And regarding your other points, don't forget urban planning. Trains and urban planning go hand in hand. You can't transform transportation by trains alone if everything is suburbs and city jobs, for example.
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Goddamn you really are just sinophobic for capital.
Everybody’s economy is different, China is no snowflake.
Actually it is. The trajectory of other peripheral countries is quite different. Compare to India, look at poverty stats when China is removed.
But I am not going to debate whether China’s capitalism is “good capitalism” or not, that feels like pulling hairs and is a digression as you yourself said.
You can't debate the topic at all, clearly, but sure want to continue making the claim that it simply switched to capitalism. Maybe don't say things your can't bc defend?
How much should China regulate? At the very least enough to stop the growth. I think that’s a simple enough answer.
It doesn't address the obvious trade-off I laid out. Why are India's Paris commitments currently greater than zero?
So, what was China's target for peak emissions? What does peak emissions mean? How are they doing regarding that target?
Not true. The US and EU have been lowering emissions for the past 20 years.
If you focus solely on production you can eke out such numbers, but it ignores the basics of imperialism and the aforementioned offshoring where industry doesn't just magically become green. Shuffling around where industry is located didn't decrease emissions by itself. Emissions targets do not stick exclusively to production and, I have to repeat again because you keep ignoring it, the US and EU are failing to meet their commitments. Yet you focus on one of the few countries that is. I wonder why. I wonder why you ignore 80% of what I say. Perhaps you should take a little break.
If you include consumption the plots look very different. And I'm not aware of easily available stats that track based on industry ownership.
Why are you acting like China is a poor helpless victim to capitalism here.
I didn't. I gave a pretty dry analysis. Maybe ask yourself why that feels overly sympathetic to you.
China chose to shift to capitalism at the end of the 1900s.
That's not a particularly accurate or useful description of China's gambit to allow (mostly foreign) capital to exploit its people to build productive forces while maintaining overall control over sweeping aspects of their economy. If China simply switched to capitalism one then has to explain why it is so different from every other capitalist country. China's trajectory is responsible for the vast majority of global poverty index improvements and this runs in dramatic contrast to the rest of the periphery that was already fully capitalist and continues to be. The redirection of funds and productive capacity to infrastructure, education, housing, direct poverty alleviation. The limits/outright bans on the financialization and speculation that characterize imperial core economies. The policy of embedding the party in large firms and turning developed industries into state-meditated co-ops. The lack of imperialist expansion required by monopolized, financialized capital. But I digress.
And they can choose to impose stricter regulation on fossil fuel emissions.
Sure. They could set them to any arbitrary level. What is the correct rate for it to be sustained? Remember, they're almost alone in meeting targets among countries as advanced as they are. What level of production flight should they unilaterally sacrifice, if any, and who picks up the slack? At which limits do they begin sacrificing that production? Are their regulations too loose or strict for the optimal trajectory? Why are we focusing on one of the only countries meeting their targets and making progress on renewables?
They choose not to because it hurts their bottom line. Simple as that.
It is, in fact, not as simple as that and this ignores the active work and debate within China that produces the results we are discussing. They aren't making their targets because that's just what capitalism does. It's deliberate, literally a result of deliberation, research, modeling, and pulling levers at the commanding heights.
The US and EU have controlled their emissions
lmfao you can't be serious they can't even meet their own targets. France is the only one that ever does and it's because they became a primary source of nuclear weapons materials (producing low emission energy as a nice side effect).
while China’s continues to gro
[Edit: nearly] Everyone's continue to grow. The targets are set, at the moment, for when they will hit peak and then begin dropping. China's peak target is set to 2030 and they are slated to beat that.
China has the highest GDP in the world, and 7th highest GDP per capita, it has no excuse anymore.
Which part of "the only ones taking this seriously" is not registering?
Most greenhouse gas emissions occurred when colonizer Western countries were industrialized. They were not "properly regulated", instead they were offshored in order to discipline labor and extract even greater profits. The offshoring was not exclusive to China, GHGs accordingly increased everywhere that further industrialized as a result of this. This effect is about as capitalist as it gets, trying to maximize profits via labor discipline and opening new fronts for increased exploitation (more profit per worker).
China's approach to this shift was to realize it was an opportunity to build their own productive forces, that capitalists would give up productive centers and move them to other countries, and those countries should be able to domestically gain and upper hand so long as they ensured that production could broadly increased with every investment. For example, China requires technology transfer as part of direct foreign investment. China was correct in this and it is why it is an exception to the rule for national development as a former peripheral country. Compare ita development to India, which did not require such transfers or focus on building production.
Now, again, this means that industrial production moved outside the imperial core and into other countries, including but not limited to China. That industry did not suddenly become green nor did it become immune to the global economic system. It meant being wed to it. As we all know China's strategy is one of interdependency with global capitalism even as they try to steer an otherwise anarchic process in a coherent direction via the commanding heights of the economy.
