LOL. Gottem!

I don't think it's all the same. Remember that China did not have a blue ocean navy in the 1800s, hence the century of humiliation. This may in fact be the first of a kind event and a further extension as China fully stands up.

I mean, I knew that the minute you haughtily used sarcasm to state China wasn't socialist and chose the lack of unions as good evidence. Bye.

And unionizing wasn't it

Cool, let them know that you know what's best for them and that they should organize themselves in a protorevolutionary formation and threaten to withhold their labor from society. You know best!

LOL, imagine a socialist country where workers needed to organize to create adversarial relationships with other workers. Shake that liberalism from your brain. Unions are an organizational form against capitalists, a protorevolutionary form that wins through threat of harm to the state. No socialist country needs to have unions, because a socialist country is one in which the state is organized in accordance with the long-term interests of the workers as a class.

LOL. "I think I'll starve because I bet I can save 3.5% on food prices in a month"

Guess which political economic form can handle price deflation gracefully (hint, it's not capitalism)

Love it

Wow, didn't even occur to me that weapons from the conflict could be funneling to Africa, even after Wagner group announced that Africa was their next theater.

Makes me wonder, with the denial of service to the drone base in the region, how much of what is happening is China/Russia working to disrupt AFRICOM operations so that BRI and dedollarization can continue without intervention from the West?

I keep finding myself being pessimistic and inflating the power of the West and trying to figure out what's going on that's not being seen and what sort of "we are weak" propaganda is being pushed in a sort of "rope-a-dope" strategy, but I'm starting to get more and more convinced that the most important lasting legacy of the USSR is their counter-intelligence developments. If Russia, led by an expert spy hunter, in collaboration with China who has also demonstrated exceptional counter-intelligence prowess, have managed to collaborate on defeating US intelligence, then a lot of what's going on makes a lot more sense. The war in Ukraine becomes an intelligence trap, where the US is driven by the need to draw out Russian capabilities to assess them, where the Wagner coup is a purge of Western infiltration, where the Xinjiang conflict is being lost at the level of intelligence, etc.

If this is the case, then Niger might be coordinated anti-Western forces opening a new front in the conflict after the West failed to open multiple additional fronts in the months after the invasion of Ukraine. The success so far could be attributed to intelligence advantage, the proceedings could (and likely do) hinge on the counter-intelligence battlespace, and if it achieves strategic anti-Westen aims, we may see new fronts open before the year closes.

And let's not forget the BRICS summit will be here in 2 weeks!

Countries don't OWN their land, they are sovereign over their territory. Quite literally no government of China EVER owned Taiwan, but all governments, including this one, have been sovereign over Taiwan. It's just that Taiwan was illegally occupied by separatists and European imperial powers. The sovereignty does not inhere to the party in charge any more than the Democratic party can own Alabama or the Republican party can own the Florida Keys.

74 years is a single lifetime. The US has lasted longer than that and it will eventually be completely removed from the world map through decolonial struggle. 74 years for a small separatist movement to be protected by European powers who dominated China for centuries does not suddenly grant new moral, ethical, political, nor legal standing. They are not a firmly established democratic nation of their own, they are a Western vassal and proxy, and as the world financial system dedollarizes Taiwan will slowly shift its stance back towards China. China has every intent in creating the incentive structures for integration to be the correct choice for the people of Taiwan. Given that when it started support for integration was met with death, the current state of integration polling is a good sign that things are slowly moving in the direction China wants them to. And the people of Taiwan are not blind to nor ignorant of what the US does to its proxies.

Integration will eventually happen.

It's also not the US's choice. The European empire, which the US inherited and evolved, is slowly but surely ending. The integration will happen, and the US won't launch a world war to stop it, because China won't launch a war to integrate, because China isn't the belligerent that the West has been trying to invent through propaganda for 2 centuries. Instead, China will continue to assert its position, demonstrate it's ability to protect Taiwan from further imperial manipulation, and wait until Taiwan is ready to experiment with "one country, two systems". China, unlike the West, can wait for a long time.

I would say that suicide is not patriotic to anyone.

But you have nothing to say to about America not allowing integration with China without launching a world war? Curious.

The PRC has never owned Taiwan

What a fucked up imperialist framing. The PRC doesn't own China, it is the current government of the sovereign nation of China which has included Taiwan for a very long time and still includes Taiwan. You don't say that the Democrats don't own Alabama, but you apply an idiosyncratic standard to argue that the US is justified in turning Taiwan into it's military proxy and threatening to send millions to their death over reintegration of a territory that is quite literally by all standards part of the same nation as the mainland.

Also, it doesn't matter about the ethnicity of the population because, at the end of the day, they don't want to be part of China.

