That would be true if Ukraine wasn’t drafting its people and giving prison sentences for expressing that Ukraine should cede the territory its lost for peace, while the US demands they draft even younger people.

Currently, most of the people fighting on either side have no choice, nor do the people having their homes destroyed.

They lose out in that any time you refer to something that can be counted, you have an irregular counting word before it. Each word doesn’t get its own counting word though, and there’s a generic, ge you can always use if you have the vocabulary of a 3 year old, so it’s not that bad, but it’s still completely unnecessary memorization.

Chinese is even cooler in that they don’t need different, often irregular versions of the same word for tense and plural either.

No, you see we need to fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood. Every Ukrainian man, woman, and child must be sacrificed and the whole of Ukraine sold for scrap then reduced to toxic, landmine-ridden wastes, unfit for human habitation.

It’s good when we do it. It’s bad when fascists do it.

These attempts to humiliate often just lend more power to the victims anyway.

Nah, nazis depend on the appearance of strength, publicly humiliating them is very effective.

Because calling anyone else an American is insulting.

Piquing a demigods’s curiosity, returning to your home city and finding it’s been turned to metal and everyone is fused into the walls/floors.

Or they can just be boring and do “Huh, we have an array of telescopes, it’s very large.” OK, what do we call the small one?

We’ve increase the frequency for radio, lets call it High Frequency. We’ve increased it further, what do we call it? Even further. Surely it can’t get faster than this. God dammit. Fuck it, just use numbers.

Russian influence is on the rise and surprisingly effective.

…Do you think Russia is communist?

Going full fascist to enforce austerity.

Declaring martial law at 19% popularity and accusing anyone right of Mussolini of being communists, just classical South Korean things.

This is how carbon credits work.

That article isn’t great in the way that it considers GaAs wafers separately, as if Chinese export controls won’t touch GaAs wafers, whereas the Chinese announcement specifies anything that might be used by the US military industrial complex containing Ga may be targeted.

Antimony? That thing I gotta pay the ex-wife?

They also skipped how production of these metals occurs, for Gallium for example, it’s a byproduct of aluminum production. China became the main gallium (and later, LED) producer because they mandated (and sourced relevant equipment) for bauxite refining operations to harvest it, despite being non-economical to do so at the time, as part of a project that was consuming ~5% of their national budget in the late 80s.

America produces 1/36th of the aluminum China produces so even if Trump took the same step (I’m sure he could use the Defense Production Act or something), the numbers don’t add up.

Others require the blighting of huge swaths of land and a lot of future work to prevent contamination of ground water (see West Virginia).

I don’t believe America has the capacity to build local production with its current political system.

The US should be looking into what? How to deal with getting sanctioned by the US?

With Biden ramping up the trade war and a second Trump presidency on the horizon, it would have been dumb not to study how to prepare for sanctions.

They wanted them to win last time at first too, hence why they gave them weapons and positive press coverage (as the “free syrian army”).

Are they a US proxy or independent

Yes. Turkey does things the US doesn’t like, such as bombing US proxies, namely the Kurds, but at the same time, the US hold’s turkey’s leash.

the Kurds are the ones benefiting from the oil production

This is correct in the same sense that the poor benefited from the trump tax cuts; the US is getting that oil for $16/barrel.

What about US-induced famine?

Grain has been transported out of the US occupied area into Iraq.

There’s food scarcity and hunger-related disease across Syria, but it is significantly worse in the US-occupied areas.

To be clear Assad is not a good guy here, but stealing the country’s resources and bombing forces fighting the former Al Nusra only makes things worse.