

No worries folks, any infiltration violence in resistance isn’t likely to be directed at random civilians.
A lot of vandalism, though. And some judicious sniping would be likely.
No worries folks, any infiltration violence in resistance isn’t likely to be directed at random civilians.
A lot of vandalism, though. And some judicious sniping would be likely.
A lot of us grow up around long guns. Handguns are relatively rare.
I yell at the road when people drive badly, too.
Isn’t that the relationship Russia had with Ukraine when Putin took over?
Yeah if you meet JT he’s just another confident politician in public and seems a bit shallow and kinda cringe, so whatever.
But everybody hates Skippy, the person. He’s a dick IRL and emptier than his résumé. The PP parade will just hold their noses and march anyway.
“…for some reason…”
The reason is the same as all fascist takeovers. The coup works slowly, then suddenly. We are in the acceleration phase, it’s ramping up, just as they said it would in the Project 2025 documents.
I REPEAT: THIS WAS ALL ANNOUNCED BEFOREHAND. Plus, history explains.
The script is to combine a shock and awe campaign of massive change on so many fronts that no one could possibly resist them all, and to demoralize and deflate opposition.
Once this phase is complete, the power thieves will have sufficiently infiltrated the monopoly on violence (military and policing management) and the bureaucratic and technocratic key elements will be gutted or loyalized, so that a full coup can occur. Full control of media, a massive apparatus of repression and surveillance, and a hot mess of mistrust throughout society.
Interpersonal and community relations will be broken and replaced by dependency on authority for guidance and morality and information. Rights will be crushed and perverted. Power and money will only flow to the top, and poverty will become the norm.
US international influence will contract and enemies will be constructed. Blame Canada.
Just a warning though, when you folks are finally conscripted to invade northwards, we have a lot of methods and welcoming gifts to make it regrettable, and people here are getting prepared. I’d dodge the draft, when it comes, if I were you.
Might think is an irony, but it’s intentional: that area is supposed to be sacred to the locals. This ongoing violation is just colonialism and genocide 2025.
Hm good point, and the techbro loligarchs will be gunning for control over areas like that, so it will be under pressure.
Not a popcorn show though. More like fingernail lunch.
It’s the path of strongly hierarchical institutions. The hierarchy itself skews bullshitters and sociopaths into power over time, and it becomes self-justifying and drops the core goals as you point out.
Flatter hierarchy institutions seem to have some immunity to this if the central goals are sufficiently motivating. The Quakers manage a fairly enduring fidelity to their original principles, for instance, and I admire their organizational methods and commitment to good works, if not their mythology. At a much smaller scale, nonprofits and cooperatives I have been involved with also have more or leas success avoiding institutional rot based on that combination of clear goals and power sharing.
That is the cycle of enshittification: give things away free at first, find ways to get indirect revenue from that by selling your users once the network effects kick in, and then in the end, raid the whole company for the primary shareholders.
It’s a new economic model peculiar to late stage capitalism, and it’s like an engine that drives loligarchy. Chucklefuck rich white boys who don’t realize a little learning is the most dangerous thing of all.
The Revolution requires many Fronts, comrade pardner dude.
Wait didn’t MEC collapse into / get bought by a regular corporation?
Some parts of the culture are smoothbrained. Diversity is things like ‘black white latino asian’ whereas in more wrinklybrained cultures it’s more like ‘somali finnish trini chilean thai’. Economics is freedom vs communism instead of reality etc. And geography, well, good luck.
I guess the solution is for people with conservative values to stop associating so freely with subjugation addicts? Once conservative identity is dissociated from a wide spectrum of racist and classist bullshit, not to mention that we are entering an extinction level event of our own doing, then maybe the guilt by association will go away.
Opinions are often based on premises or observations or claimed facts, which are sometimes very objectively wrong.
I get what you’re complaining about but the ‘sanctity of opinion’ isn’t a strong argument.
And yet, nobody who trumpets this as an issue really thinks hard about it as a philosophy. They just say stupid things like I am an absolutist, all speech should be free.
Then they turn around and complain about being defrauded lol.
If anyone thinks that this is hyperbole, a reminder that the Proud Boys are designated a terrorist organization by the somewhat sober and reasonable Canadian government.
TL;DR
Large, somewhat centrally planned economy decides to spend a decade investing in the economy, general advanced manufacturing process. Succeeded, and all their trading partners wound up undercut and viewing it as economic warfare. Me: facepalm.gif
Like lord voldemort from Harry Potter, “Made in China 2025” is an initiative which induces so much fear and loathing abroad that Chinese officials dare not speak its name. The plan, introduced a decade ago, called for pouring money and resources into dozens of industries. The goal was to turn China into a green and innovative “manufacturing power”, one that relied less on labour and Western supply chains, and more on automation and new home-grown technologies. This was Xi Jinping’s vision for the Chinese economy.
It has, for the most part, been a resounding success. Aided by the government, Chinese firms have risen to the very top of some industries. They have grown more automated and sophisticated. The torrent of goods coming from Chinese factories (and weak domestic demand) resulted in a record trade surplus of nearly $1trn in 2024. But China’s success has had consequences, ranging from economic distortions at home to a backlash abroad.
