I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations.
If China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.
>China is extremely offended by a lot of things done by a lot of countries
Yes, that's bad. Hence, "should be held to the same standard". You may reasonably disagree with that, but as it stands your implication is that the more bad things a country does, the less we should care.
Changes in that area, resulting in broken database entries and skipping the country entry/label. People break stuff all the time. Let's see if it stays missing for more than a couple of days...
Reminds me of the problems with contested borders, which e.g. Yandex runs into because they operate in Western and non-Western jurisdictions. They ended up just removing all national borders from the maps for this reason, which has made the UX worse, especially for international trip planning.
Google (used to?) opts for a different approach where some borders are drawn based on where they geolocated you to.
I mean, depends on use case right? Certainly for travel and navigation purposes I very much want to know when I'm about to leave a country :-). For any economical or political review as well, country birders are extremely relevant data.
There certainly are geology and other scientific endeavours which perhaps don't care too much for countries, but even they probably need them when they interface with regular humans (I.e. This lake is in such and such country, this volcano is about to explode over there, etc)
Tourist endeavors really care about borders for 2 aspects: as barriers, and as places where legal or social rules change. If administrative borders had their powers limited to, say, statistical purposes, and not social obstacles, a tourist would stop caring about them.
Interfacing with humans does not necessarily have to be done along social borders. I'm sure it wasn't that way before the rise of the nation-state. Everyone knows where the Alps are, or where the Great Lakes are. Pretty much every place on Earth is covered by some geographical-not-political area name. Why shouldn't places be referred to in that way? It's harder to politically push for a change in the definition of the Gobi Desert than of an arbitrary administrative unit.
If I'm reading it correctly then, you're aftually advocating for a massive paradigm change in our social and political life, and not for a small UI change in mapping software.
Which I did not pick up from your initial post within this context, but fair enough!:)
I'm actually curious about the UI change in mapping software as well. The current cartography is focused on human-scale things, rather than geological-scale things. It's hard to find a map that gives topography as much space as it gives to roads, even when visiting some mountain ranges. In the lowlands, tourist maps still focus on roads and town names disproportionately more than on the type of environment and natural landmarks.
On a global scale, when the country borders are removed, we find ourselves lost, despite the huge ecological and geological diversity of the place, which makes our - or at least mine - experience as a inhabitant of this amazing place so much poorer. Compare the difficulty of finding the Atacama desert versus Luxembourg. How often do you see a whole-Earth map with the desert marked but not the state?
You should run for congress... wait, no borders means no countries so no congress. Just a bunch of really powerful people making rules over fiefdoms...
When you're near a border you typically don't want to get your car ride routed over 2 border crossings just because it's the shortest path. Skipping the borders is definitely not a "better off" situation.
Yandex removing displayed borders doesn't move us in any way closer to borderless world in reality. No country is seriously considering it. It's not a canary for anything - they stopped displaying borders exactly because countries/people care about those a lot.
But it's categorically different. Removing pictures from CVs so that corps are unable to discriminate based on that image still maintains the concept of "employee". Doesn't removing borders effectively remove the concept of "citizen/national"?
The subject of a CV is the human, but the subject of a map is the place. Removal of borders removes the concept of a citizen, but maps are concerned with the concept of an area. Nothing of value is lost. In more practical terms, I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen, other than by drawing nation-state borders, or those that are concerned with immigration (but for those, it's a relevant concept).
First, if you remove detail about a person from a CV, that person still has those characteristics.
It's not clear what effect "removing borders from maps" has - if you are suggesting having no borders as in your original comment, or having them, but just removing them from maps.
In the latter case it would be massively inconvenient to not know where borders are, if there are visa issues. Plus, there isn't really an equivalence to "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border". The appearance of a single, otherwise anon individual, versus international agreement on where the borders are seem to be v. different things.
As such, interpreting as the former; "maps are concerned with the concept of an area" - they are as concerned with navigation as anything else, so include roads, and borders plus border stops. "I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen" no, but they usually name the country - I mention citizen from the perspective on how it impacts travel; presumably removing borders means there are no territories, and thus no countries; but a country is as much a collection of people (citizens) so both diminish, unless you maintain a territory-less concept of citizenship.
