Honestly, I get the sense that you already know a lot of what’s in the article. It’s definitely worth a skim but I don’t think you’ll find much that is news to you.

This article is a good one to throw at the people who are engaged and who are open to reading or research but who haven’t really wrapped their head around the situation and are taken in by the western media narrative because that’s all they have had exposure to.

You might like it still but I think you’re sorta beyond the target audience tbh.

I couldn’t agree more.

I have recently taken to asking anarchists what makes them believe that they are entitled to the undying, unreciprocated allegiance of the communists, particularly when they whinge about Makhnovia or Revolutionary Catalonia being “betrayed” (you can throw Kronstadt in there too) and they never for one moment stop to consider that those movements might have been betraying the communist revolution.

Of course, they never have a reply.

Though there is more to the Revolutionary Catalonia issue and I am considering drafting a short piece in defense of the actions of the USSR framed around the writing of George Orwell, of all things, so I might come up with that soon…

Wow, that’s awesome - I didn’t realize the author was on here!

Excellent article.

I recently had an exchange where a Yankee told me that China is in dire economic straits because of the fact that their economic growth has slowed.

1. That’s because of the pandemic and the CPC has explicitly abandoned their economic targets for the year in order to prioritize the wellbeing of the people of China and to implement the best COVID mitigation strategy they can

2. Their economic growth has “slowed” from often double-digit annual growth to a mere 6.5% approximately

3. As economies develop and mature, it becomes a mathematical improbability to be able to maintain such a staggering rate of growth consistently, if at all

4. The last time America reached 6.5% growth was back in the 60s (from memory) and these days it can only muster 3 or 4% when recovering from a prior economic downturn, but it effectively only manages to muster roughly 2%, especially when this is averaged out

It seems like US exceptionalism literally knows no bounds - not even hard economic data can restrain it.

Btw I’d also like to see much more investigation into Laos and Cambodia but I think I’m stuck the western bubble :/

I guess it boils down to the fact that the authors who are motivated enough to do proper research are also going to be motivated enough that the limitations that Twitter imposes won’t be enough to stop them.

Some time back I regaled my partner of a story where I painted a picture of pre-/early-internet days where university students and academics literally spending their days in libraries assiduously chasing down sources and publications and authors and trawling through the archives manually. Those were a different breed but I suppose that these sort of people are still out there in the world and they’re just the kind of people to screenshot a dozen pages of sources and write extensive twitter threads like this today.

If you have trouble with that stuff you can always try using Outline.com, Archive.is or the Wayback Machine to get it to work.

Unrolled thread here for those who hate twitter as much as me.

Seriously, I cannot imagine a worse website for long-form posts like this. Who knows how they manage to get so many high effort pieces like this one…

Yeah, because polygamy definitely wasn’t tightly linked to the cultural system of exploitation and oppression of women in Burkina Faso - it just existed in a cultural vacuum and Sankara was an evil dictator for taking away freedoms /s

I wish I were that organized lol

I have a bit of a backlog of good stuff I have recently come across and it’s rattling around somewhere in my head so I thought I’d make a couple of communities for my areas of interest and then I’d just gradually populate them with the decent content I know of to help Lemmygrad as it builds momentum.

I’ll run out of content soon :P

“I was taken to a hospital to undergo a [sterilization] operation, but because I have always suffered from a gynaecological condition the doctor said I could suffer complications that include death, so they spared me.”

Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.

Enbies, Ladies, and Gents — the key witness for Adrian Zenz’s report on forced sterilization of Uyghurs in her own words.

What stories will she share next? 🤔🤔

Ah, shit. I was wondering if it was some sort of connection issue problem :/

Surprisingly, I just discovered the MiUI native browser handles this situation without a hitch and I need to update the main post but that aside my connection is dogshit. Indonesia and Nepal have better internet speeds than I do.

I did make sure that the connection was clear and that I didn’t have anything else using bandwidth but it’s probably just a terrible internet connection. I’ve never conducted a speed test because I know it’s awful and knowing just how awful it is with particular details and statistics is only going to make me feel more miserable about the situation lol.

I don’t know enough to make a solid call on this but they are moving to a model of providing food subsidies to people instead of providing the people with subsidized food, so this is an attempt at addressing issues of hoarding and speculation on necessities because each person will have access to limited subsidy rather than unlimited subsidized products.

There is also the devaluing of the CUC which is a move to shift the concentration of wealth from the hands of the tourism and tourist-adjacent industries and operators back into the general population, which I think is a good thing and it’s necessary for the benefit of the people of Cuba because it will mitigate the uneven development that the tourism industry brought about.

It looks like they are also shifting their economy to focus on domestic production over imports as a way to keep wealth circulating in their internal economy where possible rather than being bled dry by heavy reliance on imports, like you see happening in many developing countries around the world.

I would expect to see some radical economists coming up with deeper and more comprehensive analysis in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for that, take my analysis with a grain of salt, and I guess the only way that we’ll really understand the impacts is with time.

Yeah, it is. Plus it’s a short read.

Of course there are the typical protestations and concern-trolling from the US delegate in there and also some from the Turkish academic Gün Kut but the Chairperson of the committee does a great job of politely and respectfully slapping them down in the most Chairpersonly, most UN manner.

Note that this documentary is almost 5 years old now so it might be a little out of date in some aspects however it’s useful as a measuring stick to analyze how things have progressed since the release.

That’s true.

I found it to be fucking hilarious that a week or so after that recent border skirmish, China conducted some military exercises in the Tibetan plateau and India was like “Oh, my bad — we don’t want any trouble!”

I really don’t think any party in that region, or the US & NATO, would be anything but reluctant to get engaged in a trans-Himalayan war because to would be a tactical and logistical nightmare for all sides.

Oh that’s really interesting to hear about. How do you make a fully-featured collaborative online document and not have permission control and revisions? That seems bizarre to me…

Looks like I’m finally gonna have to learn how to use Github, I guess.

This is a living document, it will be updated as new atrocities pour in.

oof

Pilger regularly writes for Red Flag newspaper which I’m sure is going to come as a shock to you when you learn that it’s a Trotskyist newspaper. I think that speaks volumes about the editorial line that he takes in this documentary — good on anti-imperialism, bad on AES.

🦀🦀🦀

I think I like that one better, thanks for the recommendation!

Glad to hear that people are breaking away from Google Docs. I hope that more people realize that their work is at risk if it’s within the Google ecosystem.