Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "VisualPolitik EN" channel.

  1. I liken America's overdramatized politics to walking: it's in constant reaction to inherent unsteadiness that you actually take a step forward. Some steps might be bigger than advisable, some are real tepid, some might go sideways, but as long as one side isn't allowed to overly dominate the movement, the entire body is not that likely to faceplant.
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  2. It might have been a consideration of leaving Afghanistan for China to take... right when China's productivity has begun stalling and creditors have begun calling.
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  3. Democracy is a fundamental interest of the US. If defending Taiwan leads to breaking the unchallengeability of the CPC on the Mainland, that's what America will do 🇺🇸🇹🇼
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  4.  @peekaboopeekaboo1165  What's inaccurate was the _when_, not the _if_. The CPC lately has only accelerated instead of reversed its self-made fundamental problems of aging, debt, and pollution. I've seen firsthand the collapse of optimism in China especially among the younger folks -- there's a real danger in the coming years of China stagnating and getting overtaken from collective inaction and anomie, which will only raise discomforting questions about how the people actually benefit from the Party.
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  5. The public sector has to exist to fund things that are required yet short-term unprofitable to a privatized industry, like infrastructure, education, and regulation. Though there is a balance to be achieved and China is certainly way biased towards its overbearing government.
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  6. Aviation components, medical equipment, and agricultural goods of all sorts are some of the things China depends on the US for. That's before considering the education and tourism to Chinese visitors which if considered exports the US has a massive trade surplus on.
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  7. Short of guaranteed free housing and healthcare for life on VA compounds in major cities, recruits are usually looking for something much earlier in the contract like education support and sign-up bonuses.
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  8. Problem is our most advanced equipment could get used up quickly, and then we really are back to obsolete kit if there's any that we hadn't already disposed of. Compare that with the PLA where their stuff may not be the best, but at least it's new and thus not soaking up as much resources in maintenance and upgrades for a while. Plus with the consolidation of competitors, we lack the multiple independent lines of effort that China's SOEs also face, but we don't have a command economy that streamlines something to happen. Much of our efforts are wasted on compliances as demanded by America's voters for the government to "save money" on strictly the lowest bidder without much consideration of product quality or vendor reputation, as well as paying for various levels of bean counters often working on a 12 month budget that wasn't authorized until a few months into the fiscal year.
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  9. Yes climate change is an identified threat that would cause conflicts to flare up, along with the associated supply chain disruptions and mass migrations. Also reducing our need of fossil fuel for static assets like generators also reduces the risk to supply lines and the personnel who are tasked on them, because trucking fuel between bases is among the most hazardous of missions.
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  10. You think that's bad? You should hear how badly they butcher Chinese and Korean names.
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  11. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were definitely real people. But yeah the zealous veneration of those guys and their ideals certainly creates unnecessary aggression.
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  12. Like 5 or 6, only 2 or 3 of whom might have completed school due to having to split family funds. Children are surviving but this realization hasn't reached young couples yet, and its harming the prospects of their children as uneducated ones get left further behind economically. Plus there's their church/mosque/traditional parents pushing them to "Birth 'em all and let God sort it out".
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  13. Sadly the politicians who advocated it are not around long enough to be held accountable.
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  14. That's if China's economy keeps growing at the same rate, which is already slowing and likely to stall due to unreversed aging, overleveraged debts, and pervasive chemical pollution. There's a reason why the PRC has gone all "wolf warrior" and its "Dynamic Zero-COVID" measures are expected to persist: their economy is no longer reliable on indefinite growth and the distraction from politics provided from delivering on promises of future wealth.
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  15. The host country also has to accept and support the immigrants like any native resident when they do communicate and try to contribute. Notice how more ethnically-identified Europe tends to have more problems with newcomers compared to the immigrant-driven Western Hemisphere.
