KeyWiki is an anti-left doxxing website. They trawl careless orgs' member lists and then dig up information about them to harass and intimidate organizers or even just random DSA libs.
Terrarium
joined 3 months ago
He allegedly was a local leader of sorts in Association nationale des étudiants du Burkina, a Burkinabe Marxist organization. But I'm far from an expert.
Yes and structurally universities "train" far more PhDs than they have professor positions so it is literally impossible for the vast majority of academic track PhDs to get a professor position. The economics drive this: PhD students are just underpaid lab workers, basically. Like the 5 interns hoping to get the one full time position, it's not an accident, the situation is gamed because the employer gets more labor for less money.
Their supposed plan is to have private companies do it and charge large fees. This would just crush all Aliexpress (as is) demand, though. To keep functioning they would switch to stateside warehousing models or some loophole. They already use their own repackaging service to make there be fewer packages and their own delivery services to bypass USPS, UPS, etc.
It's very common for avoiding de minimis and/or having a lower tariff fee. Some countries have de minimis of around $50 so the seller will list the vakue as $30 for a $150 item, foe example.
That happened on a smaller scale when they tried to abruptly end de minimis around 2 months ago. Previously they would at most randomly check a few of these small packages, suddenly they had to check all of them. USPS customs ground to a halt and items were delayed for up to 2 weeks or so even though they paused the de minimis repeal very quickly.
They're allegedly going to try it again. Their supposed solution is to bypass USPS and have private companies add very large customs fees on top of tariffs. If implemented it would kill the small direct orders market but not after a bunch of pain for buyers that didn't realize their $50 temu order would get a $75 tariff and a $50 fee tacked on after they ordered.
If this is all implementd it will mean much less trade and more expensive imports for basically no reason or benefit. Just a bunch of new pointless and privatized customs workers.
Young scientists are convinced they are headed for bigger and better things and that the work they do is very valuable - either intellectually or personally or both. They do not see themselves as of the same class as janitors, they are just temporarily overworked for the cause and things will get better later when they are in charge or in some senior role. They are "paying their dues".
Then 90% of them realize there is no such job waiting for them and they slowly shed their belief system. But it can take decades.
Planned Parenthood is extremely NGO-ified. It technically has two wings, one for medicine and one for political lobbying / propaganda, but the latter provides so much funding for the former that it might as well be the parent organization.
So PP will, unfortunately, go in whatever direction it believes will get it funding, which has historically been lobbying and integrating with the Democratic Party. That "party" is not exactly stepping up for trans people so I'm pessimistic. I wouldn't be surprised of Dems went TERF soon.
A lot of China issues are more internal, typically with a lot of sweatshops
China does not have a lot of sweatshops.
Last year I would've said censorship is definitely a weaker point for China but given the US right now ehh... Anything China has done on that is happening right now in the US.
Censorship is not a moral quantity, it is a tool. It can be used for good reasons, okay reasons, understandable reasons, cruel reasons, economic repressive reasons, purely reactionary reasons. If you punch a Nazi you are censoring them and I commend you for doing it.
China can be a bit shit to deal with on trade even as a country that does a ton of with them but current US is uhh.. definitely not better.
Define, "a bit shit to deal with". What treatment fo you believe your country deserves?
China is very much trying to make sure Taiwan is China even though Taiwan doesn't seem to want that.
China fought a civil war in the 1940s following the expulsion of imperial Japanese occupation. The communists won. The nationalists, i.e. reactionary capitalists, mass emigrated to Taiwan for a final holdout (they did genocidal things to the indigenous people there btw). The US intervened to prevent the communists from finishing the civil war and reuniting all of China. This was only possible because the US was also pressuring China via the invasion and later partition of Korea and China chose solidarity with their analogs there facing a much greater threat (the US). Since then, both the PRC and Taiwan have claimed all of China. The KMT claims even more than modern China, in fact. The civil war has never ended, it has simply reached a deadlock, with Taiwan serving as a US outpost and manufacturing center.
Public opinion is easy to sway, particularly on polls. We can say that the people of Taiwan don't want war and yet the US wants to use them to provoke China into war. We can say that they prefer the prior status quo of almost one country with two systems, i.e. easy trade and travel with their neighbor, to one of barriers and US propaganda against the PRC.
And what has the PRC done, exactly, to Taiwan?
In general China is a bit of a dick when it comes to boats on what they think is their water even if that's not super agreed (I understand many spots have many overlapping claims from multiple countries).
China is exactly like every other country in having boats in waters that others complain about. Even some landlocked countries. Though it is far less rapacious, per capita, than most. Why are you singling out China?
The shipping what is basically pure garbage globally is shit but not entirely China's fault, because maybe if some business owners hadn't decided that paying the minimum possible for things was a good idea we wouldn't be flooded with trash that morons requested.
