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cat botherer posted:Thanks FF! It does make sense, especially with the treadmill of steppe nomads conquering settled peoples and then getting soft. It still seems like there would be way better ways of trying to maintain separation, though. Oh there are definitely better ways. The thing is that because it’s a performance of power, it almost doesn’t matter how effective it was or wasn’t so much as “look, if I can make you do this silly bullshit, even if you’re faking it, I’m in charge”. They didn’t make the sort of distinction between for lack of better words, pageantry and public policy that we do. So, the earlier examples of 18th century European aristocrats wearing stockings and periwigs that got more and more exaggerated, it doesn’t matter if it looked ridiculous aesthetically, they could say to any burgher criticizing them, “it looks like access to the court, and therefore power, and that’s not so loving silly is it?”Receiving lands carved out by the Sun King’s conquests is worth wearing a fake mole, right? I mean, pragmatically, postmodern subjects that we are, we can realize “wear these clothes to get rewarded/punished” is effective as long as the person making the rules has the authority to reward or punish you. The Manchu forcing Han Chinese to do that worked the same way. It’s effective (as long as), their power to carry out their threat/promise was effective. Because it was a direct expression of power, it’s why during the Taiping the rebels started their rebellion by growing their hair out, and expressed their sovereignty, once they controlled territory, by their subjects doing the same thing, on pain of death. They were demonstrating that they, not the Qing, had a monopoly of violence, so the power of a state, over a defined territory and population, which could be seen by who had what hairstyle. It’s why when the Qing started winning, they killed anyone whose hair had grown out. I realize that it’s ineffective, I mean this is not how we would govern or rebel against state authority, but we live in a world with different measures of power and authority. To my earlier point about the Kraut usurper Hannovarians, they perform being more-British-than-British, whereas before Victoria they often spent as much time in Hannover as England and barely spoke English. They now stand for the country itself rather than a dynasty ruling it by right of conquest, so their symbols have been reconfigured. There are some very amusing books about this because Queen Victoria playacted being Scottish at Balmoral while she was raised in a German court. Like, the degree to which they took on Scottish symbols, and she demanded visitors to Balmoral dress like Scottish peasants, it’s very funny, but it was also good politics because when she started her reign, how German she and Albert were was the major source of controversy, to the point where people talked about a republic or other claimants. Nationalism changed the game, as far as how dynasties have to adopt symbols, that’s a big change in one lifetime. There’s a book about Prince Phillip’s childhood in Greece and you can see his entire family getting less “German” and more “Greek” as their holds on power came under pressure. Then, when he’s been considered as a candidate to marry Elizabeth, he’s “British”, he starts dressing and acting like a career Royal Navy man, or more likely the calculation, Victoria’s predecessor, William IV “The Sailor King”. e: Sun Yat Sen and others actually debated the queue and “Manchu”, “Chinese” or “Western” dress in the new China, apparently quite intensely. I know very little about the particulars though. Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 18:28 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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this comes up all the time when people talk about imperial regalia so for example, when people say “oh, can you believe only the Byzantine emperor was allowed to wear purple isn’t that silly?” Yeah! He was emperor. Only he could wear purple! Imagine having an executive that powerful now.
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Jan 9, 2024 18:31
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VoicesCanBe posted:The only pressure point that would have even a remote chance of working is Taiwan. well i think taiwan is probably a non-starter because it's completely unwinnable and also china has no reason to invade. maybe if the us did a Taiwanese missile crisis type deal they could trick china into shooting up the island and just let all the Taiwanese die without reacting with nukes but i don't think that's realistic for a number of reasons
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Jan 9, 2024 18:33
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Hatebag posted:well us ukraine policy has largely been successful if the goal was to isolate european markets from russia and economically weaken europe to make it easier to manipulate. that dovetails with brexit nicely, too. The only country the US can use the new war to force cutting trade with China is Japan (plus the other Anglo countries). But the difference here is that the Russia and EU economies are complementary; the China and Japan economies are competitive and overlapped. So China would have a upper hand in this new post-globalization realignment. S Korea has already said they are not going to take a side many times and the SK elites have slightly more back bones than the LPD. As for Germany, it's an unknown factor. But if Germany is going to keep deindustrialize at the current rate, she is not going to be a player on the poker table soon.
