China is stumbling towards an invasion the same way they stumbled their way into and through COVID. The consequences of this dangerous ineptness will be similar for the world.
I think Xi is counting on the west to be too distracted by Ukraine and Israel to effectively support Taiwan.
Also, speculation on my part - but this feels like the usual posturing/distraction playbook. China’s economy isn’t doing so hot and the government’s bungling of COVID is still fresh in everyone’s minds, so what better way to make people forget about that than to saber rattle?
@detectivemittens I may sound like a broken plate but I think it's precisely the situation in Ukraine that is giving them hopes. Had the US not put on hold that package for Ukraine, the Chinese could have simply taken a more moderate stance towards Taiwan. By doing what it did, yea, as you said, the US showed its weakness in providing its allies and partners with the required military help.
The arrangement with Taiwan is different though. A war between the two Chinas would see direct US involvement, not just the sending over of old weapons that are well past their expiration date.
People were saying the same about Russia before he invaded Ukraine. The moment we see a buildup of troops at the coast near Taiwan, the countdown to the invasion is ticking down. I do not think it’s a matter of if, but when. Could be this year already. I do not believe that the so-called PLA is even remotely capable of successfully conquering Taiwan, since they have zero experience with any kind of complex military operation (least of which any combined arms and naval landings, let alone the most challenging one in military history), but I think the end result will still be an enormous amount of destruction and suffering, as well as a major and long-lasting economic crisis.
Cars were so uncommon to people outside of Beijing that they would pay to have their picture taken with a car as a memento or proof to others that they saw a car and they do exist. Motor vehicle production didn’t really pick up until the early 90’s. Before that, manufacturers were only making a couple hundred thousand cars per year in the entire country.
At least that’s how I interpreted it after reading about the Chinese auto market history on Wikipedia and combining it with my own personal history with computers while growing up in a rural town in the US.
Thankfully most signs are that the PLA is targeting having a force capable of credible cross strait operations in 2027, so we still have at least three years. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the US all know this and have been spending the last two plus years reshaping thier militaries to be capable of directly opposing such an act, and in doing so it is become pretty clear that any cross strait action is only going to end in a lot of CCP ships on the bottom and a good fiscal year for Lockheed Martin.
In doing so it makes it vanishingly unlikely that it will actually move beyond posturing in the first place. Unlike in Ukraine where the West has committed to supporting and resupplying the victim, many of the Asia Pacific Nations are committed to providing active military operations in defense of Taiwan.
That being said there is still to my knowledge no Asia Pacific equivalent to NATO Article 5 unfortunately, which may result in dangerous doubt in terms of credible deterrence, especially if the CCP believes it has friends that will quietly bow to it in Tokyo and Washington in 2027. For all of Trump’s shouting, most of his actual actions involvedo withdrawing the US from everything he could that China didn’t like.
While still unlikely, credible deterrence still requires the Chinese Intelligence both believe and be good enough at handling bad news to accurately report that up the chain of command, and as the FSB demonstrated in Ukraine that’s not necessarily a given. If there are enough yes men, then things could get very bad indeed.
Especially in China. That’s a place where it’s not uncommon for very high ranking members of the government/party/major companies and public figures disappearing for months on time if not indefinitely. If it can happen to those people, it can happen to bearers of bad news much further down the line. Not to mention, Xi has been busy purging anyone who even looks remotely competent/threatening (same thing, really) for a while now in the very old-fashioned sense of the word, which isn’t exactly conductive to a smooth running state either.
Those photos are so harrowing 🙄 Meanwhile, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other American black sites are still open, and an actual genocide is happening in Palestine with American material & political support.
The Uyghur genocide has already been debunked several times over, but go on Guardian.
Great whataboutism, tankie scum. No shit the US does some truly fucked up shit. Nobody realistically thinks their government is a paragon of virtue. Just that the Chinese government does fucked up shit as well. Both can be true, bootlicker.
What a coincidence, here in the US we banned all our anti-war candidates from the presidential election too! (Yes, I know dnc primary candidates aren’t literally and legally banned).
I see you only read one out of the two sentences I wrote above. I addressed this in the second sentence which was in parentheses because I predicted that my comment might be confusing to some. To be fair, my comment did assume some knowledge regarding the 2024 DNC primary which has been structured in such a way that no candidate but Biden, a pro-war candidate, could possibly win. Hope this helps.
This is a sign how powerful Navalny still is in Putin’s imagination even from his prison cell. Everything seems done for Putin’s victory in the upcoming election in March, all opposition eliminated, but he still fears the ‘dissident’ so much to locate him at the edge of the Arctic Circle.
sorry ma’am, your child was one of thirty five killed when we reintroduced wolves to kindercare because they were native here in the 1300s, but their comeback is something to behold, and the survivors have quite a story!
I kid, but also, reintroduce them to areas where they’re least likely to bump up against population, all the areas they natively lived in the past are, unfortunately, overrun by humans. I live in Washington state, where we’re seeing grey wolves slowly come back. I’m all for it. And here in Seattle, we’ve always had Coyotes living around the town, on the large greenways. Keep your cats inside if you love them!
And then some people wonder, why we don’t want Muslims in Europe. It’s not because we hate them for their religion (for the saner part of Europeans it’s the same bullshit as Christianity), we just don’t want their bullshit and raping and executions and misogyny and all the other nice things here.
See, the thing about religion, that no religious person wants to come to terms with, is that no religion is a monolith. What does that mean?
Even if you claim to be a fully practicing Christian, Muslim, Hindi, etc, there will always be descrepencies. Furthermore, no one believes exactly the same thing as someone else. The nature and limitations of the human mind does not permit it, so thinking that if you identify with a religion that suddenly your behaviour is dictated by dogma is nonsensical.
