How much time do you have?

Our position hasn’t shifted that much from the pod’s position.

The pod has a semi-ironic veneration of China, per the Wolf Warrior episode. It hates the entire US establishment. It wants Iran to get a nuke. Much of its stance is based on opposing what the most awful people in Amerikkka support.

That’s not to say we follow the pod’s marching orders. Rather, we get to the same place for much the same reasons.

The Ukrainian issue is probably the best example of this. No one here’s super pro Putin or his brand of Russian nationalism. When the war started, we were deep into ‘lol there’s not gonna be a war’. We had to eat humble pie, hard.

You know what changed?

Ukrainian flag emojis.

The worst people in the world, with the absolute worst takes, went hard on the Ukraine side.

Was the war a bad idea? Quite possibly. It’ll likely settle into a frozen conflict again, much like it was before, with similar territory, at the cost of a lot of lives.

But seeing people go around, pretending there wasn’t Ukrainian shelling of the Donbas? Pretending Putin hadn’t been pushing for Minsk II to be implemented as agreed? Saying that Putin wants to wage a genocide against Ukraine? Seeing everyone bend over backwards to apologise for literal neo-Nazis?

Fuck that.

Look we just want high wages, strong regulation, and redistribution of wealth, but without any of the levers of power necessary to achieve it. Is that so much to ask?

Yeah, the weirdest part about 90s/00s culture is the idea that a stable desk job in an air conditioned office is the worst thing ever.

9 to 5? Sounds heavenly.

It’s the best type of bourgeois spectacle. It’s like bum fights, but instead of two unhoused people, it’s two rich assholes. Whoever loses, we win.

If you like legal drama, load up the whole-day episodes from Law and Crime on YouTube, and enjoy. I know I did.

What.

Here’s a take I saw on Folau that made me pause for a bit.

Missing from the public discourse is the background of how evangelical Christianity swept the Pacific Islands. This the story of colonialism and Christian missionaries and Captain Cook; of the destruction of local religions and languages.

It is the story of how all over the world, cultures that didn’t have laws or customs against homosexuality or gender fluidity could become so puritanical that they turned against their own LGBTIQ brethren in favour of the gospel as preached by their colonisers; only for the colonisers to then finally soften their own stances against homosexuality and decide that homophobia was yet another moral failing of the colonised. *

I still don’t like him, but there’s a grain of truth in it.

Graeber has you covered.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. These “heroes” are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their role as heroes: as Clark Kent, Superman may be constantly trying, and failing, to get into Lois Lane’s pants, but as Superman, he is purely reactive. In fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination: like Bruce Wayne, who with all the money in the world can’t seem to think of anything to do with it other than to indulge in the occasional act of charity; it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily carve free magic cities out of mountains.

Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the superego clubbing the errant Id back into submission.

V for Vendetta.

A government uses a false flag pandemic to consolidate power through provision of a vaccine. A single person in a Guy Fawkes mask wins the populace over with atrociously verbose wordplay and domestic terrorism. He also wins the girl over to his ideology by kidnapping and torturing her.

It’s less lib and more outright reactionary, but whatever.

I’m digging the encryption clues.

Parenti has a short primer.

Maidan put pro-west, anti-Russian fash sympathisers in charge. The population of Crimea, being ethnically and historically Russian, said ‘fuck this’ and left, then joined Russia.

There was various degrees of US support to Maidan and Russian support to Crimean independence.

Geopolitically, the annexation of Crimea was a response to the west’s pulling of Ukraine into its orbit. The Russian preference would have been to keep a Ukrainian govt sympathetic to Russia. But when that proved impossible, taking only the pro-Russian portion of Ukraine was the next best choice.

My understanding is that, historically, Crimea was Russian, and was transferred to Ukraine as a gift during the USSR era.

Sad horse show is way better than sad grandpa show and both are reflections of the social malaise we’ve fallen into

You’ve quoted the right leaning party members at a conference during the height of privatisation. Ofc there’s gonna be some dumb shit said.

If you’re assessing China, you need to look at its direction presently, under Xi Jingping, not it’s direction thirteen years ago under Hu Jintao, especially given that the Shanghai Clique of Jiang Zemin only started to lose power in 2006-2007.

Instead, let’s look at some of what Xi says.

Here’s a document distributed to all high level cadre outlining ideological trends to be wary of.

Neoliberalism advocates unrestrained economic liberalization, complete privatization, and total marketization and it opposes any kind of interference or regulation by the state. Western countries, led by the United States, carry out their Neoliberal agendas under the guise of “globalization,” visiting catastrophic consequences upon Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, and have also dragged themselves into the international financial crisis from they have yet to recover.

This is mainly expressed in the following ways:

[Neoliberalism’s advocates] actively promote the “market omnipotence theory.” They claim our country’s macroeconomic control is strangling the market’s efficiency and vitality and they oppose public ownership, arguing that China’s state-owned enterprises are “national monopolies,” inefficient, and disruptive of the market economy, and should undergo “comprehensive privatization.” These arguments aim to change our country’s basic economic infrastructure and weaken the government’s control of the national economy.

Not to mention this hilarious headline: China’s Latest Crackdown Target Is Liberal Economists.

Alright, so there’s at least some ideological pushback. But what about reality? After all, didn’t they privatise a bunch of stuff like those economists wanted?

Well, the holding entity for state owned entities is the largest economic entity in the world at approximately 7.6 trillion USD, so whatever they’ve privatised, there’s clearly a hell of a lot they haven’t.

But what about the general trend? And what good are those entities if they’re just running according to market principles?

Well, let’s just check the news:

An agency led by President Xi Jinping to advance institutional changes in China has approved a new plan to make state-owned enterprises “stronger, better and bigger”. Monday’s decision by the Central Commission for Comprehensive Reforms to “optimise and restructure the state economy layout” – a euphemism that generally points to government-led mergers and the consolidation of various state-owned companies, with ornamental participation by private investors – came after Beijing found its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to be more reliable in answering the government’s calls during the coronavirus.

China’s “adjustment” of its state sector is aimed at “serving national strategic goals and adapting to high-quality growth”, and state firms will dominate areas of “strategic security, industrial leadership … and public services”, according to an official statement released through the Xinhua news agency.

So what we see is that SOEs were better able to respond in a pandemic situation, where market allocation just wasn’t going to cut it, and use value needed to be pushed to the fore.

No one’s denying there are capitalists in China, or that they haven’t been allowed to flourish. What’s important is that they remain under the control of the Party, and that the Party retains its control over police, military, and the commanding heights of the economy. It says a lot that even at the height of their power, the capitalists had to couch their arguments for privatisation in Marxist terms.

Leftists don’t have opinions on fucking kids challenge

We already do see it, in fan fiction. However, those works end up hitting a ceiling, as they lack the resources to get polished, or the legal rights to get published.

The New Communist Party of Aotearoa has a website up over here and their analysis is usually solid.

I’ve just done a quick search, and this book looks decent for an overview.

And of course, there’s Lenin’s analysis of us:

A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistical philistines, who have brought their “civilisation” with them from England and keep it to themselves like a dog in a manger.

Sure, the major cities are hot shit, but there are parts of China, especially rurally, where it’s all but a completely different country.

That’s why it’s still considered ‘developing’.

They’re a developing nation, and well below their historical carbon budget per capita.

They’ve committed to peaking in 2030.