DdCno1 @ DdCno1 @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

A superpower that doesn't project force around the globe isn't a superpower. Love it or hate it, but America is the sole remaining superpower and as such, it can't afford to stay out of affairs, including in the Middle East - and when it's forces are attacked, it has no other option but to strike back. That's the bare minimum. The moment it retreats out of world affairs, power vacuums emerge and the world becomes a much less stable place.

Can we not post and upvote literal Chinese state media?

It's brilliant insights like these that I come to this community for.

Reason #49583 for any Russian with a degree to get out of the country.

I feel second-hand embarrassment for journalists, analysts and politicians who, for many years, portrayed Putin as this shrewd master strategist - whereas in reality, he's merely another brutish, mediocre autocrat, repeating all of the same obvious mistakes similar rulers have made for millennia.

Nothing Israel has done justifies October 7.

Here's an in-depth academic analysis of this:

https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/hybrid-threats-hamas-use-of-human-shields-in-gaza/87

Not that you care, given the ridiculous lie you just spread.

Lightning adds a layer of complexity and additional failure points. It also centralizes power in the bitcoin network even further.

It doesn't actually change anything about the fact that Bitcoin isn't a currency: Despite the fact that it's claimed to be theoretically able to handle millions of transactions per second, it only handles a few million per month or about half of all Bitcoin transactions after having been around for six years (and most transactions aren't payments for goods or services). The vast majority of online commerce does not accept bitcoin nor any other cryptocurrency, which isn't surprising, given that their values fluctuate wildly. Currencies need, acceptance and stability, neither of which applies to anything crypto.

This isn't propaganda and none of this has been debunked. Bitcoin can only handle a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (in practice it's closer to between 3 and 5) and I'm not aware of any cryptocurrency that can handle more than 60 transactions per second. Regular financial transaction networks meanwhile handle thousands of transactions per second while consuming far less power (both in terms of electricity and computing power).

China’s economic growth

How much of this is growth comes from construction? How can we know we can trust the numbers out of China?

The Iraq invasion lead to over a million Iraqi refugees fleeing to Syria

Irrelevant. The kids Assad had tortured belonged to important Syrian families, not any refugees in the country.

the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel (triggered by Israel’s illegal occupation of Lebanese territory that only the US recognizes)

Also irrelevant for the same reason and this land is only occupied, because it was used by Syrian forces for artillery shelling of Israel during the Six Days war. While the occupation isn't widely recognized, I really see no point in portraying it as a bad thing. Israel was attacked, they took a piece of land away from the enemy that would have made future attacks easier. Hardly an evil plot anyone needs to lose sleep over, other than Syria and Israel.

Not to mention, the 2006 war wasn't a war between Lebanon and Israel, it was one between Hezbollah and Israel - and certainly not one over the Golan Heights, which the terrorist group couldn't care less about.

utterly destroying Libya and turning it from the most prosperous African country to one that has open slave auctions

Libya saw an uprising that was supported by a Western coalition based on a UN resolution. Blaming America for the ensuing chaos makes no sense. It was morally the right choice to support the rebels.

Yemen too, now

Why blame America when Iran is responsible? Iran-backed and -directed Houthis fired first, including at American ships (but anything that floats in these waters). Again, it makes no sense to blame America for shooting back here, especially since everyone else, except for the UK, is either unwilling or unable (like China) to do so.

Back to Syria:

Did America pour grease on the fire once it started? Obviously, it literally backed the opposition groups and inflamed the civil war!

I don't think you are aware of this, but in a single prison, Assad has had about as many people murdered as died in the entire war in Gaza so far:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SednayaPrison

Are you really blaming America for supporting groups that fight against such a monster?

There were almost 20,000 air strikes!

Let me do some whataboutism for a change: There were 45,000 Russian air strikes until 2019 alone, which, unlike American air strikes, primarily targeted civilians:

https://airwars.org/conflict/russian-military-in-syria/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RussianinterventionintheSyriancivilwar#Civiliancasualtiesandwarcrimes

And did US intervention in Syria help? Or did it make everything worse? I think we both know the answer.

No, I don't think we can agree on this either. There are now parts of Syria with democracy and human rights:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutonomousAdministrationofNorthandEastSyria

Why are you blaming Syria on America, even though it was internal unrest sparked by the Syrian government torturing a bunch of kids for anti-Assad graffiti? This resulted in increasingly larger protests, which were crushed with incredible violence by the regime, which in turn led to mass defections from the Syrian army as more and more soldiers were unwilling to kill their fellow citizens, creating factions that fought both against the Syrian government and among each other.

America caused none of this. In fact, it's the Syrian government that claimed foreign agents were responsible for the initial protests. It's not a good look to repeat this obvious and transparent lie.

Fine construction? Based on what? Have you actually seen these ghost cities? There is nothing fine about them.

I don't think you quite understand that in this case, it's millions upon millions of working and middle class people who put most of their life's savings into this.

Power, opportunism, thirst for war, corruption (not oil though). Plenty of reasons for this war.