Not clear to me "Nothing of value is lost" - tell me how this would impact, say, Israel? or anywhere bordering Russia. Or are you only taking from the about specific cherry-picked locales?
> "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border"
The problem is closer to: "the presence of pictures on CVs is detrimental to someone due to outside bias", "the presence of borders on maps is detrimental to Yandex due to outside bias". Not quite the same mechanism, but similar in spirit.
> they are as concerned with navigation as anything else
All maps are concerned with an area, some with navigation. A map of the Moon is still interesting to some non-astronauts.
I concede, if you use a map for navigation, a concept of a national border is still relevant. But in other cases, given the variety of possible geographical data, it rarely is.
These border checks are waived, not abolished. In times of crisis, they can (and were, during the Pandemic for example) reinstated. Countries can impose movement restriction for internal regions as well, but these carry a much higher legal overhead.
Also, Schengen borders are transparent only for full EU residents. If your visa and right of abode is restricted to a particular country, the borders are still very relevant.
Even for EU residents, the borders are still relevant as they demarcate places with quite different civil and penal law codes.
A nice fantasy, but something tells me a borderless reality is not in our near term or distant future. Maybe by the time Star Trek is more fact than fiction
That's a big hypothetical. Mapping companies are not the arbiters of where borders exist. Knowledge of where de facto borders are is pretty useful for directions.
This to me is like saying your a sovereign citizen. The world would be better off if we all shared resources and everyone enjoyed some minimum of quality of life while there still be strong desires from individuals to create. Its a nice idea but not a reality that is possible.
I'm pretty sure Yandex removed all borders was because the Russian government annexed territory but they hadn't clarified the territory borders that were annexed, so Yandex decided to be on the safe side and remove all borders to avoid this issue.
The obvious alternative explanations?? Like they just randomly and accidentally decided to erase an entire state? Particularly an extremely contested state? Give me a break - you’re really not making a good argument.
Can you show me an example of a UN country being erased from a map during a major event in which others are calling for them to be wiped off the globe?
China publishes an official political map each year, which the companies must treat as canon. They also swapped a contested half-Russian island to being fully China. I think it’s a way to assert some politics at a lower volume.
I can’t say for sure this is that, but I can say for sure that there is tremendous political power in cartography and the simplest act of choosing the label levels for placenames. This move has been done countless times before so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s intentional.
it also has little incentive to do so, as it's positioning itself as a possible mediator, one that also does a lot of business with Israel. And remember, the thing that led to the short animosity between China and the Soviet Union (well, one of the things) was that the SU was a country with a mission to spread its system, while China wasn't, and isn't. China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.
The more likely explanation is that the companies are catering to their custmer base. As in most of the world, there is huge public support to stop the killing of Gazans. Western companies, and companies in Wester-capured neocolonies, can't show support for Gaza. Maybe this is ALibaba testing out if it can. It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, or if it gets changed again in a few days. This should tell you more.
> China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.
Tell that to the Austrailians and now the Israelis, where China has sent a naval task force. China is building aircraft carriers like nobody's businesss for force remote projection, which is the one thing they're really good at. China has the same desire to project force as the US, they simply lack the means to do so as effectively. Their recent actions in the Gulf is proof enough of that.
The truth is that this was always the case, no change happened. All that happened was that a known anti-china fake news "reporter" associated with the falun gong cult was spreading lies on twitter. See for example here: https://twitter.com/CurtExplores/status/1719334699599122690
I don't understand this. China is not exactly pro-muslim as we all know. Why would this happen? I'm not very knowledgeable in this subject but it looks to me like some mistake or bug? Or just "when a country's name is displayed at when zoom level compared to the size and shape of said country"?
With "not exactly pro-muslim" I mean they have their own share of anti-muslim history and this does not rhyme with that. As said, I'm not knowledgeable on the subject but would like to learn.
