«12. . .2,2452,2462,2472,2482,2492,2502,251. . .2,5142,515»
My economy has been 99/100 for the longest time and being 1 point off is irksome. At the same time, I don't want to answer an issue and plunge my economy stat downward.
#FirstWorldProblems #ChampagneProblems
¡Maayong adláo paisano! I'm also from the Philippines (the actual country), though I have a nation in your region too.
Hola I'm new in this, Well I hope we get along and grow together.
Havilland, Horatius Cocles, The Rouge Christmas State, Michigain, and 2 othersMeltama, and New Kiwis
Bienvenidos and welcome!
I'm at 98 so I'm just one point behind you! :P
Horatius Cocles, The Rouge Christmas State, and Meltama
I have been thinking lately about the American response to China and Russia, particularly now that Biden is in the chair and looking to change our approaches to these two countries. My conclusion: the current European and, yes, even American approaches towards Russia and China are striking when you consider the character of those two countries' leaders and the offenses they have committed to "Western" values. While there is growing fear of China, we continue to relatively turn a blind eye while lashing out at Russia is a comparatively disproportionate way. Here are my comparisons:
- Putin = rules with an iron fist and permits authoritarian use of torture and manipulations of the law, but is also quite even-handed on matters of religious freedom and is a Christian and honestly is about the best sort of leader that Russia could have in its current social state. Almost certainly supported by the majority of Russians even if they stuff ballots.
- Xi = rules as an appointee of the CCP with no popular input. A career bureaucrat, personally pushes for the massive increase in Chinese soft and hard power, the repression of Christians and Falun Gong and Muslims, and detention camps for the Uighurs. Turns a blind eye to systematic rape, encourages mass-torture and surveillance of the population, promotes his personality through overt propaganda.
Which of the two is worse? Sure, one wears a suit and the other occasionally jumps shirtless into freezing water, let's look a little deeper. Why are some many talking heads and politicians obsessed with Putin as the world's boogey man but rarely if ever target Xi personally (criticism is typically just of "China")? Now for the countries themselves:
- Russia = its main crimes against "Western values" are...taking Crimea from Ukraine? In other words its a property/boundary things: they took that province, slap a lot of sanctions on them. There are other smaller things to be sure, but that is the primary cause of its estrangment and the economic penalties on it. Meanwhile: Russia's economy is smaller than Texas'.
- China = its main crime against "Western values" are legion: mass torture, organ harvesting, forced abortions/sterilization, detention camps, suppression of dissent and minorities, suppression of non-state approved religion, "brain-washing." They even have what is basically a Crimea equivalent: stripping Hong Kong of its Basic Law treaty rights. What do we do? Some harsh words and tariffs (which most people complain about up top) and essentially no sanctions. Meanwhile: economy expanding massively.
In other words: our priorities are massively screwed up. We are more concerned about borders than about decency, the message is essentially: you can do whatever you want to people, as long as it is on the correct side of what we think is the border. By any standard we should be hurdling enormous penalties, threats, anything at the Chinese and drawing and quartering their evil malicious little hinnies before we even think about saying something mean about Russia. Crimea is Russian anyway by any rational/historical standard, the barbarism in Peking is far more dangerous, threatening, and demonic.
People criticize the Allied ignorance towards the crimes perpetrated against the Jews, which is probably not terrible fair considering they were already fighting a war against Germany. What have we done against China on a grand scale? Certainly less. Alas, the question is: What can we do?
Phydios and Failesian empire
A couple extracts from John Lukacs that remind me of this threat:
"And the sources of this kind of critical intelligence are not merely those of a "scientific" attitude. Russia [China] under Stalin [Xi], again, illustrates how the advancement of the physical sciences and of their application in an increasingly industrialized and technological society can coexist with a relapse into barbaric patterns of behavior, rhetoric, and thought."
"unless our Asian brethren understand that the progress of civilization (which, by now, is a progress of a kind of "Westernization") is not merely the dissemination of tools and of skills, there is, I believe, enormous chaos ahead of all of us--the symptoms of which, already apparent here and there, are the usual ones of a blind and unwitting relapse into intellectual primitivism."
