partial_accumen

DenverCoder9 strikes again?

I can see the advertising campaign for that one already: “Get on the fucking train, Shinji”

This tweet from her matches Russian political positions. Especially considering that Russia had seized almost 1/3 of Ukraine when she tweeted this. It was particularly tone deaf on Stein’s part because Ukraine had surrendered its nukes, and its reward was being invaded by the country it gave the nukes to.

Steins dinner with Putin was in 2015, so post invasion of Crimea and over a year into Russian “little green men” invading the Donbas.

First, I’m not stupid enough to go to Russia to celebrate their propaganda apparatus like she did. Second, I notice you selectively ignored the other option of her just standing up and walking away.

You’re working very hard to craft some kind of narrative trying to convince us she has repeated poor decision making (a bad quality for a President). Are you trying to do that because the other, more likely scenario, is the reality she’s willing tool for Russia?

That explanation isn’t helping her cause or that of the Greens. She actively went to a celebration of the Russian state propaganda machine, that is mistake #1. Then, according to you, she made a choice to continue to sit silently a table with Putin. She could have either kept quiet, stood up and removed herself, or she could have exercised some statesmenship and when presented with the President of Russia, challenge him on his policies of invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine killing its citizens and kidnapping its children in the Donbas.

Instead, according to you, she sat silent.

she did not have dinner with putin. this is misinformation

You’re looking at the picture. Both Stein and Putin are sitting at the same table. There is food in front of both. Are you claiming the photo is fake? Or are you playing word games where the meal was something like “lunch” instead of “dinner”?

The ruling parties love to smear the Greens on this side of the pond too, unfortunately

The Greens on the USA side of the pond do a great job of smearing themselves.

Here’s the US Green Party 2024 Presidential candidate Jill Stein having dinner with Vladimir Putin, members of Putin’s senior staff, and self admitted registered foreign agent for the Turkish government, Michael Flynn.

You can’t hand wave this problem away, saying you get what you pay for (also a common saying in the West). It’s systemic. Also, I’ve taken risks buying more expensive versions of the same products and had the exact same result.

…and…

So I ask you this: Was it the parents fault for feeding their babies contaminated baby formula? Should the people who installed toxic drywall have known better? Did the people who died from contaminated blood thinner deserve it for being poor consumers?

There’s another element of Chinese culture you’re missing and it is that of “miànzi” (面子) or “face” as in our version of the phrase “saving face”, or figuratively “reputation”. The sellers do care about their reputation, but there are different groups they care about and groups they may not. You’re likely a western end user retail customer. Most probably don’t care about you. They might care about their reputation with their western reseller customers though.

The examples of poison drywall or adulterated formula are very bad by both Chinese and Western standards, but for slightly different reasons. The western view it as bad because it harmed the end consumers. The Chinese view would be a loss of face of the seller for being such a public and shameless scam without integrity or honor, a huge loss of face.

No one seems to care in China. It’s like you say, making money is all that matters.

You’re close to understanding, but you’re still missing it. Again, you’re judging this by western standards. Now, I’m western, and I like the western standards, but I also understand that their culture doesn’t have to conform to ours for it to be “right”. There is no objectively right way to do this. We’re all different humans figuring different systems. I certainly have my preference for the western style, but that doesn’t make what the Chinese have been doing for hundreds (3000 thousand, if you ask the Chinese) of years they’ve been doing less “right”.

Let me tell you something: Toys made in West go through such testing. It was a lesson learned in blood over decades.

That’s a very recent addition to western culture. Lots of toys even during my lifetime were dangerous. Two generations back, in the USA we had toys like this which heated up to 260 °C (500 °F):

Which caused serious burns and even some deaths for the children playing with them.

In the 1950s this was a toy:

You’re bringing your perspective of individualism which is very much a Western idea. Other cultures don’t come from that perspective and arrive and different conclusions. I can tell you, we’ll see more of this press up on our western culture as trump continues to flounder our dominance and China continues to rise.

I’m also apply the same logic to Americans. If a USA of the future is the trumpian-style, I’d rather have a strong China to act as a check on US power. We, the USA, are a negative force on the world right now under trump.

I can go on and on about the poor quality of tons of Chinese-made products but you get the idea. Having said that, there’s plenty of great Chinese brands that make quality stuff. It’s just that there’s so much more cheap/generic stuff from China that competes with the good stuff it gets drowned out.

