Will China's AI Surveillance State Go Global? (theatlantic.com) 109
China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place, reports the Atlantic's deputy editor, and "because a new regulation requires telecom firms to scan the face of anyone who signs up for cellphone services, phones' data can now be attached to a specific person's face."
But the article also warns that when it comes to AI-powered surveillance, China "could also export it beyond the country's borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats" and "shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide..." The country is now the world's leading seller of AI-powered surveillance equipment.... China uses "predatory lending to sell telecommunications equipment at a significant discount to developing countries, which then puts China in a position to control those networks and their data," Michael Kratsios, America's CTO, told me. When countries need to refinance the terms of their loans, China can make network access part of the deal, in the same way that its military secures base rights at foreign ports it finances. "If you give [China] unfettered access to data networks around the world, that could be a serious problem," Kratsios said...
Having set up beachheads* in Asia, Europe, and Africa, China's AI companies are now pushing into Latin America, a region the Chinese government describes as a "core economic interest." China financed Ecuador's $240 million purchase of a surveillance-camera system. Bolivia, too, has bought surveillance equipment with help from a loan from Beijing. Venezuela recently debuted a new national ID-card system that logs citizens' political affiliations in a database built by ZTE.
* The article provides these additional examples:
But the article also warns that when it comes to AI-powered surveillance, China "could also export it beyond the country's borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats" and "shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide..." The country is now the world's leading seller of AI-powered surveillance equipment.... China uses "predatory lending to sell telecommunications equipment at a significant discount to developing countries, which then puts China in a position to control those networks and their data," Michael Kratsios, America's CTO, told me. When countries need to refinance the terms of their loans, China can make network access part of the deal, in the same way that its military secures base rights at foreign ports it finances. "If you give [China] unfettered access to data networks around the world, that could be a serious problem," Kratsios said...
Having set up beachheads* in Asia, Europe, and Africa, China's AI companies are now pushing into Latin America, a region the Chinese government describes as a "core economic interest." China financed Ecuador's $240 million purchase of a surveillance-camera system. Bolivia, too, has bought surveillance equipment with help from a loan from Beijing. Venezuela recently debuted a new national ID-card system that logs citizens' political affiliations in a database built by ZTE.
* The article provides these additional examples:
- In Malaysia, the government is working with Yitu, a Chinese AI start-up, to bring facial-recognition technology to Kuala Lumpur's police...
- Chinese companies also bid to outfit every one of Singapore's 110,000 lampposts with facial-recognition cameras.
- In South Asia, the Chinese government has supplied surveillance equipment to Sri Lanka.
- On the old Silk Road, the Chinese company Dahua is lining the streets of Mongolia's capital with AI-assisted surveillance cameras.
- In Serbia, Huawei is helping set up a "safe-city system," complete with facial-recognition cameras and joint patrols conducted by Serbian and Chinese police aimed at helping Chinese tourists to feel safe.
- Kenya, Uganda, and Mauritius are outfitting major cities with Chinese-made surveillance networks...
Right now I'm more scared about Trump than.. (Score:1, Insightful)
... some third world nation getting more surveillance capabilities.
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Right, because Trump will never be able to buy it from them.
Wake up Sheeple!
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So you believe he's doing more than Obama? You know, the one who got caught tapping Angela Merkel's cellphone. The one under who's administration, had the whole Snowden thing blow up. And FWIW, I'm not implying that it didn't occur prior to him, but your fear is stupid.
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Obama was not a significant threat to "the Rule of Law" the way Trump is. (Its a shame that republican refers to a political party, rather than the political theory of republican governance.) Yes, you don't want a federal bureaucracy, acting on behalf of a ruling elite, subverting Constitutional law. But now we have a guy in office that directs the executive branch to commit human rights crime (permanently separating children from parents seeking asylum), actively violates the Emolluments Clause, sends f
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So, you're arguing that what I pointed out doesn't fall under the rule of law? How about when he ordered American citizens killed? So much for the Constitutional scholar. Don't get me wrong, I despise Trump, but Obama was crappy too, with numerous legal scandals during his administration. He was just smart enough to have his minions handle them instead of being a tweeting jackass like Trump. And, if you look back before Obama, we didn't have nearly this much racial tension.
He had the opportunit
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I can live with the disgrace of separating children at the border for no compelling reason.
