MolotovHalfEmpty

I have no idea why this tweet appeared at the top of my feed today, but since it did I thought I'd share.

(CW! Ableism/R-slur in Tweet)

Angelica Oung is a Taiwanese neoliberal "China Watcher" online who churns out anti-China content and was apparently embarrassingly starstruck by the Halo mask YouTube guy. Only she (and others judging by the responses) are now saddened by the fact that Noah Smith has turned out just to be a racist idiot who publicly accuses them of having been turned by Chinese spies if they suggest a source that has anything to do with China, even on other subjects, and who'd get mad and bullying if they didn't support his completely made up conclusions.

Full tweet below:

SMH, Noah, I thought we were friends.

Let’s rewind: the year was 2020 and I was a little no-name business reporter from the Taipei Times tweeting out my articles and takes. Noah Smith reached out on DMs to chat. Followed me a retweeted a few times. I was star struck! Wow! Noah Smith noticed lil ol me! I just about doubled my follower count!

My friends in LA were so excited I was noticed by public intellectual Noah Smith. Wow, Angelica! You really made it! Do you think you’ll get to meet him? Oh sure, I replied. He’s very interested in Taiwan. When he comes to visit and I think he will, I’ll be his one-woman welcoming committee.

Noah did reach out frequently to ask questions on Taiwan, but increasingly it seemed to me that he was asking for confirmations for his pet theories and would be vaguely annoyed if I don’t affirm them. Importing massive quantities of Vietnamese mercenaries to defend Taiwan? I dunno Noah. Are Vietnamese mercenaries a thing? What about the language barrier?

There’s a Peter Zeihan-like quality about Noah. He seems really smart on things I knew nothing about and gradually became more ignorant as he approaches my area of expertise (Taiwan and energy). Still…I was astonished that he blocked me when I pushed back in public on the idea that all you need for a modern grid is solar and batteries.

That’s fine. At some point he unblocked me cuz we were invited to the same conference. And I was always careful not to get blocked again until he was asking for good sources on India/Pakistan last week and I said a lot of the sinosphere accounts have been good and early.

His responded with “I’m going to go back through your tweets to find out exactly when you got turned.” And then I got blocked…again.

I’m sure Noah wasn’t the only one who blocked me or I lost credibility with because I’ve compromised my integrity by passing on “Chinese propaganda.” I don’t know to what extent I’m cancelled, but I do notice a very different lineup of regular commenters under my post these days. And that makes me sad.

Because the people who used to follow me and boost me when I was enthusiastically participating in Taiwan’s vapid COVID-era aura farming online are the ones who needs to read me now the most, or they’ll keep getting China wrong. But they won’t.

Hey! Peter Zeihan and Gordon Chang are still at it so I’m sure being chronically wrong on China won’t hurt Noah’s career either!

In a way, they’re more pathetic than grifters because at least grifters have agency. These guys don’t even know that they’re wrong…I think. Their natural removedation just so happens to fill the spiritual need of an anxious and arrogant west as they look to China’s rise.

Former guerrilla, teacher, philosopher, and President of Uruguay José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, has died aged 89. In musical memorium, here's 13 minutes of afrobeat featuring one of his speeches (excuse the automated translation):

We promise a life of waste and waste. Deep down, it is a countdown to nature and humanity. Civilization against simplicity, against sobriety, against all natural cycles, against all natural cycles

But worse

"civilization" against the freedom of having time to live from human relations the only thing transcendent: love, friendship, adventure, solidarity, family...

Today is the time to start fighting to prepare a world without borders

The globalized economy has no other drive than the private interest of very few

The great task for our peoples, in our humble way of seeing... is the whole

It would be imperative to achieve planetary consensus

To unleash solidarity towards the most oppressed

Tax-catching waste

And the speculation

Mobilize the great savings

Not to create disposable

With calculated obsoleence

But useful goods, no frivolities

To help lift the world's poorest

Yes, the high politics intertwined with wisdom

Our time is potentiously revolutionary

As you have not known the history of humanity

But he has no conscious driving.

Or less driving simply instinctive

Much less still

Organized political driving

Because we haven't even had precursor philosophies

We need to govern ourselves, or we succumb

This is our dilemma

Let's think about the underlying causes.

In the civilization of waste

In the civilization of insisting that what you are throwing away is time for wasted human life

Squandering on useless issues

Think of human life as a miracle

That we are alive by miracle

And nothing is worth more than life

And that it is our biological duty, and above all things

Respect life and drive it."

He certainly did.

Solidarity in finality that has lived in my head since their first record.

(Grumble: what is the point of prioritising yewtube if any yewtube URL gets flagged as invalid and unpostable by Hexbear?)

I did a silly thing while stuck on hold for over an hour at work.

A mural in Milan dedicated to Davide "Dax" Cesare, a young militant of the ORSo community center who was stabbed in a fascist ambush, that also goes incredibly hard.

Genuinely radical, working-class, left unity punk with an empowerment message, who also name drop the likes of Vladimir Tatlin and aren't afraid to talk theory in interviews.

Best punk band in Britain for the last decade, hands down.

Ripped from the pages of that dreadful zine someone posted the Reds Under The Bed & How To Stop Them In Your Org! guide from, I present... a whiny teenage livejournal post about how mean the "left" are (which apparently also includes hardcore Zionists braying for blood) and what a terrible place it is to be for smol bean climate activists.

I could do like 50 of these but I have to go to sleep.

Drop me a message comrades and we'll sit on the roof...

Still the best Blink 182 tune they ever recorded and one of the best pop-phnk tunes of the era.

Shame Tom DeLonge got suckered into being one of the Mirage Men.

Look, we all get lost sometimes.

No more so that the pseuds who decided to debate whether this was actually as song about an alien or not for years.

Desert highways all look the same.

Perhaps the best indie rock tune about about the UFO conspiracy ever recorded. They put it in a (really good) episode of the X Files to throw us off the scent.