Thread: Brave New World

Originally Posted by sabang

I guess yours is not the only opinion (thank goodness).

More crap off of quora. Your desperation is apparent as you are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel. As usual, just making a fool of yourself.

Actually, I find your desperation abundantly apparent. Rather childish too.

And I quite like a bit of a wind-up.

Originally Posted by sabang

The TikTok War

You must be disappointed that in thsi war there are no murdered babies.

Originally Posted by pickel

That kind of censorship doesn't bother sabang one bit though.

sabang's hypocrisy is legend, of course

Originally Posted by pickel

And if China is so great, why do so many of them live here?

According to sabang China is the happiest country in the wor
d with 107% of the population happy with the gobvernment

Originally Posted by sabang

And I quite like a bit of a wind-up.

You should be used to being wound up by now

Originally Posted by sabang

FULL- https://www.mintpressnews

Mint Press News again.

Originally Posted by sabang

Actually, I find your desperation abundantly apparent.

Utterly laughable. I am not the one posting idiotic shit off Quora.

Posted on May 13, 2022 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Indo-Pacific strategy adrift in an illusion


"The Chinese daily Global Times featured a political cartoon marking the US-ASEAN summit meeting in Washington on May 12-13. It showed the US President Joe Biden seeking help from a bus load of ASEAN officials to give a push to his battle tank hopelessly stuck on slush and mud and is sinking.

Biden’s tank is of course on the road to China. The cartoon captures the US’ desperate need to get the ASEAN countries align with its so-called Indo-Pacific strategy aimed at containing China. The ASEAN countries live by trade, but Washington’s obsessive focus is on security and coercive diplomacy, and the mismatch hinders the Indo-Pacific strategy from gaining traction.

The summit is a pivotal moment when the ASEAN leaders get to see whether Biden has anything to offer by way of economic cooperation — trading and investing, etc. — or will continue to cede regional economic integration with their region to China. In 2021, China’s trade with the ASEAN countries had touched US$878.2 billion, by far outstripping the US’ trade with ASEAN ($362 billion per last available 2021 figures.)

The summit is not expected to yield much substance. Biden is placing store on its symbolism. He hopes to impress the ASEAN leaderships that even at such a fateful juncture with a war raging in Europe, the Indo-Pacific strategy remains his heart’s desire.

No doubt, Biden hopes to push the Ukraine issue with the ASEAN leaders seeking a coalition with them against Moscow. But the ASEAN countries have mixed views on Ukraine. Myanmar at one end is supporting Russia, while Singapore instinctively embraces Washington’s sanctions against Russia. Vietnam and Laos, with strong connections to Moscow since Soviet era, abstained at the UN General Assembly votes reprimanding Russia. The ASEAN countries are concerned over the increases in the cost of oil, gas, grains and fertilisers due to the conflict in Ukraine and call for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

Washington’s entreaties to exclude Russia from the G-20, East Asia Summit and APEC later this year have been disregarded by the host countries (Jakarta, Phnom Penh and Bangkok.) Washington’s projection of Ukraine crisis as a confrontation between democracy and autocracy won’t fly in Southeast Asia, which widely practises hybrid forms of authoritarianism (Indonesia and Malaysia being exceptions.) The ASEAN countries do not want another bipolar world order. Nor do they want to get caught in the US-China rivalry trap. Besides, Russia is one of those rare countries that offers space for ASEAN to navigate the US-China relationship.

It will be interesting to see whether Biden pushes the envelope by coercing the ASEAN leaders to cut back on weapons purchases from Moscow or threaten them with secondary sanctions on Russian oil. Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Indonesia have purchased a significant amount of military hardware from Russia.

Fundamentally, the US holds a weak hand in the absence of a robust economic and trade strategy to counter China’s increasing influence in the region. The Biden Administration is averse to negotiating any new free trade agreements. With with protectionist sentiments running high, opening American market access is viewed as politically perilous.
The ASEAN, on the contrary, revel in free trade options. It is currently negotiating a FTA with Canada and its members are signatories to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership(RCEP). Beijing is a bird of the same feather — it has even applied for membership to CPTPP, while through RCEP, it aims to become even more integrated with ASEAN. Equally, the US lags far behind China in infrastructure investment. Washington has tom-tommed a Build Back Better World initiative to counter Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, but it remains in words.

