firmly of the belief that guitars are real
policing a space/securing it for industry costs. They didn’t change the maps just to feel good about themselves, this is only the first step to opening these spaces up for exploitation.
If nothing else, they need a presence to help the companies quash unionization efforts on the mining rigs, don’t they? And that costs.
I don’t know that I justified it, just pointed out a basic historical truth about industrialization. With a shred of historical context it’s trivial to turn the conversation from “ew China evil” to “is it possible to industrialize without this shit?” which is a question anybody should have been asking from the very beginning.
At the end of the day, lambasting China for doing all the things industrializing nations have always done, without offering a concretely better, alternative path for industrialization, and simultaneously demanding they achieve a similar level of development as the West without doing anything the West did to get there, is honestly just pointless. The West imposed a competitive market system based on the preposterous violence of industrial production on the rest of the world, and are now going to be collectively hoisted by our own petards over the next few decades.
If we wanted them to industrialize without shit like ethnic homogenization/genocide/systematic exploitation of labor/everything else, we might have tried blazing a path to economic development that wasn’t based on those things.
For the record, though, any nation-state that got big did all of that. That is literally what industrialization has more or less always looked like. The US used to run sweatshops and disappear/murder activists of any kind, especially the ones who pushed back against the pennies-an-hour sweatshops. It wasn’t until the 20th century that US courts even started reading the First Amendment to mean the government had an obligation to not fuck you up just for your political beliefs (see this title since that’s a larger historical argument than can fit on Lemmy).
You don’t get social freedom and rights in an industrial society until it hits a very high point of development. This has been true of more or less anywhere.
While we could argue China should have looked for a better way to develop, the United States also helped create an international system in the middle of the 20th century where the only real option was to aggressively industrialize in an even worse way than the US did, or just be subject to outright neocolonialism (and then develop your industry also in a bad way, also likely without rights, and then not have a rounded enough economy to do anything other than be exploited by richer countries), and then, when China decided to just take a heavy state-led path that employed capitalism and tools of standard industrial nation-building to set themselves up as a powerful capitalist nation-state, like they were “supposed” to, Western countries, the US in particular, bought in hard and financed everything they’re now recoiling against.
China’s great sin, in this context (and while I’m being slightly sarcastic there, sure, the way they’re industrializing/running shit is bad), was choosing to use their enormous land-mass, resource base, and population to not just be on the very bottom. If America/the West had wanted to see the world industrialize better and more humanely, they should have tried at literally any point to help the world industrialize better and more humanely. At this point, it’s a little absurd for Westerners to complain a situation they created and financed extensively for decades.
I did some reading and while it’s true that the continued existence of the US federal government is a large collection of dick moves forming one gigantic meta-dick move, this is actually pretty straightforward. The UN Convention on the Law of the Seas defines a range of distances from the seashore where a state can claim the seafloor/minerals etc as its own; everything past that is the high seas. The US hadn’t previously maxed out its claims, so there was wiggle room under UNCLOS to expand said claims.
Now, why would they bother, why is it suddenly worth the extra administrative cost of claiming even deeper offshore waters, that’s an interesting question. I’d say it’s a good indicator of the increasing cost and difficulty of extracting natural resources (likely technology has brought the cost down some, too), pushing nation-states to pursue ever more exotic and costly extraction methods, but overall this doesn’t seem that significant (we all already knew that was a trend, that’s why we’re all on this community).
The push to expand territories is a troubling one, because sure, this is a legally uncontroversial move, but if expanding territories is at this point our best option for propping up the system, we’re in for another era of wars. But we all knew that already.
According to the State Dept announcement, the new lines were determined by the Extended Continental Shelf Task Force, which is a cross-agency task force representing 14 different federal agencies. More likely, the expanded areas have a variety of resources that would be of interest to US industries.
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Counterpoint: with some subject matter, you don’t need nuance or subtext. Hence why IB remains, in my opinion, his greatest work. It’s one of the few subjects where you don’t need nuance so the good technical aspects of his filmmaking doesn’t just wash out in all the blood and gore. All you have to do is cook up a story in the Trek universe where his filmmaking style would be an asset (hint: have the story revolve around killing fascists), don’t give him complete control, and make him work in tandem with Star Trek old hands like Brannon Braga or Jonathan Frakes and I honestly think you’d end up with something good.
Personally, I think Star Trek is good enough that it deserves more and more interesting film treatments than it’s gotten. Tarantino Trek would upset a lot of people just because it wasn’t an anodyne feel-good PG movie, but if it was good, we could end up with other, better directors doing even more interesting things with Trek.
I didn’t say give him full artistic freedom!
