Yeah pretty much

Last I heard, Trump’s own actions were tanking the popularity of his European equivalents across the board. Reform UK for example peaked in the polls about a year ago, and have been dropping ever since.

I migrated to Ubuntu from Windows 10 when it became end-of-life last year. I had a major head start beforehand because my work allowed me to dabble in Linux for a good 2 years beforehand, though! It’s been great! Pretty much everything that you “can’t do” on Windows has some sort of open source alternative. Can’t have Microsoft Office on Linux? Download Libreoffice for free! Can’t have Adobe Creative Cloud? Just download Krita and Kdenlive for free! Can’t have Microsoft Edge? What on earth do you want it for?? You don’t really need to use the terminal for most things, but it can make a lot of things much easier and quicker if/when you do get your head round it.

The only notable weak point is a few specific online videogames. Valve Anti Cheat really doesn’t play well with Linux (which is really dumb because Valve are so well known for supporting Linux). I’ve managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 playing online using “Steam Runtime 1.0 (scout)” but I haven’t found anything that works for Team Fortress 2. That being said, most other online games like Bloons TD6 and Worms WMD work perfectly natively, 90% of games released last year were natively Linux compatible, and the CEO of GOG said they’d like to support Linux more too, so even this is an improving situation!

The Belt and Road Initiative isn’t the win-win co-operation that it’s made out to be. The Global South gets these contracts to build all these shiny motorways and other infrastructure… to ship materials to China. The roads are usually well out of urban centres and only made for the sake of easier trade with China, not to make ordinary people’s lives easier. The contracts state that all the construction has to be done by Chinese companies, so the money goes back to China despite being framed as some sort of charity (they even ship over Chinese workers so it doesn’t even create jobs for the host country) and the host country has to pay back the loan with interest anyway. I forgot to mention, if the host country can’t pay back a BRI loan, China’s been known to accept other payments like taking the host country’s ports. Doesn’t that sound like imperialism? Oh, and they often fall apart after a few years. Pakistan, Uganda and Equador specifically are having issues with cracks appearing in BRI dams, which could lead to entire towns being flooded.

I don’t know about opinion polls to measure China’s democracy. The CCP have ways of “persuading” citizens to feel like the government respects them. According to the World Press Freedom Index, China actually has the third worst freedom of press in the world, ahead of only North Korea and Eritrea.

The idea of Russia getting a free pass as better than the US simply because it can’t do as much damage is interesting, sort of like an equality vs equity argument, but at the moment Russia’s the only one throwing around literal nuke threats like christmas cracker jokes.

The meme comparing Xi Jingping to Winnie the Pooh has its origins in China, so it’s nothing racial.

Since you mentioned that Chinese propaganda isn’t good either, I know you’re arguing in good faith. I’ll also say that before 2025 I would have said China was easily worse than the US, but now I’m not so sure. Either way, it’s comparing mouldy apples to mouldy oranges.