Google says the Chinese military budget is 281 billion. They probably get lower cost labor and production, but that’s significantly lower than the United States.
Adjusting for Purchasing Parity, an imperfect measure, that still only like 600 billion, significantly lower than the United States.
They're vertically integrated so a lot of materials are cheaper. They also steal a lot of technology, so they save a lot of money on having to do the research the US already paid for. Finances alone don't make the military and your argument doesn't change anything I said.
Vertical integration is an interesting claim, because we have been told that the government outsourcing to private companies is more efficient due to competition than the government doing the work themselves.
brother we're not discreet about it, the US is a stain on the world and the world would be more stable and better off if it disappeared, it is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world. It's not a deep, hidden conspiracy.
It also turns out that only one side of these two has the means to wage war and is also the biggest arms dealer in the world. Bully gets called mean names, boo hoo :(
We didn't start World War 1, or World War 2, or the Korean war, or the Vietnam war. We didn't make Russia attack Ukraine. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran or Kuwait. We didn't make Iran fund terrorism around the region and the world.
We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO. We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East so it isn't constantly at war, often caused by Iran proxies.
What country is it that you're defending? Iraq? That country that invaded its neighbors, lit all the oil fields on fire, committed genocide and buried all the bodies in countless mass graves, attempted to kill the US president, attempted to blow up the World Trade Center and abducted women then raped them while recording it to show the recordings to their family to shame them? Is that what you're defending? Please tell me, I want to know.
Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
The world is not a very nice place. Make sure you know what you're defending. We have free speech in the US and people can do their own journalistic research and reporting even if it goes against our own government. These other countries don't have free speech, so they can spread all kinds of lies about the US and ban any other opinions inside their countries. That means people become indoctrinated and find it more difficult to think for themselves to get closer to what the truth is.
Maybe read how de Gaulle viewed the US "promoting peace in Europe" or how the British did after the US stole the Suez canal and kicked the British out of the Middle East.
Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
>Vietnam war
Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
>Korean War
True, not your fault, you just bombed an entire country into non existence.
>Iraq attack Iran
Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
>Iran
You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
>We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO
Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
> We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East
By spending hundreds of billions on a country that, since its inception, has continuously been at war, an aggressor, colonizing, genocidal theocracy? Working out GREAT.
>What country is it that you're defending
Watch out, your paranoia is seeping through. The US is a net negative to world peace is the only thing that was said.
>Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
While none of those countries are angels, and a lot of them are also victims of political power plays outside of their own control (hint: it involves the US being so violently anti-communist that it would rather raze a country to the ground rather than see its hegemony ever so slightly threatened), I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice. It's really hard to catch up to the US on the scale of atrocities committed.
I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
>[free speech word vomit]
I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
We've got a billionaire funded conspiracy openly ignoring the Constitution, wantonly trashing our American liberties, and yet you're still raging about "communist billionaires" ?
The politics of billionaires as a group is not leftism, nor is it rightism. The politics of billionaires is self-serving authoritarianism. From each camp, they pick the sides of issues that stand to increase their own power, taking stakes in them as if they are horses. They will gladly support woke groupthink as long as it's getting results, and then readily switch to supporting anti-woke groupthink when society has had enough and the winds shift.
The net effects from both phases are losses from our individual liberty, which have been accumulating for decades, and are presumably the source of your rightful anger. But please come to your senses!
From what I've seen, freedom of speech has been improving. It used to be that people could barely speak their mind on Reddit, Twitter or at universities without getting attacked or cancelled over who knows what. Now, people are expressing themselves more regularly in all of those places. Universities still have a ways to go, but it is improving.
There have been some television networks that also had public licensing to broadcast over the air, but that requires a broadcast license which has stipulations of serving the public interest. To maintain this license, you require locally relevant content, a variety of viewpoints expressed and they cannot distort the news.
Increasingly, shows like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and The View which are all broadcast over the air with public licenses, became more than simply interview shows with interesting guests. They became actual political hit jobs that masquerade as news while day in day out insulting politicians and spreading provably false out of context lies which people could debunk themselves with their own research. Yet, these networks used this entertainment loophole as if it was a blank check to go against the public interest broadcast license.
No doubt, people can argue the same about politicians themselves, but politicians aren't restricted to this legal standard, because they need the flexibility to achieve whatever they think the country needs at the moment. Public broadcasting is its own thing and does allow for a significant range of content, so long as you adhere to the standards.
If PBS ran a decent journalistic report investigating some problem in an administration that is in the public interest and is an entirely different thing than these political hate shows that all seem to echo the exact same thought with different words. They can exist just fine, but I fundamentally agree that it stretches the definition of what is acceptable public interest programming for over the air broadcasting.
Putting pressure on them to change up their programming is probably a good thing for the country. What ever happened to the old high quality high integrity debate shows and intellectual interviews? It's all insults or propaganda now and "I don't know, they're crazy!", so nobody understands what's going on in the world or why it's happening. It's like they make it obvious that they have no interest in informing you, because if you understand it, you can't hate it as much as they need you to.
It would be fine for those networks to continue running those shows, but they would have to move it off to some other channel that isn't broadcast using an over the air license.
As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
Companies are largely pro-American and if they feel like woke helps resolve some kinds of political tensions that have been dividing America, then they will feel like that is the patriotic thing to do. When it turns out that is actually Marxism in disguise aimed at destroying the country, they push back. These things just happen slowly and it takes time to adjust.
> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.
FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".
As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
Google says the Chinese military budget is 281 billion. They probably get lower cost labor and production, but that’s significantly lower than the United States.
