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[10ebbor10]

They're slowing down the procentual growth of coal as part of their energy mix, but in actual numbers it's still growing rapidly, and IIRC, faster than before.

[Descan]

...and now Thailand's army has decided to coup the government. Expected?

I find it kinda hilarious that RedKing posted about this just a few days ago...

Martial law =/= coup.

So yeah, Redking didn't talk about the coup, considering that it hadn't happened yet.

don'tbeajerk

[Zangi]

Well, he does talk about events that somehow leads up to the coup...
(People can't compromise for shit, military says fuck it.)

[redwallzyl]

he has actually said its a coup now.

[smjjames]

Edit: Posted in the wrong thread. XD

[Darvi]

Nah man, see, the troops are farther away now, so it takes longer for their orders to reach them. They only recently heard about it.

[smjjames]

OOPS, posted that in the wrong thread! *facepalm* Wasn't even paying attention to what thread I was in.

In reference to my previous post that is, not this one.

[RedKing]

Actually, the Thai coup caught me by surprise. I actually thought they were just going to wait for things to simmer down and then hand back control. But, it looks like even with the threat of martial law and a potential coup, the two factions couldn't come to any kind of agreement so the army felt it had no choice but to dissolve the caretaker government and call for new elections at some point in the future.

I kinda wish the US hadn't been so quick to jump on the "Boo hiss, bad army!" bandwagon, but I guess it's de rigeur -- if you claim to support democracy in all forms, you have to oppose coups even when they mostly make sense. Same reason we (lukewarmly) opposed the Egyptian coup, even though there were probably a number of people in Washington who were happy as hell to see it happen.


Regarding China and the Gazprom deal --

I think one of the things that many in the West have overlooked (or just not believed) in the last several years is that China (or at least the central government in Beijing) is dead serious about trying to "go green". Not because they're a bunch of hippie tree-huggers, but because they're technocrats and they've run the numbers and realized that China is going to be unliveable and unsustainable very, very quickly if they don't. At the rate of growth and rate of pollution they're generating, they're quite literally going to drown in their own waste if they can't make major strides in this area. (Implementation is another matter, because as I've discussed, getting a good idea in Beijing to translate into action on the ground can be infuriatingly difficult).

It's sad, but an atheist "totalitarian" regime is more serious about saving the planet than a supposedly "enlightened" democracy, precisely because they don't have political pressures to discount science. They're sinking more than 10 times as much money into green tech R&D than the US does. This natural gas deal with Russia is just another piece of that. If they were a US-style democracy, the lobbies for the large coal mining operations in China would be fighting this tooth and nail and no doubt launching a PR blitz on how all the yellow sulfur fumes from those billions of coal cakes people are burning are just "Happy Sunshine Smoke" and decrying that Beijing was making the country MORE dependent on another country for energy, when they have all this wonderful Chinese coal that creates millions of jobs.

[10ebbor10]

To be fair, in China, the effects of pollution are hardly deniable. I mean, it's difficult to say that coal is harmless when you can't see the sky, and the ground is covered in ash.

[RedKing]

True, but this is also a state that is well-versed in denying that anything is wrong. Those tanks in Tiananmen and the blood they're scraping out of the treads? Just a normal routine thing. Nothing to see here, citizen, move along.

But even when have evidence, it gets ignored. Look at fracking -- you have people whose fucking tap water is flammable from the methane content, and pro-frackers will just handwave that away. The United States has gotten incredibly good at telling ourselves that nothing is wrong, because something wrong would mean changing behavior. And we can't be asked to get off our fat, lazy asses to inconvenience ourselves.

[Sheb]

To be honest, flaming water existed before fracking in regions with really high methane content. Fracking just made it worse.

Also, I was wondering, is there a concept similar to "white man's burden" in japanese? How is it called?

[10ebbor10]

Anyway, China isn't doing as much about pollution as it might seem. Yes, they're building renewable and Nuclear power, but they're also building coal, and everything other energy resource they can get.

[RedKing]

To be honest, flaming water existed before fracking in regions with really high methane content. Fracking just made it worse.

Also, I was wondering, is there a concept similar to "white man's burden" in japanese? How is it called?

Best example I can think of is nihonjinron, but that's actually referring to the Japanese academic study of why Japan is a special snowflake.


@10ebbor10: Yes, but they are significantly attempting to decrease the share of coal in their overall energy profile. It's just that their energy demands are growing so fast that even opening new coal plants, it could still be decreasing as an overall percentage. I know there's a plan to build some huge-ass solar farms in Xinjiang.

[Culise]

To be honest, flaming water existed before fracking in regions with really high methane content. Fracking just made it worse.

Also, I was wondering, is there a concept similar to "white man's burden" in japanese? How is it called?

Yes and no.  As far as I know, it didn't really get promulgated overtly until the thorough militarization of Japanese society of the post-Taisho Showa era, and it was more of a "common understanding" rather than something that was boiled down into a single pithy quote by a Japanese Kipling.  Ultimately, one could probably characterize the conception of Japanese "anti-imperial" thought that meandered through the 19th century and ultimately culminated in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in much the same way.  Like the White Man's Burden, it was largely a moral excuse to exercise untrammeled imperialist practices over the poor indigenes, but the claim was that in doing so, they would be liberating these countries from the burden imposed on them by the European powers and America.  However, as the other populations of Asia - Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Malay, Indochinese, and so forth, were all weak and disunited, it would have to be the promulgators of this pan-Asian philosophy and the only major East Asian power to avoid colonization, or to put it succinctly, it would have to be Japan that would take on the leading, dominant role in the Co-Prosperity Sphere, a burden taken on purely for the good of the others.  Japanese propaganda in the Second World War thus consistently claimed things like "Asia for Asians!" and "Liberation from the imperialists!", and Japan consistently utilized independence movements in India and Indonesia as catspaws for destabilization of those lands they couldn't invade or stabilization of those lands they had.  The fundamental seeds for this can probably be traced back to early pro-Western Japanese advocates, some of whom advocated things like the conquest of Ryukyu and Korea, or even the Philippines and China, though it was far more of an undercurrent in that era. 

[RedKing]

Personally, I think a lot of that stemmed from how China was treated during the Opium Wars. Japan saw a nation which had been the shining core of Asia for 3000 years get curbstomped by the gaijin Westerners, and it scared the fuck out of them. It would be (to borrow CK2 for a second), like watching the Aztecs come in and conquer the entire Holy Roman Empire in less than a year.

China and Japan had both been in a long period of stagnant isolation from the West (a couple hundred years). Japan looked at what happened to China and realized it was because Western technology was significantly in advance of Asian technology. So in the late 1800's the Japanese government made a concerted effort to send its best and brightest young people to Europe and the US to learn everything they could, then return home. This way they could try to leapfrog into modern technology (especially industrial and military tech) without necessarily allowing Westerners to come in and run things.

They were pretty much the only Asian country to pull that off. Everyone else either got colonized or retreated even further into isolation. So because of that (and their special snowflake Nihonjin status), it fell to them to "liberate" Asia under their watchful aegis. Honestly it's less of a "Japanese burden" and more like the Monroe Doctrine that the United States would "protect" all of North and South America from European influence -- which meant we totally had the right to meddle in those countries ourselves, to keep them free.

Had resource conflicts not forced Japan and the US into war, I the Axis plan had been more or less "Europe for Germany, Africa for Italy, Asia for Japan and the Americas for the United States". (at least until things like oil and minerals and lebensraum would have pushed those hegemonic spheres into conflict).