You’d think that’s too far fetched even for a joke that someone would have a take like that but it’s not as far from reality as you’d think. I’ve known people who genuinely seem to believe that we’ve evolved past the need for industry and we can all just write apps for a living.

I mean yeah on the face of it having similar (by then even a bit bigger) population size to China, plenty of natural resources and the largest amount of habitable land in the world, it seems bad that India is only producing a fraction of what China is. But maybe they can compensate for that by going hard on IT and finance to be like the rich, developed western nations. Working in factories or on construction sites is for losers anyway, smart people work in offices writing code or trading stocks - those are the high paying jobs, ergo it stands to reason that a country is better off the more people it has doing those kinds of jobs… ideally 100% of the population for maximum profit!

I was also under a wrong impression. From how well versed you are on what’s going on in Europe i thought you were European 😆

I’m going to offer a more historical explanation and say that imo you have to go back further than WW2 or even WW1 to understand the deep seated issues that these countries have. A big reason why they are so mentally colonized is because they were physically and culturally colonized for hundreds of years by the Germans during the middle ages when the various crusader orders established their own states in the Baltics. During that time they developed a collective Stockholm syndrome and ever since they can’t stop wanting to be German. And just like the western Ukrainians (who were also colonized by Germans in the form of the Austro-Hungarian empire) oftentimes going completely insane in their zeal to show their loyalty to the West, including being more brutal in their atrocities toward Russians and Jews than even the Nazis.

Bullshit.

God, that’s gotta be the whitest shit i’ve ever read.

Excellent points all around. Thanks! I love that we can always rely on you to give us the sobering big picture analysis whenever we get too in our heads about something.

Yeah, you’re right…i just get frustrated sometimes because i’m really really sick of these assholes. Can’t wait to see them gone.

It definitely wouldn’t be a good thing, that’s for sure, as an immigrant i am acutely aware of that. I’m just saying whichever way you view that possibility, whether you think it would accelerate us even faster into open fascism (though it’s hard to argue that the current regime isn’t fascist when you see how they fund+arm literal Nazis, run cover for a genocide, and persecute journalists and activist groups who dare to go against the accepted narrative) or you think that they are a wild card who may shake things up and possibly do a U-turn on at least the most self-destructive Ukraine policies if not put up some resistance to the NATO-EU Atlanticist project (highly unlikely imo, at the end of the day the right wing’s “populism” is always fake and a cover for giving more money and power to capitalists), there is no reason quite yet to fearmonger/get your hopes up. What we will see is more of the same, more doubling down on sunk cost. The foot is stuck to the accelerator pedal and the car is heading straight for a cliff.

I just wonder if some sort of bidding war there will start.

Unfortunately in that sort of scenario China does not have the upper hand. Of course it has one big advantage over the US which is its overwhelmingly superior productive capabilities, but the US has two things going for it:

Firstly they control the dollar and they can print as much of it as they need to bribe pretty much anyone. And sure without productive capacity all of that is just worthless paper but the problem is that China still accepts that worthless paper in exchange for its physically tangible and actually valuable goods.

And the second, which i think gets overlooked a lot in Marxist geopolitical analyses, is that the US ruling class is fanatical whereas China’s is pragmatic. Someone who is irrational and fanatical makes more mistakes but they also are also always going to be willing to stake more and go harder than someone who is being reasonable and cautious. This factor should not be underestimated.

For all the great things that can be said about the current Chinese leadership, which i do think still genuinely believes in socialism, the one thing they don’t have to the same extent as they did in the Mao era is revolutionary zeal; the willingness to take big risks, make any sacrifices necessary, and the confident belief - an almost religious-like faith if you will - that you are bound to win. This is something the USSR had during the Great Patriotic War, we can see it today in the Axis of Resistance, and we also see it in the liberal fanaticism of the western imperialists, but i just don’t see it in China. But idk maybe this is all bullshit and i’m just being idealistic here…

True, if France and Germany bail it’s game over, but i don’t see it happening just yet. We’re not getting AfD any time soon in Germany, we’re getting CDU again, most likely either with FDP or even SPD again. I.e. more of the same. And as for France, the centrists have managed to successfully defraud the left of its electoral victory. In order to cling to power they will likely enter into an alliance with the nationalist right, but there is no reason to believe that LePen would behave any differently than a Meloni or a Wilders. These right wing “populists” are all talk during elections but when they get power they just bend the knee to NATO and the EU. The dam break has to happen eventually because the deterioration of material conditions will make it unavoidable, but i think the time frame we’re looking at is longer than some people hope. Not that it matters much because i think Russia is on track to completely collapse the Ukrainian front lines much sooner than that.

