• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • BrokebackHampton@kbin.socialtoNews@lemmy.world•US expects to upgrade Vietnam ties, risks China anger
    11·
    10 months ago

    Nobody seems to have pointed out the obvious historical angle where China and Vietnam have been long-time enemies.

    The issue goes back to the Cold War era and the Sino-Soviet split and it’s kinda hard to synthesize in a few short paragraphs, you can read more on the wiki article about it, but these sections could be a good summary:

    Vietnam was an ideological battleground during the 1960s Sino-Soviet split. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping secretly promised the North Vietnamese 1 billion yuan in military and economic aid if they refused all Soviet aid.

    During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese and the Chinese had agreed to defer tackling their territorial issues until South Vietnam was defeated. Those issues included the lack of delineation of Vietnam’s territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin and the question of sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

    And also:

    In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Cambodian–Vietnamese War caused tensions with China, which had allied itself with Democratic Kampuchea. That and Vietnam’s close ties to the Soviet Union made China consider Vietnam to be a threat to its regional sphere of influence. Tensions were heightened in the 1970s by the Vietnamese government’s oppression of the Hoa minority (Vietnamese of Chinese ethnicity) and the invasion of Khmer Rouge-held Cambodia. At the same time, Vietnam expressed its disapproval with China strengthening ties with the United States since the Nixon-Mao Summit of 1972.

  • BrokebackHampton@kbin.socialtoNews@lemmy.world•South Korean dog meat farmers push back against growing moves to outlaw their industry
    333·
    11 months ago

    In order to better live with the fundamental contradiction of loving animals but also eating them, people put some animals in the “pet” box and some in the “meat source” one with a one way street between the two, in that animals that would be considered meat sources can become pets but never the other way around.

    I bet it subconsciously makes some people feel more compassionate towards animals. But it’s nothing more than a moral contradiction trying to be masked.

    It makes sense to feel some sense of apprehension or even disgust when the topic of eating dogs is brought up because it feels so geographically and culturally distant from us, but the truth is you can see this happen across the relatively small European continent. Dog meat used to be a thing in Switzerland, maybe not anymore. Nordics will be horrified to learn cute bunnies are a very culturally relevant meat source down south in the Mediterranean (traditional paella contains both rabbit and chicken meat), where they are also kept as pets. France loves their horse meat but in other places of Europe this is unheard of. And so on.

    Don’t get me wrong, I eat meat and have a couple of cats as housemates. You couldn’t pay me enough money to try cat meat. But I don’t pretend like it isn’t a fundamental contradiction, nor will you see me retching if I hear eating cats is a thing in some region/culture.

  • BrokebackHampton@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Loving this game: Against the Storm
    1·
    1 year ago

    City builder with no combat is right up my alley, so I thought Against the Storm was absolutely brilliant. A much needed fresh take on the genre.

    I’m also looking forward to Steamworld Build. I’ve loved the Anno series since I was a child and I love most of the games in the Steamworld series, so this combination is shaping up to make for an amazing game. I tried the demo a little bit and it looked so well designed and polished.

  • BrokebackHampton@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•A viral left-wing Twitter account may have been fake all along
    8·
    1 year ago

    It’s a topic that’s maybe a bit too dense and broad to reduce to a single short comment, but trying to simplify things a bit:

    • Leftism is quite a nebulous term, its boundaries are delimited differently depending on who you ask. IMO It could be characterized as opposition to the capitalist economic framework (stemming from the question “Can the system be reformed?”, only answers starting with a “No” would be considered leftist). One of the main indicators of something being leftism lies in its adherence to the marxist principle of the working class being the owner of the means of production (or more famously, “seizing the means of production”).
      This point in itself would mean democratic socialists (demsocs) are considered leftists but social democrats (socdems) are not. I’m sure lots of people will agree and a lot more won’t about that boundary for “leftism”.

    • The conflation of terms like liberal, leftist, communist… into one and the same is a topic deserving of its own dissertation that can only be explained as the resulting image from the warped looking glass that is the current American political landscape, concept that is often illustrated by talking about the shift of the Overton Window. These things in turn can be explained as the lasting echoes of McCarthyism and its Red Scare tactics that had a profound effect on American political discourse.

    • Liberalism (another term so broad it would be impossible to fully explain in a few sentences) in its modern conception, and especially as “liberalism” is understood outside of the US, would mean an adherence to market economy ideology and the belief in private property. That would include all the range of positions from “The system is fine just as it is” to “The system is inherently fine it just needs some minor touch-ups” and all of them would find themselves opposed to leftism, which following the analogy would be the position saying “The system IS the problem”.