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Jan 9, 2024 18:40
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The Oldest Man posted:"in bases" being more literal these days https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/crashed-b-1b-bomber-carcass-visible-at-south-dakota-base Few pages back but uhhh dont these have nukes on them?
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Jan 9, 2024 18:55
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No, the B1 is forbidden by... START II? some nuclear treaty, from carrying nuclear weapons. The command and control hardware was removed from them some time ago
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Jan 9, 2024 18:57
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Frosted Flake posted:this comes up all the time when people talk about imperial regalia so for example, when people say oh, can you believe only the Byzantine emperor was allowed to wear purple isn’t that silly? Yeah bitch he was emperor only he could wear purple imagine having an executive that powerful now. Unfortunately, an executive in the 21st century is never going to wear a wig and flamboyant capes like a bourbon monarch. It's not that Capitalists never flaunt the luxuries they have access to in what could be called a display of power, but their attire is very noticeably an exception to that. Black, white, and grey - Masculine dress has never been more dull. Three-piece suits are practically designed to conceal the person wearing them as much as possible: they're tight around the wearer and choke out the two openings through which skin comes out with neckties and cuff links. The clothes now hide the person donning them instead of making them stand out, in other words, the powerful don't wear their power anymore, they prefer to keep it implicit rather than explicit, and frankly that's lame. If you're going to dump so much waste in our oceans, at least have a little style while doing it. Sancho Banana has issued a correction as of 19:03 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 18:57
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JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:No, the B1 is forbidden by... START II? some nuclear treaty, from carrying nuclear weapons. The command and control hardware was removed from them some time ago start ii never went into effect
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Jan 9, 2024 19:05
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I would have to go looking for it, but I read a fairly interesting chapter in a book on fashion and cultural history that suggested that the shift of men’s attire in the late 19th and 20th century towards clothing that more resembled what were considered “work clothes”, like the charcoal suit, reflected an awareness and that’s where power lay. You could see the rich dressing like bankers going to their offices as possibly being similar, on a psychological level I suppose, to the rich previously wearing the attire of knights on campaign or the Meiji ruling class first dressing like samurai, then like European military officers, but in either case wearing their swords. Similarly after the Crisis of the Third Century, when the army installed “barracks emperors” by acclamation, kingly attire goes from trying to dress like Caesar to wearing the soldier’s cloak and the trousers of a Germanic federate - albeit both in purple. So, the ruling class dressing like they’re going to the office? Seems like it shows where power resides in a capitalist state.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:05
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VoicesCanBe posted:This has probably been discussed in this topic already. But with the very obvious struggles the US are having to stop Yemen's blockade of the red sea - and Operation Prosperity Guardian appearing to fail before it even got started - how on earth are they expecting to build a naval coalition against China? I seriously do not know how a navy can deal with unlimited incoming anti ship missiles in the case of Taiwan. Even if their missiles totally suck you can still exhaust SAMs and AMRAAMs and be a sitting duck.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:14
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skooma512 posted:I seriously do not know how a navy can deal with unlimited incoming anti ship missiles in the case of Taiwan. Even if their missiles totally suck you can still exhaust SAMs and AMRAAMs and be a sitting duck. The PRC also has the ability to call up its airforce right there not to mention navy. It just isn't a feasible fight for the US, and a collapse of supply lines is going to be clearly more devastating to the US than the PRC especially since the entire region could possibly be disrupted. Really, the only real weak spot for the PRC is iron ore, and honestly, I suspect besides recycling they have other options.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:22
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Frosted Flake posted:I would have to go looking for it, but I read a fairly interesting chapter in a book on fashion and cultural history that suggested that the shift of men’s attire in the late 19th and 20th century towards clothing that more resembled what were considered “work clothes”, like the charcoal suit, reflected an awareness and that’s where power lay. My personal theory is that WWII rigidly defined men's fashion across most of the world for decades, and that hasn't really ended. The only place that men's formal wear gets crazy is for celebrities or runway fashion that nobody actually wears.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:24
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Halloween Jack posted:They were probably discussing Flugel and his theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation. I missed that episode of Rogan. What’s the premise?
