Money isn’t the issue, at least not a real limiting issue. Any major European leader crying about it, should go suck on a tailpipe.
The real limiting factors are existing European stockpiles, and limited industrial capacity for things like high volume munition and artillery shell production.
So…you couldn’t even be bothered to read more than a few paragraphs?
The Communist Party has long been the ultimate decision maker in China. But after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping and his successors built some checks against excessive power, hoping to avoid a repeat of Mao’s turbulent rule.
The party and government systems worked in tandem. Party leaders often set broad policy, and government ministries and agencies refined and implemented their goals, sending feedback to the leaders.
Dictatorships don’t have legal and systemic checks against the autocratic rule, which is why Xi removed them.
You’re using a lot of words, but they’re based on your lack of understanding post-Mao CCP goverence that Xi upended when he seized power.
But I’m done going back and forth on this. You should feel free to go on believing that I am wrong, and that you are right, because I have no confidence that you would read any dry academic writings on the topic that I respond with, as you couldn’t even make it through a few hundred words of a NYT article.
Your first link shows exactly why the CCP wasn’t a dictatorship in the era the preceded Xi, and your second link has nothing to do with that era at all.
I have an academic background in this field, so the idea that my understanding is based on reading a single sentence, or a few Wikipedia entries, is amusing.
I know it’s cliche, but I really think you need to go look up the the definition of dictator.
Or, crack a political science 101 book and skip right to the section on political systems.
Or maybe your misunderstanding is just a lack of knowledge of how China’s government structure functioned post-Mao, pre-Xi.
Whatever the reason, I think you need to do a little bit of reading, but it’s not like you’re alone in this misconception so I don’t mean this as an insult.
Words have meanings, and the word you’re looking for is authoritarian, but that doesn’t mean it was a dictatorship.
They were a one party system, that had regularly transitioned power at scheduled intervals for decades. Which means they were not a dictatorship, until Xi stopped those transitions of power.
The modern context of Japanese and Chinese expansionism in this particular area is similar in some ways, but very different in other ways.
Regardless, I agree that China doesn’t have the legal right to seize territory, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t understand their perspective.
It also doesn’t make the idiotic reductionist take that this is all “capitalism”, any less idiotic.
All that said, I also understand that great powers tend to only talk about international law when they are applying it to countries they view as beneath them, or inferior.
In this case, China is coming into its own as a regional hegemon, assuming their relatively new status as an outright dictatorship doesn’t fuck that up. To do that, it has to push out American naval power, there’s no alternative for them.
So, if Xi’s one man politburo figures out how to walk and chew gum, while also driving a successful regional expansion, I don’t think yours, or my, quibbles about international law will make much difference.
Luckily, whether he’s capable of juggling all that successfully, is still an open question with a lot of doubt.
That statement is so incredibly wrong in this particular context that it’s actually impressive.
Well, maybe not impressive, but it does show off your ability to speak authoritatively on a topic that you know absolutely nothing about, except of course for your firm conviction that capitalism is clearly the only thing motivating it all.
Are you saying that national security strategies, and war in general, didn’t appear in this world until capitalism emerged?
It’s about expanding their ability to project naval power in general, but more specifically, trying to to build effective defensive counters against potential future naval blockades and maritime containment e.g. Island Chain Strategy
That’s oversimplified, and there are other aspects to it, including domestic political cultural ones, but naval power and national security is the most significant.
I am not taking any position on justification, legal standing, or strategic prudence for this strategy.
There are any number of white papers, from both Chinese and American security organizations/think-tanks, that will cover the subject in much greater depth if you’re interested.
I’m aware…but it’s still not the reason they are attempting to expand their territorial waters…
Except, China is not trying to expand its territorial waters “because capitalism”…
There’s ratified UN conventions on what is legally considered genocide…
I would suggest that instead of sourcing your understanding of genocide from Lemmy comments, you go read it, or at least it’s Wikipedia entry.
