Xi Jinping
, Who rules with absolute authority (Voted by the national people’s congress
), has shown he is willing to let the Chinese people endure Hardship(not buying US Treats). President Trump revealed he has limits (he fucked around and now he is finding out) 
china will grind to a halt without southern yellow pine 2x4s
it was wild learning a 2x4 isn’t 2"x4"
shrinkflation smh
I learned that when I was like 7 years old because most of my close family work in construction trades.
There is actually a reason for this, and you can also get a “raw” 2x4, the finished ones are slightly smaller because they get dried, sanded, and shaved to meet a more exact measurement standard.
America: Trump may be evil but at least he’s not chinese
This assumes the average American can form such a sentence without slurs
The way I’ve heard many Americans say it, they seem to think “Chinese” IS a slur.
One of the most common slurs against Chinese people is literally just a portmanteau of the words “China” and “man”. The slur wholly depends on people already thinking Chinabad for it to be insulting.
I don’t assume the average American can form a sentence.
I’m vaguely remembering a study that showed that the US had one of the lowest literacy rates of high wealth nations, which strongly reinforces your point
You have successfully persuaded the Europeans
Source is New York Times if anyone else was wondering.
thanks, I was guessing BezosPost but I was 50/50 on that guess
The New York KKKrimes at it again.
Funny I’ve literally been talking to people in China all night in a group chat and none of them seem to be enduring hardship. Im sure western media wouldn’t lie tho.
My favourite one was “Xi Jinping surrounds himself with allies” Ooooh, 2 spooky 4 me.
Xi staffs his top-level positions with people close to him: evil
US President staffs his top-level positions with people close to him: meritReal
vibes
Wait, last when i checked it was “China stands alone”
Smart leaders know to surround themselves with enemies who want them dead
It’s disturbing how this whole debacle has led to exactly zero conversations about curbing the power of the executive
Like congress is totally fucking useless but they used to at least have some self respect. You would think that for being power hungry jackals they would be a little more power hungry
I said the same thing in Trump’s first term when he was threatening to nuke the DPRK. Liberals were all up in arms that Trump would possibly do that, but NONE of them even questioned if the executive should have that kind of power in the first place.
That said, I’m currently reading Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. And it’s clear to me that the men who wrote that dogshit constitution clearly thought the executive and the judiciary should have a ton of power. Those rich assholes hated the poor and yeoman farmers, and so much of what they put in the final document was basically just “we can never let anyone challenge the sacred rights of property”, and saw the executive as the final check on democracy. The whole idea of the electoral college was that they couldn’t trust people to make that decision (and “people” here just means propertied white men anyway) so they would nominate aristocrats to make the real decision. They saw a powerful judiciary and executive as the real source of power. Really, this all is just a return to form.
Yeah, it’s not new. Wasn’t the senate explicitly designed as an anti-democractic body as well?
The senate was designed specifically for the wealthy, it was seen as a sort of House of Lords for the US and was seen as the superior to whatever house of legislature had more democratic representation.
Such a great read, if not a bit boring when he’s just listing off their property.😅 But it was a real eye opener to the thought process behind this country, especially finding out the truth behind the Constitutional Convention and what the general population was moving towards with Shaw’s Rebellion.
I found it to be a great followup to Gerald Horne’s Counter-Revolution of 1776, if you’ve not read that yet.
Yeah good point they’ve always been useless
Congress and the judiciary both. Trump is operating with near absolute impunity and shows how this system relied almost entirely on the willingness of participants to “play by the rules” in the past.
Matt Christman has a good Inebriated Past that is closely related to this, Chapo Trap House Ep 329
like the drug guy?
I don’t follow
For congress, they have been willingly ceding power to the executive for most of US history. The most obvious one is war making and war declarations. Congress will cede powers that are risky or divisive between donors and constituents or factions of either. They mostly just want to hang on to enough power to get the lobbying dollars and get sinecure jobs afterwards, but not enough power that they make risky decisions that would piss off those donors/corporations.
Wow, Trump’s being rehabilitated before his term even ends. That has to be a new record.
This is the classic thing that even happened back during Trump 1. It’s the cycle of Trump talks about doing bad thing and sometimes starts doing it, news talks about how bad it will be, Trump backs down and scales back to only doing part of it which is still bad, news praises Trump for not going through with it fully.
Trump bombed Syria in 2017 and the libs clapped like seals
afaik Xi can be removed by a vote of the central committee
yeah people just can’t wrap their minds around indirect elections. like you vote for some guys that then vote for a guy to do executive stuff. if you don’t agree with your guys choice you recall them.
they act like direct popular election of the executive is the pinnacle of democracy (when it’s even a fucking recent invention in liberal democracies!)
imagine having representatives that you can directly interact with and recall at will. thousands of times more “democratic” then an executive popularity contest
(also this is how you get competent managers, which is what the executive should be. managers of things when the legislature is not in session)
reminds me of this, I hope you like it. (seeing Trump wildly mash buttons on the imperial console has made this age well imo)
On a small scale, direct democracy is great, the problem is when you try to scale it up, direct democracy transforms into its opposite and becomes the greatest hindrance to democracy.
