Aceticon

Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.

(I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).

However, it's been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they've been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I'm wary of calling that Communism).

Are they even left of center nowadays? I don't know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what's done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.

I don't think they've yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they've kept the Authoritarianism going.

Not all Authoritarians are Fascists.

That said, I would agree that whomever supports Putin, supports Fascism - there is nothing at all Leftwing in present day Russia, quite the contrary.

China is more complicated.

Dutch people pay so much tax because dutch companies pay so little tax, so pretty much the entire burden of paying the costs of the State comes from the wallets of individuals (whilst companies too are owned by individuals, those rich enough have many ways of avoiding paying tax on that and a lot of the biggest owners of the companies making profits in The Netherlands - whilst paying little tax on said profits - aren't even resident in The Netherlands).

In countries were the tax take is more evenly balanced between people and businesses, people pay less taxes for more services (The Netherlands doesn't even have a National Health Service, only a mixed Health Insurance system).

I lived in The Netherlands over a decade ago and already back then the country already had Northern European levels of taxation with nowhere near the levels of Public Services that countries with similar individual taxation - such as the Scandinavians - had and I doubt a decade of right-wing neoliberals in government has made things any better.

If I remember it correctly, in China Mao ordered sparrow to be killed en masse because they supposedly ate the grain: turns out that what they ate were the pests that attacked the plants.

That's a wierd as hell take.

The first placed was the supposedly Center Left (Partido Socialista), the second was AD - a cohalition of the Center-Right "Partido Social Democrata" and the conservative party (to were the fascists migrated post Revolution) CDS - the third was the hard neoliberal party (Iniciativa Liberal) and the fourth was Chega.

The first 3 parties are neoliberals, curiously from softer to harder (if we ignore CDS, the junior party in AD, which is a traditional conservative party rather than neoliberal) and the 4th is towards the Fascist side of the rightwing.

The Iniciativa Liberal who got 3rd place is almost as far-right as the Chega, it's just that they're from the American-style ultra neoliberal side of the far-right whilst Chega is from the Fascist side, so they're less into moralism, nationalism and statism and more into privatise everything including the National Health Service, remove all regulations and cut the top tax rates - i.e. basically replace the European style social net with the American model on steroids.

Curiously both Chega and Iniciativa Liberal grew from nothing roughly at the same time, both a few years after Steve Bannon came to Europe with money from several very wealthy Americans very openly to "expand the far-right in Europe".

This was not at all a victory against the far right because the two far right parties, Iniciativa Liberal and Chega got more seats than ever before.

You would need to be seriously deluded to think that a party whose politics are those of the fat-cat rightwing of the American Democrat party (think Finance types and Tech Bros) in an European country like Portugal is to the left of anything but the new Fascists of Chega.

Notice how one of the underlying messages of the cartoon is that it's Zionist Karen that is the real antisemite: by deeming that those demonstrating against the killing of children are antisemite (literally: against Jews), she is implying that killing children is a Jewish thing to do.

This is very much the kind of racism displayed by those who equate anti-Israel with antisemitic: they're implying that Israel and its actions are all core Jewsih chracteristics, de facto slandering all Jews including those who disagree with Israel and/or its actio s, so they're the ones who by definition are antisemite.

Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.

Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they're supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.

Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.

I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)

So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear "do such and such".

So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, "just in case".

Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.

Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn't exactly damage my career.

That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with "innocent" requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would've actually risked ending up in jail.

(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).

A "walled swamp",

What's there not to like?!