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Tim Cook Praises Apple's 'Symbiotic Relationship' With China During Beijing Visit
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Telling me you don't know jack about China without telling me you don't know jack about China.
And if you think Hu and Xi are on the same level as dictators, you must really know your dictators.😂
They are clearly not at the same level. Xi has been corrupted by the power given to him and now considers himself God-like and did not voluntarily stand down after his first 8 years.
Seems to me that force-replacing any leader after 8 years is a good idea. Some will reach the “I am too good to not lead this country” mindset before 8 years.
Edit: but it should be manifested in the constitution of that country- not forced upon by some foreign nation.
Indeed. Saying that Hu is on the same level as Xi as dictators would be like saying that Chinas military presence in ~3 other countries is equivalent to US's ~50. That's just completely ridiculous 😂
My initial response to this was written too early in the morning - and my previous too late in the evening 😂🫣. Sorry for not addressing all your concerns. I am happy to read that you do not attack Russia/China and their population as a whole.
First: Totalitarian regimes are obviously not a good thing. But it's just not so black and white that I think we can call them "undeniably evil". First of all, that implies to me that any action the leaders of these countries have taken was done with evil intentions. That's not the case.
Second: Marking them as "pure evil" will not help a thing. It will just give them yet another excuse for suppressing their populations (because they have to defend the country against the big western enemy). It will give them even more excuses for attacking countries and intensifying the fight over countries in the "buffer zones" between super powers.
Third: How will you actually deal with such super-powers that are also totalitarian without causing their populations to suffer even more. The more you isolate them, the more likely they are to get a dictator that is even worse when the current dictator "expires".
The only option I see is to carefully, without being too naive, continue to corporate with them. Address their issues in private talks (leader to leader), but continue talking.
Its really just diplomacy 101. If we (in the free western world) does not appear as an aggressor and enemy to these regimes, the dictators will have a harder time to remain in power. They need a common enemy to justify their existence.
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Excellent. Feel free to make a further specification on which oppressor you prefer.
Note: I’m claiming it is an oppressive regime. I’m not saying China today is any better than the oppressive regime twenty years ago.
Peaceful cooperation is all we've been doing since the nineties. The naive assumption that they would get less authoritarian over time has proven to be categorically false, and now they are actively threatening democracy on the world stage. At this point, cutting ties with them is the only sane course of action.
It was a dynasty for a long while, until the 1900s I think (correct me if I’m wrong). Then the country fell apart and was embroiled in several civil wars. Then the communist movement came along and the anti communist movement were fighting the communists until the Japanese came along. They then went with the principle of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” until the Japanese were defeated. The communists pushed the Nationalists onto the island of Taiwan and formed the People’s Republic of China in 1949. That is the current China. Not the dynasty one, unless you are thinking of the China of old, which is Taiwan in this case.Read some history books and with an open mind. Or just some Wikipedia articles if that’s not asking too much. China has existed for more than 2000 years (although borders has probably changed over the centuries as borders do). I’m talking about the culture and people that defined the country. With the exception of the last century or so, that people and culture have been the most civilized for many, many centuries and without engaging in wars on the other side of the world.
Taiwan is to China what Cuba is to the US. End of story. How did the US react when Soviet was putting missiles on Cuba?
Have a look at this and tell me who should feel most threatened:
List of countries with overseas military bases - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
US has over the past decades put military bases as close as possible to both China and Russia, basically surrounding them.
Surely China has invaded other countries and so have Russia. They have invaded countries that they share a border with. And so has practically every other country in the world. I do not try to justify that - wars are horrible whoever is starting them. But you don’t see them repeatedly starting wars or destabilizing governments on the other side of the world just because they don’t like who’s in charge.
Also, Taiwan is not to China as Cuba was to the US. Cuba was not forced by the US to go the island, unlike Taiwan. Taiwan does not have weapons places there from the US, they buy the weapons from them. They have two different type of governments, although I think Chiang Kai-Shek was very corrupt at the time.
China is intentionally bankrupting countries to control them.
I do not want another Neville Chamberlain that allowed Hitler to take so many countries, or like how Japan was taking over so many territories. I don’t want another person like that. You need some force in order to have diplomacy, otherwise they’ll just break the agreements, such as Russia not renewing the NEW START treaty only after Biden took office.
I generally do not support wars, unless it is obvious that a country is invading another country to gain something, and the response can be quick and effective, such as the Gulf War. I think the way the Gulf War web was the best possible outcome for the circumstances, but unfortunately, I think it is the exception rather than the rule.
It was the exception in part because Iraq wasn't a nuclear power. The Gulf War also wasn't a proxy war or a civil conflict, which almost every other recent war has been.
Hitler was forming an original "NATO alliance" and this is why he received so many territories as well as Britain forwarded him a Czechoslovakia's gold reserves. Stalin understood this very well and effectively crushed this "NATO alliance" by making a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It is an incredible achievement when you can make the Master and a Puppet turn on each other. I am sure that this case is being studied(maybe even secretly) in all the best universities around the world.
Taiwan and Cuba is the same in terms of geopolotics. US military presence on Taiwan is to China what Chinese military presence on Cuba would to the US. That’s why US officially left Taiwan in 1979.
And I believe there was also a time in a not so distant past where the US tried to dictate by force who should be leading Cuba. But the invasion failed. And quite a few US “opinion makers” was pretty mad at the people of Cuba kicking out US.
But I was not accurate. It turns out that US military is present on both islands and Chinese military is not present on any of them. So they are not completely the same 🤷♂️
Not anymore on US grounds at least 😂
You just outsource it to less developed countries to do the dirty work for more profit, closing your eyes for how the raw materials for that Tesla battery was sourced.
But why did we have that war? And which one of them? The first or the second? And where were those weapons of mass destruction?
Well, the people that invaded Cuba were former Cubans supported by the US and the CIA. Pretty sure that was a contributing factor in the whole world being almost blown up to smithereens.
Evidently you don’t know the names of the first and second wars. They have different names.
I don't know enough about Gulf War history to answer that (though I'd like to read about it and learn). I was just explaining why it might have been more successful than other wars we've gotten involved in. Believe me, though, I'm under no illusion that wars are fought for humanitarian reasons or to "spread freedom" (and there's no doubt that the Iraq War was launched on a campaign of deliberately lying to the American people).
The Gulf War is the first Iraq war and the purpose was to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. The Iraq War is the second Iraq War and was most likely driven by the American government to remove a person they didn’t like.
Oh yes. The Cubans that had the RIGHT political ideology. All those stupid Cubans, Latin Americans and Chinese that went for the WRONG political ideology.
That’s a little lacking in details compared to the section about extension here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_START
… describing how several attempts to extend it was stalled by the US.
But true. About one month ago Putin said that the deal is off.
I’m not an expert in politics, but I think any attempt on diplomacy between US and Russia has been off for about a year or so. You can call me naive, but I honestly think the world would become a better place if Putin, Xi and Biden picked up the phone and started talking and listening to each other’s concerns.
True. If we’re talking about the “kick Saddam out of Kuwait war”.
It had several things going for it that made it a success:
- it was pretty clear beyond reasonable doubt who was the aggressor
- the objective was clear
- kicking Iraq out of Kuwait by any means was largely backed by UN. Having a UN mandate is a big thing in my world.
- the war pretty much stopped when the objective was fulfilled
- Saddam was allowed to stay as leader in Iraq, so the country was not left destabilized without a strong leader
Not saying that Saddam was a nice dude. Just stating the fact that he was a strong leader.