Terrarium

Get involved in organizing. Even just little bits. Even just a reading group.

Qihoo is just a typical tech company with a "security" focus. It having a VPN is like Norton having a VPN - like Norton VPN.

Using a shell company is likely just a way to avoid sanctions.

A Chinese app talking to Chinese servers is no more alarming than a Swedish app talking to Swedish servers or an American app talking to American servers. Imagine writing a breathless "report" about how searching the App Store phones home to the United States. You know, to search for and download apps.

So basically the Tech Transparency Project is just doing some nationalist orientalism.

From their website: "TTP is a research initiative of Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization that uses research, litigation, and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life."

Their director: "Katie Paul, TTP’s Director, specializes in tracking criminal activity on online platforms such as Facebook. She also serves as co-director of the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project and a founding member of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO)."

They are somewhat opaque about their funding. They claim to not accept corporate funding but every funder they list is just a middleman NGO for corporate/billionaire funding.

So, a typical NGO run by a cop.

Tech companies are generally terrible and tied to financialized nonsense, but there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The outrage is premised entirely on xenophobia.

If you don't count oip and spices, then any kind of dal. Dal, onion, ginger garlic paste, chili, tomato. Then add your spices, which can be as simple as garam masala, turneric, and red chili powder. Salt after it's cooked. Aside from the onion everything can come from the pantry or freezer. Technically you could blend and freeze the onion to make life even easier.

I know I'm pushing it but this is basically the easiest meal ever and it's just one pot. You only need to dirty a cutting board, knife, and spoon. It's nearly a pantry meal and requires no thought or special technique aside from knowing when onions are caramelized but not burned. And it's vegan, gluten free, and very inexpensive.

Yeah Castro was forced by the US to be more friendly with the Soviet bloc due to trade (US embargo preceded the revolution being explicitly communist) and military threats and actions (if the US constantly threatens to attack you, the USSR might counterbalance). The revolution did have a substantial communist contingent in the cities and in leadership, so this was a natural consequence.

One of the first things done by the revolutionary government was to strike a deal for sugar exports, as the country, like many colonized countries, had a massively unbalanced economy that catered to colonist interests - at the time, cash crops, mobbed up casinos and sex trade, and limitations on industry. They originally made this offer to the US, but the US, as always, went as extreme as it could do pressure the newly sovereign government and refused and made threats. They then made basically the same deal with the USSR.

If you're a cowardly white supremacist, don't reply to this message.

Another banger from JDPON Don

The white supremacist's greatest fear is that they will be treated as harshly as they have treated others. So they must invent and imagine brutality to fear, justifying their subscription to continued ethnic cleansing against no-whites.

You need reeducation.

I don't see how you can see the persecution of Uyghurs and the forced assimilation of Xinjiang

Xinjiang is already assimilated. It is part of China and has been for ages, governed under the guiding principles of multi-ethnic administration. The persecution of Uyghurs is far kinder and more positive than anything the West has ever cooked up. Vilifying it requires a particular level of gullibility that only really exists as white supremacist laziness.

and expect China to do any better. Genocide is genocide.

China has not committed genocide. However, the countries you prefer have.

In Africa? That is actually correct. Western countries do not build hospitals in Africa. The most they do is build pharmaceutical production facilities that are later bombed by their airplanes.

The West only built hospitals in Africa before WWI when they were treating the continent as full-blown colonies. The hospitals were built in colonial trade centers for colonists, not for the indigenous people. Neocolonialism does not partake in this practice, it is premised on neoliberalism. It, at most, issues debt with anti-worker and anti-sovereignty strings attached that ends up damaging thr country's infrastructure further. It is important to understand that the OECD countries do not, generally speaking, operate by capital investment in infrastructure of imperialized countries. They are parasitic.

I think you don't even know what a debt trap is. It is certainly not the practice of forgiving debt, renegotiating debt plans, or even just eventually taking the assets provided when a country or other debtor defaults.

China has dramatically improved living conditions for its own people over the previpus 50 years. This is in stark contrast to virtually every other non-OECD country subject to imperialism. It is even in stark contrast to many OECD countries who have spent the last 50 years neoliberalizing their economies, making life overall much more expensive for their people despite the spoils brought to them by imperialism.

What do you think of when you imagine the ills China has done "to its own people" and have you spent more than 10 minutes actually researching the topic(s)?

And don't forget that GDP just means, "monetary value of sales" and can include such things as financial transactions that created nothing. If debt is sold 3 times for value X, then 3X has been added to the GDP. China has a much loser level of financialized nonsense than the EU. Its GDP reflects tangible productivity, an ability to create actual products and services.