I cannot tolerate the notion of separating children from their parents, moving them to another state, and then booting out the parent(s) without any documented means of reuniting the children with their parents! You've just allowed your federal government to commit a human rights crime and create an artificial orphan for absolutely no justifiable reason! Fuck off with your FOX disinformation distraction/excuses.
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(Its a shame that republican refers to a political party, rather than the political theory of republican governance.)
As opposed to the democratic party, who uses a superdelegate system consisting of party elites that nobody votes for, where those unelected party elites have a much higher say in who wins the primaries than individual voters do.
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The problem is that I can use the term elected democratic form of government, and people understand its a government where its leaders are elected by the voting populace. What I can't do is refer to a republican form of governance, where rule of law is supreme over what 51% of the population (of idiots) wants to do, because people will confuse the political science theory with the totally unrelated American Republican party fuckery.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/... [theintercept.com]
https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
https://www.wired.com/story/at... [wired.com]
https://www.eff.org/press/rele... [eff.org]
https://www.vice.com/en_us/art... [vice.com]
and the chinese corporations :
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/17... [tweakers.net]
and the ones backed by the lobby to deliver the NSA from evil :
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
because its okay to give european data to the nsa
This Is Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: This Is Bad (Score:2)
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It's "comrade", dummy.
Re:This Is Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The last thing that humanity needs is universal surveillance by an entrenched oligarchy as instituted by a technologically empowered antidemocratic police state.
Sure is a good thing that illegal PRISM system was dismantled way back when entrenched monopolies were caught being contracted by an anticonstitutional police state to enable universal surveillance.
Oh, wait...
There are better questions (Score:2)
Re:There are better questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There are better questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta get tough on crime/violence/tax evasion/terrorists/litterbugs, you know!
You forgot the big one...child pornography. That always works.
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"When facism comes to the US it will be wrapped in the american flag" was wrong. It will be wrapped in "think of the children".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Then the question will be which side Russia will be on.
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The same way we avoided World War 3 between 1946 and 1990. (Or 2020). Proxy wars and forever wars outside of the superpowers' borders. Within their borders, crushing of dissent and solidifying of the class structure. The 1% retaining some say and degree of autonomy and everyone else being, if not enslaved, at best forgotten.
War capabilities pretty much hit their apex within 20 years after WW2, with nukes and the delivery systems with continuous global reach. No advancements in raw power after that can possi
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They won't wait for it but this is a crucial observation in any case. If you look at what the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) does, the general idea is simply 'we have to do what China does and more so we can outcompete them'. They throw in a few constitution/human rights quotes into it to soften it all up but that those concerns are not credible. The central idea is to go all out on AI for organizing all aspects of society.
EPIC has published an internal report from NSCAI the
Re:There are better questions (Score:4, Insightful)
A better question is when are we going to outlaw governments and businesses from making CCTV or facial recognition mandatory or tying them to financial incentives.
It can easily be argued there are perfectly valid use cases so how do we draw the line?
Re:There are better questions (Score:4, Insightful)
A better question is when are we going to outlaw governments and businesses from making CCTV or facial recognition mandatory or tying them to financial incentives.
"We", kimosabe? "We" have jack shit to say about how this plays out, because we have no power left. Our governments are owned by the corporate elites, except in China, where the corporations are merely happy to be in bed with the government whip-crackers. Elections are a sham because politics has supplanted religion as the opiate of the masses. It's all just a grand magic show - one hand distracts the masses while the other leads them to compliant servitude under the guise of safety, comfort, and above all, order.
Pretty much all of the world is an oligarchy of some flavour - some governments are just more upfront and less apologetic about it.
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This problem is easy to solve (Score:2)
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Exactly this (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been warning that the Social Credit System will not stay contained to China for long. By 2032 China is predicted to be the world's largest economy, and with that comes a lot of influence. Currenty the Social Credit System is used to help Chinese citizens know which businesspartners it can trust. From there it's a small step to ask international business partners to also get a score in order to be more trustworthy.
It's only an app away. TikTok is just practice.
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Re:Exactly this (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, then, the solution to the problem is clear and simple: FUCK CHINA.
