House passes $1.6B to deliver anti-China propaganda overseas
responsiblestatecraft.org
responsiblestatecraft.org
nice typo
> calm and not emotional
It comes from the Latin stolidus: “inert, dull, stupid”. So it's a strange case of a word with initially negative connotations that becomes somewhat neutral. Although Oxford Languages (Google's source) lists also "bovine", "lethargic", "torpid" and "stupid" as similar words, after "impassive", "unemotional" and "calm".
NATO chief urges China to stop supporting Russia's war in Ukraine https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nato-chief-urges-china-...
How China helps keep Russia's economy afloat https://www.dw.com/en/how-china-is-helping-keep-the-russian-...
Keeping America close, Russia down, and China far away: How Europeans navigate a competitive world https://ecfr.eu/publication/keeping-america-close-russia-dow...
So with Russia, we're past that rude awakening moment. With China, it hasn't happened yet.
This just sounds like "Somehow it's bad when enemy soldiers shoot at us, but we also shoot at them! What a hypocrisy!"
The problem is, there's a beginning, sure, but no end to such circular reasoning; seeding perpetual conflict.
So it would be "The enemies soldiers are evil and just want us all dead, but we're the heros protecting our country".
Sometime the world is indeed black and white. Other time, it's greyer if not outright muddy. In other words, it all depends.
But it's far more common for "us" to be the good guys and for "them" to be the bad guys. Even without knowing anything about "them".
I would call that perspective too cynical for what the world actually looks like.
Oh - and don't copy our laws regarding foreign agents. That is bad! Do as we SAY not as we do!
We all thought they were lying!
[0]: https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/2404_fs_mi...
for example: US, EU raise alarm over China’s ‘very substantial’ support for Russia in Ukraine war. Beijing’s ‘significant’ exports said to be used on battlefield and given in exchange for Kremlin’s sensitive military technologies https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3278160/us...
or: Chinese coast guard ships fired water cannons and blocked and rammed a Philippine fisheries vessel https://apnews.com/article/china-philippines-disputes-spratl...
or: Japan claims Chinese military plane violated its territorial airspace for the first time https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/27/asia/japan-china-military-pla...
I recommend seeing what China has its monies in, because they are in fucking everything today.
As an example, China has their monies in like 80~90%+ of the global video game market through Tencent, and video games are one of the heralds of pop culture and thus influence today. More critically, China has a growing stranglehold on the next generation of global payment processors through Alipay and WeChat Pay among others.
Also, perhaps ironically: This entire thread with numerous pro-China/anti-US/anti-west sentiments.
To put this in Civilization terms, China is going for an Econo-Cultural Victory and I daresay it's working.
survey would say otherwise: For the fifth year in a row, about eight-in-ten Americans report an unfavorable view of China https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/01/americans-rema...
In the 18 high-income countries we polled, views of China are, on balance, negative. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/07/09/views-of-china...
Also of note in that survey is that the anti-China sentiment is heavily biased towards older conservatives. That means the current and coming younger, more progressive generations are more pro-China, relatively speaking.
This is China's investment into soft power blossoming in spades.
As for the country survey, have a closer look at that breakdown: The west, to include Japan and South Korea, are anti-China as a collective. Most of the rest of the world is at worst neutral and at best pro-China; South and Central America is almost entirely pro-China including Mexico, the US's immediate neighbour to the south.
Also, despite Indians' claimed anti-Chinese sentiment, India is also one of, if not the, China's biggest strategic ally if not necessarily a friend.
Again, China's investment into soft power blossoming in spades.
While the efficacy of American anti-Chinese propaganda is certainly debatable, it's clear the US and the west at large are losing the econo-cultural fight and need to respond somehow.
I'm not going to mention the smaller hits like Arknights and Azur Lane and many more.
Japanese and Korean pop culture are yesterday's news, Chinese pop culture is the current trend. And note, I say that very begrudgingly as a Japanese; even in Japan now the Chinese games are more popular than homegrown Japanese games.
And of course Tencent also owns part of Path of Exile, Epic Games, Discord, Roblox, etc.
China used to own AMC Theaters too, and still owns some Hollywood studios like Legendary (Batman, The Hangover, Pacific Rim, Interstellar, etc.) through the Wanda conglomerate.
While we're talking about pop culture, China is just quietly buying up America piece by piece...