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Jan 9, 2024 19:27
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Frosted Flake posted:I missed that episode of Rogan. What’s the premise? iirc the theory is that starting with the 19th century, western men discarded beauty, making it exclusively the domain of women, as it became more socially valuable to show off the things that you do rather than the person that you are, hence why capitalists today pretend to be hard working go-getters and changed their outfits to be more no-nonsense and serious.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:31
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Halloween Jack posted:They were probably discussing Flugel and his theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation. I think it was around and post WW1, when all the aristocrats went from wearing top hats and tailcoats to pretty normal looking clothings. Like the very rigid, class divided society Agatha Christie wrote about in her books are very different from the world after her. She continued to write about that world in the book for 10+ more years. And the British love that world and they keep making new shows and movie about it.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:39
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Hatebag posted:well i think taiwan is probably a non-starter because it's completely unwinnable and also china has no reason to invade. maybe if the us did a Taiwanese missile crisis type deal they could trick china into shooting up the island and just let all the Taiwanese die without reacting with nukes but i don't think that's realistic for a number of reasons I agree that Taiwan really isn't feasible for the US but as their hegemony declines further and further the ruling class' desperation to inflict some sort of "punishment" on China will increase. And Taiwan is their best shot at provoking a reaction from China that might lead to Europe decoupling from China the way it has from Russia. This is not a logical long-term strategy but we can see from all the hysterical media coverage that turning Taiwan into Ukraine is the gameplan. The silver lining is that it very likely will not work out for the US but that could still lead to an insane level of death and destruction.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:39
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VoicesCanBe posted:I agree that Taiwan really isn't feasible for the US but as their hegemony declines further and further the ruling class' desperation to inflict some sort of "punishment" on China will increase. And Taiwan is their best shot at provoking a reaction from China that might lead to Europe decoupling from China the way it has from Russia. I honestly don't think there is a going to be a giant fight for Taiwan, it just is too lopsided and the PRC is has the ability to hammer it in a way even the Russians can't do to Ukraine. I think the most likely result would be for living standards in the West to crater to levels they haven't since the Great Depression.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:42
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dead gay comedy forums posted:ngh, I have difficulty parsing this rationale of "one weird trick" that comes in topics like the Great Divergence. Like, if one bothers to take a few steps back, one can see that gunpowder was merely one consequential factor. It's starkly funny how one of the most recent pivots on the Gordan Chang track of China watching is that China is doomed because their population is going to collapse while the US is just going to epicly swell to 1 billion Americans through migration. Even ignoring the inevitable contradictions between the nativists and the immigrationists, what all these China watchers are proposing is to essentially ignore all of history before them and instead focus on exploiting labor intensively. It's surreal how after the American elites discoursed themselves into believing that China's manufacturing prowess was achieved through cheap labor, they now essentially want to regress into a feudal or even slave mode of production.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:57
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VoicesCanBe posted:I agree that Taiwan really isn't feasible for the US but as their hegemony declines further and further the ruling class' desperation to inflict some sort of "punishment" on China will increase. And Taiwan is their best shot at provoking a reaction from China that might lead to Europe decoupling from China the way it has from Russia. yeah i think the us strategy is to just keep tensions high and see if an opportunity arises to goad china into doing something stupid, and then use that to cut china out of european and maybe latin american markets. doesn't make a lot of sense, though, because the global economy is completely dependent on china. if they managed to make china a pariah state the entire world would go into a severe depression. russia is only about 1.8% of global gdp, china is 17.7%. and excluding russia from just european markets has disrupted trade everywhere and made a global recession if not a depression. what happens if a country with a 10x bigger economy that's much more integrated into the supply chain is excluded? so it just seems like optimistic saber rattling in the end
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Jan 9, 2024 20:00
