• freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    27·
    2 years ago

    Is the state of geopolitics under going a significant change in the last few months?

    • Xi isn’t talking to Biden. US diplomats are chasing down Chinese counterparts to even get basic courtesy.
    • China improved the Suadi/Iranian relationship.
    • Ukraine is trying to get China to talk more about their peace plan.
    • The German chancellor came to the US to say the US didn’t bomb Nord Stream 2.
    • The winter doesn’t seem harsh enough to have turned the tides in Europe
    • 7 countries in Africa are in revolt
    • Workers are rioting in France
    • US rail workers were stopped from striking
    • Credit Suisse got acquired as part of the financial destabilization that started with SVB
    • US capital is going on strike as hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs at tech companies
    • Finland is joining NATO
    • Russia is planning to move nukes to Belarus
    • Japan is discussing arming itself
    • 200+ Chinese billionaires are no longer billionaires
    • Germany is having nationwide transit strikes
    • More international deals are being made in currency other than USD
    • China is outpacing the US in high tech
    • The US is committing to building hypersonic missiles, years after its opponents have
    • Mass shootings in the US are way up this year for the 3rd year in a row

    It feels like in the last few months, things have been accelerating. I’m seeing symptoms, signals, and shifts in the above list. It feels like before the year is out we may have one of those weeks where decades happen.

    Am I missing something? Am I seeing something?

    • ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭@lemmygrad.mlOPM
      10·
      2 years ago
      ⬜🤨⬜⬜⬜🤨⬜🤨⬜⬜🤨⬜🤨🤨🤨🤨⬜🤨🤨🤨⬜
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        • CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml
          12·
          2 years ago

          Don’t wanna come off as too much of a tin foil hat, but it’s a little strange that this just happened after Tucker Carlson was “warning” of arming trans people and while Anti Trans legislature is in the mix.

          Is it a possible false flag? Am I being insensitive as a person or is that just cause the amount of shootings?

          • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
            7·
            2 years ago

            I don’t think you need to put on a tin foil hat to think about how this will make sure trans people get even more vilified. False flag? I don’t know. But they will probably not let this slide without getting some anti trans shit going.

          • SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
            6·
            2 years ago

            May be. Could also be that because of the likes of Carlson and the aforementioned legislature, trans youth are becoming more alienated than ever. This is not to sympathize with or forgive a mass shooter. But we know the root cause of this shooting epidemic is alienation, more often than not leading the shooters to becoming Nazis. I find it feasible that a trans kid could snap like this, is all.

            • CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml
              5·
              2 years ago

              That’s also a possibility. Either way this could trigger a bloody back and forth of shootings between fascists and trans youth, where the trans youth clearly are not in a position win out. It would alienate many would be allies by attacking school children with acts of terrorism and not an organized struggle against fascism and the state.

              On top of that with the new surveillance state law getting pushed, we are living in scary times.

    • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
      17·
      2 years ago

      I am amused by the notion that the government supposedly doesn’t know about all that suffering. As if it’s not aware. As if it’s not intentional. And libs have the audacity to mock Russian citizens with the “bad boyars, good tsar” junk

    • 50_CENT_ARMY@lemmygrad.ml
      16·
      2 years ago

      Get out there and vote. If that doesn’t work, vote harder. If it doesn’t get better, we’ll try again in a couple of years, where we’ll vote again. Repeat this indefinitely, and you have democracy. Simple!

    • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
      16·
      2 years ago

      “Japan is hardly socialist” how tf did they come to the conclusion that they are at all? (Probably “socialism is when the government does stuff”)

  • Mzuark@lemmygrad.ml
    19·
    2 years ago

    If Donald Trump or Desantis wins in 2024, it’s gonna be because people who grew up with Pewdiepie and all kinds of other fascist dogwhistles are now able to vote.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    18·
    2 years ago

    Was dealing with some feelings of anxiety for the last two months, which focussed on money related thing and a fear of poverty. But the thing is, there was no real reason for it. I’m okay money wise.

