CHINA

GODFREE ROBERTS—Social discontent – rooted in workers’ material lives – was real. Workers’ productivity had increased by 250% since 1957 and the cost of living had increased by 10% but their incomes were 5% lower. Their protests about wages, benefits and work conditions expressed a yearning for human dignity and democratic control over socioeconomic life. One temporary worker recalled, “We were simply inferior. In the factory, if people didn’t know your name, they would just call you linshi gong [temporary worker], which sounded contemptuous. Therefore the word linshi gong was a taboo among us. We would rather call one another lin xiong or ‘temporary brothers’”.

WEI LING CHUA—Recently, a number of street interviews were conducted in Taiwan province asking young Taiwanese “Do you know the relationship between the Republic of China and Taiwan?”, the reply shocked the interviewer as the majority of the youth in Taiwan didn’t even know their political entity’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC), and that the ROC’s constitution regards the mainland of China and Taiwan being parts of the ROC sovereign territory.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It’s a mistake not only because assuming that the center position must be the best one is a type of fallacious reasoning known as the middle ground fallacy (the correct position between “Drink a gallon of bleach daily for good health” and “Drink zero bleach daily for good health” is not “Drink half a gallon of bleach daily for good health”); it’s also a mistake because the entire framing arises from a situation that has been artificially engineered by the powerful.

ERIC ZUESSE—On 20 June 2023, the anonymous author of the Moon of Alabama blog, who has long been chronicling the death-throes of the neoconservative dream that has been ruling in America, finally announced the end of that dream, and I here shall take the liberty to post below his historic article, which not only announces, at long last, its end, but which quotes the evidence that it now is only past history and no longer will be leading America to go off the cliff into WW III, nuclear Armageddon.

JEFF J. BROWN—I think they were trying a lot of different ways for civil defense, and I think they were using COVID as a way to prepare for the coming war with NATO. And I think that they know that and even the US is so arrogant. They’ve even alluded to it that they are developing gene marker bioweapons for Han Chinese people, Slavic, Russian people, et cetera. And they’ll use Taiwan, I think just to attack China and just like they’re using Ukraine to attack Russia. And I think though they know that this time it’s going to be a really serious biological weapon that has Chinese gene markers.