Why should China be incapable of reaching anything more than one quarter the per capita GDP, with therefore roughly one quarter the living standards, of the U.S.? Is it some xenophobic illusion that the average Chinese person is only one quarter as smart, or only works one quarter as hard, or cannot work out a way to achieve more than a quarter of the living standard of an average American? Or to put it the other way round, that the average American works more than four times as hard, or is four time as smart, or can work out a way to remain living more than four times as well as the average Chinese person?

Well you see actually China uses rote memorization unlike us in the West where creativity™️ and free thinking™️ is taught in schools.

Silly Marxist, that’s why they can’t be richer than us.

I was investigating some current NGOs and other groups in my country and somehow it lead me to this site and org called the Global Peace Foundation.

The website definitely looks like a 3 letter agency, and what I found funny was that in the board of directors one of the ex-Presidents of Guatemala was there.

I really have 0 tolerance for these people because they really are unashamedly chauvinistic in the most idealistic way possible.

I’ll support my homophobic country everyday rather than any liberal utopian reincarnation these people concoct in their heads because the fact of the matter is that the people here are overwhelmingly queerphobic.

That is the reality.

I’ll support China’s BRI building a highspeed rail line right through my gasp homophobic hometown.

What a naive, ahistorical and disgustingly parochial view of international relations, politics and society.

Taliban deploys heavy reinforcements to Iran border

Videos circulating social media on 31 May show Taliban forces heavily reinforcing the Afghan border with Iran on 31 May, after significant escalation regarding a water dispute between the two countries, which resulted in heavy border clashes between the two sides over the weekend.

…

The outbreak of fighting came a week after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi warned the Taliban to respect Iran’s rights to water from the Helmand River shared between the two countries, under the 1973 Afghan-Iranian Helmand River Treaty. Iran has long accused Afghanistan of restricting the flow of its water to Iran and causing droughts or dry spells.

…

Despite videos showing reinforcements on the border, Iranian media reports suggested that some “elements are trying to provoke the parties involved with rumors and fake news.”

I really wish yankees would stop interfering with SEA affairs like history hasn’t shown that they’d rather kill of us than give an inch to treating us like humans with dignity and self-determination.

Also of course another Malaysian Chinese guy that blew up in anglosphere internet (Nigel Ng) has to lean onto anti-Chinese sentiment (social credit, cancelled, Taiwan province etc) meme to woo over Western simpletons.

I read a comment months ago about how “overseas Chinese” are meticulously planning for the downfall of socialist China and you know what this only gives credence to that.

Obviously I don’t believe that wholeheartedly but ffs these people make it too easy to think that way.

I mean comedians are petty bourgeois anyways so what am I really expecting.

I hate medical insurance companies and the MIC (medical industrial complex) consisting of all the shitty Western pharmaceutical companies (GSK, Roche, J&J, Bayer, etc).

Fuck you all.

I wonder how many have died because of their “intellectual property” and “risk-taking”.

Edit: used wrong word, pharmacology instead of pharmaceutical. Annoyed me too much so had to change it.

I was reading Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America by Anibal Quijano and it makes me sad that such a sophisticated retelling of race is basically non-existent here in (maritime) Southeast Asia.

It is often actually ignored in favour of a sort of vulgar developmentalism. Racism in it’s colonial and “post”-colonial forms are never fully interrogated and historicised, and in fact is often reproduced by the supposedly indigenous governments here.

A reason for this was the defeat (or failure, depends on how you see it) of left-wing movements in the region, by comprador reactionary forces and their Western masters.

In a way my comment history is a testament to that alienation and nihilism.

I didn’t even realise this was the name of what I have been practicing in general for a couple of years now - with some degree of success. That’s good to know.

Funnily enough I also experience something similar with temperature. When it’s hot and I sweat, hell, even when it’s cold and I sweat, it triggers a full body sensation because of my skin condition.

It’s unpleasant to say the least.

I’ve been slowly forcing myself into the heat and learning to tolerate it all.

At least now I can tolerate being outside for more than 10 minutes at a time, which is a success I guess.

