☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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The way that normally works is that the US will isolate a country that can’t fight back and then commit war crimes there for decades because it’s a good profit vehicle for the military industry. They control the level of escalation, and they’re able to turn heat up when they want or to cool things down when they need to.
The difference with Iran is that it’s not isolated, and it’s able to fight back in a meaningful way. The US does not have escalatory dominance in this conflict. And that’s a whole new development for the burger reich.
You’d think the US would’ve already been learning these lessons in Ukraine, but evidently they were not. And this is the first time the US got itself into a war where it does not control escalation. I don’t see why Iran would settle for anything less than pushing the US out of the region entirely at this point.
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That’s a good point, I didn’t really consider Xiaomi being Android based. If Google did go through with this, they could do the same thing Huawei did too, and just fork. I really wish I could get Chinese phones in Canada, maybe now that the relations with the US are souring, there might be a possibility.
I do think everything comes down to the ecosystem in the end, and that’s what ends up being the lock in mechanism. If you live in a country using a western software stack, and you need to communicate with other people, it becomes really difficult using any platform that doesn’t support popular apps everybody uses.
One of the worst developments in the tech space was proprietary protocols becoming the norm with stuff like Slack WhatsApp, and Discord. Now huge chunks of the public are locked into that because all their friends are on those platforms.
The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
The fact that you have political understanding of a small child really explains a lot about this whole discussion.
How to say you’re an ignoramus without saying it. China is a socialist state led by a communist party. Socialism is the transitional stage when the working class holds power, but the established relations have not yet abolished. Anybody with even a minimally functioning brain would understand that you can’t just flip a switch and go from one type of system to another, that there would necessarily be some sort of a transition period.
Sure buddy, China’s just like the USA. These are definitely things that happen in capitalist countries. 🤣
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
Student debt in China is virtually non-existent because education is not run for profit. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Unfortunately, I really can’t see a critical mass of devs organizing to do that. What I’d really like to see is for somebody to start selling hardware with something like GrapheneOS installed out of the box. Having to get an older phone, and then side load the OS is just too high a bar for even most technical people to jump over. But if you could just buy a phone that works out of the box, that could drive adoption. And then the ecosystem would develop around it completely outside Google control.
China does have unemployment, but it doesn’t have an unemployment problem. Generally, people who are unemployed, are doing it by choice. Some people decide delaying joining the workforce because they want to get higher education, and they can be more picky about choosing jobs. Other people are between jobs. And the point you make regarding housing and access to basic necessities is the key part I think. This is basically what people advocate for in the west when they talk about basic income. It’s not the ideal lifestyle, but you’re not living on the street, and you have your needs met even if you aren’t working.
exactly