BrokenGameboy posted:

I remain skeptical about if China is still socialist or on a path towards full capitalism. But I'll leave you two to that argument, since you have more knowledge regarding Chinese history and material reality - - I'm always looking for new books though, so link me some if you want.

Instead, what I'm interested in - - at least in this moment - - is if China is still planning on building their democracy. That was part of their long term plan, wasn't it? What happened to it, and what do we know about it?

BrokenGameboy posted:

Yes, I understand their overall plan. And what I meant was proletarian democracy, since I apparently need to specify that.

Pizza Segregationist posted:

It's always seemed to me that the fact that China is willing to at least address Marxian economics in their education system and portray Mao as someone worthy of respect and consideration means that their population would be a lot more amenable to liquidating the billionaire class and expropriating their property (compared to the US especially). Doesn't mean that Chinese billionaires have a secret plan to voluntarily remove themselves from power, but it seems pretty reasonable to assume the average Chinese person has better class consciousness than the average American, just by virtue of having a national identity that is nominally socialist

BrokenGameboy posted:

Isn't debating around if and what people truly believe in their heart of hearts pretty immaterial?

indigi posted:

how do you integrate 600 million people who have directly suffered due to American hegemony into wanting to uphold it

mila kunis posted:

...
China does seem to want to follow the path of wanting to grow the per capita GDP / purchasing power of their populace and supplant the west as the world's most important consumer market. Which means higher wages relative to profits and I don't see how you do that under capitalism without the similar contradictions that led to neoliberalism, jobs flowing out of the country, and rising costs of living leading extreme debts and rent obligations placed on the population.

The question is whether the CCP has studied this and sees it as something to avoid, or whether they seem themselves, personally, enriched enough by it in the short term to do it anyway.
...

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

Remember this fact as Russian propaganda heats up!!!

https://twitter.com/DavidPriess/status/1486322924734881797

Punkin Spunkin posted:

https://twitter.com/Gregor_Schwartz/status/1487140542429507585
Lol

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

we stan the anti-imperialist defense industry and their wrecker engineers

sexpig by night posted:

This isn't intended to be a "gotcha" question, but I'm genuinely curious on this take-- Do you think the Palestinians should cease resistance and their territories incorporated into Israel? If that's different, why not?

Al-Saqr posted:

me too if Ukrainians and Russians went back to their homeland half the population of Israel would be freed up lol

Mr Hootington posted:

https://twitter.com/tripgabriel/status/1495884782043119616?t=sFrpPwJEzB86D1TttNViYw&s=19

Gresh posted:

lmfao

hes literally telling the average paycheck-to-paycheck American who doesn't give a gently caress about Ukraine that your wallets are about to get hosed harder at the pump because "freedom" and "democracy" in some European backwater in an election year

SorePotato posted:

The discourse is out of this world rn. Personally I hope Xi Jinping comes out on top here

Zeroisanumber posted:

I'm not so much talking about the Russian Army not being able to beat Ukraine in a fight, but their logistics are completely hosed. Things in Russia are better than they were 20 years ago but anywhere outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg has just not gotten investment. Idk how long they could actually keep up the fight before things started breaking down.

Frosted Flake posted:

i’m getting the impression that people think “Conventional War” means “Bomb the Iraqi Army unopposed for weeks, then shoot them up at night when they don’t have NV/TI, and their rounds can’t penetrate armour”

and not

“entire brigade is hit by MRLS because we’re addicted to GPS/Radios and everybody had their cell phones with them, vehicles weren’t camouflaged or dispersed, nobody had dug trenches, so now carry casualties to an aid station by stretcher under fire because no way in hell helicopters can fly”

QUEER FRASIER posted:

I feel like the battles of Mogadishu and Fallujah are good examples of the U.S. military’s capabilities. any mission they are given they will gently caress up in myriad ways, and the only thing they are genuinely good at and can be trusted to do is kill a lot of unarmed civilians and make the situation much worse

Frosted Flake posted:

There must be a reason the US selects proxies on the edge of and at odds with their larger societies.