You are talking about people who suffered under the White Terror for 40 years, which included torture and murder of anyone who disagrees with the KMT. The individual beliefs of the residents is a direct result not only of the indoctrination from that White Terror but from the heavy indoctrination by European propaganda for many many decades.

What matters is that there is no way from Taiwan to be independent. It will either be part of the imperial bloc and therefore a military threat to China and a base for Western imperial power projection and containment, or it will be administered as a province of China and the Europeans will be kicked out of their foot hold. This is why the conflict exists, not because the people in Taiwan care one way or the other, but because independent Taiwan is a strategic position for the European imperial order. China will integrate it because it is required for Chinese national security, which serves not merely the people of the mainland but also the people of the island. It would be tragic for the US to turn Taiwan into another meat grinder in its bid to use proxies to maintain its global oppression.

LOL, "expansionism". Like what NATO does? Or do you mean the reintegration of formerly centrally administered provinces after imperialist interventionism that occupied, divided, and oppressed? Because lest you forget, all the people on Taiwan, except for the very small number of natives who survived the genocidal KMT, they're all part of China. They seceded and the Europeans protected them, not because they had a right to seceded, but because Europe wanted to maintain military and economic dominance over the region. Taiwan is a proxy in this case. Reintegrating the proxy is not expansionism.

Expansionism is 600 military bases around the world. Expansionism is establishing Ukraine as a new proxy and attempting to install net new nuclear capabilities on its border with Russia. Expansionism is literally what China has been fighting against for centuries. And now, because they want to continue pushing out European interests from their corner of the world, you're crying "expansionism"! It's ridiculous. Was it expansionism when Hong Kong was returned to China from the British? Was it expansionism when the British could no longer have complete immunity from Chinese law in Shanghai? Was it expansionism when the North Koreans tried to push out the Japanese from the peninsula?

Europe has been expanding for 600 years and you're going to cry foul when someone tries to push out European interests from where they never should have been in the first place?

This is because when the losing fuedal-fascist White Army fled to the island, the imperial fascist British and Americans interceded to protect their imperial fascist interests by ensuring that the KMT was able to stay alive and that they would be further indebted to them. The KMT then proceeded to prosecute the ruthlessly brutal White Terror on the island while the North Atlantic imperial fascists maintained diplomatic and military relationships with the island as a way of holding on to their imperialist presence in China that they obtained through violence, occupation, and the forced selling of opium.

Specifically that it is not administered by this particular central government of the mainland is irrelevant. The former central governments all administered Taiwan prior to the civil war, but this particular central government was stopped by European interventionism to advance European interests.

Suicide isn’t patriotic

Tell that to literally all the European and American soldiers who say they want to die for their country, and all the bumper stickers, and all the memorials, and all of the ceremonies, and all of the rhetoric, and all of the families, and and and... Or do you not consider it suicide when Euro-centric soldiers choose to enlist and committing to fight to their death?

And it isn’t a Chinese island; that’s the point

It's literally populated by almost entirely Chinese people, Chinese people who genocided the native inhabitants. It is quite literally part of the same land mass and water ways just like Manhattan, Galveston, and the Florida Keys. In all ways except one, it is a Chinese island.

The one way that it is NOT a Chinese island is that when the losing fuedal-fascist White Army fled to the island, the imperial fascist British and Americans interceded to protect their imperial fascist interests by ensuring that the KMT was able to stay alive and that they would be further indebted to them. The KMT then proceeded to prosecute the ruthlessly brutal White Terror on the island while the North Atlantic imperial fascists maintained diplomatic and military relationships with the island as a way of holding on to their imperialist presence in China that they obtained through violence, occupation, and the forced selling of opium.

This is the ONLY definition of "Chinese" that Taiwan is not, specifically that it is not administered by the central government of the mainland. The former central governments all administered Taiwan prior to the civil war, but this particular central government was stopped by European interventionism to advance European interests.

You are grasping at straws in trying to construct a narrow moralistic narrative that smoothly eliminates all the parts of the narrative that would fly against your moral narrative. It's not working. Reality is what it is.

I mean, isn't this just the most schizophrenic framing. It's Chinese soldiers who are lunatics for being patriotic but Americans are sane for threatening world war over a Chinese island on the other side of the world.

LOL - fucken brazen. I cannot wait to see the libs twist themselves into knots trying to get upset at this without giving up their game.

The US is sending more aid per year than Russia's entirely military budget and Russia hasn't even gotten through it's old weapon systems yet.

But that's also besides the point. Let's assume you're right and Russia has lost more than Ukraine. How does that jive with Ukraine's inability to make meaningful progress in their offensive? They've reclaimed something like .2% of their lost territory, which is easily within the margins of the ebb and flow of conflict.