It keeps crashing and not loading stuff correctly and giving me lots of hang time.

A lot like Reddit around the time I left Digg

Let’s just assume that the data you’re using here is trustworthy, since that makes this a very simple discussion.

According to that article, COVID may have resulted in a million deaths in China above the long-term trend line in the last 3 years. This is known as the excess mortality rate, which we can directly compare to other countries even if China lied about COVID mortality (and hey, maybe they did - it would be in their own interests so it’s plausible)

According to this article, since the pandemic began the US’s excess deaths have also sparked sharply even as the COVID mortality rate falls in official government data (sound familiar?) FTA: Since the pandemic began, excess deaths are up by more than 1.25 million in the U.S., about 15% higher than in the pre-pandemic years. That’s worse even when you don’t take populations into account!

Now we can do excess deaths per capita to compare these two policies:

• China’s population is notoriously huge, with currently 1.412 billion people living in China. 1 million excess deaths among 1.412 billion people gives us an excess death rate of ~0.07%

• America is a much smaller country, with 331.9 million people. 1.25 million excess deaths among 331.9 million gives us an excess death rate of ~0.38%

That means America’s policies were 5x worse on a per capita basis. This is why American life expectancy has fallen behind Chinese life expediency. “Ineffective and unnecessary” by what measure?

If China had responded as badly as the US and had an excess death rate of ~0.38% then over 5 million people would have died. Even if we take your pessimistic numbers at face value, zero COVID saved so many lives that Chinese life expectancy actually rose above American life expectancy!

America is the worst of its cohorts, but the rest of the West failed too!

• France had 151,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost over 3 million

• Germany had 254,000 excess deaths . At that rate China would have lost over 4 million

• Britain had 237,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost just under 5 million.

• In fairness, according to your data, China only barely outcompeted South Korea at 42,000 excess deaths - at that rate China would have lost 1.14 million instead of a measly 1 million. That’s still 140,000 lives that were saved because of zero COVID that would have died with South Korean policies.

In conclusion, China is a positive force in the world and I know which side I’m on in the next Cold War.

You can have the last word. Pick a side lib.

China’s zero COVID policy saved countless lives, possibly millions, while Americans were marched to our deaths to make widgets as “essential workers”. That’s what the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie does - social murder.

How the hell could you look at that and then conclude “zero COVID was insane”? Or that it’s no different than bourgeois nationalism? They literally put the lives of workers above economic productivity! That’s clearly the behavior of a worker state.

You seem to think that China is some kind of hive colony and that all dissent from the masses is crushed with zero hope for any sort of change ever happening. As if China has solved the human equation and can maintain perfect dominance despite internal contradictions.

I strongly disagree. It maybe appears that way because we’re entering a new Cold War, but in reality politics is still possible in China and people can still do things to force changes.

We actually saw this! China was set to maintain their zero COVID policy for as long as the virus was a threat, but internal protests drove them to follow the rest of the world into reopening. If you were right then zero COVID would have never ended.

Personally, I think zero COVID was a net positive and disagree with the protests, but I can at least recognize that people hated it and that China eventually listened to protesters as all governments eventually must. No government can maintain perfect domination. You are far too pessimistic about China.

Orientalism.

The reason the slave trade isn’t a thing anymore is because the US/UK-led global empire decided to collectively abolish it in the first place.

That’s really what you think, huh? They just abolished slavery because they decided to? For what? Because they’re so nice? lol

It can only be an anomaly, because not only did the US/UK/Europe win the geographical lottery (making it an anomaly that can’t be repeated) but also the Atlantic slave trade and the rapid expansion into the so-called New World was another anomaly. Then, like I said, the World Wars created another anomaly that saw literally every other empire fall and the US gobble them all up with only the USSR around to challenge them. Then the USSR fell and the US became the sole global hegemon, another anomaly that, combined with intercontinental flight and communication, created the first global empire in history!

China doesn’t have the same geographical advantages. China doesn’t have the opportunity to steal trillions in wealth from native lands and native peoples. China can’t make a new slave trade. China will be forced to compete with other powers, like the declining US and EU as well as regional rivals like India and Russia. China can’t recreate US global hegemony, and neither can any other country because all the low-hanging fruit has already been eaten. US hegemony is collapsing because it’s an unsustainable form of geopolitics. There’s no bonanza of resources to exploit anymore, it’s all gone, and now we’ll be entering a post-neoliberal world with permanent multipolarity.

Let us not forget that global warming is going to continue to destabilize the entire world with billions forced to migrate. Country after country will collapse into uninhabitable dead zones. China isn’t going to build an empire in the ashes left by this particular epoch, no one will and no one can.

This is a new situation and I obviously could be wrong, but unless China figures out cold fusion or asteroid mining or something I don’t see them becoming the new global empire. We’re at the end of an era and something new is happening.

I don’t believe Chinese hegemony is possible. US hegemony is a historical anomaly created by the very specific circumstances of colonialism, slavery, and then the post-WW2 period that saw all the old empires destroyed.

Once this empire is dead, there won’t ever be another. The material conditions won’t allow for it.

Your country extracted super profits from the exploitation of the third world and then redistributed a small portion of that stolen wealth to pacify the workers. Mine did that too and that’s nothing to be proud of!

tankies now still demand unconditional loyalty for their anti-US crusade, with little regard for anything else.

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, which means the contradictions of US hegemony are the highest contradictions and take precedence!

It doesn’t matter if I personally disagree with how China is responding to Muslim extremism or how it responds to protesters or how it is supposedly “developing the means of production” with state capitalism, because China is still an ally in the fight against empire.

When the empire is dead we can deal with the lesser contradictions.

As the saying goes, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

By refusing to condemn China, I must therefore support it. That’s how it works. You can’t just be a third positionist about this and say “I oppose everybody with my own special snowflake socialism!”

“support”

You keep using this word, but do you really think any of the people you call tankies have actually done anything to support these countries? Or, more likely, are you using “support” to mean “refuse to condemn/disavow”?

Well, count me in to that group.

I will not join the imperialist dogpile against China. My opinions about their government is irrelevant at best, and at worst by joining in the echo chamber of “China Bad!” then I am helping America pave the way for a war it so obviously wants.

If you want to call that support, then I have to ask why supposed “socialists” are joining America in attacking China!

Tankie was recouperated from dissident socialists, the way it’s used today has very little to do with its origin. Just because something starts out as a politically radical idea doesn’t mean it can’t get twisted in bourgeois society. It’s mostly just used as a smear to mean “communist I don’t like”

It’s like woke - what started as a term used by BLM to criticize oppression of minorities was recouperated and now it’s been turned into a right-wing smear and lost all meaning.

I’d considered it and dismissed the idea before, but I think I was just scared of transitioning.

Then I got to feel what I was missing and knew what I was missing out on :)

When we started wearing masks at work, I started to get called ma’am a lot.

I started hormones the next year.