InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided]

Mate the chuds and creationists are uniquely your country’s fucking problem

White supremacist right-wingers are uniquely a US problem? I’d agree they’re uniquely powerful in the US but that’s a major reason why the US is “uniquely” the world’s problem. What a strange take to read here, that chuds are only something USians need to be concerned about.

You’ve constructed a straw man from this

That makes no sense. I’m not attacking anything, so there is no strawman to create. You just quoted someone else who said something that Dawkins himself never said, so it seems pretty obvious where the strawman is and who is creating it.

It’s been decades since I read it but the selfish gene was absolutely full of this genre supremacist shit

“Gene supremacist”? lol, what even is that? Understanding how genes replicate is not “gene supremacist shit,” it’s scientific consensus. “The matter of the world around us is made up of atoms and their interactions? That’s just atomic supremacist shit.” These sentences have no meaning.

his evo-psych trash clearly infects all his views

To the extent he believes in evo-psych, I’m sure it does effect his views, some of which I explicitly addressed. That doesn’t invalidate the real science, which despite being a terrible person, he has also done and made contributions to. He’s hardly the only scientist who had a lot of shit views on other topics, that’s even the majority. Plenty of them think their expertise on one topic makes them an authority on others and they are wrong, and Dawkins is one of these as well. That doesn’t make him wrong about how genes work or the broader biology and it certainly doesn’t make the premise of The Selfish Gene wrong.

You’re not misremembering because those were major misconceptions about what he was saying, especially in the premise of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene. But that book as well as his other ones on evolution, genetics, and biology are accurate, with Selfish Gene just being a popular-accessible explanation of the scientific consensus on the role of genes in evolutionary biology. It was misconstrued, often intentionally and said to be this nihilistic justification for human selfishness, which it’s not, and I think that’s what you’re remembering. It’s one of those instances where someone who may be an asshole and totally worthy of criticism gets criticized for mostly the wrong reasons, and those wrong reasons are what end up getting solidified in memory incorrectly as why they’re an asshole.

Replicating molecules (like DNA) replicating and propagating themselves is the “reason” for the whole thing in terms of how biology at the molecular level works. It’s not an answer to a “why” question, but a description of what’s really going on at scales we aren’t used to thinking about or readily able to see. But neither Dawkins or any other evolutionary biologist I’m aware of ever implied that DNA is all that “matters” or that or that other systems aren’t at play in reality. Just like the fact that “all the matter we see, including life, is composed of interacting atoms” does not negate the presence of society or human emotion, neither does the genetic description for the foundation of life and how it evolves.

But all of that is aside from Dawkins’ Islamophobia, misogyny, deep misunderstanding of systemic racism (i.e., just racism), his flippant disregard of (CW) SA victims with the justification that he was one himself and therefore had the right to extrapolate everyone else, his creepy views on human sexuality, etc. In other words, Dawkins is a shit person and absolutely should be called on all the disgusting nonsense he’s said, but let’s call him on what he actually got wrong and not perpetuate misconceptions about all the stuff he got totally right regarding evolution and biology, which ultimately just carries water for the chuds and creationists.

Dawkins is a piece of shit for a number of reasons, but where did he ever say anything like that?

There are certainly different people with different preferences, and most Chinese people are indeed fine with CCP. A dictatorship has an obvious need to maintain many nationalist, so it is not surprising that you can find Chinese who loves CCP.

Lol “it’s no surprise the vast majority of people approve of and appreciate their government, since a dictatorship has to be maintained.” Yeah, what an awful, terrible dictatorship that rules with such an iron fist that it forced the approval and support of over 90% of the population. Clearly, in any real democracy, everyone hates their government, like the in the US. You sinophobic liberals are such a transparent joke.

Many people are more than willing to turn a blind eye on all the artists, journalist, and lawyer, who were arrested, since it has nothing to do when them. This is a emotional topics for me, because one of my highschool classmate has been seperated from her father, for he was advocating more transparent laws and enforcement.