And yet we can see the difference those commanding heights make even on this specific issue. China is the global exporter and consumer of green energy, leading the charge on solar panels that countries like the US sanction and tariff, instead promoting fossil fuels. China is taking the actual steps you'd imagine Western nations doing (even though they never have), like setting public targets and meeting or exceeding them, and sticking to their obligations.
Imagine what could be done if every country could work in concert for those developments. Specifically, against the anarchic tendencies of the market and capitalist profit seeking.
It's actually the capitalist system as a whole. The large fossil fuel companies of course push for extraction and maximizing their customer base, but it is the entire underlying economic system that ensues it is wasteful and that alternatives for energy production are avoided or limited.
Let's go through some examples.
Just think about all the jobs on the planet. How many of them are actually necessary and doing work that prioritizes sustainability or limits environmental impact? How much is producing pointless goods or forcing them to be grown in wasteful ways in order to maximize profit? Is the fruit in your fruit cup grown in Latin America, packaged in Thailand, and sold in Germany? Is your job in or related to finance, real estate, or insurance (all useless or leech industries)? Are there 30 people doing a job when only 3 are needed because 5 companies are doing redundant hiring between each other?
Look at one of the largest single-entity consumer of fossil fuels on the planet: the US military. More than the vast majority of countries. Now you might say, "hey wasn't this about the economic system?", and yes it is. The purpose of the US military is not "defense" of the United States itself, its lands. The purpose of the US military is to enforce its unipolar status as the primary seat of global capital. Bases all around the world, surrounding shipping lanes and energy. Their most conspicuous targets revolving around either energy (Venezuela, Iraq, Iran) or opponents of the capitalist system or peripheral countries trying to assert a slightly higher level of economic autonomy.
The reason for this is that the economic system is driven entirely by profit-seeking, namely accumulating more and more capital via injecting capital into activities. Productive, redundant, destructive, capital doesn't care so long as more comes back through the activity. Environmental sustainability is not something capital considers except as a new way to market selling more products and therefore increasing itself. Capital industrialized entire nations while dooming generations to lung problems from soot and famine conditions and dust bowls from over extraction and the elimination of the commons. It simply does not care, at all, and it is in control of nearly every human on the planet, including those who own businesses, pressing them into the capital-increasing social activities it spurns.
You could end every energy monopoly tomorrow, even nationalize them, and the vast majority of emissions would still remain, as the actual primary engine would be left intact.
The only way to secure an environmental future is to overthrow capitalism and put people, not capital, in charge.
Debian is better as a server host. Ubuntu is not easier for a server for anything except initial installation but you've already done that once with Debian so you'll be fine. Only reason to use Ubuntu is if you want core software updates every 6 months and for this purpose you don't. And can still have the option for newer software in select cases using containers.
I don't know enough about the red scare to really comment on it. McCarthyism didn't really happen in my country as much as it did in the US.
Are you sure? There were killings around the liberal world as well as proscriptions.
Coopting and infiltration of labour movements were partly responsible, but more so outsourcing/global competition (as you mention) and changes in dominant economic sectors played a big role too.
The fact that outsourcing could even happen is already an indication of weak unions. In this case, weak unions coopted into the liberal legal order.
On top of that retirement of former union members - those that saw what the benefits of unions were first hand - also cut down union interest gave corporations more power.
Meaning the unions progressively lost their militancy, the left having been purges for liberals and against class consciousness and solidarity.
They did not do an about-face because Joe Rogan told them to. The left was systematically dismantled through the red scare, including the purging and cooption of unions into the liberal state establishment. Robbed of class struggle and solidarity, unionized industries could actually be weaponized against workers' movements and then later, weakened by cooption and fraternizibg with management, dismantled through offshoring with no coercive resistance.
The people today are the dispossessed and are as miseducated on this as yourself. Having no correct information by which to understand their position, they will replace it with things like, sure, Joe Rogan, but really they mostly fill their heads with self-blaming liberalism and acceptance with the usual reactionary thinking that the ruling class amplifies to secure its positions. Something you are surely not immune to, either.
The "researchers" in no way demonstrate that "AI" replaced any of the jobs lost. They don't even raise the question of whether "AI" is used to discipline labor despite not being much of a productivity aid.
This is one of the problems with treating class as an inherent identity, not a person's relation to the means of production. A person that begins as a direct wage laborer is working class, but if they ascend the ladder they become closer and closer to carrying out the functions of the owner class (i.e. becoming upper management) they lose proletarian character and gain bourgeois character. So the UHC CEO may have started out working class but obviously he became a bourgeois monster.
There's a similar pitfall, which is the uncritical moralization of the working class. The working class has a world historical role to play and is the class oppressed by the bourgeoisie, but it can easily have reactionary elements that should not be embraced, esoeciskky not as "working class values". The working class exists in the society shaped by the bourgeoisie, with marginalizations baked in by the bourgeoisie that can become self-perpetuating (e.g. racism), so we must not simply accept whstever the majority opinion of the working class is, let alone some random guy that ended up facilitating death and pain for profit.
Racism itself is promoted and maintained by the ruling class because white supremacy serves to undermine class consciousness. The same playbook is uses for other forms of marginalization, but race is the most strongly maintained in the United States due to chattel slavery and the ruling class' investment in it.
