Recently:

The case of Smart Shirts Limited vs Sheffield Hallam University was heard in the High Court, King’s Bench Division, Media and Communications List. The judgment was delivered by Deputy High Court Judge Susie Alegre on December 17, 2024. The dispute centered around a libel claim brought by Smart Shirts Limited, a Hong Kong-based garment supplier, against Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) over a report and emails alleging connections to forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)…

The court determined that both the email and the report were defamatory at common law, as they could adversely affect the attitude of others towards Smart Shirts. The judgment emphasized that the publications were presented as factual findings based on extensive research, thereby influencing their perceived credibility.

Notably, the truth is a defense in defamation cases. If I publish an article saying my extensive research shows you cheated on your taxes, you won’t win a libel case against me if my research actually shows you did cheat on your taxes. That the university couldn’t win by simply showing that their accusations were truthful is damning.

See also:

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.

This should also be viewed in context of the U.S. directly funding anti-China media. If you aren’t real interested in factual reporting to begin with and you add a heap of intentionally negative propaganda on top, the only reasonable conclusion is that most of your accusations range from grossly exaggerated to bullshit.

It’s the drop rule but for capitalism

Egalitarian ideals are very new compared to Christianity

Run that one by Jesus and I think he’d be surprised

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-human-shields.html

After Israeli soldiers found Mohammed Shubeir hiding with his family in early March, they detained him for roughly 10 days before releasing him without charge, he said.

During that time, Mr. Shubeir said, the soldiers used him as a human shield.

Mr. Shubeir, then 17, said he was forced to walk handcuffed through the empty ruins of his hometown, Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, searching for explosives set by Hamas. To avoid being blown up themselves, the soldiers made him go ahead, Mr. Shubeir said.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/middleeast/israel-gaza-human-shields-investigation-intl/index.html

In an interview with CNN late last year, an Israeli soldier said his unit had forced a Palestinian man to enter a building ahead of troops…

The exact scale and scope of the practice by the Israeli military is not known. But the testimony of both the soldier and five civilians last year indicated that it was widespread across the territory: in northern Gaza, Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.

One of the civilians, Mohammad Saad, age 20, told CNN that IDF soldiers had detained him in Rafah.

“They would ask us to do things like, ‘move this carpet,’ saying they were looking for tunnels,” he said. “‘Film under the stairs,’ they would say. If they found something, they would tell us to bring it outside. For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israeli-soldier-palestinians-human-shields-gaza/

Tommy [an anonymized name] said his commander ordered his unit to use Gazan civilians to search buildings for explosives instead of dogs…

Breaking the Silence has acted as a watchdog body over the Israeli military for more than 20 years. It said it had corroborated Tommy’s account with other soldiers.

Multiple eyewitness accounts from both sides, and stories from anonymous sources match up with each other, as well as with stories of named sources.

…you actually believe the USSR was executing… someone… if a particular woman didn’t get a science degree?

How do you think unnecessary deaths and imprisonment in the Soviet Union were related to its egalitarian approach to education?

Cool campfire story

The communist party however has already covered up

The conspiracy theory here is this.

you can have a bit of capitalism and a bit of socialism in a healthy mix of free trade economy with regulations

I used to believe this, and I also used to argue against socialists on the same exact grounds.

At some point I noticed that all those nice little bits of socialism that rounded off the edges of capitalism kept getting rolled back. Then I read more about how those safety nets were put up in the first place – I found out they were all bought with the blood of people much farther left than me, and I saw how violently capitalists opposed them. I found that a lot of the reason those safety nets were so nice for so long in the Global North was that our countries were slaughtering people by the millions (again, a lot of leftists) elsewhere in the world to prop capitalism up.

At that point I stopped just nodding along to all the campfire stories about socialist countries. Maybe, like my standard U.S. education had missed a lot of pretty important things about how capitalism works, it had similarly missed some important things about how socialism works.

How are you defining mass parties?

When did they stop working, and why?

Your idea is that… any politics with roots in the 20th century are irrelevant?

When exactly did everyone on the planet wake up and decide history doesn’t matter?

It’s functionally no different than a dollar bill.

In the case of communist ‘money’, I think we would cease using money to kill our neighbor.

Seems like a big difference to me

Doesn’t sound like they live in a bubble, then.

the Republicans fixed the DMV here by running it like a business

Any details?

Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is poor.

Michael Parenti

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

Fidel Castro

Every national economy has some planned parts (utilities and ag in the U.S., for example). Most less-planned capitalist economies don’t work, either – what has capitalism done for the vast majority of people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa?

China is a major example of a more-planned economy working as well as any economy in recorded history. About two-thirds of the economy is in the form of state-owned enterprises, the rest of the economy is firmly answerable to the government, and there’s top-down economic planning at regular intervals. In 75 years this has taken China from a mostly feudal society that had been carved up by various invaders for the previous century to a country with modern living standards and technology on par with anyone in the world.

Central planning is also at the core of the largest companies in the world, even ones that operate outside of significant state economic planning. Apple and Microsoft don’t have internal divisions operate on market principles; they plan and direct resource and labor distribution from the top down. The People’s Republic of Walmart is great reading on this last topic.

If you are incapable of doing so, then your point is simply considered a rumor.

Why don’t you hold yourself to this standard?

Our informative well-sourced arguments, their propagandistic walls of text

You don’t get to keep your weapons when you surrender. It’s just not an accurate summation of the situation. The big difference between surrendering to an opponent vs. agreeing to a ceasefire is that with a ceasefire you can re-start fighting at some point.

Hezbollah surrendering without a ceasefire in Gaza

I don’t think they surrendered to anyone – they just negotiated a ceasefire between them and Israel. Bad, but they’re not off the board like Syria.

Assad won’t really be missed for anything but his compliance in transporting weapons to Lebanon.

Who knows what information Hezbollah had about the impending collapse of Syria that we didn’t have? Who knows how that impacted their ceasefire decision?