Also, leave it to Texas to actually create an entertaining training video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwuulISNQUo
I think, and this is talking moreso about politically involved people (journalists, activists, very politically online people, etc.) than State department folks, though it applies there as well, that missing from the list of the big problems about Russia is their generally anti-LGBT policies. Outside of connections to Trump, I feel like I've read more about Russia being bad for not being progressive in that area than anything else, Ukraine included.
What's ironic about that, of course, is that it is not as if China is 'Pride' welcoming, and neither, for that matter, is literally the entire rest of the world outside the West. It's a really bizarre disconnect in that the kind of people who are most likely to condemn any praise for Western Civilization as inherent bad/colonialist/imperialist/evil also push ideas that exist functionally nowhere outside of said civilization.
I hesitate to assume motive, but I really do get the feeling that it's sort of a 'soft bigotry of low expectations' on a major scale, and I think that this part does creep up into the powers that be. Russia is European, so it's assumed automatically that they are expected to be better, to be held to a higher standard because of it, even if a dozen countries in eastern Africa or southwest Asia are doing far worse. I have heard a lot more from progressives on Russia cancelling pride parades than anything about every single country in Africa not called 'south' not having same-sex marriage laws, or someplace like Nigeria making it illegal to even be an accomplice to homosexual intercourse. It's this bizarre paternal ivory tower sort of thing (that you even see domestically in some ways, by Democratic definitions of 'homophobic' more black people qualify than white even though most white people are Republican) where 'minority' countries are just given a pass on meeting standards because it is not expected. Just look at the explosive response to Hungarian nationalism as another comparison to China, when what Hungary has been doing is barely kid's play next to them. The only real time it seems China has anything thrown back at it is when there's a more easily-identifiable victim in play in Hong Kong, but even then 'Free Hong Kong' is not much more than an internet phenomenon, the amount of apology or apathy towards China is remarkable-just look at what happened with Daryl Morey and the NBA and how nothing came of it, he lost.
I think the influences end up being then both higher expectations for European nations (and Israel, but I think there's some legitimate prejudice there too) than others, and then, somewhat connected, though I don't think wholly joined at the hip, the general fear of being labeled as racist for anti-China criticism. I don't think it's mostly the second, though, and I don't think it's anything like an active conspiracy, I really do pin it down to what's probably a largely unconscious double standard that does go all the way up to the tops of diplomatic corps where it's just sort of assumed on one hand that China and other countries will act a certain way, but Russia or Hungary or whoever are naturally expected to be Sweden. Russia is thus considered more evil than China because they score lower on their own separate scale, even if they're clearly a far lesser threat/evil if you go apples-to-apples.
Running parallel to this is that Disney+, which specifically thanked Chinese government agencies involved in the Uighur oppression in the credits of their Mulan film, has fired Gena Carano from her acting role because she said that "hating someone for their political views" was bad, and because she's not left-wing that is thus a 'disgusting' and unacceptable thing to say. (That's what's really crazy about this, she didn't even say a thing about Republicans, conservatives, Trump, anything, she was literally shut down for saying that hate is bad, because she was condemning hate that they liked)
Standard for foreign governments: Somewhere below ethnic cleansing. Standard for American actors: All woke, all the time, or out the door.
We already saw it where they would not film in "eww, pro-life" Georgia but would in "Oooh, concentration champs!" Xinjiang, but there's another data point for it. It's just a deep double standard, and not even an unconscious one in cases like these. I don't think (though the optimism is probably unwarranted) that most Democratic politicians/diplomatic workers have such an explicit policy of China-can-do-no-wrong, but I think that the double standards/free passes are of the same type, just somewhat smaller and more unconscious than anything, I don't think they get up and say, "I'm going to condemn X for Y, but I'll be sure not to condemn China for Yx100", I think the idea of applying the same standard just does not cross their mind in the first place.
Apparently (in a super quick development) Carano is now going to be acting and starring in a film produced by the Daily Wire.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/gina-carano-to-produce-and-star-in-upcoming-film-for-the-daily-wire
Three thoughts on this:
1. I'm glad that she's going to be getting at least some opportunity to continue in work after the unimaginable crimes of condemning hate and being generally conservative.
