I don’t think our views are too far apart to be honest. My final comment (as this thread is about China and I have derailed it enough) - isn’t that logic giving my country (England/Britain).a free pass for what happened in Ireland? Or France in Algeria? Border problems, internal matter, repression to prevent an attempted secession….
Cold War against China?
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I don’t think our views are too far apart to be honest. My final comment (as this thread is about China and I have derailed it enough) - isn’t that logic giving my country (England/Britain).a free pass for what happened in Ireland? Or France in Algeria? Border problems, internal matter, repression to prevent an attempted secession….
don't think so because france and england don't have contiguous borders with ireland and algeria. the uk/ireland thing is obviously contiguous but not historically speaking, not until act of union anyway. also i don't think the chinese get a free pass for vietnam or that the ussr gets a free pass for its internal repression. it's all you ever hear about really whenver the soviets are brought up. so it's a good counterpoint but i don't think it stands. there's also the point that france and england were empires with colonies all over the world at the same time as they dealt with ireland and algeria. they never confined themselves to "internal" repression. more so in the english case because it remains unresolved through historical colonial settlements in the north and the legacy thereafter.
It's animal agriculture in general that is the problem. You think this is bad, just wait until antibiotic resistance gets worse due to the gross farming practices in Western countries.
Obviously it wasn’t my last post before….I’m not sure I get the difference between colonising overseas and colonising a land empire through centuries of expansion. France has fully left Algeria (conquered in the 1830s), Britain occupies 6 out of 32 counties in Ireland (united under the English crown since Tudor times), while Russia still occupies the whole of Chechnya (conquered in the 1820s IIRC).. Ultimately it derives from tne same source - England was not going to compete while restricted to two thirds of a rainy island whose main export was cloth, just as the Grand Duchy of Muscovy would have been a footnote in history had it limited its ambitions to a small area around the Moscow and Volga rivers rather than pushing out in all directions at the expense of former inhabitants. It just looks more obviously wrong in the former case.
Anyway, I appreciate your considered responses and let’s hope there may be some solution to these colonial legacies I’m confident Ireland will be reunited at some point in the near future, Ukraine will salvage most of its territory and, sadly, Israel will contnue to be given carte blanche to chip away at the West Bank.
Does the US really not have this capability?
@neverdie @MoskvaRed not to weigh in on your discussion, but you may find these threads interesting:
This absolute fiasco of the russian army made me wonder if china is the real deal or are they also a paper tiger like the russians are? I remember everyone saying how amazing russia's military was just months before the war. What's the consensus on china?
Very difficult to say. The only thing I know about the PLA (the Chinese army) is how they allegedly ran away while UN personel and civilians were being attacked by one of the warring factions in South Sudan when PLA soldiers were part of the peacekeeping forces. Then they got into a knife scrap with Indian soldiers at the India-China border a couple of years ago or so. Those incidents are not particularly looking good for China, but the Taiwanese armed forces don't cover themselves in glory either considering how slowly they reacted when Chinese civilian drones flew above and near military bases a few weeks ago.
The PLA may try their luck against Taiwan because the latter has a poorly trained army of their own, but they would be in no winning situation if they went after the likes of South Korea or Japan.
My guess is the poor performance of the Russian military has taught China valuable lessons if they didn't know them already. Which are: maintenance, morale and training matter.
Almost certainly yes. Dictatorships tend to have this problem because the priority is to say "yes" to your superior, show, even if not real, that things are good, etc. Dictatorships live by the perception they create, economic growth (think the construction boom in China; I know first hand in Chinese cities, big, beautiful buildings being completely empty; clubs where foreigners go, being crowded by actors rather then real people).
Dictatorships create a culture of "yes" men and women and very little substance. The same is most likely the case with their military.
Similar to how the Soviets invaded us in Red Dawn.
There was a discussion on the topic of China during mid-afternoon on CNN. Joe Biden announced his first formal national security strategy by identifying China as "America's most consequential geopolitical challenge."
Not sure if this warrants its own thread, but this is insane:
What is going on here?
Seems the Chinese Consul General doesn't like protests outside of the Consulate so he grabbed a poor girl by the hair and dragged her inside the gates and started beating her.
He should be PNG'd immediately.
This is an example of the kind of intimidation that the PRC does against anyone and anything that dares to call them out. It has become more blatant under Xi (punchable cnut face) and since the protests in Hong Kong began pre-pandemic. Those feckers (Chinese consulate workers and other pro-China students) are always spoiling for a fight anywhere in the world, including in Canada.
That old anti-democratic Chinese man alone in the beginning of the video (who is the consul, it seems) should have been punched in the face.
Judging on the tweet Chinese consulate staff are beating up someone?
