Munrock

Munrock , 5 days ago

The president of a miscellaneous Global South nation was walking along the beach with Xi Jinping.

"Xi," said the President, sometimes it feels like you're there for us, but sometimes it feels like you've abandoned us.

Xi bade the President to look back along the two sets of tracks they had made on the beach.

"My like-minded good friend," said Xi Jinping, "the Chinese people have been walking hand-in-hand with you ever since we stood up in 1949."

"But Xi," said the President again, "sometimes one pair of footsteps veers away."

"Those are the times you turned to the Americans." Xi pointed to where the straying footsteps came to an abrupt stop at an ice cream truck. "But we have always been here to resume walking together once your people grew weary of being fed junk food."

Munrock , 9 days ago

It doesn't matter what the people outside China think. The people inside China - on both sides of the Taiwan strait - think Taiwan is part of China. They all call themselves Chinese except the tiny minority that speak with American accents. There are indigenous ethnic minorities on Taiwan whose ancestors were not part of China, but they didn't call themselves 'Taiwan' because that's a Chinese word.

Munrock , 9 days ago

How'd that work out for Australia and Gough Whitlam trying to close Pine Gap?

Munrock , 1 month ago

They are becoming more progressive, just slowly. They tried going faster in the cultural revolution, and it was disastrous.

It might feel painfully slow compared to Western progressivism, but that's because it's educating and incrementing generationally so that the changes happen with the popular support of billions of people, and they stick.

In the West they will force progressive values into law while half or more of the population still oppose it, and so they move 3 steps forward but then 2-4 steps backward as they flutter between parties in their circus democracies.

Look at women's rights like abortion and workplace equality. The gig economy is less than 10 years old and China and Vietnam look after the welfare if workers in that new industry better.
China and Vietnam are already ahead of the West in a lot of progressive respects. We'll see China having better LGBTQ rights than the West in our lifetimes.

In the meantime be wary of letting liberals cherry pick the benchmarks for measuring which place is more progressive - they'll always hyperfocus on LGBTQ for progressivism until the day the West falls behind on it (and it will), and then they'll find something else.

Munrock , 2 months ago

Florida Man tells teachers to scare children with stories of bad communists

Munrock , 3 months ago

I think a few reasons. First they can't afford it, second they're pinned by various influential lobbies (e.g. fossil fuels opposing green energy), and third they have a much more powerful media sector now and any enviable news that comes out of China is overwhelmingly disbelieved if mentioned at all.

Munrock , 3 months ago

Expand the picture a little bit, though, and you're living a life where you have hours to spare and gardening, with advances in small-scale farming tech, is an enjoyable hobby. Something you do as your main source of food, or something you do to supplement your apportionment of the centralized, industrial scale farming industry (which also enjoys advanced in technology that make it more harmonious with nature and more efficient with its use of land).

When you consider the technology we have today that was considered sci-fi whimsy 40 years ago, the technological advance required for the pictured aesthetic is well within our capability.

Munrock , 3 months ago

Yeah very true. The difference isn't in the solarpunk-aesthetic vision but in the path to get there (industrial innovation vs primitivist regression), and when reactionaries try to falsely claim the idea of a green future as something that is exclusive to de-industrialization. I think it's important not to let that false exclusivity stick.

Munrock , 3 months ago

Ravens organise. Parrots are territorial with each other. Easy raven win.

Munrock , 7 months ago

Yeah it's definitely disappointing.

The irony in some of these comments castigating him for supposedly not being marxist, and doing so by applying the most dogmatic, context-free invective.

Munrock , 7 months ago

I like Hakim's content, but

You know you can take this up with him directly, right? If you know his content well enough to first say that you like it, and second claim with confidence that he's a "Muslim first and a Marxist second," you must have heard more than once that his DMs are open.

Why here? He doesn't even participate here. The !leftistinfighting community even states in its description that this place is for directly challenging one another, and yet this post is challenging a specific individual who isn't present.

What purpose is served by posting this criticism here, that isn't better served by posting it directly to the accused?

Munrock , 8 months ago

I love it. It really shows that the blind trust by liberals in their privately-owned media free press and capitalist-controlled state media public service media has been a frustration for the left for so long that even Stalin was taking the piss out of it.

The Western Media's stranglehold on public trust is being severely shaken by the situation in Palestine, but even as people see organisations like the BBC blatantly trying to suppress the reality of Palestinian genocide they still believe the same liars when they talk about Xinjiang or try to portray public sentiment in Taiwan as separatist.