That fortunately reveals nothing. I’m not a fan of asklemmy questions that are phishing/doxxing expeditions, whether intentional or not. I’ve removed some such posts in the past.
Yemeni sources indicate that the departure of USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Gravely from the Red Sea is part of the preparations for the coming assault.
This is horseshit. Regardless of whatever it might say on paper, the indigenous peoples obviously don’t have equal rights with the Western settlers, and the indigenous Arabic language obviously doesn’t have equal standing with the newly-resurrected Hebrew. In practice not even the indigenous Jews have equal rights with the Western settlers, nor do the Ethiopian settlers.
Netanyahu will just be replaced with another genocider in a long line of genociders, stretching back to the Nakba. If you try letting up on the genociding like Yitzhak Rabin, you’ll just get whacked and replaced.
Tiananmen Square only really comes up when propagandized lemmitors bring it up, because it’s been discussed to death already. But we have no problem talking about it any more than the Chinese people or Chinese state does, despite Western propaganda about it being censored in China.
There have been 970 US student protests related to the Israel-Gaza conflict between 7 October and 26 April, the vast majority of them peaceful, according to the latest available statistics from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), which tracks political violence and political demonstrations across the US...
The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and when those efforts failed it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop, just last week.
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
Really cool blog post with beautiful photos and starts with a fun and interesting intro, here captured in an image for the the tl;dr but-want-to-comment-anyway among you :...
My parents raised me to always say "yes sir" and "no ma'am", and I automatically say it to service workers and just about anyone with whom I'm not close that I interact with. I noticed recently that I had misgendered a cashier when saying something like "no thank you, ma'am" based on their appearing AFAB, but on a future visit...
I don’t know where you grew up, but this sounds like “southern hospitality.” I’m a gen-x New Englander, and it always creeped me out because I suspected it originated from slavery, and it seems I was right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_hospitality
I don’t think that kind of thing is unique to the South nor its link to slavery. In a larger scope, it’s a deference to class hierarchy. George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, talking about his experience in socialist Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War:
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos días’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy.
Violence begins with cops or fascist agitators*. So far the students have had the discipline to not retaliate, which is what the violent agitators want.
Often the analysis we’re presented with in the media is often limited to GDP, which doesn’t really help us to understand why the US, for example, have lost its competitiveness, its industrial strength, its ability to compete, especially with the Chinese.
The idea of American economic growth from the 1990s on was, instead of producing manufactured goods, we will develop intellectual property monopolies, especially in information technology, in pharmaceuticals. And America will make its economic growth in GDP, not by making profits to employ labor to produce more and more goods and services, but to have monopoly rents for our pharmaceuticals. So we can make pills that cost 10 cents each and sell them for $500 each. We can make computer programs for automatic artificial intelligence and for computer chips and for all of the information technology we have at enormous markups. And we can live on our economic rents, live off the fat of the land, as they used to say. We don’t have to have blue-collar jobs. Everybody can work in an office and make money that way.
You have today, as the election for 2024 is being prepared, the bewilderment of the Democratic Party here. If you look at the GDP, President Biden says, you’re doing so well, look at GDP. And the vast majority of Americans, according to every poll in every part of the country says, we’re not doing well at all. We’re doing awful. And it turns out that when you look at what is the American GDP, well, almost all of it is the growth in prosperity, the growth in financial benefits for the 1%, maybe for the 10% of the population. And the 1% and the 10% has increased its wealth so much since 2008 led the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates that the 1% and the 10% gain is larger than the loss for the 90%. So all that the President Biden can say is, who are you going to believe? Are you going to look at the statistics or are you going to look at your own life and what you have to spend at the grocery store and what you have to spend on rent and housing as America turns away from a homeowner’s economy into a rental economy?
The main culprit for the economy’s falling growth rate and the general middle-class economic squeeze is debt – or more specifically, the burden of having to pay it back, with penalties, fees and lower credit ratings. The mainstream press depicts the rising market price of homes as a benefit to homeowners, a capital gain as if they almost were real estate speculators or capitalists in miniature, not wage-earners running up debt. GDP statisticians include the rise in valuation of owner-occupied real estate and the rising rents it saves homeowners from having to pay as adding to GDP. But homeowners do not receive a corresponding income for living in their homes, even if rents rise in their neighborhood. And debt-financed home-price inflation has become a major factor squeezing family budgets in today’s world.
When they fall behind in their payments and are subject to late fees and higher interest rates, these payments are treated as an addition to GDP (“financial services”), as if the economy is getting richer. So when the specific components of what seems to be empirical statistical evidence of affluence are analyzed, they consist not of real product and prosperity but transfer payments from the economy at large to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector.
