We already have a ton of names. Nobody is getting burned.

Love to give a President the Nobel Prize inside the first six weeks on the job.

Remember how well that worked out for Obama?

The largely clandestine effort, profiled in a New York Times report and a forthcoming book by Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman, highlights a remarkable transformation for a man who campaigned four years ago as an anti-war Senator, former law professor and defender of Constitutional due process. He pushed for an end to the use of torture on terror suspects, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay military prison, and for trying detainees in federal courts. For those efforts he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet over the past three and a half years, Obama has sat quietly “at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical,” according to the Times. He personally vetted names on a “kill list” of targets, authorizing dozens of drone strikes even in cases with only vague and inconclusive evidence about who’s really on the ground, according to the report. Neither the evidence against the suspects nor the suspects’ identities is available for public scrutiny.

US power stems directly from its dollar position.

Soft power stems from its ability to cut individual nation-states off from global trade. But if you take a hard look at, say, North Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or Iran, you’ll notice that it’s not simply access to legal international markets that causes their poverty. These countries are physically encircled by US military. Cuba, in particular, is ringed in by US warships with an entrenched beach head at Guantanamo Bay.

And it goes without saying that these countries are constantly under threat of espionage, plagued by disinformation, and periodically sabotaged by US special forces.

The dollar position is a consequence of these interventions, dating back to the Cold War Era.

The longer this goes on, the more systems decouple from the USA and correspondingly the less power and influence they have.

It’s been going on since Truman. Arguably back to McKinley. The US has been a fountain of militant white nationalism for centuries.

Meanwhile, European corporate media seems vastly more paranoid and fearful of infiltration by Eastern adversaries. Muslims coming up through Turkiye or crossing north of the Mediterranean. Russians driving tanks all the way from Moscow to Berlin. Chinese businessmen stealing European jobs, Orientalizing markets, and corrupting the fragile innocent young minds of the liberal intelligentsia.

I just don’t see decoupling happening (in my lifetime). Trump will lose his grip on power, US neoliberals will retake the federal government, and we’ll have another wave of “normalization” that settles anxious Europeans just long enough for Palantir and News Corp and JP Morgan and Microsoft to secure their hooks a bit deeper.

Question is what they’re going to do about it, though.

The EU is just about as integrated with the US economy as any two continents can be. Nevermind the US military presence.

Is that going to change? Or will Europeans just feel grumpy into the foreseeable future?

Nobel Peace Laureate

Wish that brand wasn’t covered in the slime of the last recipient.

Terrorism

Strongly believed that Jim Watkins was Q, although there’s enough of a gray area given how many different accounts claimed to be Q at any given point.

But who he was involved with is probably gonna be harder to work out.

Damn, who would he be involved with? Who who who? If only there were clues…

Hey, just apropos of nothing, anyone know who Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad was?

“Hey you stupid fucking libs, what if Epstein = Russia? You like that? Idiots.”

You clearly don’t know shit about history

You got banned from Reddit, didn’t you?

Interesting to make the parallel of the inept, corrupt and teetering late-Qing dynasty to the modern CCP

I know you’re trying to win an argument here and not engage with the history at all.

But surely you can see the difference between a government that crumbles in the face of a reactionary Christian cult and one that gets our way ahead of the problem.

China is not the USA. There are a million reasons organized religion wouldn’t work as a political vector there.

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

The Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War, Revolution, or Movement, was a civil war in China between the Qing dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The conflict lasted 14 years, from its outbreak in 1850 until the fall of Taiping-controlled Nanjing—which they had renamed Tianjing “heavenly capital”—in 1864. The last rebel forces were defeated in August 1871. Estimates of the conflict’s death toll range between 20 million and 30 million people, representing 5–10% of China’s population at that time.

…

The uprising was led by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka who proclaimed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ. Hong sought the religious conversion of the Han people to his syncretic version of Christianity, as well as the political overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and a general transformation of the mechanisms of state.

