Superior Mind
(not macbeth)
+1,755|6663
Pretty exciting stuff
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
Imagine waking up one day to find out you live on an Indian reservation.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Superior Mind
(not macbeth)
+1,755|6663
Imagine waking up one day to find out you live in the United States of America?
uziq
Member
+492|3422
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14 … ing-states

anglo-america loses its grip.

While​ the peddlers of free markets, democracy, the end of history, neo-imperialism and the flat earth were getting high on their own supply, China emerged as the most formidable exponent of concerted state power so far seen. Just as American wages began to stagnate in the 1970s, the living conditions of a large percentage of the Chinese population began to improve dramatically: the biggest transformation of this kind in history. This extraordinary economic expansion has been accompanied by unparalleled damage to the environment and cruel limitations on individual liberty, especially in Hong Kong and the minority regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. China also needs to confront mounting national debt and the problems associated with an ageing population. Still, scepticism about its material progress, insistence that regime change and American-style democracy are inevitable, or that the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, do nothing to improve the prospects of citizens in the countries that are so proud of being democracies.

Their sanctimony can’t disguise the fact that China, single-mindedly pursuing modernisation under a technocratic elite, has verified Hamilton’s belief that only a strong, proactive state can protect its citizens from the maelstrom of violent and unavoidable change: ‘Nothing but a well-proportioned exertion of the resources of the whole, under the direction of a Common Council, with power sufficient to give efficacy to their resolutions, can preserve us from being a conquered people now, or can make us a happy people hereafter.’ China has been more coldly pragmatic, too, than its Western critics. After all, a ruling party that calls itself ‘communist’ chose to abandon its foundational ideology and adapt itself to a market economy, just as the US, seeking to build a new world order, was failing to implant democracy by persuasion or military force in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Arab world, succeeding only in facilitating brutal anarchy or despotism in almost every country it sought to remake in its image. More recently, and damagingly, a feckless global experiment in economic hyper-liberalism led by Anglo-America’s political class and mainstream intelligentsia has helped empower neo-fascist movements and personalities in both countries.

China may or may not address its democratic deficit, as South Korea and Taiwan have both done. Its chillingly resourceful suppression of dissent in Hong Kong and Xinjiang renews the warning from the histories of Germany and Japan: that the modern state’s biopower can enable monstrous crimes. But there’s no getting around the desolate position that the great paragons of democracy find themselves in today. Neither Britain nor America seems capable of dealing with the critical challenges to collective security and welfare thrown up by the coronavirus. No less crushing is the exposure, as Rhodes finally falls, of the fact that the power and prestige of Anglo-America originated in grotesque atrocities and, as William James wrote in 1897, that ‘a land of freedom, boastfully so called, with human slavery enthroned at the heart of it’ was always ‘a thing of falsehood and horrible self-contradiction’.

The moralising history of the modern world written by its early winners – the many Plato-to-Nato accounts of the global flowering of democracy, liberal capitalism and human rights – has long been in need of drastic revision. At the very least, it must incorporate the experiences of late-developing nations: their fraught and often tragic quests for meaningful sovereignty, their contemptuously thwarted ideas for an egalitarian world order, and the redemptive visions of social movements, from the Greens in Germany to Dalits in India. The recent explosion of political demagoguery, after years of endless and futile wars, should have been an occasion to interrogate the narratives of British and American narcissism. Trump and Brexit offered an opportunity to ‘break democracy’s spell’ on the Anglo-American mind – something the political theorist John Dunn has been arguing for since the late 1970s, long before Anglo-American triumphalism assumed inflexible forms. Those hypnotised by the word, Dunn argued, had become oblivious to the fact that the political and economic arrangements they preferred, and which they described as ‘democracy’, could neither continue indefinitely nor handle ‘the immediate challenges of collective life within and between individual countries effectively even in the present’.

