The opinion is less interesting than the facts, the increasing rhetoric from the new leader of the rebellious province taken with US angling, taken with the fact that RAND study said the US had until 2026 before China overtook them militarily and it certainly seems like the stage is being set for a near term independence declaration and conflict in the SCS over Taiwan.
Given that there are elements of the bourgeoisie and state desperate to take down China and force the reluctant elements of the bourgeoisie/corporations to join in decoupling, the most realistic plan for that is instigating a conflict over Taiwan, declaring that the US and EU must “stand with democracy” as they did with Ukraine and forcing companies and countries in the case of the EU to decouple suddenly and harshly from China over it while blasting propaganda at the citizenry to get them riled up in an anti-China fervor so they don’t even notice or get angry at anyone but China for the first couple years as prices skyrocket, as supply shortages cripple the economy and so on.
Unfortunately such conditions will not likely lead to enough class consciousness for a progressive revolution of any kind but rather lead to isolationism, reaction, the working class in the imperial core being chained even further, forced into lower living conditions, forced into a kind of rentier-serfdom as the powers that be try and reshore and friendshore. The real problem with this plan occurring in time for the US to think it can win is that US foundries for chips and such won’t be anywhere near operational by 2026.
But ultimately winning a military conflict against China is not necessary for defeating it according to the plans they have. Those plans call for economic isolation of it, embargo, sanction, strangle. And for that they need outrage, they need a cause celebre, they need war propaganda. Though another problem with Taiwan is that unlike with Ukraine it won’t hold out for months. If the PLA decides to swoop in they can crush it with incredible violence and secure it within a week. If they decide to embargo and turn the screws to save lives versus an invasion while bombing military targets and formations it still likely won’t hold out for more than a few months and communications will likely be cut very shortly into things meaning they won’t have as much video propaganda to go on. At least I hope the Chinese are wise enough to cut submarine cables to Taiwan to isolate it from the western internet and propaganda as part of such a strategy. Though I suppose the western media can simply rely on making up Ghost of Kiev type stories about the break-away rebels fighting back, perhaps use video AI to “illustrate” such ideas and not disclose that it is the case right away along with lots of scary shots of Chinese military ships in formation and any initial videos that get out.
No matter how you dice it, it seems likely if not certain that Americans and probably Europeans are within the next 5 years going to find themselves without access to many Chinese goods, certainly the electronics market everything from hard drives to motherboards to graphics cards and smartphones will see spiking prices and probably severe shortages depending on how bad it gets. Just look at an artificial, engineered shortage in the prices of SSD’s because Samsung cut production to drive prices up and Micron of course did nothing to increase production because they like higher prices too. Check the price of a 1tb ssd 18-24 months ago compared to now, dramatic increases, from $60 to $100 often.
Even if the US doesn’t pull off a dramatic decoupling by war, they’ve shown with the solar panel tariffs that they’re willing to destroy the planet in some vain, idealistic hopes that they can forcibly revive domestic manufacturing and consumption by keeping out Chinese goods which only shrinks the market, hits the proletariat, etc so there’s no reason to expect that cheaply priced quality Chinese goods and components in goods from other countries will continue to flow.
The date may be much later but the US is definitely pulling out all the stops to try and make it happen eventually and slap up a hard wall for high technology. The recent comments by the occupied Korean government about their need to invest in chip-making shows the US doesn’t want to put all its chips so to speak in making chips in the US and realizes they may need help with that. Sacrificing Taiwan still means they have the puppets of occupied Korea and Japan to put such production into. Both of which they can manipulate to have lower prices than US production. I could see such a plan in Korea bearing fruit in 5-6 years easily.
China sees at least most of these moves hence their movements to move to Linux and risc architectures before the US can pull the ripcord and leave them stranded within 5-8 years at most.
May their plans fail spectacularly, may the people turn on them sooner than later. However we should all be realistically prepared for a crucible ahead of us that will mean much worse than the loss of cheap electronics treats.
They’ve already violated sovereignty by holding it for more than a few months. Freezing is a nonsense term. It’s stealing but saying I’m not going to put it to use YET and maybe you’ll get it back if you do what I want you to. They’ve already stolen it by virtue of taking it from Russia with no intent of returning it and denying them use of it, they’re just quibbling whether they feel morally okay using it now or later and for what purposes. So IMO I hope they just take it, because they’ve already crossed a line and should suffer for it.
