Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Yes, and?
Does anyone think that China is just full of the warm fuzzies and wants us all to hold hands, make smores and sing kumbaya? They are every bit after power as the US is to hold onto it.
Yeah it's sort of like accusing a presidential campaign of being "all about gaining political power". Of course that's the goal. That's not the metric by which you should judge its actions.
Freedom of speech? Yes and no. The government has freedom of speech, but American TikTok clones do not. If TikTok users are successfully forced to use YouTube Shorts instead, they'll get stuck with YouTube's censorship and content control for corporate friendliness and user engagement. People like Elon give "free speech" a bad name, but it is actually a problem if for most people "the internet" is controlled by a small number of big technology companies and those companies use their positions, intentionally or not, to suppress ideas and control public discourse. TikTok users will still need to use words like "unalive" on platforms owned by American corporations.
Constitutional protections for your home and property? Not really. Many people are renting and protections for renters vary by state. Property can be stolen by police through civil asset forfeiture.
The opportunity to improve your socioeconomic standings, ie The American Dream, is largely a myth. Recently, the poor get poorer. Real estate values and cost of living are climbing much faster than wages for those at the bottom. If you're at the bottom, it's even more difficult than usual to get the four year degree and years of prior job experience required for many entry level positions with better pay.
America has legal slavery enshrined in the constitution. If somebody is convicted of a crime, they can be sent to private prisons to do slave labor for somebody else's profit. This disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
These freedoms are a strength indeed, but they are also a vulnerability that can be exploited by foreign powers. Freedoms remain free so long as the people exercising those freedoms do so responsibly. I think a lot of people in the US do not exercise this freedom responsibly. I think a lot of Americans are being manipulated into voting in autocracy. Ironically.
Complete and total freedom is just anarchy, and anarchy collapses on itself and turns into autocracy.
Not all states are equivalent.
The US is the hegemonic imperial core country (like the UK before it) and has been since the end of WWII, and even moreso since the end of Cold War I. The imperial core’s imperialism is driven by the monopoly stage of capitalism. The imperial core has been pillaging the Global South for the last 200+ years, including putting China through a century of humiliation. It caused WWI & WWII & Cold War I, and has now started Cold War II.
The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
The US has over 750 overseas military bases around the world, and is building more to further encircle China. It constantly has multiple regime change operations in play around the world.
But China is not a capitalist state and is not driven by the forces of monopoly capitalism. I think it has one anti-piracy base in Djibouti.
I'll look through your sources because they seem intersting but China is 100% a capitalist state. They ditched communism years ago and only kept the authoritarianism
If it’s a 100% capitalist state then why is it ensuring that its people can afford housing at the expense of the capitalists? CNBC this week: China's housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
Unlike Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not answerable to the capitalists like the US is.
Why The Government Has Infinite Money
Capitalist countries still have social programs mate. Unless you think Canada is a communist country because we have free healthcare? I suppose I could call it a mixed economy if it makes you feel better
On a side note, owning a home is culturally very different in China than in the western world. They have a massive housing bubble ongoing and its pretty wild. Look up China Ghost towns. Some insightful shit.
The imperial core countries affords those—notably deteriorating—social programs through the exploitation of the periphery countries, programs which the core does not allow the periphery to have. The global north working class paid for those concessions with our blood & sweat, though no one seems to remember, thanks to two red scares and a cold war. The purpose of FDR’s New Deal was to save capitalism from socialist threats, and the capitalists have spent the last fifty years chipping away at their New Deal concessions. Europe had its own, even stronger socialist movements, and their capitalists similarly ceded ground temporarily.
China escaped from the imperial core’s predation in the last century, and is still in the process of recovering from it.
United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
Despite over sixty years of imperial core-enforced sanctions, Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans.
I am familiar with them. Those were planned communities that were photographed after construction but before being populated. Perhaps there were some duds, I couldn’t say: researching every bit of US propaganda gish gallop isn’t my day job.
This Is What The World's Loneliest Metro Station Looks Like Today
China intentionally popped its housing bubble recently, and that’s why some capitalist real estate developers are going bankrupt, and China isn’t trying to save them because they’re capitalists.
Let's take a page from Helldivers and call it "Managed Capitalism." Surely far better than rootstock /s
Americans downvoting you, mad they are the bad guys.