The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which was announced in February as part of the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy, is unlikely to seduce the ASEAN leaders. The point is, for ASEAN countries, the bigger market by far is China. They are not going to be persuaded to build a supply chain completely decoupled from China.
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said that Southeast Asia “does not want to choose” between China and the US. Indeed, ASEAN strives to maintain positive relations with both Washington and Beijing. The paradox is, while there could be strategic convergence between some ASEAN countries and US over China’s rise, there is also divergence with regard to the US approaches — in particular, Washington’s goals to counter the rise of China by building a US-led security order that might undermine ASEAN and by weaponising sanctions in its diplomatic toolbox.

The Indo-Pacific strategy visualises sees the development of a ‘free’ and ‘open’ region bolstered by strong alliances and partnerships. Such goals entice the Quad, which savours attempts to manage the rise of China. But where the ASEAN does not see eye to eye with Quad is in its desire (and need) for more robust economic engagement with Beijing and its preference for inclusive cooperation. Again, Beijing has come up with an alternative to a US-led security order when it counter-proposed its Global Security Initiative at the recent Boao Forum for Asia focusing on principles such as indivisible security.

On the South China Sea, the Washington Summit will make the usual noises about upholding international law, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the peaceful resolution of disputes, but here too, how far the ASEAN is convinced about genuine US respect for its centrality in the regional security architecture is a moot point.
Meanwhile, a new factor is the election victory of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as the next president of the Philippines. His running mate Sara Duterte is the daughter of outgoing president, Rodrigo Duterte, who had skilfully carved out a middle position between Beijing and Washington, resisting attempts by the US to raise tensions in the South China Sea, and opting instead to work with Beijing on territorial disputes and keeping high-level channels of communication open with Beijing on issues of mutual concern, including direct contact with President Xi Jinping.

As his presidential legacy, Marcos Jr. has vowed to sign a bilateral deal with China to settle the South China Sea issue. Xi Jinping’s congratulatory message to Marcos suggests that Beijing apparently senses an opportunity to reset the balance of relations with Manila. Conceivably, if Philippines and China enter into deeper cooperation as well as finally resolve their South China Sea issue, it will shake up the Asia-Pacific, undermine the US efforts to militarise the southeast Asian region and render hopelessly obsolete Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy itself.
Interestingly, Philippines, which was the US’ closest regional ally historically, is giving a miss to the Washington Summit, pleading the political transition in Manila. During his entire 6-year presidency, Duterte never once visited the US."

Indo-Pacific strategy adrift in an illusion - Indian Punchline

OhOh, sorry to report, but China is shut!

^Nay problem. The elderly Chinese will relish a bit of peace.

Thai express always deliver come heatwave, tornado or monsoon.

Not one Asian country including Japan Sth Korea or China has made it to developed world status or anything approaching it by not dealing with the 40 plus trillion economy of the west.
Russia is about to find out even a country of its vast size needs the west and the results when it chooses to provoke the west into isolating Russia from their economies.
China will try to separate and bully small countries but even the CCP understands the perils of isolation from western markets. Western countries are already looking at product substitution from China.

That willingness to conceal Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism has grown even worse since the outbreak of war with Russia.

The U.S. news media’s treatment of the Ukraine issue has long been characterized by flagrant favoritism. Reports from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, and Freedom House showing that Ukraine’s actual conduct differed markedly from its carefully crafted image as a dedicated young democracy received little coverage in the mainstream press.

That willingness to conceal Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism has grown even worse since the outbreak of war with Russia. Media coverage moved quickly from ignoring or minimizing inconvenient information about Kyiv’s political and economic system to channeling outright Ukrainian propaganda.

For example, multiple unfiltered stories from Ukrayinska Pravda and other Ukrainian news outlets have become a nearly daily feature on Yahoo’s news feed. Official statements and press releases from Ukraine’s government also appear on Yahoo and other outlets, frequently without an acknowledgment that the accuracy of those accounts could not be confirmed.

Contents in the Washington Post and the New York Times, which set the agenda and tone throughout much of the US news media on any issue, similarly have conveyed a solidly pro-Ukraine perspective. Moreover, there are very few competing accounts in those outlets from Russian news sources or even from American analyses that challenge the dominant narrative.

