sodium_nitride [she/her, any]

No it boils down to “we kicked the Japanese fascists out and have a pretty decent standard of living now compared to the rest of the world”

Not OP, but you can easily find statistics on public transportation, wages, healthcare/life expectancy, government approval, ecological policies, technological development, energy use and so on.

Collecting these statistics takes too much time for a single comment, but you can find statistics from a wide variety of sources such as the world bank, imf, rand (western sources), or Chinese sources like Chinese government data (like from the national burea of statistics).

Either way, the data is quite favorable for China and Chinese citizen’s quality of life. They have a higher life expectancy than Americans, world class public transport, the world’s best green energy industrial complex (by such a huge margin that in comparison, the rest of the world might as well not try). It is quite a decent place to live in, baring the issues with low wages, youth unemployment and high working hours (compared to western nations, as least until the fascists de-develop the west enough).

unless they are rival imperialists in which case the “bone to grind” is with imperialism.

This is where the issue comes down to because many western leftists pretend, based on their own misunderstandings that many western rivals are imperialists, despite the fact that many of these western rivals have a net export of surplus labor/commodities, being exploited by international capital, therby having a class interest opposite of imperialism.

Not to mention the military encirclement that these nations face, which their enemy nationalists take as some sort of natural God-given equilibrium. Deviating from this encirclement by forceful measures is then taken as a sign of evil/imperialist ambition, meanwhile leftists at home in the west fail to resolve military encirclement by pressuring their governments. I mean, for how many decades has Cuba been under a blockade? What horrific conditions gaza has been subjected to. Can any of these situations be resolved without force? And if these people use force, they get called imperialists.

In the interests of fairness, the PRC during Mao and Deng’s time also famously considered the USSR to be “social imperialists”, helping cause the downfall of the USSR and setting back socialism by a century. So this isn’t exclusively a western leftist problem.

“Our glorious people’s Ministry of Truth has determined that their wretched Mistry of Truth is lying while assuring us that OUR Ministry of Truth would never lie”

My sibling in christ, do not insult my intelligence. The gaza genocide isn’t even over. At least wait for the bodies to become cold before you start defending western media institutions.

I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, encouraging racism instead of criticism of the state?

It is a common deflection that I have seen. Furthermore, it is quite stupid as well, since governments don’t fall from the heavens. They are made from the people. Modern states are not small warlord bands, but significant fractions of the entire populace and economy.

None, if you’re a principled anarchist. That’s why I don’t have a fundamental problem with anarchists (other than my philosophical objections to anarchism)

However, many self-proclaimed anarchists do in practice support imperialists because they have a big bone to grind with AES states or even anyone who positions themselves against western imperialism.

They internalise western propaganda against these states/nations, because I guess, it’s a state so therefore it must be as comically evil as the worst fearmongering described by anglophone media. Or my favorite, “even only 10% of the atrocities were real, they would still be super evil”, that kind of thinking.

Of course, I have some contact both with actual chinese or russian people (many of whom aren’t even socialists), and they clearly have a much deeper and nuanced understanding of their nations than the even the most “I hate the government not the people” type of western anarchists. It makes the anarchists come off as silly white supremacists.

Most likely, if my contact with anarchists had begun with third world anarchists, I would never have had a phase of hating anarchists (which itself was a silly thing to do). But either way, I still find Marx more compelling than any anarchist writer, so I am still philosophically a Marxist.

I read marx/lenin, found them to be compelling.

I am very interested in the science of economic planning and ecosystem management.

Originally, I considered myself to be an anarchist, but other anarchists had a very strong tendency of supporting imperialists in their actions against non-western countries, and frankly, I’m not white enough to be tempted by the benefits I would not be gaining from installing rightist dictatorships in Venezuela or China or Cuba if the “anarcho-bidenist” types had their way.

Looking back at it I find the whole “fight” between anarchism and marxism-leninism to be very silly, but since I think that China and Hamas are actually doing useful work, this automatically makes me incompatible with many anarchists.

I know it’s popular in the west these days to attribute anything that goes wrong in their countries as being Russia’s fault, but this level of paranoia is genuinely absurd and funny. Like seriously, Putin is personally ordering Russian spies to … do arson attacks on random IKEA stores?

