Doesn’t Hasan have a larger audience without doing that sort of thing?

Vaush’s whole thing is controversy bait. He purposely crosses lines to get people mad at him while maintaining some form of “plausible deniability” to where his fans can always find a way to defend and excuse his actions by talking about “you don’t understand the context” or whatever, it’s a very common and tiresome tactic. Like, if you’re trying to promote a shitty video game that can’t stand on it’s own merits, just do something to antagonize either the left or the right (doesn’t matter which) and then go to the other group and be like, “Look, the guys you hate hate us, you should check us out.” Controversy generates clicks. A big reason for Trump’s success is that he cracked the code on how to apply this formula to a political campaign. If you know how to recognize it, it’s very obvious that Vaush does this.

This sort of opportunism is very detrimental to actually understanding the world or promoting ideas or building a movement. It’s essentially brain-poisoning and a cognitohazard. You’re much better off reading actual books than just following whoever’s best at attracting attention on the internet. If you are going to shun books for videos, you should at least go with someone more educational, like Shaun.

I’m sure that your branding of the Chinese economy is based on a very high degree of intellectual rigor and definitely not just pulling words out of your ass based on vibes.

I didn’t say they weren’t doing fine or that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing.

So your position is that their system is “Fascist Corporatism,” but also… that’s fine, actually?

I just said that they’re not communists. This is not a bad thing! But lying about it is of course somewhat distasteful, especially for those people who think themselves as being communists.

Whether they’re “lying” is a matter of interpretation and ideological differences. Like, if I’m a hardcore, traditionalist Roman Catholic, maybe from my perspective, all Protestants are “lying” about being Christian because “true Christianity” means my interpretation of it. Likewise, if you’re a hardcore Maoist, then maybe you’d argue that China is governed by revisionists who are “lying” about being communists.

If we want to look at it from a relatively objective point of view, the largest number of self-identified communists in the world are Marxist-Leninists, who don’t view China as “lying about being communist” but rather agree with or at least critically support their approach. So, idk, if you want to join some fringe Christian sect that claims every other sect as being heretical and themselves as the sole defender of the faith, or if you want to join some fringe communist group that denounces every other communist group as revisionist and themselves as the only “real” communists, then idk, you do you ig. But not everyone who believes different things from you is “lying.”

What do they do in China, exactly? It looks like single-party fascist corporatism.

The funny thing about discussions about China’s economy is that you can use pretty much any term to describe it as long as it’s bad. If “socialist” or “communist” is understood to be a bad thing to those in the conversation, you can use those terms without objection, but you can also say stuff like “Feudalism” or “Fascist Corporatism” or “Colonialism” or “Capitalist” or “State Capitalist” or whatever tf else, it’s all just vibes-based and the only requirement is that the vibes be bad.

China has a mixed economy with a combination of state ownership and private investment, with the state maintaining a controlling share in certain key industries, and preventing (at least so far) economic elites from infiltrating the government for the purpose of widespread regulatory capture and deregulation. Billionaires exist but sometimes face real consequences for illegal activity, and the balance between public and private ownership tips more heavily towards public when compared to other countries such as those in Europe.

The partial liberalization of the economy is meant to encourage economic development post-industrialization, and prevent the challenges the USSR faced with economic stagnation post-industrialization. Central planning works great if you’re just trying to meet people’s basic needs like food or shelter, but the demand for consumer goods is more fluid. This policy is also adapted to the global situation, China has benefitted greatly from industry moving there and by becoming a major trade partner of the US and other countries (while also holding the bulk of manufacturing output), that makes it difficult for outside forces to go to war or level sanctions/tariffs on them.

It is not a “communist” country in the sense of having achieved communism (in this sense, a “communist country” is an inherent contradiction). It could be called a communist/socialist country in the sense that it is governed by (self-identified) communists. Socialism, or I should specify Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, aren’t a set of specific policies but rather a materialist and class-based mode of analysis to be applied and adapted differently depending on material conditions.