These are the consequences of capitalism, not morons or China being bad. Capitalism forces owners to maximize profits any way they can and if that means a 10% cheaper item that breaks twice as much, well they don't care so long as their profits go up. Capitalism also creates a culture of commodity acquisition through the destruction of forms of socialization and self-actualization. So people adopt consumerist hobbies that appear to others as, "buying dumb garbage". China's explicitly stated strategy is to allow capitalist relations in a subset of its economy, particularly for export, in order to build up what's known by Marxists as productive forces. That to survive imperialism and imagine socialist transition, they need to be able to create all the products needed and to rope imperialists into dependency. It seems to be working, wouldn't you say?
China has also advanced massively in two decades. It doesn't just export cheap plastic things. Some of the finest and most durable products come from China.
Would have preferred much better cooperation with COVID but both in the US and where I live (Australia) there are definitely internal issues that also could have dealt with it.
This is also capitalism. The US and Australia are financialized economies premised on commercial rents and appropriate COVID interventions destroyed that model. The financiers demanded higher profits and their states relented. China and other socialist-run countries responded much more appropriately and millions of people would still be alive if others had their model.
It's harder for me to see what's actually going on inside China, I don't read or speak any language aside from English to know if everything is actually relatively fine in China, until I bother looking I mostly see my curated sections of news which while fairly unbiased, tends to not show the good things about anywhere.
Talk to people in China. Watch videos of normal people there doing normal things. It is a normal country with nice people.
Re: the news, focus on media criticism. What are the tropes being played up? Who wrote the article? Who is the editor-in-chief of the rag? What sources do they cite? Are they associated with the MoD? An NGO with MoD ties? Who pays them? Are they representative? When they call someone an expert, why should you believe them? And of course, to properly criticize you will have to acquire a lot of geopolitical knowledge to know when something said is simply false.
I know people sometimes get conveniently disappeared, but I've heard of a dozen cases or so which is more normal than you'd think reasonable for most countries.
This is a chauvinist trope. Chauvinist media calls people in China "missing" with literally zero evidence. Those people regularly have to come out and say, "I wasn't missing, I was just living my life like normal."
But in the US, immigrants are being disappeared on a daily basis on camera.
Directly comparing with the US as opposed to less fucked up countries does make China seem significantly better off, I guess because I'm from Australia where you could fairly argue we are much better
Australia is a US lapdog. Remember AUKUS? Y'all are used to poke and prod China all the time and your MoD runs propaganda operations against China all the time.
Australia is also an Anglo settler state that is continuing its genocide against aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians still fear the state stealing their children over small and normal things, something that does happen and is a holdover from cultural genocidal boarding schools. Australia has not returned lands to the rightful owners and the height of its justice is a piecemeal appeal to tolerance and integration. Australians remain highly racist.
General abuse of ocean territory rights
Oh? What are the abuses, exactly? Are you familiar with maritime territorial claims and what they tend to look like? The history of island disputes? The nature of shipping lanes in the region and how this intersects with US imperialism? Who otherwise controls sais shipping lanes, de facto, and why?
Where did you learn of these "abuses" and did you read the sources critically? Did you ask whether you should take the Director of the US National Defense Maritime Research Organization (etc) at their word?
general human rights abuses
And here you see how human rights have become a diluted tool for chauvinist thinking. Can't even be specific! What human rights abuses? How do they compare to others countries'? What is the government response? Why did they happen? No, no, don't ask such questions, right? The important thing is that you've terminated thinking with a negative view of China. This is the essence of the "tankie" epithet, it is the left-punching insult of chauvinist incuriosity.
with sweatshops and the like
Sweatshops are the workshops of the poor and exploited. They are usually in service of imperialists, literally owned by companies like Target, and they operate in more exploitable countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia. When thinking of sweatshops, you should direct your anger at the OECD imperialists that own and run them. Understand that the countries with them operate under incredible pressure from imperialists, often including coups by said imperialists to install capital-friendly leaders.
China has generally done away with sweatshops. They have automated and industrialized. There is still difficult work and long hours, but the image you have in mind is likely chauvinist on multiple levels.
along with the excessive control of the people.
Again, incredibly vague. This is an arbitrary yardstick, you could say this about literally any governance structure of any size. I have seen "horizontalists" disrupt meetings because they thought the existence of open committees / working groups in an organizing space was "authoritarian". Who knows what you're talking about, though it again rings the bell of orientalism.
Releasing CFCs again, like we got rid of that shit for a reason if they could stop pumping it out that would be fantastic.
Okay so the situation you're complaining about is that some companies were releasing CFCs and then the Chinese government cracked down on it, reversing this. That's what makes you bigoted towards China? Is this the "excessive control of the people" you were talking about?
Destroy me, Xi