Well it has to do with the physiological afflictions that affect the skeletal structure of a comprador's body. Per the Cleveland Clinic:

Kyphosis, an excessive forward curve of your spine, is a treatable condition that usually doesn't affect a person's day-to-day activities unless the curve is severe. An early diagnosis and treatment can address this condition before it gets worse.

In seriousness, the current South Korean leadership won its current position from a 0.73% margin in a 2022 election, largely through inflaming the South Korean societal gender antagonism, where they stood on the side of misogyny. Being carried into the Seoul presidency by incels, Yoon then proceeded to spend the majority of his time on foreign affairs, because the internal contradictions of South Korean society are simply insurmountable for President Incel to solve, whereupon he capitulated on all the historical grievances that previously prevented a South Korean junior partnership to Japan, like abandoning comfort women victims and allowing Japanese military stationing in South Korea. The point is to create a fait accompli of irreversible South Korea-Japan ties to bind South Korean foreign policy to the US in the New Cold War that any successor in Seoul would be unable to undo and therefore forced to abide to. Given that it was reported just today that his approval rating is at 20% and the same survey reported that "66 percent said South Korea should only provide nonlethal military assistance, such as medicine and food, to Ukraine," I'd imagine he's leaning all-in on foreign policy compradorism, by flouting the charade of South Korean "democracy," as a means of carving out some semblance of a personal political legacy.

To be honest, this has parallels to the original Cold War. Helmut Kohl of the 1980s in the BRD was exactly this sort of bumblng blowhard. A wannabe Reagan and Thatcher two-for-one in Bonn, yet powerless to do anything for resolving BRD domestic conditions. He turned his attention then to foreign policy, aligning the BRD as a vassal to Reaganite geopolitical interests and tanking Ostpolitik with the DDR, similarly to how the current Seoul regime has destroyed the detente with the DPRK created by the Moon administration. Ineffective - until Gorbachev came along and sold out the DDR so that Kohl got to claim the "honor" of becoming the first chancellor of a "unified" Germany. In that instance, in terms of the narcissistic politician's desire to secure a historical legacy, being a comprador to US geopolitical interests "paid off," as repulsive as it is to admit.

In a larger sense, you could say that everything which the current historically unremarkable generation of leadership in both the West and its vassals like South Korea are doing resolves around clinging to the same hope, which in a macroscopic way helps to explain moves like this. They think they are on the winning team and therefore the only important thing to do is securing their number on this team. It's akin to the doctrine of "proleptic eschatology" in Christian theology, where everything being done in the present is rationalized for the anticipation of the "second coming." In this case, the "second coming" is that of a new Gorbachev figure who will deliver the West the victory to this New Cold War. The lesson they think they've learned from the original Cold War is that material conditions are fundamentally secondary in principle and irrelevant in practice: they don't need to concede anything or "waste their time" resolving immense domestic contradictions or compromise with "the adversary" because a Gorbachev will inevitably come along to hand them the keys to the entire house once again and elevate their names into the history books like what happened to their predecessors.

Beyond the power struggles within the CPSU that allowed Khruschev to consolidate his position, the main reason why he was “allowed” to get away with de-Stalinization is because of his abuse of trust. It’s the same thing with Gorbachev later, really, but especially so during Khruschev’s time. Both Soviet citizens and leftists around the world trusted the USSR in the 1950s. They recognized the heroic struggle and undeniable contribution of the USSR and its people in the war against fascism. They saw the blatant persecution and censorship against the left in the Western world following the ousting of Wallace in the 1944 Democratic convention and Truman’s coup as FDR’s successor. They trusted the CPSU to do the right thing.

There were, in essence, two camps in the left before the 20th CPSU Congress: those that had grievances with Stalin and initially saw some criticism of Stalin as not necessarily unwelcome until they later realized over time how far Khrushchev took it and the fallout; those that deeply admired Stalin and thus transitively trusted the CPSU which he led and built, meaning that when the CPSU under Khrushchev turned against Stalin himself, the latter group was completely paralyzed and didn’t know how to respond.

