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  • Meanwhile Republicans are going on every news channel to declare that this administration's policies are guaranteed to make China the dominant world power.

    The reality is, China is not really that concerned with what the US does beyond whether those actions benefit China. They'll complain publicly any time they aren't being treated "fairly" -- which in their doublespeak means favorably -- and then turn around and treat everyone else with explicit unfairness in a fairly public and obvious manner. Don't subscribe to their reaction videos.

    The only question that matters is whether the policies are effectively delivering on their professed goals.

    The IRA mostly such a brilliant piece of legislation that it is hard to even understand that it made it through the legislature nearly unscathed. Ignore the leftists so far up their own assholes that they'll pretend Joe Manchin taking a small shit in the corner means we should permanently condemn the whole pool. The chips bill is pretty reasonable, albeit quite protectionist. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has its priorities all over the place, but still manages a fair amount of impressive progress (though god help me the amount we are STILL spending on highway expansion is simply incomprehensible. We KNOW it doesn't work).

    Whether or not China likes or hates these policies... no one should care who isn't Chinese. It's not our problem. They have an authoritarian government and can change their domestic rules to get on friendlier terms with the rest of the world any time they please, and if they aren't doing so that is their choice to make. They have a right to complain to the WTO. They know better than anyone that the WTO has no real power to change domestic policies, though.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    A persistent theme in Republican campaigning these past few years has been the effort to portray Democrats in general, and President Biden in particular, as being soft on China — in contrast to Donald Trump’s supposed toughness.

    This looks ironic now, since Trump, who had favored a ban, suddenly reversed his position, reportedly around the same time that he had a sit-down with a billionaire who donates to Republican campaigns and has a large stake in the Chinese-controlled company.

    Even before his TikTok flip-flop, however, the reality was that while Trump talked a xenophobic line that shaded into racism — for example, trying to relabel Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” — and imposed showy but ineffective tariffs, he never had a coherent strategy for confronting our biggest rival.

    China just filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization about the Inflation Reduction Act, which, despite its name, is at its core an attempt to fight climate change by subsidizing the transition to a low-emission economy.

    And it has often engaged in blatantly discriminatory policy — for example, for several years, until 2019, non-Chinese companies were essentially prevented from supplying electric vehicle batteries to Chinese car manufacturers.

    As I said, Biden’s China policy is so tough that it makes me, someone who generally favors a rules-based system, nervous, although unlike many economists — who, I’d argue, don’t fully grasp how the world has changed — I do believe it’s the right approach.

    The original article contains 913 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

  • Trump bans China: Boooo

    Biden bans China: Yaaaay

    If money was put into production in Mexico instead of trying to squeeze every last cent out of it, China wouldn't have all of the worlds production right now.

  • After NYT reported falsified rape allegations, even crappy articles like this don't seem all that bad.

    • What. The fuck. Are you even talking about. It's telling that I have no idea which candidate you're even referring to. Please take your medicine...

      • I think they're talking about the Hamas rape allegations.

        A big part of the art of bad faith-arguing is the taking one semi-related kernel of truth and inflating it like a balloon one step at a time until its massively outsized implied impact can eclipse the thing you want to disagree with, but which you can't or won't just deal with head-on.

        In this case, this person maybe doesn't want to make the attempt to criticize this story directly, so instead they go with:

        • Some of the allegations of rape in the NYT's reporting were probably wrong (true)
        • Therefore they shouldn't have published the story (debatable -- literally, there was heated debate about it internally)
        • And furthermore all the allegations and the main thrust of the story were wrong (untrue -- see the UN's report on sexual violence during the attack for example (content warning)).
        • Therefore because a couple, but not all, of the accounts they published in that one story turned out to be suspect, the New York Times as a whole and every single thing it publishes is crappy
        • Therefore this story is crappy and I don't even have to say why I think so; I can just say "rape allegations!" and call back to #1 and all the rest is implied.

        I actually do think that the New York Times has a massive pro-Israel anti-Palestine bias and that that colored that particular story, them choosing to report it, and how. But it doesn't mean even that the story was falsified or that Hamas didn't rape anybody, let alone whatever else about the other 99.whatever% of the stories they publish.

33 comments