/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>489218 (OP)
The Soviets largely didn't care about "converting" the US to socialism, they were primarily focused on getting countries in the periphery to sign up for the soviet system.

The Chinese priority is leveling up China and creating as many economic links with other countries as possible. They kinda see fucking with other countries as having an opportunity cost that is too high. If they have compromised US structures, they're likely holding back on that. If the US goes to war with them, that would be the time they activate it.

From China's perspective an arms race against the US is something they can win. Their physical economy is more than 3 times the size of the US's, and that gap is growing. Most of China's military industrial complex is not privatized, which means their weapons are more cost effective. So they probably have a 5to1 economic advantage in an arms-race, and they are tech-ing up faster than the US. My hunch is that Chinese see the US as a predator, and they have to demonstrate that they are not pray. The calculation is that either the US see reason and backs off or it goes bankrupt trying to arms-race against a much larger competitor. It would be kinda ironic if the US does to itself what it did to the Soviets.

Internationally China derives a huge amount of political capital because they don't meddle in the internal affairs of other countries.

I do not think that the Chinese would ever consider something like a color revolution, they value stability and harmony. Tho they might be interested if you have a way to bypass trade barriers, at least that's my hunch.

"Color revolutions" are just foreign-backed coups, and they're probably a shitty way to make lasting geopolitical friends. The ally you create is only temporarily predicated on the coup government's ability to control the country by force. Eventually someone finds out about them and there's an enormous backlash. The forces of reaction in the US would rightfully be seen as patriots attempting to restore sovereignty to the US from foreign control and it would drive something much worse than the original Red Scares.

China isn't socialist and it's definitely not an example to inspire international revolution.

>>489259
Ok, then you do it better dummy.

>>489260
Da deformed workers state gonna liberate da peepooole.

Hello everybody it is me, the world's best socialist, here to tell you how real socialism is done
<shits pants
well I can never get up from this armchair now, it would be too embarrassing. Anyway, fuck the Chinese.

>>489259
This but unironically.

>>489242
Wonderful reply, thank you.

While China is in a very good position right now, eventually the western world will have to move to socialism or fascism. And the US has missiles aimed at China and have also used nuclear bombs on civilians in the past. So China may want to eventually deal with that.

>they value stability and harmony
But isn't it totally unfair that one side wants harmony and the other side spreads propaganda and incites riots against you? The US basically does everything short of actually dropping bombs to China. In fact every socialist state is faced with constant threats from capitalist ones. So why play nice? Why not be the bad guy that they already paint you out to be?

I really think that 20 years ago China would have suffered if they fucked with the US the way US fucks with China. But today they have nothing to gain from being nice. That's my whole point I guess.

>>489262
>Not doing socialism right
This is not even it, China is a capitalist state that suppresses independent working class action while petty bourgeois manage the affairs of the state.

>>489267
>suppresses independent working class
Yeah because they have a working class party that you should be using to make changes.

>while petty bourgeois manage the affairs of the state
Yea but you'd be saying the same thing about any leadership anywhere, you can say that your tribe's Chieftan is a privileged boogie position. So yeah the person you're replying to has a point, what's the point of criticizing china for not being perfect while we don't have anything to show for in north america?

>>489269
Critique isn’t about demanding “perfection.” It’s about identifying which class a party and state serve. The Chinese Communist Party represents the interests of the national bourgeoisie, not the working class. Just like in the U.S., the Chinese state exploits labor, accumulates capital, and suppresses independent working-class organization. Socialists don’t pick sides between rival capitalist blocs, they build solidarity with working people everywhere, independent of their capitalist rulers.

>>489266
>While China is in a very good position right now, eventually the western world will have to move to socialism or fascism.
You're right, but there are other possible outcomes: the west might implode.

>And the US has missiles aimed at China and have also used nuclear bombs on civilians in the past. So China may want to eventually deal with that.
Nuclear deterrence seems to be holding for now.
On a technical level directed energy weapons will eventually be able to effectively counter nuclear weapons.
The population is very war-weary so there might be a political solution

>But isn't it totally unfair that one side wants harmony and the other side spreads propaganda and incites riots against you? The US basically does everything short of actually dropping bombs to China. In fact every socialist state is faced with constant threats from capitalist ones. So why play nice? Why not be the bad guy that they already paint you out to be?
What counts is whether or not a strategy works, not whether it's justifiable.

>I really think that 20 years ago China would have suffered if they fucked with the US the way US fucks with China. But today they have nothing to gain from being nice. That's my whole point I guess.
China obviously would be capable of screwing with the US in a 100 different ways. However it feels a bit like the Chinese are building up their system and are succeeding beyond anybody's expectations while the US is chimping out trying to get them to loose focus.