Even if we assume the law is written as a good faith civic regulation and not a tool to discourage religious support networks and competing power structures to the ccp, what can it possibly achieve?

If you’re suspicious or hostile to Evangelical Christianity, there’s no reason to believe this can’t be both.

Christianity as an entry point for KMT nationalism has been a problem in China since the Revolution.

do these people have the right to organize and operate their communities in a way that suites them or not?

Are you a sovereign citizen? No, organizations don’t just get to write their own laws because they call themselves a church.

And further, does that punishment look to fit the crime?

Ask the Branch Davidians. In this case, Yayang Network repeatedly and notoriously violated these laws, escalated rhetoric when they were delicensed, and are now actively agitating for a full church lead revolt.

After the riots in Hong Kong - heavily influenced by Trump aligned evangelicals - and the violent insurgencies in the United States lead by like minded Evangelical conservatives, I’m not sure how trying to serve a couple of guys with an arrest warrant is an overreaction.

Why do you have a such a visceral reaction

I’d call it a logical reaction.

I’d also be curious to know what you’d have them do differently.

So far, the liberal response is “do nothing and hope they stop”. And we all know how that worked out for the Americans.

Sure. But you still need to square the circle on public policy.

Are you in favor of minors being forced to attend religious services by their parents or not? Should this forced attendance be a prosecutable offense or not? Should repeat offenders be arrested and charged or allowed to operate in defiance of these rules indefinitely?

As we saw under Biden, liberals love to say they have strong moral convictions. But they hate the idea of actually enforcing any of them.

So, assuming you’re fine with the Yayang Network continuing to operate, you also have to ask yourself… are you going to be happen when these people are running your town? Your state? Your country?

So, I did a little digging on this group - the Yayang Church Network - because I was curious to know the details.

Turns out, there’s a prohibition in China against church attendance for minors. China does not allow anyone under 18 years old to attend religious services or receive religious education under a set of policies rooted in the Regulations on Religious Affairs (revised in 2018) and in the government’s broader mandate to “separate religion and education.”

The Yayang Network operates in open defiance of this rule. It’s leadership - specifically a pair of evangelical pastors named Lin Enci and Lin Enzhao - have made it a practice to openly and publicly denounce the law in services where parents are encouraged to bring young children. And this police action is in response to these organized religious protests.

Now, I’ve been in the Reddit/Lemmy community for a while. And… historically… these sites have been pretty nakedly against religious indoctrination of young people. There’s also a strong anti-natalist sentiment which might run afoul of church’s progenitor - Watchman Nee or Nee T’o-sheng - whose evangelical traditional outlook encouraged large families in strict defiance to the Chinese One Child Policy.

So I do have to wonder if people on this site are going to be outraged at China for religious persecution generally speaking. Or if they’re actually sympathetic to the Yayang Network’s evangelical traditions and founding beliefs.

Silicon Shield

So, let’s pretend the end goal of the Chinese state is a full scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan (it’s not, as evidenced by the soft economic takeovers in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and assorted border nations, but lets pretend).

Now, let’s consider that Xiaomi has already designed a 3nm chip and Huawei is close behind with an expected 2026 release. Economically speaking, who benefits if TMSC blows up its own facilities and hands 70% of the global market share to these two companies (plus Samsung and maybe Intel if they ever get their shit together)?

This feels like Nancy Kerrigan putting a baseball bat to her own knee and threatening to ruin Tonya Harding’s career.

Maybe there can be some kind of NFL style trade.

All y’all thought there was going to be a US Civil War, but it turns out the first shots are getting fired across the Alberta/Saskatchewan border.

Damn, dude. Whatcha gonna do about it?

Plenty of 3rd spaces exist in Texas. You just have to pay to play. The hyper-capitalist dream is alive in the Lone Star State.

I always imagined thats why there were so many drunk people out and about. Because the only habitable place outside of homes were bars if you didn’t have a gym membership.

I gotta wonder how much of the decline of alcoholism in the subsequent generations boils down to affordability.

Gym memberships are way cheaper than bar tabs.