    Decided to talk to someone last week and they suggested taking a vitamin B complex supplement. I already take B12 but they said it might not be enough to cover for the rest of the B vitamins.

    I didn’t feel like my problems were taken seriously, but I tried it anyway because I figured it wouldn’t hurt me. I’ve been taking the supplement for a couple of days now and no joke I feel so much better. It’s like a 10kg weight is lifted from my chest and the fog in my head is going away.

    Who woulda thunk.

  • Neptium@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    2 years ago

    So I watched this DW documentary on Nusantara, and what I found odd was their statistic that 20% of Indonesia’s population are indigenous at 5:50.

    In actuality, close to 98% of Indonesia’s population is indigenous if we take conventional meanings of the term.

    Don’t get me wrong, indigenous and similar terms, like bumiputera and pribumi have very loaded meanings in maritime Southeast Asia. There are ethnocentric and inclusive interpretations of these terms.

    However, the statistic seems just so random. I don’t know of any ethnic classification that consists of 20% of the Indonesian population.

    Is this just some settler-colonial insecurities being projected onto a global south country?

    • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
      12·
      2 years ago

      Is Indonesia like Latin America in that regard? As in, virtually everyone has indigenous ancestry, but relatively few people have maintained their precolonial customs, language, religion, etc

      • Neptium@lemmygrad.ml
        11·
        2 years ago

        I wouldn’t say so. Colonisation has a deep and lasting impact on our cultures of course, but to say that none of the precolonial customs were maintained is a bit of a stretch.

        It is more accurate to describe Nusantara, or the Malay archipelago, to that of South Asia. Native languages are still spoken. Cultural traditions have largely been maintained. Although, there is now a confluence of Westernised middle classes, reactionary traditionalists and chauvinists, isolated indigenous groups, and accompanying capitalist classes and imperialism attacking collectivist values and structures in our societies.

        Just to raise a few points about it, for religion, christianity missionaries did penetrate the southeast Asian archipelago, with the most obvious example being the Phillipines, having a christian majority, but in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia, it had a very limited impact on indigenous religions, most importantly being Islam, Hinduism, and local traditional faiths, however christianity gains prominence the more eastwards you go.

        Western Papua and Sarawak (East Malaysia) has christian majorities for example.

        Language is another contentious issue, with both left-wing and right-wingers in Malaysia for example, supporting the use of Bahasa Melayu (Malay) as the main language of the government prior to independence. Again this has some exceptions, with for example Sarawak, maintaining English as the de facto language of (state) government even though Malay is the national language.

        Indonesia has only bahasa Indonesia as their national language, but other indigenous languages are recognized in the regional level. I can’t say for sure about the specificities of Indonesia’s national language policy, but from what I know, “colonial” languages like Portuguese, English and Dutch have a negligible amount of speakers or relevance there.

        • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
          4·
          2 years ago

          Interesting to hear how colonialism impacted these peoples differently. Thanks for sharing! I hope Indonesia continues to resist western imperialism

      • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        Latin America is different, in a way, since the racial relations are not the same as in America, though there is its own brand of racism.

      • Neptium@lemmygrad.ml
        14·
        2 years ago

        A bit of a long response, but I wanted to justify my choice of words with proper care.

        What I mean by “conventional meanings” is which ethnic groups in southeast asia are typically considered as indigenous in popular discourse.

        For example, Arab peranakans, people who had Arab descendants, are often considered indigenous, while Chinese peranakans are not. Indian peranakans also suffer the same predicament, with some considered indigenous while others are not.

        So in my original comment, if we consider chinese Indonesians as indigenous, that would amount to literally 99% of the population, if not just 100% of the population, except for a small segment of eurasians.

        Indigenous thus is not about if you were born there, about how long you’ve been there, about the religions you follow or the languages you use but it’s about all of those things all at once, dependent on the sociohistorical conditions of that time.

        This was (is) often to the detriment of chinese groups in the region in the 20th and 21st centuries, regardless if they were “totok” (first or second generation immigrants) or peranakan or “straits-born”.

        This is further complicated by the political-economy of colonial southeast Asia.