Also yes, cultural erasure can be an act of genocide, but I doubt the Belarus situation would quality at the moment. Given their governments participation in the assimilation, it probably requires some additional actions, or metrics. But, it’s not like I’m a human rights lawyer, so maybe I’m wrong.
Considering India and China are nuclear armed geostrategic rivals, with ongoing territorial disputes, and not too distant history of hot wars, I think this type of cooperation can be a good thing.
But that’s also why I’m skeptical about how much dual use technology they’d be willing to share with each other. And when you’re talking about space travel, or moon bases, practically everything is dual use technology.
If anyone is unclear why Russia would be involved, it’s their rocket and nuclear technology. Or rather, the Soviet legacy of R&D that is still useful.
Probably because people like you make them feel unwelcome.
Did you ever stop and think that if you made them feel comfortable, that they might visit more often?
Here’s a still frame of the otters in question. I’m betting they could quickly surprise and surround anyone they caught alone. And would have no problem giving chase on land.
Wow, talk about some blatant dog whistling here…
Inner-city otters? Why not just call them musteld hoodlums? Or shrimp theiving thugs?
How much you wanna bet that if this was an artic fox, or polar bear attack, the words inner city would never have appeared in this article…
He was a cutout. Someone who was used because he was controllable and disposable. If he was clever, he wouldn’t be dead, he would have had safeguards in place to protect his life using the influence gained from his organization/racket.
But it wasn’t really his racket, he was just a face of it. A body used to fill a recurring role that intelligence agencies find very useful.
And clearly, They learned their lesson from the Franklin scandal I linked above. That was a true clusterfuck that took a lot of effort to clean up and mitigate the fallout from, which is why they put so much effort into making sure it’s smeared as a hoax, overblown, and fake news.
They even indicted at least two victims of that particular ring, and at least one was sentenced in prison for “perjury” refusing to recant her testimony.
Go scratch the surface of his resume.
He was a cutout used by more powerful people, and placed into roles he wasn’t remotely qualified for.
Basically, his hedge fund was a front. Rich people would park their money there, and in return, get access to the underage girls he provided.
Which gave him more access, and more influence, to other elites e.g. politicians and aristocrats, which was used by his handlers in the intelligence communities to unclear ends.
There’s a reason why that tapes the FBI discovered at his properties have gone “missing”, at least from public view.
As for why I said he’s a moron, start here:
Oh, and just for the lulz.
"Donald Barr’s son, US Attorney General William Barr is currently investigating the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
In 1973, Donald Barr, hired a young 20 year old college dropout named Jeffrey E. Epstein to teach math at the Dalton School. Epstein taught at the school between 1974 and 1976.
Donald Barr also wrote this sci-fi novel, Space Relations, about sex slavery in space."
Other accounts dispute that Donald Barr actually met Epstein, but not that he was the headmaster at the school that hired Epstein, nor that he wrote that book.
I’m not sure if this is another piece of damning evidence of him being placed in positions because of his proclivities, or just a darkly hilarious wtf fact.
News, tech, left-wing politics, memes, anime, and porn are Lemmy’s biggest community types.
I know a lot of different subtopics fit under each, and I’m sure I left a few top level subjects out, but my point is that there are a lot of mid-sized, and especially smaller (by Reddit standards), subreddits that Lemmy is no where near being remotely useful as a replacement for yet.
I have community subreddit collections that I don’t see Lemmy replacing anytime soon. I mean, I hope they do. I still check every so often, and yes, communities for them exist and they have maybe a few dozen users, but not enough to even try to just suck it up and deal.
A long history of military dictatorships, followed by the many flavors of Peronism, is actually how Argentina managed to downgrade themselves from developed economy, to a developing one. Which is also what created the conditions that swept the current government to power.
I’m not saying the current administration is helping the situation, just that their economic policies have continued a long standing tradition of gross economic mismanagement.