TreadOnMe [none/use name] @ TreadOnMe @hexbear.net

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5 yr. ago

That makes more sense, since those areas would have been heavily industrialized.

You have this weird idea that tying up the US financial sector into Chinese assets would not be a win for China at the moment. You want to cause issues in a country, get everything directly aligned against the geopolitical projections of the military industrial complex. That said, to the degree that the English Chinese media portrays itself as wanting U.S. investment, it's likely because much of the Chinese bourgeois financial assets are tied up in the U.S. and Canada, which was a poor decision by them, and places them right in the line of expropriation if an actual conflict pops off between the U.S. and China. If Wall St gets as involved in China as the U.S. retail and services market does, that limits the possibility of that happening, as the financial sector has massive political sway in D.C. specifically.

55% tariffs is absolutely a win. It does nothing to actually create an incentive for the U.S. to actually pivot towards rebuilding it's domestic manufacturing base, since Chinese products are usually three to four times less than their competitors anyways, and is a drop in the bucket for what they actually trade globally. And this is besides the point that if they really cared, they would likely just redirect the trade through cut-outs in Malaysian.

The way we will know if this was actually a win for the U.S. is if Chinese companies start acquiring domestic manufacturers and then developing the domestic manufacturing production in the U.S. as has happened with the Saudi and UAE bourgeois in order to get around the tariffs.

Edit: Reading through this and other stuff you have posted, you make the assumption that the U.S. is going to somehow reverse it's decline in the ability to militarily project force and that they will eventually be able to take out China militarily. I am on the opposite side of that speculation. We are simply not going to agree on this. I too hope that China doesn't pull another China-Vietnam war and not learn from the mistakes of the U.S. in terms of understanding the changes and adaptations made in modern warfare. Historically, they have been very poor at it, and given how conflict adverse they are, they likely won't have any real experience up until the big one happens.

2nd Edit: And none of this implies that this is 'Good for Communism'. I think it is good for China, but I'm pretty unsure if continually entrenching yourself in the neoliberal world order will ever be a fantastic way to bring it about globally.

I was about to say, as a straight male patron of many a lesbian bar (because they are usually cheap dives), and the facilitator of at least three relationships through the process of 'being sociable', this is less of a 'how lesbian bars are' and more of a 'how lesbians wish lesbian bars were'. Maybe I'm just not going to the correct lesbian bars.

You are also missing the straight women who have mistaken it for a gay bar.

Yeah, it's totally better when you have completely paid actors in your advertising. Not even kidding, I watched many commercials be filmed in the retail store I worked at because it was right next to the corporate office, and they never once had an actual retail employee on film.

Or when you have a social media person whose whole job is to gussy up basic things like being able to take breaks and talk to your co-workers as being a 'fun work family'. Nope no advertising or influencing happening here.

That remains to be seen. I personally think one side or the other must win out, and that will be when the opportunity presents itself, because they both need to exist for the empire to continue running. If one side wins, it will destabilize the entire project, and that is where opportunity lies.

It's not the in-fighting that benefits us, it is the assumed total victory against their greatest challenger that will leave them open.

Yeah I had many similar experiences when some o my acquaintances in high school started an 'atheist club' and asked me to join because I was one of the more vocal non-believers in school (in that I would actively discuss and push back against faith-based narratives in class, but just within what was being discussed) but was still friendly with the more liberal evangelicals. I think I attended two meetings before I realized that most of them were just "Science as the superior faith" people and not really all that interested in the philosophy of knowledge or how to know things. It was a really eye opening moment for me that there needs to be more to this whole skeptic thing than just contrarianism, and felt that it was doomed to online obscurity.

I don't think much has changed, if anything there are more conservative Dennis's than there ever were before.

I'm not even sure Stalin has anything to do with the specific borders being drawn, he likely would have just reviewed and approved what was written up before it was sent to the general assembly of Soviets. But he was also abit of a notorious micro-manager, so it is possible that he would have been leading the meetings where it was discussed, but so would have multiple representatives from the Ukrainian nationalists and other affected Ukrianian and Russian speaking Soviets.

Hell part of my understanding was that part of the reason the USR got Russian speaking lands was as a form of reparations for treatment under the Russian empire, though it has since been portrayed as Stalin forcing Russian speaking people onto the USR in order to control it politically. This, of course, makes no sense since the RSR already was in control of the land politically and allied with the nascent Ukrianian nationalists, and that until recently, most Ukrainians and Russians understood themselves to be 'brother-people' which has a specific word in Russian and Ukrianian. Basically, it would have required Stalin to not only understand and plan for post-Cold War Russian politics, it also would have had him understand and plan for post-WWII Soviet politics, and been explicitly against the brand of socialism that he was the leader of the faction of.

Damn, can't believe God was the Politburo's nationalism committee headed by Stalin.

A good rule of thumb is to assume that your average American is Mac from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in that the fact that science makes you look like a bitch sometimes is evidence that it doesn't actually know things. Or they are Dennis in that they assume that the science is right because that makes them feel superior to others, not because they are actually interested in the truth-value, or why and how we understand the science.

I don't think philosophy has been killed in stem, it is just that they are fed bits and pieces of it, without context of the whole, and in an incredibly purposeful way meant to counter revolutionary dialectical materialism.

