A lot of people don't know how to do this in their own countries. All the paperwork and red tape etc. It's left opaque because if everyone knew how to do it everyone would also realise how easy it is if you have the starting capital, and then they'd have more questions...
I sometimes wonder about what kinds of questions people could ask in that subreddit that would necessitate admitting Western lies and accepted mistruths, without the questions themselves being accused of ulterior motives.
If Hasan were "Thanos snapped" out of the equation, it would be a reach to think that the people watching his stream aren't going to up and read Lenin or find their way here or join their local Marxist org.
But I agree that if we are going to basically give people pacifiers that they should had least not be laced with poison.
We're not giving people pacifiers that are/aren't laced with poison. Bezos is giving people pacifiers, and one of them is significantly more left than the others. If we had the means to stop Hasan from speaking, his audience are not going to get up off their couches. They would just tune into other (likely further-right) influencers. Don't interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake.
He wouldn't need to be defended if he wasn't consistently attacked. The real question is why does he need to be attacked?
In terms of being a pipeline, he's definitely not pushing his audience to the right. He's not pushing them toward the dead-end false-left Democrats either. He actively speaks against both of those groups. And then he makes his viewers aware of efforts like The Deprogram.
It's literally the definition of the mouth of a pipeline. His content is mild enough for the the capitalists who control all the modern public fora to allow him to draw in huge viewership numbers, and that viewership has its overton window shifted left enough for them to discover further-left materia that they otherwise would never have known existed.
At worst he's inconsequential, at best he's feeding left. To the real left. There's no opportunity cost to him doing his thing. His chat is a cavalcade of lumpenproles and kids spamming 'top kek' and 'goated' and pepe emojis. They're certainly not moving left on their own.
I don't think either of those issues impact a command economy anywhere near as much as they do a laissez-faire system. Both issues affect the exchange value of the currency. A command economy that doesn't rely on imports for its critical products and services can use alternative means to apportion and distribute them internally.
Empire by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand has been good so far (I'm 12 episodes in). I can't speak for subsequent episodes and don't know anything about the two hosts beyond this podcast, but they're painting a very stark picture of how fucking evil the British were in India (and I think they move on to other colonized regions later).
The biggest critique of the Western left that arises from the Uyghur issue is how willing the majority were to believe the genocide narrative. There's a real genocide being streamed to all their phones, their nations sit on textbook examples of ethnic cleansing from their colonizer days and beyond, and yet their governments, who commit war crimes on the daily and are the most blatantly pro-capitalist, anti-worker governments on the planet sling a litany of bullshit accusations at China and the Western leftists go 'yeah, that tracks'.
Support for China amongst the Western left is relatively new as it's getting harder for Western media to credibly deny the good that the Chinese nation is doing for its people, for foreign allies that the West continues to abuse, and for the environment. And yet when the Uyghur thing is denied as more of the same Sinophobic red scare bullshit, it still sticks. And there's no way to make that make sense without Westerners coming off as latently racist with lingering white man's burden/manifest destiny brainrot.
Something important to note about China's private sector compared to Western liberal ones, is that it's highly regulated, and because of that a lot of the disgustingly abusive ways that private corporations treat the public just doesn't happen there.
For example, with ads in apps. It's just accepted knowledge that with 'free' apps, you are the product and the app sells your data and/or attention to advertisers. In China that's all extremely regulated: if you see an ad, it's got to come with some kind of special offer or deal that benefits you, and not in bullshit "mark the price up and then discount it back down" kinds of ways.
So in the West the app sells your attention to the advertisers; in China the app sells access to you and the advertisers give you coupons and discounts (that automatically get processed by the app's payment system) in exchange for your attention.
And the most important part is that if people report an ad, the government will be on the side of the public when it investigates, as opposed to the toothless reporting systems that nobody bothers with in the West.
The net effect of this, and many many other kinds of 'authoritarian' regulatory laws that don't exist in the west, is that I'm not experiencing the same kind of enshittification in China as I am in the West.
'Strong' is a vague term that could mean 'power projection' or 'resilience' and I don't think you folks need to decide which one 'strong' refers to by default when you already agree on the relevant details:
US has power projection.
China has no interest in power projection.
US doesn't have anywhere near enough power projection to defeat China in China.
Good. I'd rather see the leading edge of AI development under the regulation and discretion of the PRC than under the unregulated control of private interests.
A lot of people don't know how to do this in their own countries. All the paperwork and red tape etc. It's left opaque because if everyone knew how to do it everyone would also realise how easy it is if you have the starting capital, and then they'd have more questions...