72T Bulletins have really dropped in quality since I haven't seen a single mention of this important economic update.

China Railway, the nation's state railway operator, said on Saturday that it sold 22.88 million train tickets on Friday, setting a new record for single-day ticket sales, indicating a strong demand for travel.

Also holy shit 22.88 million train tickets in a day is an insane amount the international community needs to come together to ensure every chinese citizen has access to travelcards and abonnments so they don't have to buy a single tickets for trips.

There's also some other stuff in the article which non train nerds might find interesting I guess but who cares honestly.

Crisis and Bailout: The Tortuous Cycle Stalking Nations in Debt

The government of Ghana is essentially bankrupt, and has turned to the International Monetary Fund for its 17th financial rescue since 1957.

:imf-cool:

Honestly, I gotta hand it to elon mungus. Before I used to read the replies and try to dunk on people or annoy some dumbass or look at other profiles for funny posts. But now I just look at the linked post, and close the tab. 10 seconds max. It’s been great. I’m still wasting time, but at least it’s not soul sucking.

Pretty insane that Z-Boy is STILL wearing his damn green shirts now on day 567 or whatever.

Sweden has not gone far enough to secure its place in NATO and guarantee the ratification of its bid by Türkiye, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said ahead of a parliamentary vote on the matter.

Speaking to PBS News on Monday, Erdogan confirmed that Sweden’s membership in NATO would eventually be on the agenda of the Turkish Grand National Assembly after it reconvenes in October. However, when pressed on whether the vote would take place soon, the Turkish president remarked that “for that to be happening, of course, Sweden should keep its promises.”

Erdogan stressed, in reference to Kurdish groups that Ankara considers terrorists, that those organizations “should immediately stop their demonstrations on the streets of Stockholm, and they should stop their activities because seeing this actually happening is going to be very important for the Turkish people.”

The Turkish leader also acknowledged that while Sweden had seemingly amended its legislation to address the issue “it’s not enough.”

Libs continue to learn nothing. Also it was clearly stated this guy fought against the Russians during WWII. I swear to god these losers would fail an elementary school level listening comprehension test.

Trudeau accuses Indian government of involvement in killing of Canadian Sikh leader

(reminder on Modi and its tense relationship with non Hindus)

what did apple mean by this? 🤔

AMLO Rejects Proposal to Convert Ex-Presidents into Senators

Previously, Senator Rojas proposed amending the Mexican constitution to make outgoing presidents honorary legislators without voting rights.

On Wednesday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) rejected the proposal to turn former presidents into senators and affirmed that he will retire from political life at the end of his term in October 1, 2024.

"Don't involve me in that. I have already said it. I am a man of convictions and word. I have one year and 10 days left in office," he said.

On Tuesday, Senator Alejandro Rojas of the ruling party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), proposed amending Article 56 of the Mexican Constitution to make outgoing presidents honorary legislators without voting rights.

"I will hand over the presidential sash and retire. I will not accept any position inside or outside the country. I will not participate in any academic or political events. I will not comment on political matters again," AMLO asserted.

The right-wing opposition has accused Lopez Obrador of imposing Claudia Sheinbaum, the MORENA presidential candidate, in order to influence the next presidential term. However, AMLO has denied this and reaffirmed that he will not comment on public affairs.

"The generational change is coming. I'm happy because it will allow continuity with change," President Lopez Obrador said.

"I won't maintain communication on social media. I will deactivate my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I won't receive anyone who approaches me with anything related to politics," AMLO added, explaining that he will dedicate his time to writing a book about Mexican conservative thought, which he hopes to publish in about three or four years.

https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/1706077564249477280

A member of Zelensky’s security detail got inebriated in a NY bar, and demanded that Americans shout “glory to Ukraine” when they didn’t comply they acted in typical fashion and started a fight inside the establishment.

Lol lmao

Trudeau says Modi goverment is responsible for the assasination of a Sikh leader in canadian soil vs

UK public support for ‘big government’ hits record high

Some 68 per cent of taxpayers thought government should definitely “be responsible for keeping prices under control”, the annual British Social Attitudes survey found, up from 29 per cent when the question was last asked in 2016 and the highest since records began in 1985.

The large study — conducted between September 7 and October 30 last year, during which time Liz Truss was UK prime minister — found that a record 53 per cent of people thought the government should also definitely “be responsible for reducing income differences between the rich and poor”.

Sir John Curtice, senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, which runs the poll, said: “Both Conservative and Labour voters have changed their minds about the role of government and about taxation and spending over the years.”

smdh my dick head, the virus of authoritarianism has come to the UK, whose citizens now desire the brutal tankie policy of "wanting the government to do literally anything to improve their lives". damn you, Putler!