And the lead protesters in the US who advocated for… the state to stop murdering black people openly in the street were themselves murdered and disappeared. It’s an emotional topic for me since people I knew in school were beaten half to death and permanently blinded by the police. The US is an infinitely more heinous dictatorship than China, violently suppressing anyone it deems a threat, while pretending they have “freedom” because they don’t crack down on the ones that are of no threat.

There are plenty of Chinese mastodon instance. Go there talk to them and see what they think.

I don’t need to, I can and do talk to plenty of people from and currently in China. Even a few irl!

Of course, you don’t need to believe me, or people on mastodon, or journalist from all “mainstream media”; and just trust people on hexbear. But that will likely be no different from people who only believe fox news and infowars.

It’s not about trusting people on hexbear, it’s about trusting the population of China, which again has overwhelming support for the CPC. It’s also about being able to plainly see what the CPC does both domestically and internationally. I trust the Chinese people.

OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml did. Oh wait, they didn’t paste the specific numbers that are both widely known and readily available, able to be found within a few seconds using search engine, they only referenced them. My mistake, I had assumed you were capable of doing that. But since you’re not:

World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

Looks like someone couldn’t handle some actual statistics when presented with them.

Honestly, I am quite surprised how low tankies are willing to go to defend China. As a Chinese, it is very disheartening to me that people have never experienced or seen the suffering of living under an authoritarian government, are more willing to blindly defend it

There are literally some “tankies” on hexbear that are in China and posting from China right now. @Flyberius@hexbear.net. There are some users here who are Chinese and grew up there (not sure if they’d want to be tagged though). There are journalists who decided to go live there in part because of how much more freedom they are afforded there, people like Ben Norton, who you would probably also label a “tankie.” All of whom can attest to how baseless and sinophobic all the fabricated “suffering of living under an authoritarian government” stories really are. We aren’t all just clueless westerners, but your assumption that we are is also telling.

That doesn’t matter you numbskull, she not only endorses but is the enforcer and overseer of the racist system that does execute black people regularly (and they do it with trials or not, it doesn’t matter - it’s literal state murder with racist motivations). Your position is the same as “but did HITLER pull the lever that released the zyclon b gas?”

And yes, Harris actually did convict people, including black people.

you aren’t necesarily a racist for arresting a black person

Yes you are. You’re racist if you enforce a deeply racist system, especially one that regularly executes black people with and without trial.

Then you need to do more reading because I did work in this field and have read the science on it as well. First all, you have to take into account what time scales are being discussed. What you’re reading is, I’m all but certain, just talking about the coming few decades, in which yes, millions at least will likely die. And even then the science that tends to reach the public is toned down, pacified, and doesn’t represent the whole truth. You should be familiar with this as a communist trying to get an understanding of what’s really going on with the world via popular journalism. Is what you’re reading about “catastrophic weather events” also discussing what will be happening 1000 years from now? 10,000? Despite the longer scale, what we are doing right now and in the coming decades will have an effect on those longer scales. Climate change is so much more than simply an intensification of weather events. It is literally a rapid change to the composition of our atmosphere. An atmosphere which has, by the way, been completely altered by life in one of the most chemically fundamental ways possible, from a reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing one. This is what I mean when I say even many leftists just do not understand how extreme the risks are here. A runaway greenhouse wouldn’t just kill a billion, it could well end our species and most other species of “higher lifeforms.”

Well… Earth becoming more like Venus is an inevitability in the high hundreds of millions of years (and for scale, multicellular life has been around for roughly 5-600M years, with the more than 3 billion before that just being simple single-celled prokaryotic life), but that is completely independent of anthropogenic climate change, it is because of the expansion of the sun towards it’s red giant phase. In terms of being habitable to life, Earth is easily past the half-way mark already, no matter what. However, that is far enough out that it doesn’t bear worrying about and isn’t something we can have any sort of impact on.