Some hardcore Maoists would argue that China’s current system is a deviation from the correct socialist ideas, as espoused by Mao. However, there’s also this odd branch of Westerners that don’t like China’s liberalized system because “it has billionaires,” but also don’t like what they had before under Mao when they didn’t have billionaires, but also claim to dislike full-on capitalism - so as far as I can tell, they just dislike China regardless of what they do or don’t do. I’ve yet to find any such person who’s actually willing and capable to engage in a discussion of “what should they do/have done economically” as opposed to just bashing them. And in fact, when asked what kind of economic system they support, they’ll often describe a mixed system similar to what China has, but then be like, “but not like that.”

Kinda seems unfair that somebody’s aunt should have to purchase insulin she needs to survive, like she shouldn’t have to work harder to have the same lifestyle as someone without a disability. Maybe we should just give her the insulin she needs to survive, and compensate the people who make it out of some sort of common pool of resources everyone is required to contribute to, in order to distribute the costs more fairly.

Yeah, or like they do in China.

Unfortunately for many parts of the world, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to go full socialist or not, if you get in the way of multinational exploitation and neocolonialism, you’re gonna get couped. There’s no shortage of left-leaning non-socialists who have also been targeted by the CIA. Like Guatemala, where they just wanted to do basic land reform so farmers could work their own land, but Chiquita didn’t like that so it became the origin of the term “Banana Republic.”

would not the fact that blue shifted galaxies being rare, mean that in general all galaxies are red shifted from the perspective of all galaxies, thus they are expanding away from a point on a similar vector, and thus have a central point?

No, it means the opposite. They are expanding away from all points, because space itself is expanding. In fact, stars are able to move away from each other faster than the speed of light, which is only possible because space is expanding. Again, like the surface of a balloon, we can imagine that the further away two points are from each other, the faster they’ll move away from each other as the balloon expands, so even if there’s a certain maximum speed that you can move along the surface of the balloon, if two points are far enough away from each other the rate that distance is created between them can exceed that speed.

If there was a single, specific point in space where all the stuff came from, then we wouldn’t observe the same thing in every direction. Sure, we might see stuff ahead of us redshifted because it’s moving faster and stuff behind us redshifted because we’re moving faster, but we should also expect to see stuff to the sides moving alongside us at similar speeds that would not be redshifted. The fact that there’s consistent red shifting in every direction, getting more pronounced the greater the distance, leads us to the conclusion that space is expanding.

And a balloon does have a vector of direction: the mouth piece

It’s an analogy, don’t take it too literally.

Imagine the universe as the surface of a balloon. The Big Bang Theory stipulates that at one point, the balloon was extremely small, like a single point. But now that the balloon is bigger, you can’t find a particular spot on the balloon where that point was, because everywhere was that point. No matter where you are in the universe, if you turned back time and shrunk the balloon back down, you would be at the point of the Big Bang. Nowhere is closer or farther away from it.

That it’s trivially easy for them to just casually decide to do a genocide with no input or oversight from any democratic process that could hold them accountable or allow the people to actually control what our foreign policy is.

It’s pretty much in line with the “Lizardman Constant,” named after a poll that 4% of Americans think the world is run by lizard people. You can ask anything in a poll and you’ll pretty much always get around 4% trolling or whatever.

And that in itself is a reason why the intelligence community cannot be allowed to exist in its current form.

And I think it’s funny that you’re blatantly lying about what other people believe, and your response to that is, “Ha! Not every word that comes out of my mouth is a lie, only lots of them!”

Of course, the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” of the national security state. The careerists don’t want oversight and the president wants plausible deniability so they’re left to just do whatever tf they want with no democratic accountability whatsoever.

Despite his contributions, he was forced to undergo chemical castration because of his sexuality, so it was a pretty big deal.

due to choices made by the Indonesian government

If you knew anything at all about the thing you’re talking about, the democratically elected Indonesian government were some of the ones being targeted in the genocide, by far-right groups who were able to overthrow it due to US backing. Absolutely disgusting to try to blame this on the Indonesians and trying to absolve the US of guilt.

If I go through your post history, what’s the over-under I’ll find you blaming Russia for the rise of the far-right in the US?

Yeah, but that resulted in John Tyler who was a pro-slavery democrat in all but name. Can’t really win.

I agree with most of this, but slave owners could dream of a lot of violence.