133arc585

133arc585 , 10 months ago

the worth of the guns and tanks and other things we’ve been giving them that were just collecting dust over here?

Use of reserves motivates replacement. Just because you’re giving them weapons that were produced in the past, and therefore whose (production) cost has already been incurred, doesn’t mean that occurs in a vacuum. With stock running low, contemporary money goes in to replenishing that stock. In effect, there’s no difference whether you send old or new equipment, because both incur costs in the present.

No actual money was involved and so didn’t really cost us anything.

It cost you exactly the amount it cost to produce them. Just because it was produced in the past, doesn’t mean it was free. You paid for it X years ago, and are only now seeing it used. You paid for it. Moreover, you’re now going to pay to replace it.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

The conflict is not occurring in a vacuum. They can pretend that they are the only ones who can make that decision, but without the West sending ridiculous amounts of money in arms and support, they wouldn’t be in a position to make any decision. As long as they’re entirely dependent on others, they can’t monopolize the decision making here.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Congratulations citizen! You have been awarded with a 600 FICO score for promulgating sinophobic nonsense. If you also prove that China is the Big Evil, you can get an additional 250 FICO score.

–

I don’t think you see the irony in using the dead trope of “Social Credits” when an actual credit score exists in FICO and can be used to deny you housing, loans (and therefore access to education), jobs, and more. And if you think it’s just financial transactions, try looking at what companies like LexisNexis have on you that it coalesces into things like “RiskView”, or how much of a profile skip tracing agencies have on everyone. Then you have the profiles built on you by several government domestic (and foreign) surveillance agencies. And you have the profiles built on you by several big tech companies. Just because there’s not a single, unified, government-sponsored surveillance and consumer rating agency doesn’t mean the tangible effects of such disparate systems aren’t identical to what you claim happens in China (i.e., denial of services and access). It doesn’t matter if it’s 50 different entities controlling parts of the system if the end result is identical.

133arc585 , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I hate this saying. It’s not explicit, and logical consequence isn’t bidirectional, but it implies that those who do remember the past somehow won’t repeat it. Which is blatantly false. Many people, even those who intimately know history, want to repeat it. Either because they think material conditions are just different enough to lead to a different result this time, or that the precise way the actions in the past was carried out was subpar and with tiny tweaks it would lead to a different result, etc. I do generally agree with the explicit statement, but I strongly disagree with the implicit statement.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Read my edited footnote. I do not fully agree with the claim itself either.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

1. Strong nuclear force: holds the nucleus of an atom together
2. Weak nuclear force: responsible for radioactive decay
3. Electromagnetic force: of charged particles
4. Gravitational force: attractive force between objects with mass

133arc585 , 10 months ago

The person I replied to wasn’t able to name the forces beyond gravity, so I think over-simplification and reduction to specific phenomena they would have heard of is appropriate.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Indeed. Funk can not only move, it can remove.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Gotcha, no problem, I did take it as criticism of my comment but that was a reflex.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Tangentially related but I can’t seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:

1. Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
2. If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
3. Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Your comment doesn’t make any sense.

The fundamental forces are physical forces.

It is feasible for consciousness to be something like a force (more accurately, perhaps, a field) and as such it would be by definition a “physical” force. The use of the modifier “physical” on force doesn’t make much sense here: all forces are physical, as are all things that actually exist. It could be useful to consider the objects of consciousness as emergent, and the force of consciousness as fundamental; I don’t know enough about this line of thought to say much on that.

Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.

That’s literally what the comment you’re replying to says. Emphasis on “as far as we know”. There’s no obvious way to dismiss it outright as not being a force, it’s just that as far as we know currently, it isn’t a force.

I don’t personally have a well thought out stance on the matter.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos.

So in theory they could exist anywhere in the universe somewhat close to a star, if the relevant particles in our atmosphere are around that star? That’s what I meant about the density distribution: are they spherically distributed around (all) stars, or are they only present in very specific situations?

These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.

I thought they had a small selection of possible decay products. Not particularly relevant to me at the moment, though.

As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.