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Hatebag posted:yeah i think the us strategy is to just keep tensions high and see if an opportunity arises to goad china into doing something stupid, and then use that to cut china out of european and maybe latin american markets. imo it's even worse than the raw numbers would suggest because russia's largest contribution to international trade (petro products) is largely fungible so it can still get into the global supply elsewhere even if you sanction them. stop them from selling to a, they will just sell to b, a takes a hit on transport cost or quality and buys some of what b used to buy. there is some disruption of the market but not too too much. china otoh produces a lot of non-fungible stuff that isnt made elsewhere in addition to just being a lot bigger.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:07
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Ardennes posted:The PRC also has the ability to call up its airforce right there not to mention navy. It just isn't a feasible fight for the US, and a collapse of supply lines is going to be clearly more devastating to the US than the PRC especially since the entire region could possibly be disrupted. Have you considered that the Chinese military doesn't actually exist? China is just a steel mill masquerading as a country. I think we should sink a few boats and let the chips fall where they may.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:08
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I could see some future US CIA thing to do Big Bay of Pigs on China with some ratlined anti-PRC nationalists to try to stave off the final stages of the US's slide into total irrelevance in the Western Pacific, that'd probably be enough to trigger an invasion
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Jan 9, 2024 20:11
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Hatebag posted:yeah i think the us strategy is to just keep tensions high and see if an opportunity arises to goad china into doing something stupid, and then use that to cut china out of european and maybe latin american markets. The other thing, from the defence policy books, is that right now the US maintains a favourable military balance. I know that cuts against the premise of this thread, I am only telling you what is in the Naval Operations/Coalition Warfare/Amphibious Operations/Canadian Defence Policy textbooks that the people making these decisions base their views on. The US has an advantage in military power over China, therefore the US should use that power to offset areas where China has an advantage (everything else). It's fundamentally the same calculus as the Opium Wars, where China had no economic or political reason to open their ports to the Europeans, so European military force was used to create an economic advantage at the barrel of a gun. So, I will go further, though I agree with the previous few posts, and say the strategy is to keep tensions high and see if an opportunity arises to goad china into doing something stupid where US military force can neutralize China's other advantages. Which, was more or less the strategy with Russia, though by proxy. Russia was not behaving the way they were "supposed" to, therefore the US used war as a way of bringing about favourable outcomes. If you look at books on Iran and Venezuela, as well as Cuba, opinion is more split as the US is perceived to have more economic and political leverage, but with China and Russia, by RAND's estimation, the best way to "overextend" them is to provoke a military confrontation where the shrinking US military superiority can halt China's rise before it's too late. That's why the background to all of this poo poo about Taiwan and the South China Sea is China's construction of a capable blue water navy 20 years ahead of where estimates placed it. I can hunt down that citation, but I thumbed through some of the USNI books on naval strategy and China, and the ones written in the 2000's placed China having a "real" navy as at least a half century away, and the one's written recently have something approaching panic at the gap before they overtake the US is shrinking before expected. A military confrontation, blockade, whatever the gently caress, with China now is one where (they believe) America will come out on top and the USN will check China's rise. That will not be the case in 10 years, and then there will be no cards left to play. This is a bit like when the continental powers were calculating miles of railroad and birthrates and figuring out how long until Germany would no longer be able to fight a war against both Russia and France. The Germans calculated that if the Russian railway system was completed, and France's population rebounded after a slump in the 1900's, Germany could no longer win, and so would have to give way to French demands for Alsace Lorraine before a shot was even fired. They were very concerned about what that date would be. So, when given the opportunity to go to war in 1914 and possibly win, even if war could be avoided, they took it, because if a similar crisis happened in 1920, they would have to back down and make concessions to France. Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 20:17 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 20:13