Currently feeling the freedom of a 10% rent increase by a poc landlord because of “inflation, interest rates and rental demand”; how progressive.

That top panel is a barely disguised white supremacist, manifest destiny caricature.

In this case, literally both sides are wrong.

Honorary Aryans.

Definitely. However I do think there is hope to be seen by the fact that the process of de-dollarisation now is irreversible, with the Global North’s inability to stop it from happening, shown by the results of NATO’s aggression in Ukraine.

Even the bourgeoisie here knows where the wind blows.

I can explain this actually.

Deng did take inspiration and learn from the so-called Asian tigers.

But these economies, especially Singapore, are very different to China.

Superficially it may seem similar, especially in SEZs and Hong Kong, whereby both Singapore and the SEZs/Hong Kong exhibit characteristics of a free market, low taxes and basically higher exploitation of labour.

Singapore started as a trade colony and success came from trade. It was never really truly was a productive economy, although currently does invest and is part of the global value chain for electronics. However, financial services was and continue to dominate it’s economy.

SOEs are also prevalent in Singapore, which the World Bank always tries downplaying, but unlike China, Singapore’s population has been effectively urban from the start.

The great thing about China’s economy is the collectivised rural sector, throughout it’s existence and even after reform and opening up, played a critical role in absorbing internal and external shocks to the economy. This allowed for consistent double digit growth and allowed them to continue to let their economy grow even when external factors where unfavourable (ie. Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, Atlantic Financial Crisis of 2008). Not to mention that although SOEs in China took a backseat during the 2000s, the “commanding heights” of the economy, and critical infrastructures continues to be publicly owned.

Singapore’s success came from literally being a Tax Haven for all international companies to dodge taxes in SEA economies. It’s economy is fully integrated into the world economy, which also explains its very Western-friendly foreign policy (relative to rest of ASEAN except Phillipines).

So a country with 1.4billion people really can’t emulate the economy of an island state literally 0.0001x its population.

Is watching the series worth it? A lot of people here have been talking about it.

And by worth it I mean was it atleast entertaining or had something interesting to say?

The last thing I want is to watch something painstakingly Euro-Amerikan that didn’t even happen anywhere close to them.

I do wonder how the few people who are critical of China but concede that China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty thinks they managed to do it.

Do they just think China through their own authoritarianism^TM just outlawed poverty?

Or do they actually recognise the massive undertaking of mobilizing and organizing millions of people into the countryside to directly tackle the problems of those most affected?

Western MSM pushing the whole BRI is failing narrative really is major cope.

Is this grifter still popular in Amerikan circles?

I would say he should touch grass but it might be better for everyone here that he doesn’t go outside.

This just made me check if the Malaysian one, Bernama and RTM is labelled and nope it isn’t.

I guess it only applies to current Western geopolitical enemies and in typical liberal “both sides” fashion they label some Amerikan ones as well to seem fair.

I think directly calling it the colonizer mentality is more effective.

I always had apprehensions regarding the use of the word tribalism and these articles voiced those concerns really well.

I have been playing a lot of geoguessr lately and US towns and cities really stand out like a sore thumb. I thought I knew car centric cities but the way Amerikan cities look, with low density residential spaces and wide roads coupled with relatively flat land makes every city feel very barren with concrete.

Too many times I expected the area to be peri-urban but it is actually close to the centre of a city.

I wouldn’t say so. Colonisation has a deep and lasting impact on our cultures of course, but to say that none of the precolonial customs were maintained is a bit of a stretch.

It is more accurate to describe Nusantara, or the Malay archipelago, to that of South Asia. Native languages are still spoken. Cultural traditions have largely been maintained. Although, there is now a confluence of Westernised middle classes, reactionary traditionalists and chauvinists, isolated indigenous groups, and accompanying capitalist classes and imperialism attacking collectivist values and structures in our societies.

Just to raise a few points about it, for religion, christianity missionaries did penetrate the southeast Asian archipelago, with the most obvious example being the Phillipines, having a christian majority, but in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia, it had a very limited impact on indigenous religions, most importantly being Islam, Hinduism, and local traditional faiths, however christianity gains prominence the more eastwards you go.

