just let America fall… right into the hands of Putin?

lmao you think Russia is capable of invading America? You understand Call of Duty games are fiction right? Modern day Russia can barely take the russian-speaking part of Ukraine, and saw a hostile Ukraine as such an existential threat they went to near total war.

make their own empires, and directly subvert their governments by installing themselves a literal emperor?

They go to re-education camps and then get real jobs.

Or they don’t, historically speaking, it’s up to them.

And if not, what then - China just takes over the world by default?

From the french revolution to slavery to segregation to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to apartheid, in every instance the privileged assured everyone else that they would be just as brutal and cruel to them as they were to the oppressed class. They’ve been wrong every time. The indigenous people of the Americas and Africa are not waiting to put you in camps and erase your language or sell your drinking water to richer countries.

That said, when I mentioned “keeping the democracies of the Western world functioning”

Most of those “democracies” are dictatorships of capital who depend on the exploitation of the third world to maintain a standard of living at home, the essence of social democracy. Maintaining them isn’t a good thing.

I think you are perhaps not listening to the right set of liberals

I think you are not looking at the history of their actions or reading between the lines. The sales of weapons to western-backed dictatorships for the purpose of putting down restive populations in the event they try to rise up don’t stop when a democrat is in charge.

Social democracy maintains that very exploitation. There is little disagreement among liberals when it comes to the exploitation of the third world.

You want food stuffs that don’t involve slavery? End neocolonialism.

You’d be dismayed by how many people don’t even have that scruple, as long as it’s happening in the third world.

Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism after all.

The fact that they’re putting forum results ahead of web seems like they’re just throwing in the towel on having useful web results that aren’t just searching thing+reddit/stackoverflow.

Yeah no from what I’ve heard, it’s just as bad in Germany, with Die Linke being controlled by social democrats. Which is weird considering East Germany is still in living memory and (I’d hope) your education covering how the nazis rose to power, since the split between liberals and communists is pretty important.

There was a similar use in the 17 and 1800s when conservatives were the upper nobility and liberals were the lower nobility and capitalists (this caused problems when the liberals, who used the working class to carry out their revolution, then turned on the working class when their own aims were achieved, since at that point, the interests of the lower nobility+capitalist classes diverged with the working class, which typically left the liberals unable to defend themselves from the forces of reaction. This happened at least 5 different times.).

Today though, conservatives are still liberal.

Have you explored why you hate furries? How do you feel about LGBT+ and neurodivergent people?

Republicans are liberals too, liberal simply means supporter of capitalism.

Though it’s commonly used in the US to exclusively refer to social democrats, social democracy is just a subset of liberalism.

This, and a lot of liberals are entirely unaware of anything left of social democrats, so they’re genuinely confused by anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.

This results in democrats accusing HB of being trump supporters, conservatives accusing HB of being liberals, and both accusing them of being paid shills of foreign countries.

I can’t find any English-language papers covering the protests that did any actual journalism.

There’s quite a few that covered the protests, but only in service of the typical “ccp bad, the people yearn for freedom” story, so they didn’t bother with such details.

Maglevs tend to have wheels that get deployed on approach, so I don’t think that’s a big issue.

I don’t understand what this is addressing

China’s HSR has an issue in that it doesn’t go to the city centers, you still have to take a metro or bus to get there.

I can’t imagine how difficult it’s gonna be getting land for maglev. Shanghai’s maglev was supposed to connect the Hongqiao and Pudong airports, but they got NIMBY’d by property owners who wanted a bigger setback and used FUDD to organize protests.

Before watching the video, I was thinking all maglevs were just gagetbahns since there’s little difference in how maglevs are used vs conventional HSR, but 380 mph and 100+ mile long tracks make a qualitative difference as it competes with aircraft after you consider boarding, taxiing, time to get to cruising altitude, etc. This is especially important given how much CO2 per passenger mile small aircraft generate.

Also if the US can spend trillions on wars, and has a similarly sized economy, I’m sure the Chinese can afford socially beneficial projects like this even if ticket prices never cover operating costs.

The statistics about 90% dog attacks being pitbulls is because cops can call any dog a pitbull.

Oh you mean music from the 1900s?

What’s really old music? Like Greenday?

Weird that we don’t have any videos of hundreds of thousands of Russians walking into machine guns.

Weird how the nazi generals claimed the same thing, despite no mention of that in the extensive soviet records released after the coup.

The US’s own war games indicate they cannot hold Taiwan.

China’s calculus for whether they need to invade Taiwan is based around whether there will be a peaceful reunification in the future or if it will be used as a springboard for military action against mainland China.

Graphite is now a nano material?