2. There is a 99% chance that the film is going to sputter and be a complete bomb if it ever even makes it. The market is not there, conservatives just do not go for ideological media in the way that the left does-even Clint Eastwood cannot make that sort of thing happen, and he has a lot more money, experience, and name recognition.
3. This is a really bad sign for the future. I don't think that there's much chance of success on any level, not just this film, I think that any kind of conservative entertainment effort is never going to be able to become a major player, but this ideologically segregationist trend is not going in a good direction, where it's not that occasional productions are liberal or conservative, but you have your liberal film company and conservative film company, extend the MSNBC/CNN v. Fox divide into entertainment media as well as news media, and really, probably beyond that too, end up with Goya beans vs. Nike on a broader level than we've seen before.
The general left-wing progressive hold on the culture is more or less absolute and unassailable, it's not going to be broken up by this sort of thing, but the abandoning of even the general concept of tolerance is going to be a harsh one. We're setting up an environment centered around marginalization to the point where there are two entirely different perceptions of the world, an uneasy balance where the sort of beliefs that would be seen as essentially normal in everyday life are barred from the upper echelons in entertainment/news/business as unacceptable. That's not a good system and it certainly is not going to be a stable one, but I at least can't see any way away from it. When a 50th percentile conservative in real life is a 99th percentile extremist in the university system, and in the entertainment industry, and in the corporate world..... things falls apart, the center cannot hold.
Judging by his statement released today, it looks like Biden's going to make gun control his big cause. It's possible that this is just a one-off, that he is making a statement to be able to say he made a statement and is not going to follow up on it, I certainly hope that is the case, but I would not stake my money on assuming that he is not going to follow up.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/02/14/statement-by-the-president-three-years-after-the-parkland-shooting/
It's really something that is just baffling on a number of levels. It seemed like Biden was looking to just run the early part of the term on executive action and get easy accolades for 'unity' and whatever he does on coronavirus, but switching the post-impeachment gears to not just a political issue, but arguably the single most head-to-head battle-lines combative political issue with the possible exception of abortion is a total 180 from that sort of thing. I expected nothing major until COVID started dying down, and then I would have guessed the angle would be either healthcare or climate change, which are both less contentious for the average person and areas where the Democrats are generally more trusted, obviously Republicans would complain, but those are very 'political' issues. Gun control is a culture war fight to the core, and mobilizes a heck of a lot of common people in anger against it, not just the think tanks. It certainly does not come off as 'unifying', and I think it'd be difficult to even spin it as such. I'm an extremely cynical person, and gun control is my biggest fear in this administration, and I still did not expect any significant moves until there was a chance to exploit a tragedy, or at least until the checks that were supposed to go out his first day in office went out.
I can think of a couple reasons why he might have gone for this. First, it might just be his top issue, he certainly has hit hard on it on the trail, and this is where he wants to spend his political capitol, he may just not really care about healthcare or the environment. Second, he may be trying to take political advantage of the incident at the Capitol before it fades too far out of the news cycle and use that as an argument for disarmament. The third and most devious of the possibilities is that this might be a knowingly doomed attempt to set up a second one later, if a bill fails to pass, and a mass shooting later is committed by someone breaking gun laws, I can easily see using an argument that 'this would not have happened if we only passed the gun control we proposed, blood is on Republicans' hands!"
I've been intentionally detaching myself from following politics too closely just for the sake of my mental health (and New Year's resolution to minimize the hate and anger I get into on the topic), I frankly have largely tuned out the impeachment trial and did not even know the final vote was happening until it was over. Now that detachment is probably a risky proposition in the sense of not hearing about a ban and getting pinches for possessing something now-illegal, but I'm just going to go with the optimistic and probably stupid assumption that Biden was just pandering and taking another opportunity to wring political points out of dead children and there won't be a political effort behind it. I suppose that's the 'good' option.
There's no doubt she's been made a "martyr" among the MAGA faithful. A gun went off to stop the rioters from further destruction and criminal activity, not an intentional act to kill Ashli Babbitt. If she was alive today, which I wish she was, she'd likely be among the rest of those arrested for their part in Jan. 6th. As for Jacob Blake, there's no excuse to shoot someone in the back, let alone 7 times and leave him paralyzed. Intentional excessive use of force and brutality by a police officer is not on the same level with Ashli Babbit.
