The Stephen Crowder tier of right-wing hucksters make money on the “Buy My Merch To Make The Libs Mad” gambit precisely because you’ve got a full panel at MSNBC screaming about Russians being behind everything from Black Lives Matter to InfoWars. This kind of annoying Own-The-Libs bullshit only works because Liberals eat the Evil Foreigners Behind Everything line up with a spoon. It works because so many people are panicked about Russians hiding in the weeds.

“They” also happily parade around with “Trump 2028” hats and bumper stickers that gloat about contributing to climate change, because these things are unsettling to a liberal audience. If nobody cared about Russia, conservatives wouldn’t try to enrage their Lib neighbors by claiming the love Putin so much.

The public has been generally brainwashed into believing the Russians aren’t a threat

Are you fucking joking?

Does make you wonder about all those Flock Cameras going up in the US and Europe.

I wonder how the public would respond if they believed the cameras were accessible by the nefarious Russians or the insidious Chinese?

I think we’re well past “Wake Up, Sheeple”. But good luck getting any three Americans pointed in the same direction.

Amid ongoing genocide in Gaza, systematic Israeli theft occurring in Palestinian civilian homes

You used the Taliban’s miserable treatment of women to justify a 23 year holocaust in Afghanistan.

Now you’re calling a Chinese campaign to educate and elevate women living right next door to Afghanistan a genocide.

Beginning to think you just hate Muslims and want them to suffer.

It is very cringe to see folks who clapped like seals when the US bombed a girl’s school get incredibly mad when someone else builds a girl’s school.

I would be curious to know this uptime relative to any other self-hosted sites.

I remember Reddit and Twitter constantly suffering from uptime issues and they were far more decentralized, with modern infrastructure to match.

Is 95.2% all that far out of the realm of expectation?

the US hasn’t let them

It’s not the US, it’s this big magic rock. Also works to scare away tigers

Say the word “Terrorism” and you can justify almost anything

That said China is not wholly innocent in not doing the same.

I mean, the fact that you’ve got to caveat your caveats on this illustrates the dynamic at play. Chinese bureaucrats are focused on land and sea borders, building trans-Asiatic trade routes, and securing friendly relations with rich underdeveloped nations in the Global South. American bureaucrats are ambushing fishing boats, kidnapping presidents, starving entire islands of people, and bombing hospitals and schools.

They still push for influence for soft power

To what end, though? Not to be That Guy, but…

One of these countries is pursuing a very explicit policy of ethnic cleansing for the purpose of resource extraction and white nationalist enrichment. The other is doing industrial development, domestic enrichment, and cultural preservation, with an explicit but ultimately benign bias towards the national leadership.

At some point, Westerners criticizing China sound like the KKK - hoods and burning crosses and all - denouncing the NYPD while reading chapters from Howard Zinn’s People’s History. Even if you do land on a salient point, it comes across as nakedly opportunistic and insincere. Even more so when you’re doing Woke Land Acknowledgement for Tibet, while orchestrating fascist regime change all over Latin America.

And then what comes of it? Now we’ve got a Canadian PM stuck banning Chinese EVs to prop up the American gas-guzzler industry in the name of… national sovereignty? Economic independence? The newest Philippian dictator is fighting a turf war over a string of Pacific Islands for the benefit of who? Six billionaire families that run the island nation like their own private fief? In the name of… freedom and justice for all? American aircraft carriers lining up to flatten wedding parties in Yemen, before a glide bomb connects with their laundry room or the crew mutinies over half-rations of dog food?

Who is this critique of China in service of, exactly? Nobody in the know seriously believes these criticisms are coming from civil libertarians or liberal democrats. Everything is just in service to the all-consuming machine of techno-feudal corporate expansion for a handful of white nationalist oligarchs.

There was a lot of hysterical social media and agitation on behalf of a vocal minority inside Hong Kong. Even then, Hong Kong was already a police state under UK rule. It was one of the reasons Western libertarians loved the place (and it’s spiritual twin Singapore).

The idea that a Chinese aligned government would need to extradite someone from Hong Kong to the mainland only makes sense if the person in question was a fugitive from the mainland hiding specifically in Hong Kong. Which would make about as much sense as an American fleeing the US criminal justice system in Guam or Puerto Rico.

As to

China has stated it would recognize not so much independence of Hong Kong but its self autonomy that allows it to run.

The Hong Kong political structure remains intact. The leadership has all rolled over to Chinese aligned bureaucrats. And the modern-day pro-Democracy protests are an echo of the same pro-Democracy movement that sprang up under British rule back in the 1980s.

This is where Western spin sells people on “Evil China” by neatly sweeping the history of these regions under the rug. You get an earful about China being anti-democratic, when it inherits an anti-democratic UK colony that it promises not to reform. You get an earful about abhorrent Chinese labor practices (the 996) that predate the hand-over and are exempted from mainland labor protections for the same reason. You read about an extradition from Hong Kong to Taiwan and get an earful of spin about how this threatens people in Hong Kong from Hong Kong. And then you read about a Hong Kong riot that kills a couple of Hong Kong cops, rephrased as Tiananmen Square 2.

All this on the back of Chinese reforms that prohibit crypto-scams, crack down on medical quackery, reform predatory loans in the housing market, and dramatically improve labor and environmental standards nationwide, which just so happen to rub a bunch of MAGA-aligned US mega-corps the wrong way.

Do you remember what precipitated the Hong Kong protests?

Habara ass response.

I don’t see China behaving much better if they ever become a super-power

I’m not sure what else they’d need to do to qualify, shy of actually building out a global network of military bases. In that case, sure. If they start acting like the US, then they’re no better than the US.

But for the time being, what I’m seeing - and I’ll quote Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia on this one

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

To date, I’ve seen a lot of Chinese Hospitals (and factories and ports and colleges) opening up across the world. Meanwhile, the only thing guys like Trump and Starmer seem to want to contribute are frowns, finger wags, and 500 lb bunker busters onto wedding parties.

Tibet came under the rule of the Qing dynasty of China in 1720 after the Qing expelled the forces of the Dzungar Khanate from Tibet

:-/

Details?

The three-week incursion into Vietnam in 1979 was certainly a bad decision by the Chinese government. Idk if it stacks up against the American 13 year invasion, occupation, terror-bombing, and torture/assassination campaign that became emblematic of US Foreign policy. Easy to forget the scope of the difference between the two interventions, given how often modern China-watchers love to bring up the former while neglecting the latter.

But do you have anything perpetrated by the Xi administration specifically? Or just something a sitting administrative official actually presided over?