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  16. The PRC is heading that way too, talk to any Chinese national as a foreigner (not a fellow citizen/potential Party informant) and you'd see they know a surprising amount of "unpatriotic" knowledge and embarrassing news. The turn towards uncritical nationalism and state control over the markets hints at the Party running out of options to continue its unchallenged rule. A lot of critics say the US is going that way too, but it's been on the "verge of collapse" since 1812. Part of the reason it's so durable is because it holds the potential for revolution every year or so through periodic voting. Plus America thrives on chaos and loosely-defined limits; arguably the disturbing pushback comes from when those societal red lines start getting found and established to the detriment of the privileged.
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  17. They have their freedom, the US just doesn't want to make direct trade with Cuba. Yet despite a literal world full of willing alternatives, the Cuban government still manages to screw up the wider nation in support of its much narrower "security" interests.
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  18. Blockades are legally considered a full act of war, and may be reacted to accordingly by Taipei’s allies. Plus the PLAN hold on the Pacific side will be tenuous at best since they’ll be on the opposite end of Taiwan who will resist any missions to support the vessels out there, especially since the eastern half of the island is where all the defensible mountains are.
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  19. That’s the ideal. But as the PLA continues to plus up its capabilities, Taipei must improve its overall counterforce to match.
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  20. I've survived the other extreme, having lived in the low-tax weak-state libertarian paradise of Subsaharan Africa, where personal family and faith dominate public policy. It's just as dangerous and dismal as "collectivist" nations, but they trade tangible improvements like decent infrastructure and industry for blind optimism and self-confidence. That environment of local gang territories, strongman entrenchment, arbitrary "rules" and "fees", random violent petty crimes, and harsh punishments with zero deterrent effect (for with nothing substantial to fear losing, any risk becomes promising) is where I see America heading should MAGA with its much more narrowed sense of compassion continue to advance.
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  21. It's not just childcare and parental leave, but the two decades of education (especially creative ones which dissent from classic value of loyal discipline) needed to keep automation an assistant rather than a replacement. Only with such an assurance of livelihood can couples really consider having more kids.
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  22.  @seh1080  Even then, taking Táiwān wouldn't necessarily grant the PRC that high value-added human capital the Taiwanese possess in their brains and democratized governance. That durable prosperity comes through societal trust and exploratory dissent, which can't develop under Communism.
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  23. The PLA isn't short on wasteful spending either. They spend way more time on grand parades and patriotic indoctrination when they could be out training in the field and figuring out how their equipment will hold up away from the luxury of garrison maintenance.
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  24. Turn against Australia? The Aussies are prolific in the expeditionary use of its army, and are consistently lauded for how well they do in combat.
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  25. No, Canada isn't part of this arrangement. They're within the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group, although their focus is primarily on Russia.
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  26. How so? China relies on the US for food and other raw materials for its industries. Cutting off China (and especially convincing some of our other friends to do the same) would force them to quickly empty their treasury ordering from alternative markets. Combine that with actual combat in the East and South China Seas scaring off civilian ships, and the PRC would implode in unrest as cities go dark and food prices skyrocket while the Chinese people wonder how come their only child disappeared on deployment.
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  27. What's important is the QA in the process, which have to abide by strict international standards and not Chinese corner-cutting because Chinese airlines are flying Airbus and Boeing airframes overseas (including back to the EU and US).
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  28. That's before considering the suspicion that a significant share of RMB was double-printed, which better explains Beijing's push for digital e-CNY.
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  29. The US military provides the GI Bill to veterans, which pays for tuition and a stipend for attending higher education (not only academic university, but also expensive trainings like flight school). There's also additional Tuition Assistance for those actively serving and doing courses in their off time. The education benefits is by far the biggest bait to enlist new recruits.
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  30. I'd imagine if Russia invades and keeps the upper hand, Ukraine could petition for NATO after publicly ceding Donbass and Crimea to Russia... who will then have the tough choice of accepting or forcing them to be independent, which then raises troubling ideas in other parts of the Federation.