Only question is whether the west will actually manage to incentivize the creation or movement of means of production to replace this tariffed production from China. Certainly there are forces in India that would like to take on this role though the level of corruption and other endemic issues like lack of reliable utilities in many areas there and incomplete transport networks, etc makes it an uphill climb. With enough free money and subsidies it’s possible I suppose given a few years even in the west. In the end succeed or fail this will hurt Chinese exports a bit, hurt US workers who purchase these things and have to pay massively more whether because of tariffs or higher costs from reshored production. At the end of the day this is shooting the foot efforts to mitigate climate change because this will lessen the appeal of moving to green energy, EV’s, etc and it’s pretty predictable at the end of all these high prices Republicans (bad cop) will come in, declare the whole thing a failure and gut the subsidies leading to shrinkage of the whole industry and its usage in the west to being a kind of luxury thing.
So not only is Biden abetting genocide in Gaza, he’s pushing full steam ahead for full-scale eco-cide and the worst climate outcomes. China should really just gut-punch the US already, slap up a total stoppage on things and crash the US economy into the ground. US politicians are already badly hurting the proletariat with these moves and inflation so it would be a matter of getting very bad fast rather than slowly.
So this fine fellow is arguing that America would be fully within it’s rights to annihilate the ICC if they “kidnap” Netanyahu (which I think means issuing arrest warrants). His logic is that it’s a joke organization and they don’t get to tell us (Israel?) what to do....
Guarantee you when this person heard Putin had an arrest warrant on those bullshit made up charges they didn’t have these thoughts, they probably thought good or it was justified or simply nothing.
The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents.
P.S. never give cybersecurity spooks clicks even after they go "freelance" or whatever
Imagine if a Chinese company did this. Liberals would be hooting and hollering about Xi Jinping personally breaking into your apartment to rearrange your anime collection and take pictures of the files on your computer. There’d be immediate calls to ban the company from all business dealings within the US. But because it’s a US private corporation that abuses the shit out of the proletariat there’ll be a some pressure to fix it and they’ll maybe eventually get around to doing it and get a slap on the wrist if anything for this and a slap on the wrist for the rent fixing collusion.
No but their landleeches might. The guy who found this out works for Amazon hosting and lived in an apartment complex that installed them. He investigated and complained about this and was brushed off.
We’ll see if this holds up in court but I have a feeling the walls are closing in, the boot is falling, the illusion of freedom Americans have been granted will be stripped away soon....
I’ll admit it’s not as great as it once was but I do think one reason the US especially wants to gut punch Kaspersky is because they’re developed advanced security systems for industrial systems which Kaspersky previously revealed western backed state actors were very interested in trying to learn more about. These types of systems would be on the front line against western intelligence agency hacking campaigns.
Kaspersky actually set the standard for HIPs and behavior control some years ago, they’re no longer an exclusive pack leader there but their software very quickly had a lot of granularity in control making it one of the better fully loaded packaged solutions.
Right now I don’t see any good software that really has everything packaged together. It’s all configurators and gui’s for Windows systems plus bolted on other aspects like firewall control.
China has built a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target US and allied military capabilities,” Whiting said, describing Beijing’s efforts as moving at “breathtaking speed.”...
As usual it’s couched in the usual language of soft escalation they used in Vietnam and countless other places, the suggestion the troops will have non-combat roles, repair roles, free up Ukrainian troops but we all know the truth is if that was all they did it wouldn’t have a meaningful impact so they’re going to be in combat, in Ukrainian uniforms or plain fatigues with patches off or fatigues with patches on. Salami-slicing.
In the same way that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, AT&T, Twitter, Reddit are owned by the US government, that is subject to regulations of the government for the country in which they are legally headquartered, in which most of their engineering work is carried out, in which their primary development and internet distribution infrastructure is and in which their CEOs and top staff are.
Or how about how the top micro-chip lithography company ASML despite being headquartered in the Netherlands had its sales of its products to China vetoed by US pressure under the guise of US national security and suppressing China. So much for the free market from the country that claims to be capitalist. So much for allowing freedom of operation by private enterprise. And not just ASML, they’ve banned an American company, NVIDIA from selling it’s top AI chips to China as well, guess NVIDIA is an arm of the US government.