The reason those monks set themselves on fire in Vietnam was because Diem and his guys were militantly Catholic in a largely Buddhist society and used the protection afforded by US support to antagonize the Buddhists, including passing all sorts of restrictive laws. The population breakdown here is different, but these campaigns against the Russian citizens of THEE Ukraine would not be possible without US support either.

It’s not as explicit as the British and French picking a race or caste or linguistic group to be Their Guys, but it feels as if in a vacuum the furthest right wing ethnic nationalists wouldn’t be the people holding the reins, in the same way that in a vacuum Catholics would not be running Vietnam.

So, how much of this is Divide-and-Rule, and how much is just a byproduct of Maidan?

The prominence of these groups, at least going from what I’ve read, is not organic or related to their popularity or the natural sentiment of the Ukrainian people, so creating or elevating them must serve some function post-2014.

Frosted Flake posted:

I know I just posted this the other day, but they had 30 years!. They got to enjoy that to their hearts’ content! Any failure to make good on that is their own.

I wish there was an End of History thread to explore this in, because it overlaps with the succ, Doomsday Econ, Capitalism, US Would Lose WW3 and Dems are Doomed threads, but I can’t get over this feeing of there being a pervasive sentiment of Sore Winners in the West.

Not just in international diplomacy, but domestic politics too, even in the capitalist class broadly, they had a 30 year run of winning over the Left, workers, the working class, any foreign states, any opposing ideology, any culture or media that wasn’t hegemonic. They won non-stop. 9/11, The Great Recession, Brexit, southern Europe resenting the EU and Trump were own-goals, and rather than idk reflect, they kept at it. Now that it’s crumbling they aren’t reminiscing their time in the sun one bit.

I can’t actually put my finger on what it is they’re doing. Some are in denial, some are pissed, but they can’t seem to see that they had 30 uninterrupted years of the world they wanted and their actions during that time have directly led to where we are now. They ended it, no one else.

If they hadn’t humiliated and looted Russia and Eastern Europe, propped up Yeltsin, rejected Russia joining NATO, bombed Serbia, and expanded NATO we would not be here. For fucks sake the reason there isn’t a BAOR standing proud with colours flying to stop the Russians is that the Brits destroyed their own society, and their own economy in those 30 years and then destroyed their Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. What did they think would happen 40 years on from “There’s no such thing as society”? That the Household Cavalry would be exempt? Britain’s not even in the loving EU anymore, the world order they are frustrated they can’t uphold is already gone.

I realize they probably thought they could stand over a prostrate Russia, presumably forever, but as much as Russia getting comparatively stronger than 1991 was outside their control, Russia’s attitude towards them, and their own weakness is entirely their fault for what they did in those 30 years.

Frosted Flake posted:

lol holy gently caress dude, sign the drat treaty.

Unless he thinks he can win a war that starts at 4am local time, and all evidence points to “no”, I’m a loss here.

Al-Saqr posted:

just saw blinkens statement that Russia will invade before the night is over

it’s 5 am Moscow time, where’s the invasion?!

Frosted Flake posted:

This is my read too.

We loving pulled our troops and diplomats out while continuing to encourage Zelensky to stall Minsk II!!

He got set up. I can’t read it any other way.

Lastgirl posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/HayesBrown/status/1496710912648044548

Frosted Flake posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dObTXYa-_n4

I never thought I’d see Deep Battle. This is a real “they do move in herds” moment, with the realization that my battery, regiment and Brigade would have been obliterated and I would be red mist had NATO been involved.

My only hope is that someone learns from this because Russia demonstrated decisively it’s not 1992 anymore. I don’t want to hear another loving word about how NATO is incontestable in conventional war. We spent years training the Ukrainians. Their war is already over.

The response to this cannot be to get more hawkish with Russia. They just showed why.

Asproigerosis posted:

I have no idea why anyone would fight for chernobyl. Like radioactive dirt is really not valuable for anything, ain't nobody sneaking in to the plant to steal fuel rods or some dumb Tom Clancy bullshit to make dirty bombs

Chamale posted:

I can't help but think about the fact that Russia's had over a million covid deaths, the second-worst in the world. I wonder if that's affected Putin's behaviour or his willingness to gamble lives on a geopolitical gain.