The problem is, and I know leftcoms don’t like to hear this, but regular people are not omniscient! The large the scale of the election, the more difficult it is for a person to even grasp the full scale of what they’re voting for.
Take, for example, the US presidential election. If Joe Biden had a 5 minute conversation with every single American of voting age, it would take almost 2000 years to complete. It’s not physically possible for regular people to come to know a candidate on an election of this scale organically.
How do they come to know them, then? Simple, through media institutions. You cannot vote for someone without knowing who they are, and hence, whoever is placed on the media will be the first step in the nomination process to decide who can get elected, since it will be impossible for voters to even know who they are voting for without the media.
Who ran for president in the US last election? You can probably say Joe Biden, Donald Trump, maybe if you followed it closely you’d know some less known candidates like Bernie or Howie.
In reality, 1,216 people ran for president in 2022. Yet, you don’t know of almost any of them. Because you only know of who the media told you about. And it’s even worse in the US because the media is controlled by money so a candidate’s viability is directly linked p with how much money they raise to appear in the media.
In practice, large-scale direct democracy always just devolves into a dictatorship of the media. Whatever small group has control over the media will control all of society, because regular people are not omniscient and won’t understand how to run a country as big as China with over a billion people, and will rely on the TV to tell them how to vote, not because they’re not smart, but because nobody is that smart. You aren’t either, nor am I.
With some exceptions like national referendums on issues people might actually generally know about, in general, all elections should be very small in scale, or else they will be easily susceptible to manipulation.
Yes, for a large society, this requires many layers of elections, but it originates from small scale direct democratic elections at the base, and every layer going up is subject to the right to recall by the one below it. Each election is small enough so that people know who they are voting for at every step, so it is a rational system and not a chaotic one, producing efficient government that has its roots in the public.
This is far more functional than some chaotic direct democracy where 1+ billion Chinese people vote on every single issue. Such a thing would be a complete disaster and not democratic at all.
It also adds a benefit of making it rather difficult to climb to the top. To be president, you have to constantly prove yourself on every layer. You have to start small, directly elected at the root, and prove yourself at a local level, and eventually work your way up until you eventually prove you can manage towns, cities, whole provinces, until you can even be considered to be at the helm of the entire nation.
Adding these layers not only makes it more democratic and rational as a system but it also has a benefit of inherently injecting merit into the process.
The obsession over direct democracy for everything needs to go. It works well for somethings, small-scale elections at the base for the first layer of representatives, and occasionally on natural referendums where certain issues affect everyone. But it is not some cure-all silver-bullet for everything and is in fact a complete disaster if you try to apply it to everything.
—zhenli真理
great read i’m saving this!
the media access part really hits home. especially in the U.S., the whole “setting the narrative” thing.
there’s only so much room in people’s attention span unless you sit at your PC all day and obsessively research.
also the layered approach is really the only way to create an actual meritocratic system. sure, it’s possible for corruption but that can be countered by strong accountability.
Yes, the Chinese people had to endure the huge hardship of charging American tourists double for a week. How could Xi put them through that?
Their authoritarian willingness to let the people endure hardship, our free-market principles of personal responsibility and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.
hardship-bearers in that case being hedge fund managers and ceo-s
Decoupling from the US is gonna be sooooo hard bro trust me the CCP is finished, it’s so over they’ve got no homegrown industry to cope with the tarriffs they’re gonna starve trust me, their economy will collapse bro, anytime
These are the same fucking people going on for two weeks about how yankkkees should endure hardship. Incredible
“B-b-b-boss! You gotta see this! It’s real bad!”
“What’s all this ruckus?”
“The president flinched! The Chinese got a win and now people are going to see the superiority of China’s socialist government! Look at these comments, “Lol. Lmao.” Sir, these people are laughing at the very concept of liberal democracy! There’s no possible way to spin this as a China Bad story!”
“Oh, 's that all? Just say whatever they were trying to do was bad so it was good that our guy flinched.”
“But sir, Trump was the one that started the trade war! If it’s bad, won’t we look like the aggressors?”
“Look, you don’t gotta suck 'em off or anything. Just give ‘em the ol’, ‘both sides bad but their side worse.’ ‘Neither Washington nor Beijing, but Washington.’ They’ll eat it up. Forget about who started what, the readers want to hear why China’s bad, if we don’t mention it they won’t think about it.”
“Brilliant, sir! That’s an incredible way to turn it around! I’ll get right on it!”
“Whatever. Fuckin’ rookies.”