Yeah, but disagreeing with another country's genocide against Muslims doesn't mean they will disagree with their own. Geopolitics is often hypocritical (see US getting pissed the Soviet Union deployed ICBMs in Cuba while they have theirs in Turkey; or US collaborating with the ICC to help the investigation against Russian war crimes in Ukraine, while sanctioning ICC prosecutors when they try to investigate American war crimes in Afghanistan; China being friendly and investing in many Muslim-majority or Islamic countries while genociding their own Muslims).
I think it's mostly the ones on the South China Sea. And you don't display disputed borders when you want to be neutral. Baidu can just show the official border according to the PRC.
That's the "lip-service to democracy" line from privileged (all the way to neo-colonial) powers.
It's more like a handful of privileged countries behaving as if they own the world, and their client states (who the first have no problem if they're theocratic or dictatorships or brutal far right as long as they are their allies), against the developing world and any country with claims to sovereignity.
Norway is a US client state; Poland could become sovereign but they're too busy trying to annoy literally everyone doing any business with them from any side, for whatever reason.
You should include Israel and Hamas in that list if you value morality, Israel chose to act like Russia in worse, Hamas chose to fully embrace their terrorist role instead of advocating for peace
Bibi tried to be friends with Putin and avoided sending weapons to Ukraine, while Russian PMCs Wagner and Redut trained Hamas. Hopefully Israel will be rethinking both the relationship with Russia and the relationship with Bibi.
> It's Russia, Iran, China and friends against all democracies.
I love this kind of rhetoric, it implies we in the west are the democratic ones and dehumanizes the "enemy". The same wording has also been used to condone carpet bombing civilians the last weeks. "It's up to the democratic world".
I don't think we are that much better, our leaders are just better at hiding their bullshit. But people willingly fall for the myth that we are somehow the "good guys".
The way you put it's X, Y, Z and friends against us is also interesting. Have you considered it might be the other way around? Hasn't basically every president waited for a reason to fight the last boss in the middle east? We're very hungry for war in the west, don't fool yourself we're any better than the rest.
We're not content with what we have, we will keep destabilizing the world until we own it all. The day every so-called leader answers to the US that's when we have world peace.
China is very anti-Israel, the government has condemned Israel and called for a two-state solution. And the online discourse there is extremely anti-Semitic, the Chinese version of Twitter (Weibo) is basically Gab.
The most antisemitism lately in my twitter feed comes from the academia and leftist intellectuals. The right leaning seems to be a pro make gaza the biggest parking in the middle east breed.
> Nobody on the left or right in the west is that anti-Semitic, at least not publicly.
Jews in the west are afraid to go to universities. Stars of david were drawn on many houses in France. In a Palestinian demonstration where they called for a Palestinian state from river to sea (elimination of Israel), the only arrested person is a Jewish woman who confronted them.
I don't rush to call people antisemitic, I think most of them are just "useful idiots" for the Hamas/Iran propaganda. But there are also some people who are letting old prejudice rise and using this as an opportunity. This isn't mainstream but that's how these things start...
You're kidding surely. that quote comes from random social media posts. A rather lazy narrative by VoA, which will get its readers to stereotype China as anti-Semitic, or as being more tolerant of anti-Semitism than the West, stereotypes you seem to have accepted too, when none of that is empirically established.
It's a strange motte-and-bailey, where media outlets are factual ("here are a few tweets"), but are always interpreted in irrational ways ("XYZ group has a big problem with ABC"), since average people are known to falsely generalize based on anecdotes. I'll take such articles seriously when they start presenting quantified empirical data. I'll be waiting a while.
I don't know how to say this but have you ever visited a site called 4chan? And that's not even the worst offender. Ever since Twitter fired most of its content moderation team, it's also pretty easy to find that kind of talk there, as well as the inverse (i.e. literal calls for genocide against non-Jewish Palestinians).
> The most antisemitism lately in my twitter feed comes from the academia and leftist intellectuals.
I'm curious what you're defining as antisemitic here. I've seen a lot of claims that being anti-Israeli-government is equivalent to antisemitism, but this is objectively not the case.
From the top of my head - direct praises of hamas, sharing of the paratrooper meme, sharing of the star of david beheading babies meme and generally a lot of people direct or indirect calling that the Israeli deserved it. There are a lot of Mia Khalifas out there.