Western Papua and Sarawak (East Malaysia) has christian majorities for example.

Language is another contentious issue, with both left-wing and right-wingers in Malaysia for example, supporting the use of Bahasa Melayu (Malay) as the main language of the government prior to independence. Again this has some exceptions, with for example Sarawak, maintaining English as the de facto language of (state) government even though Malay is the national language.

Indonesia has only bahasa Indonesia as their national language, but other indigenous languages are recognized in the regional level. I can’t say for sure about the specificities of Indonesia’s national language policy, but from what I know, “colonial” languages like Portuguese, English and Dutch have a negligible amount of speakers or relevance there.

A bit of a long response, but I wanted to justify my choice of words with proper care.

What I mean by “conventional meanings” is which ethnic groups in southeast asia are typically considered as indigenous in popular discourse.

For example, Arab peranakans, people who had Arab descendants, are often considered indigenous, while Chinese peranakans are not. Indian peranakans also suffer the same predicament, with some considered indigenous while others are not.

So in my original comment, if we consider chinese Indonesians as indigenous, that would amount to literally 99% of the population, if not just 100% of the population, except for a small segment of eurasians.

Indigenous thus is not about if you were born there, about how long you’ve been there, about the religions you follow or the languages you use but it’s about all of those things all at once, dependent on the sociohistorical conditions of that time.

This was (is) often to the detriment of chinese groups in the region in the 20th and 21st centuries, regardless if they were “totok” (first or second generation immigrants) or peranakan or “straits-born”.

This is further complicated by the political-economy of colonial southeast Asia.

The key point is that there have been “foreign” migration into the Malay archipelago long before European arrivals in the 15th century. Prior to “proper” colonisation in the 16th century.

They were fully incorporated within the respective feudal kingdoms (and mode of production) and some have had mixed blood, and some also completely assimilated to local cultures and customs.

These mixed race individuals formed part (and came from) the mercantalist, trading class that morphed into the “middlemen” class, alongside other mixed race groups (eurasians) as well as other “foreign” ethnic groups during colonisation. They occupied the middle and lower-upper sectors of the racial economic hierarchy in colonial society.

These became the capitalists of post-independence southeast Asia (alongside a fledgling indigenous capitalist class).

Certainly, indigenous southeast Asian peasants were dispossessed of land during colonisation, but they were dispossessed by their own native brethren and europeans through feudal and colonial institutions, not by the vast majority of newly arrived Asian immigrants, which were sometimes either similarly or seperately exploited by european colonizers through indentured and wage labour.

History itself shows this through the proletarian pendatangs and asings (foreigners or aliens) support of the national liberation and decolonization movements in the region.

So, it is unlike the indigenous in the Americas and other settler-colonial nation-states, where a (relatively) clear delineation can be made between settlers and indigenous peoples, through the settler’s expropriation of indigenous land and accompanying genocide. In these societies, indigenous people are defined by their oppression by the settler economy, regardless of cultural assimilation, blood mixture, class or being “non-white”, because that came after the arrival of the settler economy. (If I understand it correctly.)

So I watched this DW documentary on Nusantara, and what I found odd was their statistic that 20% of Indonesia’s population are indigenous at 5:50.

In actuality, close to 98% of Indonesia’s population is indigenous if we take conventional meanings of the term.

Don’t get me wrong, indigenous and similar terms, like bumiputera and pribumi have very loaded meanings in maritime Southeast Asia. There are ethnocentric and inclusive interpretations of these terms.

However, the statistic seems just so random. I don’t know of any ethnic classification that consists of 20% of the Indonesian population.

Is this just some settler-colonial insecurities being projected onto a global south country?

That’s the infamous 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. Neoliberalism does it’s wonders aye?

I blocked shit reactionary says a few weeks back and I have to say my scrolling experience in this site has just been much more chill as a result.

I find it so ironic that Europe really sold any independence it had to be Amerika’s lapdog.

Even capitalist countries in the global south, like India or Indonesia, has seen high average GDP growth over the past few decades, and will continue see higher than Western average growth the next coming few years.

They can’t even adequately benefit and manage the mode of the production (and associated colonial profits) that was first developed on their own soil.

