I certainly agree China is a very great threat, that is making the world a lot more of a mess than it could be. And not just with China but also in the West,
Yay! That is my central thesis.
the left wing is by far the greater threat right now than the right. Whenever someone in a Western country says anything at least remotely patriotic, they are automatically set-upon by the extreme left and denounced as 'Nazis', 'racists', 'homophobes' and 'sexists', and encourage others to do the same, while when anyone says something that is leftist in the extreme nobody bats an eyelid, because they're afraid of the left-wing gangs on social media encouraging them to be ostracised from society. In this way the left-wing is suppressing freedom of speech.
I would say the Left is more dangerous right now. I don't think the Left is more dangerous forever and always. The suppressing of free speech is what is important.
During the George W. Bush years, the Right was trying to suppress free speech.
In short, the side that is suppressing speech is always wrong. That doesn't mean that the people they suppressing are automatically right. It's possible for multiple people to be wrong.
The slurs of calling someone a Nazi, homophobe, sexist, etc is part of language control. SIGN language. Shame, Insults, Guilt, and a Need to be right. That's what you use when facts and logic aren't on your side.
There is also the issue that if you use an insult too much, it loses meaning. This is already happening with "racism." If everyone is a racist than it means actual racists get a free pass. At this point, real racists don't mind being called racists.
Note, when it comes to the US-Mexico border, I'm on the fence, metaphorically speaking. I don't know if I want a closed border or an open border and I don't know
how I want to do it.
But I do know that not everyone who wants a tighter border is automatically a racist. If people keep saying that, than the only people who will be willing to join the immigration debate will be the actual racists.
Many of our national institutions are being brainwashed by the left. The BBC is a left-wing mouthpiece when it should be a neutral broadcaster,
I do not follow British politics very closely but this much is obvious/\
I cannot say with certainty if the Labour Party are neo-Communists or not.
Local councils and universities pander to BLM protesters who cause riots and defile historic monuments like Warhammer Beastmen, which simply encourages them to do it again and again because they'll know they'll get their way by doing it.
The BLM started with good intentions but it's out of control, and no one seems to get punished for the burning, looting, and murders.
Whatever your movement or group is, you have to police your own group for bad actors!
Saying that the British Empire of old had good and bad stuff is like saying "At least Hitler built the Autobahn". It was a force of evil in the world and historians have a very clear picture of it. Colonialism (not only by the British of course. Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Portugal, Italy and Spain were just as bad) was one of the worst things ever done by humans, and we are still fighting the damage that it caused. As you stated correctly China hugely profits from that.
I'm not sure if colonialism was the greatest evil ever perpetrated by humans or not. I would say slavery was worst. Slavery predated the colonial era and lasted much longer (there was overlap). It doesn't really matter, there it's not a competition.
If anything the past evils of slavery and exploitive colonialism is important from a "never again" stand point. The CCP is doing both of those things
right now.
As for what to do about the great evils perpetrated long before I was born. I don't know.
It is possible that an evil action, evil person, or evil group can do something good. I'm not saying the Autobahn makes all of Hitler's evils worth it...far from it.
But I am saying we shouldn't dismantle the Autobahn as a symbolic attack on the Nazis.
On a similar note, colonialization accomplished some good things.
Not every African nation is a place of misery. Some of them are modern and prosperous and they wouldn't have gotten to where they are without Western technology.
Does it justify colonialism? Not really. But don't throw out the good consequences of a bad thing.
I will point out the CCP's Belt and Road Initiative is specifically designed to emphasize the bad elements of colonialism while removing the good elements of colonialism. They are using migrant Han Chinese workers rather than creating local jobs and the local Chinese owned businesses in African and Southeast Asia are
not paying local taxes, and the infrastructure is mostly used to strip natural resources and ship it to China. The only non-Chinese people that benefit from this are the corrupt politicians taking bribes.
I will point out that a Eurocentric view of world history is insulting to Africans and Asians
even if the history paints the Europeans as the bad guys.
The Africans were minding their own business when evil Europeans sailed in to enslave them.
The Native Americans were minding their own business when evil Spaniards and Anglos sailed in to genocide them.
The Chinese were minding their own business when the British forced them all to become Opium addicts. Etc.