Instead, the elevation of tub-thumpers to high office in London and Washington led to a proliferation of self-pitying and self-flattering accounts, describing the way the long march of ‘liberal democracy’ had been disrupted by uncouth ‘populists’, ‘identity liberals’, ‘social-justice warriors’ and even, as Anne Applebaum claimed in a cover article in the Atlantic, by senior Republicans, who had abandoned their ‘ideals’ and ‘principles’. Mark Lilla’s preposterous argument, first aired in the New York Times, that the ‘Mau-Mau tactics’ of Black Lives Matter and Hillary Clinton’s radical ‘rhetoric of diversity’ helped elect Trump, was reverently amplified in the Financial Times and the Guardian. Mainstream periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic quickly mobilised against a resurgent left by promoting intellectual grifters and stentorian culture warriors while doubling down on their default pro-establishment positions. ‘The New York Times is in favour of capitalism,’ James Bennet, the newspaper’s editorial page director, told his colleagues, because it is the ‘greatest anti-poverty programme and engine of progress that we’ve seen’. Bennet, who had given space to articles that denied climate change, promoted eugenics and recommended apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, was forced to resign last month over an op-ed calling for military force to be used against anti-racist protesters. Nevertheless, Samantha Power’s recent claims in the NYT that ‘the United States leads no matter what it does’ and ‘nations still look to us in times of crisis’ confirm that the factotums and publicists of the ancien régime remain persistent, yearning for a Restoration under a Biden administration.

However, after the most radical upheaval of our times, even the bleakest account of the German-invented social state seems a more useful guide to the world to come than moist-eyed histories of Anglo-America’s engines of universal progress. Screeching ideological U-turns have recently taken place in both countries. Adopting a German-style wage-subsidy scheme, and channelling FDR rather than Churchill, Boris Johnson now claims that ‘there is such a thing as society’ and promises a ‘New Deal’ for Britain. Biden, abandoning his Obama-lite centrism, has rushed to plagiarise Bernie Sanders’s manifesto. In anticipation of his victory in November, the Democratic Party belatedly plans to forge a minimal social state in the US through robust worker-protection laws, expanded government-backed health insurance, if not single-payer healthcare, and colossal investment in public-health jobs and childcare programmes. Businesses pledge greater representation for minorities; and book and magazine publishers seek out testimonies of minorities’ suffering while purging unreconstructed colleagues.

Such tardy wokeness, unaccompanied by major economic and cultural shifts, invites scepticism – black lives, after all, have increasingly mattered to corporate balance sheets. The removal of memorials to slave-traders is likely only to deepen the culture wars if it is not accompanied by an extensive rewriting of the Anglo-American history and economics curriculum. Certainly, the new-fangled welfarism of Britain and the US will remain precarious without a full reckoning with the slavery, imperialism and racial capitalism that made some people in Britain and America uniquely wealthy and powerful, and plunged the great majority of the world’s population into a brutal struggle against scarcity and indignity.

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin outlined the necessity of such a moral and intellectual revolution in the starkest terms, arguing that ‘in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves,’ to ‘discard nearly all the assumptions’ used to ‘justify’ their ‘crimes’. The fire Baldwin imagined in 1962 is now raging across the US, and is being met with frantic appeals to white survivalism. ‘You must dominate,’ Trump told state governors on 1 June, threatening to unleash ‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons’ on his political enemies. Understandably, people exalted for so long by the luck of birth, class and nation will find it difficult, even impossible, to discard their assumptions about themselves and the world. But success in this harsh self-education is imperative if the prime movers of modern civilisation are to prevent themselves from sliding helplessly into the abyss of history.