I mistyped the mean lifetime, it’s actually 2.2 microseconds. That’s three orders of magnitude different, but from a (non-relativistic) view it would still only travel about 66 centimeters. I’m missing too much information to try to solve the length contraction equation (I don’t know its length, or its velocity) for the observed length. I’m curious here because they’re able to travel on the order of roughly 50 meters into the Earth, and from what I can find they disappear there due to absorption from the many atoms they pass through on that path. So that leads me to a question: If there is not relatively dense earth to get in the way and attenuate the muon, such as if it were produced by a gas cloud beside a star, how far would it realistically be able to travel? Since the muons on Earth “die” from absorption rather than lasting long enough to decay via weak force, they would, in open space, surely be able to travel far enough without enough collisions such that they do end up “dying” by decay.

Thanks for the reply, I am curious here about something that I don’t have enough knowledge to answer for myself.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

I don’t think you know what “fascist” means.

Moreover, people will happily complain that Chinese/Russian “propaganda” is allowed to exist, especially on the internet. They will demand that Chinese/Russian “propaganda” is removed from social spaces. And, then they somehow they have a problem with other countries (esp. China/Russia) wanting to do the exact same thing. The premise is that the propaganda being put out is misrepresenting the truth to influence public thought: when it comes from China/Russia, people want it blocked and removed; when it comes from the West, blocking and removing it is some sort of “free speech” issue (or, as you wrongly claim here, “fascism”).

In this particular case, I don’t personally know hardly anything about the movie, and I do strongly disagree with using “promoting homosexuality” as an excuse to ban something. But in general, countries wanting to put a damper on other countries’ propaganda is near universal.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Call that tin foil hat syndrome or whatever.

Racism. It’s racism and xenophobia.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

This is why countries are banning use of their tech being anywhere near government communications.

No, that’s also racism and xenophobia. They spread propaganda about supposed backdoors in network hardware, but can never actually point to any. If there’s no exfiltration, you aren’t “giving them access to your data”.

I have zero trust with a nation that actively steals from any nation it can get away with.

Considering a lot of Chinese network hardware, specifically Huawei, is at the literal forefront of technological development, continually developing and producing the fastest devices with the highest throughput, etc., it is false to say they’re just stealing their tech. They’re beating out all the countries you could posit that they’re stealing tech from. Moreover, if you’re basing your supposed trust in a tech manufacturing company/country based on whether or not they steal tech secrets, what countries could you possible trust? The USA steals tech through (government enacted) corporate espionage against firms competing with firms in the USA[^1][^2]. You’d be hard pressed to find any country with tech manufacturing that isn’t engaging in corporate espionage.

[^1]: Edward Snowden says NSA engages in industrial espionage[^2]: NSA is also said to have spied on the French economy

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Right so that’s entirely meaningless. Read my comment again. I didn’t say they don’t steal tech, what I said was two-fold:

1. Every country with manufacturing ability steals tech. Therefore basing whether you trust a country/company on that factor is worthless.
2. There are some fields, such as networking tech made by Huawei, where they can’t possibly be stealing tech, because they’re at the forefront, ahead of all competitors.

You took the one very specific thing I didn’t say in my comment (namely, that they don’t steal tech), and decided to just shit out a bunch of links saying they do. Yet, you didn’t address any of the points that I did make, such as saying that is a meaningless angle to look at this from.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

AFAIK Apple is the company that has moved to 3nm process before any other tech company. Apple’s camera are dog crap, but other than that they are streets ahead.

Sure, but I didn’t say they were at the forefront in every facet of tech. That “just” in my comment you quoted is also doing some heavy lifting: they aren’t only (“just”) producing stolen IP-based tech; they are in part but not entirely. What I said was again two-fold:

1. Not everything they produce in tech is stolen IP, such as the network hardware I mentioned (see below); and
2. Since every country with tech manufacturing is engaging in corporate espionage, that is a useless metric to judge a country/company’s trustworthiness.

Networking standards are agreed before implementation. It is not that the signal is stronger or there is a better reception. The difference between 4g and 5g is down to coding how the signal is sent.

There is plenty of room for advancement in network tech that’s largely independent of the specific protocol it’s carrying. That’s why I mentioned Huawei in particular, because they have had some of the highest-throughput carrier-grade switches (that is, a single device can switch a much higher number of connections at a much higher bandwidth than alternatives). To simplify: instead of an ISP needing a dozen switches from a competitor to achieve the throughput of it’s supported bandwidth for the number of customers it has, it might need only a couple of the Huawei switches. And, frankly, it can be the case that a particular piece of hardware is able to put out a stronger signal than alternatives, for the exact same protocol (e.g., 4G or 5G); you could very well produce a consumer grade WiFi router with larger signal range, or a cellular tower with a larger signal range (yes, there are physical limitations to these, but we aren’t saturating that in general yet).

