and as a result, ordinary analyses are usually, blatantly wrong, as in this article.

Absolutely agree, Mr.Age_of_Surfaces.
Personally, I’d say its is best to keep politics out of watches and avoid the matter altogether. Realism is not the most popular way that ordinary folks look at politics, despite it being the foremost theorem in IR. Liberalism takes precedence in ordinary circumstances.

Yeah, cancelling is bad, therefore let’s support cancelling all people who don’t fit some arbitrary criteria our dear party leader pulled out of his ass for some political gains.

Imagine not liking some right infringements in your own country while siding with a literal concentration camps building totalitarian dictatorship. You must have an IQ of at least 200.

The United States knows a thing or two about aggressive expansion, elimination and assimilation. Its white landed elites led a war of property rights against the British in the 18th century. It then waged more wars and incursions in the 19th century than any other country, including the European empires of the day. Most of this aggression was directed against native American civilisation and resulted in their displacement, murder and eradication. This was state policy, just as the Chinese use state policy to establish its territorial interests today. That’s what states do, regardless of political stripes. So it was that once Theodore Roosevelt declared the internal frontier sealed, the expansionary, corporate wars of the United States spilled over into Latin America and across the Pacific.

Today, the United States has earned a reputation for duplicity and incompetence. Losing wars abroad (Afghanistan being the latest) and at home (against Coronavirus) show it to have a weak core. It is not a reliable ally to human rights defenders anywhere, whether they are in Amazon basin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the Kurdish lands of Syria and northern Iraq. It wages war against independent, investigative journalism, and attacks personal privacy by casting all forms of human congress as a potential threat to national security. Its militarised police shoot and kill unarmed black people in industrial numbers, and beat up unarmed human rights protestors. Its health care system costs 40 per cent more than the OECD average and yet it has the lowest life expectancy of any country in that affluent group. Maternal mortality in Washington, D.C. is worse than in Syria.

Rather than bleat impotently about the travails in other countries, Americans ought to focus their ire and agency on the parasitic corporate gulag that is their political system and economy. As far as businesses are concerned, if you want to operate in a particular jurisdiction, you are obliged to observe the prevailing legal and regulatory frameworks that organise commercial activity. If you don’t want to or can’t, feel free to take your business somewhere else. That’s how it works within the United States and any country with enforceable policy. That’s how – in a rules-based system of international trade and commerce – it works between countries too.

The main reason that China is demonised in the Anglosphere is, in the first instance, down to maritime trade: the majority of the world’s shipping freight passes through the South China Sea, the Straits of Molucca, and adjacent water bodies. Reduce China to a two-dimensional caricature, and it becomes easier to shape the conversation and mobilise public support to a hawkish foreign policy posture. Wrap it all up in the verbiage of human rights and you get the liberal hawk. Liberal hawks don’t like to be reminded of international law even as they invoke parts of it selectively to pursue their pet peeves.

International law does not recognise Chinese Taipei as an independent country. For that to change would require the 195 Members of the United Nations to admit it as one. It is the only global body that can confer this status (for better or for worse). The American foreign policy and intelligence establish know this, so they direct their efforts instead to cultivate public outrage in other ways to keep things in a state of unsettled ferment. That means butting into China affairs. Stability would mean continuity, and continuity grants China a placid stroll towards global pre-eminence. Despite intentions to the contrary, bipartisan American incompetence is helping to accelerate that transition.

There is no chance that Chinese state capitalism will turn against consumption. Environmental and demographic imperatives mean the content of that consumption may shift, but when you’ve lifted 400 million people out of poverty in half a century, you’re going to work to satisfy aspiration. All that’s happening now is that the Chinese state is directing how it wants its capitalist market to operate in accordance with broader state policy, just as it has always done.

I enjoy The Truth About Watches because its voice is clear and unabashed. It’s obvious this posture comes from a place of fiercely-guarded autonomy and this makes it an enjoyable refuge from the callow nonsense that we find across the spectrum of watch writing. But this autonomy also means it occasionally ‘goes off on one.’ The liberal hawkery of the article above is one such instance.