Let's see, the House covid bill includes $2000 checks and a phased in $15 minimum wage hike. Not exactly radical ideas for a time of extreme crisis.
By all means focus on China as well, its abuses are too many to number (Uighur concentration camps, social credit system, Hong Kong, etc.) I think the difference is that China is no-nonsense is setting itself outside Western norms and values. Russia is somehow seen as "European" so there's an idea that it should play along with democratic values. As the recent blog from an EU diplomat shows us, EU and Russia are only getting further apart.
https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage_en/92722/My%20visit%20to%20Moscow%20and%20the%20future%20of%20EU-Russia%20relations
Putin, a Christian? Please, that's political theater at its finest. The ROC is little more than a political proganda prop for the state. He gets to ride bare chested with a large silver crucifix dangling. At the same time, assassinating political opposition candidates is a-ok.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/02/09/russian-orthodoxy-and-politics-in-putin-era-pub-67959
There's hardly any acceptance of religious views outside the state official orthodoxy. JW's are actively persecuted and the Russian Catholic Church hardly exists. Muslims, Hare Krishna devotees, etc. there's no tolerance for any of that. Religious expression is heavily limited. Sorry but "even handed" is just false.
China has more muscle to portray itself via hard and soft power as the alternative model to Western democratic governance. Plus the technology transfers, stealing of intellectual property, etc. etc. all make China an adversary for the foreseeable future. The idea you're going to "contain" China seems nonsenical. It's the largest nation in the region it' going to have a sphere of influence.
Jacob Blake was armed, as per his own admission, had physically fought off police officers, and was entering a vehicle with children inside. Babbit was unarmed, and the only person possibly anywhere near her was the armed officer on the other side of a barricade with open space behind him, while she had not performed any violent action to justify even a fear there.
Police responded to Jacob Blake because the woman who had accused him of physically raping her called them, and they shot him only after attempting to physically restrain him failed, then attempting to tase him failed, then he picked up a weapon. The cop who shot the unarmed Babbit for trespassing just went straight for the gun and immediate deadly force.
You're correct that they're not on the same level-but they're not on the same level in the complete opposite direction. And I am sorry, but "a gun went off" is one of the craziest uses of passive voice that I have ever seen. The man pointed a gun at an unarmed woman, leveled his sights, and pulled the trigger. Justified or not, there is most certainly no world in which it is not a deliberate action.
As a general matter, I tend to oppose heavy minimum wage hikes for multiple reasons, mostly the three-point arrangement of criminalizing low-wage labor, harming employment especially at smaller businesses, and being one-size-fits-all in a diverse country ($15 an hour is rough with the cost of living in Los Angeles, but is the median wage in Mississippi, where the cost of living is vastly more affordable)
In the middle of a pandemic, though, I think it crosses the line from 'bad policy' to practically sadistic. After forcible shutting down businesses for months (and seeing plenty of them looted and burned in the meantime), the government forcing a doubling of wages a year in which untold numbers were forced to close because of their own action is just insanity. I can't imagine being a small business owner fighting to get by who got gut-punched by being shut down by government action and fined if they tried to stay open, then faced destruction by rioters and looters, and then have that same government that made it illegal for them to operate mandate that their employment expenses go through the roof when they're just trying to get back on their feet.
Big corporations made bank in the pandemic, Amazon has been making bank, but Chuck's Grocery Supply and Susan's Coffee Shop are drowning. Is anyone surprised that Bezos has actively advocated for a $15/hour minimum wage? Small businesses are carrying a larger burden right now than they have in decades, and throwing this anvil on them would snap their spines-without even getting into how many people making under $15/hour now won't get a pay raise, they'll get a pink slip and a look at the new automated check-out that's replaced them. Now, more than ever, I can't construe such a massive spike as anything more than a gift to the biggest corporations to just accelerate the inequality gap and further bury the non-billionaires, from the party that supposedly is against those megacorporations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/15/texas-oklahoma-record-cold/
Temperatures in Texas are at or near 0 F. The state is completely unable to deal with that level of cold. Millions are without power because power plants have failed under the load. Much of the central and southern US is experiencing similar, if less severe, conditions. Here in TN, my family's safe and warm, but we aren't going anywhere today or (probably) tomorrow. And I just saw someone on FB say, "It's -15 in MN right now, and we're fine. Get over it."
