What do they have?

Affordable housing lol

Apple: Yes thank you for that glorious catalogue of overpriced, overhyped, badly made, spying and extortionate products. Truly pioneers at ruining the electronics industry and the digital realm. Also, is this really the top achievement of your civilization? A greedy corporation? Dude, my people were pulling insurance scams and doing pyramid schemes 10000 years before you even had a country. You don’t see me being proud about it.

NBA: Nobody cares.

Sydney Sweeney: Who?

A company with 100% of its manufacturing in China

A basketball league that is watched by 625 million Chinese fans, who also watch their own national league

And an actress who is bad at saying words

Ok. I think China gonna be ok yall

apple

decadent company that makes their phones IN CHINA

NBA

where CHINA is their most important international market

sydney sweeney

laughs in jackie chan and bruce lee

How is that not satire lol

This is just sad.

I’m a Yankee and to me, Apple is one of the most overrated brands in existence (largely driven by marketing and it being one of the few major options, which is a way capitalists force a perception of “popularity”); never cared for sports and even some sports fans I know will watch the March Madness basketball stuff but not the NBA; and with all the various celebrity names in my head that I never asked to know, I don’t even know who Sydney Sweeney is and I’m probably better off that way.

That said, yeah, I’m sure these things have a certain amount of broad-reaching popularity. But the harsh truth of it is, it’s largely an extension of imperialism and global capitalism. As US imperial power declines, so too will the faux popularity of its soulless products that take the place of having a culture or heritage.

While China can point to cultural meaning, the US points at nostalgia for Spongebob. It’s kind of staggering to me the extent to which US culture, and perhaps the imperial core west more generally, appears to pour nostalgia into the cultural void left by empire. I mean, case in point, look at the whole Trumpian movement. “Make America Great Again” - nostalgia for the past. The US can’t even fucking imagine a future without envisioning either a rose-colored-glasses version of the past or imagining the future as a broken down dystopian hellscape. Brings me back to the term Capitalist Realism: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This grips the west and it shows in the denial of a person like this. The part people this haven’t accepted yet is that China, even if we want to say it’s not fully realized socialism, is also not capitalism (at least not in the meaning of it that the west understands) and it’s already living in the future.

We don’t have to imagine out of LSD and craft a future out of impossible uncertainty. China is already living it. It’s mainly a matter of having the political power to translate what they do to the conditions of other places.

The future is, more broadly speaking, socialist and communist, and Apple is just a passing phase of amalgamated capital. It cannot stand against the winds of history.

I suppose it could be a point about soft power, but at the end of the day Chinese soft power of actually collaborating with the global south as equal partners instead of treating them as your underlings is much more powerful than the “soft power” of people knowing your brands and actresses

Basketball and Sydney Sweeney, time to pack up and call it quits folks.

Oh it’s gonna be Chinese. WSJ just needs a few stocks to prop up before it does.

Like even if I go with the premise: Being within standoff ammunitions range to the place where they make all the apple chips