That's one of the contradictions of capitalism. As wages are pushed down, so does the ability to purchase the wares and services they produce. This also hurts the profits of companies.
It's not. The author's own dad publically called him out as a liar about his story (I believe the author claimed his dad was dead). It's a fabricated story, like almost all defector stories from North Korea. Stories like his sells well, and there's no way to verify any of it.
The political orientations you describe don't threaten or oppose the political system, it's part of it and leveraged by the ruling capitalist class as its defenders. A better question to ask is, how does publicly voicing and acting with _real_ opposition get treated in the US? That's way more dystopion. See COINTELPRO for a historical example. Its modern equivalents which has only intensified the hunt for real, opposition does have extremely dystopian tendencies, through cencorship and political persecution.
The example I gave had adherents who broke into the U.S. Capitol Building and got in close physical proximity to members of Congress, some of whom hid in offices.
Some number of these same adherents were hit with charges ranging from seditious conspiracy (I think four Oath Keepers) to trespassing. Those charges were processed through the court system like any other charge. Journalists interviewed them pre- and post-verdict. AFAICT they said exactly whatever came to their minds in these interviews. Someone did a long form interview with the Qanon Shaman guy while he served his time, which is interesting to listen to.
Again: do we have anything remotely analogous in China where we know what happened to the adherents through ongoing interviews? If not, then on what grounds do you argue the U.S. is more dystopian?
> See COINTELPRO for a historical example.
Bing actually gives results we can publicly read and discuss about that. From what I recall Bing is forced to give zero results for Tank Man in China. Saying that the latter is less dystopian doesn't make sense.
The dystopia in the US has mostly to do with the scale of global surveillance, that way surpasses anything any other country is doing, including China, the oppressive legal system that incarcerates an unjustifyably high proportion of the population, adversarial and racist "policing" of the citizenry, their global and unusually brutal military aggression and coercion, and economic inequality, even forced upon other "vassal" countries through various political and economical means. So I don't think China is anywhere comparable to the US in this regard.
That being said, what we're discussing here is the manner of which political dissidence is allowed domestically. Political dissidence is just not allowed in the US to any real extent. People attacking the democratic party are not dissidents of the capitalist system. Republicans themselves as representatives of the capitalist political system are just as vile, and I suspect many of them are privately jubilant about the same extremes the most right-wing conspiracy theorists raves about. Doesn't mean that both Republicans and Democrats stand shoulder to shoulder against the menace of real political dissidence. It is actively being suppressed into nothing.
In decades prior to now it has existed, but it has been systematically and super-judicially been suppressed in violent and non-violent ways. Today, all american-owned social media plays along, and follows US intelligence orders to the letter, as they are required by law. Most politically disturbing media content comes from other countries nowadays, and the US has been quick to outright van and cencor foreign social media, and anti-US voices on american social media.
Obviously polital dissidence it's not allowed to a wide extent either in the US or China. But people in the west generally don't recognize how propagandized the western narrative is, even weaponized, and how global social media is a central part of it.
Of course no american social media, or product, like Bing will be allowed to conduct such information warfare in China. But remember that VPN servives are widely available in China which circumvents the domestic rules. Those are still allowed to operate. The US has actually recently ruled VPN usage as liable to get you prosecuted for terrorism or aiding terrorism.
By the way, do you have any idea how many hundreds of billions of dollars are yearly poured into creating negative media content about China and esp. the Tianamen Square incident (which happened 30 years ago), directly from the US state? I.e. propaganda for the world to consume?
It's curious that cybercrime in the news is almost always attributed to enemy state actors like Russia, China and North Korea. Don't western countries have hacker groups, other than ideological groups like Anonymous?
Blaming North Korea for cybercrime is a convenient way of 1) shifting focus from uncomfortable facts (e.g. if the hacker group comes from an ally, or is domestic) - 2) justify our inability to do anything about it, and 3) to further western propaganda surrounding North Korea. Continually blaming North Korea for things without proof is one way of justifying the severe economic sanctions/blockades that have been in place for decades.
i recently wrote a comment about how america can "justify" stuxnet attack on iran as a "display of capability of usa and israel" but in the same breath they are quick to "attack on our critical infrastructure is an act of war against our great nation and we must respond".
you can hit the other guy and call it a win but god forbid if the other person hits back, then its a matter of hurting your pride. meh.
huawei has been on the grill for "secret backdoor" for quite some time now and as far as i remember, no "proof" has been given yet western states have been quick to follow suit in banning their equipment. on the contrary, intel and amd have documented backdoors in their CPUs by nsa/cia but that's "fine", no big deal....
USA can spy on germany, uk, which is documented but if there is even an alegation of the same being done by china, all hell breaks loose.
this is the reason why many countries around the world are switching to RISC-V platform, away from X86 because america can and has shown multiple times that they can "strongarm" those companies to simply quit a market and exert pressure. people don't want that.
Probably because it’s hard to function as a nation (or a person) if you are constantly being hypercritical of any hypocrisies. We would all drown in a sea of self-hatred and convert to vegan monks with no cars or possessions.
