371–380 of 1001 posts
I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China. It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead. Yesterday I h…
Am I the only one with “99 Luftballoons” in my head?
I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China. It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead. Yesterday I h…
China is not simply rolled out as a boogeyman. Apart from any of their ambitions, at minimum the worlds reliance on them for various resources and manufacturing capacity almost exclusively has, in the last 2.5 years, been revealed as an extreme flaw and risk to global economic stability when that resource and manufacturing pipeline is disrupted. That is, at a bare minimum, a serious problem that will take years to so…
The Us military only shot it down because of pr. Usually you ignore spy planes. The are easy to track, and the military and airforce know how to sit around and wait things out. America should retaliate with its own balloons with no Intel packages, instead the should be very visible, and at the ceiling of most fighters so China has to waste be anti satellite missiles on cheap balloons.
I have been in "no politics, no news" mode for over a month. I try to do this about once a year. I have yet to tell my wife I do it, but when I am on this limited media consumption she always comments how pleasant I am to be around. I think it is a good thing for all of us to do once in a while, until 80 years ago most news was at best three or four days old, go back 120 years and you're getting only last weeks top t…
Maybe I'm a pessimist but there is little I can do to make an impact on geopolitics.
I want to spend my energy on the things I can control and little energy on anything else.
I'm much happier being completely unaware of whatever may be happening with the world.
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It is possible to believe both "China bad" and "we should not go to war with them". That's the key part I think OP has noticed with (mostly US) western media coverage of China lately: It's not just "China bad" but it this preparatory drumbeat of war that is written between the lines. There are a lot of countries Americans might consider bad. But the news media isn't subtly and constantly hinting that we might want to…
Please point out some American media claiming we should go to war with China. That's just a ridiculous statement. There is no amping up for offensive war with China. There is plenty of amping up of concern that China will invade Taiwan and that we'll likely need to defend them. However the US is actively trying to prevent that from happening by being loud on the global stage and actively trying to show that the US do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US has been around as a modern country longer than China - we have more than a century on them; China started the 20th century divided with several parts of itself colonized. China fought a civil war between the dominant Republic abd the communists, and might have been able to win if not for the Japanese invasion; post war, they didn't have the ability anymore to fight off Mao's revolution. In other words the cur…
Also note that China's killed way more people in it's short history than the US did through it's entire 240 year history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Tens of millions of dead in a short few years.
What about the great depression in the US? The dust bowl? Various bank runs in the 19th century? Hell, African-American deaths due to slavery? Civil war deaths? Deaths of native Americans in our various undeclared wars against them?
Probably China still has a higher number either way, but if we're going to do a fair comparison, we probably should compare percentages of the population. The US civil war killed a single digit percentage of US population at the time, so perhaps not as extreme as the great Chinese famine but still huge (it was the bloodiest war for US lives ever, by a huge margin)
The video of the shoot-down shows flashes from the detached-and-falling payload, probably explosive self-destruct devices detonating. (It'd be shocking if the Chinese didn't include a self-destruct capability.)
Isn't it a hydrogen balloon? Wouldn't some level of explosion be expected?
I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China. It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead. Yesterday I h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world should also be very concerned about the current leader in China, who is currently re-writing the democratic traditions of China to remain in power indefinitely, which echoes the moves certain other leaders have made. This is, time and time again, a precursor to using military adventurism to justify and consolidate their grip on power. If anything, people aren't worried enough. Being overly sensitive about a…
Uh, what democratic traditions of China?