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

  1. Problem is practically nobody really trusts a Chinese stock market, and those who do aren't allowed to buy an considerably influential amount of shares. That's why the Chinese people basically threw all their investment efforts at the "safety" of real estate.
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  2. Japan, Korea, and Táiwān also democratized and unlocked their cultural potential: hence anime, k-pop, and bubble tea. The CPC spends a lot of its resources (with a budget probably even greater than the PLA's) stopping this in the name of "stability", with censorship efforts deliberately extending into other countries. Even Indonesia and the Philippines (#1 and #3 economies in ASEAN) removed their dictators through popular movement, and have since elected their leadership through the collective voice of all their citizens. But the even more developed Mainland China doubled down on authoritarianism, which is coming back to haunt them as aging, debt, and pollution stall the economy on which the Party's unchallenged rule rides on. Hence the Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and new cross-Strait crisis they're banking on to keep up the Party's appeal back at home at the cost of foreign attraction... and thus all the "anti-China" videos we're seeing a lot of these days from pretty much everywhere that lacks corporate sponsorship.
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  3. Also superior industry and moral justification: the Brits stopped trying to buy Southern cotton when the Union declared its goal to end slavery.
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  4. In Chinese language media, the US has already been made the enemy for even more minor and vague issues. This is really a conflict driven by the CPC, although luckily at least urban Chinese seem to know this despite all the censorship and propaganda. For the rest of the world, it's slowly realizing the overall parasitic trade relationship with Běijīng. Companies surrender critical IP and trade secrets just for cheaper goods and tenuous temporary access to the Chinese consumer market. Meanwhile BRI recipients receive a small army of Chinese workers who wall themselves into colony-like compounds and provide less local work opportunities than promised, while getting troublesome build projects, proliferated corruption, and added debt that's even harder to clear than their existing Western ones.
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  5. We still have to prepare for a Běijīng that lashes out with the PLA as the Mainland runs out of profitable economic opportunities for the CPC to justify its continued uncontested rule.
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  6. "Highly specific" subject to very loose interpretation by the Party, as with all of their other laws.
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  7. Probably waited until the UK lost its voice in the EU
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  8.  @SerenityM54L2SAM5L5N1  Because they're part of the horde of Mainland imports, or the minority of rich HKers whose wealth depends on the whims of Běijīng?
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  9. In both cases, it's subversion of injustice.
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  10. Right, the last time the Republicans ordered combat that ended well was 1990, which was against an opponent with clearly inferior equipment and narrowly-defined tactics.
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  11. WW1, WW2, and 9/11 proved that there's a pretty shallow lower limit on how much we can stand down and look inward.
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  12. Western countries have more capacity to include and integrate immigrants, unlike ethnostates like China. Foreigners don't remain all that "foreign" in an open society.
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  13. It's still more rosy than reality. There's a New Zealander named Tony who's an economic policy consultant in Beijing and runs the channel "China Update", and his daily videos are even more grim.
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  14.  @Zergcerebrates  It wouldn't take so long if Maoist ideology hadn't set China so far back with purges of its culture and human resources. The PRC is still trying to catch up to where China could be if the Chinese people weren't so restrained by the Party's tunnel visioned campaigns and gaslighting of project failures.
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  15. "Flexible employment" (gig work) isn't exactly opening their own business.
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  16. Western aid demands improvements to governance and transparency, which is exactly what corrupt African officials don't want. Hence why they go for Chinese and Russian alternatives who purposely look the other way.
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  17. I see parallels with how the US treats its black population, sending more police than public support because those in power don't want to see them as equals. Hence the escalation of protest that because they're not addressed at lower levels too often ends in street clashes and riots.
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  18. When it does happen though, it would play in favor of the West's resilience and creativity. Mainland China is already deep in a clash of civilizations mindset, but has little experience with dramatic setbacks which makes them brittle. Add how the PLA ranks are now filled by only-sons and how infamous the PLA is in taking casualties to achieve an objective, and the Party would be spending an increasing amount of its war chest on internal "stability" on all the families whose only son "disappeared" on deployment (not to mention all the simmering anti-Beijing elements who'd take advantage of the realignment of security forces). Plus China increasingly relies on imports for food and fuel, and that would further deplete their savings, supplies, and popular tolerance paying for overland alternatives because all the civilian ships are scared away from the crossfire. The PRC has to go hard on a quick and fairly painless victory, because that's the only way the Party can win -- and it's the same mistake that Imperial Japan did. Their China wouldn't survive years of warfare, sanctions, and businesses that went elsewhere, which is bound to happen in their promised invasion of Táiwān and the generations of insurrection that will immediately follow.
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  19. That's because hate is stronger than love, and those seeking power gain popularity by inventing someone to rally against. The Nazis were voted in by striking out against Jews, nowadays it's more anxiety over accelerating economic inequalities successfully deflected usually on foreigners instead of faceless corporations and robots.
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  20. Capitalism/communism focuses on production, libertarianism/socialism on distribution, and democracy/autocracy on policy. Arguably it's possible to be a capitalist socialist democracy.
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  21. Right, South Korea and Táiwān were likewise horribly repressive regimes when they started out, but are now highly respected cultural powerhouses. The difference is that their dictatorships ultimately yielded to its people, unlike their NK and Mainland counterparts.
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  22. Westerners directly, or do you mean all the local simmering feuds and foreign funded anti-US forces who deliberately targeted regular civilians to sow fear and doubt about the post-Saddam government?
