If your government refuses to stop the flow of drugs into the US by addressing cartels don't be surprised if the US delivers weapons to said cartels so they can have some infighting going on.

If the mexican government would actually make work of dismantling the organized trade, there would be no incentive to deliver them weapons to shoot each other.

My Spanish isn't great, but it seems like the CIA agents were going on missions with Mexican authorities. Is that an issue?

They were declared cia officers with black diplomatic passports.

> Just a couple of days ago we found out that 4 undercover CIA agents were operating here in Mexico

was that a surprise? i'd be more surprised if it were only 4.

The only instance of false equivalence I see is the mention of lower back pain vs cancer.

The US committed massive treaty violations and genocide, on top of huge imperialist destabilization of many sovereign nations. Tianmen square and the Uyghers are bad, but we're straight up evil.

canada has our own history of socialism in the form of crown corps and healthcare. why wouldnt we lean into our own successful practices?

"communist Russia"

Don’t forget, it also allows them to regularly and consistently jail citizens either zero recourse.

I promise you they wouldn’t be getting released like we have happening in the US.

>when I was in Shanghai, I went for a walk and saw more McLarens and Ferraris in a few hours than I've seen in New York, Berlin, and Paris combined.

Sounds awful imo.

Yet when they want beautiful nature and buildnings etc they go here to Europe.

Very much. Try to start a union in China and see how communist that country is. China is essentially a right-wing hypercapitalist country run by a dictatorship.

It's funny how this comment (which states nothing but facts) was upvoted and then some poeple were coping with reality by downvoting it.

Nazis? Soviets? CCP? Spanish Empire? How are you doing the math?

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

In it's entire existence? I believe it shot up a couple tens of thousands of schools during the cultural revolution, and not by mistake. But yeah, I guess that's not bombing. China clearly prefers shooting the students, keeping the building.

Why are you changing the subject?

I'm not who you were originally talking to, champ.

Which ones do you like to mention?

The issue is that the way you're expected to criticize America from what I observed is along the lines of 'they mean well but...'

With China, you can say 'yeah, this is good, but they eat babies for fun' and it would mostly pass with people nodding along.

No I don't mean one needs to be American. The reciprocal isn't valid. I talked about China. Given the misinformation the "western emisphere" has been subject to, I would find it dubious to get the echoes of what mainstream media portrays it as, even though there are elements of truth in what most people believe.

The U.S politics are easier to understand from the outside. For one it's a democracy, a more transparent process despite a lot is happening behind curtains. I have no idea what North Koreans are able to make of the U.S scene, I know for sure people in U.S and Europe are hardly able to comment on N.K.

tldr: I'm with you non Americans (and Americans) are perfectly able to critique the U.S with some valuable accuracy.

I find western obsession with "being able to critique X" very weird because it stops at just that. There's very little attention paid to whether the critique produces useful outcomes. While cost of living, energy scarcity, employment, education, wars, etc are all getting worse, people focus on being able to insult the president as the ultimate freedom, even when that achieves nothing.

Meanwhile in China, you can't change the ruling party but you can change policies. They restrict media and speech freedom, but they also work tirelessly to improve the livelihoods of the people.

If the west chooses the value empty talk over outcomes, fine, you have the right to choose that. But no need to force that value on other societies. China and Chinese society at large has the right value unity and livelihood over speech. They have the right to prefer what westerners call an "authoritarian" government that delivers on those values, without getting demonized. They're not forcing their way on you, no need for you to force your way on them.

We're lucky the EU regulators moved so slowly that the industry had already consolidated around USB-C (a standard that Apple was a key participant of and would have eventually moved to eventually). When they were first deciding what to do back in 2209, they decided that Micro-USB was the best standard. Imagine a world where everyone was forced to use Micro-USB...

The obvious takeaway here is that a country / blok can't regulate their way to innovation... so I'm not exact sure why you included it in your list of paradigm shifts. If anything, when the next paradigm shift around charging drops, the EU will be once again on the back-foot due to these short-sighted USB-C regulations they enacted.