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The Oldest Man posted:imo it's even worse than the raw numbers would suggest because russia's largest contribution to international trade (petro products) is largely fungible so it can still get into the global supply elsewhere even if you sanction them. stop them from selling to a, they will just sell to b, a takes a hit on transport cost or quality and buys some of what b used to buy. there is some disruption of the market but not too too much. china otoh produces a lot of non-fungible stuff that isnt made elsewhere in addition to just being a lot bigger. yep, that's what I meant by china being more integrated into the supply chain. transistors, steel, heavy industry, electronics, a million other things. it would take decades of consistent central planning to replicate even a portion of china's manufacturing capacity in other countries. meanwhile most of the liberal countries can't even build railroads or infrastructure
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Jan 9, 2024 20:15
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You just conveniently ignore all the smuggling operations and declare victory. Like how you can mix 49% Russian oil with 51% other oil and legally call it non-Rusian oil. The legal loopholes are already built-in. All the main-in-China products on Amazon and Walmart will all have a "made in Vietnam" or Mexico stamp after a half year hiccup. And you can say Chinese global trade has declined sharply as long as you only calculate the transactions through Swift. Or just buy your poo poo from temu.ca.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:17
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Frosted Flake posted:The other thing, from the defence policy books, is that right now the US maintains a favourable military balance. I know that cuts against the premise of this thread, I am only telling you what is in the Naval Operations/Coalition Warfare/Amphibious Operations/Canadian Defence Policy textbooks that the people making these decisions base their views on. The US has an advantage in military power over China, therefore the US should use that power to offset areas where China has an advantage (everything else). It's fundamentally the same calculus as the Opium Wars, where China had no economic or political reason to open their ports to the Europeans, so European military force was used to create an economic advantage at the barrel of a gun. Yeah this is why I think it's plausible that the US intelligence apparatus would do something really provocative like try to arm death squads in mainland China, coup Taiwan if a future reconciliatory governments starts to talk about peaceful annexation, that kind of thing. It's obvious they want the fight and just as obvious (to everyone in this thread, anyway) they'll lose.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:21
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Frosted Flake posted:The other thing, from the defence policy books, is that right now the US maintains a favourable military balance. I know that cuts against the premise of this thread, I am only telling you what is in the Naval Operations/Coalition Warfare/Amphibious Operations/Canadian Defence Policy textbooks that the people making these decisions base their views on. The US has an advantage in military power over China, therefore the US should use that power to offset areas where China has an advantage (everything else). It's fundamentally the same calculus as the Opium Wars, where China had no economic or political reason to open their ports to the Europeans, so European military force was used to create an economic advantage at the barrel of a gun. if the us had a bit more foresight they coulda used the 90s and 00s to isolate china but rich americans were making too much money by investing in china. so basically globalization has saved the world lol
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Jan 9, 2024 20:28
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It really hinges on Taiwan. If the US is unable to get a reliable proxy, through leverage or colour revolution, it falls apart because the US apparently in all of these confrontations sees the need to 1) be "justified" and fighting in "self defence" and 2) have a proxy to soak up whatever number of casualties the American public would not bear. Sort of related, setting up a conflict where they are defending Brave Little Belgium, but also realizing even though that's a justification, absent aggression directly at America, like Pearl Harbour, the American public support is only going to go so far. In Vietnam, people generally believed they were fighting in defence of South Vietnam, true, but also felt like it wasn't worth the sacrifices, hence Vietnamization. So they need a Taiwanese government that is essentially willing to be destroyed so America can retain an advantage over the Mainland, rather than cut a deal with them. In Ukraine the moment where the government had to choose between annihilation and cutting a deal is where a colour revolution came in. In Ukraine the other advantage was ethnonationalism let them install people who believe any sacrifice to join the West is worthwhile, they're happy to be destroyed so the west has an advantage over Russia because they feel like they're benefitting from that, bless their hearts. I don't know that a Taiwanese government is the same way, or that recalling Formosan history as part of a non-Chinese empire, will go as well. I realize they've made some gestures, and that Taiwan and South Korea were filled with Anticommunist grandpas postwar who knew all the words to the Kimigayo, but Japan isn't quite "the west". Throwing yourself on your sword to help America fight against the Chinese, even if you brought back the historical memory of Imperial Japan, all of the weird poo poo Ukraine has done since 2014, is still a problem because America hosed Japan over pretty hard, pretty recently, so ... idk. The US needs a government in Taipei that will declare independence and then press the issue to a shooting war with the PRC, and I just don't know if they're going to get one.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:30
