(Thread IKs:
fart simpson)
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The US strategists (when US still had long term strategists) like to in each regional theater, designate one of two countries as the "bad guy" and leverage the conflict between the good nations and the "rogue nations" to maximize the profit. In the Latin America, the bad guys are Nicarague and Cuba. In the Middle East, it's Iran. In the far east, post cold war, the US had to designate a bad guy between China and Russia, and it was Russia. You can argue US could have switched the designated bad guy role from Russia to China sooner. I don't know if US could have pulled it off in the mid 90s. China naturally has a lot of money making advantage over Russia. China has bigger market, bigger cheap labor force and very large diaspora. Also China had breakneck growth rate during the entire 90s. In the 00s, Bin Laden took the attention of the US away from China. Many Chinese agree on this idea.
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Dec 25, 2020 18:13
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Protagorean posted:do you want the cool Chinese lunar base researching an alien anomaly left by cosmological Satan from Destiny, or do you want America to turn the moon into the truck stop/theme park from Futurama Well, Shadowkeep sucked and the second episode of Futurama is my all time favorite.
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Dec 25, 2020 18:30
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Reality took a while to sneak up on the West: was comparatively pro-Western and Xi played it very low key the first couple years of his tenure. It didn’t help that the Crimean crisis made Russia the “bad guy” for a couple more years on top of that. Hell, Biden still can’t decide which one is the bigger threat and the US pretty much locked itself into a two front war.
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Dec 25, 2020 18:59
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Ardennes posted:Reality took a while to sneak up on the West: was comparatively pro-Western and Xi played it very low key the first couple years of his tenure. It didn’t help that the Crimean crisis made Russia the “bad guy” for a couple more years on top of that. Hell, Biden still can’t decide which one is the bigger threat and the US pretty much locked itself into a two front war. Russia has the GDP of portugal (or some other loser country like that). their army is four divisions. Most of mainstream america consider still Russia's power to be undiminished since the cold war ended.
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Dec 25, 2020 19:16
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bedpan posted:Russia has the GDP of portugal (or some other loser country like that). their army is four divisions. Most of mainstream america consider still Russia's power to be undiminished since the cold war ended. It is a “they are infinitely weak and yet infinitely dangerous” issue. In reality, Russia is still a powerful state but no where the same degree as the Soviets. The US leadership is used to always getting their way so there is no room for compromise and the list of enemies is piling up.
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Dec 25, 2020 20:22
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Ardennes posted:Reality took a while to sneak up on the West: was comparatively pro-Western and Xi played it very low key the first couple years of his tenure. It didn’t help that the Crimean crisis made Russia the “bad guy” for a couple more years on top of that. Hell, Biden still can’t decide which one is the bigger threat and the US pretty much locked itself into a two front war. Crimea happened because 2 separated administrations pressed the gas pedal toward Russia when they didn't have to. Bush W expanded NATO to grabbed all the former Soviet client states because W needed some goonies to vote yes in the UN for his Iraqi war. Obama admin and Hilary/Anthony Blinken pushed eastward again into Ukraine because they were too in love with their color revolution tool kit. As for Biden, I get the idea he wants to do limit the great power competition in military and tech war only, we will see.
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Dec 25, 2020 20:40
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im fully expecting biden to sabotage our ukraine policy out of spite to punish them for daring to indict him over blackmailing their government that this will hurt us more than it will hurt them will i suspect be a recurring theme of this administration
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Dec 25, 2020 20:43
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The more I read about the Cold War time the more I get the feeling that the conflict with the USSR was entirely a side show while the main event was preventing Third World development. Makes sense that the USSR going away changed nothing.
