerpt of the interview.

Go set up your own instance and never raise this subject here again