Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "'There is a real desire' in President Xi for China to be the dominant power" video.
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@iggy5347 Yes, the people in Hong Kong were more free under Great Britain than they will be under China. But the British had no right to even BE there to HAVE a Hong Kong, in the first place, and what they did in the Opium Wars is a blot on British history.
That being said, I consider Hong Kong to BE China, at this point, and I don't want Mainland products passed off as made by free people in free Hong Kong, when they aren't. Any special privileges enjoyed by Hong Kong should cease as soon as possible, because it's 100% China, now, no matter how they dress it up. And I don't want cheaper products at the price of propping up tyranny. If it's not obvious that China is an oppressive and tyrannical totalitarian state under CCP, then you need to catch up on your China Uncensored.
I think China becomes a backwater if we hold it accountable and insist on fair and transparent trade. They don't meet the transparency or fairness criteria. They're rogue traders we did a favor to allow into the world trade community, on the assumption that they would behave better if we treated them nice. We know beyond a doubt that they just kept up with their same old ways. We don't need to fight them. But we don't need to do business with them, either.
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It depends on who's in charge. Under Bush's, Clinton and Obama, it was non-stop de-stabilization and regime change, functionally identical to colonial empires of the 17th - 20th Centuries, only with better tech and more sophisticated media.
There's a mind-set in the foreign-policy establishment that insists that we not abandon x, y or z because we made promises to freedom fighters. If we abandon the Kurds, it will make it harder for us to recruit freedom fighters in the future! That was Bolton's thinking. I think Trump foolishly let himself get talked into protecting those oil fields in NE Syria, on behalf of the Kurds.
There's all this bad policy that was justified during the Cold War and now there's a "sunk-cost fallacy" embedded in all their thinking. Rather than cut their losses and admit that meddling extra-legally, abroad, is just non-stop blowback, they talk about all the years and money investing in "developing assets abroad." Well, maybe the American people don't want U.S.-funded paramilitary all over the planet. Today's freedom fighter is tomorrow's terrorist. Our foreign-policy wonks set us up for this, time and time again, and are never held accountable. Their main skill is in smearing those who dare challenge them or call them to account.
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She's wrong on American culture. The fear never went away. Those kids in school in the '80s still believe all the nuclear-freeze propaganda, and now they're politicians and administrators. In their younger days, it was the Spotted Owl and Snail-Darter on the enviro front. Now it's CO2-driven global warming. Same people. Same fears. Same confirmation bias. Same mix of half-truths that add up to lies.
At the same time, it has been revealed that estimates by hawkish conservatives during the '80s over-estimated Soviet capabilities by a factor of 10, in order to justify a military big enough to police the entire planet (poorly, arbitrarily, brutally and often greedily).
But otherwise, she's spot on about how the global warming crowd, who pretend they're champions of the disadvantaged and dispossessed, are systematically attacking access to clean, cheap energy, which ALWAYS hurts the disadvantaged and dispossessed the most. No regard. And yes, if you make all other forms of energy prohibitively expensive, people WILL go back to burning wood! Unintended consequences that are so predictable that I'm going to stop calling them "unintended," because if these policies come from leaders who know better than we mere serfs, then they KNOW these consequences are around the corner, so it's willful ignorance, stupidity, greed, or sheer malevolence driving it.
Now for the nuance: Rocket-stove mass heating systems burn wood all the way down to NOTHING, using an insulated burn chamber that gets up to refractory temperatures, so that the only exhaust is CO, CO2, H2O. Take that super-hot exhaust gas and run it through an earth mass, heat up that earth mass, and you only have to burn wood for 1/10 the amount of time, and there's zero particulates coming out. It's quite clean and up to 90% more efficient than the most efficient, government-approved wood-heat systems on the market. But you kind of have to build it, yourself, because the establishment doesn't know what to make of ACTUAL green tech that doesn't involve billions of dollars in subsidies and millions of dollars in kickbacks.
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