That said, the climate change that we as a species are causing right now could lead to a runaway greenhouse effect on much shorter time scales. The fact is, there have been times in Earth’s history where it has been so hot that complex life could mostly only survive at the poles (with the equator being a death zone to all but simple, single-cellular extremophiles) and there have been times where Earth was encased almost entirely in ice except perhaps at the equators - not just our usual conception of an ice age, but “snowball earth,” and this was likely caused by certain forms of simple life, fascinatingly enough. The feedback loops we are triggering right now have a potential to drastically change the composition of the atmosphere on a far shorter timescale, one in which we are talking about an end to most complex life (obviously ourselves included). It was almost certainly volcanism that caused Venus to go from a mostly habitable planet to the completely, utterly inhospitable world it is. Volcanism has also been responsible for extreme heat and mass extinctions on Earth, but obviously it never tipped over into Venus-like territory. The thing is, right now we’re changing the atmosphere at a rate far faster than volcanism has in the past! And rate of change matters a lot with this kind of thing. I’m repeating myself, but again, it is not a certainty but it is a possibility that anthropogenic climate change could hit tipping points that Venus-ifies Earth on a much shorter, nearer term than anything relating to the expansion of the sun, on time scales that are worth worrying about (if we value humanity as a whole), and is the sort of thing we can have an impact on.

Both. I do believe that “communism will win” as an inevitability (with one big caveat, see below). Capitalism obviously is unsustainable and rife with internal contradictions that can only lead to its eventual demise. The obvious and broad example being that it requires infinite growth on a finite planet. But I think it can get very bad before it gets better, and expect it will further devolve into fascism (much more so than it already has) for most if not all of the western world, and the entire world will suffer as a result. Socialism, then communism will eventually emerge (since fascism is just as doomed by its contradictions as capitalism is), but before we get there, I expect there is going to be some truly unimaginably dark and horrible times on the way there. So in that sense, I am ultimately optimistic about the future of the world, but extremely pessimistic about its more immediate future.

But now for the caveat. I think that most people, even leftists, don’t fully appreciate how much climate change is going to reshape the world. There is a real chance that it will get bad enough that civilization may not survive, that humanity as a species will be among the many that don’t make it through the mass extinction we’ve only just entered. Even people fully on board with knowing climate change is bad and must be curtailed as much as possible as soon as possible still mostly don’t realize how much a genuine existential threat it is on a planetary scale, on a scale of centuries and longer. It is by no means a certainty, but given the feedback loops we don’t fully understand and definitely don’t know how to interrupt, there is a possibility of Earth even going the way of Venus. Obviously I hope that’s not the case, but it would be a mistake not to recognize the extreme potential of climate change. If we are able to mitigate it in time, I am like I said, ultimately optimistic. But I am beyond afraid that we won’t be able to mitigate it in time.

In other words, it’s not just “socialism or barbarism,” it’s socialism or annihilation.

Just because you aren’t used to hearing about the vast reality beyond the propaganda bubble you’ve (knowingly or unknowingly) confined yourself to, that doesn’t mean that something you encounter outside of that bubble that contradicts it isn’t factually the truth. If anything, as a rule of thumb, it’s more likely to be closer to the truth if it contradicts whatever narrative nonsense you’ve been swallowing from any given large western media news outlet.

Bro, learn to read paragraphs. My comment above is literally made up of two of them of very normal and standard size. Have you ever read a book? Paragraphs written in places other than twitter or reddit tend not to be broken up arbitrarily every 2 sentences like it seems you wanted me to do.

The question is why won’t you condemn the aggressor and stop putting the onus of peace on the people who are being murdered by an aggressor?

The people being murdered… Oh, you mean the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine? The ones who the openly fascist banderite government (that coupe’d the democratically elected government in 2014) were trying to ethnically cleanse when Russia stepped in and prevented it? Yes, I do support those people of Donbas, and seeing as they support Russia, you should too if you care about innocent people getting murdered. Similarly, I condemn the aggressors, the aforementioned banderite Ukrainian fascists and their NATO backers.

I’m not the person you were asking, but yes, I also support the people of Western Ukraine, the vast majority of whom do not want to fight in this war but are being press ganged, literally kidnapped off the street by the Ukrainian government and shipped off to be cannon fodder and die on the front line. I fully support them and advocate for the immediate end of this war so that no more of them will die needlessly in this senseless meat grinder that NATO and the Ukrainian government insist on perpetuating despite their inevitable loss. If you care about human life and if you care about justice, then you would completely support Ukraine immediately accepting this peace offer. If you think human life is cheap (especially if it’s foreign to you) and that Ukrainian working class people are expendable and should go ahead and die for the sake of lines on a map that favor western countries, then yeah, that would be in line with cheerleading for the Ukrainian government and opposing the offer of peace.