What this means is that while class is the major material dividing line that societal forces follow, racism is also a potent force. Just because it gets the oxygen it needs to survive from the continued class war does not mean that racism itself does not exist and make the lives of black people, brown people, etc harder. And white people do have it easier just because they're white. So if you say otherwise, those who know better will not listen to you.
So, instead of going the route that dismisses the impact of racism, instead acknowledge that class and race oppressions are intertwined and that the former drives the latter, so we need to end capitalism in order to undo marginalization. And to do so in solidarity means you also need to take an anti-racist line and stand in solidarity with marginalized people.
Abolish with prejudice
I am correcting your false claims and am getting amused by the fact that you abandoned any pretense of reading or responding to explanations in the previous thread, even making excuses for not having the time to do so, even though now that you clearly do have time you are using it to instead double down on your misconceptions while still lashing out at "the tankies" (me).
You lobbed insults and denigration and now plead victimhood when receiving mild criticism of your claims and behavior.
It is very funny that they're back here complaining about "the tankies" and rehashing the same talking points they couldn't defend a few days ago. It's like they are trying to embody the stereotype of the "Western leftist".
There is ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang in which China has piggy-backed on the US "war on terror" as an excuse to repress muslim population.
There is not. There are no hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing nor evidence for one. The think tank propagandists behind these claims - they are all in the same funding networks connected to the NED/USAID - spent ages just trying to shoehorn what was actually happening into a wishy washy definition of "cultural genocide", which is to say, there is no mass death, no mass expulsions, no attempt to eradicate the population in any way.
Re: "cultural genocide", even with a wishy washy definition, that is also specious, as Uyghur culture has not been disrupted or banned. The exact opposite is the case, it is lifted up culturally, promoted materially. What is oppressed is anything in the neighborhood of salafism, which has never been part of Uyghur culture, but in their infinite (islamophobic) wisdom, the western pro-think tank critics have conflated it with Uyghur culture simply because they are largely muslims.
And you have, yet again, uncritically accepted the liberal propaganda narrative against the designated enemies of the US state. Are you noticing the pattern? It seems you are more interested in living in a fantastical liberal bubble than ever acknowledging that "the tankies" actually can defend their ideas while you cannot.
This is officially called "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism". Do I really need to say more?
Yes, you do. You can of course understand almost nothing about this from that title. I would challenge you to tell me what you think it means and what is going on in your thought process.
Taiwan has its own democracy and wants to be independent, yet China claims it as its own.
A few days ago I broke this down for you and you ignored it entirely. If you deigned to read what others told you, you might understand the basics of the detente with Taiwan.
Yes there's asterisks and details and questionable involvement from the West in all of this, but these aren't "myths".
The content of both claims are, in fact, mythological. In the first case it is very literally the propaganda outfits of CIA cutouts and the promotion of some expat grifters working together in an absurdly lazy information war. In the latter case it is a false pretense of having no idea or way of knowing what the tension is over Taiwan and opting to present it in an intentionally vague way to put it in a worse light while also using a liberal framing re: praising it as democratoc, whereas any anarchist will not uncritically celebrate bourgeois electoralism, and certainly not in defense of an ethnocentric state. Taiwan did actually do an ethnic cleansing, which is ironic for your case.
Sinologists from various countries have stated that they or their colleagues have been barred from entry or held by authorities for weeks because of what they've said about China. For example I just heard Weigelin-Schwiedrzik say this on a marxist podcast.
Literally who cares.
The only burden I've ever placed on you is to be self-consistent and not use homophobic insults.
And I don't need your support for China. You are largely indistinguishable from other liberals that think they are anarchist for some unclear reason, having done no work to shed the liberal propaganda against the US state's designated enemies. And now that you are over here having clearly done no reflection or self-criticism regarding your misconceptions and bad faith behavior, why do you think anyone should spend time trying to educate you?
Least genocidal liberal
lol you're still at this after abandoning this thread? The one where you jumped in, whinged about "tankies", and then ignored nearly everything that I said to you while apologizing for not having the time to respond?
Why are you now here and still whinging rather than back at that thread actually engaging? Why are you doubling down on this nonsense when you couldn't defend it directly against your targets of insult?
Remember when you resorted to the homophobic remarks I predicted?
Individual consumer shaming for society-level problems is usually corporate PR to defend from interventions. The classic example is the invention of the "litterbug" when companies introduced disposable but not easily reusable or compostable packaging and trash was piling up in much larger quantities. There were movements against using the packaging itself. The "litterbug" PR campaign successfully changed the narrative to make this litter an individual problem to shame people for rather than a problem with capital. Similarly, there were many movements against cars in the beginning. It was considered outrageous when "chauffeur's" would hit pedestrians, there were calls for entire bans. There were multifaceted PR pushes to instead shift blame to pedestrians while giving cars exclusive use of the streets, pushing pedestrians to the side and calling them "jaywalkers" if a car hit them. Both of these cases also involved heavy lobbying/bribery of the political class, same as today.