Although attribution is often difficult, and some incidents will have nothing to do with Russia

One would think that the statement that follows this would be something like “on occasion, conclusive evidence has been found of Russian spies committing petty acts of vandalisim”, or something like that. But no, there isn’t even a pretense of there being any sort of evidence in this article. It just says “it is clear”, and vaguely references a UK intelligence officer (what a trustworthy source!)

Unlike the USSR, Putin’s Russia is essentially post-ideological.

Meaningless statement (post-ideology does not exist), and also demonstrably false given that Putin very openly adopts a Christian and a nationalist position/policy.

hard-left anticapitalism

Ah, so it’s that thing where the self-proclaimed “moderates” pretend that everyone who opposes them and their socio-economic agenda is secretly a Russian agent. Got it.

such as the placing of cameras along Polish railway lines on which aid to Ukraine flows.

Mixing incidents of what are likely legitimate spying with random petty crime does not mean that the random petty crime was also some Russian plot.

It also contributes to another Kremlin (and, indeed, Chinese) talking point, that removed western democracies simply don’t work.

The poverty and dysfunction of western societies is not the fault of the scary foreign boogeymen.

This also highlights another virtue of this new strategy for the Kremlin: it encourages and mobilises our own paranoia.

Lmao the article itself is fueling this paranoia.

The answer was — and is — not to let that panic us or force a change in policy: to keep calm and carry on.

This is something Europeans are failing spectacularly at.

This would not be a problem if they could fix the economy. Fundamentally speaking, people who oppose immigration either do it out of economic anxiety or racism. The first can be solved by regular socialist policies, while the latter are an irrational bunch of reactionaries that will continue to oppose the left no matter what.

Minor point about the quintiles.

They are not misrepresented. The range of different quintiles is usually different. The point is, each quintile contains the name number of data points (neighbourhoods in this case).

So 20% of neighbourhoods have an average between 0 and 33k. And 20% of neighbourhoods have an income between 65k and 246k.

middle class hitlerites, and it’s the child of registered nurse who is also a single mom.

Can the child of a single mom nurse not be a hitlerite? I mean, what else are we supposed to call people who run the imperial death squads?

“Billionaires are hoarding money” is what I would expect to hear from a reddit radlib railing against wealth inequality, much less from an econ professor who uses this idea to suggest that billionaires are actually good.

It is a criminal offence to trespass on protected sites, which include crown land, land belonging to the King in a private capacity and all licensed nuclear sites.

Both equally important to protect from trespassing.

The US enforcing a wide blockade against China would be unfeasible due to the sheer size of the Chinese coastline and the US dependence on Chinese trade. I do agree that better equipment does allow China to reduce losses.

I think there was never any real doubt that Vhina would win in a conventional war against the USA. The factors were always so stacked against the Americans that winning for them has been largely impossible since even the early 2000s.

Not only is China’s mass manufacturing base far superior to the US, they also have the distance advantage (don’t have to carry materials across the pacific), and have clear win conditions (retake taiwan or repell the US) allowing for much better public mobilisation.

Furthermore, US military assets are constantly worn down and tied up in conflicts around the world. People believe that US troops are so experienced because of their constant campaigns. Pure idiocy. Modern war is not fought using cavalry charges and pikemen. Modern war is fought using equipment, which in the US case has been degraded by overuse (look at their own reports for the readiness of their weapons). And that weaponry is not easy to replace or iterate either because of the small production rates and long lead times for everything. The experienced soldiers that people glaze the US for come back in wheelchairs and with PTSD.

The number of disabled veterans has jumped by 25 percent since 2001 - to 2.9 million - and the cause really is no mystery.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/number-of-disabled-us-veterans-rising/

Yes, the nunber of disabled veterans in the US is more than twice the size of its entire army.

All of these latest technological improvements only change the odds even more to China’s side. A US-China war, if it happened without the use of nukes would likely not be WW3. It would be over fairly quickly, and afterwards US hard/soft power would start declining even more rapidly. There really isn’t any point for either US or China to launch massive land campaigns that take multiple years to finish.

And if the war happened with the use of nukes, it would also be over quickly.