Interests: Linux, Economics, Politics, & Religion.

  • 7 Posts
  • 104 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 14th, 2024

help-circle

  • Your link reads just like every western European country with failing demographics … and it isn’t working. I did hear on NPR News the other day that China is implementing a new tax on contraceptives. That’s a new idea. Something that would be so unpopular, it could only happen in a non-democratic country. Maybe that’ll help, but my prediction is that it’ll just increase (or slow the decrease of) the population of ethnic and religious minorities within China, something the one-party government may not like. I do not see any good solutions within reach for China. Demographic issues are cultural issues and you cannot change a culture quickly. Demographic issues are rarely economic issues (though economics gets the blame). Are there any subcultures within China known for large families? Here in the US, we have Amish, Mennonites, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Traditional Catholics, and Quiverfull Evangelicals who all tend to have large families. Myself, I have 11, and have just learned my wife is pregnant with twelve.

    I have a customer (I own my own business) who is a Chinese immigrant to the US and I was visiting his house here in the US. We were talking and he learned that I had 11 children. He immediately called his daughter, who is a doctor still living in China, and gave her a stern talking to about how this “poor” man here in the US can give his parents 11 grandchildren and she could not even give them just one. It was a little awkward to listen to, as they went back and forth between English and Manderin. What they feel is not unusual among the Chinese. China’s one child policy defined Chinese culture. And now young men and women just do not have the example or the confidence to start a family. They also have witnessed a generation of people praised for work and professional success that comes at the expense of producing and raising many children. The one-party state does not have the tools to dramatically change this trend. If a reverse happens, it’ll happen over the period of a century, not years or decades.













  • Quin Dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895. It remained part of Japan until 1945 when Japan surrender to the United States at the end of WW2. It was then handed over to the Republic of China in 1945 and remains with that government through today. The people living in Taiwan have their own government, history, and sense of nationalism that’s many generations separate and distinct from anyone else.






  • Ukraine maintained every part of the Minsk agreement reasonable to keep while Russia was in blatant violation of the agreement. Russia agreed to a withdraw of military forces from Ukraine (including the Dombass region) and refused to do so after signing the agreement. This constrained what Ukraine could reasonably do under the circumstances. To Russia, the agreements were a hiatus in a bigger fight.

    The LPR and DPR are not recognized as legitimate entities under the Minsk Agreements. They were added without consent by Ukraine after Ukraine had already signed the agreement.

    Russia, what they gain is security

    Yes, now bombs fall on Russian cities, power plants go dark, and refineries are on fire.

    if this is for “vainglory,” why limit it to the Donbass region

    Russia has already expanded their territorial claims beyond the Dombass.

    Russia has proven capable of fighting an attrition war that Ukraine cannot

    Neither side is doing well. If Russia was capable, they’d be gaining more than a few meters every day.

    Russian population benefiting massively from strengthened ties with China

    Russian demographics are in the toilet and friendship with China isn’t going to help.

    Russia has been strengthened economically

    A wartime economy produces encouraging economic figures but cannot be sustained and, when the war produces this kind of strain, the post-war economy is economic collapse. The war has to end someday and it will be ugly for the Russian people when that happens.


  • I gather that English is probably a second language for you, so I assume you have confused terms. Balkanization is not a color revolution. Balkanization is when a larger country breaks apart into several smaller countries. For example, if a political crisis resulted in a power vacuum within Russia sufficient for the Buryats to declare an independent republic, along with the Yakuts and several others. That would be Balkanization. These new nations would be weak and would be vulnerable to political or military capture by China. The US does not want that. A color revolution, on the other hand, could be a number of things, but most likely a change in the leadership in Moscow without producing a plethora of fracturing states. If the current political regime in Moscow was replaced by one more friendly to liberal, democratic, and market-oriented institutions, that’s one the US would favor, especially if it prevented Balkanization.