The willingness of the US press to foster a favorable image of Ukraine knows few bounds. During the early weeks of the war, American news outlets even circulated the story about the “Ghost of Kyiv” – the fighter pilot who supposedly became an ace in a matter of days by shooting down numerous Russian warplanes.

That account had all the earmarks of transparent propaganda, and the Ukrainian military ultimately conceded that the story was fictional. In the meantime, however, it had served its purpose well as propaganda for credulous Western audiences, and the US press aided that effort. Indeed, the coverage of Kyiv’s retraction of the story was noticeably limited.

An especially egregious performance has occurred with respect to the role of the Azov battalion (now the Azov regiment) in Ukraine’s defense effort. The Azov battalion was notorious for years before the Russian invasion as a bastion of extreme nationalists and outright Nazis.

That aspect proved to be more than just a source of embarrassment for Ukraine’s supporters when the unit became a crucial player in the battle for the city of Mariupol. The Western (especially US) press sought to portray Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian siege as a heroic effort similar to battle of Stalingrad in World War II.

The prominence of the Azov regiment among the defenders certainly should have complicated that media portrayal. Yet most accounts simply focused on the suffering of Mariupol’s population, the heartless villainy of the Russian aggressors, and the tenacity of the city’s brave defenders.

Such accounts typically ignored the presence of Azov fighters among the defenders or failed to disclose their ideological pedigree. A Washington Post story, for example, merely described the Azov regiment as “a nationalist outfit.” Other news accounts referred to the Azov forces in a similar vague manner, occasionally with a perfunctory acknowledgment that the regiment was controversial.

One article, though, engaged in a more extensive whitewash. A May 11, 2022, Wall Street Journal column by Jillian Kay Melchior featured an interview she had conducted with Bohdan Krotevych, the Azov regiment’s chief of staff in Mariupol. The following passage was typical of the article’s tone.

The Azov Regiment is known for its courage – and controversy. US media has reported that some members espoused neo-Nazi ideology, a claim the Kremlin has taken up. I asked Mr. Krotevych about the unit’s reputation. “Like in other units, including military units of the US army, there are some individuals who hold Nazi views,” he says. But labeling the entire regiment neo-Nazi “is like calling all Americans racist because the KKK exists in the US”

Amazingly, Melchior let that absurd, self-serving statement pass without making an effort to provide a clarification or rebuttal. Even a brief counterpoint might have mentioned that the Azov regiment uses banners and insignia that bear a striking resemblance to counterparts used by the Nazi SS and other portions of Adolf Hitler’s regime. Most Americans (much less the US military) do not openly display KKK regalia. The rest of the story is nearly as defective, allowing Krotevych to come across to readers as a heroic figure.

It is hardly a new aspect of the US media’s performance regarding foreign conflicts that journalists are willing to sanitize the image of whatever faction Washington favors. Most of the mainstream media did that with respect to the Kosovo Liberation Army during the conflict in the Balkans. The same has been true of news stories and commentaries on insurgents trying to unseat Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad. Very few accounts accurately describe the most influential components of the rebel forces as the jihadists that they are.

However, the coverage of the Ukraine war threatens to achieve a new low in media integrity and credibility. When the establishment press whitewashes the behavior of outright neo-Nazis, something is terribly amiss.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 12 books and more than 950 articles on international affairs.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2022/0...h-grows-worse/
[/COLOR]

Is Russia balanced in the news it shows its people sabang? Or are you just being a hypocrite again?

Originally Posted by sabang

veteranstoday.com

A fake news tin foil site. Surprise surprise.

Originally Posted by sabang

That willingness to conceal Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism has grown even worse since the outbreak of war with Russia. Media coverage moved quickly from ignoring or minimizing inconvenient information about Kyiv’s political and economic system to channeling outright Ukrainian propaganda.

That's pretty much like everybody I know sees it.

Originally Posted by pickel

Is Russia balanced in the news it shows its people sabang?

Pickel's last resort

Originally Posted by helge

Pickel's last resort

Another hypocrite that claims they hate corruption and censorship, but gives the worst offender a pass.

Originally Posted by pickel

Another hypocrite that claims they hate corruption and censorship, but gives the worst offender a pass.