The question is "Who"? Who's going to fuck China? Only the US is possibly positioned to do it - but they're on the verge of 'failed nation' status, and they have their own very strong tendencies toward monitoring and controlling the population. Who else? A group of nations led by the British, who have their own well-advanced surveillance infrastructure? India, which is also an advanced surveillance state? I'll be surprised if we don't see this 'social credit' concept take off there within 5 years. Who else is left?
The days are long past where it's possible to 'fuck China'. Large portions of the world are already bent over and being fucked by China, and the only countries who might be able to turn the tide are too busy jumping on the bandwagon.
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its not really about China (Score:5, Insightful)
China is just a test bed for all those surveillance systems. No matter what they publicly say the governments of most if not all countries in the world want at least some aspects of it for themselves as an easy way to fight crime or opposition (and usually both). If not China, then it would come from some (for example) american startup that is already helping police avoid surveillance limitations (eg https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org])
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Who knew that all those movies set in a dystopian future would actually turn out to be documentaries?
Will US Anti-China campaign ever stop? (Score:3, Insightful)
An interesting thing about the US is that once the government gets on a foreign policy paranoia/warmongering theme, the US media is usually happy to become the ground troops in the propaganda war. Hence "reports the Atlantic's deputy editor..." Could you be just a tiny bit less predictable.
If you're not careful, US government and media, you're going to talk yourselves into another phony "Iraq war" situation.
It's scary that foreign conflicts are so good for presidential election popularity.
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Yes, good, China is friend and good buddy.
Evil westerners complaining about “spying”!
We should burn them in oven and embrace love of the ever seeing eye!
Re: Will US Anti-China campaign ever stop? (Score:1)
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Are Huawei users pretentious enough to leave that marketing signature turned on to wear it as a badge of honour?
Re:Will US Anti-China campaign ever stop? (Score:5, Insightful)
This article came from The Atlantic. It's about the last place you'd go to find anything supportive of Trump. But I do understand, Trump has talked about the dangers of China, so any moral person would obviously disagree with anything negative about China because we should all believe the exact opposite of Trump in every situation.
The people being manipulated are the ones who feel the need to disagree with everything that Trump supports or speaks out about. You've been so brainwashed in to the resistance tribe, that you can't possibly find 1 out of 100 things that might not be disagreeable.
China has been a growing problem. Both political parties ignored it out of convenience. Cheap consumer goods and globalization were all anyone cared about. The problem is they're not our friends. We've exported much of what was once our world leading expertise in technology and manufacturing. What we didn't freely hand to them, they went and stole. We've bled jobs to China. We've bled technology to China. And we've had such a distorted trade with them, we've bled wealth to China. They're using all that to spread global influence and values which do not match ours.
There's no one pushing war with China. What Trump is pushing for is disengagement. Bringing manufacturing back. Stopping the industrial espionage and theft of US technology. Ending the unfair trade practices. Stop being reliant on a authoritarian regime for many of out basic needs such as medical supplies.
Nixon and Kissinger started the current relationship with China. The theory was if we normalize trade with them, it would bring them in to the international fold and their government would follow to more Democratic. It worked to a degree, then the cost of transporting goods around the world dropped off a cliff, American firms discovered cheap labor at the same time that unions were pushing for ever more expensive contracts and benefits and it all snowballed from there.
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There's no one pushing war with China. What Trump is pushing for is disengagement. Bringing manufacturing back. Stopping the industrial espionage and theft of US technology. Ending the unfair trade practices. Stop being reliant on a authoritarian regime for many of out basic needs such as medical supplies.
From the CCP perspective, those actions are acts of war and aggression. We would be threatening to cut the legs out from under their illusion of "infinite growth forever" that their entire economy is based on. It could be seen as an existential threat to the party if they ever let that train crash, and perhaps they will do literally anything to stop it. Including nuclear war. Maybe that's why there was such bipartisan support for TPP and why both establishments hated Sanders and Trump so much respective
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Re:Will US Anti-China campaign ever stop? (Score:5, Insightful)
Western countries may not be anywhere near perfect, but I'd still rather put up with our problems than live under the thumb of an authoritarian regime that doesn't value human life let alone believe in human rights and civil rights, where you say the wrong thing and you can find yourself in some 're-education camp' getting brainwashed, or have every family member and friends threatened, or perhaps just 'disappeared' for good.