Sarah Ashton-Cirillo got fired for that creepy video 🥳

Now if only that Nazi fuck would get fired from life.

I've been trying to find decent histories and analysis of Singapore as part of the COTW and it's been extra challenging this time, and until a few hours ago today, I didn't know why. So I plunged into the first book I could find that seemed tolerable, which was Singapore: A Modern History by Michael Barr, published in 2020. He seems pretty lib to me, but has a ton of other work on Singapore. I got through Chapter 1 and I can't say I'm a big fan of how the book is structured and what it focusses on (Chapter 2 is literally called "The Idea of Singapore", going into what the elites think about Singapore - I want more nitty gritty stuff on the actual people, which the article posted by @thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net very helpfully provides) and it doesn't really go in chronological order either, so I don't plan on finishing it.

But now I understand a little better about the situation, so here are my notes I made while reading the first chapter, which is called "Let’s Talk About 1819: Reorienting the National Narrative":

It’s a country, and a city, consisting of less than 6 million on an island of about 700 square kilometers. It is a city-state in an age of nation-states, which is quite odd. There are few like it in the world nowadays - Vatican City and Monaco, for example (though one could argue that Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Hong Kong are quasi-citystates). In a world where capitalism has very almost won, it’s interesting that you don’t see more city-states. Smallness, as Foreign Affairs writers like Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory Treverton have said, brings strengths, and largeness can have its weaknesses.

Singapore wins many Best Countries At X awards, such as “ease of doing business”, and “one of the best healthcare systems”. It even gives out its own awards, like the Global City Prize, awarded by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. It also happens to be one of - if not the - most expensive places in the world to live. The city government attempts to redistribute enough social goods to its ordinary citizenry to benefit - the author points out that few cities do anything similar.

‘The Singapore Story’ is a nationalist narrative, or perhaps mythology, invented by the country’s political leaders in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the template of how the history of the island is taught in schools, colleges, and universities in Singapore, ever since the National Education programme was introduced in 1997. It has been described as “a triumphal narrative of deliverance from political, economic, and social despair … through the ruling regime’s scientific approaches to solving the problems faced by a developing and industrialising society,” and even a “biblical narrative of deliverance,” in which the demons are communal discord (from Malay ‘ultras’ and Chinese ‘chauvinists’); the pull of loyalties to other nearby countries, and those countries’ overbearingness; communism, in the form of students and unionists; and poverty. Recently, Western decadence/liberalism, and religious extremists have found themselves on the list of demons too. The angels are, in contrast, Sir Stamford Raffles and Lee Kuan Yew, who singlehandedly elevated an island from the Third World to the First.

The mother of Singaporean history is Mary Turnbull, who, in her book, began Singapore’s history on the 30th of January 1819, when the local chieftain, the Temenggong of Johor, signed a treaty with Raffles, agent of the East India Company, allowing them to set up a trading post. Let there be light! Her 1977 book was so well-researched, digging through so much archival material, that her book is still a fundamental text for historians of the region. It was consciously national, separated from the histories of the countries around Singapore (’if it’s across the water, it’s not our history!’) and also from the pre-colonial past. That being said, she began writing it when the government was actively discouraging the teaching of history, instead wanting to focus on the future. A few years after publication, in 1980, wouldn’t you know it, the government thought, gee, perhaps history is important after all, and her book became the foundation of history education to this day. The reason why it survives to this day is precisely because it is teleological, and thus allows the ruling elite to have a national myth that reinforces their current positions.

It was a career-killing exercise for a Singaporean scholar to question that orthodoxy, and even recently, scholars that do try to disrupt this view of history - is it actually true that literally everybody who opposed the government was a godless commie? - are known as “revisionists” or “Alternates”. As such, critiques of The Singapore Story tended to come from abroad, such as from the French scholar Philippe Regnier, American scholar Carl Trocki, and Australian scholar James Warren, among others - and not all of them even “historians of Singapore”, with others like Peter Borschberg and John Miksic being Southeast Asian archaeologists, who brought up evidence that, what do you know, the Singaporean universe did not begin in 1819, which is something that was ignored until the 1990s. In addition to these figures, certain events in The Singapore Story - like the 1963 sweep of over 100 alleged communists in Operation Coldstore, and the 1987 sweep of 22 alleged Marxist conspirators in Operation Spectrum - were challenged by some scholars and victims of the repression.

By the mid-2000s, there was general acknowledgement of and even classes in pre-1819 Singaporean history. In 2014, the Singaporean history textbooks were updated to go back all the way to the 1300s. The government got the last laugh, however, by stating that the birth of the Singaporean nation-state was in the 1300s - the national myth must continue one way or another. The Singapore Story remains dominant in pedagogy, publishing, and global consciousness, despite all the “revisionist” history and evidence arrayed against it. It is a war of power and politics that merely appears to be two old bow-tied historians arguing about Singaporean history.