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Hatebag posted:if the us had a bit more foresight they coulda used the 90s and 00s to isolate china but rich americans were making too much money by investing in china. so basically globalization has saved the world lol They probably would've still tried to do so despite the adventures of American capitalists, at least to some degree, if not for Bin Laden dragging the US into a decades long distraction in the middle east. America had the world at its feet for a 20 year window, and it squandered it completely.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:40
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Frosted Flake posted:It really hinges on Taiwan. If the US is unable to get a reliable proxy, through leverage or colour revolution, it falls apart because the US apparently in all of these confrontations sees the need to 1) be "justified" and fighting in "self defence" and 2) have a proxy to soak up whatever number of casualties the American public would not bear. there isnt a limit of depravity the US government will stoop to in order to get the narrative it wants. if that means taiwanese anti-communist death squads, thats exactly what theyre going to try to create. if that means false flagging some terrorist attacks, game on. whether any of that poo poo actually works or not is an open question but the us is absolutely never going to stop at "well the color revolution fizzled guess we go home now shucks" as long as they aren't totally locked out of the country physically.
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Jan 9, 2024 20:48
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Sancho Banana posted:They probably would've still tried to do so despite the adventures of American capitalists, at least to some degree, if not for Bin Laden dragging the US into a decades long distraction in the middle east. America had the world at its feet for a 20 year window, and it squandered it completely. well, a half dozen wars, smaller conflicts, western-backed coups/revolutions, and proxy wars did cause decades of disruption in oil trading resulting in increased oil prices and trillions of dollars in arms sales to the benefit of rich americans. plus a large portion of americans are now galvanized fascists that are easily manipulated. so to those rich people that's probably not squandering the post-ussr/pre-ascendant china years
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Jan 9, 2024 20:53
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The Oldest Man posted:there isnt a limit of depravity the US government will stoop to in order to get the narrative it wants. if that means taiwanese anti-communist death squads, thats exactly what theyre going to try to create. if that means false flagging some terrorist attacks, game on. whether any of that poo poo actually works or not is an open question but the us is absolutely never going to stop at "well the color revolution fizzled guess we go home now shucks" as long as they aren't totally locked out of the country physically. Good point. I suppose I'm just curious about the Taiwanese side, because stopping that at all costs, pretty important. So, how strong are American NGOs compared to the rest of civil society, to what degree are there football hooligans and metal fans waiting in the wings, how organized is the ideology of Imperial Japan as an anticommunist saviour, or ethnic Taiwanese as essentially different than (racially inferior) mainland Chinese etc. ? That's what I would be looking for. I don't think these things are 1:1, even though the playbooks for the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia are basically identical, because in Central Asia, US colour revolution attempts usually involve Islam to one degree or another as the reason Russia is their eternal enemy, but surely the basic ingredients would be recognizable? ee: I'll say that in both Cuba and Venezuela based on the recent efforts, even if the governments aren't actively cracking down on those people all the time, they clearly know who is going to be in the US camp in the event of a colour revolution, because it's been very easy for them to take them into custody and unwind the media apparatus within days if not hours. In Bolivia, Evo Morales was caught much more flat footed, and probably shouldn't have been. eee: I think Rania Khalek joked that any government that wants to avoid a colour revolution should just arrest everyone connected to an NGO as soon as protests mysteriously start, and she's not wrong, but in Georgia they openly threatened a colour revolution if... the networks that carry out colour revolutions... were exposed. Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 20:58 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 20:54
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Frosted Flake posted:eee: I think Rania Khalek joked that any government that wants to avoid a colour revolution should just arrest everyone connected to an NGO as soon as protests mysteriously start, and she's not wrong, but in Georgia they openly threatened a colour revolution if... the networks that carry out colour revolutions... were exposed.  It's this. You just have to arrest the NGOs and accept you'll be called a tyrant for it. At this point if you're a head of state who's on the US target list, and don't understand the tactics the US will lose to bring you down, that's on you for not learning from history.