Pickel the Dodger tries again.

No cigar as you well know, that I find Putin and his regime repulsive, but you will dodge that too, won't you, Poor Pickel.

"Can't find a box to fit helge in. WahWah"




Not a fan of Zelensky either, as you might have noticed.

Take it that you have a poster over your bed with Wlodomir.

Hypocrite

Originally Posted by helge

"Can't find a box to fit helge in. WahWah"

Trust me helge, I've found a box to put you in, and it's labeled "boring".

Well I'm out of the "hypocrite box" then ?

Trust me, Pickel; I can live with you finding me boring.

I don't really want to have anything to do with people without principles, like you.

You lot are more than often only good for watch tower recruitment.


Cause you are so good at following orders.

^
Yup. Still boring.

Why not- some American propaganda about Russian propaganda.

Current and former employees describe Russian state television as an army, one with a few generals and many foot soldiers who never question their orders.

Six nights a week, Vladimir Solovyov, one of the dominant voices in Russian propaganda, gathers a half-dozen pundits for more than two hours of what appears to be unscripted political crosstalk. Most recent episodes have been devoted to mocking Ukraine and its allies—especially the United States and President Biden—and debating Russia’s options. “Should we just turn the world to dust?” Solovyov asked during his show on April 29th. His guests—seven middle-aged men—laughed heartily. Later, Solovyov grew sombre. “I’d like to remind the West of two statements of historic significance,” he said. “The President of the Russian Federation has asked, ‘What is the point of a world in which there is no Russia?’ ” This is a quote from an interview Solovyov himself conducted with Vladimir Putin, in 2018, in which Putin responded to a question about the possibility of a nuclear war. The second statement Solovyov quoted was also from Putin in 2018: “If they start a nuclear war, we will respond. But we, being righteous people, will go straight to Heaven, while they will just croak.” Solovyov quotes this one a lot, sometimes as a sort of call-and-response with his guests.

All broadcast television in Russia is either owned or controlled by the state. The main evening newscasts on the two main state channels, Channel One and Russia One, cover more or less the same stories, in more or less the same order. On April 30th, for example, Channel One led with a report from a village recently “liberated from the neo-Nazis”; Russia One began its newscast with a general update on the gains made by Russian troops—“Hundreds of neo-Nazis liquidated, tens of airborne targets hit, and several hits against command centers and equipment stockpiles.” Both newscasts reported on atrocities ostensibly committed by Ukrainian troops. “The Ukrainian Army once more bombed civilian targets,” Russia One claimed. Channel One carried a detailed confession supposedly made by a Ukrainian prisoner of war, who said that he had raped a Russian woman and murdered her husband. Both channels carried reports from a military hospital where a group of young men in identical striped pajamas received medals for their heroic roles in “liberating” Ukrainian towns and villages.

Coverage is repetitive not just from day to day, television channel to television channel; nearly identical stories appear in print and online media, too. According to a number of current and former employees at Russian news outlets, there is a simple explanation for this: at weekly meetings with Kremlin officials, editors of state-controlled media, including broadcasters and publishers, coördinate topics and talking points. Five days a week, a state-controlled consultancy issues a more detailed list of topics. (The organization did not respond to a request for comment.) I have not seen these lists myself—individuals with access to them said that they were too scared of being prosecuted under new espionage laws to share them—but they agreed to analyze the lists during the course of a couple of weeks. They said that the lists generally contained six to ten topics a day, which appear designed to supplement the Ministry of Defense’s war updates that constitute mandatory coverage. Those among my sources who have seen these lists work for non-broadcast media, but the talking points they described invariably appeared in the news lineups on Channel One and Russia One.