Many leading parties in the Comintern belonged to the first camp. Stalin completely alienated the Yugoslavs through his overreaction to Tito’s attempt at market socialism. The Communist Parties that fell into the Western NATO sphere of influence felt betrayed, especially Italy’s CPI and Greece’s KKE, over his abandonment of them through Stalin’s fears of provoking a WWIII. Stalin may have been right and the USSR deserved peace, but being right had its consequences as well for the Italians who he advised to hand over their arms to the soon-to-be NATO regime and his feuding with Tito which allowed the reactionaries to defeat the KKE in the Greek Civil War. Churchill claimed that he settled the division of Europe and the surrender of Greece with Stalin through a simple five minute chat and officiated with a napkin agreement.

The CPC themselves initially did not denounce Khrushchev because Stalin deeply let down the party through his advice in the 1920s of demanding the CPC to subordinate themselves to the KMT, which led to the 1927 massacre and purge by the fascist Chiang once he took over the KMT. Stalin also deeply distrusted the CPC following 1949 and thought they were a nationalist force and a “fake revolution,” a denial of socialist comradery which was deeply insulting to all the CPC’s heroic first generation like Mao, Zhou Enlai and Deng that fought off the Japanese and liberated China from the KMT. To his credit, Stalin was a man of principled integrity and when he was proven wrong after seeing the Chinese People’s Volunteers rescue the DPRK, he completely corrected course and apparently never again disagreed with Mao on the handling of the Korean War again, even to the point of always siding with Mao against Kim Il-Sung.

Also importantly, like Caligula in the Julian-Claudian dynasty of imperial Rome, Khruschev’s early years were seen as a “honeymoon” period. The SED in the DDR also chafed under Stalin because while they understood and agreed with the necessity and righteousness of German reparations to the USSR, the fracture of Germany meant that the DDR was forced to foot the entire reparations bill. The USSR absolutely deserved reparations but this forced the DDR into a catastrophic lose-lose “catch-22.” As the least developed region of the old Germany and only half the size of the BRD, the DDR was already in an imbalance with the Wessis. With the US sponsoring the Marshall Plan (which contemporaries largely only saw for its "benevolent" face value and failed to see as the self-serving financial imperialism it really was), the reparations to the USSR meant that the DDR-BRD economic dichotomy went from the DDR stagnating-BRD improving to DDR worsening-BRD improving. This later led to the material disparity and population flight that then forced the SED to construct the Berlin Wall. Khruschev annulled the reparations and this was widely appreciated in the DDR. With the CPC, he further extended Soviet aid to China meaning that his early years were the height of the Sino-Soviet alliance and this furthered the CPC’s hesitation at instantly denouncing Khrushchev.

This was the camp in the left that initially tolerated the criticism of Stalin. The other camp, those that trusted Stalin and the CPSU, were for the most part too completely stunned, when the latter turned on the former, to denounce Khrushchev. At "best," this led to simply rejection of Stalin and a swerve towards following Khrushchev. At worst, this led to complete disillusionment with the entire socialist cause. How this occurred is best exemplied from the story of Eva Kaufmann, a SED party member, and her reaction to the 20th Congress as a youth in the FDJ, the Communist youth organization in the DDR.

"People who thought like me had no doubts that the new order was a good thing, so when I heard from a friend who wrote to me from West Germany that there were camps in the Soviet Union and people were being murdered, I said to myself, “That’s propaganda, it’s simply lies.” Then when the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU revealed the atrocities, it was a terrible shock, even through the reports about the terrible number of victims were not very clear. We were allowed to listen to Khruschev’s secret speech which was read out to us and it was clear to me that what was now being revealed would mean a very deep crisis for the whole communist movement for the socialist countries."

The Twentieth Congress abused the trust of people in the institution of the CPSU to then destroy their trust in Stalin. As a consequence, they felt betrayed not only by Stalin but also the CPSU which had “hidden” his actions prior to the revelations. This had immense consequences through its inescapable logical conclusion: if even Stalin, who led the USSR to become the principal force that defeated fascism and liberated Eastern Europe, did all these things, then all future socialist leaders could also have the potential to turn out to be “criminals.” No one could trust the motives of any socialist leadership if they accepted the narrative of the 20th Congress that Khruschev put out, since Stalin “got away with it” during his own time and it was only through the voluntary disclosure of his successor that allowed “the truth to come to light.” This led to a damnation of any socialist leadership that was unfalsifiable and the sustained rise of the chauvinistic and smug Euro-“Communism."