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That's letting local populations balance their own safety-vs-freedom-vs-economics formula. Some regions will disagree with YOUR preferred ratios.
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Your country is just as bad and that means you have to let China do what it wants and not complain!
Fuck off and go back to Beijing.
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HAHA u r mad! xD xD xD
See, that's what you look like to everyone else, kiddo.
He thinks he makes anyone angry, LOL
Nope.jpg
We just think you're a bored kiddie who heard about this place from 4chan/g/ and thought your low-quality bait would actually get you some attention here.
However the fact of the matter is you're just sad, sad, sad.
"Trolling is a art", son, and you just don't have the talent for it.
Unfunny
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It's hard to oppose it, because the CCP is clearly unethical, abusing the population of China.
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A growing problem to what? US unilateral domination of the world? Yeah, well F U. And no I have no association with China.
I just profoundly resent US exceptionalism, "eminent domain" baloney, and insufferable superiority (right to rule) complex.
And regarding jobs. If you haven't figured out yet that AI, automation/robots are today's and the near future's job killers, not China or other low wage countries, then you're not paying attention and you're xenophobic.
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Wrong tack.
Remember how the problems with the Mujaheddin were USA's blowback for its behavior in Afghanistan?
CCP's rise to power and totalitarianism is our blowback for enabling them with money and market power, that was used to cut the legs out from under laborers demanding a fair wage. There's nothing phony about governments wanting ultimate surveillance and behavior modification.
As for the US media, hollywood and sports teams are too busy selling themselves out to the CCP right now to bother making 80s
Re:Will US Anti-China campaign ever stop? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's face it, China is gradually becoming Soviets 2.0 with or without Trump. They recently burned their remaining checks and balances and made made Xi a full-fledged dictator, Stalin Style.
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Try NSDAP 2.0.
It has a philosophy of creating Lebensraum for its preferred ethnicity.
It uses both conquest and ethnic cleansing to do this.
It operates concentration camps.
It harvests the hair and organs of untermenchen to enrich the fatherland.
It has an on-paper socialist economy but in reality allows chosen cronies to act freely and rapaciously.
It is trying to fuck Russia over a barrel.
It tries to forge ties with central and south american countries as a safety net / launchpad for attacks against the USA.
B
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Unlike Hitler and the Soviet Union, China is using trade and infrastructure deals to gain influence instead of raw invasions (with a few exceptions). But that could all change when they get too powerful and too confident.
I don't think the world likes it when any one country gets too powerful, including the US.
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Your forgot about those places they have invaded like Tibet and parts of the south China sea. They have been threatening to invade Taiwan for decades. They have the world's largest army by manpower with no one else coming close.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
China has had plenty of invasions of its neighbors just since the CCP took over. Never mind it's history before then.
India In 1962, 2020 etc
Philippines - 2019
Tibet in 1950
South and North Korea in 1950
Soviet Union / Russia In 1969, etc
Manchukuo in 1945
Re:Will US Anti-China campaign ever stop? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not mutually exclusive. Both Trump and Xi are control-hungry assholes. I'm glad the USA still has some checks and balances remaining...so far.
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Give me a break. The problem with China was evident to me before it even started, back in the 90s when Perot was running. I would have stuck with Reform Party if Perot hadn't been a nut.. and then it got taken over by the hard-right Pat Buchanan and died right there.
I think Perot underestimated how much the Rust Belt and other ordinary Americans were not aligned with the globalism, free trade, and open borders being pushed by the elites. I think he basically freaked out when he polled within striking dis
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No worries they won't kill you, you'll just have a nice vacation in a 're-education camp' courtesy of The State.
You won't remember who you used to be when they get done with you, but that's a feature not a bug: tabula rasa. Can't feel bad about fucking up if you can't even remember the life you used to have.
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The alleged president will use any China action as an excuse to bash them. Just as an example, the alleged administration is complaining about China postponing Hong Kong elections when the alleged president wants to do the same thing in the U.S. It isn't so much an administration as a Cosa Nostra operation with various dons controlling the tentacles.
That said, China is certainly going to lock down their pop. as tight as the CCP can manage because the last thing they want is for people to communicate about t
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Everybody noticed, but there isn't anything that can be done about it until next year at the earliest. We have to fix our local problems first.