> It's curious that cybercrime in the news is almost always attributed to enemy state actors like Russia, China and North Korea. Don't western countries have hacker groups, other than ideological groups like Anonymous?
It is just a matter of propaganda. Notice how in europe almost every crime was attributed to islamists. And then, after some days, they change the story.
From the "who benefits?" pov, there are lots of military/state security people who stand to gain status, attention, budget etc by painting online crime as conflict between countries. In the private sector it's the opposite, companies don't want to talk about how they've been victims of breakins.
Period. Western media has propaganda just like Russian media has theirs. Don't try to spin it as if the West is lying and Russia is not.
I would give you benefit of the doubt, but your post history shows you've been lamenting about the demonisation of Russian media, so your bias, as well as mine, is clear.
Both Western and Russian media are liars and full of Shenanigans. The only thing that matters is who is winning it. Many social accounts, streaming websites, news etc. must oblige to US policy otherwise they are banned or they face attrition.
Just see wion news. They have been speaking in favor of Ukraine in every news. But, they were banned because US thinks some news might be inappropriate for them. https://twitter.com/WIONews/status/1507378019563974659
First, there is no simple western media. That of Poland is different from Germany is different from France is totally different from the US media. Some of those are better than others
Second, we have a classic dilemma. There is a media openly spreading lies and wartime propaganda. Will you teeate the spread of blatant lies, hatred and incitement in the interest of "freedom" when the aim of that very media is not to inform but to incite anger, aggression and sow doubt about the government?
I think it would be counter productive to bring attention to this.
They're a very small percentage of Ukraine population.
If ANY country got invaded some of the soldiers defending against invaders are going to be fascists, it's inevitable. If the US got invaded and you wanted to throw out the fascists out of the army you wouldn't have much of an army lol.
Defending against an invasion from a foreign country is not really the time to discuss political ideologies, bullets are bullets, once the russians are out they can go back to making less than 5% of votes...
In any country a certain part of the population holds extreme views. If the military represents more or less the population then by necessity it will contain some fascists etc. If anything, you would not expect many vegans or non-violence activists in the military, but you would certainly expect to see those people that love power, weapons and the language of force, which correlates quite strongly with fascist views.
Op did not claim that the whole military is fascist.
They're near the border so obviously they can be seen as vital. They also were preparing for years.
If you're willingly getting a job that entails killing brown people overseas for no legitimate reason you're kind of a fascist :) If you voted for trump you're kind of a fascist.
>Right, because there is no way they would draw more support after being lionized as heros.
Like I said, I don't think this is the time to think about this, if your city was getting destroyed by a foreign invader, would you really care who's fighting the invaders? If they committed crimes they can be dealt with later once Ukraine assured its survival.
> If ANY country got invaded some of the soldiers defending against invaders are going to be fascists, it's inevitable
> Defending against an invasion from a foreign country is not really the time to discuss political ideologies
Yeah, yeah, it is like they just popped into existence on February 24.
If Ukraine government was really bothered with them they wouldn't exist now (or at least they wouldn't be a part of the country military forces) and it couldn't be used by Putin as one of the means to justify the invasion. Yet...
There is fascists in America and in most European countries. There is more white supremacists in America than Azov members in Ukraine(in %), but the GOP still exists, and there is American senators against interracial marriage.
There is literal nazis in any army in the world. Armies are rarely full of peaceful left leaning people.
putin doesn't need a reason. for anything. he murdered people for decades without repercussions, why would he need any kind of justification?
ASBMilitary was banned from Twitter. They said their reporters in Ukraine were threatened due to the nature of their reporting, which challenged the Ukrainian narrative we're fed in the West.
Of course all Russian-friendly media platforms are banned. The narrative they bring is dangerous to the false image we're creating here in the west.
Social media platforms are waging war on "misinformation", removing content and opposing views en masse. This is not a secret. We're shielded against "propaganda", not aware we're steeped in propaganda.
The funny thing, even western news media reported on the resurgence of the far right and the prevalence of Neo-nazism in Ukraine, as well as its connection with government post-euromaidan. Referencing these very articles gets you stamped as a Russian bot these days.
The fact is that NATO countries are funding and militarizing neo-nazis in Ukraine in order to undermine Russia. And they're shielding them from bad press. Moreover, government forces (of which the neo-nazi militia is part of) has bombarded civilian areas of the seperatist regions for 8 years, and still do, which has killed about 14k civilians. There's complete silence about this injustice in the western press coverage of Ukraine.
What's most concerning is how normalized it has become to hate Russians.
I mean other than when invading poor, impoverished countries in third world for reasons full of deceit, corruption and material gain, when has Western media ever lied to us?
You're just saying Western media is hiding the "facts" but not telling us which facts might these be. Do you mean the bullshit reasons Putin has told the Russian people to justify invading Ukraine? Is the West hiding that he really is there to denazify Ukraine?
Please tell us what the West doesn't want us to know.