As Kaufmann’s story also showed, Khruschev’s betrayal also legitimized anticommunist Western propaganda. Leftists were used to the propaganda barrage against the socialist cause and against the USSR and had generally learned to dismiss it. Because the most openly anticommunist regime was the fascist reich, the revelation of its own atrocities after WWII thus transitively debunked all anticommunist and anti-USSR narratives as propaganda in the eyes of most leftists. As Kaufmann shows, this allowed a cognitive dismissal of all subsequent anticommunist propaganda as the Cold War began. For the CPSU to reveal that not only did Stalin do wrong things but criminal things beyond even what Western propaganda alleged then legitimized anticommunist sources of information from the West. This led to blowback against the USSR and led to the schism between Khruschev himself and Western leftism after the 1956 intervention in Hungary because Western leftists felt compelled to question Khruschev’s rationale and bought the shrill Western narratives that the Hungarian reactionaries were mere “reformers.”

In the socialist world itself, many people were utterly disillusioned and lost their trust in authorities entirely. Nearly all the dissidents, reactionaries and soc-dem “reformers” that came out of the woodwork in the Gorbachev era, reading through their writings, directly attribute trace their own disillusionment with the socialist system through the common origin story of their shock at the “revelations” of the 20th Congress. Some people like Keeran and Kenny in “Socialism Betrayed” see Khruschev’s later, more “evenhanded” comment that "All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit” (the truest thing he ever said) as a sign of desperate damage control, but it was far too late. A CPSU leadership collectively worth less than Stalin’s shit had turned the image of Stalin, the CPSU and socialism itself to shit. Later, the anti-Stalin agenda was used in the Gorbachev period as a powerful propaganda cudgel for the reactionaries to resmirch and sideline Marxist-Leninists, as can be seen from the ouster of Ligachev following his promotion of the letter by Leningrad chemist Nina Andreevya who defended Stalin. The Overton window had moved so far to the right in the USSR that this defence of Stalin was able to be used to purge Marxist-Leninists from leading government positions, directly causing the counter revolution that led to the collapse of the USSR.

I would say that some part of the Russian experience comes from the Soviet campaign in the aid of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. You captured the major Afghan ring road and more or less all the major cities, but then what? The reactionary mujahideen simply retreated to the countryside in the same way the Taliban did following the later American invasion. Funded by American weapons in the same way that NATO now funds Ukraine, the entire strategic paradigm shifts towards an endless defensive slog against counter-insurgency. You can't abandon your own established holdings, the major cities and its peoples, to consolidate properly for both PR/morale and humanitarian reasons and so the conflict is a long bleed. Once an equilibrium is established, you cannot strike out against the mujahideen-occupied countryside without drawing resources used to defend your established urban holdings. The Soviet and US Afghan Wars are examples of how precisely a long war should not be conducted.

The only long war in contemporary history which brutal attrition was the intention is a war that most ML don't study because it's a miserable inter-fraternal conflict between socialist states, the Sino-Vietnamese War.

The primary literature I'll reference is from a Chinese gusano professor, Xiaoming Zhang, who worked for the US Air War College (and ironically was later recently targetted by the FBI China Initiative and subsequently lost his job): "Zhang, X. 2015. Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. University of North Carolina Press." As it was sponsored by the literal US DoD (the first book I've ever read where there's a disclaimer that says: "The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government."), it is obviously ideologically reactionary but because it is meant to provide for the US military an account of PLA strategic planning and thus largely focuses on military analysis, that part is therefore worth reading.

The Sino-Vietnamese War is actually the war in all with the most parallels to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Deng's intentions for the war with Vietnam was principally "attitude adjustment." Vietnam had sided with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet Split and this was seen as a betrayal of China's support in the Vietnam War. It started with an initial invasion that was then, by Vietnamese argumentation, repelled. This is what NATOpedia classifies as the "official" Sino-Vietnamese War and in the Vietnamese narrative, it repelled an invader that was planning to sweep their their way through Hanoi all the way down to the Mekong Delta. But then the conflict kept going on.