        The key point is that there have been “foreign” migration into the Malay archipelago long before European arrivals in the 15th century. Prior to “proper” colonisation in the 16th century.

        They were fully incorporated within the respective feudal kingdoms (and mode of production) and some have had mixed blood, and some also completely assimilated to local cultures and customs.

        These mixed race individuals formed part (and came from) the mercantalist, trading class that morphed into the “middlemen” class, alongside other mixed race groups (eurasians) as well as other “foreign” ethnic groups during colonisation. They occupied the middle and lower-upper sectors of the racial economic hierarchy in colonial society.

        These became the capitalists of post-independence southeast Asia (alongside a fledgling indigenous capitalist class).

        Certainly, indigenous southeast Asian peasants were dispossessed of land during colonisation, but they were dispossessed by their own native brethren and europeans through feudal and colonial institutions, not by the vast majority of newly arrived Asian immigrants, which were sometimes either similarly or seperately exploited by european colonizers through indentured and wage labour.

        History itself shows this through the proletarian pendatangs and asings (foreigners or aliens) support of the national liberation and decolonization movements in the region.

        So, it is unlike the indigenous in the Americas and other settler-colonial nation-states, where a (relatively) clear delineation can be made between settlers and indigenous peoples, through the settler’s expropriation of indigenous land and accompanying genocide. In these societies, indigenous people are defined by their oppression by the settler economy, regardless of cultural assimilation, blood mixture, class or being “non-white”, because that came after the arrival of the settler economy. (If I understand it correctly.)

      • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
        12·
        2 years ago

        Silly Westerner.

        Edit: I’m being cheeky here, but to answer your question: no, there technically isn’t.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    14·
    2 years ago

    The Christian Health Insurance, one of the biggest insurers in the country, just started an onlyfans account for educational purposes. Sometimes reality truly is stranger than fiction.

  • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
    11·
    2 years ago

    Perhaps I shall make more posts about CPUSA since people were interested in them last time (since most people aren’t used to getting a CPUSA-point-of-view post or barely know about the org outside of, say, Black Bolshevik or Settlers).

  • frippa@lemmy.ml
    11·
    2 years ago

    Healthcare in Europe still costs a lot and while cheap but low quality one is readily aviable on ebeery street corner, good but expensive one is scarce

    (my medicine is weed BTW)

    • ButtigiegMineralMap@lemmygrad.ml
      9·
      2 years ago

      Maybe a tough one, but how would you describe the Russia-Ukraine situation to somebody who’s on the Fence, or living under a rock so to speak?

      • Makan@lemmygrad.ml
        5·
        2 years ago

        Ukraine is Nazi-infested; Russia is right-wing, but not controlled by a fascist faction.

          • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
            8·
            2 years ago

            Keep up the good work, I’d say. I don’t know how you come across these details, but I’m glad you share them. I’ve learned quite a bit.

            • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
              3·
              2 years ago

              Thanks! Occasionally I’ll share a link that I found while lurking Reddit or whatnot, but most of the time I find these doing searches on ResearchGate, Libgen, Google Books, Google Scholar, SearXNG, or, as a last resort, Wikipedia.

              It helps that I am inquisitive, possibly more so than others my age, and I wonder about details with which I have only the vaguest familiarity; as, I know that Germany, Italy, and Japan were all allies, but what did they actually do together? I had never seen anybody discuss that. And asking things like that turns me towards research such as this.

              Seeing others benefit from my knowledge is my goal, but expanding my own knowledge is worthwhile all the same.

              • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
                4·
                2 years ago

                It’s important work. Funnily enough, I frequently refer to this IRL in conversations about education and propaganda. Like you, I know the Nazis weren’t alone, so I ask, ‘why weren’t you taught anything about the Spain, Italy, and Japan in school?’ That question is often enough to get people to think about the extent to which the West really did (it didn’t) eradicate fascism after WWII (which serves my rhetorical purpose). But I don’t have much more to add than that because, I also wasn’t taught about what the fascists of other countries were up to in the twentieth century. So it’s great to see someone digging up sources.