Let it be clear, I am quite positive the Western intelligence is doing a massive work of propaganda and happy to be able to silence RT. But this doesn't justify and validate the bullshit story Putin has been telling the world to invade a sovereign country.
That's the problem. We don't know if it's BS or real. How am I, halfway across the world, going to know?
The other problem is we've labelled it BS to some degree because we just think Russia is making shit up to justify their actions. Maybe we think that because the claim of a "democratic", almost in NATO country becoming nazi is unthinkable, therefore it must be disinfo and propaganda BS by Putin.
Zelensky has banned all opposition parties that were critical of him in any way, claiming they "were all Russians", which looking at a few of the parties banned is clearly a joke.
Zelensky also banned all non-state approved news, forcing all information to be funneled through his one approved network.
This is pretty common in prelude to and during wars. Abraham Lincoln infamously shut down newspapers and arrested journalists and the newspaper's staff.
Try and go to a Russia-aligned (or at least not Ukraine-aligned) subreddit, copy a defense of Russias actions, or a condemnation of the Ukraine government, and see how it fares on big subreddits, like r/news or r/europe. You'll almost certainly get banned, esp. if you link to media articles that support your argument. Even if your entire argument is factual and supported by western media articles.
Moreover, it's not a well-hidden secret that Reddit is a very popular target for information warfare on behalf of western intelligence. Information warfare and media operations with the intent of controlling the narrative is extremely widespread. It's not surprising that Russian media are blacked out and labeled misinformation. Closing ones ear to the opposing viewpoint had already become a prime virtue, and isolating out dissenting opinions is an important part of this kind of information warfare. Western news media is absolutely steeped in pro-Ukraine propaganda, obviously much more that even Russian media is with pro-Russia propaganda. It's a case of fish not knowing they're in water. It's insane to me to see the extreme extent of demonisation of Russia, and even ordinary russians on reddit. You won't see this universal kind of demonisation in Russian media. Controlling the narrative is a powerful thing.
That's not true in general, because import prices go up during inflation, and foreign investments go down, which might lead to foreign investors pulling out, and other effects. The US is in a unique position due to them keeping the USD stable internationally by being the world reserve currency, a status the US government abuse by printing an excess of dollars. US inflation is in practice a taxation of the international community who must mostly purchase oil in USD, and are otherwise financially tied to the US.
One could draw a comparison between the US and the East India Company, in that they invade countries, overthrow governments and fuels civil wars in the Middle East and Africa (partly) in order to enforce US dollars as the de facto medium currency of international oil trade, and the subsequent funneling of oil profits into western financial assets and companies.
The money they pay also has 0 tangible value. You can't pay humanity out of poverty, that's a ficticious dream. Poverty is a structural problem, and a political one. It has more to do with what other countries are allowed and not allowed to do within the larger financial superstructure dominated by western capital.
That money absolutely has tangible value. If Jeff Bezos is willing to pay $500 million for a yacht, but I'm willing to pay $600 million to build schools, the market should favor building the schools and society ends up with a bunch of schools rather than a single super yacht.
That's why we need some kind of significant wealth tax. Take the money away from people that will choose to allocate resources to yacht building and other frivolous things and spend it on stuff that has an obvious benefit to society.
Inflation may be a bitch, but last I checked I could walk into McDonald's with a green piece of paper with a "$5" printed on it and walk out with a Big Mac, no questions asked.
That's what "fiat currency" means. The green piece of paper is useless in a vacuum (maybe unless you're a fan of tiny origami or in search of kindling), but because everyone just agrees (and the US government enforces) that a particular kind of green paper with a "$5" printed on it has a certain value, then it can be used as a medium of exchange.
It doesn't scale, is the thing. You can't walk into a macdonalds and walk out with a billion burgers just because you're a billionaire. What seems to make sense on a micro level is completely nonsensical on a macro level. Money is mostly tied up in property, stock, loans and financial derivatives anyway. It's largely a ficticious element, which is printed by the billions every day.
Of course it scales. Sure, he'd probably need to call ahead (like, way ahead), but if a billionaire wanted to buy a billion burgers, it's not like that's an impossibility.
> It doesn't scale, is the thing. You can't walk into a macdonalds and walk out with a billion burgers just because you're a billionaire.
That's only because the super rich are dictating what's in demand. If you take all the money being spent on luxury watches and start spending it on dental care for children, the market should reduce the supply of watch makers and increase the supply of dentists in order to meet the demand for each.
Most money is invested in assets designed to retain wealth or increase profits, directly or indirectly. Their wealth and power is contingent upon that very scheme.
you can't pay humanity out of poverty, but you can help humans out of poverty. don't look at it as a global problem, it's an individual problem. so the thousands of dollars that went to stupid monkeys, if you take just 1% and give it to someone that values it is much much better
Most if not all of them. Especially during a downturn, all assets of all classes tend to correlate and produce negative returns. During big crises, stocks that before seemed uncorrelated/anti-correlated have a tendency to increase their correlation and go down together; at the extreme, even bonds cease to act as a diversifier against stocks plummeting.