Was reading this transcript of an interview of John Bellamy Foster on Ecological Civilization and I found this quote particularly funny:

Thank you, Professor Foster, for your wonderful speech, which brought us the vivid progress of Marxist thought with Western academic characteristics.

I understand in this context it is a compliment but calling someone a Marxist with Western academic characteristics conjures up a very different person in my head.

Just because you read a few Western news articles does not make you an expert in a country of 32 million people. Global South Marxism is an evolving science, it is there if you actually seek for it.

I wrote this mainly for my own personal reference, so I don’t expect much engagement and just posted it here for those few number of people who care enough to read it.

I also barely scratched the surface. There is much to be said about AI and Mahathir, and Malaysian politics generally, but for precision I didn’t mention it. And of course I don’t blame foreigners for not knowing Malaysian history. In the grand scheme of things, it is less historically significant than for example British, Indian or Chinese history.

Indeed, even when neglected countries occasionally gets mentioned in Western or Alternative media, how much thought and consideration is given to those living their lives in those countries? What do the local revolutionaries and Marxists have to say about their own country, especially in countries with seemingly non-visible communist movements? This of course applies to numerous of countries across the global south and I think it really applies here.

No investigation, no right to speak.

The class struggle in Malaysia continues by the marhaen on the ground, even with chauvinistic side-lining by Eurocentric commentators.

Malaysia

Really hate how my government and local media is harping about muh debt to GDP ratio and justifying the most uninspiring liberal think tank market policies known to man.

This is what happens when you outsource tertiary education to Western universities.

No wonder we do so well in those “Economic Freedom” indices. Yes keep attracting FDI, that will surely develop our country…maybe in numbers.

A short history lesson:

During the supposed “Labour” leadership of the UK in 1947, they enacted further anti-union laws that effectively destroyed all of the major trade unions - all affiliated with left-wing and communist independence parties - in Malaya. And when the federation of Malaysia was formed in 1948, the UK arrested thousands of communists and labour union leaders through a declaration of a State of Emergency. Concurrently in 1948, in the coloniser’s turf, the NHS was established.

To this day, unions are completely irrelevant in Malaysian politics. We had no general strike since the hartal in 1947 against the aforementioned British laws. A large aspect of the multi-racial and multi-religious, secular labour and liberation movement defanged and subdued.

This gave way to the rise of political Islam that rejected syncretic and sufi principles that were part of our interpretation of Islam (and how it related to our culture).

Of course this isn’t just putting blame on the colonisers. I have to also blame the bourgeois compradors that was tasked to maintain the coloniser’s superstructure and mostly fulfilled that role.

It’s also important to note that a good chunk of the Malayan liberation movements supported reunification of (the area that consists of modern-day) Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Indonesia into a single state. This is something that is maybe reserved to history (at least currently) but I personally say is a strong prequisite for a socialist future for Nusantara. However, that is very obviously not wanted by the West - even a capitalist one would counter their aims back then and even now.

To elaborate on the other comment, this quote might be useful:

This is why ASEAN should steer clear of either bandwagoning (i.e., openly and exclusively aligning with a stronger power) or hedging its bets (i.e., playing both sides) via the IPEF – which could well be inimical to the pre-existing RCEP and other areas of strategic cooperation and make joint-development (JD) in the SCS even more difficult to achieve.

Joint development of course, being one of the only well-thought out plans that can actually resolve the SCS dispute. (Which is why the West hates it so much.)

The Western Pacific region or rather the southwestern Pacific is different from the rest of the wider region – with its own perspectives and concerns and vision. Geo-economic linkages and supply-chains don’t necessarily extend to geopolitical/geo-security alliances, at least for ASEAN as a whole. And even (regular and customary) joint-military exercises don’t necessarily translate into concrete military commitments in the form of a Nato-like alliance.

Source.

Which is also why I very much cringe at overly online liberals when they picture ASEAN as nothing but just either a US or China pawn (showcased through their lavishly sadistic WW3 maps), like we can’t assert our own independent politics.

@Aru@lemmygrad.ml.

I hope the ping works? Here’s the “essay” you asked about all those months ago lol.

