Maybe settle down a tad Jones, achieves nothing going off about clowns and bitching and whatnot. You are not reshaping global opinion on OMITT.

I just had a post swallowed that more or less agreed with you though. I have come to realise in the past couple of years that it is very hard, from a perspective that lies within customary United States hegemony, not to view China's business as usual as it becomes an imperial force as highly aggressive.

The controversy here in Australia during our recent election campaign about China's Solomon Islands security deal is a great case study with lots of predictable facets, including

  • rational fear of Chinese empire-building in the South Pacific and SE Asia
  • irrational, Sinophobic fear of the same thing
  • inability to see the history of racist colonial contempt for SE Asia and the island nations that will grant China these opportunities as it seeks them out
  • inability to see our region is already pock-marked with dozens of variably weaponised United States military bases encircling China (hilariously, this was barely mentioned in the Australian press)

The reality in places like Australia is that China's business as usual of military projection, use of soft power, trade wars, tariffs and sanctions, public rhetoric, propaganda etc as it goes about expressing its strength is going to be perceived as unusually aggressive even though it is nothing but standard for our ally the United States. That's going to be where this place comes from psychologically for a long time to come.

jones wrote:

You right wing clowns

😆

I'll respond to the rest when I can be bothered but thanks for that. Gave me a good chuckle. I've been called a lot of things but this is a first  😆

JazzG wrote:
jones wrote:

You right wing clowns

😆

I'll respond to the rest when I can be bothered but thanks for that. Gave me a good chuckle. I've been called a lot of things but this is a first  😆

Great that you got that out of it at least. I don't actually believe your views are fully right wing fwiw, you tend to have some reasonable points every now and then but they're mostly drowned out by some biased and very salient anti leftist nonsense. Most of the time I see you posting in this thread it's to complain about "those on the left".

Probably more apt to call you an enlightened centrist but that's actually even more of an insult as far as I'm concerned.

For what it's worth, the psychology about United States empire I was talking about in that previous post is in no way restricted to the right wing in Australia, it probably covers at least four fifths of the political landscape.

Burnwinter wrote:

Maybe settle down a tad Jones, achieves nothing going off about clowns and bitching and whatnot. You are not reshaping global opinion on OMITT.

Jazz is a good sport, the way he's dishing out his little jabs I'm sure he can take some himself.

As for the rest of your post I agree with it, a little more balanced than I'd like but that's only because I'm balancing out the vitriolic nonsense I see in Western media myself. It should be noted that we're living in countries where sinophobic, russophobic etc views are rampant in media without people even realising it, the talk of geopolitical "rivalry", dogwhistle racism towards these cultures etc allthewhile making billions in businesses with the people you're spitting in the face of on the daily. The other day in German state TV was a social science professor who explained that while Russians look like they're Europeans, they're really not and similar to the Chinese they have a "strange" relationship to death which isn't in line with ours.

Maybe that's part of the reason I'm a little "biased", doesn't mean I'm not critical of some of the PRC's decisions and policies, in Xinjiang, in Tibet etc. At the same time everyone would do well to try keep their own house in order before going off about how others are doing

I don't think you're particularly biased Jones, I tend to find myself almost in agreement with you on many of these topics.

My personal take is that it's best to look at China through the lens of similarity more than the lens of difference, comparing its activities with those of the United States historically and today rather than falling for narratives about exceptionalism and great difference.

Xinjiang for example, as a detention project, per capita relative to China, it's somewhat comparable to the scale of Australia's immigration detention archipelago in recent years. And the repressive techniques used in Xinjiang are half borrowed from the "counterinsurgency" field manual the United States used in Iraq during the "reconstruction" (amazing term), which was itself mostly written by an Australian military intellectual.

Likewise Belt and Road, though it's a vast collection of varying neo-colonial projects, is much smaller than the equivalent western soft power and debt slavery initiatives over the past decades.

I expect nothing special from China but the instruments and techniques it is using are mostly established, normal stuff. There are salient differences, but … its ambitions to build military bases, control its adjacent territories and such certainly aren't among them. Engaging successfully with what China's doing now is going to require western governments to adjust to these positions.

That’s quite an elaborate way to downplay genocide.

Gurgen wrote:

That’s quite an elaborate way to downplay genocide.

Far from it. Drawing the comparison is one way to pay proper attention to the imperial crimes of the United States empire which have been aided and abetted by my own country, without downplaying what China's doing in Xinjiang.

When we talk about the United States and Iraq, a situation which has partly inspired China's techniques in Xinjiang, we're talking about a place where hundreds of thousands were directly killed by war, and millions of excess deaths occurred due to war and sanctions.

That war, along with other push factors like the junta in Myanmar (formerly an ally of various Australian oil and gas investors), was among one of the leading reasons tens of thousands of people ended up passing into immigration detention in Australian camps onshore and offshore, prior to my nation's decision to start just turning boats of asylum seekers around at sea.

Meanwhile in Xinjiang you've got authoritarian surveillance and re-education, and between one and two million people reportedly interned by the Chinese regime, with a whole raft of disappearances and a big international propaganda effort.

What am I downplaying?

It will be antithetical to understanding the development of the world in coming years to imagine that China is run by some sort of gaggle of sadistic Bond villains while NATO and the United States are honourable protectors of freedom.

That's not how it has worked, and that's not how it's going to work. These imperial structures are more similar than different and at this historical moment they're more convergent than ever before in their repertoires of power.

It's also wrong, both factually and ethically, for all discourse around contemporary events to be couched in historical relativism. The world must be addressed as it actually manifests itself if we are to make any sense of it that can produce emancipatory potentials. Whether various atrocities are better, worse, or equal to each other has little bearing on those potentials, and more importantly, I think we need to resist the temptation to exclude or ignore aleatory processes from cybernetic thinking.

Coombs wrote:

I think we need to resist the temptation to exclude or ignore aleatory processes from cybernetic thinking.

At the very least we can avoid reasoning via "China bad, United states good", a position which is neither empirical nor generative.

5 days later
19 days later

May have? What is the point of the UN?

But investigators said they found "credible evidence" of torture possibly amounting to "crimes against humanity".

Words being carefully chosen, I haven't actually looked at the report.

Fuck man, even I know that was happening. It's not careful, it's cowardice. Useless globalist nonsense.

We (the US) are bussing migrants to Mexico and dumping them in the desert to die, sexually assaulting captive women whose children we've forcibly removed from them, overtly funding racist extremists across the globe, and withholding an entire nation's assets (which we stole) as millions go hungry. Rights-based politics are a sick joke.

11 days later

Yeah just seen it on Al Jazeera 49 dead Armenian soldiers, 0 dead on Azerbaijan's side yet AZ media say Armenia started it, sounds highly plausible. Hope your family are safe if you still have any there.

The coverage on this in Australia is absolutely buried. Reading about it it sounds like the alignment relative to Ukraine means Armenia is going to be hung out to dry by Europe.