Like, yeah, they can ‘get away with’ ending soft power. They can ‘get away with’ extrajudicial killings. They’re operating off of pure machismo right now. They’re getting drunk on their vices. They’re stripping masks where masks wouldn’t be advised to be stripped. I feel like I understand now that Fascism is, in part, an expression of weakness. They wouldn’t be doing this unless they were scared. It’s too volatile. It feels both too late on a power-level and too early on a popular-level. Never mind the ticking time bomb that is AI data centers. It feels like, and I’m sure this is cope, there is a timer on their ability to run the circus much longer.

My first instinct here is to doubt myself, intellectual pessimism and all. In that vein, maybe this is just revolutionary optimism, but we’re at the point where it feels like there is a palpable anger brewing in the basement. I don’t know. Maybe Palantir works as an anti-communist panopticon and we just death spiral forever. I don’t want to lose hope.

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago

    Yes that makes more sense.

    I will reiterate my position: China is rolling out a lot of policies to promote domestic consumption, but my take is that you cannot truly resolve that without resolving the elephant in the room, which is the massive wealth inequality.

    The economists look at the record amount of household savings and think that they need to “trick” people into unleashing their savings, but this misses the fact the problem is a distribution problem. A lot people choose to save is because of the economic uncertainty. People are afraid of losing their jobs and since there is no social safety net, they prefer to save than to spend. This situation did not exist before 2020 by the way, when China’s economy was very much on the upward trajectory with the real estate booming.

    I have said this before but just to write it out again, the solution to this will be:

    1. The government provides job guarantee to the unemployed, so people will not have to worry about losing their jobs and lose their household income.
    2. The government provides social safety net so people won’t have to worry about dishing out large expenses in case of medical emergencies and during unemployment.
    3. Wealth redistribution.

    The first two require the central government to run high deficit. In order for people to have the money, somebody’s gonna have to spend it. Previously this was foreigners money through export, as well as the money from infrastructure investment. But since the export and investment-led growth are hitting a wall, it can only be the government running deficit (spending beyond what they earn) to offset that.

    The third is… uh… let’s just say very difficult.