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-19 05:43:13)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

lol, comments in yahoo news were so toxic I guess that the company suspended the feature.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
They had to take the comment section off of NJ.com because the right wingers were awful there. Fox News killed their comment section for years because it was becoming insane. CNN's has been gone for almost half a decade at least. Comment sections are interesting but nothing good can ever come of them for news sites. If you leave them unmoderated, they become insane. If you moderate them then you have to train someone to moderate them and in that way you are promoting an ideology.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n15 … se-century

whose century? america and china’s schism.

read this. it’s very very good.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
If you'd been paying attention you'd have seen I've been saying a lot of that for a while now.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
but it doesn’t concur with your paranoid worldview at all. you are incidentally right, in a limited way, for all the wrong reasons.

besides, i’ve never argued against the idea that the CCP is a bad thing, or that their actions over hong kong are wrong. i’ve merely presented the point, which is touched on in the essay with reference to western hawk’s rosy post-fukuyama assumptions that china is destined to fall or revolt, that people like jay are very very wrong on this point. what we actually have to contend with realistically is an extremely patriotic and nationalist china full of people who think they’re doing just great, actually, hong kong or xinjiang be damned.

i don’t think china is going to stage a mass invasion of australia any time soon, which is the sort of rhetoric you spout. i do think they are inevitably on their way to global pre-eminence, and might not necessarily care how we feel about that. the west is having an existential crisis and a loss of primacy. a lot of it, really, is our own fucking problem. the chinese don’t care. i don’t think they want to put us all in camps and conquer our lands; i think they’re just amused by our ructions and contortions, our trumps and our dilberts.

it also touches upon just how keen american businesses were, via the WTO, to engage with china and ‘open up the market’. for right-wingers or people like yourself now to turn around and talk about trade wars and protectionism is just funny: you were the exact same people advocating china’s business plunder in the 90s. that they have managed what were at first very humiliating, pro-western WTO terms into a ‘win’ for them is a huge egg-on-face moment for western capitalists. we have been outplayed.

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-31 04:52:28)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
I've never advocated getting in bed with China in business terms, I've seen it myself and said endlessly it was a terrible idea to be gifting them money and technology at our own expense, effectively selling our assets to buy disposable goods. And as I said endlessly, and the article says, super-ethical live the freedom dream hipster Apple were right in the forefront of that, building suicide factories and using slave labour which paid into the CCP.

Engineers rarely want to offshore work and never see the benefit, only the hard work needed to bring suppliers up to speed.
Its always the hipsters and the MBAs who want to send labour and pollution offshore where the standards are lower.

China is doing pretty nicely with its 'developing nation' status at the same time as having a nuclear arsenal, bullet trains and space program. That advantage needs to be cut right off.

Whether China will actually invade anywhere or just use the threat of its military to force 'tributary nation' status on others who have resources they think are rightfully theirs who knows. They aren't building up their military, building runways all over the place and mapping seabeds for no reason.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-08-01 21:51:41)

Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
So as we recently had the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, I think it's right time to once again consider the fact that we still have thousands of weapons of unimaginable destruction at the fingertips of a dozen or so world leaders.

The logic is that these weapons are some guarantor for our security through mutually assured destruction. I feel that as time passes, they're ever more rather guarantors of our extinction or at the very least crimes against humanity of a scale not yet seen in history. As the use of these weapons fades into history, so too seems to fade the public conscious about them. Yet only in the last few decades have we truly managed to piece together what sort of consequences nuclear explosions really have. Populations near test sites in Nevada have been subject to far higher incidence of cancer and resulting death than anyone else. (strange) birth defects are more common there as well, for generations now. The amount of nuclear explosions around the world have irradiated our planet to such an extent that for some purposes we have to use steel produced before WW2, as the production process today contaminates it with radioactive isotopes that have been left in our atmosphere.

While I'm sure there's a possible workaround for this last issue, these are just some examples of the terrifying consequences that these weapons have had far beyond their initial explosion.

Personally I feel that any military person or politician who speaks to me about the value of 'tactical nukes' or M.A.D. in the 21st century is a fucking madman.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-08-11 11:10:16)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Well we haven't had any continent scale set-piece wars since, no nation has really been prepared to get into much more than a proxy war - and China has won all of those.

I think we'll need nukes for when China releases the next plague. Next time round they'll have the vaccine before they release it and we won't have a means to hit back besides nukes.

