xtian

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by xtian 5y ago
Will you enlist?
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by xtian 5y ago
I didn’t say it was all futile and hopeless. I have a lot of hope, but maybe in a different direction than you do. And my opinions on these issues have developed significantly even in the last year. I’m always open to new understanding. But
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by xtian 5y ago
Facing the reality I mentioned is the only opinion that matters. From there we can start to talk about building something new. Otherwise, have all the anti-war protests and activism in the last 20-30 years curtailed the US war machine one b
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by xtian 5y ago
“Economic pressure” also kills children and brings suffering to the people. The fact is that the US has bankrolled or committed itself atrocities just as gruesome as any of the “evil dictators” against which our media drums up popular fervo
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by xtian 5y ago
Yeah true the only way to know their real interests is to listen to the West. That's why when native Chinese people say the social credit system doesn't exist I call them liars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaPv
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by xtian 5y ago
A survey conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School found that satisfaction with the central government in China rose from 86.1% in 2003 to 93.1% in 2016: https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resil... Is
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by xtian 5y ago
Their official position is that they will invade if any of a few specific things occur. And China's military spending is less than 4% of their GDP last I checked. That seems pretty good to me given all the geopolitical aggression the
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by xtian 5y ago
> Third: It's 23 million people who have built an advanced economy. Being able to siphon that wealth will be a massive boon for the CCP and other parts of China. Ah yes, the filthy lucre of siphoning an economy with 4% of their own
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by xtian 5y ago
> we own Taiwan and we will depose their government by force if necessary, eventually. Until very recently this was Taiwan's stance on China. What exactly would China gain from invading Taiwan? My understanding is that their main go
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by xtian 5y ago
That article is vague even by the standards of Western reporting about China. This Reuters article about the same event is more specific: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-defence-idUSKBN2BU... It says Chinese
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China and Climate Change: An Exchange(mronline.org)
1 points by xtian 6y ago|0 comments
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by xtian 6y ago
So the capitalist system is “saving money to buy stocks” and the solution to fix it is “bipartisanship” and “metrics”? Gotta say he does make a strong case for the failure of the US education system.
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by xtian 6y ago
So if crises happened both before and after efforts at intervention it almost seems like the tendency is endemic to capitalism itself. Which is one of the many things Marx was right about.
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by xtian 6y ago
The whole reason government intervention into the economy was introduced (creating your "crony capitalism") was that falling profit margins meant the only way to maintain or grow overall profit levels was to increase production, w
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by xtian 6y ago
I'm not sure what you think you're proving, but to me it seems like you have a restrictive conception of human meaning and spirituality that you're trying to forcefully ascribe to Marx.
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by xtian 6y ago
But you haven’t proven how Marx understood the term, simply that he rejected certain ideas from his time. Does spirituality mean denying struggle and conflict in human history? I’m not going to attempt to prove a negative with regards to di
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by xtian 6y ago
Dialectical materialism isn’t in conflict with spirituality. It doesn’t deny that humans are spiritual creatures. It is in conflict with metaphysical idealism. If that’s what you’re trying to say then I agree, but I’m simply making the poin
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by xtian 6y ago
I asked where Marx denied spirituality, and you misinterpreted quotes based on the assumption that spirituality as humans experience it is the same as Western metaphysical idealism. The long history of mystic and traditional practices refut
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by xtian 6y ago
I’m not interested in the categorical definition of spirituality in the Western philosophical tradition. I don’t think Western definitions have anything to do with the spirituality humans have participated in for tens of thousands of years.
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by xtian 6y ago
Materialism within Marxism is more similar to the unitive worldview of eastern philosophy than the dead mechanistic sense we associate with the term. It doesn’t deny spirituality. It just asserts that human meaning and spirit exist within a
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by xtian 6y ago
There have been accusations that ICE has performed forced sterilizations, but for now it remains at the level of conspiracy theory. It's easy to talk about how "unfortunate" US atrocities were and insist they're "in
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by xtian 6y ago
Where did Marx deny spirituality?
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by xtian 6y ago
Marxism is not about fixed ontological categories like you're describing, it's about understanding the universe and society as a processes which develops according to interrelated dynamic forces. My understanding of class in Marxi
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by xtian 6y ago
How does capitalism as an economic system seek to create checks and balances?
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by xtian 6y ago
What makes Homebrew a failure? I don’t generally have issues with it for my needs.
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by xtian 6y ago
Is that an argument? I notice from your comment history that you defend the UK at every turn. Why is that more legitimate than someone from the middle of the US taking seriously his country’s history of foreign coups and war crimes and tryi
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by xtian 6y ago
I'm from the US so that's what I'm qualified to speak about. It rates highly on this supposedly authoritative index so that's why I used it as an example. What I mentioned about the US is not conjecture. The funding of U
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by xtian 6y ago
I don't think "democracy" is something you can measure objectively like a scientist in a lab. What these indexes measure is proximity to Western liberalism, but I think different peoples have the right to their own forms of g
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by xtian 6y ago
The National People's Congress in China has more members per capita than the US House or Senate as well as more independents and minority party representation. The NPC has a higher percentage of women than the US Congress (exceeding th
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by xtian 6y ago
Oh, “the democracy index”? Good thing we have a neutral and objective measure of each country’s quantity of abstract democracy. I’m sure there’s no cultural chauvinism or politically-motivated biases at play here.

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