Payments on the economy’s rising debt should rightly be viewed as a subtrahend from national income. But the GDP accounting format treats this rising debt as a necessary cost of production. In this line of theorizing, creditors provide a productive service whose value is reflected in the rate of interest and the magnitude of fees and penalties. Ultra-low interest rates, resulting from financial lobbying pressures, have held down the cost of carrying this debt, but these low official rates mask the reality that many debtors fall behind and have to pay penalty fees and high penalty interest rates.
These payments are added to today’s GDP measure, even as they leave less family income available to be spent on products. The result is a statistical confusion concerning how much GDP growth is actual income and product growth, and how much is rent extracted from disposable personal and corporate income. That is the basic conceptual issue addressed in this paper.
The key to understanding the U.S. economy is not so much GDP as capital (asset-price) gains and the offsetting debt burden financing these gains. This financialized overhead is not real growth. It does not make the economy richer. This paper explains why, and provides a statistical format to measure the magnitude of rent extraction or the FIRE sector on the “product” side of the economy, deflating disposable personal income available to spend on goods and services, and capital gains on the “total returns” side, so as to show how most wealth is achieved not by actual production but by increasingly debt-financed asset-price inflation.
I won’t try to when Hudson is such a good explainer. His 2019 paper he refers to is here: PDF. I think it’s largely an updated executive summary of his 2015 book, Killing the Host (PDF).
If you prefer video/audio, here are three relevant episodes from this year of Hudson’s & Radhika Desai’s Geopolitical Economy Hour:
The United States House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would expand the federal definition of anti-Semitism, despite opposition from civil liberties groups....
Once Obama got in office, Democrat stans suddenly didn’t care about the Global War(s) on Terrorism anymore. They were silent on his star chamber as well. It was a real wake-up call for me.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced plans to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over its war in the Gaza Strip, which human rights advocates and other experts have warned could amount to genocide....
Income inequality rhetoric ignores that a class can reap the benefits of work via public investment (e.g. a bullet train), even if bosses make more as individuals. Working Chinese people are seeing the fruits of their labour despite billionaires and inequality. To recriminate them for not demanding more is recriminating the virtue of patience.
In fact, much of what passes for “socialist” idealism in the West turns out to be a mirror image of bog-standard liberal-capitalist entrepreneurship propaganda: “I will be my own boss! I will run my own business!” This idealism appears unaware that the necessity of management is foisted upon us by logistics, not capitalism. Denial of this reality results in fantasies of perfect synchrony between perfectly autonomous anarchists.
The “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” dream, embraced more by pundits with cushy lives than working people, also reveals a dark truth: western “socialists” have some awareness that a more equal world will mean losing first-world privileges. They cannot conceive of things getting better steadily and slowly, with hard work. And so they are forced to denigrate the Chinese road of self-sacrifice in favour of leisure-driven utopianism. The reality is that the victory of the working class over the capitalist class will usher in an era of hard but rewarding work, as opposed to hard work without reward.
Are you kidding me? iPhones and most smartphones and laptops are Chinese products. The vast majority of high speed rail in the world are Chinese products. The Tiangong space station is largely Chinese products.
According to software engineer and blogger, Paul Biggar, however, one key detail on the methods employed by the Lavender system that is often overlooked is the involvement of the messaging platform, WhatsApp. A major determining factor of the system’s identification is simply if an individual is in a WhatsApp group containing...
On February 19, 2014, one year after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms) announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.
Hello! I've been searching for a reddit alternative, and yes, I've picked Lemmy and Raddle, but here's the thing. My morbid curiosity is perked up, and a part of me wants to join the "free speech" alternatives, like Saidit, Poal, etc. What's wrong with me that I want to join toxic places? I mean, yes I'll find a whole new...
It’s so funny when a liberal crying about “western values” is lecturing me on what constitutes idiocy.
Yogthos is not defending Western/liberal values, he is pointing out the hypocrisy of liberalism.
Liberation of Ukrainian people must culminate in the destruction of the Ukrainian state, be it western- or Russian-backed, as is the case for all other peoples and states.
Yes.
On the other hand, destruction of only Ukraine serves only their imperialist oppressor - Russia.
Russia is not predominantly an imperialist state at the moment, though it is a capitalist state which should ultimately be destroyed. And being a capitalist state, in time it may well develop into a full-throated imperialist state. To elaborate I’ll copypasta myself:
Honest question from a non-communist, based on your reply here. Does one need to support Putin to be a Marxist?