Topics fall into four broad categories: economic, revelatory, sentimental, and ironic. Economic stories should show that Western sanctions against Russia have made life harder in Europe than in Russia: people in Britain can’t afford heat, Germans could be forced to ride bikes because gas prices are rising, stock markets are falling, and Western Europe may be facing a food crisis. Revelatory topics focus on misinformation and disinformation in the West. These may include stories about Ukrainian refugees exposing their true criminal selves by shoplifting in a Western European country, or a segment about Austin Tice, an American journalist who was kidnapped in Syria, in 2012, narrated to suggest that he was punished for telling the truth about the United States. Sentimental stories focus on connections between Russians in Russia and in eastern Ukraine: a couple getting married in newly “liberated” Berdyansk, humanitarian aid from Russia arriving in the Donetsk region, and Russian doctors providing medical treatment to children injured in Ukraine. Finally, ironic stories focus on mocking the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, frequently, Joe Biden’s supposed mental decline. For these, Russian television often uses segments from Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was in Moscow, watching television, and I was struck by the ways in which channels downplayed the war: the tone was matter-of-fact, the length of newscasts unchanged. I assumed that this was a strategy aimed at making Russians pay little attention to what the Kremlin was calling a “special military operation.” But, according to my sources, what I was observing was not a deliberate strategy but a lack of strategy. At least some of the Kremlin’s media managers hadn’t known that the invasion was coming. Now television is all war all the time; in addition to talk shows and newscasts, there are special reports that claim to debunk Western and Ukrainian propaganda or to expose the roots of so-called Ukrainian fascism, and fictional dramas on the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s term for the Soviet part of the Second World War. In the past, journalists in television and print media would be instructed to pursue specific angles on stories. But people who have seen the lists describe a less prescriptive process today. “It’s this, not that—for example, Mariupol, and not Bucha,” one of my sources said. “And within that space you can even have a discussion.”

Solovyov, whose show airs on Russia One, is a master of orchestrating what sounds like discussion, within the narrow space defined by authorities. On April 26th, he and Margarita Simonyan, who runs both Rossiya Segodnya, a domestic state-news holding, and RT, the international arm of the television-propaganda machine, discussed a purported plot to assassinate them and several other propagandists that had ostensibly been foiled by the secret police a day earlier. Footage of the raid looked like a parody—among the evidence police claimed to have found was a pendant with a swastika on one side and a Ukrainian trident on the other, Molotov cocktails in plastic bottles (not a thing), and three video-game cartridges. Simonyan mused that the assassination was planned on orders from the opposition politician Alexey Navalny, in collaboration with Zelensky, because both are neo-Nazis.

In 2020, Navalny himself survived an assassination attempt that appears to have been carried out by Russia’s security service, the F.S.B.; he has been in prison for more than a year. “Can you even imagine the things he would have done here, if he hadn’t been jailed?” Simonyan said. Before I dived into watching Russian propaganda, Lev Gudkov, an independent sociologist, told me that television rhetoric was based on “ascribing their own traits to the opponent.” It really is that simple. Solovyov and his guests, along with the other news anchors, reporters, and hosts on Channel One and Russia One, sound like aggrieved kids on a playground: “No, you are the Nazi!”; “You are shelling residential neighborhoods!”; “You kill journalists!”; “You rape and kill civilians!”; “You are genocidal!” (I asked Solovyov and Simonyan for interviews; Solovyov didn’t respond, and Simonyan used her Telegram channel, which has about three hundred thousand subscribers, to announce that she would not speak to me.)

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizo-fascism” to describe actual fascists who call their enemies “fascists.” Snyder has said that the tactic follows Hitler’s recommendation to tell a lie so big and outrageous that the psychic cost of resisting it is too high for most people—in the case of Ukraine, an autocrat wages a genocidal war against a democratic nation with a Jewish President, and calls the victims Nazis. The talking heads on Russian television regularly acknowledge the apparent absurdity of the situation they claim to describe. “The world has gone mad,” Dmitry Drobnitsky, a political scientist, said on Solovyov’s show, on April 29th. “Russians are Russophobic, and Jews are the worst anti-Semites.” A few days later, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, in an interview on Italian television, repeated the same canard about anti-Semitic Jews, adding that Hitler was part-Jewish. Solovyov, who is Jewish, has referred to Zelensky as “a supposed Jew.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annal...d=CRMNYR012019


Doesn't seem much different to our propaganda TBH.

Originally Posted by sabang

Doesn't seem much different to our propaganda TBH.

Clueless as usual.

Emphasize rape and other atrocities, mock the opposition leadership, push 'good news'- same shit, different language.

Originally Posted by sabang

same shit, different language.

Most definitely not, but you keep smoking your fake news.

Glasnost your Perestroika Comrade!