Yeah. The worst in all of this is that news media just don't seem to make a bigger meal out of such behavior from PRC citizens/representatives abroad. If this kind of nasty stuff happened at a American consulate, can you imagine for one second how much noise news media would make by now? No one should become numb to such behavior from certain countries; it is just downright unacceptable.
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There's been a few podcasts over recent weeks about Xi with his third term inauguration happening (today, I think)
https://www.economist.com/theprincepod
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d768t8
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...r-china-s-party-congress?srnd=oddlots-podcast
BBC one is probably the best. Economist one starts good but tails off. Bloomberg has awful adverts
https://www.economist.com/theprincepod
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d768t8
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...r-china-s-party-congress?srnd=oddlots-podcast
BBC one is probably the best. Economist one starts good but tails off. Bloomberg has awful adverts
I can't only imagine how people would feel if it happened in the US, which would be outraged, perhaps the British aren't quite as hysterical about sovereignty.
The semiconductor ban and the implications.
Some of these Chinese diplomats are crazy.
It's a confusing video. What is going on? Apart from a crazy looking guy tearing down The posters and some people trying to beat someone up and The Police trying to break it up?
Was the protestor dragged in and then what was The Police doing inside?
Was the protestor dragged in and then what was The Police doing inside?
It has become their MO since Xi consolidated his grip on the CCP. It's called the wolf warrior diplomacy; the CCP rewards that shit.
Just as I previously mentioned, news media would be going apeshit worldwide for at least a couple of days if that kind of stuff happened in an American consulate. The worst in all of this is that it could have happened in American consulates IF the previous administration replaced all diplomats with total loons of the same ilk as those "wolf warriors."
Yep, they pulled someone in and were ganging up on him. The cop had to come in to pull the protester (and most likely a full-fledged British citizen/resident) out of the compound. Here's a report from the BBC on what happened; you can see the number that those people did on the lone protester. Big balls shown by the diplomats, eh?
https://news.sky.com/story/chinas-a...ary-pilots-in-threat-to-uk-interests-12723395
These airmen have been trained by the RAF at huge public expense and then get to fly around the sky in our fast jets and helicopters. And they are so privileged and patriotic that they then go and sell their knowledge of the RAF warplanes to China. To my mind that is treason.
These airmen have been trained by the RAF at huge public expense and then get to fly around the sky in our fast jets and helicopters. And they are so privileged and patriotic that they then go and sell their knowledge of the RAF warplanes to China. To my mind that is treason.
Nah, it's just capitalism. Sell your services to the highest bidder.
All they're doing is taking the Tory government's advice in seeking higher paid work.
Not quite as easy as that because they will have had to sign the Official Secrets Act.
I did and I only worked with the RAF on the support of their fast jets.
The article explicitly mentions there's no implications of the act having been broached.
It's just a distraction piece. When you get articles like that where there's no figures or attempt to quantify the issue you know its serving a different purpose. Coincidentally there's a new bill being put through to monitor those working for foreign government. Funny that.
Actually says that 'it was not thought'.
Means nothing.
They are hardly going to admit that the Official Secrets Act has been broken are they because then China would know that they had something of particular interest.
If anyone's interested, here is an interesting talk with the author of a book on Chinese intel.
The premise is mostly that what we see under Xi Jinping isn't necessarily a Xi thing but that the CCP was never really interested in liberalizing or rising peacefully. He says Chinese intelligence agencies were trying to influence the West into believing China was going down that route and that those operations can be traced back likely to the 90s.
The premise is mostly that what we see under Xi Jinping isn't necessarily a Xi thing but that the CCP was never really interested in liberalizing or rising peacefully. He says Chinese intelligence agencies were trying to influence the West into believing China was going down that route and that those operations can be traced back likely to the 90s.
Another view of the Manchester consulate incident.
Not all people from that place have diplomatic immunity. I say the GMP better send an arrest warrant to whoever can be arrested and prosecuted from that lot.
Not all people from that place have diplomatic immunity. I say the GMP better send an arrest warrant to whoever can be arrested and prosecuted from that lot.
Who is the guy with the long hair and funny cap? He looks like a guy in a Shaolin movie. Maybe he thinks he is in those times? I am sure that HMG can deport all of them because it looks like they abducted Bob outside of the compunds and dragged him in and then beat him up.
That cnut is consul-general Zheng Yixuan.
If those guys are actual diplomats, they should be deported. But if one or more of them don't fall into the "diplomat" category, they can be prosecuted since their level of immunity is only related to official acts. I don't think that dragging someone in to beat him is an official act that would be recognized in any measure by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
No and probably some of them are not holders of diplomatic immunity. The dividing line in prosecution also depends on who was involved in dragging Bob inside.
Sad moment. Lt. Col. Vindman gave his 2 cents as well.
It's a frail old man of a former president, FFS!
It's a frail old man of a former president, FFS!