In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.
Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.
Oh I see, this conversation would just be a repeat of eight months ago, where no successful communist states have ever existed, the USSR was an ethnic cleanser, and Russia today is a fascist state. You also seemed to downplay Ukraine’s Nazi problem.
You were right on at least one account, though: Haz, Maupin, and Hinkle are patsocs and/or nazbol pieces of shit. But I don’t know why you thought anyone on Lemmy/Lemmygrad/Hexbear would give them the time of day. Where did you get that idea?
Xi Says China Will ‘Never Forget’ the US Bombing of Its Embassy ( www.bloomberg.com )
What is your little slice of the internet that you own/maintain?
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLopDcjdhYBYkHE_nqV7QNzrCsnscs2amf&si=q-PTjPEwEvuGWnkJ...
NYT awarded Pulitzer for Oct. 7 Al-Aqsa Flood coverage at Columbia University today ( www.msn.com )
https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2024...
Yemen Braces For Impending Massive US-Led Air/Ground Campaign ( scheerpost.com )
We need an exodus from Zionism | Naomi Klein ( www.theguardian.com )
Israel gotta go ( lemmy.ml )
U.S. Military Personnel in Iraq Put on Standby to Support Ground Involvement in Israel’s War on Gaza ( theintercept.com )
‘They’re sending a message’: harsh police tactics questioned amid US campus protest crackdowns ( www.theguardian.com )
There have been 970 US student protests related to the Israel-Gaza conflict between 7 October and 26 April, the vast majority of them peaceful, according to the latest available statistics from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), which tracks political violence and political demonstrations across the US...
Bundeswehr's classified meetings found online ( www.dw.com )
China's representative points out at the ICJ that armed resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law and is not terrorism. ( media.mas.to )
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/112/386/280/617/135/463/original/1740b068eeaf7aff.mp4
Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software ( alinpanaitiu.com )
Really cool blog post with beautiful photos and starts with a fun and interesting intro, here captured in an image for the the tl;dr but-want-to-comment-anyway among you :...
Russians Who Fled Abroad Return in Boost For Putin’s War Economy ( www.bloomberg.com )
The perfect way to round out your career ( lemmy.ml )
How should I change my polite behavior to be more accommodating?
My parents raised me to always say "yes sir" and "no ma'am", and I automatically say it to service workers and just about anyone with whom I'm not close that I interact with. I noticed recently that I had misgendered a cashier when saying something like "no thank you, ma'am" based on their appearing AFAB, but on a future visit...
Biden condemns university antiwar protests, says 'Order must prevail' ( www.nbcnews.com )
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2442782...
NATO starts deploying troops as Russia races to win ( asiatimes.com )
US House passes bill that expands definition of anti-Semitism to comparing Israel with Nazis ( www.aljazeera.com )
The United States House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would expand the federal definition of anti-Semitism, despite opposition from civil liberties groups....
What are some insults in english that will make non-native speakers have to ask someone their meaning?
Colombia to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over Gaza war, Petro says ( www.aljazeera.com )
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced plans to cut diplomatic ties with Israel over its war in the Gaza Strip, which human rights advocates and other experts have warned could amount to genocide....
Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s 'Scary' For The Rest Of The Auto Industry ( insideevs.com )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15089465...
The untold story of Arab Jews — and their solidarity with Palestinians ( www.vox.com )
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2436007...
China launches world’s largest electric container ship with 50 MWh battery ( thedriven.io )
Israel using Meta's WhatsApp to kill Palestinians in Gaza through AI system ( www.middleeastmonitor.com )
According to software engineer and blogger, Paul Biggar, however, one key detail on the methods employed by the Lavender system that is often overlooked is the involvement of the messaging platform, WhatsApp. A major determining factor of the system’s identification is simply if an individual is in a WhatsApp group containing...
Should I join "free speech" alternatives?
Hello! I've been searching for a reddit alternative, and yes, I've picked Lemmy and Raddle, but here's the thing. My morbid curiosity is perked up, and a part of me wants to join the "free speech" alternatives, like Saidit, Poal, etc. What's wrong with me that I want to join toxic places? I mean, yes I'll find a whole new...
Uncle Sam be like ( lemmy.ml )
Ukraine notified the Council of Europe of the partial suspension of some clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms in connection to recent changes in its martial law. ( www.euronews.com )
The western values Ukraine is defending are becoming more apparent by the day.
Fascism everywhere ( lemmy.ml )