TreadOnMe

There are still large amounts of industrial capital in the U.S. They are usually tied directly into providing secondary goods for the U.S. service industry or auto mobile manufacturing. However, the U.S. is also still one of the largest providers of paper products internationally, because we are uniquely situated with a relatively small population to arable land (for obvious reasons). It just isn't as large as it was before percentage-wise and the job benefits are nowhere comparable to what they were in earlier times. It is literally buying into political propaganda that says manufacturing does not exist in this country. It does, it's just that the work is long, hard and tedious, and everything is moving away from unskilled labor and towards increasingly complex engineering automation and robotics solutions, of which the real labor-hour efficiency gains are unclear, but having two engineers on salary pulling unpaid overtime is usually cheaper than having four unskilled employees.

That being said, everything is dictated by finance and everyone is moving into finance. I'm not sure how it ends, but we are rapidly moving into the 'trading a briefcase full of $1000 back and forth until someone dies of starvation' territory.

I love when they say, oh he has won the most impressive collection of endorsements, none of which we will name except for a billionaire.

Yeah, no conservative has ever committed violence after not having 'democratic' politics not go in their favor.

I remember plenty of people here (myself included) who said the same thing. And I am not even a believer in accelerationism, it is just a noted phenomenon.

That makes more sense, since those areas would have been heavily industrialized.

You have this weird idea that tying up the US financial sector into Chinese assets would not be a win for China at the moment. You want to cause issues in a country, get everything directly aligned against the geopolitical projections of the military industrial complex. That said, to the degree that the English Chinese media portrays itself as wanting U.S. investment, it's likely because much of the Chinese bourgeois financial assets are tied up in the U.S. and Canada, which was a poor decision by them, and places them right in the line of expropriation if an actual conflict pops off between the U.S. and China. If Wall St gets as involved in China as the U.S. retail and services market does, that limits the possibility of that happening, as the financial sector has massive political sway in D.C. specifically.

55% tariffs is absolutely a win. It does nothing to actually create an incentive for the U.S. to actually pivot towards rebuilding it's domestic manufacturing base, since Chinese products are usually three to four times less than their competitors anyways, and is a drop in the bucket for what they actually trade globally. And this is besides the point that if they really cared, they would likely just redirect the trade through cut-outs in Malaysian.

The way we will know if this was actually a win for the U.S. is if Chinese companies start acquiring domestic manufacturers and then developing the domestic manufacturing production in the U.S. as has happened with the Saudi and UAE bourgeois in order to get around the tariffs.

Edit: Reading through this and other stuff you have posted, you make the assumption that the U.S. is going to somehow reverse it's decline in the ability to militarily project force and that they will eventually be able to take out China militarily. I am on the opposite side of that speculation. We are simply not going to agree on this. I too hope that China doesn't pull another China-Vietnam war and not learn from the mistakes of the U.S. in terms of understanding the changes and adaptations made in modern warfare. Historically, they have been very poor at it, and given how conflict adverse they are, they likely won't have any real experience up until the big one happens.

2nd Edit: And none of this implies that this is 'Good for Communism'. I think it is good for China, but I'm pretty unsure if continually entrenching yourself in the neoliberal world order will ever be a fantastic way to bring it about globally.

I was about to say, as a straight male patron of many a lesbian bar (because they are usually cheap dives), and the facilitator of at least three relationships through the process of 'being sociable', this is less of a 'how lesbian bars are' and more of a 'how lesbians wish lesbian bars were'. Maybe I'm just not going to the correct lesbian bars.

You are also missing the straight women who have mistaken it for a gay bar.

Yeah, it's totally better when you have completely paid actors in your advertising. Not even kidding, I watched many commercials be filmed in the retail store I worked at because it was right next to the corporate office, and they never once had an actual retail employee on film.

Or when you have a social media person whose whole job is to gussy up basic things like being able to take breaks and talk to your co-workers as being a 'fun work family'. Nope no advertising or influencing happening here.

That remains to be seen. I personally think one side or the other must win out, and that will be when the opportunity presents itself, because they both need to exist for the empire to continue running. If one side wins, it will destabilize the entire project, and that is where opportunity lies.

It's not the in-fighting that benefits us, it is the assumed total victory against their greatest challenger that will leave them open.

Yeah I had many similar experiences when some o my acquaintances in high school started an 'atheist club' and asked me to join because I was one of the more vocal non-believers in school (in that I would actively discuss and push back against faith-based narratives in class, but just within what was being discussed) but was still friendly with the more liberal evangelicals. I think I attended two meetings before I realized that most of them were just "Science as the superior faith" people and not really all that interested in the philosophy of knowledge or how to know things. It was a really eye opening moment for me that there needs to be more to this whole skeptic thing than just contrarianism, and felt that it was doomed to online obscurity.

I don't think much has changed, if anything there are more conservative Dennis's than there ever were before.

I'm not even sure Stalin has anything to do with the specific borders being drawn, he likely would have just reviewed and approved what was written up before it was sent to the general assembly of Soviets. But he was also abit of a notorious micro-manager, so it is possible that he would have been leading the meetings where it was discussed, but so would have multiple representatives from the Ukrainian nationalists and other affected Ukrianian and Russian speaking Soviets.

Hell part of my understanding was that part of the reason the USR got Russian speaking lands was as a form of reparations for treatment under the Russian empire, though it has since been portrayed as Stalin forcing Russian speaking people onto the USR in order to control it politically. This, of course, makes no sense since the RSR already was in control of the land politically and allied with the nascent Ukrianian nationalists, and that until recently, most Ukrainians and Russians understood themselves to be 'brother-people' which has a specific word in Russian and Ukrianian. Basically, it would have required Stalin to not only understand and plan for post-Cold War Russian politics, it also would have had him understand and plan for post-WWII Soviet politics, and been explicitly against the brand of socialism that he was the leader of the faction of.

Damn, can't believe God was the Politburo's nationalism committee headed by Stalin.