>>489273
>The Chinese Communist Party represents the interests of the national bourgeoisie, not the working class.

I'm not sure why you're saying this, this is easily disproven. The Communist Party of China (and that's what it's called, not sure why you're calling them the "Chinese Communist Party") has done more for workers in general than any other organization in all of history.

>>489277
>On a technical level directed energy weapons will eventually be able to effectively counter nuclear weapons.
lol, are you an MIC marketer?

>>489279
>lol, are you an MIC marketer?
If you knew what effective directed energy weapons will likely look like, you might not be so quick to jump to that conclusion.

Lets begin, directed energy weapons will have some energy conversion losses, that means waste-heat. Small things are better at shedding waste-heat than big things, because small things have more surface for a given volume.

That means that if we are going to make a energy weapon, it will be made from an array of many tiny emitters, that all aim that the same target.

This thing will not be cannon-shaped. It will be a large flat emitter grid.

It's going to be practicle to install it next to a population center, being the size of a very large parking lot and then hook it up to the power-grid to charge a capacitor-bank that will provide the insane peak-power requirements.

It's not suitable as a offensive weapon, because you can't realistically stick this thing onto a "mobile attack platform".

But wait there is more, you'll need a gazillion emitters, so it's going to be made from mass produced components. So it won't be super secret military tech, and hence no big profit margins, which translates to zero interests from defense contractors.

I think the pioneer effort to build this will come from civilian space agencies looking for a means to clear space trash that's interfering with their launches. Said space trash will become a major thing because off all the satellite constellations (each containing many tens of thousands of sats) that are going up.

Big cities will be next to adopt this, they will see it as an energy shield, probably against unwanted drones, to be more attractive than "unprotected cities". They'll basically just copy paste what space agencies created and tweak it a bit. And then it'll be infrastructure.

If enough of these get build, they can be synced up and used to snipe nukes.

>>489298
>>489277
>directed energy weapons
I love how weapons marketers have jumped on this stupid hype terminology to wow the sci-fi nerds and obfuscate what it actually is. Everyone else just calls them lasers.

>>489298
>If enough of these get build
That's always the key limitation that shouldn't be discounted. It's exactly the same reason that anti-ballistic missile interceptors have been a boondoggle and failed technology spanning four or five decades now. Interception technologies can be frustrated trivially through the use of multiple missiles, multiple warheads, and most importantly cheap reflective decoys deployed with the warheads. Additionally you had better hope these lasers or masers (you'll need to be able to penetrate atmospheric interference) can intercept all of these nukes a great distance away from your hemispheric region, because a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere produces an electromagnetic pulse that could be nearly as devastating as an explosion near the ground. The Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test caused massive electrical damage in Hawaii over 900 miles away and was the reason that all later nuclear tests have been done underground.

>>489300
Well it might be lasers but there are other forms of suitable energy too. I didn't know "directed energy" was already a marketing buzzword. I thought i was just using a non-specific term. I'm feeling a bit perplexed, all the existing energy weapons are sort of just technology tests, why would they need marketing before they have wares to sell ?

>>489301
You are right that it's still possible to over-saturate these, but you can't really deplete any interceptor ammunition. I do think that it eventually be cheaper to scale generators and emitter arrays than missile batteries.

I don't know why you think that intercepting automatically means detonating the warhead.

>>489302
>I don't know why you think that intercepting automatically means detonating the warhead.
That's not necessarily my point. An adversary on the other side of the planet might intentionally detonate some of their warheads in the upper atmosphere to generate an EMP and knock out ground infrastructure if they have a feeling that a lot of their warheads might get intercepted anyway. The range of EMPs is easy to underestimate and might end up harming the adversary too (so would nuclear winter), but anything goes in MAD.

>>489303
>An adversary on the other side of the planet might intentionally detonate some of their warheads in the upper atmosphere to generate an EMP and knock out ground infrastructure if they have a feeling that a lot of their warheads might get intercepted anyway.
I can't answer this off the top of my head. I'm not sure what the effective range of an EMP would be when knocking out a energy-weapon-array. Not sure how to estimate that given the broad range of possible designs for energy-weapon-arrays.

But you bring up a valid point.

>>489305
Self-contained military installations typically have shielding to protect against EMPs. It's the entire rest of the civilian infrastructure that doesn't because it's impractical. The target of an EMP wouldn't be a hypothetical laser/maser array likely shielded against this sort of thing, it would be civilians just like targeting a city with a nuke is.

>>489306
So what you are getting at, is that you think intercepting nukes is not worth it because there's always EMPs. Not sure if I agree with that.