Lastgirl posted:

why would you

intelligence community has no credibility for the last 20 years

the massing made me felt like it was going to happen just from the fact that people kept egging and drumming it up, so if you consistently and continuously paint putin in that direction with no recourse, he's just going to say gently caress it and he did, then now everyone's acting like he's gone mad when they want him to be a madman the whole time

MLSM posted:

Hey buddy are you familiar with the last 30 years of nato expansion towards russia that might have something to do with it lol

brugroffil posted:

I don't think "this country will join NATO" justifies Russian invasion and overthrow of their government. Ultimately force rules at the end of the day so it doesn't matter what's "justified" or not, but it was Putin's choice to invade.

I'm also not sure that there's good reason to believe that even full Minsk 2 and NS2 coming online would be enough. The rhetoric and demands from Putin over the last couple of weeks are way more expansive than that.

brugroffil posted:

I guess they should have gotten those nuclear weapons more quickly.

MLSM posted:

Nobody said russia was leftist you dumbass

What we’re saying is russia is 100% justified in preventing Ukraine from joining a nuclear military alliance given the last 30 years of nato bullshit in the region hth

Al-Saqr posted:

awesome thanks for the vote of confidence america:-

https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1496895423772086282?s=20&t=0EVXjc0Dp3xfK4BAu1BreQ

MLSM posted:

How else would they stop Ukraine from joining nato genius

Al-Saqr posted:

there’s no way the loving Russians let their VDV use their personal phones with tiktok on them also he’s not wearing gear that suggests he’s entering a combat zone maybe this was from that training a year ago?!

Opioid posted:

if the concern is NATO on their borders, won’t they just create an issue once they take over Ukraine? would the next step be demanding Poland leave NATO because it poses a threat and they don’t want a bordering nation to be a NATO member?

Oglethorpe posted:

Al-Saqr posted:

belching a mouth full of Cheetos while waiting for a raid in FF14

“PUTIN HAS GONE TOO FAR aGAINST THE WEST”

vyelkin posted:

honest question, which other countries do you think are going to join NATO after this?

This is NATO's current membership:



there are a whole three countries in Europe that border Russia and are not already members of NATO: Finland, the country that Russia wants its neighbours to emulate ("Finlandization" is a term that was used for one potential end state for Ukraine); Belarus, Russia's closest ally and client state; and Ukraine.

who else is going to join? Moldova, which already has part of the country occupied by Russia? Georgia, which already has part of the country occupied by Russia and which already lost a war to Russia over this in 2008? Armenia, a Russian ally that hates NATO member Turkey? NATO has made it clear that they're not going to support non-NATO members against Russia and they're not going to let in countries that have existing territorial disputes with Russia, and Russia has now made it clear that overtures to NATO can be catastrophic.

Russia isn't surrounded by some infinite number of foreign countries that will decide to join NATO after this. Ukraine is by far the biggest, strongest, and most populous of Russia's European neighbours. Given that NATO already covers almost the entire continent, it should be comprehensible why Russia wants to draw a line in the sand here - there isn't much more for them to lose on the issue of NATO expansion.

Frosted Flake posted:

I was thinking about it, and I’ll pull the papers on what we (Canada) were training Azov in, but is it possible that we were training a hard core of ideologically motivated ethnic nationalist militiamen with the idea that the Ukrainian Army would buckle and Azov would be “The Mujahideen” in that Afghanistan fantasy scenario the NatSec people have been chattering about?

Because that makes a lot of sense to me if all the diplomatic and policy signals suggest the goal was to bait Russia in. It may also explain why the only military aid was man portable AT/AA weapons. It would be a comically bloodthirsty plan, but Stingers and Javelins are the kind of weapons you’d give an insurgency, not a regular army hoping to stop a committed attack.

Animal-Mother posted:

maybe Iran will assassinate Spider-Man and SpongeBob after all.