Your logic has a flaw though: It's not like Saddam would have just stopped doing his thing in 2003 had he not been removed from power. The country was a powder keg anyway, so perhaps it would have ended up just like Syria eventually (I can't imagine the Arab Spring leaving it alone) - or perhaps we would have seen another war between it and Iran. Another possibility would have been Iraq attacking a neighbor other than Iran again, perhaps at a time when they weren't expecting a harsh American response (e.g. under a Democratic US presidency).

None of this excuses that Bush and Blair made up reasons to invade the country nor the incompetent handling of it afterwards that led to most of the up to one million dead post-Saddam, but let's not pretend that everything would have been rosy had the second Gulf War not happened.

The upper estimates for the number of people killed under Saddam Hussein are about one million as well. Now what?

Iraq was better off before the invasion. Fact.

I don't think this is a fact. Let's look at a few metrics, starting with HDI:

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Iraq/humandevelopment/

Infant mortality rate:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/infant-mortality-rate

GDP per capita (ignore the silly outlier):

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/gdp-per-capita

These basic figures suggest that a number of key aspects of life are indeed better than they were during the dictatorship.

The homicide rate is higher now:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/murder-homicide-rate

Keep in mind though that there is no way of knowing how accurate official figures from the past were (this also goes for the numbers on human and economic development, of course). Also worth noting that the government itself could kill and maim with impunity back then:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde14/003/1996/en/

Freedom of the press is still pretty abysmal these days (and the page also touches on what you were likely mentioning the instability):

https://rsf.org/en/country/iraq

A report from 2002 on the state of affairs under Saddam's rule:

https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq/press.html

I would admit that life in Iraq could be safer under Saddam Hussein compared to today, given that he kept a lid on especially religious conflicts, but this came with a big asterisk: Provided you didn't run afoul of the regime or provided the regime didn't think you did (no court of appeal, no independent judiciary, torture and murder are common - you can be the most loyal Baathist and still just be unlucky), provided you didn't have a pretty daughter (or were one) in a place where Saddam's son were looking for girls to rape, torture and murder, provided you weren't a member of a persecuted ethnic group, provided you didn't own something Saddam or his sons wanted from you, etc. The usual caveats of living under autocratic rule, with the added "insane son of dictator" factor (see also: what Kim Jong Il was up to in his younger days).

The Democratic Party covers a range from supporters of European-style Social Democracy (Sanders, Cortez, etc.) to the moderate center-right. The former is definitely part of the leftist spectrum. They would be at least slightly left of the center in Europe and most definitely are by American standards.

The fact that there aren't any noteworthy Communist politicians in the US isn't all that surprising given that America wasn't exactly receptive to this ideology for most of its history and that the the whole Marxist Leninist world revolution ended up being a rather embarrassing failure. Arbitrarily claiming that anyone who is anti-communist, which is hardly an unreasonable position, can't be leftist is just absurd.

I looked for Ethiopian or African news sites that confirm this story, but it seems like it's not accurate. This African green news site only mentions that ICE cars will be phased out in line with the EU by 2035 and that the government encourages the sale of electric cars through incentives and local assembly:

https://www.afrik21.africa/en/ethiopia-non-electric-vehicles-soon-to-be-banned-from-importation/

There is nothing on this on any large Ethiopian news site. The Reporter has no article on this:

https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/?s=electric+cars

Neither does The Ethiopian Monitor:

https://ethiopianmonitor.com/?s=electric+cars

This Senegalese outlet states that it's not clear when the ban comes into effect:

https://apanews.net/ethiopia-to-ban-importation-of-non-electric-cars/

Given that there are significant issues with maintaining and insuring existing electric cars in the country, it's safe to assume that the ban will not happen immediately:

https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/30035/

There is a different car import ban since October of last year aimed at returning citizens, which doesn't appear to have anything to do with the move to electric vehicles though:

https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/36044/

So in other words, this awful article containing a chat log for some reason (What on Earth was the author thinking with that?) is just an example of poor reporting.

Sure, but China suffers from enormous environmental cost as well (cement is ridiculously terrible for the environment; now think about what drives most of their paper growth), under an inherently unstable hybrid between market capitalism and state economy, coupled with what can only be described as a demographic WMD, an erratic leadership that, through purges after purges after purges, is busy erasing even the pretense that it's operating under technocratic principles - and on top of that, you get these heave-handed attempts at information control. The latter in particular has never ever worked at making people forget that the economy is on a downwards trajectory with absolutely no sign of even slowing down, let alone a solution that doesn't involve launching a major war in Asia in the hopes that rallying around the flag will somehow prevent the whole house of cards the CCP has been busy building over the last couple of decades from crashing down.

Xi inherited many of the issues China is suffering from, but he also inherited a nation that was slowly opening itself and reversed that course almost from day one. Instead of realizing the untapped potential the emerging Chinese civil society had, he only saw it as a threat and clamped down on it through positively Maoist measures. He has also done everything in his power to make the economic situation worse, all in the name of securing his rule and that of his party (in that order). Xi's answer to economic woes and the demographic decline is mass slavery, which I feel the world will finally stop accepting the moment China oversteps its bounds towards the outside. A war against Taiwan would do it, but I feel like even a major escalation in their (at this point) ten dash line imperialism, perhaps against Japan, could be enough to trigger substantial backlash.

How doubleplusungood.