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Dec 25, 2020 20:45
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Some Guy TT posted:im fully expecting biden to sabotage our ukraine policy out of spite to punish them for daring to indict him over blackmailing their government You really think he's that petty, self-destructive, and delusional about his role in the world? me too
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Dec 25, 2020 20:56
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Some Guy TT posted:im fully expecting biden to sabotage our ukraine policy out of spite to punish them for daring to indict him over blackmailing their government who is “us” and “our” in this post
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Dec 25, 2020 21:06
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genericnick posted:The more I read about the Cold War time the more I get the feeling that the conflict with the USSR was entirely a side show while the main event was preventing Third World development. Makes sense that the USSR going away changed nothing. preventing third world development is synonymous with international capitalism
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Dec 25, 2020 21:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:The impression I got of US views towards China, particularly in the latter part of the Cold War and in the post-Soviet era, was that they'd eventually liberalize, "mellow out" (my phrasing) and become a nice, behaved member of the global world order. I'm fairly sure I'm not alone in this characterization - I think I picked it up from retrospectives by Adam Tooze and Pankaj Mishra. I think a key factor here was the desire to reduce Russia itself to a permanent neo-colony, I don't think they could have succeeded in the long term in any case, but I suspect even they could see that an active antagonism with China would present major obstacles there.
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Dec 25, 2020 21:21
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genericnick posted:The more I read about the Cold War time the more I get the feeling that the conflict with the USSR was entirely a side show while the main event was preventing Third World development. Makes sense that the USSR going away changed nothing. Well, the big shift was that the pretense of "reform" capitalism disappeared because the West no longer felt vulnerable to infiltration, butat the same time traditional colonial empires only disappeared to replace by a crypto-colonialism of military/political/financial control over the global south. The common thread in Western thought was that China would completely turn its back on its Maoist roots and join the other "Asian tiger" states that were enthusiastic allies of the US. It was assumed that Russia could easily be "brought to heel" and that China and Russia could never cooperate because of past history, which meant that the US didn't need to sweat it. As for Ukraine, the US already screwed them really badly. Maybe Biden has some new ideas he wants to try out. Really, at the root of this is that "experts" in the beltway really do not give a single poo poo about what is actually going on and pretty much just recycle answers that follow "conventional thinking" because it is a path of least resistance. In the end, why be provocative and endanger your job? Pomeroy posted:I think a key factor here was the desire to reduce Russia itself to a permanent neo-colony, I don't think they could have succeeded in the long term in any case, but I suspect even they could see that an active antagonism with China would present major obstacles there. Basically, the goal was to simultaneously widdle Russia's power outside its borders while trying to eventually get enough leverage on the streets to finally re-set everything back to 1992. Basically, the goal was to have a weak, basket-case Russia that would be forced to be reliant on the West and therefore be completely docile and allow the US full rein in Eurasia affairs. Part of that plan was keeping the Russian economy/population weak enough that they really couldn't fight back. The plan started to go to pot when it seemed that Putin wasn't going to follow Yeltsin's lead, and then due to Clinton's regulation of commodities, the Russia economy started to pick itself off the floor in the 2000s. ---- The Republic of China and the PRC never recognized Tibet as an independent state, and from both of their perspectives, it was a rebellious province. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 21:39 on Dec 25, 2020 |
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Dec 25, 2020 21:26
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Wait what's a good read if i'm looking to understand the 'actually occupying tibet and evicting its leaders was cool and good' perspective because honestly i have never understood that. I mean feudal tibet sucked from my understanding but so do many places that it would still be wrong to have invaded.
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Dec 25, 2020 21:26
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genericnick posted:The more I read about the Cold War time the more I get the feeling that the conflict with the USSR was entirely a side show while the main event was preventing Third World development. Makes sense that the USSR going away changed nothing. I wouldn't say either was a sideshow in any sense, but it was absolutely a war on multiple fronts, and fatally, one in which the imperialist side was much closer to having real unity of command than it's opponents. I think that factor is one that cannot be emphasized enough in understanding the present attitude in the PRC, and why it might in some respects fall short of an ideal internationalism - that the success the imperialists enjoyed in dividing their enemies makes the really critical thing building up the strength of the PRC itself, not counting on any potential united front.
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Dec 25, 2020 21:27
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Benagain posted:Wait what's a good read if i'm looking to understand the 'actually occupying tibet and evicting its leaders was cool and good' perspective because honestly i have never understood that. I mean feudal tibet sucked from my understanding but so do many places that it would still be wrong to have invaded. That whole narrative makes no sense because Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was never in in dispute by anyone until the big bad communists came about. Is Texas being invaded by America on Jan 20 because some Texans don't like Joe Biden? I mean you could consistently argue both and something to the effect of well maybe the Congress of Vienna model of nation states should just be, like, abolished man but that's not why the CIA is training Tibetan jihadists.
