I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.

Qatar, and by extension of cash money also Al Jazeera, is very anti-Iran.

I’m not seeing any news of this at all in Iranian media, which actually is fairly tabloid and weight lifting is a big thing in Iran. Even if you want to tell yourself the regime has absolute control over information, which isn’t true, they’d still need to provide a cover story due to the high profile nature of it and I don’t see one.

Also Iranian social media is vibrant and also I don’t see anything in Persian but maybe I’m using the wrong search terms?

All I see are the bbc and the telegraph and cnn etc etc etc repeating almost exactly the same story word for word.

It seems like fake news to me. The classic case of one biased journalist writing a story, sending it to AP, and the entire western media just repeating the thing word for word because it’s free news inches and posting propaganda of this nature is oddly enough free in our modern system of journalism.

It seems unlikely to actually be true to me. It seems more likely that it’s being syndicated without any critical enquiry because it agrees with the establishment narrative about Iran.

Beijing has not said why it has chosen to ramp up its efforts now, and experts have questioned whether cracking down on corruption will address systemic issues fueling the problem.

But the campaign comes amid growing public concern over China’s economic slowdown and rising unemployment and the government is under pressure to respond to public grievances and stimulate growth.

Targeting graft in the sector has the potential to bring down health care costs, as well as divert public attention from other problems and redirect blame for issues plaguing the sector. It can also enable debt-strapped local governments to gather sorely needed funds as they emerge from three years of costly Covid-19 controls.

So fucking Parenti quote it’s not even funny

Those 1-2% “don’t know” responses kind of fuck with me. Imagine being Russian and responding with “who the fuck is Stalin?”

There’s a complex split in views which you can view as a spectrum from

1. Independence now or soon
2. Maintain the status quo with the distant objective of independence
3. Maintain the status quo with the distant objective of reunification
4. Reunification now

2 & 3 are basically the same in practical terms - kick the can down the road and let the situation develop peacefully, trade with China and develop relations while maintaining full de facto autonomy for now.

2 & 3 are overwhelmingly the most popular stances with roughly equal splits over the long term, the plurality position see-saws between them over the decades.

1 & 4 are not popular, to the point of being fringe with single digit support in most polls.

There has been a surge for (1) over the past maybe five years, but this has declined rapidly over the recent election cycles and this picture was complicated by the fact the politicians who align with (1) were also riding a wave of disgust with corruption by the KMT which is basically (2) and (3), so plenty of (2) started voting for (1) out of dislike for KMT corruption. But this wave seems to be rapidly receding, ironically enough because (1) was beating the drums of war with China in politically opportunistic fearmongering that it scared plenty of (1)’s back into the status quo (2) camp, largely benefiting the KMT. It also didn’t help that (1)’s had a major corruption scandal of their own.

Really the main driver of local politics is corruption rather than independence. Independentists will beat the drum of war to create a sense of crisis and nationalism, seeking to wedge (2) away from (3) but this tends to happen most when (1) is doing badly politically or when a major US weapons deal is being made (that’s not a joke.)

(4) usually sees 5-10%.

The idea that Taiwanese are itching to declare independence right now is not well supported by polling over time. By far the most popular position has been some form of maintaining the status quo, with a split between the long term goal of unifying and the long term goal of formalizing independence.

The current situation makes Taiwan a kind of giant Hong Kong colonial possession of the USA as a military base just off the coast of China. A sustainable peace for Taiwan would require ejecting the US military presence because that’s an untenable threat to China.

I think the mainland Chinese would be happy with a one-country two-systems arrangement that sees Taiwanese autonomy enshrined constitutionally while giving control of the island for purposes of defense and foreign policy to China. That seems the best practical outcome to me.

Ukraine should perform under the flag of Bandera

What do you think would happen if, hypothetically speaking, a nearby state such as, let’s say, Cuba started hosting the military assets of a hostile power?

What about even a distant nation such as oh I don’t know maybe Iran or one of the koreas started making weapons the US felt threatened by?

Just thinking aloud here I don’t know.

The China thread is full of leftists sharing links and lemmy.ee folk replying with “tankie says what”.

It’s been fun but can we go home now?

Zelenskyy fires them for taking bribes and not for grabbing people on the street and throwing them in vans.

You’re right of course but it’s a significant degree of coercion away from the way Ukrainian recruiters were grabbing people on the street and throwing them in vans.

This has to be a bit