Pray for everyone affected by these storms, and everyone who has to be out in them. And pray that everyone from colder climates who feels the need to comment on this story would show more sympathy than snark.
The Democratic Party says it advocates for the underprivileged and disadvantaged, but the policies it advocates are more aimed at making the party's wealthy elite even wealthier. The doubling of the federal minimum wage (during a pandemic, no less) and the proposed "Green New Deal" are just two examples.
A couple of things:
1. You are forgetting the one key element in all of geopolitical discussions. Money. China holds the “paper” on the majority of American debt. Imagine if they exercised their right to demand repayment? So we play as nice as we can with them. But Russia in the mind of many Americans who grew up in the cold war era is still the Soviet Union. Russia is the boogey man that we have had for generations now, it is for lack of a better term “comfortable” for us to focus on Russia.
2. What can we do? Not much as long as the above is true.
3. The crimes against the Jews started years before the war did (January 1933.) The US (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) could have saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis before the war but they didn't. At one point, the US literally turned away a ship of 900 German Jews. Shortly afterward, it rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to the US for safety (1938 to February 1939. The war started September 1939.) even though Americans did know that Nazis were encouraging vandalism and violence against Jews especially by Kristallnacht in 1938
Hello. I'm not that "conservative" but I do hate Planned Parenthood and the act of murdering babies.
Horatius Cocles, Phydios, Michigain, and New Kiwis
i am now weird
I'm taking Lent off my screens, so I'll see you all in 40ish days, have a blessed Lent everyone!
Horatius Cocles, Roborian, and New Kiwis
Seems like someone is always willing to make fun of someone else's misery and suffering. Texas is in a state of emergency and had to get federal help as well. From 5:30pm yesterday to 2:30pm today we had spotty cell service, no Internet, universities closed for the week, no heat, limited or no water, no electricity. My power went out at 5:30pm and stayed out until 2:30pm today. I didn't have any heat for the coldest night Texas has had in decades. If people want to make fun of the suffering of people like infants, homeless, elderly, people who need the fridge to work because of insulin, and those who are disabled through this time, they can. The worst thing that happened to me was that I had a water pipe burst in the garage. I had to spend 2 hours on the phone to get a plumber to come today.
It’s all question of what a state is used to dealing with. I’m sure people in the north can handle ice cold weather fine, but could they handle a Houston summer? Mosquitos, June bugs, cockroaches, 90% humidity, temperature in the high 90s or even triple digits. Those people wouldn’t be laughing then. It’s all a question of what you have the support, capacity, and infrastructure for.
Our power grid was forced offline because multiple power generators failed. There wasn’t any choice except a controlled blackout that eventually turned into prolonged power outages. Over 2 million Texans like myself lost power. When you’re dealing with the worst weather your state has seen in decades, you’d get spooked too.
Thank you for the prayers and willingness to understand rather than add to the hurt.
I’m glad to hear you’re recovering.
We're all weird in our own ways... which is good, because otherwise I would be bored most of the time. :P
For a moment there I thought you were talking about lentils, but uh, now that I think about it more, that wouldn't make any sense. Have a good Lent!
Obviously making fun of the situation is a poor response, but I am left wondering how this storm, though far worse than what Texas and the grid are used to, not only forced rolling blackouts but knocked out so many lines. Last night, driving around and sitting in line at the drive thru (for 1 hr) to get some dinner it was clear that every other block is down or on and it is not because of rolling but because of damaged lines everywhere. How did 3 in. of snow and 15 mph winds devastate the lines so much more than massive ice storms, blizzards, and driving winds (all of which I have experience in other states)?
I was also given to understand the main causes for 30000 mwh out of commission are: 1) generators shutting off during the night, 2) iced up wind turbines.
«12. . .2,2452,2462,2472,2482,2492,2502,251. . .2,5142,515»
Advertisement