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Dec 25, 2020 22:04
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u.s. had to normalize relations with china and outsource industry to save capitalism given the falling rate of profit and to prevent the intro scene from red alert 2 from happening. in this sense china "saved" american capitalism. i don't know why. but anyways economic substructure determines political superstructure. political superstructure in return reinforces economic substructure. liberal democracy backs up a privatized economic substructure since the decentralized structure safely protects big corporations rather than letting them fall under the "tyranny of the majority." it also cannot solve its internal contradictions but must externalize / transfer them otherwise there will be an endless cycle of misery and chaos -- as is happening now to the united states. therefore, "democracy" must go out to spread to prevent self-destruction at home. this is a useful tool for developed countries with advanced productivity and to help lower the guard of developing countries so that they cannot resist. china has developed enough that this is causing an identity crisis though because it has not adopted liberal democracy and india has many problems which makes it difficult for it to be a substitute. thank you for reading my blog. i watched "red detachment of women" this morning for the first time. great movie. also i really liked the scene where the liberated slave girl goes on a scouting mission and has a 'kill bill' moment when she sees her former master. screws up the scouting mission though so she has to self-crit later https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoPM9d18e9o&t=2381s
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Dec 25, 2020 22:40
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The West was ok with Tibet being a part of China until 1949 for some ~weird reason~, and Mao loving let the Dalai Lama and the rest of the aristocracy stay in power for years until they started talking about maybe doing some land reforms to help the poo poo dirt poor peasants and the tibetan ruling class started a guerrilla war with CIA weapons and training in response.
HerraS has issued a correction as of 11:43 on Dec 26, 2020 |
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Dec 25, 2020 22:55
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Chomskyan posted:lol wtf, I understand Mao was already antagonistic towards the Soviets at this time, but what could have motivated such a heartless response to the Italian representative? Most likely Stalin-style weird humor to get telling reactions out of people. He was out to humiliate Togliatti as some kind of coward, but used too many layers of irony for people to get it, and ended up looking like the weirdo to them instead. I don't think he considered it a serious proposition that a whole nation could be wiped out, given that he also said that nuclear weapons are a paper tiger. My best guess is that he interpreted Togliatti as essentially saying "but I would die" and responded with "so what, shouldn't it be enough for you as a communist if others survive and the cause wins?"
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Dec 25, 2020 23:32
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uncop posted:Most likely Stalin-style weird humor to get telling reactions out of people. He was out to humiliate Togliatti as some kind of coward, but used too many layers of irony for people to get it, and ended up looking like the weirdo to them instead. I don't think he considered it a serious proposition that a whole nation could be wiped out, given that he also said that nuclear weapons are a paper tiger. My best guess is that he interpreted Togliatti as essentially saying "but I would die" and responded with "so what, shouldn't it be enough for you as a communist if others survive and the cause wins?"
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Dec 25, 2020 23:36
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uncop posted:lMy best guess is that he interpreted Togliatti as essentially saying "but I would die" and responded with "so what, shouldn't it be enough for you as a communist if others survive and the cause wins?" that’s still really stupid
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Dec 25, 2020 23:42
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https://twitter.com/wpbras/status/1342494811610374146?s=19
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Dec 26, 2020 00:29
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indigi posted:that’s still really stupid well it's 2020 and now everyone is going to die
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Dec 26, 2020 00:32
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Stairmaster posted:well it's 2020 and now everyone is going to die
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Dec 26, 2020 00:43
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china owns
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Dec 26, 2020 03:11
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China could be a lot better than it is but it is in most ways better than anywhere else I have lived and in few ways worse. ~NUANCE~
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Dec 26, 2020 03:33
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uncop posted:Most likely Stalin-style weird humor to get telling reactions out of people. He was out to humiliate Togliatti as some kind of coward, but used too many layers of irony for people to get it, and ended up looking like the weirdo to them instead. I don't think he considered it a serious proposition that a whole nation could be wiped out, given that he also said that nuclear weapons are a paper tiger. My best guess is that he interpreted Togliatti as essentially saying "but I would die" and responded with "so what, shouldn't it be enough for you as a communist if others survive and the cause wins?" Mao's irony was simply too advanced for the rest of the International Communist Movement. Great bits left and right... Don't underestimate the power of taking things out of context. Recently I read about a great example of this in Monthly Review - an anti-communist historian quoted Mao as saying "Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die" in the Great Leap Forward, obviously implying that Mao didn't care about people dying as long as China industrialised. But, of course, if you read on just a few sentences more in the source you see him saying "it’s quite all right to do a lot, but make it a principle to have no deaths." (Source.) The situation here might be similar to that.