For example, the engineering business philosophies driving global industry such as Deming or Shewart are ways of attempting to create a communistic ownership mindset within a company without actually giving ownership of production to the workers in order to have a better control over variability in production.

Deming straight up identifies poor management as being the primary cause of poor quality in products, and blamed basically all the things that we know are caused by capitalism without actually naming the beast itself. It is statistically driven Marxism without economic or class analysis, and in direct contrast to libertarian religious theory of what drives innovation. Of course, because of this, Deming is unable to come to a definitive reasoning as to why quality doesn't ever arise spontaneously in American corporations, but it is all there, it just needs to be put together with a spirit of revolution. But that doesn't usually happen because engineers in this country are still fairly well paid, move up quickly into management positions, and are also on the whole denser than tungsten when it comes to putting philosophical ideas together into a coherent whole.

Nothing like hearing about stoicism as a way to justify your crimes from the most driven by their feelings babies on the planet.

As I have said before, the service and finance sector are growing worried by the incoherence and audacious nature of the military industrial complex. We will see much more of this in the future as the waning geopolitical might of the U.S. is eroded.

My view of it is that news media isn't interactive enough for them anymore, especially since Jan 6th, they want to be part of the participatory television. It's not that they want or hope for real change, they just want to be part of the spectacle, not just observe it.

It would be virtue-signalling for them to stop trading with Israel, of which my understanding is that many government owned entities have already as Israel is seen as a risky investment (which yeah). Sanctions would not deter anything that is going on in Palestine, as they have been completely ineffective elsewhere, and particularly ineffective with the U.S.'s full backing. They will make hay while the sun shines.

China is literally in range of Iran's missiles who, while on friendly terms, is not, unlike Pakistan, an official ally of China, in relation to their permanent conflict with China's major local geopolitical rival, India. In the same way, the less data that the U.S. has on any of the performance specs of Chinese anti-air capabilities, the better. The rewards simply do not outweigh the risks.

Capital investments and technology transfers are painstaking processes can take years to implement effectively, which by now would likely be too little, too late. If Iran is able to stand on it's own through this I can see China seeking to strengthen their relationship, but it was unlikely before.

What would you have China do? March out to another country to assist them, because that went swimmingly for the USSR? Profusely arm them with the latest and greatest despite them having no other common cause than some replaceable trading relationships and a common enemy?

There was already massive amounts of internal fighting going on in DC when just the rare earths ban was threatened. It literally was enough to bring Trump back, tail between his legs, to the negotiating table.

It does not require a third party. It requires the interests of the massive lobbyists in the retail service and finance sectors to be at odds with the interests of the massive lobbyists in the manufacturing and military-industrial complex. One of them is in control of the vast majority of the U.S. economy, and it's not the manufacturing and military-industrial complex. If the military industrial complex chooses to pursue this, it would be a lobbying coup that would permanently wreck the U.S. domestic economy, destroy the remainder of their financial imperialism, and they would still lose to China. A war with China would cause the leadership in this country to eat itself alive, and the leadership knows this, otherwise they already would have done it. They have been deterred, and the longer they are deterred, the stronger China becomes.

It may be inevitable that the mad man pursues mad action, but they aren't mad enough to do so yet, and there no reason to force them towards that when you are getting stronger and they are getting sicker.

Exactly. For the vast majority of these protestors, the police will not brutalize them, because they pose no actual threat to their operations. For these liberals, the narrative that it is only violent protestors who get the boot will be entrenched.

They will say to themselves and other, 'I went to the No Kings protests and was perfectly fine, I even shook hands with the police, those BLM protestors and (insert group of the year) must have been doing something dangerous and illegal!'

The masses in most of these cities aren't even angry though. They are mildly annoyed that the man on the TV isn't the correct looking man on the TV.

You are misunderstanding the Mao quote. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun but it is not the only way to pursue power after deterrence has been established.

China has about three cards to play, that they have been good faith negotiators for the last 40 years and the entirety of the 21st century, they control a plurality of the worlds manufacturing production (and the labor force to back it up), and while the capabilities of it have not been tested, likely one of the most advanced anti-air and anti-missile arsenals in history which unlike Iran's is fully networked and will not be the subject of internal cyber attacks and failures, even if it cannot protect the entirety of China. They have the power that grows from the barrel of a gun.

The U.S. on the other hand, globally, has about two cards to play, both of which have been shown to only have limited effect. Sanctions and bombings. Both of which have been shown to be basically ineffective at achieving your geopolitical aims in the 21st century outside of mindless destruction.

Much like with Russia, it doesn't matter if you destroy all of China's allies, eventually even your allies will trade with them and fill the market gaps left. As long as they can prevent internal dissolution and discontent, their path towards being the premier global trader and cultural power is assured. And this is besides the fact that the U.S. would have to face a massive internal civil war of their own bourgeois if we were to ever actually go to war with China. Our entire petite bourgeois economy would grind to a halt within three to four weeks, which is the other gun has to the U.S.'s head.

I love that the American misrepresentation of what role the Kim family plays in North Korean politics has completely buffaloed Trump into thinking that Americans will ever be able to "Sit up and listen." We don't have anything close to a culture of respect for others that is required for such a thing to happen. Hell, Trump directly contributed to that culture of disrespect multiple times with his comments on Obama (not that Obama doesn't deserve massive amounts of criticism and disrespect).

It's synth jazz, which is fairly popular outside of the U.S.