Adjusting for Purchasing Parity, an imperfect measure, that still only like 600 billion, significantly lower than the United States.
They're vertically integrated so a lot of materials are cheaper. They also steal a lot of technology, so they save a lot of money on having to do the research the US already paid for. Finances alone don't make the military and your argument doesn't change anything I said.
Vertical integration is an interesting claim, because we have been told that the government outsourcing to private companies is more efficient due to competition than the government doing the work themselves.
1 reply →
>shadowy
brother we're not discreet about it, the US is a stain on the world and the world would be more stable and better off if it disappeared, it is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world. It's not a deep, hidden conspiracy.
It also turns out that only one side of these two has the means to wage war and is also the biggest arms dealer in the world. Bully gets called mean names, boo hoo :(
We didn't start World War 1, or World War 2, or the Korean war, or the Vietnam war. We didn't make Russia attack Ukraine. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran or Kuwait. We didn't make Iran fund terrorism around the region and the world.
We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO. We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East so it isn't constantly at war, often caused by Iran proxies.
What country is it that you're defending? Iraq? That country that invaded its neighbors, lit all the oil fields on fire, committed genocide and buried all the bodies in countless mass graves, attempted to kill the US president, attempted to blow up the World Trade Center and abducted women then raped them while recording it to show the recordings to their family to shame them? Is that what you're defending? Please tell me, I want to know.
Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
The world is not a very nice place. Make sure you know what you're defending. We have free speech in the US and people can do their own journalistic research and reporting even if it goes against our own government. These other countries don't have free speech, so they can spread all kinds of lies about the US and ban any other opinions inside their countries. That means people become indoctrinated and find it more difficult to think for themselves to get closer to what the truth is.
I don't know where to start. The US supported Saddam after his Iran invasion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
Maybe read how de Gaulle viewed the US "promoting peace in Europe" or how the British did after the US stole the Suez canal and kicked the British out of the Middle East.
7 replies →
>World War 2
Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
>Vietnam war
Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
>Korean War
True, not your fault, you just bombed an entire country into non existence.
>Iraq attack Iran
Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
>Iran
You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
>We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO
Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
> We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East
By spending hundreds of billions on a country that, since its inception, has continuously been at war, an aggressor, colonizing, genocidal theocracy? Working out GREAT.
>What country is it that you're defending
Watch out, your paranoia is seeping through. The US is a net negative to world peace is the only thing that was said.
>Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
While none of those countries are angels, and a lot of them are also victims of political power plays outside of their own control (hint: it involves the US being so violently anti-communist that it would rather raze a country to the ground rather than see its hegemony ever so slightly threatened), I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice. It's really hard to catch up to the US on the scale of atrocities committed.
I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
>[free speech word vomit]
I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
4 replies →
We've got a billionaire funded conspiracy openly ignoring the Constitution, wantonly trashing our American liberties, and yet you're still raging about "communist billionaires" ?
The politics of billionaires as a group is not leftism, nor is it rightism. The politics of billionaires is self-serving authoritarianism. From each camp, they pick the sides of issues that stand to increase their own power, taking stakes in them as if they are horses. They will gladly support woke groupthink as long as it's getting results, and then readily switch to supporting anti-woke groupthink when society has had enough and the winds shift.
The net effects from both phases are losses from our individual liberty, which have been accumulating for decades, and are presumably the source of your rightful anger. But please come to your senses!
From what I've seen, freedom of speech has been improving. It used to be that people could barely speak their mind on Reddit, Twitter or at universities without getting attacked or cancelled over who knows what. Now, people are expressing themselves more regularly in all of those places. Universities still have a ways to go, but it is improving.
There have been some television networks that also had public licensing to broadcast over the air, but that requires a broadcast license which has stipulations of serving the public interest. To maintain this license, you require locally relevant content, a variety of viewpoints expressed and they cannot distort the news.
Increasingly, shows like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and The View which are all broadcast over the air with public licenses, became more than simply interview shows with interesting guests. They became actual political hit jobs that masquerade as news while day in day out insulting politicians and spreading provably false out of context lies which people could debunk themselves with their own research. Yet, these networks used this entertainment loophole as if it was a blank check to go against the public interest broadcast license.
No doubt, people can argue the same about politicians themselves, but politicians aren't restricted to this legal standard, because they need the flexibility to achieve whatever they think the country needs at the moment. Public broadcasting is its own thing and does allow for a significant range of content, so long as you adhere to the standards.
If PBS ran a decent journalistic report investigating some problem in an administration that is in the public interest and is an entirely different thing than these political hate shows that all seem to echo the exact same thought with different words. They can exist just fine, but I fundamentally agree that it stretches the definition of what is acceptable public interest programming for over the air broadcasting.
Putting pressure on them to change up their programming is probably a good thing for the country. What ever happened to the old high quality high integrity debate shows and intellectual interviews? It's all insults or propaganda now and "I don't know, they're crazy!", so nobody understands what's going on in the world or why it's happening. It's like they make it obvious that they have no interest in informing you, because if you understand it, you can't hate it as much as they need you to.
It would be fine for those networks to continue running those shows, but they would have to move it off to some other channel that isn't broadcast using an over the air license.
As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
Companies are largely pro-American and if they feel like woke helps resolve some kinds of political tensions that have been dividing America, then they will feel like that is the patriotic thing to do. When it turns out that is actually Marxism in disguise aimed at destroying the country, they push back. These things just happen slowly and it takes time to adjust.
> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.
FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".
As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
2 replies →