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Dec 26, 2020 04:28
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I've noticed a trend that Mao had a dark sense of humor about how many chinese people there were and how long [chinese] history takes to play out like he maybe apocryphally offered 10 million chinese women to kissinger when he visited China, to emigrate to the USA, because China has more than enough women, as a joke I think he made some jokes about how in 300 years China will have communism thanks to him, I forget exactly and can't find it
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Dec 26, 2020 05:23
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VideoTapir posted:China could be a lot better than it is but it is in most ways better than anywhere else I have lived and in few ways worse. ~NUANCE~ Where in tf did you live
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Dec 26, 2020 06:27
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so are movies continuing to show in china? will wonder woman be shown there?
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Dec 26, 2020 06:35
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Judakel posted:so are movies continuing to show in china? will wonder woman be shown there? WW84 came out like a month ago, it was OK
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Dec 26, 2020 09:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:The impression I got of US views towards China, particularly in the latter part of the Cold War and in the post-Soviet era, was that they'd eventually liberalize, "mellow out" (my phrasing) and become a nice, behaved member of the global world order. I'm fairly sure I'm not alone in this characterization - I think I picked it up from retrospectives by Adam Tooze and Pankaj Mishra. History ended 28 years ago for the Americans.
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Dec 26, 2020 09:10
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Judakel posted:so are movies continuing to show in china? will wonder woman be shown there? Yeah, kind of. WW84, Soul, Tenet is still playing out here and a bunch of Domestic films. There are some theaters playing classic English films as well, like the Harry Potter series if you are into that sort of thing.
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Dec 26, 2020 11:22
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https://twitter.com/acupunctureUSS/status/967921831213748224?s=19 https://twitter.com/thinking_panda/status/1342400269989019649?s=19 (cover article "Behind DPP's Elected Dictatordhip") Congradulation to both Mr Xi and Mrs Tsai.
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Dec 26, 2020 14:12
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:i watched "red detachment of women" this morning for the first time. great movie. also i really liked the scene where the liberated slave girl goes on a scouting mission and has a 'kill bill' moment when she sees her former master. screws up the scouting mission though so she has to self-crit later Keep these links to Chinese movies coming. I really enjoyed this one
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Dec 26, 2020 14:55
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quote:The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external. Metaphysicians hold that all the different kinds of things in the universe and all their characteristics have been the same ever since they first came into being. All subsequent changes have simply been increases or decreases in quantity. They contend that a thing can only keep on repeating itself as the same kind of thing and cannot change into anything different. In their opinion, capitalist exploitation, capitalist competition, the individualist ideology of capitalist society, and so on, can all be found in ancient slave society, or even in primitive society, and will exist for ever unchanged. They ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate. They search in an over-simplified way outside a thing for the causes of its development, and they deny the theory of materialist dialectics which holds that development arises from the contradictions inside a thing. Consequently they can explain neither the qualitative diversity of things, nor the phenomenon of one quality changing into another. In Europe, this mode of thinking existed as mechanical materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries and as vulgar evolutionism at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In China, there was the metaphysical thinking exemplified in the saying "Heaven changeth not, likewise the Tao changeth not", [4] and it was supported by the decadent feudal ruling classes for a long time. Mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism, which were imported from Europe in the last hundred years, are supported by the bourgeoisie. BrutalistMcDonalds has issued a correction as of 16:55 on Dec 26, 2020 |
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Dec 26, 2020 16:52
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Chomskyan posted:Keep these links to Chinese movies coming. I really enjoyed this one
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Dec 26, 2020 16:52
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the only non-HK chinese film ive seen is wolf warrior probably should branch out a little more on that...
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Dec 26, 2020 16:55
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sincx has issued a correction as of 05:32 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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Dec 26, 2020 17:29
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:i could also use some recommendations There were 8 official Revolutionary Operas during the cultural revolution. I haven't seen any of those but you can check out the other 7.
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Dec 26, 2020 17:47
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