What you are experiencing is a different cultural approach that the west frequently fails to get what they expect. There’s a concept of “if you ask for bottom dollar prices, you’re going to bottom tier products”. Paraphrasing even further put another way “why are you complaining about getting junk when you’re only willing to pay junk prices?”. Get acquainted with the Chinese phrase “chàbuduō” (差不多). It literally translates to “a little bit less than all”, but figuratively translates to “close enough”. This is a very common phrase and idea in Chinese culture. If you’re buying the cheapest version of something you’re going to get a product that is likely not up to spec, but “close enough”. The second phrase you should know is “méi bàn fǎ” (没办法). This one figuatively translates to: “nothing can be done” or “it can’t be helped”. When you point out something isn’t up to what you expect, you should be ready to hear this phrase and understand that the person or company you’re dealing with isn’t interested in changing the situation and are simply washing their hands of the issue leaving you with it.

Neither of these are failings of Chinese culture, its just different. The failing would be expecting all other cultures to behave like our own.

If you don’t want the bad product, buy the more expensive version. As you said, you can absolutely get very high quality products from China, but you’re not getting those for a tiny fraction of the price of high quality goods from other sources.

To me this means the propaganda is stopping to work for increasing number of people.

I have different reading of the data. Essentially there are two superpowers today: USA and China. No one wants to be ruled by another country, but the dominant superpower has that power to shape policy around the world through military and economic actions.

What I’m seeing is that trump made the USA so unpalatable with his actions that China becomes the lesser of two evils. So its not so much that China’s bad behavior are erased, but given the choice of China or the USA leading the world, the world is rejecting the USA.

both militaries are relying on conscripts and mercenaries,

Sure, but not in equal measures. Russia’s causalities has been acknowledge by both sides to be significantly higher than Ukraine’s, and that was when Russia still had its Soviet stockpile now largely exhausted. Ukraine is getting resupplied by the west. Russia is getting resupplied by…North Korea?

Zelensky is fully fucked the next time Ukrainians bother to have a domestic vote.

Ukraine is much more than simply Zelensky. Euromaidan had nothing to do with Zelensky. I’m not aware of any groundswell of support of the Ukrainian people for capitulation to being conquered by Russia. I would think this would still mean a pro-Ukrainian anti-Russian president after Zelensky is out of office.

Both of their economies have tanked, with further economic pressures coming from the conflict with Iran and the climate change threat.

I agree, but Ukraine still has access to global markets for sales, and its new defense industries appear to be the hot item for global customers. Russia, which traditionally had a pretty good income from its defense industries has been wiped out with a multiprong situation of lack of manufacturing capacity to support its domestic weapons consumption while still providing units for export to derive income, and the poor performance of Russian systems on the battlefield make for a bad sales argument. If anything, China is poised to take over the space of defense industry that runs counter to the traditional western suppliers.

The issue isn’t whether one runs out first. It’s how long the political leadership can drag this forward before someone pops them and brokers a settlement that ends the bleeding.

With Russia that leadership is one man, Putin. I would imagine as soon as he’s gone the will to fight the war evaporates with him. With Ukraine, I’m not aware of any pro-Russian candidate that show any sign of a significant lead that would suggest pro-Russians take power in Ukraine.

But if Ukraine won’t negotiate without full return of territory (presumably even including Crimea, which is fully outside their political influence) and Russia won’t cede territory they’ve entrenched…

There is a big distinction between the primary fuel of the armies of Russia vs Ukraine.

• Russia is relying primarily on human meatwaves to take and hold ground.

• Ukraine’s army primarily runs on money. They buy western advanced weapons and invest in design and manufacturing of next-generation drone warfare (that has now become an income channel for Ukrainian arms exports to places like the Middle East). A year or two ago Ukraine shocked the world by holding positions for weeks and months with purely robotic guns. Just this week Ukraine offensively took and ground with only robots. Additional can be had with just more money.

Which one of these two do we think is going to run out first? The article we’re talking about is showing a $90B financial lifeline to Ukraine. I’m not seeing where Russia is going to get another 1,000,000 men to march into Ukrainian bombs and bullets to continue the war indefinitely.

Additionally Russia has largely exhausted its Soviet era stockpile of weapons, and the nation’s manufacturing capacity is not near enough to replace the losses as quickly as they are occurring. Yesterday’s Russian casualty numbers bear this out. 1 tank lost. 1010 men casualties.

The best name I’ve heard for the 2000s is “the noughties”, as in the plural of nought, zero.

Yeah, send the couch fucker, that’ll surely get the people out to vote.

I’m hoping it will…for Orbán’s opponent Péter Magyar.

Ah, I didn’t use the buses on my visit to Ottawa. We did use the VIA Rail from Montreal and made sure to have a Beavertail before we left your fine city though.

Were you on the Scarborough line before it was dismantled?

I would think having trump endorse you for a race in Europe would be ballot box poison.

Timberlake’s lawyers had sued to block the release of the video, arguing it would “devastate” Timberlake’s privacy by revealing “intimate, highly personal, and sensitive details”. They also said it would cause “severe and irreparable harm” to his reputation by subjecting him to “public ridicule and harassment”.

I mean, Justin can just not drive drunk if we wanted to avoid this.