Russia is neither fascist nor “the aggressor.” Anyone who doesn’t recognize that Russia entered a civil war where one side (a coup government with an actual fascist military that openly admits their fascism) was trying to ethnically cleanse the other side (who are speakers of the Russian language) doesn’t know what the fuck is going on and has almost certainly swallowed gallons of propaganda.

could stop it at any minute by returning to their own territory

And then what would happen to the people of Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas? They would get ethnically cleansed. But I guess you don’t give a shit about that? Or you literally didn’t know about that?

and admitting that they’re simply the bad guys in this war?

Baby-brained simplistic bullshit. No, Russia is not “the bad guy” in this war and you need to expose yourself to more of the world than fucking marvel movies. Also, the word fascist has a meaning, it’s not a synonym for “bad guys,” and if you had any exposure to the world beyond your little bubble from which you lap up propaganda like it’s ice cream, you’d know that (for example) the US just as if not closer to being fascist than Russia.

Nah, there was never any point where Russia was going to lose this unless countries other than Ukraine joined in with more than just grift money and weapon donations but with actual troops on a large scale (beyond just small scale mercs that are easy to deny). And fortunately that wasn’t too likely to happen because even the most belligerent NATO warhawks knew it would be seriously risking global nuclear war. So many internet armchair generals, mostly NAFO dipshits but plenty of Russia-aligned SMO-watchers too, were (and are) way too focused on the lines on the map, the fine details of kettles and who held what small towns, etc, all without recognizing the bigger picture: long term attrition. In that sense, Russia has always had the upper hand by a large margin. That’s not going to change either. Russia is, as you say, “slowly getting the upper hand,” in the more obvious ways but this was always what was in the cards and it’s just going to continue in that same inevitable direction. The only way Russia will lose this war is if there is some major change in how things are set up on the global stage.

Also it’s not really true to say that Russia is asking for more than they hold because even if some areas are still contested, Ukraine has no chance of hanging on to them. As others have noted, this is a very generous offer and I expect it’s only being made because Russia is plainly aware that Ukraine will not accept it (in fact Ukraine cannot accept it because those who fund them, those who are using Ukraine as their proxy and who are ultimately responsible for all this, wouldn’t allow them to). That’s the only way in which this offer is “dishonest,” if you consider it dishonest for Russia to propose a plan they know full well that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of Ukraine accepting.

Yeah, something of that proportion could not be kept secret even if all NATO member states were all in total agreement and unity and even with the avowed silence of high officials. It also would at least partially defeat the purpose of NATO if a state joining it were to be kept secret.

That’s right! We have to make sure the very last Ukrainian dies in a meat grinder before we even think about agreeing to these completely reasonable, even generous peace terms. Wait, what’s that? Russia will have even better leverage and grounds to demand even more concessions the longer this conflict goes on and the further Ukraine gets beaten back? Damn, oh well who cares? As long as western arms manufacturers can keep their grift going a little longer and a few more Eastern Asiastics get taken out, it will be well worth it, right guys?

Lol. I wouldn’t have been surprised by this kind of blatant cope a year or two ago. Those cringe lies about Russians not knowing how to fight or having inferior tech were all the rage among the NAFO losers at the time. Of course it was all projection even then, but now that Russia is so obviously and thoroughly spanking Ukraine, it’s much harder to phrase the “Russian orcs are dumbdumbs who fight with shovels!” line without doing a massive self-own.

And speaking of self-owns, it’s pretty funny that you insist on bringing up a completely unrelated topic where you were totally not owned by people who schooled you in an attempt to disabuse you of your willful ignorance regarding Tienanmen Square. But it looks like you won’t even believe your vaunted western liberal sources when it comes to making sure you don’t have to take your head out of the sand.

edit: Looks like I was a little late to reply to this one. Does anyone know if a user still sees responses to their comment if the reply was made after the parent comment was removed?