This also means that Christians today are not responsible for the crusades or the persecution as well as eradication of European pagans, and that Islam is not to blame for what’s going on in Iran, largely because they were irrelevant to the actual goals, which was for certain people to gain more power and wealth.
The Iranian government doesn’t give a shit about the 5 columns of Islam. Not even close. But they absolutely love having morals police, executions and an authoritarian system that seeks to subjugate and suppress any kind of democratic movement.
The Iranian regime knows the Iranian people, and if they could they would turn liberal democracy in a heartbeat, and they are still mostly Muslim. That’s why the boot has to stomp and fists have to bang on doors, like all the time.
I think people easily forget how fucked you can be if the state has so much power they can effectively curb any dissent. At that point the religion used just becomes a nice decorative mask to put on, both to keep power, but also to keep using fear via “us vs them”. This is also signified by the secular Muslim empires.
Just a little bit of history is enough to dispell all fears about religion and to squarely focus on corruption and authoritarianism instead, which is where our focus should be - and that’s coming from an atheist.
I’m sure she was Muslim till the very last cause I’d sure as hell find religion when I’m facing the end. I’d like to think I’d remain rational but it’s daunting AF. But she’s not one of the bad ones is she?
If she still considered herself a Muslim, then what happened to her was perfectly in line with her claimed worldview. She can only ever see herself as a victim by rejecting her religion. She probably wasn't conscious of it but at this point I'd say she was already an ex-muslim, it's a matter of a therapist making her aware of it (assuming she'd be rescued in time!).
I would propose that perhaps linking religion with the religious leadership is linking Christianity with “the church”. And using that logic all Christians condone pedaphilia which isn’t the case. Islam the religion isn’t about cruelty anymore than Christianity is about white supremacy.
Yes, linking the religious leadership of the inherently strongly hierarchical belief systems with these belief systems sounds very reasonable to me.
I have an impression we agree on the reasoning, just not on the details and the conclusions from these details. At this point we're arguing the semantics of whether the religious people rejecting their religious leadership still belong to the same religion or rather they invented their own religion distinct from the original one. In other words, whether the leadership is an inherent part of their religion.
Do I have that right that apart from the above we're pretty much on the same page?
I think the trouble with the conclusion you’re drawing is that it enables one to make sweeping statements about Muslims on the whole while maintaining plausible deniability in claiming that they’re only referring to “the bad ones.” In other words, sort of an inverse “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
Furthermore, I would wager that most people you’re referring to as “ex-Muslim” would still very much consider themselves to be Muslim, and even though you’re explicitly not addressing them in your claims, it’s not a huge leap that someone acting in worse faith would use your rationale as an excuse to generalize the entire demographic (including the so-called “ex-Muslims”).
Also by that logic and if as you say you feel Islam is as whacked as Christianity you should just ban religious people. While being more exclusive I could get on board with that doctrine.
No, it’s not the same thing. When most Christians, or governments in countries with majority Christian population, hear about priests raping kids, they are disgusted by it and are 100% ok with punishing the offender.
When Muslim countries hear about the above, they think justice has been done. Obviously the girl should have just been a good little child sex slave and went along with whatever her husband wanted. The see shit like this as A-OK.
It’s a false equivalence to say these two views are the same.
No, it’s not the same thing. When most Christians, or governments in countries with majority Christian population, hear about priests raping kids, they are disgusted by it and are 100% ok with punishing the offender.
ignoring that this is severely debatable, “which religion is more fine with sexual abuse” is an embarrassing pissing contest to have and one that we’re not interested in having on this website.
I don’t understand… she has the right in islamic law to ask for divorce which she would have been granted by a judge seeing the abuse.
I think it is not possible in Christian law for a woman to ask for divorce except in the case of adultry, but Islamic law is clear about cases where the husband is abusive or doesn’t take his responsibilities. I just don’t get how people still consider Iran as a country that upholds Islamic law, unless they don’t know said law.
It’s not because we hate them for their religion (for the saner part of Europeans it’s the same bullshit as Christianity)
Yes, I am firmly convinced that religion (and ideology) is used as a pretext for suppresssing people. One of Iran’s major partner countries is China, for example, but Iran says nothing about Beijing’s oppression of the Muslim Uyghur minority in China. They don’t care.
It’s all about power, and we see similar things all around the globe across all cultures and ages, including here in Europe.
two things are certain: the Chinese people will suffer, and there will be many scapegoats found within the government - people suspected of collaborating with Western spies, for example - to make examples of so that Xi is not at fault..
The commission said 29 people have so far filed to run for the presidency. But after today’s decision, Mr Putin remains the only candidate to be able to register as a candidate.
Not just this anti-war candidate. It appears all candidates are banned from challenging Putin.
They ran a shitty corrupt government, tried to conquer eastern Europe, failed, renamed themselves to “Russian Federation”, and are now trying to recapture lost states while feeding people into a never ending meat grinder.
But that was never the subject of the discussion. The USSR, and the Russian Empire before it, did successfully conquer Eastern Europe. That’s a historical fact. Whether you agree that this conquest made that land rightfully theirs is another topic, in which I have no interest.
By this logic the Roman empire should just be called the Roman republic. The systems of governance might be similar and both be abhorrent, but the USSR isn’t the same as the Russian federation
Did people really think a dictator would let a silly thing like an election get in the way of his ambition for power? It’s hilarious that people thought Putin would give up his power without violence. The only way Putin will ever leave power is through violence. Look at those gigantic tables he sits at. Putin knows how “popular” he is, even in his own country.
Everyone assumed as much. But there is now confirmation that the next election won’t be free. It’s important to be able to point to specific actions and behavior when saying Russia isn’t a free country.
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