This really is not the case. Companies look to steal tech not nations.

Well as I said the USA as a nation performs corporate espionage on foreign companies who are direct competitors to a USA-based company. I would think other nations do too, but I didn’t look that far as I have more familiarity with my chosen point of reference, the USA, and all I needed to show was existence.

As for how good Huawei is, how do you think they got the expertise.

Once again, missing the point. You can’t steal tech that your competitor doesn’t have. If they were producing the exact same tech, you could speculate that it’s purely stolen IP. But if they’re at the forefront, as I’ve said, they can’t possibly have stolen it (else, the people they stole it from would also be able to produce it).

Not only that but they are interfering in politics of other nations. They have a campaign to intimidate citizens of other states, right up to the point of kidnapping.

This is blatantly false xenophobic fearmongering and frankly off-topic to this conversation. The original point was that it was irrational (fueled by racism and/or xenophobia) to flatly distrust Chinese tech. I mean, if you wan’t to play there, would you not consider the USA’s meddling in foreign politics, including having colonies, and funding and helping enact coups and installing puppets, to be just as problematic? To preempt, it’s not whataboutism to point out a double-standard: if you don’t trust Chinese tech for the reason you just listed, you also can’t trust USA tech (or really any “Western” tech for that matter). But if you aren’t so flatly distrusting of Western tech just by nature of being produced by the West, you need to assess why you are flatly distrusting of Chinese tech just by nature of it being produced by China.

So no that is not racism. That is taking a moral approach to not trust a rogue state ran by a dictator.

It is racism, because it’s founded in the racist notions of “Orientalist mystery”, Yellow Peril, Western chauvinism, and white supremacy. It’s hypocritical to take a “moral approach” to only one country; if it was truly a moral approach, you would apply it to any other country having the problematic characteristics you’re trying to point out. Also “rogue state” here is meaningless, and it’s not ran by a dictator (but I think you either know that, and don’t care, because it’s keeping with popular rhetoric, or don’t know that, because you don’t care enough to educate yourself and would rather keep with popular rhetoric).

133arc585 , 10 months ago

They’re obviously not fascist, and you’d know that if you were being honest about it and bothered educating yourself both on what fascism is, and on the realities of the PRC.

Also, it’s not “state capitalism”. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It’s not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn’t mean it’s capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn’t mean it’s socialism. They’re structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism’s purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism’s purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn’t use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There’s also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

You’re not completely wrong but neither is the person you’re replying to. While the raw materials of construction may have an established supply chain, NPPs are unique in at least two ways:

1. Each has a somewhat different engineering design to account for conditions of where it’s built; and
2. Since the designs differ, the construction process necessarily differs and, due to uniqueness, is inherently more expensive and complicated than just building something off-the-shelf or standardized like a house or office building (or, relevant here, a wind farm).

Raw materials is only part of the supply chain: there’s construction (as you mentioned), but also engineering and design.

The expense of NPPs, including going over-budget and having to adjust engineering designs for new regulations, is largely because NPPs are regulated to “internalize” their externalities. Whereas a coal plant is allowed to pollute in gathering the raw materials, is allowed to pollute in producing electricity, and is allowed to pollute in disposal, and has weak safety standards overall, NPPs must be mostly self-contained and over-engineered for safety. If coal plants had to control all of their pollution, be earthquake resistant, be airplane-hijacking resistant, etc they would also routinely be over-budget and have delays, and have unique designs for each plant. Now, there is something like a plateau here, where at some point we will have decided on a fixed set of regulations, and common design features can be identified and re-used more than they are now, and therefore NPPs could become less expensive. But we aren’t there yet. Comparatively, we do have a practically fixed set of regulations and common design features for much of the renewable sources.

Currently, other renewables get to benefit from existing supply chains where NPPs can’t really, but it doesn’t have to remain that way, and there’s reason to believe it will remain that way.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

From the rest of your comment history? Yes, it’s entirely believable. It’s more surprising that you’re walking it back, really.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Lovely racism!