Since october 7th there I have observed (probably because a lot of people I follow on twitter are jewish, so they kinda amplify the nasty content) serious rise in "gas the jews" types of antisemithism on twitter.
Some of it edgelording of course, but a lot of the content there has serious bite.
So we have a phenomena where people of group X report anti-X content. Is there an accepted term for that? Not quite the Streisand effect.
I wonder how much that contributes to the viralness(virality?) of some of this hate speech? It's definitely not healthy and a good reason to get off social media.
I agree that this is often the case. I hate people who pull the antisemitic claim and throw it around without just cause.
Right now the main claim is about the university letters that claimed the fault of October 7th terrorist attacks are 100% due to Israel. This is dumb and devoid of factual basis. Also members of the squad said pretty ignorant things about the war.
It's a mistake even Jews make because of basic misunderstanding of the situation. E.g. the grand central demonstration.
This is all based on some correct notion: Israel has been terrible to the Palestinians. That's a fact that the Liberals are 100% correct about. There should be a Palestinian state and settlements should be removed...
But today in New York they had a demonstration which called for the formation of a Palestinian state from sea to river. That effectively means wiping out Israel.
That is the explicit charter of the Hamas. That is why it sabotaged the Oslo accord and stopped peace. Liberals are always against war, but in this case it's a war against a jihadi organization that has done everything to stop peace and a Palestinian state. Some violence is necessary to stop them.
They are also very media savvy and manipulate liberal sentiment with difficult pictures. I saw the Circus the other week. A young liberal was confronting Kamala Harris and said horrible things about Israel. He blamed Israel for the Hospital bombing and made pretty horrendous false claims. This is all false, but by the time it was proven false people don't notice it and move to the next piece of propaganda from the Hamas.
There's a liberal desire to help the weak, I'm a liberal and have that same desire. As a
By right-leaning I guess you mean neocon. I am right-leaning myself and my point of view is that we shouldn't interfere and that if both countries disappear it may be for the best.
It's what I've thought for a long time. I don't mean that we should provoke it, in fact we should steer clear, but they are both enemies of the West, so I wouldn't shed a tear.
The answer is somewhere in between. China is more aligned to the east and Israel is firmly aligned to the US. So China implicitly picks the opposite side but does so "gently" because they want to profit off the west and not alienate it too much.
They would very much like to see Israel knocked down a peg as Israel serves as a demo of the US army capabilities.
That's a very deliberate misrepresentation and oversimplification.
China is very much anti-Muslim because Islamists pose a threat to its absolute power and its projected illusion of unity.
China is also anti-Israel because Israel is a close ally of the US and majority Muslim countries normalising relationships with Israel aligns them closer with the US.
Also, the non-Chinese version of Weibo (Twitter, or X) is also basically Gab at this point and flooded with antisemitic and anti-Israel (but also anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim) posts. The owner has even shared antisemitic accounts and posts himself. That doesn't seem to be a good yardstick for anything.
> China is very much anti-Muslim because Islamists pose a threat to its absolute power and its projected illusion of unity.
A muslim is not an islamist [1], your simplification is concerning, China officially recognize Islam [2], and Uyghurs weren't subject to the 1 child policy
> It's not a fact, and it's not supported by any evidence, you (and the journalists) are confusing security crackdown (due to terrorism) with genocide.
None of your links refute anything to do with sterilization and forced contraception, despite the numerous reports, research, and overwhelming conclusion of their validity. Your links do describe bulldozing mosques, putting Uyghars in campus, and moving in ethic Chinese Hans. Stalin did a similar thing (forcibly relocating Tartars and replacing them with Russians) when trying to eliminate the Crimean Tartars.
> Now that the security crackdown has eased, journalists have changed their tone, or perhaps strategy ;)
Those links paint a picture of a brutal (and vile) crackdown. "Joking" about a supposed cross continental conspiracy between various researchers and new agencies is pretty dark. I don't think we have anything more to discuss.
