i just want to comment on a few things that people seem to think are going to be important for the next four years and i actually largely disagree with the importance of. people are taking biden seriously, and i think that's largely a mistake, based largely on the fact that his vp isn't serious. if biden loses his mind - or dies of coronavirus or whatever else - early on in his term, the country could find itself with an unserious president and in the midst of a serious crisis. 

it's not at all clear that she has any intention of following his lead at all.

what that means is that biden is really a helluva lame duck, and we're basically stuck sitting around waiting for a more serious change in direction - a change we don't at all understand, yet.

so, consider china, for example. there's some thinking that biden is going to go rogue on china, but that just strikes me as a lot of election banter...election banter that seems to have worked, btw. at the end of the day, biden represents the interests of investors, and maybe more so than most democrats. he wants cheap goods to flood the market at high prices, which means he's likely to stand with the same interests that clinton, bush & obama stood with on trade, in general. and, it might kill them in the midterms, but what are you going to do? vote republican? do you think that threat upsets them?

or, you could look at the uighurs, which a lot of conservative media publications seem to think is some kind of wedge issue. for western consumption, perhaps - for certain voters, this might be important, i'll grant that. for biden? he might see the pr carrot as some kind of leverage, at most. he doesn't care....

fwiw, he's right not to - or not to care about xinjiang as some kind of unique or special issue, anyways. i don't think we should ignore them, exactly, but we need to put it in context: china treats all of their citizens like this, they're not being singled out for particular mistreatment, and the voices suggesting that they are have ulterior motives and should be treated with skepticism. further, in the broadest of generalities, china is no doubt correct to modernize the region in vaguely the way that it's doing. criticism really ought to be minimal, and have to do with details rather than with the broader modernization goals. as a westerner, i would actually seek out voices in the region that want to modernize and welcome chinese capital, but that are interested in drawing attention to the rougher parts of what they're doing. they could be a little less harsh.

i would flat out condemn those that would leave the region behind in the dark ages and argue it's some kind of benefit to it. that's a bizarre concept of human rights. the right to malaria? the right to live in backwardsness and tyranny to religious authority? give me a fucking break. i guess the enlightenment is only for white people, or what? 

and, i don't suspect harris would grant an audience on the topic - she wouldn't even consider it a worthwhile topic of discourse.

or, you could consider iran. it's true that biden has surrounded himself with a lot of creeps and ghouls on the foreign policy file, but the days where the united states had the ability to just bomb iran are long past us. i would expect that biden is more likely to start a war than trump, but not in iran - he understands that the united states has few options, and he understands that better. there are other parts of the world that biden could and probably will get aggressive in, but the iranians are protected at the moment, and there's little threat of that flaring up any time soon. again, though - i wouldn't exactly oppose a regime change operation in iran, if it was targeted and efficient. i would oppose an occupation, but not a targeted strike to eliminate the leadership, if it worked - i'd want to be pragmatic about it, and do it in a way that opens up the region for democracy. that is the difference between iran and iraq: iran could potentially use the help to democratize, whereas iraq just crumbled on the spot. i have no love for despotic islamist regimes that torture their own citizens, and would condemn anybody standing up for them; i stand with the freethinkers, the socialists, the atheists and the feminists on the ground, not the muslim conservatives in the statist institutions.

the area i would keep an eye on is eastern europe. biden is maybe the last reaganite, and he may be the last gasp of a soviet containment policy. and, he may know it and may want to clean up the loose ends.