Because you can only tell so many stories when literally all of your characters are required to be so narrow and flat it becomes a matter of debate and discussion when they do or say anything that would make them seem like real people.
I still maintain that a Quentin Tarantino Trek likely would have been the greatest Trek film ever made (not a high bar though). Come on, imagine Inglourious Basterds set during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. But the rights holders have always been Trek’s biggest enemy because for the most part they just want to make something safe that will get people viewing, when what’s great about Trek is how expansive the universe is and how much room there is to tell stories of every kind. Literature about the far future, whose entire point is how expansive and diverse that far future could be, shouldn’t be so stylistically narrow that people get their knickers in a twist when Picard swears. But since it is, we can never have something as good or even just interesting as Quentin Tarantino Trek.
Okay, but what did you want the bereaved mom to say to the media, “thanks Israel for murdering my kid because of what someone else did!”?
Misinformation is a numbers game. For every 10 people that see the misinfo, only maybe 1 or 2 will ever see the followup proving whatever the misinformation was was in fact misinformation. And out of those 2, half will assume the followup is itself misinformation and have their belief in the propaganda reinforced. Out of the 8 who will never see the correction, maybe two will reject it, four won’t really know what to think (itself a useful propaganda outcome), and maybe two will accept it.
Concerted efforts to combat misinformation can help, maybe nowadays the number of people who see the followup is closer to 3 or 4, but it’s the same basic dynamics behind the Gish Gallop, but on an industrial scale. Making up bullshit is easy, analyzing and explaining why it’s bullshit on average takes longer than spewing out some new piece of bullshit.
Every other Zionist makes it a point to argue that the Palestinians were never a “people” because it was never an independent nation-state, but the only reason you’d split hairs about that in such an arbitrary way (point out where in the UN Convention on Genocide it says "it’s not genocide if they never had a modern nation-state of their own? Y’all) is to muddy the waters as to whether or not clearing out Palestine amounts to genocide. Blows me away people can look at this conflict and not conclude that Israel is committing genocide.
While we’re here, Bibi uses Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority and make independent statehood impossible. They don’t dislike Hamas. Hamas makes it very easy for Bibi to accomplish his party’s goals in Gaza, which include ethnically cleansing it. Why would they ever want to actually get rid of Hamas until Gaza’s been completely destroyed?
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Thanks for the updates, I wasn’t aware there had been scotched election plans in the last few years. I follow various global situations but Israel-Palestine is so hopeless it’s honestly hard to keep up with. It’s worth noting Hamas has also scotched attempts to hold elections since 2006. Interesting to note they called for municipal elections 10 days ago and apparently intended to discuss with the PA such elections at the same time as they were planning an actual massacre whose only strategic merits I have even heard suggested are “Israel’s response will galvanize Gaza against Israel,” except I’m not sure what iron resolve does against a military with IDF’s resources and lack of restraint.
Anyways, they can fight if they think it will help, but given how more or less every single armed conflict has panned out ultimately in Israel’s favor, I’d question if in their case going even harder and massacring civilians even harder is really going to help anything.
Since legislative/presidential elections haven’t actually been held since 2006, we can’t really know if the 44% of the vote (in a vote which had 76% turnout, so really, about 33% of all eligible voters, similar democratic mandates as GW Bush or Trump) would even still support Hamas today, so it’s a little generous to say Hamas massacring civilians is the same as “The Palestinian people fighting”
Typo, actually, but interpret it any way you like, make up stories, whatever you want, okay?
KInda blows me away how people don’t acknowledge the overt genocidality of Israel’s position towards Palestine. Just call them rats, Yoav Gallant, we all know that’s what you mean. People all over social media are celebrating the actual ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
And after everything since the Nakba, we’re supposed to be surprised that the political situation in Gaza has deteriorated to the point where the government is just a pack of terrorists. We’re supposed to be confused as to how that could happen.
The attack by Hamas is chilling, but punishing all Gazans for what their government has done is collective punishment, and also presupposes a lot of things (ie, “they voted for Hamas” – 44% of the electorate voted for Hamas, which means 56%, the actual majority, voted against Hamas, and they voted once, 17 years ago, so really, less than half of the electorate ever approved Hamas, but also, collective punishment is a war crime)
It seems likely Israel will succeed in clearing Gaza, because they’ve had the upper hand here and have since they stole the entire country at gunpoint with UN backing. This is depressing, but I don’t see how massacres will help anything. If anything, further violence just seems to play into Israel’s hand.
EDIT: it’s been 17 years, not 13, since the last elections in Gaza
EDIT: Corrected typo, this was early in the day for me sorry everybody, also fixed slightly incorrect info re elections, admittedly not the most up to date on the current situation over there, but at this point I believe the info in my post is at least overall correct
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