As the author writes:

The Vietnamese leadership never seemed to comprehend the PRC’s strategy and war objectives, persistently maintaining that the 1979 invasion simply constituted a prelude to Beijing’s long-term scheme of infringing on Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. After China announced its withdrawal on 5 March, Hanoi called for a nationwide general mobilization for the war and began constructing defensive positions in and around Hanoi. By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000) along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”

As a result, Hanoi’s attempts to fight simultaneously in Cambodia and on its northern border took a growing national economic and social toll, subsuming Hanoi’s effort to modernize its economy and, more important, undermining its geopolitical ambitions. According to Fred Charles Iklé, “Governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it,” and many are “blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it” that determines how well their policies serve the nation’s interests. The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.

By the conclusion of the border war in 1991-93, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, liberated from the US occupation and unified for over 20 years had still been unable to properly focus on its Doi Moi economic reforms, announced in 1986, due to the ongoing conflict:

In the end, only in 1990, after Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, did the PLA pull its forces back from the occupied Vietnamese hills. Vietnam’s national pride and domestic politics made Hanoi’s leadership unable to tolerate Chinese occupation of any Vietnamese territory, even hills in the remote border region, and it therefore responded to Chinese military pressure with a tit-for-tat strategy. After 1984, Vietnam vigorously resisted Chinese military encroachments, initiating attacks and counterattacks with huge forces even when its economy was weak. Although the fighting took place far from Vietnam’s political and industrial heartland, the conflict encumbered the country’s economy for a long period of time. For China, battlefield costs were fractional at a time of economic prosperity. In this way, China strategically outmaneuvered Vietnam. Since the Hanoi leadership played into Beijing’s hands, China’s military pressure appears to have worked.

In June 1990, during his meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Hanoi, (General Secretary of the CPV) Nguyen Van Linh claimed to have been a student of Mao’s revolutionary theory and stated his great appreciation for China’s aid during Vietnam’s struggles against the French and Americans. He then admitted that Vietnam had wronged China and was willing to correct its mistakes. With respect to Cambodia, the Vietnamese leader expressed confidence that the situation would be resolved peacefully but urged both Vietnam and China to work together to prevent the West and the UN from meddling in Cambodia in the future. The exclusion of the Khmer Rouge from a future Cambodian government, Nguyen Van Linh admitted, was impractical.

The author also makes an allegation of an "agreement" between the two Communist Parties, which is rather interesting in light of the much hyped public Vietnamese antagonism towards China by the West:

A secret deal may have been made regarding how to address the unpleasant thirteen years so that the interlude would not imperil future Sino-Vietnamese relations. The two sides allegedly reached a tacit agreement that prohibited the media from publishing stories and scholars from conducting studies about the border conflict in hopes that the recent hostility would then fade from memory on both sides of the border. Both countries could then concentrate on rejuvenating their relationship. Once again, Vietnam looked to China for direction and guidance, and the relationship was described officially as “good neighbors, good friends, good comrades, good partners” (haolinju, haopengyou, haotongzhi, haohuoban).

"Everyman his own ~~historian~~ journalist"

The opening ceremony was mediocre though obviously not for the reasons the chuds gnash their teeth. I've binged all the ceremonies back during the pandemic. London 2012 was more of a spectacle even with its typical amnesia of the role of colonialism during its industrial revolution performance, Rio 2016 had much more soul and character, Beijing 2008 is still the unbeatable standard; all of them had a more organized structure than Paris' "tourism ad skit" of Haussmann's old buildings along the Seine. The Parade of Nations is typically meant to give full attention to the athletes and so the constant interruptions to splice in perfomances were obnoxious. I will say that the hot air balloon flame cauldron, reminiscent of those balloons in the old Paris World Fair posters, is a rather unique idea that was also executed fairly well, unlike the boat parade.

The LGBT representation was just one part of Macron's overall rebranding campaign of France's image as an "progressive nation boldly confronting its past" as a theme that permeated the entire ceremony. Seeing that Louise Michel statue description on how she was "exiled to New Caledonia and fought against French colonialism" was quite a satirical display of how superficial Macron's "Brand France" is given the current French colonial occupation and the military troops stationed to squash the still ongoing New Caledonian indigenous protests taking place since May.

Here's an overview of the politics behind Iranian foreign policy from the RTSG substack that they gave in their article on the 2022 protests.

