Anyone who thinks China will be pleased for a more chaotic global situation doesn’t really understand the Chinese strategic situation.

China borders 14 countries. Four of those states are nuclear-armed: India, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia. Of those four, only Russia and North Korea are its allies (but it remains to be seen how loyal they are, considering their subordinate status.) Three of the four, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea are one crisis away from total collapse, a nuclear nightmare scenario for China.

China shares a border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, both hotbeds for extremist activity and both teetering on the edge of chaos themselves. Further chaos in the Middle East makes this situation less predictable for China.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has turned Kazakhstan and many other Central Asian powers towards the West just as China was making big inroads into those countries.

China needs the West to be stable because China does not have the consumer base to sustain its own economy, and finding new markets has been borderline impossible.

If you want to know who is responsible for the chaos, look to who it benefits: Vladimir Putin, who is losing his disastrous war in Ukraine and desperately needs the West to reduce its support; Iran who are facing unprecedented social unrest with no sign of abatement; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been stoking the flames of this conflagration with the desperation of a man whose only path away from prison and disgrace is a “justified” war that might get his next election over the line.

Whatever anyone says about the historical context aside, in the plainest of terms this war began with an enormous assault by Hamas against Israel, and so the US is bound by treaty to assist - whether they like it or not.

The IDF have been extremely critical of their leadership. Historically, soldiers being forced to fight a war for leadership they don’t support frequently ends badly for leadership when they return home.

Funny how you considered it fundamentally flawed for having problems after 40 years of continuous growth, when we in the west have regular “corrections” generally every 10 years.

This guy thinks an economy correcting itself is a bad thing

China’s going to need an astronomical amount of migration to sustain their aging population, and there’s little to no reason why people would choose to migrate there over basically anywhere in the West.

China would need to do some dramatic reinvention to become an appealing destination for migrants. Step 1 might be not arbitrarily taking migrants as hostages for political purposes.

They also have the most disproportionate gender imbalance of any nation in history, and gender imbalance is strongly associated with internal disunity and violence.

counting China completely out when it’s clowning the rest of the world on infrastructure right now

Wtf does infrastructure have to do with anything. There’s lots of Roman infrastructure all over the Mediterranean, when was the last time you met a citizen of the SPQR?

The only correlation building infrastructure has with economic prosperity is that governments often use infrastructure projects to patch over economic lulls and stimulate a lagging economy.

But for infrastructure projects to be a benefit they need to deliver more productivity to the economy than they cost to build, at minimum enough to cover the debt taken on the build it.

China used infrastructure spending to artificially stimulate the economy at a breakneck pace, and now they have all this infrastructure nobody is using. High speed trains nobody rides, entire cities built from scratch with few to no residents or businesses, and there’s only so long you can do that before it becomes unsustainable - which is now.

So what exactly are they going to do with all this infrastructure now, that will save their economy? Sell it? Half the problem is that there is no buyers.

Democracy and free market capitalism are not the ideal form a civilisation should take for many reasons, but they both have very powerful self-correcting mechanisms which have made it the most stable form of nation-state. China’s only protection against being run into the ground was its term limits, allowing leadership to step down gracefully without losing face and new leadership to step up and change with the times. Xi Jinping removed those. It remains to be seen if he has the capacity to steer away from catastrophe.

You actually think 55% of Australians are racist?

You understand that the vast majority of No voters voted that way because they didn’t understand what it was, and the No campaign very deliberately did everything they could to make it unclear and confusing.

In retrospect they really should have set it up first and let it run for a bit before they tried to put it in the constitution.

In retrospect Albanese made a big mistake breaking his own rule in being a small target and “taking Australia with you” on big changes. I suspect this will be a bit of a “told you so” moment for the section of the Labor party agitating for bigger social and economic initiatives.

Not really. This is a tragedy but historically referendums in Australia only pass with bipartisan support.

Also historically, the side that wins the referendum doesn’t win the next election, because our referendums are zero-sum yes or no choices akin to FPTP elections which favours American-style extreme politics, whereas our general elections employ preferential voting and compulsory suffrage which requires potential governments to appeal to the political centre. The referendum has shown people who the opposition party really are, and they won’t be able to walk that back.

It was to put them in the constitution as the original inhabitants of Australia and give them the right to a mostly powerless advisory body to the Commonwealth government called “the Voice”.

It was a pretty conservative idea but unfortunately the conservative opposition leader is the arch-racist piece of shit who will never win a real election, but in his desperation to make a name for himself he campaigned against the referendum, and referendums traditionally only succeed with bipartisan support. So now all that’s really been accomplished is to disenfranchise our indigenous population even more.

The difference is our electoral system doesn’t let the 30% of racist pieces of shit run the entire country.

My man colonialism created India and Pakistan but if Pakistan started slaughtering Indian civilians that would still be Pakistan’s responsibility.

Uh, the last time we heard this it was the Russians in Ukraine and the ICC finds those claims credible enough to investigate.

It doesn’t really matter if this is real or not.

Hamas killed over a thousand Israelis, Israel doesn’t need any other justification.

The cost will skyrocket as the ruble collapses

Sock puppeting works because it’s cheap, requiring payment would be a big spanner in the works.

You think they can make a machine do parkour, and they can make a machine navigate collapsed buildings, but they won’t be able to make a machine that can clear a building?

Sorry Maverick you can’t drop the drone because it’s forbidden in the Terms of Service, over.