I do share your sentiment that EU will miss the train once again on AI.

> The EU fumbled semiconductors, production went to Asia

Production of state of the art semiconductors, yes. NXP, STMicro, Infineon are still there and massive in automotive, industrial, card chips, etc.

> The EU fumbled the software revolution, the successes mainly came from the US

Worldwide massive success, mostly yes. Most European countries have their local or regional success stories though.

> The safe money is they are going to be an also-ran for the AI revolution

Not really. Past performances, or lack thereof, are not indicative of future ones.

Mistral are pretty good and selling well in the enterprise space. Some of the best voice models are coming from France (Kyutai).

>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.

Europe is constructed so you can take 60 days vacation, work 32 hours a week, get tons of social benefits, can't really lose your job, and retire when you are 65 with a full pension.

Which is excellent. Unless you need to be economically competitive.

>Europe is constructed so that it can't win, but can "pick" the winner between scylla and charybdis, pest and cholera.

Because they have no spine and no leverage/muscle on the international stage to throw their weight around and make sure they get what's best for themselves at the expense of everyone else the same way US, China, etc do.

They play the international nice guy that just ends up being the doormat everyone takes advantage of, being at the mercy of Russian and Azeri gas, at the mercy of US tech, energy and defence, and at the mercy of Chinese manufacturing after dismantling their own manufacturing, at the mercy of Turkey for migration enforcement, etc so they can't do anything radical that upsets their "partners", or that makes their virtue signaling policies look bad, or risk massive repercussions they aren't prepared for, so they just turtle, bury their head in the sand and pretend everything is going fine while falling further into obscurity.

EU flaunts its "moral values" as its strength, but their geopolitical adversaries have no such values and are dominating over them in the process exploiting their morals against them as their weakness. There's nothing virtuous in being/acting weak and letting others dominate you.

But this makes zero sense. Two different continents, values systems, law systems. Not to mention the current USA administration is openly hostile to Europe. So why would anyone confuse the two.

please provide a link to a chinese geek publically posting in china that Xi Jinping needs to be replaced.

Equivalent, here look, us state-funded news agency posting discussions about how trump needs to be replaced:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-grow-bolder-...

Yeah I would refine that argument a bit and say the US will sometimes support (or rather, ally with) dictators when the only viable alternative is an arguably worse dictator. There aren't exactly a lot of democracies in the middle east we could be supporting instead.

> I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

They don't! The majority voted for the guy who wants to, admittedly (multiple times), be a dictator and is huge fan of other dictators. If he finds a way to stay for a 3rd term his most loyal followers along with all the republicans in Congress will be just fine with it.

>I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

Well, ideology. I believe my way is the only way for every population in the world too, and I fight for it to happen. Of course, each place adapts to their own condition, but I believe my core ideology is the way for humanity as a whole, and I believe it is the same for people who defend western american-style democracy.

> Or the Chinese, for that matter?

The marched for it en masse in 1989?

Russians and Chinese are also people. They deserve to rule themselves.

Because a government has no power to tell the people what to do if the people did not vote for it to be there. There is no alternative.

people might not be excited about democracy, but they are about individual rights and freedoms

people can tell when their rights are being unjustly infringed upon, even without the verbiage.

democracy is just a handy way of working with individual rights

> Why would Russians want democracy?

Could be something to do with almost 400 years under czar heel and then 70 years under commie repressions and mismanagement that yielded one of the worst crises in the history of the country that is still being mentioned with fear (90s, brrrr).

> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years.

> Russia

What the am I even reading. Educate yourself before making such claims. Decembrist movement, 1905 revolution, 1917 provisional government, constant unrest after the death of mustached cunt, perestroika. Navalny recently died in prison for fighting for democracy, ffs. The only reason why we're having current Russia is because the West royally fucked up by not economically supporting them in 90s and allowing oligarchs to usurp vast soviet empire resources.

> I don't understand why Americans continue believing that democracy is the only way for every population in the world

It's not Americans, it's educated people who believe in personal liberties.