Just look at extremely friendly unwavering long term support for say Saudi arabia, from where all 9/11 attackers and whole extreme wahhabism came from. Say Mohamed bin Salman is proven vicious psychotic murderer yet ie Trump admires him, and no western democracy refuses saudi oil.
What soft power are you referring to exactly?
The soft power that catapulted Genshin Impact to the top of sales rankings across the entire world.[1]
The soft power that led to China's incomprehensibly deep and wide spider web of financial influence.[2]
The soft power that has us wearing Chinese blue jeans, to use Civilization lingo.
If the west thinks this is a problem (and it probably is, at least I think it is) then we need to respond. Being in denial won't address anything.
[1]: https://sensortower.com/blog/genshin-impact-three-billion-re...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent#Foreign_studio_assets
Nobody here is denying china has an economic strength but that has nothing to do with soft power. Soft power has to do with cultural export, and china has none. Zero. Nothing.
I am not in denial. Nobody outside of china gives a rats ass about chinese music or movies, or chinese blue jeans. They just know about the great wall, and about how horrible the government is.. Everyone thinks genshin is japanese, and loves japanese denim.
And you cant just flag comments that you disagree with to make them dissapear. That might fly in china but thats not how civilized nations operate. The reason I accused you of being a wumao is because of the way you behave. Not because I am in denial. I am a native born american citizen. Never met anybody who knows a damn thing about chinese cultural exports. that is because there arent any.
Unfortunately for that narrative a lot of the research funding and ideas originated in the US.
That's like saying, "The US released the Great Influenza of 1918." It's a naturally occurring pathogen. Nobody released it.
There's zero evidence that the virus has anything to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and in fact relatively strong evidence that they didn't have or even know about the virus before it spilled over.
The above two findings are completely inconsistent with the idea of a lab leak. Why would a lab leak cause an outbreak at a market that sells wild animals, of all places? And how would it cause two different lineages of virus to emerge at that market?
If you know how the original SARS spilled over, in wild animal markets in a major Chinese city (Guangzhou, far away from where the bats that carry SARS live), the Wuhan Seafood Market spillover looks nearly identical - just 17 years later.
Meanwhile, no evidence at all has emerged that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had anything to do with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Scientists at the WIV were regularly publishing and giving talks about exactly what they were working on, and they never mentioned anything closely related to SARS-CoV-2. They were working with viruses much closer to the original SARS, which is what most people back then were interested in. After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, you could actually go back and look into the WIV's publications to find the most closely related virus. It's called RaTG13, and it was published by scientists at the WIV all the way back in 2014. However, it's way too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to be the progenitor virus, and in fact, more closely related viruses have since been found by a French team in Laos. Basically, all the evidence about who knew what when, the genetics of more closely related viruses that have been discovered since the pandemic began argue positively that the WIV had nothing to do with the origins of the pandemic. This is in addition to the strong evidence that the initial outbreak was not at WIV, but rather at a wild animal market (which is exactly what you'd expect for a natural spillover).
None of this has made its way into the American public's consciousness, though.
0. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8715 1. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp8337
May god have mercy on 3rd world countries that aren't part of NATO or SCO/BRICS+, because they will have an wasted decade in the 2020s and early 2030s.
Quip for quip. More housing -> more property owners -> more NIMBYs. Do you really want more NIMBYs?
Quiping aside, what you call NIMBY i see as opposition to "profits to the developers, externalities to the existing property owners". I'm all for more housing, i just think that the above mentioned profit/externalities distribution should be seriously adjusted, and then you'd see much more housing being built.
That literally everybody else wants it and thus its priced accordingly since we have market economies (in communism it worked similarly too but it was more about apparatchiks) and such properties are very scarce is irrelevant. They just want that appreciating investment.
There is no point discussing this here, it had been done ad nausea and even otherwise rational people turn to very emotional reasoning when it comes to them and their perceived rights for their own wealth. Something about expecting the world to adjust to my expectations or desires instead of the other way.
Shocking.
(But even "friends" sometimes sling some shit at eachother every now and then when it benefits them. It just usually doesn't cost $1.6B when this happens.)
How very disappointing, Mr. Nagle.
But China is a threat in a way those others aren't. Not just an economic competitor but potentially the next superpower after ours fades, and maybe next century's dominant culture. We're scared of them because they challenge everything we believe about our own model's superiority...