To properly understand the events of late 2022, it is vital to analyze the role of different factions in Iran and their power struggles. Although many analysts in the West portray the political class of the Islamic Republic as a completely unified bloc under the control of a supreme dictator, this is far from the truth. Since the very early days of the Islamic Revolution, many factions have existed in the popular front bloc that formed the Islamic Republic. Although many of these factions, such as non-Islamic Liberal Democrats and Communists, were purged in the 1980s, strong disagreements persisted amongst the clerics and revolutionaries that ultimately consolidated their dominance in the revolutionary period

The issue that most divided this new political class was foreign policy. As opposed to the “hardline” or “principlist” faction that saw sovereignty and opposition to Israel and American imperialism as one of the primary aims of the revolution, a faction also existed that sought to work with the West, and although they saw no harm in ousting the Shah, they still believed that Iran should follow a Liberal economic and political path, albeit under a more Islamic framework. This faction came to be primarily led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and would even engage in negotiations with the US government in the 1980s known as the Iran-Contra Affair

After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or Rafsanjani, as he now preferred to be called, became the first President of Iran under the new post-Khomeini constitution. He and his party, the Executives of Construction, were known as the ‘Moderate’ faction and they began a process of liberalization in the economic and socio-cultural spheres. Rafsanjani’s two terms as President were then followed up by the birth of the closely aligned ‘Reformist’ faction led by President Mohammad Khatami. Khatami’s government pushed a policy of increasing liberalization and attempted a rapprochement with the USA under the framework of a “Dialogue of Civilisations”. In his time, Iran saw his supporters conduct the first attempt at major political change conducted through street protests during the 18 Tir movement

Khatami’s Presidency was then followed up by Ahmadinejad, whose Presidency saw a patchwork of policies and political alignments as well as the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s history as millions protested the outcome of the 2009 Presidential elections under the leadership of the Reformist candidate, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In 2013, the Reformist-Moderate movement won back power as Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections with the promise to negotiate with the USA and end Iran’s sanctions

To alleviate these sanctions, in 2013, Hassan Rouhani ran for the presidency, with an unprecedented level of advertisement and media excitement around his campaign, to negotiate with the West and get sanctions lifted. Rouhani won and pushed negotiations with the USA into overdrive, resulting in the 2015 ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ or JCPoA, according to which Iran would limit its nuclear program and in return would have certain sanctions lifted. This was supposed to be the first step in a series of negotiations that would then target Iran’s military capabilities and regional network of alliances, finally resulting in the Islamic Republic becoming a Western-aligned nation, aiming to follow the developmental model of nations such as Japan and Germany. One such example was that in 2016, merely one day after US President Barack Obama’s executive order was signed lifting Iran nuclear sanctions as part of the JCPOA, Obama signed new sanctions targeting Iran’s missile/defense programs. Not long after, Reformists such as Rafsanjani hinted at being willing to negotiate away Iran’s missile program, by issuing statements such as “the world of tomorrow is a world of dialogue, not missiles”, which sparked political feuding between Reformists and Principlists

In 2018, however, everything changed when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, started his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and Iran’s economy fell into an unprecedented recession. The Reformists, who continued to be the ruling party at the time under Rouhani, did not aid the economic situation. In addition to passing hyper-neoliberal economic policies, they had delayed Iranian trade deals with China that would have alleviated and offset pressures caused by Western sanctions, all in the hopes of returning to an idealistic JCPOA with the West. For instance, Xi Jinping proposed Iranian cooperation/entry into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as early as 2015 and 2016; Rouhani wouldn’t take him up on his offer until years later in 2021 when Iran finally joined BRI, after mounting pressure from Khamenei and the economic situation. Adding to this, Trump also assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, and destroyed all hopes for the Reformist project within Iran

Following the failure of the JCPOA and the terrible economic decline of Iran, caused by sanctions and the hyper-neoliberal policies of the Rouhani government, the Reformist movement lost all the wind in its sails. By the time of the 2019 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections, they had no popular candidates who could run in the elections as the grand promises of the last two administrations had proven fruitless. As a result, a Principlist parliament was formed in 2020, and “hardliner” Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi won the 2021 presidential elections. For the first time in decades, the Iranian government seemed unified from top to bottom. However, before things could settle and Raisi could begin to implement his policies, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement suspiciously sprung up, claiming to not only challenge Raisi but also to want an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

[...] This new foreign policy has thus far turned Iran into an important node in the new confrontation between Western powers and the non-Western world, with Iran acting as the third power in a triad that has formed with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The derailing of this new foreign policy and the damages it would incur for Iran would weaken the new emerging global system and damage the non-Western world in its confrontation with American unipolarity. This would leave allies such as Russia in a more fragile state and could destroy the new-found confidence of states such as Saudi Arabia in their pursuit of less Western-orientated policies.