The US regularly applies pressure to companies.
That’s not even getting into a whole plethora of other areas where the US exercises hard and soft power.
They were targeted for being Chinese. If they sold to a US company they could double the privacy invasive practices and you wouldn’t hear a peep. It’s not about privacy, none of your legislators give a fuck about that. In fact they use private companies to spy on you to get around that pesky constitution which says they need warrants or special legislative carve-outs but nothing about them buying your data from private companies who collect it anyways.
The US could easily have passed a nearly guaranteed to pass judicial review (unlike this) broad bill aimed at forcing better privacy practices for all social media that would either force better privacy for users or drive these companies out of business or out of the US market. But that would target Facebook which has been one of the primary lobbyists behind the anti-tik-tok scare campaign because it is murdering them in the young people market and ad dollars for retirees are not quite as good as for the younger crowd and any social media stuck with only the old is destined to whither to irrelevancy.
This is a hit job, make no mistake. By Facebook and by western investors who have been unable to invest in it and thus profit from it unlike western social media so it has to go.
If anything actions like this prevent more people from having an honest conversation and understanding of the privacy and other issues of modern social media. By putting all the blame on it being Chinese and not examining the psychology, the privacy invasiveness, etc of all of these social media apps they prevent an honest conversation, honest questioning and discussion.
And how convenient, on lib lemmy I just saw a post in the news sub from Human Rights Watch (a division of the CIA-State Dept conglomerate) that was accusing them of human rights violations. Right on cue.
Prospects of peaceful reunification with Taiwan have ‘eroded’ – Beijing (www.rt.com)
China’s defense chief has warned that Taipei is being dragged into a “dangerous situation”...
US may have secretly approved attack on Russian nuclear radar – Austrian military (www.rt.com)
(Archive link)...
Opinion: The West is one step away from openly backing Taiwan separatism (www.rt.com)
(Archive link)...
Should I donate 20 DKK to Wikipedia?
Edit: I have subscribed to ProleWiki’s patreon
Confiscating Russian assets a violation of the principle of sovereign immunity (www.globaltimes.cn)
West considering large-scale conflict – Russian spy chief (www.rt.com)
(Archive link)...
Biden announces new tariffs on Chinese EVs, semiconductors, solar cells and more (lemmygrad.ml)
whitehouse.gov/…/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes…
I think I've finally found it: Peak jingoism (lemmygrad.ml)
So this fine fellow is arguing that America would be fully within it’s rights to annihilate the ICC if they “kidnap” Netanyahu (which I think means issuing arrest warrants). His logic is that it’s a joke organization and they don’t get to tell us (Israel?) what to do....
Looks like as Ukrainian collapse looms, there's now more and more talk of Europe sending troops to Ukraine. (www.spectator.co.uk)
US blocks Palestine’s UN membership bid (www.rt.com)
AP coverage...
US government wanted backdoor to Telegram – founder (www.rt.com)
Key points:...
US to ban Russian anti-virus software [Kaspersky] for all citizens – CNN (www.rt.com)
We’ll see if this holds up in court but I have a feeling the walls are closing in, the boot is falling, the illusion of freedom Americans have been granted will be stripped away soon....
Head of US Space Farce Sobs About Chinese and Russian Space Capabilities Beginning to Match and Overtake US (www.rt.com)
China has built a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target US and allied military capabilities,” Whiting said, describing Beijing’s efforts as moving at “breathtaking speed.”...
‘No evidence of genocide’ in Gaza – Pentagon chief (www.rt.com)
Lloyd Austin said the US remains “committed” to funding [the zionist occupation], denying mounting accusations of genocide...
NATO faces ‘catastrophic defeat’ in Ukraine, must deploy troops – ex-Pentagon adviser (www.rt.com)
Strategist Edward Luttwak has argued that members of the US-led bloc will have to deploy troops to prevent a Russian victory...
The Chinese government is signaling that it won’t allow a forced sale of TikTok 👏 (www.wsj.com)
archive.ph/y6m67
Fyodor Lukyanov: The world is entering a very dangerous time (www.rt.com)
The US-led bloc believes it’s infallible and that increases the chances of a calamitous mistake...
Nepal's communist parties join forces to form a new coalition government (www.thestar.com)