dr-patriot

[dr-patriot]

A quote from Chapter 4 of "The Making of Ireland" by James Lydon, referring to the 1175 treaty of Windsor: "Finally, the high king [of Ireland] was to make sure that those Irish who had fled before English advances should return 'to the lands of the King of England's barons'. The invasion may have caused a refugee problem, but there was no intention of clearing out the Irish population from conquered land. Rather it was intended that there would be a strong indigenous element, and with it a pronounced Irish culture, in any feudal settlement."

It was only in the past 3 years or so that I found out that the first couple hundred years of British occupation were so tame in comparison to what came later, with the plantations starting in the 1500s.

[dr-patriot]

[dr-patriot]

"Rationalism" is up there with "Objectivism" in terms of "definitionally funny things to call your own belief system".

[dr-patriot]

[dr-patriot]

Madness Is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948-1980 by Michael E. Staub / Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing" by Roderic Day

[dr-patriot]

ninja swords

[dr-patriot]

bravely coming out as someone who doesn't think orange cat jokes are funny

[dr-patriot]

[dr-patriot]

5 minutes into the fabric store: wow the world has so much to offer and so many possible wonderful things to make

10 minutes into the fabric store: everything around me will continue to pollute the earth long after humans are gone and this ring of plastic minion beads will see the new pangea

[dr-patriot]

reading this & thinking back to when german green party politician claudia roth was seen clapping for no other land & said she was "only clapping for the israeli". the brightly red-green glowing line between state-mandated racism here & state-mandated racism there

[dr-patriot]

Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual

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[dr-patriot]

Weird and wonderful compilation of strange bird noises.

[dr-patriot]

I don't think you can maintain a militarist culture that vaunts bombing poor foreigners as the height of civic valour and strength and then be surprised that your adolescents find meaning in gym-addled misogynists and their hellish visions of domination and aggression. The dreams of Liberalism spawn monsters.

[dr-patriot]

For those who see history as a competition, Latin America’s backwardness and poverty are merely the result of its failure. We lost; others won. But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing: the history of Latin America’s underdevelopment is, as someone has said, an integral part of the history of world capitalism’s development. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others- the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. 

Open Veins of Latin America | Eduardo Galeano (1971) 

[dr-patriot]

bird flu is 100% the US's fault, US and UK and Sweden and such all bear a lot of responsibility for how covid is playing out obviously but the bird flu is straight up the US refusing to sacrifice short term agricultural profit & concealing & ignoring information about a pathogen that is already killing humans. btw no you can't get out of this one by avoiding eggs (US poultry are so genetically similar, unhealthy, & overcrowded that hens basically always die before they have a chance to lay anyway) — every time a virus spreads it has the opportunity to mutate. you can't protect only yourself! this is what's meant by Public Health. without culling, a flock of five million chickens in US agricultural conditions (yes, including labelled 'cage free') goes down in a matter of days with an almost 100% mortality rate, & this scenario represents five million more chances for the virus to evolve. there are over 520 million chickens in the US and approximately 166 million chickens are known to have been affected by outbreaks since 2022. H5N1 is now so rampant that wild birds can transmit it to farm flocks by flying overhead while shitting. a pandemic requires a complex sequence of numerous extremely unlikely events to all occur & it is not a given! but it can become one if US farm policy & ableism keep rolling these dice.

[dr-patriot]

So basically:

The Paracel Islands are mostly in China's EEZ, a few in Vietnam's

The Spratly Islands are mostly in the Philippine EEZ, a few in international waters

Vietnam claims all of the Paracel Islands. China claims all of the Paracel Islands. The Philippines claims all of the Spratly Islands. China claims all of the Spratly Islands.

All of these claims would extend the relevant nations' EEZs by a huge area.

No one lives on any of these islands. In fact most of them are technically reefs or rocks and not islands

There is no outright military conflict over these islands; the relevant nations are just shooting each other with water cannons and ramming into each others boats and shit.

China is building military bases on some of these islands, to launch spy planes from and whatnot. The Philippines have a small military outpost on one island because they are poor and can't afford a whole base. Idk what Vietnam is doing.

All the relevant nations want control of natural resources in the South China Sea and also control of shipping routes. Especially China and Vietnam are export oriented so they both want to ensure their shipping routes are protected in any conflict scenario. Idk about the Philippines.

This conflict objectively does not matter. I mean it matters if you're the leader of China or Vietnam or whatever because you want to secure your own geopolitical interests but it doesn't matter if you're anyone else. It's not like a threat to global whatever. I don't care very much who controls the South China Sea.