Lots of Western media isn’t blocked, CNN isn’t blocked
What was blocked recently was BBC in response to CGTN getting blocked first in the UK
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were blocked because they refused to take down terrorist recruitment pages and accounts. Remember 2011 ISIS Twitter? Like that. Those services were available before
Additionally, the idea of Internet sovereignty is important to a healthy Web industry in any country. Without the firewall, companies like WeChat and Douyin/TikTok could not have developed
Furthermore, getting around the firewall is trivially easy. OpenVPN on port 443 does the trick, I’ve set one up for a friend before. Anyone who wants to get a VPN account and browse the wider Internet is freely able to, and many do this
Finally, censorship has a purpose, and that’s public safety first and foremost. China doesn’t have large conspiracy cults like QAnon or antivaxxers, because rumor-mongering gets reported and dealt with seriously. It’s like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, stopping it is censorship but also perfectly legal. They don’t have graveyards full of children or measles, mumps, or rubella making a comeback because of this
marxists.org is a great resource. My study group has had some growing pains, but it’s helpful to start reading some material during the sessions, like Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
My friend’s aunts from Qingdao were totally open to using CBD for pain relief. Since CBD doesn’t make you high like THC, I can see hemp being legalized, especially since hemp also has historical usage in TCM. Marijuana, though, I think won’t happen for a long while since seeing and treating the effects of opium addiction is in living memory. Some other friends who went to Tibet a few times did mention that there are some hookah cafes where there’s something other than tobacco in them
You shouldn’t be divulging political affiliation on a job form, and it won’t come up on a background check as what they check are credit and criminal records
The only thing you should be worried about with joining any Communist organization is if you’re a noncitizen or a naturalized citizen for less than 5 years, as that can get you deported
Angela Davis, was an ML, now some sort of Marxist Communist, but definitely not an anarchist
Cedric Robinson was a Marxist
WEB Du Bois was an ML
Libraries originally started being attached to feudal research institutions, and public libraries can safely be considered to have originated with liberals and liberally-inclined lords of the late-feudal era. The idea that poor people are simply lacking education which hinders them from raising their status is a wholly liberal notion
Some things can’t be broken, like a sufficiently strong GPG key. That’s something which can’t be backdoored in and of itself. What they could exploit is weak protection of your private key
Other things you could use are physical one-time pads, writing notes on flash paper and burning them when not needed, holding meetings in areas where nobody has a phone or electronics in a sufficiently remote location
All of these methods increase the expense of surveillance. Even if they could backdoor everything, there’s still the expense of assigning police agents to track groups and individuals
If your operation is implementing proper guerilla tactics of leaderless resistance, taking out the #1 or #2 of a cell wouldn’t affect anything as everyone is trained to take on the role of each person 3 levels above them
I think they’ve done well for themselves given they’re one of the most-sanctioned countries in the world, and I can understand their military-first system given that the US and ROK have semi-annual training exercises to invade their country
If you want to see relatively unbiased explorations of the country, I recommend checking out Douyin videos from Chinese tourists
Are they living the most ideal life possible? No, no place is that way, but the only way to improve things would be for the US to withdraw its troops from the Korean peninsula (like the treaty they made at the end of the war stated they would) and for sanctions to end
China Daily as well, Ian Goodrum works for them
For non-Chinese news, I like peoplesworld.org
Agreed, this is where the “critical” part of “critical support” comes into play. I understand that ASSK has a gun to her head from the military at all times, but she should never have tried justifying it. Avoiding comment or highlighting the constitutional lack of civilian control of the military would have been better
Make no mistake, imperialists want Myanmar operating the way it was because it is very rich in resources and the NLD facilitated access, and that motive is missing from the coverage. However this is a choice between bourgeois democracy and undemocratic military dictatorship in the poorest country in SE Asia which is far different from liberalism vs fascism in the US being hardly separable. These liberals are opposed to the junta, have always been, and have widespread popular support within the country
Personally, my old best friend from high school and old roommate is a Muslim from Myanmar. His family lived there for hundreds of years and his parents left as soon as possible. Before the junta, there wasn’t much ethnic or religious tension in Myanmar as it was a crossroads for so many cultures. The junta began persecution of Muslims in Myanmar, particularly that of the Rohingya. This policy was continued by the military even when the NLD took power as there is legally no civilian control of the military, and the political party set up by the military constitutionally has 25% of the legislative seats. The Rohingya refugee crisis is clear evidence of the crimes being committed by the military which will continue so long as it has unchecked power.
The crisis which precipitated the 2011 election of the NLD was the 2008 protests following the criminally negligent junta response to the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis, the worst natural disaster to ever occur in Myanmar which devastated food production. International aid was delayed by the junta and much of it was embezzled.
Experience. This is the same junta which brutally oppressed the people of Myanmar for just over 50 years and was barely removed from power 10 years ago. The last 10 years under NLD leadership has made great strides in improving people’s lives, their primary focus has been on improving agriculture (which was hardly mechanized) and building infrastructure
If those users object so much, they are free to host their own instance. When federation first opened up, it led to several users of other instances coming on to our subs and behaving in ways which we found objectionable, and finding that they were acting in bad faith, we banned them. I think we have found a nice equilibrium
There can be situations where both Communists and liberals oppose the same thing, though it’s almost always for different reasons. Communists were severely oppressed by the junta as it was wholly undemocratic and kept the working people in utter poverty, and liberals were opposed to it because it halted capital extraction. The junta in many ways was feudalistic, the military was the nobility. A bourgeois democracy is still better than no democracy at all
Parenti lectures are great