That’s the case in most of these countries. I think we will see the same pattern repeat all over Europe: the Ukraine war and associated self-damaging policies are deeply unpopular, the incumbent party loses the elections as a consequence (perhaps not as a direct consequence but indirectly because of fallout effects such as de-industrialization), they get replaced with an opposition that proceeds to do exactly the same things as the previous government, nothing changes, rinse and repeat. Until the crisis in Europe becomes so bad the entire dam breaks…

Nothing. That is, doing nothing is what made him a revisionist. He didn’t undo Khrushchev’s policies either on the economic side (at least not sufficiently) or on the political side (no rehabilitation of Stalin).

Whoa there, are Red ultras?

Apparently so. They put out good content most of the time though and luckily they don’t talk about China too often. It’s still sad that they have such a huge misunderstanding when it comes to China, i mean how can you see everything that the imperialist West is doing and still think China is the same?

Woops. I missed that. Yeah that’s pretty cringe. Leaving aside the nonsense about China being imperialist that whole paragraph would make way more sense if they said US instead of China, because it’s the US that’s been mainly siphoning off German industry. A lot of companies have been moving to the US because energy prices are just insanely uncompetitive in Germany (thanks to USA blowing up our pipelines and US puppet Green party shutting down our nuclear power…). I mean just look at this shit:

Yeah not only is Die Linke dead but even before the split it had very little chance of breaking through electorally especially in the western part of Germany. They have been relentlessly smeared by the mainstream media pretty much ever since the party was created and have been associated in people’s minds with the communist “dictatorship” of the DDR. In the east that’s not as big of an issue and they used to get some wins there every now and then, but they would never have had a chance outside of those eastern states. BSW by and large doesn’t have that branding problem, though now the mainstream media is working overtime to demonize them by calling them Putin puppets. Not sure it’s working, a lot of people just don’t trust the MSM anymore.

By the way, i can personally confirm the part about the German railways being an absolute embarrassment. For months now on my wife’s commute route it has basically been a nightmare, impossible to rely on the trains even coming at all, and all they say ahead of time is “disruptions may occur”, so people go to the station thinking they’ll catch their usual train to work.

First everything seems normal, then they announce delays, then 5 min before it’s supposed to come they announce it’s actually not coming at all. Then they say you can take this alternate route via slower regional rail but you need to switch trains halfway and it’ll take you almost an hour longer, oh and for part of the route you also need to take a bus that the railway company kindly provides as replacement for the train.

But then you get there and that bus doesn’t come and there is zero explanation why not and you are stranded in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and you’d have to wait another 45 min for the next train, so you end up sharing a cab with a couple of other similarly fucked over passengers. You get to work almost two hours late.

Later that day when you get off work you get to go through a similar adventure going home. Oh and by the way starting January the price of your ticket is going up by 20%. German efficiency!

Insanity. How is this scam still a thing in the 21st century?!

Never heard of phenylephrine but we have shit over in Europe too that does fuck-all, like that “homeopathic” bullcrap. Last time i went to visit my grandma i happened to have a cold and she immediately tried giving me some stuff called “oscillococcinum”. I got suspicious when i looked over the packaging so i looked it up, and turns out it’s basically nothing but sugar claiming to be imbued with some magic properties thanks to “trace” (read ZERO) amounts of something or other.

Pisses me the fuck off…they advertise the shit out of it on TV and they get gullible old people to waste their money. And their pensions are already meager in eastern Europe, they don’t need to be scammed out of their money with placebo pills. Tried to convince my grandma to stop buying the stuff but i think all i managed to do was make her mad at me :(

Sometimes even people who have lived through a collapse don’t understand it. My family lived through the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s, and yet since moving to Germany my parents have fully bought into the dominant ideology here, they listen to all the liberal mainstream media and it’s turned them into total turbolibs. When you bring up the possibility of a serious crash because of the energy/deindustrialization crisis they say that can’t happen in democratic countries like Germany, it only happened in Romania because it was a communist dictatorship. And it was supposedly good that it happened because that was “the market correcting itself”, there was “too much” industry and building under communism.

What’s funny is that the part of my family that stayed in Romania are not buying the western liberal line to the same extent. They’re split between nostalgia for communism in my grandparents’ generation and full on petit bourgeois reactionary brainworms in the generation after them, especially in the more well off ones, complaining about welfare, criminal ethnic minorities, and adopting all the standard American conservative talking points (“woke” this, “woke” that, trans panic, too much racial/gender diversity on TV, etc.).