So the US indeed justified it’s use of chemical defoliants in Viet Nam by it’s use by the British in Malaya.

This was prompted by a comment I made before.

I actually finally had time to watch the lecture I linked in the comment and they showcased a quote from a memo made by the Secretary of State to Kennedy.

I was able to eventually find it here.

The use of defoliant does not violate any rule of international law concerning the conduct of chemical warfare and is an accepted tactic of war. Precedent has been been established by the British during the emergency in Malaya in their use of helicopters for destroying cops by chemical spraying.

I hate anglos so much.

I went on a spiral by reading a report from a free market think tank and then came across some self described “centrist liberal” news site, with their token non-white authors of course.

And they are all so bad. Like not only through their misuse of statistics, but in general, I can’t help but after reading it their very Western, and White, worldview that plagues everything they write.

Not to mention their protestations of “trans ideology”.

The rest are just some funny quotes I like to share with you all.

It’s time for us all to recognise that China is hostile to the West, and bent on world domination by any means. We need to bite the bullet and be prepared to pay extra for products not made in China.

After reading that, I genuinely burst out into tears. I was expecting something more sadistic, ie. justifying war, but instead it’s the painfully liberal “lets not buy any made in China products”, that broke me.

You make an excellent point, imo. The fear I have for the West is not China, but the so-called progressive movement. It has become detached from reality and, among other things, seeks to silence (aka cancel) its critics and redefine language to suit its own ends. It is attempting to dismantle the freedom of speech you identify as so important. So far, the progressives seem to be winning. Western society so lacks core values it seems incapable, even unwilling, to effectively oppose the progressive nonsense. China’s greatest threat is its own totalitarian ideology, not the West. The West’s greatest threat is its homegrown progressive ideology. I don’t know how we stop the internal rot.

Both taken from the comments of this article, which is funny in on itself.

And of course this amazing quote from this article:

One of the signature aspects of the culture war is the weaponisation of history, particularly by the new, academically-aligned Left. Decolonisation now dominates thinking about university curricula, as well as hiring practice, while museums have embraced its agenda with open arms.

The first sentence already a marvel to read.

Meanwhile, the ongoing return of Benin Bronzes from museums and, most enthusiastically of all, from Cambridge (116 are in the latest planned shipment back to Nigeria) involves an even more naked use of history as a grenade; most reports on the Bronzes’ return don’t even refer to the massacre of the British that preceded the looting, nor the fact that they belonged to slave-traders in the first place.

NOOO not the deaths of colonizers. I’m crying rn.

If you complain about coal power this or that it simply falls on deaf ears because a significant part of the world doesn’t even have stable electricity. Something that affects the day-to-day life of the people. Something that is needed for development.

Electricity outages is felt sometimes in the West, during extraordinary weather events usually, but it is not a constant threat. This is what a lot of westerners struggle to grasp when it comes to environmental issues.

Development unfortunately requires these tough calls, which means succumbing to coal for the short term. Especially in the current political climate. Haphazardly banning certain energy sources, like some environmentalists clamour for, would do the opposite of actually mitigating climate change and would lead to far more harm than good.

Controlled phase outs are needed. China’s plan (NDC) for the past few years (which they reiterated time and time again) was a carbon emissions peak in 2030, and from their current 5 year plan, an espousal for a ‘ecological civilization’, I have high hopes that they’ll achieve their NDC.

But to answer your question: is it fast enough, ie. is their NDC ambitious enough?

According to this site, no it isn’t.

But again, we have to consider, the West still unequally benefits more from the environmental devastation of the global south. See for example, ecological unequal exchange and its role in core-periphery relations.

The burden is not only on global south nations, when western countries must not only fulfill their own NDCs but should also provide the necessary (unconditional) aid and financing to global south nations.

same here

I attended this talk whereby the researcher, working with local Cuban academics to improve living spaces in Cuba, mentioned how in their experience the locals are very much involved in the decision-making process of their local neighbourhood (and politics generally), which I found completely stark to many bourgeois capitalist democracies we have today.

And this assessment seems to be reflected in the video. (Unsurprisingly.)