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  23. Semantics are nice, but ultimately the popular interpretation is what matters. Much like how "autopilot" actually still involves pilot presence and attention, but "common sense" interprets it as complete automation as seen with Tesla driving mistakes.
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  24. Doing the opposite just further empowers the Communists who can claim their Western-seeded prosperity as totally their own, as was ultimately seen when the US opened up to Mainland China. But unlike Western dictators, Communist regimes are willing to fight to the death against dissent, challenge, and change even when their governance becomes a clear hindrance.
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  25. Yet the outlook in West and Central Africa isn't promising if their governance doesn't improve. The Middle East is likewise rich but not advanced, which also spells trouble for their future as oil production plateaus along with their national budget.
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  26. Yet Russia is getting beat back by Ukraine despite the advantage in both numbers and capabilities, which is only set to degrade further as NATO kit gets implemented.
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  27. You're hinting that Singapore (a territory that Malaysia deliberately ejected) contributes and gets support from the West; why then is it wrong to figure out what external entities its Muslim neighbors gets and receives support from?
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  28. It's a global force. Empires aren't so keen on conversing and negotiating agreements with their counterparts abroad.
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  29. What's back is America's progressive itinerary, not just stuck on the ground with its toxic baggage 🛫
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  30. Yet America retains its "imperialism" because those countries fear the alternative... who aren't nearly as interested in letting you express yourself ☭
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  31.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  China isn't short on hubris itself. The Party's paternalistic approach leaves a lot of its people bitter (but too scared to say so), and its exclusive tribalist pride will alienate it from receiving help from abroad when it eventually needs it like so many failed empires and dynasties before. In their narrow pursuit of money and political stability, they ended up developing strong headwinds like an aging population, unattractive modern culture, explosion of debt, and overall lack of trust. I wouldn't be surprised if America regains its lead position by simply waiting out the PRC's peak 🇨🇳📈📉 And much to the chagrin of the Mainland government, Táiwān's very existence proves that Chinese people can in fact thrive without the Party 🇹🇼
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  32. The "same" rules become an issue when China gets included, as they always want to "negotiate" them at their leisure through the lens of vague philosophies and even then enforcement gets interpreted very loosely.
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  33. Lack of employment security makes tenuous predicting such dramatic increases of income. Go to any place staffed with minimum wage entry-level jobs and note how many of them should statistically be in the prime of their career.
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  34.  @luisoviedo-perez2896  More like that's what our politics naturally converges on in a winner-take-all system where the collection of losers becomes the only other side. Unfortunately this administratively simple concept also encourages pushing the extremes as a way to differentiate one from the other, since the real political spread is more a continuous spectrum.
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  35. If it can hold Táiwān and somehow gain all its current comparative advantages, much of which can't be replicated in a Běijīng-ruled environment. That's even before considering the insurgency that the Taiwanese will put up if they do get successfully occupied.
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  36. Clean air is pretty important to society.
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  37. Renewables already produce local excess, and there's active development in storing it for nighttime/calm winds. Besides battery advances, there's also pumped-storage hydro, which is basically using the excess energy to pump water back up a hill for a dam to use later.
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  38. Bicycles are cheap and quite effective (especially when specifically designed to haul cargo), but most places would rather skip straight to cars because of its other advantages to its users (superior shielding, electricity generation, less muscle use). The issue with green energy is convincing people that clean air and stable sea levels are totally worth the extra cost.
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  39. Just ask the oil companies.
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  40. Natural gas has proven it can supplant coal, and burns cleaner. Then there's active development in storing energy, one of the most promising being pumped-storage hydro, which is basically a dam beside a hilltop reservoir created specifically to be released when renewables falter and recharged by pumping it back up during the daytime excess.
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  41. Táiwān would do better with masses of cheap weapons and training on improvising more for guerilla warfare. If it takes the constantly-warring US decades to withdraw from an insurrection, there's no way the much less practiced PRC will last that long especially after entire neighborhoods of families lose their only son on deployment.
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  42. More like 500k repatriated back to Japan, those staying behind numbering like 1~2k. It's just not convenient to think how so many Taiwanese look fondly at Japan, who brought infrastructure and rural development to the island, especially after the "White Terror" of the invasive gangster KMT.
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  43. The loss of Táiwān will bleed over though, first with the Senkaku/Diàoyú, then perhaps a "liberation" of the Ryukyu from Japan, on top of punitive strikes against the Home Islands.
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  44. Right, the whole conflict over Taiwan stems from the stubbornness of Chiang Kai-Shek to not give up on his "China" while they were ahead.
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  45. No, where it's implemented the usage rate stalls while survival and rehabilitation of users improve.
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  46. Republicans complain about drugs from illegal immigrants hopping the fence, when most of the drugs come either by boat or are snuck past Customs at staffed border crossings.
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  47. "Personal responsibility" Republicans made drug usage a crime to hide from rather than a condition to seek help for.
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  48. And what of the waste it produces which remains dangerous for thousands of years? We haven't figured out how to safely reprocess the ones we have now, and back then we weren't trying to replace every fossil fuel plant in the world.
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  49. If you conveniently ignore thousands of years of radioactive waste it produces. We still haven't figured out how to fully reprocess all the waste we have now.
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  50. Nuclear is expensive and has been rising in costs. It's likely cheaper to use wind and solar, with excesses stored in pumped-hydro projects.
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