this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

anti imperialist/colonial supporters when they find out that the entire timeline of human history is conquest, colonialism, and imperialism.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

the ones who prospered were the most aggressive ones, even conquering the whole world by force, it's a survivorship bias situation.

not every group of humans is aggressive, but those eventually get conquered by the agressive ones, military power always ends up winning.

It's unscientific to say that any country, given the chance, would do the same as the europeans or the US empire did to the world.

At least the Chinese century will prove or disprove this theory, given it's the first significant power shift in the last 500 years, let's see if they will be so brutal as the US and its allies (you know who) are to the world.

I firmly doubt it, there are no signs of brutality to other nations coming from the chinese, at most you could argue of some internal issues. There are no invasions, war or regime change operations done by China yet.

As someone from the global south, I don't fear China or even Russia in the least, I only fear what the US or Europe will try to inflict in my country, like the recent regime change operations that I lived through, that was pretty harsh.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (5 children)

the ones who prospered were the most aggressive ones, even conquering the whole world by force, it’s a survivorship bias situation.

this is my fundamental gripe with the problem, yes it's technically a survivorship bias, but how do you remove it, that's the hard question.

If 10 people in a group agree to leave 10,000 USD on a table, such that after 20 minutes, they can all split it amongst themselves, and then turn off the lights in the room and plug their ears in the meantime, someone if not multiple people are going to try and take it all for themselves.

Evolution has fundamentally programmed in a form of survivorship bias within basically every species. I don't think you can separate it unfortunately.

not every group of humans is aggressive, but those eventually get conquered by the agressive ones, military power always ends up winning.

exactly.

It’s unscientific to say that any country, given the chance, would do the same as the europeans or the US empire did to the world.

i wouldn't say that they would explicitly, but i would argue that being in a position of that much power, over that much of the world, in that much of a volatile position, there is a very high likelihood that they would influence some amount of the world, in a similar manner.

At least the Chinese century will prove or disprove this theory, given it’s the first significant power shift in the last 500 years, let’s see if they will be so brutal as the US and its allies (you know who) are to the world.

if we're talking about modern day china, they already do a lot of power projection in the sea, illegally, same in the air. I don't know if they're doing any predatory lending to other countries, but that could very well change in the future, so we can't say anything about it now. It's highly likely that china at least wants other countries to be dependent on themselves at the minimum, which i would argue is a form of this power projection.

They are 100% in a position to do things that are more predatory, time will tell, i predict they will, it's inevitable, but i could be wrong. Either that or china itself implodes before we get to that point, so who knows.

personally i know nothing about their military presence outside of the previously mentioned stuff. So i can't really say anything about it, but there's probably at least one bad thing they've done. Again, time will tell.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

I'm on mobile (and sleepy) rn, so I don't think I can properly respond to all your points, but thanks for this comment, I found it overall very constructive!

I'd just like to question one point for now

If 10 people in a group agree to leave 10,000 USD on a table, such that after 20 minutes, they can all split it amongst themselves, and then turn off the lights in the room and plug their ears in the meantime, someone if not multiple people are going to try and take it all for themselves.

Where are these people from? Urban, Rural, which country, which region etc, culture can have a big influence on that, I'd guess more collectivist cultures would have a different approach to this experiment than individualist ones such as you described. The country I live is also individualist so I see your point, but is all of humanity really like that?

A Native American tribe of 10 people would probably coordinate to be able to split the money, or even to invest collectivelly in their own village for example. A group of 10 New York executives with survival of the fittest mentality would probably act like you described.

Just some food for thought, hope you or anyone reading finds this interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

It absolutely is, but my take on that is we're just bad at doing community-based government and need more practice.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

possibly, but i think it's a sort of fundamental problem. I would be curious if history/anthropology has any sort of knowledge on societies that didn't have a hierarchical power structure within itself. But i'm guessing it's very uncommon, if not unheard of.

If humans could do a communal governance structure effectively, one would think it would have already been tried, and successfully implemented.

Democracy is probably the closest thing we've ever had, but it's still not perfect.

I'm sure theres also a lot of psych and socio research on this as well.

there's also the question of whether it's even possible to have a communal government structure in the first place, the world is incredibly complex, and politics is even more complex, doing things correctly is very hard.

TL;DR i don't think it's possible, and i'm not sure it ever will, judging by how humans behave.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

I also noted this was a problem with the Rebel Alliance (who just supports a republic of oligarchs), and was called a centrist for my efforts.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It's something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.

The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.

Death to monarchists!

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 19 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

IMPERIVM SINE FINE

[–] [email protected] 9 points 18 hours ago

We conquering Cartage with this one 🔥🔥🔥

[–] [email protected] 37 points 22 hours ago (7 children)

Tankies support the more problematic empires such as Russia and China.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

More problematic to whom? The US literally changed the political direction of my country and fucked us over real hard.

Where are the chinese wars and regime change operations? At least Russia only attacks its neighbors at most so countries far away have nothing to fear, unlike the US invading and destroying countries all around the globe.

Call them empire or whatever, but being unable to admit that the US is the bigger threat to real freedom in the world only contributes to the causes of the biggest and arguably most brutal empire in history, that is in constant state of war since it was founded.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I wonder why a westerner who gets their news from english speaking western sources which profit off of the same wealth extraction as the empire they are part of would think like this? Surely the western free press would not be influenced by the whims of capital and empire. Obviously China and Russia must be the "worse empire", my empire told me so!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

Well, just personally speaking, I know Russian, and reading Russian news sources (state-owned as well as those that have been banned by the Russian state) from time to time, and talking with Russians directly, hasn't even remotely convinced me that the "Russian empire" is equally bad as the "western empire".

[–] [email protected] 15 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

And in doing so they may have pushed large parts of the Chinese-American community to the right. Tankies caping for the CCP were not a good look for the moderate immigrants who had been fucked over by the Chinese government in various ways.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 15 hours ago

"moderate" immigrants from China don't exist. You can't be moderate between two entirely different and incompatible socioeconomic systems.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Did you not read the meme? Imperialism is bad no matter who is doing it, and arguing over which empire is more 'problematic' is counterproductive, as we should oppose all empires instead of wasting all of our time and effort on getting on each other's throats.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 17 hours ago

true, being rude to other people is bad. We should stop being rude and criminalize it.

wait...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago

You're just repeating the meme.

They are all bad, they are all part of the problems we face globally, and whatabouting "them" to avoid facing criticism of "us" only serves those in power by deflecting criticism of them.

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