133arc585 , 10 months ago

• Decreased performance, as DRM is often hooked deep into event loops and adds non-negligible overhead.
• Decreased privacy, as DRM often requires pinging an external server constantly.
• Decreased security, as DRM is a black-box blob intentionally meant to be difficult to peer in to, and has been the target of attacks such as code execution vulnerabilities before.
• If you own a game but don’t have an active internet connection, DRM may prevent you from playing the game.
• If you own a game but have multiple computers, DRM may force you to buy multiple licenses when you’re only using one copy at a time (c.f., a physical CD with the game on it).
• Eventually, a DRM company is going to go out of business or stop supporting old versions of their software; if you want to play an old game that had that DRM, you won’t be able to even if you own the game.
• &c.

DRM exists to "protect’ the software developer, i.e. protect profits by making sure every copy has been paid for and to force people to buy multiple copies in certain cases. DRM never has and never will be for your (the consumer’s) benefit.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

If you support the death penalty then you believe either:

• The government’s judgements are infallible and it would never falsely execute an innocent person, OR
• You are okay with the government executing an innocent person.

I definitely don’t think they’re infallible, as there are loads of cases where people are exonerated only after serving decades in prison, or after their death. And I’m definitely not okay with the government executing an innocent person.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

You’re not just looking for conversation.

Unless you get a response from the site admins, anyone’s answer is pure speculation. No one is going to be able to say, definitively, why .ml was chosen, except the site admins.

My theory is: .ml domains used to be offered for free. So they made lemmy.ml for free, as it was just a toy project. Then, they upgraded to the paid .ml domain (which is how they managed to avoid the recent free .ml purge).

The “its Marxism-Leninism” could be true, but unless you get an answer from a site admin, everyone asserting that it’s true is talking out of their ass. They don’t know any more than you or I know.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

I am not joking.

You might not be joking but you are assuming. Do you have a link to a statement by a site admin that says explicitly that is what it stands for? Otherwise you’re just speculating, and there are other reasons someone would have chosen .ml besides it standing for that.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

As someone who largely agrees with the content of what you have to say, your delivery is absolutely disgusting. You litter every comment with personal attacks, insults, and are needlessly offensive. I genuinely don’t know if you think that aggression helps get your point across, but it doesn’t. And, considering how many of your comments get removed by mods for that insult and disrespect, you should realize that even if you personally think it’s constructive, the mods don’t. If you think the content of your comments is valuable, don’t you think it’d have more value if it is left up for others to see, instead of having it removed where nobody can learn from it? If you resort to this namecalling and aggression so much, and the comments get removed, they’re of no value. As an outside observer, by reading your comments, I’m less likely to trust what you have to say, and instead would assume you have a set agenda that you won’t stray from. Your behavior detracts from your trustworthiness.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

I’ll just summarize my point: if you think you have educational value in your comments, that value is nil if the comment gets removed.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

No point lying. If you check the modlog plenty of his comments get removed. You can check for yourself.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Really shifting the goalposts there.

You start with

The only nuclear threats have some from the US.

Then someone provides a list of such events that are from Russia and not the US, then you shift to

Every single one of these is outlined as a response to military aggression.

The original commenter didn’t say they were without context. They simply said that the threats were made, which they were. You were so adamant that they weren’t made that when you were shown proof that they were made, you have to reframe it.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

What a weird framing you’re taking. They’re literally threats. They’re contingent threats, but they’re still threats. Your claim was that they have not made threats; in reality, they have.

Also: isn’t every threat contingent? If the threat is “I will use nukes if X event occurs” it’s contingent on X occurring. If the threat is “I will use nukes” then it’s still contingent, but the contingency is implied: “I will use nukes if I want to”. There is no such thing as a threat that isn’t contingent.

In fact, since you asserted that the only threats had come from the US, can you point to any sources from the US that are threats (and let’s use your definition of threats here, too: you don’t get to point to a contingent threat)?

133arc585 , 10 months ago

A more accurate title and thesis would be “How the West’s historical amnesia took everyone for a ride”.

