These complete goobers are probably using it for visual symmetry with swastikas, but the symbol itself is a shield knot, which is like, a super common and basic knot that's been around for ages. It's a ward knot, and was often used to decorate, you guessed it, shields.

Unfortunately (and this is true outside of Ireland as well), a lot of fascists love Celtic knotwork (almost as much as they love Norse motifs).

This isn't "caving" to America, Canada is built on militarized repression of motility. This is a win for them, because they get to do something they already want (more cops to target migrants and Indigenous people under the guise of "security") and now they even get to say that this thing they already wanted is absolutely definitely worth the money and really quite a "cheap" tradeoff to stop big bad America's unreasonable tariffs.

Increased border security and larger military/police budgets is just standard operating procedure.

Malaysia doesn't recognize the state of Israel, and acknowledges its existence as occupation as national policy. They have a Palestinian embassy with diplomatic relations with Hamas. There's a Malaysia Street in Gaza.

I had never read that website (before today when I was curious why it would need this warning) but "Unfortunately I have yet to find a complete list of those EOs." Lol, it's literally on the white house's website, which he links to in the very next paragraph. Does he read??

Also he's very glad that a bunch of white supremacist militia guys and their useful idiots got pardoned. What a chud.

Ali Kadri - Imperialism with Reference to Syria ; Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment ; The Unmaking of Arab Socialism ; The Cordon Sanitaire: A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World ; Development Challenges and Solutions After the Arab Spring

Abdullah Hamidaddin - The Huthi Movement in Yemen: Ideology, Ambition, and Security in the Arab Gulf (this one is pretty pro-West/anti-Ansarallah, but if you can read past the bias there's a lot of really good context for the situation in Yemen)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb - Hiz'bullah: Politics and Religion

Harriet Allsopp, Wladimir van Wilgenburg - The Kurds of Northern Syria: Governance, Diversity, and Conflicts

Ilan Pappé - The Modern Middle East

Karim Makdisi, Vijay Prashad - The Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations and the Arab World

Linda Matar, Ali Kadri - Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War

Mahmood Mamdani - Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (a little more historical, but that always depends on how far back in context you're hoping to look)

Matthieu Cimino - Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State

Naomí Ramírez Díaz - The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria: The Democratic Option of Islamism

Rashid Khalidi - Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East ; Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East ; The Origins of Arab Nationalism

Andre Vitchek - Socialist Iran: Powerful and Determined!

Thomas Schmidinger - Rojava: Revolution, War, and the Future of Syria's Kurds

Sorry I don't really have more, most of my library in the area focuses on Palestine.

Boy do I have some news for you: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/ai-may-be-coming-for-standardized-testing/2024/03

"This could be a step towards figuring out how AI can help educators achieve a long-elusive goal: Creating a new breed of assessments that actually helps inform teaching and learning in real time, he said."

That's fair, but an important thing to remember in regards to China: Patnaik (2020) notes that 64% of the number of persons lifted above the international poverty line since 1990 was entirely on account of China. Whatever economic complaints that people on the Internet have, China has made moves to alleviate the immiseration of a billion people in the face of an over-reaching hyperviolent global hegemony.

As far as hope, I always take to heart Mariame Kaba's assertion that "hope is a discipline."

" I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad . . . hope is a discipline and. . . we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. . . I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that. And I don’t also take a short-time view, I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that, that I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of. So, that also puts me in the right frame of mind, that my little friggin’ thing I’m doing, is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but [if] it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that."

Cuba suspended the deal back in 2022 because they couldn't produce enough sugar and became a sugar importer instead, their sugar industry is in collapse. But yes, please tell me in more snarky and doomerist ways why China is a big bad bully for not continuing to buy sugar that doesn't exist

I think we're talking past each other here because the article that spawned this thread is saying the cause is specifically to punish Cuba for walking back privatization, which is spin on the situation published by Atlantic Council goons. The thing I have asserted is that if you were to look at the parent comment and the linked article, and take it at face value, you are uncritically accepting US narratives.

At no point have I denied that this deal was cancelled, nor that trade deals are implemented, maintained, or cancelled, all entirely on the basis of profitability. That isn't what this thread is about though. It's about whether or not China is "punishing" Cuba.

It's just a contract being cancelled, that could have any number of reasons behind it (and the most likely reason is profitability, which is problematic in its own right but not at all what this thread is complaining about). But to accept that it is being cancelled as a punishment to fail to privatize is pure conjecture unless you have inside information you'd care to share.

I really recommend The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne, it presents a very compelling bit of research into the pressure of burgeoning abolition on the 1776 "revolution." Abolition in totality may have been "a long ways off," but Britain had already started major court proceedings that paved the way, as well as begun arming African regiments in the military to combat France and Spain, which was a source of major unrest amongst the slave-owning American colonists. It's worth noting that the "Stamp Act" and other such "taxation" acts that American foundation myth loves to talk about, was in no small part an effort to curb the quickly-growing privatized slave industry and the tax on slaves was one of the largest component of these tax reforms.

Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff is not an explicitly anti-imperialist perspective, but the book details the process by which privatization and American regulation strangled its potential in service of corporate profit. (including the privatization of those vital parts of internet infrastructure that were previously owned by the DoD)