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Um, did you completely miss that the left actually agreed with Trump on handling China? In fact, Pelosi blasted Trump for delaying sanctions. Don't be trying to make this a Republican v. Democrat thing, it's not.
Are you in agreement with China's handling of Hong Kong? How about them raping us on trade, and getting away with it for all these years? Are you denying what this article is saying?
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It was this unprincipled economic enabling, primarily by the US, that kickstarted China's new wealth and power. Now that China has learned the tech, and principles of large corporate-style management and projects (as you would, given the highly educational circumstances of having the dirty work manufacturing mega-projects done in your country), and wants to get a b
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Maybe we're being mentally carpet-bombed with anti-China "propaganda" because China consistently does the wrong thing? From their response [bbc.com] to the HK protests [reuters.com], to their response to COVID [alarabiya.net] and the corresponding disinformation campaign through the WHO [nypost.com], the constant censorship of anything critical of China in every platform semi-owned by them such as Reddit, and so on and so forth. They also pay hundreds of thousands of people to shill for them [wikipedia.org] online and spread pro-Chinese propaganda, so posts such as yours com
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The fact that you're convinced that China had a terrible response to COVID, when USA is sitting at 448 deaths / million population compared to China's 3 deaths / million population (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) (that's right, 150 times worse handling in a country whose name does not begin with C) t
What makes anyone think (Score:3)
Hypocrisy (Score:3)
Other countries have a gazillion cameras trained on their citizens and tourists, have photos of those people via passports, driver's licenses and police mugshots, use facial recognition, licence plate tracking and phone-ping tracking, record the metadata (phone numbers and IP addresses) of all on-line communiques, and tell the USA what their (civilian) aircraft are carrying.
It's only a problem when non-allied country does it
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No, it's been a problem for a long time.
It's now an understatement to call it a "problem" when the source comes from a literally genocidal dictatorship.
Already has (Score:4, Insightful)
One again, Betteridge's law of headlines prevails. AI Surveillance will not go global.
If "global" means in widespread use in many Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Russia, the African coast nations, Australia, and C-K-J, then it already has.
China is joke, compared to EU (Score:1)
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
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Ahh, forgot this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]
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Links to patents and relevant materials are attached.
Even recent incidents, which were covered in the news and were reported about.
What more do you need ?
Actual device, shipped to your address ?
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What more do you need ?
Coherence, logical consistency, fewer leading questions. Who do you think is writing those reddit posts, half true, salted with lies?
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It's a bit late for it now.
Still, with persistence and training, you might very well surprise yourself.
Some day.
About Serbia (Score:2)
I dislike Serbia being non-sovereign state for last 30 years, or even since forever. It is a small state geographically located between "east" and "west". I dislike our Chinese and Russian overlords in similar fashion I dislike our American, German, French, British and other overlords. They always act in their interest which is usually conflicted with our interests.
But if you consider last 30 years, our "western" overlords dropped shitload of bombs
Re:About Serbia (Score:4, Interesting)
"Which one of the two evils seem worse?"
It all depends who you ask. If you ask a Serbian nationalist then all the neighbouring countries are part of 'Greater Serbia' and should submit to their Serbian Overlords. If you ask the people who live there you get a different answer.
In practice, a coalition of big countries stopped the killing in the Balkans for a few decades, but when their attention wanders elsewhere it'll all kick off again unless the people there can find some way to settle their differences. I don't think the presence or absence of a surveillance state will make a blind bit of difference.
But Europe is full of these ancient tribal and religious disputes, all supported by 'historical' maps. There's Northern Ireland, Catelan Spain, Basques in France, the division of Cyprus, and Russia in the Crimea. Maybe we should just give the whole lot back to the Italians, after all it was all Roman territory originally. Right???
Re: About Serbia (Score:1)
But if you ask me, and you yourself said that opinion of people who live here matter (I live in Serbia), that was not the case. I am not Serbian nationalist, much less imperialist. My impression is that some powerful countries invested into conflict, intens
It sounds like China is just bidding on contracts (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: It sounds like China is just bidding on contra (Score:1)
Is the US that scared? (Score:1)
Fear is over blown (Score:2)
Ohhh (Score:2)
Global, as in World? (Score:2)
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Let us hope China... (Score:2)
Is China a stasis philosophy?
Remember when? (Score:2)
Remember when the Internet was going to be the ultimate force for freedom?
Sigh...