> Why would Russians want democracy

Because they would have a choice if they want to be robbed blind by a bunch of oligarchs, and if they want to be sanctioned off from the world because the supreme leader decided he wants to kill and maim a million Russians to achieve nothing more than killing Ukrainian civillians.

> There have been zero democratic impulses in their societies across hundreds, even thousands of years

Absurdly bad historic revisionism. Russia had democratic impulses in 1917 and 1990, both hijacked and went nowhere. China's 1911 revolution was also overtly democratic in nature, but was also hijacked.

The marketing pitch of Western "democracy" has always been that you can criticise your government freely and the government won't jail you or murder you.

Also, consumer goods.

The voting and multiple-branches-checks-and-balances elements are sidelines.

Currently none of those promises are true in the US. The government is murdering and jailing people for whimsical and self-indulgent reasons, the consumer economy is about to crash, and the only checks-and-balances are the checks going straight to the Emperor's private accounts.

To be fair, there's some judicial pushback, and some political friction.

But Senate and Congress are wholly captured, the opposition is flaccid and foreign-funded, media independence is a myth, and the last time The People had any real influence on policy was the 70s. Possibly.

I have no idea if China is "better". From a distance China seems to be doing much better at building useful things and making long term plans.

But ruling cliques always seem to end up being run by psychopaths, so my expectations for humanity from China's rulers aren't any higher than those for the US.

I mean the American people who will cry about humans rights records in China will also watch masked government agents shoot down their own citizens just because they're suspected to be illegal immigrants

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad

> their elected representatives

Yes? The US president is elected, and while you or I might the system would be better if presidents didn't have quite so much authority... we know the system works this way when we vote.

You can't force change, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't be part of it. Individuals can and do join political parties and become influential within them. Political parties win elections and ultimately set policy which can start to change things.

None of those things happen quickly, and most people don't succeed in their attempt to do it. That doesn't mean it's not possible. I'd argue that it's a feature of the system that the system makes it hard to change course - it averages out the extremes.

Saying stupid things isn't outrageous indeed.

Questioning democracy unfortunately is a very common agenda by certain countries that don't want their own people to realize how much they are getting screwed by authoritarianism. But in the end it's like saying people have a "right" to get fucked over as long as it helps me. It's just a distraction. If you watch this sort of stuff closely, you'll find there has been a huge uptick online with pro-China content lately. Probably not a coincidence that Xi has told his army to be ready to invade Taiwan by next year. If Trump keeps chickening out and fumbling Iran so bad, they will probably seize the opportunity before the US or NATO have a chance to reorganize themselves into something that could actually rival China. They already have the largest navy in the world by now and they are not done building up their strength.

Assuming that China is not officially a 100% authoritarian dictatorship takes some serious mental gymnastics or hardcore brainwashing by propaganda channels. In fact forget media manipulation. A simple look at what they did to their constitution would already tell you everything you need to know. The US might be moving in this same direction under Trump, but it sure as hell isn't there yet. And if they do try to do the same, there is a good chance for another civil war. So while China is already lost, there is still some level of hope for the US.

China has one proletarian party. The US has two bourgeois parties. One might think the ideal would be to have one bourgeois party, and one proletarian party, but that hasn't seemed to work out anywhere.

The two parties couldn't be more different today. Republicans are basically an authoritarian party that would be more at home in a place like Russia - or China - today.

That being said, democracies are about generating consensus between factions with otherwise irreconcilable differences.

There should be overlap on many fronts - that's kind of a feature, not a bug - at least in many cases.

> our so-called "democracy" (quotes intended, read: "21st century western systems")

Do not conflate the broken American political system, the semi-broken British one, and the whole rest of the "west". Each country has its own political system, and they are wildly different.

> crushing dissent

Democracies are good at crushing dissent? Compared to other political systems? That's just not true. All other political systems rely on universal truth and unwavering trust in a person / religion / clique of people, who can do no wrong and can never be criticised.

> There's a reason this "democracy" is very diligent at discouraging association and unionizing

What? You are probably talking about a specific democracy, and the most broken one at that.