Maybe Russia’s actions aren’t directed by logic.

They are, just not the kind of logic that considers human lives valuable.

Every time you consider that not holding your opinion is “objectively stupid” you should stop a moment to reflect what those words mean.

Thanks, but I’m past elementary school and not here to explain the difference between calling out a direct opposition between stated goals and actual actions, vs “my opinion is the only objective truth”.

Your whole post is incredibly naive.

My European perspective is that defending corporate right as an alternative to fascism is an acceptable emergency measure while there are big credible efforts for large scale reforms to at least have a real left voting option, but it’s not by far a solution to the problem. And if you want that common platform to be the democrats, they will have to change a lot.

Like centuries of bipartisanism will be magically turned into a Euro-style multiparty coalition system in 3.8 years.

It’s just fucking absurd that people can be beat up and tortured physically and psychologically but I’m being asked to be less mean because it will hurt feewings.

I consider enabling the “stick” to be beat the fuck out of you just because you’re “not into carrots” to be objectively stupid. I’m a Euro transplant and I can’t see how it is less stupid from a European perspective. The saddest part is that my wife and I have recession-proof professions, people who got us into this situation don’t.

Remember when he said, “24 hours after he’d be president, he’d have peace?”

That’s part of a desensitization strategy where trumpy makes outlandish claims nobody takes seriously so if he manages to deliver on a single one out of hundreds of such, he’s celebrated as a visionary. So republicans are measured by their successes and Democrats are measured by their failures, no matter how low those rates may be for each.

to all the American leftists useless idiots who refused to vote against trump

FTFY. Voting against trumpy was the easiest decision for anybody who opposes fascism.

people can make social media accounts full of soft core rat erotica just for travel purposes.

My favorite bullshit from the MAGAs had been “this is not a democracy, it’s a republic”.

It used to be both, now it aspires to be neither.

They’re effectively the illuminati conspiracy theorists have been trying to find for many years now.

This is spot on.

Time to look into purchasing Swedish National Bonds, 'cause those Grippens will be grippin.

you don’t know how military alliances work, do you? not to worry, the US president doesn’t know either.

The world population is orders of magnitude larger than it was during the second world war.

FYI, order of magnitude = x10. otherwise your math seems to check out, but this got me confused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

All this raises the question: Why has the US president chosen to upend trade relations on the North American continent?

It’s because the trade agreement trump’s unhappy with was made by a raging moron.

Putin would have used a coup rather than an invasion if trump was in the office then.

Okkay, thanks for confirming that this is a pointless conversation. :)

Bye

I think the benchmarks are Japan and South Korea, and their example suggest otherwise. Again, I do think it’s absolutely possible for China to overcome these challenges, but it’s not a given. Truth be told still more likely than the US fixing its fascist problem.

I’m not convinced that shrinking population is at all an issue for a developed country that can replace workers with technology.

OK, so why do other developed countries panic about shrinking and aging populations? Developed countries “solved” this issue by outsourcing low-skilled manual labor to China. But a population tree isn’t only about manufacturing, it’s also about caring for an aging population. Our growth-based economic systems are quite vulnerable to this.

China is already one if the most automated countries in the world and currently running the biggest infrastructure investments ever.

There’s no precedence for infrastructure investments to resolve loss of workers on the scale that China is facing. Infrastructure also needs to be maintained by people. There’s also an unprecedented potential for a real-estate crisis, considering the devaluation of housing if more and more becomes uninhabited.

I think if anyone can handle population reduction it’s probably China.

Sure, they just have to achieve like 2-3 unprecedented things that also come with unprecedented consequences, etc. These responses feel like being dismissive for sake of being dismissive. My point remains: the Western powers (and russia) are dealing with precedented, or at least predicted issues, many accelerated by aging despots. China has been winning putin’s war, so time serves their purposes etc, but their hegemony isn’t guaranteed either.

Yup. and the classic paradox of authoritarian systems is that if you name and train your successor, they’ll sideline (I mean kill/imprison etc) you before your time is over, and if you make sure there’s no clear successor, power vacuum is guaranteed.

CCP will have no trouble of succeeding Xi as it’s a single party system.

The farther term limits are in the past the harder it will be.

The population issue is heavily overblown

I’d say it’s quite the opposite. Based on conversations with people who grew up in the one-child system and considering that one of the key elements of raising quality of life was reduction of births and spending more resources on these fewer kids, that are often traditionally raised by grandparents in their early years while parents are being economically productive. So people would have to compromise their present comfort to some extent to boost births. I’ve not seen a single nation in the world that succeeded in persistently raising births through pronatalist policy.

I’m not saying that this will be China’s end, but realistically they have to either lower quality of life for the populace and/or really switch away from cheap manual labor as their primary model towards more automation etc.

…China basically has to do nothing to win geopolitica these days.

I totally agree with this part.

Generally speaking, autocrats have a shorter-than-average life expectancy. At least as leaders. Trump’s mental and physical decline is very remarkable if you compare him to his 2015 self vs now. He’s slow, he has difficulty holding his attention (see Crimea annex comment this Friday), but the US still has a succession system

China faces two issues nobody ever talks about.

1. Xi Jinping is old so within years, he’ll need a successor…and with authoritarian systems, succession can be bloody.
2. China is facing a demographic collapse they have zero grip on at the moment. They might lose half their population by the end of the century. and their population hit peak in 2021, and just in the next decade they are projected to lose 50M people, (so this isn’t hat far as many people think)