Good timing, I was just wondering about the API and posted a question over there 👍

Good call, edited to add a warning

Is this a thread for recommending communities that aren’t politics, news, memes, or tech? If so, here’s some comic-related communities:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected] (generally NSFW!)
• [email protected]

And a few other miscellaneous communities:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Yep! Updates every Sunday

That looks good, thanks! I’m only seeing partial information in there, looks like it shows only the date for the first comic in each series, but that’s probably enough for me to get started

EDIT: Tried using that, and discovered that the dates are made up. I can see in the Wayback Machine that the comics were posted online before the date listed in the RSS feed. I’ll add the date going forward on new comics, but I’m still lacking a good way to add it to old comics

I tried poking around the HTML and didn’t see any way to tell the original published date. If you see some way of determining that, I can definitely add that in

Thanks, I think you’re posting that because the link is better for mbin? I tried to include the right format in the body, but I’ve edited it to use the format you’re using. Went over to view the post from moist.catsweat.com (great name btw, works nicely in the Firefox tab bar ) and it seems like it works now?

Subscribed! You might want to clarify if this is a community for where to post good studies, or where to post studies that you’re unsure on if they’re good and want critical analysis of the data, or both.

I saw an art exhibit there a while back called “God, I feel so bad”, which I feel like sums up the experience of living with such little sunlight.

I’m using a common definition of imperialism. If you wish to redefine it so that it can’t be applied to your favorite imperialists, you need to justify that redefinition. To me, you haven’t. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition. Whether or not you agree with it isn’t really the point, it’s a common definition and if you want to use it in a different meaning, you should make that clear upfront and/or justify the new usage:

Imperialism is maintaining or extending power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultural imperialism). Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire.

I guess you could call that intentional? Intentionally doing the thing that makes sense, i.e. using the common definition, which is kind of a weird use of the word. At any rate, I’m having a conversation with you because you’ve been giving thoughtful replies, as much as we disagree with each other. This is the sort of discussion that is actually worth having. As hard as it is to talk about these things over text, I think this has actually been productive. I wouldn’t have known that you’re using a different definition of imperialism otherwise, for example. That is one of the hardest things when trying to communicate, is using the same words but talking past each other.

The article btw doesn’t just reference western think tanks. India for example, has accused China of the same behavior. Many of their neighbors have accused them of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_tactics as well. I also edited the link above to point at the main article, instead of a section that links to it.

I guess as long as we can agree that the PRC is acting in its own interests. I just have less faith in humanity than you do, I guess.

They’re still imperialist, they just don’t have the power to effect it as well as they have historically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strategy

They lost out to bigger imperialists in the 19th century. Now, they’re recovering and behaving exactly as you’d expect if they’re still imperialist, just with less power (but growing).

EDIT: Fixed link above to be direct

I am analyzing why things happen, you just don’t like it. The analysis is rooted in looking at the entirety of their history. Materially, they have been just as imperialist as anyone else. My point is that looking at their imperialist history and saying things will be different this time based on vibes is foolish.

Materially, they’re xenophobic, like the rest of humanity. Claiming that they’re uniquely not xenophobic is racist in its own way.

They’ve decided before. So has Japan. But you’re missing the point here. It’s not about likelihood of it happening, it’s about what’s possible today vs possible in a changed world.

I’ll try stating it another way. If the US got busy with a civil war for the next few years and I was in a leadership position of say Korea or Japan, I would be pushing for a nuclear program posthaste, because that’s the only real deterrent.

The world we live in now is not one where it’s advantageous to China to be overtly aggressive. We can theorize all day, but looking at Chinese history, they’re just like every other empire in history, and have been quite aggressive in the past. Even the idea of “China” is born out of bloody wars of conquest. I don’t see any reason that they’d be different if given the opportunity.

I agree on what it is and isn’t, but that’s the counterpoint to your statement that communism and imperialism don’t mix. My assertion is that imperialism is a part of human nature, and so either you acknowledge that communism and imperialism do mix, or that communism isn’t realistic for humanity.

I think there’s ~0% chance you’re interested in understanding […]

It’s hard to convey over text on the internet, but I am actually interested in better understanding the world. As much as I think places like Hexbear are silly, it’s useful to encounter worldviews so alien. I really hate low-effort “dunking” even if it’s something I agree with, because you can’t learn anything from that and it loses all nuance.

I’m not saying “therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities”. Can you point to any period in history in which empires were just chill and sung kumbaya all day long, though?

We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach.

We have zero evidence that China would not take that approach in a world without Pax Americana (as much as I think the term is silly, it’s a convenient shorthand). We do have a lot of evidence that China is a normal country like everywhere else and pushes their interests where possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strategy

Those savages

If that’s what you jump to, you might want to introspect on that. They’re not savages for being xenophobic, that just makes them human like the rest of us.

If it were in China’s “nature”

That paragraph is a commentary on power relations and geography. It’s not in “China’s nature”, but if they decided to invade in a world that looked like ours today but without the US, there would realistically be nobody to stop them. Perhaps North Korean nukes would be enough of a deterrent actually, but shy of that there would be no realistic opposing force.

The threat of nukes is real. I wouldn’t expect any major wars between nuclear states right away, but there would be a lot of consolidation of smaller countries without nukes into larger countries with nukes. In this scenario if you’re Japan, you will have the option of getting nukes ASAP or deciding if you want to learn Russian or Chinese.

I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia

I’m not claiming that only xenophobia leads to military conflicts. It is often used to whip up support for conflicts that people in power want, though.

If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on

Soft power is preferable, yeah. The real measure is when someone has something you want and they say “no”.

our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

Definitely agree that they’re all fucked up. It remains to be seen how much it helps vs hurts though. Like the saying “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”, sometimes the fact that the metrics are all made up can be useful. I say that as someone that doesn’t like how little they resemble the real world.

It is not human nature in the sense that humans will always do it when the opportunity presents itself.

What would be the best historical example that you can think of? To be specific, what is a historical example of when a country would have benefited from expanding an empire, had the resources and ability to do so, and chose not to for an extended period of time?

That would be a strange form of communism.

Human greed is a base desire that has been a constant throughout our entire history. At some point, you’re arguing for a fantasy. Either Communism is a realistic political system that can be implemented with humans as we are, including all of our base animal impulses, or it’s a fantasy that requires humans to achieve a higher level of consciousness first or something.

Saying that China doesn’t have a MIC is a non-sequitur. The incentive is power. If acquiring or maintaining power in China requires military expansion, it will happen.