The author, as stated before, is a self-described revisionist, rejecting the idea that Singapore can be isolated and examined separately from the region it inhabits, at least until it gained independence in 1965. Singapore was formed by geographical factors as much as, if not more so, than the people who led it and the capitalists who invested in it. It benefited from regional partnerships which made its achievements possible. The author rejects the notion that 1819 was the all-important pivot point and explicitly structures the book to show that it need not be regarded as such.

Rip Nagorno-Karabakh

https://farside.link/nitter/ZelenskyyUa/status/1704196657313657123

https://archive.is/qyNuI

Zelensky is calling out NATO member Poland for fake solidarity that helps a "Moscow actor"

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-will-sue-poland-hungary-and-slovakia-over-agricultural-bans/

Poland has sent over 4.27 billion euros to Ukraine btw: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine/

Cuban and Brazilian Presidents to Sign Several Agreements.

The Brazilian president highlighted that “Brazil is against any unilateral coercive measure, and we also reject the inclusion of Cuba on the list of States sponsoring terrorism.”

The Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, met today with his Brazilian counterpart, Luis Inacio Lula Da Silva, and signed three bilateral instruments in the spheres of science, technology and innovation, health and agriculture.

Both presidents held official talks in Havana, in the framework of the G77 + China summit. Diaz Canel described the meeting as warm and fruitful.

Lula said in the speech he delivered that the global governance continues to be asymmetrical. He added “The UN, the Bretton Woods system and the WTO are losing credibility. We cannot divide

For Lula da Silva, the "digital revolution" and the "energy transition" are "two great transformations in progress" that "cannot be modeled by a handful of rich economies, re-editing the relationship of dependency between the center and the periphery."

Lula Da Silva rejected once again in his speech the blockade that the United States has imposed on Cuba for more than six decades, country he considers a defender of fairer global governance.

The Brazilian president highlighted that “Brazil is against any unilateral coercive measure, and we also reject the inclusion of Cuba on the list of States sponsoring terrorism.”

Freedom and personal liberty seem like vague nothing words that get thrown out by liberals. I see a lot of being allowed the freedom to buy a deathtrap vehicle and the personal liberty to look at weird things on the internet but thats about it. But what are some concrete freedoms that a Chinese person isn't allowed to do vs an American? Are there some personal liberties that you think AES countries, past or present, have restricted that went too far in your opinion? Was that thing about East Germany not letting people listen to rock music true? Are you allowed to make fun of Xi on Chinese internet?

Azerbaijani Armed Forces began to fire in the direction of Armenian positions in the direction of Gegharkunik region of Armenia.

Armenia's MOD confirmed the news that Azerbaijan began to fire on September 20, at about 22:50 using small arms.

From: https://nitter.net/301arm/status/1704582451081986067#m

Meanwhile the massive protests in Yerevan continue. Also rumours a Russian peacekeeping vehicle was destroyed with Russian causalities by the Azerbaijanis, but not comment from the Russian MOD.

"Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been wounded or killed in less than two years, can we make peace and try and rebuild what little we have left?"

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivers anti-Russian tirade at the United Nations

Scholz condemned those who call for an “immediate ceasefire” in the Ukraine war. Rather, the German chancellor cynically declared, “Peace without freedom is oppression. Peace without justice is a diktat.”

The Headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been hit like how many times so far?

there appears to be some movement on Wikipedia to change the name of the article from Uyghur genocide to some better ( but still not great) names the articles gonna be pretty bad either way but if there’s anyone who knows how to engage in Wikipedia bs here you go.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement that Russia was "deeply alarmed by the sharp escalation." Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia will not defend Armenia from the Azerbaijani offensive, while strongly criticizing Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan. This comes despite Russia and Armenia both being members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization mutual defense pact and Russia stationing several thousand soldiers in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh as peacekeepers.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Turkish diplomats about the crisis. Meanwhile, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations called on the U.S. and the international community to act to stop Azerbaijan while Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA32) stated that the renewed fighting makes clear that "Azerbaijan cannot receive U.S. military aid until it ends the crisis it has created.

Iran considers Nagorno-Karabakh part of Azerbaijan, but calls for solving the problems of the region through dialogue, said the official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic, Nasser Kanani Chafi.

The representative of the Iranian Foreign Ministry also emphasized his country’s readiness to hold a meeting in the “three plus three” format to resolve the Karabakh problem.

The UN Security Council meeting on the situation in Karabakh is scheduled for September 21