23 karma · joined August 12, 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur...
There's a de facto global tacit agreement to sell oil in US dollars - on pain of unilateral sanctions by the US or military intervention by the US military. All countries who deviate from this agreement are in fact deemed enemies of the US. This includes, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China, and (formely) Iraq and Libya. When they don't, that means that the US can't simply print dollars as they please and force other countries (who purchases that oil) to purchase US debt as well. Pricing oil in currencies other than the worlds reserve currency (the US dollar) affects the dollar value greatly. The US printed about 10 trillion dollars in two years. The rest of the oil-dependent world pays the price.
Not sure what you mean by relative time?
> Chinese construction standards are de-facto low
Compare major cities in China with major cities in the west. Compare road infrastructure (esp. highway infrastructure) and train infrastructure in densely populated areas. Their highway network is an impressive feat. China is surpassing the west, and has already surpassed the west in infrastructure standards in many areas, e.g. by pioneering high-speed railways.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-fastest-maglev-....
The US is currently making an attempt to improve the dire infrastructure situation, but we'll see how that turns out considering the intrinsic inefficiencies of state / federal infrastructure planning in the US. IMO it's almost surely to be hijacked by capital and the money will thus to a large extent be funnelled away to corrupt and undeserving profiteers.
https://news.wttw.com/2021/04/26/lightfoot-launches-1st-phas...
https://la.curbed.com/2016/11/1/13493756/los-angeles-driving...
> but almost a 0% chance that we will see GDP/capita
GDP is not an accurate measure of general economic development in the modern world. The high GDP of the US does not correlate with its failing infrastructure, its inefficient medical and educational system, high amount of poverty, drug addiction and crime etc. The financialisation and de-industrialisation of the US economy decoupled the material standards of the people from the profits of the rich, and thus GDP is largely a fictitious number. So much of GDP is tied up in meaningless activity, like the production of overpriced weaponry, increasing bureaucratization and the prevalence of so-called "bullshit jobs", and in a corrupt and immoral finance / property sector which also poses a direct threat to global economic stability (cf. the financial crisis of 2008). Let's compare living standards, not GDP. China is rapidly surpassing the US in this area. While they still have rural areas which are underdeveloped, they have made major strides this decade and recently eradicated extreme poverty. Their next step is to eradicate poverty altogether.
In combination with Taiwan, of course it is. Why don't you think it is? The history here is that Japan had criminally occupied Taiwan for half a century, and once WW2 was over, the US has supported Taiwans independence from China ever since. Due to Japan's large scale genocide campaign in China, and the fact that they barely even apologised half a century after the war (with full US support), the Japan / Taiwan issue is naturally highly political and controversial in China. There's so much past wrongdoings, so pretending to be on a moral pedestal here is ridiculously ignorant. Even these days the US is threatening war with China over Taiwan, as they have been historically all along.
> Xi-era Chinese nationalism is so fragile and easily bruised
Easily bruised only in the eyes of people completely ignorant of history, or who holds false or extremely biased historical views.
What an ignorant thing to say. China generally produces high quality stuff, for their own population as well as for the entire world.
Tbh, I think the fact that the Pentagon are basically brainwashing kids through games like Call of Duty deserves more attention. Some modern AAA games are highly political and filled to the brim with western imperialistic propaganda.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/call-of-d...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/18/video-gam...
There's plenty of research, and leaks have uncovered much of the extent of US war crimes. The proportion of civilian casualties in Afghanistan (and Iraq) are immense, bordering 80%. This is because of the extremely low bar for claiming someone are enemy combatants.
See for example just the past few days: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/30/an-afghan-family-ki...
A "suspected" car bomb (not a car bomb at all), triggered the US to kill 10 innocent civilians. They claimed they targeted ISIS, and that no civilians were known to have died. This is the rule rather than an exception, which leaks and whistleblowers have extensively shown.
The US is the only country committing genocide. They have killed over a hundred innocent civilians in Afghanistan just the past few weeks. Over the past decodes they've killed around a million innocent civilians in the name of the hyper-aggressive and hypocritical "war on terror". Indirectly, they're responsible for several millions criminal murders during the same timespan, and they've not once been put to trial. They're not only failing their citizens, they're a genocidal, terrorist state.
Where are all the journalists scouring wikileaks for real news? For real content, investigating the dark underbelly of foreign policy and war, etc.? Why are we only served with manufactured consent (i.e. bullshit) from BBC, CNN, etc.? When it comes to war, they eagerly repeat the manufactured lies about our "enemies", be it Saddam's WMD's, Assad's chemical missile attacks, Gaddafi's genocide - all exposed through wikileaks to be lies manufactured by "intelligence" agencies, in conflict with facts and evidence at hand at the time - which then serves to justify intervention on "humanitarian" grounds, but which is merely pretext for imperialist aggression. It's taboo, most of all for journalists, to take an interest in this. They are barred from mainstream media outlets, shunned even. Some are even killed (cf. the investigators of the Panama Papers). You will receive no financial support if you do, and you will be judged a foreign state actor if you're freelancing for non-western media outlets (e.g. RT).
Only in capitalist systems is this a process of enrichment of the ruling class. The transfer of wealth in the US to the richest % on the basis of war has been immense. They're not pointless geopolitically either, since it serves to stifle and subjugate foreign governments into US alignment to support western predatory and exploitative economic policies (enforcing predatory loans and commanding oil trade). Hence aggressive imperialism combines several aspects of maintaining economic and military hegemony.
The value of that money is the continued global class oppression by the international financial bourgeoisie, and the US-lead western hegemony.
The Afghanistan stalemate served several purposes as I see it.
1) To funnel money to the military industrial complex.
2) To contain China's Belt and Road initiative.
3) To maintain an active military presence in oil producing regions in order to dominate and control trade and to ensure supply (same for Iraq and Libya).
Population control is a misguided concept, and has a grim history, ranging from mass sterilisation in India to the "lebensraum" idea of the Nazis. It's not a sensible path, and is mostly tied to extreme ideologies and Malthusian pseudo-science.
Pointing to Uganda, whose citizens represents probably about 1% of emissions per capita compared to the west is is crazy to me. How can one even excuse ones own high consumption levels while blaming Ugandans for reproducing, when one represents the same amount emissions as that of a small village in some places?