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Jan 9, 2024 21:02
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Hatebag posted:if the us had a bit more foresight they coulda used the 90s and 00s to isolate china but rich americans were making too much money by investing in china. so basically globalization has saved the world lol deng saved the world.
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Jan 9, 2024 21:04
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Wasn't GW Bush's whole plan in summer 2001 to "pivot to china?" The "accidental" bombing of the Belgrade Chinese embassy in 1999, the emergency landing of a US naval intelligence plane on hainan after colliding with chinese interceptors, etc. The US had a plan The US appeared to be aiming at starting winnable confrontations with china more than 20 years ago. ...and the US has eaten itself alive while china has fed the world JAY ZERO SUM GAME has issued a correction as of 21:10 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 21:07
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Zodium posted:deng saved the world.
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Jan 9, 2024 21:09
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JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:Wasn't GW Bush's whole plan in summer 2001 to "pivot to china?" The "accidental" bombing of the Belgrade Chinese embassy in 1999, the emergency landing of a US naval intelligence plane on hainan after colliding with chinese interceptors, etc. osama saved the world
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Jan 9, 2024 21:10
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Hatebag posted:if the us had a bit more foresight they coulda used the 90s and 00s to isolate china but rich americans were making too much money by investing in china. so basically globalization has saved the world lol It's the fundamental difference between the US government and the PRC. The former is beholden to its capitalist class, the latter answers to Chinese society as a whole. Everything else stems from that.
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Jan 9, 2024 21:11
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Zodium posted:osama saved the world
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Jan 9, 2024 21:11
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JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:Wasn't GW Bush's whole plan in summer 2001 to "pivot to china?" The "accidental" bombing of the Belgrade Chinese embassy in 1999, the emergency landing of a US naval intelligence plane on hainan after colliding with chinese interceptors, etc. Yes, I was just reading a naval policy book about that specifically and lamenting that the US had secured a coalition in Asia, got fleet building commitments from Japan, I think the new ships the UK laid down (the ones in service now) were designed with that theatre in mind. The Cold War Navy was largely still in service, so it didn't matter as much that nothing was being built to replace it, similar to the Royal Navy only being able to fight in the Falklands because the (good) ships of the 60's hadn't been scrapped yet and could be recommissioned. The same was true for other NATO members, as France and Italy still had their Cold War fleets - but - at the end of service life, and with no replacements coming down the pike. e: But you have to remember, I can dig around for the citation because this was pretty revelatory to me: Why did the US go into Iraq? For oil, right? But the US was already meeting its own needs, essentially as it has since oil was first struck in Texas. Denying China Iraqi oil was seen as a way the Iraq War would allow the US diversion to the Middle East to still further their overall strategic goals. Remember as well that as soon as the US entered Iraq arms, coordination and funding started appearing in Muslims areas of Western China. The US has been lemonade out of China not falling into the bear trap by claiming genocide, but it seems like at least parts of the US government intended to make the best out of Afghanistan also by using it to apply pressure to China. They didn't forget about China for 20 years, is what I'm saying Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 21:15 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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