When the world is dying like flies and China mysteriously isn't can that be taken as an act of war? This is something we need to prepare our thinking for.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
While M.A.D. may have appeared to be a convincing argument at some point in time, in hindsight I really wonder if it was only nuclear weapons that prevented another catastrophic war. The destruction of WW2 was already enormous, when we didn't even have ballistic missiles, laser guided rockets and when explosive ordnance in general was of much lower yields. A conventional war between great powers in 2020 would be far too destructive to risk, period. No nukes needed.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

Well we haven't had any continent scale set-piece wars since, no nation has really been prepared to get into much more than a proxy war - and China has won all of those.

I think we'll need nukes for when China releases the next plague. Next time round they'll have the vaccine before they release it and we won't have a means to hit back besides nukes.

When the world is dying like flies and China mysteriously isn't can that be taken as an act of war? This is something we need to prepare our thinking for.
why would china be building so much infrastructure across the asian subcontinent and africa if they intended to unleash a lethal pathogen on the world?

the only way such a tactic would be effective is if their economy became completely self-sufficient, so that they could hermetically seal their borders and watch the world burn. they are so far away from extricating themselves from the global economy in this fashion.

and, again, why are they spending so much in burma, pakistan, the horn of africa, the rest of the continent, etc ...?
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
So they can have the land to themselves?

They want the land, not the people.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
oh, right, yeah, global domination. that trouser-rubbing lickspittle right-wing fantasy. 'the chinese want to subjugate us all!'
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
No, they just want our land, they don't want any non-chinese on the planet.

The Chinese using baubles and trade-goods to buy land and influence is as brazen as the american settlers bribing the Indians with small-pox laden blankets and pans. Its amazing no-one has noticed the parallels.

"Sorry your Huawei P40 Pro only lasted a year, they're made for export after all. And a shame the Covid-19 they were smeared with wiped out your tribe, the deeds to your river-valley are non-negotiable though."

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-08-12 04:14:35)

Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
erm western tech companies have been using designed obsolescence since the invention of the fucking light-bulb.

omG huaWei ProduCts haVe a LifEcycLe
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
ᴹʸ ʷᵃᵗᶜʰ ʷᶦˡˡ ˡᵃˢᵗ ᵃ ˡᶦᶠᵉᵗᶦᵐᵉ
uziq
Member
+492|3422

uziq wrote:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/pankaj-mishra/flailing-states

anglo-america loses its grip.
podcast/discussion of this long article here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-vide … s-of-shock
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

It seems to me that Google has been rife with "should I still buy/where to buy a Huawei phone" articles ever since US intelligence expressed concern about Chinese telecom 8 years ago. On the joking surface, it's like being told you probably shouldn't get it made people want it even more.

Yes other companies and products have planned obsolescence, but I think if you've read/heard a product has a particularly short lifecycle or problematic updates in comparison to its competitors, I believe those are perfectly good reasons to look elsewhere first.

e: I don't think Huawei sprays its products with COVID-19 before shipping them internationally as intentional modern day smallpox blankets. It's surprising dilbert brings it up.

Dilbert, didn't you try to go to a restaurant earlier in the pandemic? I recall some recent complaint about the owner wanting to hug people. Why even go to a restaurant during a pandemic in the first place? Why then all this concern about Chinese companies "shipping it abroad?"
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
We had zero community transmission for a couple of months, restaurants were open provided they stuck to the rules, the economy needs money.

Stupid owner ignored the rules. In Victoria too many stupid people ignored the rules and look at what happened.

You're right, Huawei probably doesn't spray their products with COVID-19, they aren't prepared with a vaccine.
When they have a vaccine ready beforehand they'll be spraying them with COVID-22.

But its a serious question, if and when the world is going down with the next pandemic and one country is suspiciously immune can that be taken as an act of war?
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
so stupid i can’t even be bothered.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
It must be hard being that stupid.

Anyhoo, I'll just wait for the opportunity to say I told you so.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
looks like the russian opposition leader has had too much to drink again and lost consciousness.



he keeps doing this! silly man.

Last edited by uziq (2020-08-20 03:09:38)

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