#881
Post rating: +
ive been reading alot of headlines this morning and it looks like self-driving cars are already here and theyre crashing into/plowing through/colliding with crowds at an alarming rate. i hope that poor man sitting in the front left-hand seat gets the due process he deserves as an innocent passenger with no agency
#882
"Jpg." - Hank Hill
Post rating: +
i'm going to spend all day on twitter making memes about how liberals hate socialists more than nazis, then turn around and ask them to suppress protesting to stop the nazis
#883
Post rating: +
social media was a mistake
#884
Post rating: ~


it begins?
#885
Post rating: +
No the dissolution of the U.S. empire began a while back afaik
#886
[account deactivated]
#887
Deus Ex Machinist
Post rating: +
very interesting beef. this move is of course part of trump's play in Korean peninsula, but the economics

“The theft of intellectual property (IP) by foreign countries costs our nation millions of jobs and billions and billions of dollars each and every year,” Trump said, as he signed the memo surrounded by trade advisers and company executives. “For too long, this wealth has been drained from our country while Washington has done nothing... But Washington will turn a blind eye no longer.”


trump promised to 'bring back' industry and jobs to US from China. now that he has realized that american companies remain profitable only through divesting ops to China and investing at the financial level globally, he needs a new tack to deliver on his promise.

the Chinese government denied the allegations and implied it might challenge a U.S. action in the World Trade Organization.


so this is really about going after China alone.

On his first Monday in office, Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-country trade deal that the Obama administration saw as its key method of pressuring China on trade. The deal, which did not include China, had strict rules for IP and it would have required Beijing to change certain laws and practices to join the pact.
The Trump administration, in contrast, has shown a preference for using unilateral measures, like the Section 301 investigation. The law would allow the president to eventually unilaterally impose tariffs and other trade penalties against China over its IP practices. The move is a far cry from the broad 45 per cent tariffs that Mr Trump threatened to impose on China during last year’s presidential campaign. But it signals a tougher approach, with Mr Lighthizer, who served in the Reagan administration, being one of a number of China hawks in Mr Trump’s cabinet. 


reaganomics reactivated for IP. so how exactly are the devious Chinese disrespecting USIP?

Chinese rules require foreign firms who want to enter certain industries - such as energy, telecommunications and autos - to form joint ventures with local partners, which often results in the transfer of technology to the Chinese companies. Beijing also strongly encourages global businesses to carry out R&D activities inside the country.
Beijing has other ways of getting its hands on valuable commercial information. Officials often insist on taking a close look at technology that foreign companies want to sell in China.
"Chinese government authorities jeopardize the value of trade secrets by demanding unnecessary disclosure of confidential information for product approvals," the American Chamber of Commerce in China said in a report published in April.
"Many Chinese companies go after technology hard and the tactics they use show up again and again, leading us to believe there is some force (the government?) teaching them how to do these things," said Dan Harris, a Seattle-based attorney who advises international companies on doing business in China.


how dastardly - some force is making these chinese negotiators better at kung-fu. could all this be a distraction?

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Chinese citizens filed nearly twice as many patent applications as Americans last year, and Chinese spending on research and development almost matched U.S. levels.
"IP theft is yesterday's issue," wrote Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "In part because of past technology transfer and in part because of heavy, sustained government investment in science and research, China has developed its own innovative capabilities," he wrote. "Creating new IP in the United States is more important than keeping IP from China."


the backlash is already here.
articles referred:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/14/trump-administration-goes-after-china-over-intellectual-property-advanced-technology/
https://www.ft.com/content/0e57be1c-7f84-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff
http://www.weny.com/story/36129965/how-china-squeezes-tech-secrets-from-us-companies

#888
Post rating: +

You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss’s continuing indulgence of white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led, to vilify the security chief. Trump’s defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday press conference, was tepid.

But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. “They’re wetting themselves,” he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I’d just published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon’s boss.

“In Kim, Trump has met his match,” I wrote. “The risk of two arrogant fools blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since October 1962.” Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?

I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak by phone. Bannon promptly called.

Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, “It’s a great honor to finally track you down. I’ve followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China. You absolutely nailed it.”

“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”

Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution , forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China’s trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”

But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing’s aid on the North Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don’t want to mess with the trading system?

“Oh, they’re wetting themselves,” he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence.

“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton out at State.”

But can Bannon really win that fight internally?

“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”

“We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, every day.”

Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.

There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First, to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon’s China trade strategy are other Trump administration officials, it’s not clear how reaching out to the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.

More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump’s election were “Resisting Trump” and “Containing Trump”) and assume that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.

The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the press. He’s probably the most media-savvy person in America.

I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

From his lips to Trump’s ear.

“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His enemies will do what they do.

Either the reports of the threats to Bannon’s job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting. Given Trump’s impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes.

The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We’ll see if he’s still there.


http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant

#889
Online
Post rating: +

tpaine posted:

failtroops are all of them except for like breanna manning type folks.


when people talk about trump banning trans ppl from the army a good thing to say is "The greatest american military hero in the last 50 years, is trans"

#890
"Jpg." - Hank Hill
Post rating: ~
ahem

osama
#891
Post rating: +
they fired bannon because he said in an interview that north korea was a sideshow
#892
"Jpg." - Hank Hill
Post rating: +
the charlottesville driver is the best/worst kind of troop: the loser washout troop

• Military records show that Mr. Fields entered the Army on Aug. 18, 2015, around the time his mother wrote on Facebook that he had left for boot camp. Less than four months later, on Dec. 11, his period of active duty concluded. It was not immediately clear why he left the military.