The West has made a very concerted effort to ignore the historical and geopolitical context (and misrepresent it where it must mention it) surrounding the situation. The conflict did not begin in 2022 by Russia. The only way the West has managed to gain and hold support has been by deceptively misrepresenting the reality of the situation in order to rally everyone around a perceived Evil. They don’t bother describing what the people in the actual territories that asked for Russian support want. They don’t bother describing how Ukraine has bombed its own people. They don’t bother to describe how, partially due to Ukraine’s abuses, several regions voted to join Russia. They don’t bother to describe how Russia was invited by those fighting for their homes and families against Ukraine. They don’t comment on how millions of Ukrainians have chosen to immigrate to Russia since Ukraine bombed its citizens in 2014. They don’t dig in to why the majority of the global population supports Russia here.

This is not Russian imperialism or colonialism. This is not Russian aggression. The attempt to describe it that way is dishonest and, unfortunately, most people don’t care enough to actually inform themselves so this portrayal catches on rather easily.

The Western media has taken advantage of the fact that very few people are informed about historical context, and that most people don’t care about context. The Western media has taken advantage of the fact that people like to be united against a Big Evil, in a fully black-and-white way, devoid of any context and nuance.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

China is a socialist state so by definition cannot be

Can you elaborate on that? I agree that China is not imperialist, but I don’t see how socialism by definition precludes that possibility.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

You didn’t answer what I asked.

You said that capitalism by definition leads to imperialism. I asked how socialism by definition precludes imperialism.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

I don’t see how that follows.

Because you need to get to imperialism via capitalism.

Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people; in theory, why can’t it engage in colonialism to bring in resources to benefit its people?

There is definitely no other way.

Its obvious how capitalism leads to imperialism, but it’s definitely not obvious how that would be the only way to arrive there.

Any elaboration you can provide would be great because you’re acting as if it should be obvious why what you’re saying is true but it absolutely is not.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of attempting to answer the very direct confusion I’m having. You’re doing a lot to make sure it’s obvious how capitalism can and does result in imperialism, which frankly I’m mostly in agreement with. My issue is that you’re asserting that socialism can’t lead to imperialism. You’ve still given no reason that this is to be the case except for this attempt:

Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people by moving past a society based on exploitation. This is why it wouldn’t engage in colonialism.

And I agree that, by definition, it’s a society based on the betterment of its people. Stress should be applied there to its people. I’m not justifying imperialism at all, but it’s a pretty obvious argument that by subjugating other nations/peoples and exploiting them, you can make the lives of your people better. Perhaps you’re trying to say that the type of leadership and ideology that creates and maintains socialism would also be ideologically against imperialism, but that seems more pragmatic than theoretic. You’re saying socialism can’t engage in imperialism by definition but the most I’d give is that it doesn’t engage in imperialism in practice.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Thank you, I’ll look at that. It might be my misunderstanding of a technical term, but I don’t see the logical sequence that makes it apparent that socialist countries can’t engage in imperialism/colonialism.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

• Chinese Communist Party
• Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang
• China Democratic League
• China National Democratic Construction Association
• China Association for Promoting Democracy
• Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party
• China Zhi Gong Party
• Jiusan Society
• Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League

133arc585 , 10 months ago

So what’s the conclusion as to what’s happening?

As I wrote about in a thread a couple weeks back (here, here, and here), this should have been fine, and was fine on paper.

According to official statements it was going to be diluted, before release, to a level that was even lower than what Fukushima NPP put out while operational. Then it was going to be released at a rate that maintained this concentration.

Did Japan lie? Did it not dilute how it said it would? Was it a technical failure and dilution did not occur at the level they said it would, or was it released too fast at the dilution level they set? Was there not testing at release time/site?

133arc585 , 10 months ago

The OP put a non-paywalled link in the post body.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

If you truly think this is a display of Russian aggression I genuinely doubt that you have any historic view on the geopolitics of the region. The conflict did not appear out of thin air in 2022. The situation is more complex than “Russian aggression”; in fact that’s not even a part of the picture. Russia is responding to requests for assistance after Ukraine began bombing its own people in 2014. Many of these people voted to join Russia after this disgusting display by Ukraine. Before 2022 most of the combatants against Ukraine were regular people fighting for their homes and families. These people realize that Ukraine wants to bomb their homes and Russia is offering to fight alongside them. On the weekend before the SMO began, there were 2000 ceasefire violations in the Donbass. Between 2014 and 2022, 1 million Ukrainians immigrated to Russia because of the abuse by the Ukrainian government. And since the operation began in 2022, another 1.3 million immigrated. The people in these territories that Ukraine has zero regard for view the support they are receiving from Russia positively: they invited Russia in to assist them, and they are somewhat reliant on Russia to protect them from Ukraine.

