believe that hierarchical violence was invented in the 20th century
Well that's just not what I said - you specifically said fascism, which was invented in the 20th century. It has more specific characteristics than just hierarchical violence; ethno-nationalism, militarisation of the state, flexible suppression of opposition and centralised autocracy.
Just because you're mad about being corrected doesn't mean you need to be a dick about it.
Democracy has existed far longer than fascism has... the earliest fascist movements weren't until the 1910s, while the earliest recorded democracy was around 508 BC, with the earliest recorded usage of the term in the 430s BC. You're wrong by a margin of millennia
My dear god, this is history fundamentals. And the sheer balls you've got to have to be that rude while being just this severely wrong is obscene.
Democracy isn't a magic anti-fascist spell, sorry to break it to you. If someone can convince enough of the population to elect them, then they get into power, fascist or not.
By your definition, there really hasn't been a "real" democracy ever, frankly, since it depends on there being a state with no imbalance of wealth whatsoever. If that's how you want to define it, sure, go ahead, but I'm going to keep using a definition of democracy that's based on how the institutions of elections and the state are built, because that's a useful way to discuss political systems, and "democracy is when only leaders I like are elected" is not.
Brazil's leaders are elected through universal suffrage, its speech and media are (relatively) free, that's a democracy by any reasonably useful definition. There's plenty to criticise in how that democracy functions, especially how money and power can influence those outcomes, but there is no perfect democracy, just the best attempts at what people can build within their existing social systems.
Democracy is a political system, while capitalism is an economic system - understanding how they interact with each other is useful and important, but pretending they're mutually exclusive is unnecessarily reductive, and closes the space to actually discuss those things.
Edit: the mere fact that Bolsonaro attempted to retain power by force, but was unable to do so in the face of losing the election is direct evidence that there are functional democratic institutions in Brazil
I fully agree that Bolsonaro was a straight up demon, but I also agree with the idea that - currently - the administration of Brazil is probably about as good an example of a good world citizen as it gets
Oh yeah, Russia is real good at keeping those tech oligarchs in check /s
BRICS is such a loosely linked group that generalising like that is just never going to be accurate; Indian and South African, for example, policy on tech regulation couldn't be more different if they tried.
Don't get me wrong, I think BRICS is a good organisation for economic cooperation between these very diverse countries, but there's really no common political, social or economic characteristics.
Brazil is a good example of that, because under Bolsonaro, it couldn't have been more different - regulations on big tech and banning X would never have happened under his tenure (well, at least not with the same goals)
I mean, I don't disagree that there's similarities especially wrt to nationalism etc, but I also think those things are far more widespread than the UK and US.
Germany for example has had the AfD emerge as a major party with a big rise in nationalism, Italy has Brothers of Italy in power, who were an explicitly fascist party until very recently, and Italy has a long history of nationalism. China and Russia are extremely right-wing, propagandised, xenophobic, nationalist, surveillance capitalist and deregulatory (moreso wrt Russia), but it would be very silly to claim that makes them America-like.
I'm just stating how I see it from the perspective of a person actually from Britain - not sure what you're referring to wrt UK/me personally(?) having a superiority complex about it, in fact I'd argue self-deprecating, anti-British attitudes are an integral part of British culture in a way that is a direct inverse of US nationalist fervour.
I just think "the UK is America lite" is a very reductive way to look at a country that is highly culturally and politically distinct from the US. Whether that's the NHS (the first ever single-payer national health system), which the US has no equivalent of, the importance placed on the separation of church and state, or the far stronger regulatory frameworks that have frequently been a preventative factor that have repeatedly caused trade deals with America to fail (eg the whole bleached chicken thing).
One of the primary reasons trump wants to reduce the US' focus on Russia and Ukraine is to prioritise their position towards China. That's not to say Trump might not decide against direct involvement; he's famously erratic, but the semiconductor production of Taiwan is an critical economic dependency that can't be replaced in the short term.
No, it's not a joke. And putting a small amount of thought into it makes clear that the US believes it can effectively defend Taiwan - it wouldn't keep such volumes of weaponry there if it believed it would trivially fall into China's hands.
I think you deeply underestimate just how difficult and expensive in manpower and materiel it is to perform a naval invasion, especially against a nation whose military is specialised for pretty much exclusively that purpose.
Naval superiority is naval superiority; if you can't get your military to the other side of the strait, you can't invade the island, regardless of distance. The actual question is whether Taiwan would be able to hold off an invasion for long enough for the US navy to reach and control the strait, which is reasonably likely given the US rents a large number of naval bases in the region for just this purpose.
I'm going to just go ahead and ignore your second paragraph, since it's entirely unrelated to the US's military capability wrt to Taiwan.
They don't build the weapons for themselves (mostly), but the US has enormous volumes of weapons (presumably including a lot of drones) already stored in Taiwan so that they can be bought and delivered instantly if they're needed
Send the US navy to blockade the strait and finalise the sale of the billions of dollars worth of weapons already waiting on the island for exactly that purpose
Drone warfare will be the primary form of warfare (ie automation will continue to become more prevalent), Haiti will still be in crisis, China and the US will still be competing for military dominance, China will still have a disproportionate amount of rare earth metals (that one isn't even a trend really, just describing geography), and states will continue to call terrorists freedom fighters whenever their goals align.
So, basically, the same trends that have been ongoing since the cold war will continue to be trends, Nostrasmartass.
But all these things you've listed above had specific, self-evident purposes, regardless of the ethics of the actions.
So that doesn't support your argument that Russia just does random chaotic shit for the sake of it - in fact it does the opposite, suggesting that Russia acts.
As an aside, there was absolutely no reason to be calling the other person "pathetic" for having a differing perspective to you; they were responding politely and in good faith.
Well that's just not what I said - you specifically said fascism, which was invented in the 20th century. It has more specific characteristics than just hierarchical violence; ethno-nationalism, militarisation of the state, flexible suppression of opposition and centralised autocracy.
Just because you're mad about being corrected doesn't mean you need to be a dick about it.