香港,中国

  • 5 Posts
  • 219 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 13th, 2022

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  • It just so happens that under Russian rule, Russian rulers will be making profit instead of Ukrainian rulers.

    I think we’re missing a couple of nuances here, no? Although it’s a stretch to call them nuance. The way Ukrainian rulers have been making money has been through privatization. And because there’s so much privatization we need to look at who owns Ukraine’s economy. It’s only escalated since Russia invaded, with national assets being sold off to foreign private sectors so cheaply that one has to wonder why they did it when the gains are a drop in the bucket compared to the direct aid they’ve been getting from Western public sectors.

    If Ukraine emerges from this conflict with its own sovereignty, it’ll be sovereignty over a flag, a presidential palace and a state framework that protects foreign companies’ investments from hungry Ukrainians.




  • The Democrats knew this was going to happen. There’s no way they couldn’t. And I don’t mean Democrat supporters, many of whom were vehement that Biden was fine like so many anecdotes in this thread recount. I mean the Democrat leadership, who manage his campaign and more than likely manage his presidency. Unlike the public, they have access to him. They have his medical records, the reports of his doctors and caregivers, everything. There’s no way they didn’t know this would happen if he debated.

    They might start seeding support for a different candidate into their supporter’s discourse after this, but they will have been planning for this outcome long ago. And when a left-leaning (left from a US Overton window) news platform hosts a debate that shows him up that badly and then publishes commentary like this, you have to wonder if that caused friction with the DNC or if they assented to it.

    As the party starts singling out a replacement, the question I hope people start asking is why they didn’t replace Biden earlier? Did they need to wait until the urgency of imminent elections made their new candidate more palatable? And if they don’t replace Biden, why are they letting Trump win?







  • Firstly, while i am no expert on the subject, it appears to me that this is a clear legacy of colonialism. Secondly, judging by how many modifications the Vietnamese alphabet has, all the various diacritics and tone indicators that are necessary to make it work, this would suggest to me that the Latin alphabet is just not a good fit for the specific phonology and tonal nature of the Vietnamese language.

    This is correct. France’s particular style of colonialism was particularly aggressive about erasing native languages and forcing them to adopt French. Do an image search for a map of Francophone countries and you can see the scar they left across West Africa, for example. In Vietnam, they were starting to use Latin alphabet as an alternative to using Chinese characters before the French came, but the French pushed them towards exclusively using the Latin alphabet as part of their process of converting them to Francophones.

    There’s not really a historical writing system to re-adopt - the Chinese character system and its derivatives are just as ‘imported’ as Latin, and I think if you go back earlier than that there’s multiple cultures and ethnic groups and not really a unifying language on the peninsula.

    I’m not sure why the Vietnamese haven’t created a new writing system, but I know they’ve considered it multiple times and chose to stick to what they have. Completely switching the writing system is a lot of work. Shifting the infrastructure and education systems and planning a transitional phase where both systems are used is a huge effort on top of everything else the new government had on its plate.







  • They are becoming more progressive, just slowly. They tried going faster in the cultural revolution, and it was disastrous.

    It might feel painfully slow compared to Western progressivism, but that’s because it’s educating and incrementing generationally so that the changes happen with the popular support of billions of people, and they stick.

    In the West they will force progressive values into law while half or more of the population still oppose it, and so they move 3 steps forward but then 2-4 steps backward as they flutter between parties in their circus democracies.

    Look at women’s rights like abortion and workplace equality. The gig economy is less than 10 years old and China and Vietnam look after the welfare of workers in that new industry better. China and Vietnam are already ahead of the West in a lot of progressive respects. We’ll see China having better LGBTQ rights than the West in our lifetimes.

    In the meantime be wary of letting liberals cherry pick the benchmarks for measuring which place is more progressive - they’ll always hyperfocus on LGBTQ for progressivism until the day the West falls behind on it (and it will), and then they’ll find something else.

    [edit for typo]