The details of Made in China 2025 are laid out in hundreds of official documents. A so-called “Green Book”, published by a committee of China’s top engineers, identified targets for government largesse. Ten sectors, ranging from information technology to aerospace, were chosen. Within these, hundreds of industries were designated for support in the form of direct subsidies, cheap credit and inexpensive land. Producers of such things as solar panels, chips and aircraft benefited. The project covered much of China’s industrial base.
chart: the economist
The goals were sometimes vague, but the plan also laid out dozens of statistical benchmarks. China appears to have exceeded most of these. It was already the world’s largest manufacturer in 2015, accounting for 26% of global value added in this sector. In 2023 that number was 29% (see chart 1). More impressive, though, has been China’s performance in fields deemed important by the state.
Two of the clearest examples are electric vehicles (evs) and drones. The plan called for Chinese companies to sell 3m of the former in 2025. That shouldn’t be a problem: they sold more than 10m last year, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the global total. In the last quarter of 2024 China’s biggest ev-maker, byd, surpassed Tesla, an American firm, in worldwide sales of battery-only cars. China’s biggest drone-maker, dji, is even more dominant. Its share of the global market in consumer drones is over 90%.
In the area of clean energy the aims were fuzzy, but the gains of Chinese companies are unambiguous. Whereas in 2015 they produced 65% of the world’s solar panels and 47% of its batteries, today they are responsible for around 90% and 70%. The government’s support means they can make these things at lower cost than firms elsewhere. In much of the world, the green transition is powered by kit made in China.
chart: the economist
Chinese manufacturers are making more stuff, but the government also wanted them to make more innovative stuff. So the plan called on them to funnel 1.68% of their total revenue into research and development by 2025, up from less than 1% in 2015 (see chart 2). They achieved that objective in 2023. A related aim, for firms to file more patents, has also been surpassed.
Which goals remained elusive? China hoped to be manufacturing its own large commercial aircraft by now. In 2023 the c919, a Chinese-made passenger plane, did have its first commercial flight from Shanghai to Beijing. But it was made with many foreign parts. Western firms still supply most of China’s passenger planes.
An even bigger disappointment has been the slow progress in semiconductor production. Most Chinese companies are still only capable of making mid-range chips. Things were gloomy in the sector even before America imposed export controls on chips and chipmaking equipment. Some argue that these restrictions have spurred innovative workarounds. In 2023 Huawei surprised America when it introduced a phone containing an advanced seven-nanometre chip. Meanwhile, China is increasing the subsidies flowing to companies such as smic, its largest foundry.
Made in China 2025 has, then, achieved most of its aims. But at what cost? The fiscal expense is impossible to calculate. One attempt by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank, estimated that China spent over 1.7% of gdp on industrial policy in 2017-19, which would add up to over $3trn in today’s dollars if sustained for a decade. That money could have been spent on other things, such as health care, which might have better served the public: fewer evs, more icus.
Beyond the fiscal burden, China’s industrial ambitions have also required a big commitment of labour and capital. China’s manufacturing workforce was over 123m people in 2023. These labourers have become more productive: output per worker has increased by roughly 6% a year on average from 2014 to 2023, falling only modestly short of the government’s goals.
But that performance required enormous inputs of capital. When this investment is taken into account, things look less impressive. The economy as a whole has fared badly on measures of “total-factor productivity” (tfp), which try to capture the growth in output that cannot be explained by increases in capital or labour. This disappointment has been felt in high places. It may lie behind Mr Xi’s recent push to cultivate “new productive forces”, which will supposedly contribute to tfp.
A different policy mix could have encouraged greater household spending, not capital spending, and flourishing services, not manufacturing muscle. These two shifts could have complemented each other nicely. As people grow richer, they devote a higher share of their budgets to education, health and recreation rather than manufactured clutter. Stronger consumer spending would, therefore, have been a boon to China’s service firms, which account for the majority of employment. That, in turn, might have bolstered the labour market and created more of the kinds of jobs that China’s millions of university graduates are equipped to fill.
As it is, Chinese buyers do not come close to purchasing all of the things that Chinese factories produce. So the country is busy exporting the rest. Angry trade partners accuse it of flooding their markets with cheap goods, undercutting their companies and hollowing out their manufacturing sectors. They launched almost 200 anti-dumping cases and other trade investigations against China in 2024, according to official data. India, which has its own “Make in India” initiative, made more complaints than any other country.
The fears of China and its foreign critics tend to feed on each other. For Mr Xi, the primary goal of Made in China 2025 is self-reliance. He talks of taking things “into our own hands”. That task has become more urgent in the face of foreign tariffs and export controls. Donald Trump’s return to the White House, surrounded by China hawks, has undoubtedly reinforced Mr Xi’s vision for the Chinese economy.
But even if America had not taken a hawkish turn, it is difficult to imagine the Communist Party under Mr Xi pursuing a different strategy. “They basically think that rich countries are those that make stuff and the richest countries are those that make the most advanced stuff,” says Gerard DiPippo of the rand Corporation, a think-tank. Although in many ways China’s big bet on industrial policy has paid off, there have also been large downsides. Just as Voldemort twisted the behaviour of the people he possessed, the policy that must not be named has skewed the evolution of the economy it inhabited.
Yeah, a reminder to Canadians that our blueshirts (equivalent to brownshirts etc) were rounded up and interned during WW2. They got back to work somewhat right after because the country was still freakin racist, but it took until recently for actual fascism-with-Skippy to pop up again.