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  ðŸ˜†

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  ðŸ˜†

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.

Second day of shelling of civilian targets in Armenian cities. Media coverage in the West: "fighting broke out". Condemnations from EU governments: Luxembourg 1 - rest 0.

Burnwinter wrote:

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.

New York Times said "clashes broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh". People care so little they can't even get the geography right  😆

This is a good read on this topic: [url=https://evnreport.com/opinion/of-useful-idiots-western-supremacists-and-white-monkeys/]Of Useful Idiots, Western Supremacists and White Monkeys - EVN Report[/url]

jones wrote:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/exclusive-us-considers-china-sanctions-deter-taiwan-action-taiwan-presses-eu-2022-09-13/

Remember when this was all just posturing and nothing would come off it? Yeah when your Playstation or whatever video game is in vogue these days won't arrive in the mail and the tears are flowing it'll start to sink in.

I think we're still tracking 3 as the most likely options - very little has come of it. The disentanglement of US and Chinese economies (it must be stressed that they are still very interlinked) started far before Pelosi's visit to China and will continue into the next decade regardless.

Secondly, I think you continue to underestimate how keen every other country in the region welcomes US involvement in the South China Sea as a counter balance

Mirth wrote:

There's 3 possible outcomes

1) China does nothing (unlikely) - and the US and every other country in the region gain from that

2) China invades - highly unlikely and we all lose.

3) China raise tensions and Taiwan will have to recognise that an invasion at some point is a possibility (Most likely). That's probably a win for the US, since it's been trying for ages to get Taiwan to take the prospect of an invasion seriously - meaning invest in asymmetric capabilities rather than useless warships. As you say, the US won't write a blank check to guarantee Taiwan's security because China won't be pleased but the US needs Taiwan to be an unappealing target for China.

Good read, Gurgen. I appreciated the author's critique of both sides of naive imperialism and naive anti-imperialism, though I think his own argument about the West shows there's been no symmetry between those sides.

It's really disgusting and saddening that the same enthusiasm that leads people to put Ukrainian flags in their Twitter usernames and cheer on the current "eastern counter-offensive" will also add up to a blind eye to Azeri hostility against Armenia, or worse yet, some sort of dogmatic anti-CSTO chauvinism that holds Armenia to account for Russian aggression—which is complex enough. 

We can't place faith in nation states and empires, they're the formations that generate these wars. 

Gurgen wrote:

https://eurasianet.org/azerbaijan-launches-wide-ranging-attacks-against-armenia

The EU's new "reliable energy partner", replacing Russia who have been kicked out for attacking a sovereign country, attacks a sovereign country.

World: "we urge both sides to de-escalate".

Disappointing but not entirely surprising either the EU/Western response.

I can’t remember the exact details but isn't Armenia surrounded by mostly hostile countries? 

Mirth wrote:
jones wrote:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/exclusive-us-considers-china-sanctions-deter-taiwan-action-taiwan-presses-eu-2022-09-13/

Remember when this was all just posturing and nothing would come off it? Yeah when your Playstation or whatever video game is in vogue these days won't arrive in the mail and the tears are flowing it'll start to sink in.

I think we're still tracking 3 as the most likely options - very little has come of it. The disentanglement of US and Chinese economies (it must be stressed that they are still very interlinked) started far before Pelosi's visit to China and will continue into the next decade regardless.

Secondly, I think you continue to underestimate how keen every other country in the region welcomes US involvement in the South China Sea as a counter balance

I don't really follow your first argument, to paraphrase Klaus until the day something happens nothing will have happened. You could've made the argument that nothing happened in Ukraine/Russia either up until February 2022 but very obviously US, EU and of course Russian involvement there even before 2014 have had a massive hand in what's happening today.

As to the second point I don't necessarily disagree, unlike Jazz and you seem to assume I don't have any love for the Chinese government - they're talking multilateralism for as long as it suits them. I just think the US is a much bigger threat in the region and elsewhere and being honest dodgy governments in SE Asia welcoming US involvement doesn't change my mind on that - I might not know as much about that part of the earth, but plenty of corrupt governments in Africa and the Arab world welcoming US presence never meant it's ever done any good to the people there. There are ways to battle encroaching from China without calling the world's greatest arsonist into it.

JazzG wrote:
Gurgen wrote:

https://eurasianet.org/azerbaijan-launches-wide-ranging-attacks-against-armenia

The EU's new "reliable energy partner", replacing Russia who have been kicked out for attacking a sovereign country, attacks a sovereign country.

World: "we urge both sides to de-escalate".

Disappointing but not entirely surprising either the EU/Western response.

I can’t remember the exact details but isn't Armenia surrounded by mostly hostile countries? 

Yes, two of which (Turkey and Azerbaijan) are openly genocidal. But these are friends of the West so then it's fine.

Burnwinter wrote:

Good read, Gurgen. I appreciated the author's critique of both sides of naive imperialism and naive anti-imperialism, though I think his own argument about the West shows there's been no symmetry between those sides.

It's really disgusting and saddening that the same enthusiasm that leads people to put Ukrainian flags in their Twitter usernames and cheer on the current "eastern counter-offensive" will also add up to a blind eye to Azeri hostility against Armenia, or worse yet, some sort of dogmatic anti-CSTO chauvinism that holds Armenia to account for Russian aggression—which is complex enough. 

We can't place faith in nation states and empires, they're the formations that generate these wars. 

Essentially they first throw you to the wolves and then say: "why are you hanging out with wolves?"

The clip has English subtitles. Sonneborn is the founder and head of a satire party, basically shithoused his way into the European parliament by taking the piss out of all established parties yet he's by far the most brutally honest politician you'll find anywhere.

This was a brilliant speech.

Yeah ... if you believe that mortality of 1,500 ... I'd say it'll turn out to be at least thousands directly and tens of thousands more indirectly.

Massive human displacement through flooding in south Asia is the paradigmatic, textbook example of how climate change has been predicted to have social, economic and ultimately probably military consequences for the past couple of decades at least.

It's been scary hearing these incredibly muffled reports of this arriving as if it were inevitable and of little import. Feels like the global death drive has never been stronger.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220905005440/en/President-H.E.-Volodymyr-Zelenskyy-rings-bell-at-NYSE-to-signify-Ukraine-is-open-for-business

Unreal picture 😆

This is the result of the multinational conference in Lugano Switzerland from July then. Labour laws have already been gutted last month so open season now for exchange traded companies to hunt for Ukrainian state owned assets. Damn I reeeally wonder how this will turn out

Now, if only they will begin to be as forceful when it comes to Israel…

Sweden is a bit of a special case amongst the Nordic countries. A bombing in Norway would be huge news all over the country, and I mean a singular one, not one per night.

Of course electing a bunch of neonazis isn't going to help.

If that is true what is the point in going through all that effort, just fill the ballots in yourself!

flobaba wrote:

https://www.commonsense.news/p/two-bombings-in-one-night-thats-normal

Is this an increasingly prevalent sentiment in other parts of Europe?

Scary feature and I don't dispute its reporting at face value, but I'm also aware we're reading a Quillette stable journalist on Bari Weiss's Substack. Be good to read something from a trustable source on this, if anyone's got anything.