https://web.archive.org/web/20230624214638/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/05/look-at-the-lights-my-love-annie-ernaux-book-review/674235/

Anyone who's studied the George Orwell novel 1984 want to explain to me what the fucking point of "newspeak" is and why it's not a strawman "we're gonna make the commies seem like supervillains and do random stupid shit for no reason" type trope? Because when has any prominent figure in socialism or communism ever suggested dumbing down language? Give me an example of a commie language reinvention please, 1984 is supposed to be the definitive manual on what happened under communism isn't it?

Also detecting a hint of racism in that plotpoint because there really are real languages that evolved naturally where the positive and negative expressions are indeed structured as good, not good, very good, very not good, etc. Is it trying to say that people speaking those languages are bad at expressing their thoughts because it's not how English does it?

Actually, Chinese is kind of like this with its use of pre/suffixes. Chinese is also one of the best languages for poetry and literature. Source: Native Mandarin speaker.

Crossposted from my Mastodon

And this is rolled back from their initial proposal of 80 hours.

It's already a red flag when a factory/workshop has one of these days without injury things, it's a deep, blood stained scarlet flag when this isn't on a whiteboard, not on a piece of paper, hell not even on a simple plaque with changeable number inserts, but a fully printed and laminated metal sign with an electronic counter.

Credit: https://octodon.social/@aspensmonster/109224357840045377

First of all, consider that most major media content from official sources like TV shows and movies are geolocked to approved countries. This has way more to do with copyright and licensing than censorship, but it's what it is.

Second, consider the fact that every VPN around the world advertise that "if you're in China, you can use us to get past censorship" in their marketing. Now, how many VPNs that Westerns use have an actual endpoint inside Mainland China? Totally legal to do btw, but how many prividers actually do it? Which, fun fact, the simple act of jumping the great firewall isn't illegal. It's only illegal of you commit a crime while bypassing the firewall, like if you were posting on a Western porn site or something, in which case it could be used to increase sentencing in court. Technically you can only use VPNs by Chinese companies (many of which still let you jump the firewall BTW), but as far as I know they don't enforce it that much considering how prevalent Western VPNs are over there, and the fact they if they really cared they would have blocked all the major foreign VPN endpoints. Watching even explicitly state censored stuff isn't illegal, it's only illegal if you make, advertise, duplicate, or distribute it. Actually, additional fun fact, access and possession of porn is generally legal in China, they only criminalize, again, making, distributing, duplicating, or advertising it, that's just their general philosophy when it comes to banned media.

Third, consider piracy. How often do you see Chinese media on western torrent sites or illegal streaming sites? I dunno about you, but pretty much never for me. Meanwhile, plenty of Chinese illegal streaming sites have all the Western shows you could want, and Chinese people torrent stuff all the time. Piracy is technically illegal in China, especially since torrenting counts as distribution, but I've personally never heard it enforced for regular Western movies and TV shows, only for porn and stuff like that. (Source: Am Chinese, lived in China) And there are tons of Chinese streaming sites, hosted in China, which you'd think would be pretty easy for them to shut down if they actually cared about it.

All in all, Chinese people aren't starving for Western "freedom" media. The West is starving for Chinese media.

Text Mirror:

What does decolonization of Hawaii, and the US look like? From one Native Hawaiian's perspective (me)

The US military is destroying our islands along with the 12 million tourists under foreign billionaire-owned tourism. Too many Americans are buying up our lands forcing us out by jacking home prices to $1.5 million etc.

But the solution in places like Hawaii, North America is not as simple as everyone who is white or non-indigenous simply leaving.

If the people in Hawaii & North America could repair the inequities with the indigenous people there, respect treaties, allow indigenous and ethnic minorities to exist as equal yet different - the way Vietnam, China have 50+ ethnic minorities who co-exist, allow them to speak languages, don't mass-arrest imjpoverish, etc - then everyone would not need to leave.

If the colonizer-mindset people in Hawaii leave and go to N America, that pushes the problem to Native Americans. If they go to Europe, at least you don't have re-settler colonialism.

When the French colonizers were defeated and kicked out of Vietnam, they were < 5% of the population, had clearly delineated 'us and them' lines, and so decolonization was more straightforward. Most French chose to leave Vietnam, because they were there to extract resources and labor from their 'coolies' and when they couldn't anymore, they went back to Europe.

At the same time, all people of French/white heritage were not required to leave Vietnam after the dismantling of colonial yt supremacist rule.

As an example, my Vietnamese friend Luna Oi has a white American husband in Vietnam, and he is not required to 'go back to America' because he's white. He simply has to follow the rules of Vietnam, its socialist anti-imperialist country, and co-exist peacefully, and it is fine. Vietnam is 98% indigenous.

Bolivia is ~60% identifying as indigenous, with a unique history, but they have had great successes with their indigenous-led socialist plurinational - meaning many language, many peoples, coexisting within one state - in the Western sense.

They do not require the 40% white/non-indigenous identifying people to leave Bolivia and go back to Spain, Europe, US, etc. but over time, they will need to learn to co-exist in actual equality with the indigenous.

The US is 98% identifying non-indigenous, with ~20-30% non-white identifying.

The US is the worlds' largest European settler colony by far with 330 million people, and the worlds' capitalist superpower that dwarfs and puppeteers its parent Europe itself.

The process of undoing colonization, and healing the broken people and ways (including indigenous and non-white people who have had our ways and languages severely harmed by colonization) will not look identifical to either Bolivia or Vietnam, and will be unprecedented in human history - but we can learn from each of these struggles.

Education, listening to the marginalized, indigenous etc. and implementing that education in concrete ways is certainly an important part of the process. Which is why the US is banning CRT, anything that makes white people 'uncomfortable' from schools. Because it would indeed be the undoing of the US over time.

Long story short - it will be a long story and there is no easy shortcut out of it, lol.

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