#893
Post rating: +
i watched some footage from "charlottesville" and god damn is that the worst pile of colossal larping failson shit ive ever seen, with more guns than anywhere else in the world the "alt right fascist revial" rock up with friggin wooden shields and hitler slogan tshirts then one of them who couldnt even hack it as a troop choses to try and recreate the latest euro-wizarding attack. All the while the real fascists™ march around with guns and camo uniforms claiming they're theyre to "keep the peace" in leiu of the police. Watching some armed militia person telling a kid with a capitain america shield and flag to fuck off then shouting out "there's another one surrounded by n****rs" as they rush off is deeply unsettling.
#894
Post rating: +
...like considering a huge part of amerikkkan kkkulture is how they singlehandedly defeated hitler, trying to build a USA fascist movement off images of nazi germany seems as stupid as if these fuckos were walking around with chrysanthamum flags and shouting long live the emperor...

...dang i am full of advice for fascists today :rolleyes:
#895
Post rating: +

tears posted:

...like considering a huge part of amerikkkan kkkulture is how they singlehandedly defeated hitler, trying to build a USA fascist movement off images of nazi germany seems as stupid as if these fuckos were walking around with chrysanthamum flags and shouting long live the emperor...

...dang i am full of advice for fascists today :rolleyes:



yeah there's something very strange about people shouting "blood and soil" in a society that's been industrialized for over 100 years and so doesn't have a proletarianized peasantry nostalgic for for a medieval past. or maybe it's just a settler tradition.

#896
[account deactivated]
#897
[account deactivated]
#898
[account deactivated]
#899
Online
Post rating: +


liberals unable to even attack Endless War from the left

Edited by ilmdge ()

#900
Post rating: +
Do people actually say "Draft Evader." It's draft dodger. Is this some kind of gold plated weasel word meant to tiptoe around reminding people that dodging the draft happened because Vietnam was a crime against humanity, or is it just stuffy liberal formal speak.
#901
Post rating: +
It took me a few goes to not read it as Darth Vader, so maybe that liberal multi dimensional chess has transferred over to the #resistance
#902
Post rating: +
the funny thing is that Donnie has surrendered to the military establishment just like we all knew he would, the sad other funny thing is that all of his dumbfuck internet supporters are fooling themselves into not seeing what happened

Edited by thirdplace ()

#903
[account deactivated]
#904
[account deactivated]
#905
Poronto
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gravity is alt-left
#906
Post rating: +

RTC posted:

Don't know where else to post this, and apologize for the twitter link. But, Chelsea Manning (American whistle blower) was just released from prison.









#907
Post rating: +

RTC posted:



yeah but she probably associates "tankie" with the redkahina clique that accused her of being a spook, because the CIA loves to have their agents whistleblow on war crimes then get locked in a nude cage for four years in order to get enough "street cred" to infiltrate the DSA

#908
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

marlax78 posted:

tears posted:
yeah there's something very strange about people shouting "blood and soil" in a society that's been industrialized for over 100 years and so doesn't have a proletarianized peasantry nostalgic for for a medieval past. or maybe it's just a settler tradition.



on one hand, U.S. culture is a blood drinking parasite by nature, on the other, german nazis didn't know shit about history any more than U.S. ones do

#909
Post rating: +

thirdplace posted:

yeah but she probably associates "tankie" with the redkahina clique that accused her of being a spook,


i long for those simpler times of old when i could simply condemn tankie as an anticommunist slur instead of having to explain to twitter-tainted acquaintances 'no, those are the bad ones'

#910
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thirdplace posted:

RTC posted:


yeah but she probably associates "tankie" with the redkahina clique that accused her of being a spook, because the CIA loves to have their agents whistleblow on war crimes then get locked in a nude cage for four years in order to get enough "street cred" to infiltrate the DSA



i promise the troop is actually just a liberal

#911
Post rating: +
Chelsea Manning released some files & sat in jail for 4 years or whatever shes not actually a good communist or anything.
#912
[account deactivated]
#913
Dont Mess With Sucess
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tpaine posted:

I could release my futa drive and go to pervert jail and suddenly I'm Leon Trotsky?


this is confirmed in the transcripts of the moscow trials

#914
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Think I'm going to go ahead and ifap tpaine & see if anyone lets him out
#915
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damn it, clarence.
#916
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Petrol posted:

thirdplace posted:


yeah but she probably associates "tankie" with the redkahina clique that accused her of being a spook,


i long for those simpler times of old when i could simply condemn tankie as an anticommunist slur instead of having to explain to twitter-tainted acquaintances 'no, those are the bad ones'






Divide, and conquer

#917
[account deactivated]
#918
Post rating: +
Free mumia
Free tpaine
Free cialis
#919
Post rating: +

roseweird posted:

underestimating political and economic power of petty bourgeois farmers imo, also not taking into account the great sprawling decentralization of america which people experience through its highway system and suburban life in general


yeah rich farmers are definitely the driving force behind most of the fasc tendencies out west in the prairies. of course there are neonazis in the city here but they are likely to just be goofy shithead cosplayers like the failsons of odin, more violent in the immediate sense but easy to send packing and less dangerous in the long term. real prairie socialism is unfortunately all but dead.

#920
Post rating: +

Keven posted:

Think I'm going to go ahead and ifap tpaine & see if anyone lets him out



This is just like what happened to Chelsea Manning