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Comment by mschuster91

2 days ago

> they just want everyone to think that way

That's the thing with religious or ideologically driven dictators. They're nutjobs, not beholden to reality in their decisionmaking but to whatever their ideology prescribes - and thus are prone to making decisions that seem to (or end up being) utterly stupid / irrational.

With Yugoslavia, it was Tito's idea to force all the various countries into one common ethnicity. With Russia, it is Putin's dream of restoring "Greater Russia". With China, it's the dream of re-unification with Taiwan on one side, and reversing what is seen as a land grab by back-then Czarist Russia in Outer Manchuria. With Trump it is the desperate desire to be beloved (and the desire of his Project 2025 handlers to turn the US into an ethno-christo-nationalist state). With Ben Gvir and Smotrich in Israel, it is the desire to wipe out anything Palestinian.

And the result of these madmen was and is an untold amount of needless suffering. There is no reason at all to not believe what China is openly saying [1] and to prepare accordingly. Better be prepared than be sorry.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/xi-jinping-vow...

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mschuster91

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idiotsecant  1 day ago

It's wildly naive to think that dictators are 'nutjobs'. They are, without exception, shrewd political operators. You don't get to be dictator and stay dictator without a certain skill set, and part of that is having a good sense of which actions get you a bigger bank account and which ones end with your head on a stick.

They might be wrong like any human, but they aren't cartoon villains.