I know life is a lot easier when you don’t muddy things with context. I know that it’s a lot easier to be righteous in your condemnation of a world power because they’re “evil” and an “aggressor” than it is to acknowledge that the situation is more complex. I know that it’s a lot easier to go along with what Western media says than to be informed and hold your own opinions. I know it feels nice to rally with everyone against a perceived enemy. I know it feels nice to feel that your country (and military) is finally doing something good for once. But you can’t let wanting to feel good stand in the way of reality. The Western media has done a hell of a job propagandizing this war, attempting to remove any historical and geopolitical context, in order to gather and maintain support. Think honestly: how much historical and geopolitical context have you seen, especially from popular media sources? How much more effort is spent on raging about current “evil deeds” than understanding the desires of the people in the actual territories that have asked Russia for help?

Please read, and inform yourself. Life is less black-and-white than “Russia evil”.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Who has spent the most on this conflict? Hint: it’s not Russia; it’s not even Ukraine; nor is it any European country or…any other country. The USA has spent more on this conflict than any other country, including Russia. Who platformed Nazis, embedded them into the military complex, and helped put them in positions of power within NATO? You guessed it, the USA. Do you think the USA is some independent third party observer here?

133arc585 , 10 months ago

If France does that we will beat their ass.

I wish I could say this response is surprising, but it’s really not. When you can’t win by diplomacy, reasoning, and discussion, and when you feel that you have the right to punish other countries for being sovereign, you resort to force and “beat their ass”.

Do you believe France is sovereign, can make their own decisions, and can act in their own best interest, and are fully competent and able to do so? Or do you not believe they have the right to be sovereign and you (whoever “we” is) have the right to force them to align with your interests? If they end up in any agreement with China, it was their own decision and they did so because it benefits them in some way; do you feel you are permitted to punish them for that?

133arc585 , 10 months ago

It is disturbing how righteous you feel in your ignorance.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107.

I’m not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it’s 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn’t do. My point was they’re similar and middling in the ranking.

Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.

This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn’t that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it’s decreasing. The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”) in part because the issue doesn’t address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn’t magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.

Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.

The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn’t publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren’t doing what they said they would. You’re confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There’s a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it’s because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn’t have so much support for the party.

(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it’s ranking; inverting the sort order doesn’t make the countries less similar, and since they’re middling, inverting the sort order means they’re still middling. I didn’t make a claim that one was better than the other).

133arc585 , 10 months ago

It seems you’re right. I will edit that part of my comment. But I will point out: I wasn’t making a statement that one was worse than the other. I made the point that they’re similar in ranking and like I said, even if you reverse ranking order they’re still just as similar. And, since they were middling in their ranking like I originally said, if you invert the sorting, they’re still middling.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

You’re taking an overly specific definition of lynching and framing the situation wrong, and coming to a bad conclusion.

A court’s refusal to punish it, in nearly every case, is tacit support. They aren’t saying “please, lynch!” but they’re saying they won’t punish lynching.

This also easily fits any definition of lynching that’s not so restricted so as to only include “hanging black people from trees in town squares”.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

There was also evidence that these balloons had equipment on board that did not line up with what is expected on a weather balloon.

Do you mind sharing your evidence? Because that’s not what was officially reported by the Pentagon. It was reported that it had off-the-shelf components (i.e., exactly what you’d expect on a weather balloon), and didn’t collect or transmit anything.

Chinese spy balloon didn’t collect intelligence as it flew over US: Pentagon:

The Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean in early February was built, at least partly, using American off-the-shelf parts, a U.S. official has confirmed to ABC News. […] Later Thursday, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said that the balloon not only did not transmit data back to China – it never collected any.

You’ll note that media still insists on using the phrase “spy balloon” when it was just a weather balloon. They even said as much, and they still use fearmongering phrasing because they know it serves their narrative.

133arc585 , 10 months ago

Olga is glad that Russia has intervened in the conflict, and she indeed corrected me when I once referred to the Russian SMO as an “invasion”, telling me that Russia did not invade. Rather, they were invited and welcomed in. That does seem to be the prevailing view in Donetsk as far as I can tell.

Russia, Donbass, and the reality of the conflict in Ukraine