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  31. Kinda wondering how popular an American version of Patriot Park would be 🪖🙋‍♀️
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  32. Iraqis also provided considerable support to take down Saddam, and a lot of the hardship was caused by local insurgent groups trying to establish their turf when the Americans weren't around. Ukrainians have long ago rejected affiliation with Russia, and civilian casualties are clearly caused by Russian forces.
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  33. You can thank Putin for that, along with Xi.
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  34. China has to start by being able to separate the CPC and PRC government from the Chinese people, history, and culture. But this is exactly what the Party does not want you to do. Notice how emotional a Chinese national would get if a foreigner criticized some aspect of modern Chinese politics, even though you might believe the same thing, because an outsider's comment feels like a random insult against your own parents. The world will then be less malicious to China because you discover that it wasn't as malicious towards all of China as your authorities had told.
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  35. Huh, always wondered why Panama was a top choice of a business base. I've heard similar with the Russians and Seychelles.
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  36. Defending Taiwan will be a mostly technical battle of ships and planes, which America has the upper hand in both equipment and experience deploying, and very little opportunity for press camera embeds and plainclothes combatants. If anything this plays into the US military's strengths.
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  37.  @eternalelysium4944  Actually the US had been reducing its military investments in the decade after the Soviet collapse. 9/11 turned that around.
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  38. Right, the work culture prefers we pay for that "fun" now and not into decades of caring for dependents.
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  39. Ironically at some point you'll be more likely to find it abroad, since Koreans who expatriate tend to be more religious and thus generally have larger families.
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  40. The Mountain Pass Mine in CA recently reopened after renovations that fixed its earlier pollution issues, and within two years went from 0 to 15% of the world's output. Next year its refinery should be fully operational, cutting China out of the loop for ore processing and giving the world a new cleaner alternative for rare earth elements.
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  41. China is facing a downward spiral of aging, household debt, soil pollution, emptied seas, and endemic corruption. If anything it's the West that can sit back and wait for China to peak in the next couple decades.
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  42. If it means lowering the bar on the definition of "poverty" and not really providing the freedom of movement and information needed to break upward, it's not really that much of an achievement.
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  43.  @JK-gu3tl  It certainly worked for Táiwān, which was just as autocratic into the 1980s. Nowadays the Republic of China doesn't even come to mind among foreigners when they hear about the "White Terror".
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  44. Which only makes China going to war even more risky for civilians, since their scope of "threats" is much wider. All it takes is a couple tankers to be mistaken as warships and suddenly nobody will be willing to sail anywhere near potential Chinese crossfire with the food and fuel China itself relies on.
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  45. The PRC has had a horrible kill-death ratio for the objectives they achieved against a foreign force. In fact their modernization efforts may have been inspired by the Gulf War, where the curb stomping the Iraqi Army received didn't bode well for the PLA who were using similar equipment and doctrine.
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  46. Have you ever noticed that STEM folks make for horrible managers and often don't last long as politicians? It's because the strong technical focus usually ignores the things people actually care about. This is why leadership positions get ironically filled by those who studied stuff like art and history.
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  47. What matters more is overall debt to GDP, along with how fast it's growing. America's grew by 10% across multiple administrations in the same last 10 years while China has doubled under their single Party, and China faces much greater challenges moving forward due to its own mistakenly tunnel-visioned policies and failure to generate trust in its claims of "win-win" partnerships.
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  48. Modern China seeks its pre-industrialization glory, desperately wanting to return to an age when the mass of muscle under its management meant superiority, ignorant of the fact that creativity combined with power tools have made that strategy obsolete.
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  49.  @simonjones9455  The US has been on the "verge of collapse" since 1812, and various Panics, and the Civil War, and the anarcho-communist insurrection, and the Great Depression, and the assassination-a-month Civil Rights Movement. This "woke" vs MAGA battle is tame by comparison. America has already survived much worse.
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  50. We like to dramatize our challenges and faults, because that's also how we at least partially resolve them too.
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