A slight exaggeration, but I read by an American English teacher in Japan that the way Japanese teach WWII in schools "Japan was having some territorial disputes with other Pacific nations and then the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on us."
Taking a victim mentality never helps because it requires a person or group to abandon their agency.
If you have no agency, you are helpless to solve your own problems, so you need a big strong government to save you! This can plant the seed for a communist or authoritarian state.
The storming of the Capitol was instigated by Trump because he was a bad loser beta and couldn't stand someone else winning the election, that's all. As bad as it was, it wasn't directly associated with right-wing politics, that wasn't his main motive. The BLM riots on the other hand were directly motivated by left-wing politics.
Yeah. It was bad but it was the actions of one man, not a vast institution.
The statues are not meant to worship people, they're just there to commemorate them for the good things they did for the world, and to defile them like those dumbass BLM protesters do is desecrating a living human being's memory, second only to doing that to their graves. That is unforgivable.
And they destroyed a statue of Ulysses S. Grant! He was the most important leader in the Union fighting the Confederacy and he spent most of his presidency opposing the Klan.
Was he perfect? No. But if Ulysses S. Grant is not an ally to black people than it is literally impossible for a white person to be an ally to black people.
I know so little about EU politics, that if a make a comment about the EU, I'm probably going to look dumb, so I will step out of that one. Other than the EU needs to get much tougher against the CCP.
The atrocities in China are very real, and being neutral to that, as the left wing wants us to do, is only going to help China carry on committing them.
It's not just the Left wing that is complicit, there is a segment of the Right backing them up. In the West there are
two groups playing defense for the CCP in the media. Socialists and neo-Marxists who want to paper over the evil inherit in their ideology and very callous Wall Street types who want to sell their souls in order to get a piece of the Chinese market (which requires kissing the CCP's ring).
I watched a long podcast from China Unscripted. I'm not going to post the whole video, but I will summarize interesting thing in that the CCP is slowly losing Wall Street. Not for any moral reasons but for economic reasons.
The CCP officials in charge of brokering deals with foreign businesses are accustomed to dealing with Chinese businesses. In other words, they are so used to being able to dictate the terms unchallenged that they forgot how to negotiate.
CCP Negotiator: "So you are going to run interference for us in the Western media, you are going to give us a bunch of investment money, build your stuff with Chinese contractors, and we are going to keep 80% of the profits"
Disney Generic Corporate Representative: So I am willing to compromise my morals, but I am not going to do it for free. You got to give me more money for this.
waitwaitwait...
Patrotism is a thing, nationalism is a different beast.
Patriotism is basically national loyalty. I critique my nation or the way it's run, but i still defend it.
Nationalism is an extreme and deviated form of patriotism, basically the government is right, and the interests of your nation superseed interests of all nations.
I can be a patriot and I will gladly join the NATO. A nationalist hates NATO.
Past (and actual) regimes merge the fervor of nationalism with the concept of superiority, especially when it comes to ethnicity and religion. In such contexts, “patriots” can become those who happened to agree with you or look like you, and “traitors” those who do not. And a real patriot can be labeled as enemy of the nation.
This reminds me of something Jordan Peterson said. Paraphrasing here:
The 20th century taught us that both the Right and the Left can go too far and do horrible things. The question is, how far is "too far."
By now we learned, that once the Right starts preaching about racial superiority, that is the canary in the coal mine. Once a Right winger says something about overt racial superiority, the appropriate thing to do is stop dealing with that person.
It's cut and dry. Sure you can argue about "dog whistles," but for the most part, at least the US, if a Right Winger spouts overt racism most Republicans will shun them.
There is no cut and dry point for when a Far Left person goes "too far." There is no clear thing they can say or do that will cause 99% of society to close them off. They are allowed to joke about throwing people in gulags, sterilizing most men, stealing the children away from parents who are straying from the party line, and a variety of other horrific things
I would say that when patriotism goes "too far" is when you talk about destroying the inferior group.
Guys, please. Don't derail the thread even more, make another one.
I agree, lets stop talking about BLM on this thread.
I'm not opposed to talking about the subject. I just don't want to talk about it
here as tempting as it is to bring up this meme.
