America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties, too many in fact
the USSR lost 20 million people in WWII, the US lost 250k. we've been crying about 3,000 people from 9/11 for nearly two decades. most americans don't know what it means to suffer, they don't know what mass casualties looks like; we're the softest jelly donuts around.
We are not just the softest jelly donuts but we are the most uncaring and beaten down bunch. Each person dying from covid is too many and the fact we aren't in the streets demanding these assholes be hanged says a lot.
There is one other factor that people are loathe to discuss (with one exception). Yes, the U.S. has botched its response to Covid-19. At the same time, its experience shows that America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties, too many in fact. It had long been standard Chinese doctrine that Americans are “soft” and unwilling to take on much risk. If you were a Chinese war game planner, might you now reconsider that assumption?
No, I'd assume I could double tap Denny's and the survivors of the first strike wouldn't even leave until they got their order.
I wanted to let you know I'm howling like a madman at that image, and an upbear just didn't seem like enough.
Hi howling like a madman at that image, and an upbear just didn’t seem like enough, I'm dad!
If you were a Chinese war game planner, might you now reconsider that assumption?
I'm sure Chinese wargame planners have reconsidered some assumptions about the US. Like, they probably didn't know before that half of the country is too soft to wear a mask for half an hour.
Uh are they arguing that the US' willingness to let people die is somehow a good thing?
"In Communist Russia, millions of lives were squandered with attrition tactics and human wave attacks because their ideology has no respect for human life."
I was just listening to trillbilly’s today and they mentioned how China is referring to the present moment as “post-covid”
Absolutely incredible Bloomberg opinion
“One Belt, One Road” plan no longer seems like such a great investment, with the drop in pants and car sales.
I can't find the map but they're talking about this
https://archive.is/tquI0
Boy it sure is lucky there wasn’t far more material reasons for doing this otherwise this author would look really dumb.
ELI5?
Here's an ELI5 I gathered from the below links:
Chinese authorities have been cracking down on efforts by wealthy Chinese to hide their riches away from capital control (things like cryptocurrency or foreign real estate markets). Ant is basically an unregulated, app-based pay-day-lender: Its business model encourages desperate individuals to take on high risk, high interest loans which are then sold to investors - literally just extracting wealth from the productive economy.
But the revelation (for me at least) is that Chinese regulators have been telling Jack Ma that they would reject this IPO for months. From @danisth's article below:
Ma thought he could simply bull his way past the Chinese regulators – that because he runs Alibaba and its subsidiaries, that they would defer to him. But the whole point of a finance regulator is NOT to let the finance sector write its own rules.
And the western press flips the story and wraps it up in the existing "evil freedom-of-speech denying communist Chinese brutally repress its critics" narrative.
Here's a much easier way to read that 55 tweet thread.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/05/gotta-be-a-pony-under-there/#jack-ma
this is the zoomer equivalent of grampa mailing you newspaper clippings to read
One true trend from the article is the increasing hostility and ever more blatant attacks on China from the West, with some kind of blockade and military assault not far off in the future. I just hope they somehow manage to cast away their managed capitalism and transition to full blown socialist technocracy in time so they are well positioned to effectively resist, seeing as how the PRC's capitalist facade is becoming less and less of a barrier by the day in holding off western imperialist aggression.
Less people died in China than in the US. Let me explain why that's bad for China
