SLAVOJ ZIZEK—Another weird phenomenon that we can observe is the triumphant return of capitalist animism, of treating social phenomena like markets or financial capital as living entities. If one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we should really worry about are not thousands who already died (and thousands more who will die) but the fact that “markets are getting nervous.” The coronavirus is increasingly disturbing the smooth running of the world market and, as we hear, growth may fall by two or three percent.
CHINESE WAY OF LIFE
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An essential element to explain the successes of China is its agricultural policy. China is one of the few countries in the world that has guaranteed access to agricultural land for its farming population. After the revolution, agricultural land came into government hands and every farmer was allocated a piece of land. That measure applies to this day. The agricultural issue in China is so pressing because the country has to feed almost 20 percent of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the fertile agricultural land. To give an idea of what this means: in China there is a quarter of a hectare of agricultural land per inhabitant, in India double that area and in the US 100 times as much.
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Oops for Google Apps? Huawei seeks an alliance with other Chinese firms to push US giant out of Asia
20 minutes readSeems like Google, a corporate giant that has eagerly collaborated with the US government in fighting “fake news” (read: silence dissident anti-imperialist news), and was happy to apply Trump’s trade sanctions on China is now reaping the whirlwind, as it richly deserves.
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JEFF J. BROWN—When a pendulum is far to one side, it tends not toward middle ground but toward its extreme opposite. Counter-culture tragically replaced by full-on tweet-culture, the room pulsed with interruptions, nano-scaled attention spans, and sophomoric appeals for repetitions, rephrasings – even debate! – of Guy’s well substantiated points. Breathtaking. Like visiting a glacier that isn’t there anymore. Humans have never, ever been more in need of acute neocortical functioning. I fear it is no coincidence that our controlled and censored western culture precludes it.
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Xi Jinping’s tough warning on Western subversion in Hong Kong-Xinjiang-Taiwan is a direct cue from citizens’ NBA outrage
20 minutes readJEFF J. BROWN—In a recent article I came down really hard on Messrs. Morey and Silver, because like them, I too used to be a “liberal, do-gooder racist”, who thought I had all the best Western answers for the rest of the world’s inferior peoples.