You think that China does not extract any economic value out of Tibet? That’s pure naivete.

The victorious imperialists ALWAYS claim that their subjugation of another is to the benefit of that other nations. Always.

Yes yes yes, China freed and liberated Tibet by taking it over. Of course. Nothing imperialist about that.

Just like the US has been liberating and freeing all those people in the middle east.

Let’s start with Tibet.

Being anti-tankie does not make you anti-communist.

Modern day China is both capitalist and emperialist and has a disregard for basic human rights. It is not in any way shape or form a communist state. Oh, and it actively tries to censor and erase the fact that it ran down its own citizens with tanks.

A tankie is someone who blindly supports authoritarian regimes simply because they’re anti-west

You cannot acknowledge anything even slightly negative that China has ever done without being jumped all over

By “being slightly critical” they mean even slightly implying that China is not in every way a completely perfect utopian paradise incapable of doing wrong.

I’m a socialist but not a tankie. Criticizing tankies!= criticizing socialists

I have and I think that there is validity to the propoganda model.

But the propoganda model does not say that all reporting by Western media is false, only that Western media has a hidden bias. But while Western media has an underlying bias to shape a narrative that fits the interests of the wealthy, Chinese state media has an overt and explicit bias to push the narrative in a direction that fits the interests of the state.

So why would I be more skeptical of western reporting on the incident?

There were some Western news outlets that lied about the events and propagated false information, and there were some that that did not.

The fact that Western media outlets cannot be blindly trusted does not mean that the Chinese state controlled media can. The Chinese state has a lot more incentive to lie about the events than independent news orgs do.

You’re right, there isn’t a single Western country that has a freer press than China. In fact, China may be the world’s last bastion of open information and free speech.

Yes, Western media can definitely not be trusted. Better to get the real story from the secretive, authoritarian government that heavily suppresses speech and directly controls its major media outlets.

This is and has always been a red herring. It’s irrelevant if people were killed in the square or in the streets around the square. People were killed in Beijing by the Chinese military in order to suppress the protests. End of story.

I’m having a hard time envisioning a situation where testing my code requires a bunch of unused variables. Just don’t declare the variables until you’ve started writing the code that uses them…

Why in the world would you want to develop something that doesn’t follow the coding rules required by your org, just so you can go back and fix everything before submitting a PR? That’s just extra work.