“I trust the United States government and so should you!” -Alphane Moon

How’s that relevant? Do you have counter evidence for any of the points I made or are you just desperately trying to prove you’re not a dupe?

I do check out RFE/RL and its sister outlets from time to time. It’s pretty obvious that their agenda aligns 1 for 1 with American foreign policy objectives. To be fair though, the US wouldn’t fund RFE/RL if it didn’t effectively dupe people into believing it was an unbiased source.

I think you mean it’s designed to prevent partisan interference. RFE/RL’s purpose is to support US foreign policy which makes it inherently political. It is undeniably a propaganda outlet and therefore comparable in function to RT. You may trust American propaganda over Russian propaganda but that doesn’t mean the former is not propaganda.

What an absurd response. This is akin to saying RT isn’t Russian state propaganda.

I think there are a few obstacles to that actually.

The first is that the global financial system is structured in a way that artificially inflates the value of the Dollar and the Euro. This is great for western capital. However, it also means that domestic labor is more expensive than foreign labor which makes onshore manufacturing unprofitable.

The second problem is that western subsidies rarely hold companies to account. The US tried to onshore semiconductor manufacturing through the CHIPS act in explicit attempt to compete with China. Only a few years later and big recipients of those subsidies are already giving up. Intel is laying if 15k employees and TSMC is delaying and scaling back their plans for a fab in Arizona. Given how much influence over politics capital owners have in western countries, I don’t see this changing anytime soon.

Lastly, I forgot to mention but the artificial inflation of western currencies is in part maintained by their control and influence over the energy trade. Any of course by energy I mean fossil fuels. As such, if the west were to enable a global green energy transition they would be shooting themselves in the foot so to speak. This is likely part of the reason why China is investing so much in renewables. Energy independence will benefit them greatly as they won’t have to depend on an energy market dominated by western powers.

This is such a wildly naive and orientalist view of the Middle East. If you actually studied the modern history of the region you would know that since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire western powers have ceaselessly meddled in the affairs of the people there.

They’ve supported coups in order to overthrow democratic governments. They funded right wing jihadis including the precursors to and allies of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. They’ve enabled war crimes left and right. They even invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and continues to bomb the whole region with an extensive and secretive drone program. Even now the west continues to defend authoritarian and genocidal regimes like Saudi Arabia or Israel as long as they serve their western interests regardless of their destabilizing effect.

The reality is you have no idea what a Middle East would look like without western intervention. To pretend that you do only reveals your complete ignorance and racist arrogance.

The problem here is western nations use orientalist and racist narratives to pretend as if their meddling in the Middle East is not the primary cause of modern conflict in the region. People just accept those natives uncritically and assume they must be the smart ones for having read articles in the NYT about it. Never do they study the modern history of the region and the ways in which western powers are constantly intervening.

she had absolutely nothing to do with […] any regime changes

That’s certainly not true if you if you know anything about recent Balkan history.

Between 1993 and 2001, Alexander was USAID’s deputy for the Europe region, focusing on immediate post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans.

USAID financially supported anti-government organizations in the Balkans in order to foment regime change during her tenure. This isn’t a secret either. That information is publicly available. If she was working at USAID during that time at best she was only tangentially involved.

The Carter Center is literally run by a woman who worked for much of her career at USAID, an agency that has directly supported regime change efforts in Latin America.

You don’t have to white wash Carter’s foreign policy to criticize Maduro.

Carter’s own national security advisor tried to legitimize Pol Pot for fuck’s sake. That’s not to mention Carter continued support for the Indonesian dictator as he carried out a genocide in East Timor. Oh and we shouldn’t forget the Carter administration started the program which funded and armed the right wing islamist progenitors of the Taliban in Afghanistan. More relevant to Latin America, Carter’s support for the El Savadoran military dictatorship was critical for its stability as it committed unspeakable atrocities.

Don’t be confused by Carter’s outward humanitarianism in his post presidency. He was not an aberration when it comes to US foreign policy and I wouldn’t expect the Carter center to be either. It’s literally run these days by a woman who spent much of her career working for USAID.

AMLO is explicitly rejecting the idea that there is evidence of fraud which is what the article is about. The title is accurate even if AMLO is not taking sides.

What are you talking about? It’s not the opposite at all. The short article just states that AMLO said that there was no evidence of fraud and that he’ll wait until the full vote tallies are released before commenting. That’s basically exactly what the title says.

If you have to defend Nazi’s because the SC will give them a more favorable decision then the legal system is already fucked beyond repair.

Well part of it is China was a severely underdeveloped country. They had to play catch up and so they traded access to their large labor market in exchange for technology transfers agreements.

That said, I think it would be incorrect to say their economy is currently based on copying. They publish more high impact research papers these days than any other country and are technological leaders particularly in green energy. This has been such a rapid change though that I think people’s perceptions of the Chinese economy lag the reality.

Then I’m not sure you know much about the motivations of Xi, the CPC, or the US for that matter. Since the 80s both sides only real interest has been economic growth. The US was fine with Chinas growth for decades as long as they provide the US a source of cheap labor. However now, China’s economy is actually larger than the US’s in terms of purchase power parity. If left unchecked China would become the economic center of the world without firing a single shot.

The US is clearly worried about losing it’s economic dominance as the worlds only superpower. That’s why it’s made contingency plans for how to confront China militarily. If they tried to subdue China through an invasion it wouldn’t work. China is a nuclear power and that would spell the end of the world. What they could do instead is use islands off the coast of China to enforce a naval blockade of the mainland. From South Korea, to Japan including Okinawa, to the Philippines the US is stationing military assets all the way down the coast. Taiwan would serve as the linch pin to that plan.

Again I have to repeat the US is not the defender of liberal democracy that they claim to be. The people of Taiwan should be clear eyed about that.

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Sure but the tensions between China and the US never went away. You may not have Chiang Kai Shek seeking US support in order to invade the mainland. That much is true. However, the US is still very much interested in keeping Taiwan within its sphere of influence as part of a militaristic strategy of containment aimed at China.

I don’t think the US state department cares much for the welfare of Taiwanese people in all of this. If you have any doubts about how the US operates all you have to do is look at its relationship with Israel today.

You’re not wrong. The CPC see Taiwanese independence as a threat because the US prevented them from taking it during the Chinese civil war. The US knows this and clearly intends to use Taiwan as a pressure point to gain diplomatic leverage against China. That makes it a high stakes game with the Taiwanese people caught in the middle and no resolution in sight.

Given that context, it’s not surprising most people in Taiwan want to maintain the status quo and prevent any escalation. However, as tensions rise between the US and China the political tensions in Taiwan rise with them.

They treat Taiwan that way because the Chinese civil war was never fully resolved. The US interfered to prevent the communists from taking Taiwan and ousting Chiang Kai-shek’s fascist KMT. As such, the CPC sees persistent US support for Taiwanese independence as an implicit threat against their sovereignty.