In short, it seems like the JCPOA was the darling project of the Iranian "Reformist" faction, the characterization of whom by RTSG immediately brings to mind a Westanbetung capitulationist like Gorbachev. It is rather interesting to read about the Rouhani government's self-sabotaging liberal idealism given that Western coverage through the entirety of the contemporary Iranian period has been just static portrayals of an "unchanging hardliner leadership."

The Soviets continue to outdo us with their version of this.

Your issue made me realize how land acknowledgments are basically the equivalent of those little provenance placards in every Western museum: "This masterful example of 17th West African jewellery is from Mali." The way people puff up their chests from making those little land acknowledgment declarations compared to that.

Okay, cool story, so how did it get here then, to where it is now? Crickets, of course, from the curators. And sure, if you consider it better than the alternative of them straight up claiming it materialized out of thin air and rendered corporeal form inside the glass case or them lying that the West African jewellery was actually made in Birmingham, thus making it their national property, it is "better" than those things.

But there's no acknowledgment of the process; the nature of now things ended up as they are now; whether maybe, just maybe, there should be more sharing with the descendants of its original owners rather than hoarded by the failsons of Western imperialism, let alone reparation and repatriation.

Through this, it also reveals the fundamental conceit of land acknowledgments. They'll never get away with declaring some random Anglo-Europeans autochthonously sprung out of the dirt, making them indigenous to their stolen lands. They're too proud of the claim to heritage to old Europe and their perception of the settler-colonial story, in any case. As such, these land acknowledgments are no concessions at all for them to make. There's no threat of cognitive dissonance to their settler narrative when they spout such acknowledgments. All the thorns of the real flower have been trimmed away, leaving just the plastic rose petals representing their modern narrative of "reconciliation" glued on top.

Yes it represents the leftist fetish for unilateralist martyrdom.

(I believe it's a conch shell)

Except we already have the conclusive natural ontological symbol for "family" right here: ☭

It's nearly impossible to get a factual grounding of the status of LGBT peoples in China through English media, since rainbow imperialism has been fully weaponized against designated enemy regimes. Western media describes China's official policy as "no approval; no disapproval; no promotion." I can't find any literature that actually attests to this as written policy, but even if true, this position has given relatively meager ammunition for atrocity propaganda so far compared to other fronts of propaganda assault against the country. China is the chief designated enemy regime today and the only major thing I've seen thrown is primarily the "muh censorship" shtick. There is an undeniable fact that organized LGBT groups can and have been appropriated by Western interests in terms of NGO collaboration with Western funding and support, however. The chief obstacle to securing LGBT rights in China will never be the allowance of these dubiously affiliated groups, but overall societal reception. With the latter, wholly independent and organic means of collective organization will naturally form.

Through my personal trawling, the current situation as I understand it is that the more conservative elements of Chinese society see it as a foreign intrusion, similarly to how reactionaries in Russia view LGBT there. Uniquely, however, the main hurdles are mainly cognitive however and can be overcome by LGBT allied advocacy:

• LGBT toleration is not against Chinese historical tradition. There are countries where historical tradition is legitimately in opposition with the fight to secure LGBT rights. China is not one of them. The core of heteronormativity doctrine that prevails today across the world is derived from Western Christian dogmatism. However, China has had a long history of homosexual toleration and practice before heteronormativity was imposed at gunpoint by the proliferation of Western Christian missionaries, whose allowance to propagandize the population was a stipulated condition enforced onto China after the First Opium War by the Treaty of Nanjing. Paradoxically, conservative groups intent on defending Chinese tradition are in reality preventing the restoration of China's historical tradition of toleration in favor of the 19th and 20th century Western imposed heteronormative dogmatism.
• The latest concern is that for those who see China's aging population as a national security threat, they consequently therefore see LGBT peoples as abetting this demographic trend. This interpretation of conjoining LGBT liberation with declining demographics is entirely unfounded. Not only is a truly LGBT tolerant society no obstacle to stable demography, this is putting the cart before the horse.
  • The principal impediment worldwide to declining fertility rates is the absurd cost of living for the global Gen Z and Millennial generations, particularly housing costs, and China is not an exception here. As usual with Western coverage of China, if they screech something is going to collapse the country, it's more likely a good policy decision. The recent popping of the real estate bubble is the government's campaign against the skyrocketing housing prices. The fixation on enforcing heteronormativity to "resolve" demographic trends is therefore completely misinterpreting the issue.
  • LGBT peoples are not categorically anti-natalists, the clarification of this point must be fully advocated. In the current medical context, LGBT peoples will only be a contributing drag on demographic conditions if they inhabit a social and legal jurisdiction which inhibits their ability to participate in child rearing. A society that establishes an institutional adoption progress by LGBT parent aspirants would find that they are no more proportionally inclined to anti-natalism than heteronormative peoples.
    • Additionally, the developing medical context in terms of reproductive technological advancements see the real possibility of neutralizing the biological hurdles to LGBT contribution towards birth. The promotion of achieving this technological condition would be entirely synergistic with China's national objective of ensuring the vanguard of a socialist state at the leading edge of human biosciences advancement.
• I've seen it suggested from a geopolitical basis that the calculus of securing the liberation of LGBT peoples would alienate China from its Global South colleagues whose societies face similar objections to advancing LGBT rights as neocolonial assaults on traditionist lines, along with the weird social conservative bedfellows that are currently chummy with China, like reactionary Russia and (wtf) the German AfD. The logic of this cynical argument must be connected to the reality that China, by its nature as a socialist state, alienates the capitalist elites (and therefore the media culture) of Global South and capitalism restoration countries like Russia far more than LGBT rights ever will. If the goal was to make Global South social conservatives happy, the logic of that sort of accomodation followed to its conclusion would lead to the overthrow of socialism in China. Rather, China must remain at the vanguard and set an independent standard for how the Global South can liberate LGBT peoples without resorting to the commercial and imperialist appropriation and two-faced perpetual legal and political semi-toleration of LGBT in the West.

I had a migraine session on reddit back when hogwarts legacy was released from arguing how blatant the racial coding of the goblins was. The game actually encapsulates how mindless it has become for this "head empty, genocide ready" mentality for designated "evil" races in modern fantasy to be readily used by writers and accepted wholesale by apparently most of the audience.

Beyond the already odious Jewish caricature borrowed from the original Harry Potter representation as greedy moneylenders, classic subconscious British liberal chauvinism by JKR, the game went further by making the goblins an antagonistic faction which uses militant means to secure their species rights. This is viewed by the protagonists through the same light that liberals view real world armed resistance groups of marginalized peoples like the Black Panthers and, of course, Palestinians.

The goblins canonically live in an apartheid state where they're relegated as financial serfs for the humans, with restrictions on magic use and unable to access the same educational institutions that humans do. Yet, because Ranrok (their leader) chose violence (along with doing plot nonsense bad things to justify their elimination), the usual liberal exclamation of "they've gone too far and ruined the purity of their victimhood" comes up. There is literally a comprador goblin by the name of Arn who opposes Ranrok's movement and bemoans (in a chud dialogue scene) that "While I would like to see goblinkind treated by wizards as equals, bloodshed is not the answer."

This typical liberal sentiment, the same one even MLK denounced in his Birmingham Jail letter, is wildly hilarious when applied to the Harry Potter universe. Ranrok is defeated, so certainly his violent ways must be disproven by a vindication of the liberal "peaceful gradualism" theory right? Except the game is set a full century before the books, and so we know that canonically absolutely nothing has changed in human-goblin race relations nor would goblin rights improve even a single inch. Dumbass comprador Arn's fantasy of a "diplomatic end to the discord with wizardkind" still has predictably made zero progress in a hundred years, and ever onwards considering J.K. "Elves love slavery" Rowling never cared about addressing the racial apartheid of the setting.

Also, the protagonist is a full blown psychotic terrorist who literally shouts "Your blood is on Ranrok's hands" as they murder goblinfolk- all while being an underage Hogwarts student. This last bit tore apart the cognitive dissonance far enough that even the reddit crowd started memeing about it (and of course, there were the customary apologists in there explainbroing how this was all still OK and kosher).