I didn't say all Muslims are Islamists. I said Islamists (i.e. political Islam) pose a threat to Chinese unity and the unquestioned authority of the state, which the CCP tries to project at all costs. Consider the political influence of Evangelical Christians in the US if you feel more comfortable talking about it that way. The difference is that (local) Evangelicals are a much weaker influence internationally than Islamists. The closest Christian equivalent I can think of are the Moonies in Japan but that's a regional cult generally considered separate from mainstream Christian sects.
I'm not saying anything negative about Islam here. If there were a similar international network of political Christians, China would likely be very concerned about Christian minorities as well, but as it is, Islamists pose the most direct risk of promoting separatist sentiments and this makes Muslims suspect, whether their religion is officially tolerated or not.
Heck, Tibet is another obvious example with separatist sentiments being directly tied to the religious/spiritual structure of the region and its opposition to the absolute claims to power of the central government. It's just a consequence of trying to project a monolithic structure for a territory this vast with this many ethnic groups and cultures within. Probably the weirdest and most impractical manifestation of this is in the single Chinese timezone.
And given the aparent tolerance shown towards the one in the ME, its easy for them to claim double standards when people complain about treatment of e.g. the Uygurs. Because, well, there are.
All of the stans seem to get quite well with China, they are buddies with Iran and the Gulf and they make major investments in the green crescent in africa. They also get well with Malaysia.
That is quite pro muslim. The only muslims they have problems with are the one inside their borders. So less than 1% of the total muslims in the world.
I think there's a big chance it's a bug. Small chance it's a political motivated 'sabotage' from someone low down in the hierarchy. Super low chance it's a political statement from the company management.
A funny thing I just noted that could lead to this behaviour is that if you wanted to place the label for Israel at the centre of Israel then I think it would be in Palestine.
I'm not 100% sure because Google Maps doesn't show a label for Palestine.
I don't see any country names on the map. When I type 'israel' into the search bar I get the same chinese characters that are being shown under Jerusalem (耶路撒冷) -- I don't ready or speak any chinese
--
If I play with the zoom I see many small countries without labels (no idea what they say) -- cyprus, israel, and lebenon included
Not being able to read Chinese explains your difficulty spotting country names on a Chinese map, but you could have tried using a dictionary to find out what labels to expect for Cyprus (塞浦路斯), Israel (以色列), Palestine (巴勒斯坦), Lebanon (黎巴嫩) etc.
It basically says that the foreign ministry says they have a formal relationship with Israel and that the ministry publishes an official map with Israel on it and that if you search for Israel on any of those map providers it will show Israel.
I just love that in the minds of Westerners, 'Chinese company does X' is the equivalent of 'China does X', and when queried on why they think this, they'll tell you that Xi Jinping, like Oz the Great Wizard, pulls the levers of more than a billion Chinese individuals from behind the curtain.
All companies in China are under control of the CCP so it's the same thing. The "West" isn't an authoritarian state so this might be why people think of it like this.
A bit hard to find open, unbiased, and independent information about a country that forcibly suppresses anything negative about itself, isn't it? Jack Ma criticized the government and suddenly disappeared for years losing his position at the company in the process. If they can do that to one of the most powerful people in the country, they can do it to anyone else.
Jack Ma never disappeared though, same case with the Chinese Tenis player. Thats the exact same thing the other poster was criticizing. Its the western media making up stories to fit the anti-china narrative.
The very first sentence of that Wikipedia article is incorrect (it takes an extremely obtuse reading of Peng Shuai's social media post to construe it as an accusation of sexual assault), so I don't have high hopes for the accuracy of the rest of the article.
Wikipedia is good for many things, but not for hot-button political topics. Those sorts of pages are usually written by politically motivated editors, so you're seeing whatever spin the dominant group of editors at that page wants you to see.
It's not at all difficult to find open, unbiased, independent information about China. You could apply for a visa right now, travel there, and talk to people yourself. It's not difficult. This isn't the Mao era any more.
This is a pretty dismissive exaggeration of people's thoughts. China does, famously, control businesses. It doesn't have to be absolute dictation of every decision to warrant suspicion.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadIf China decides (and no-one is saying that it has) that it no longer recognizes Israel, then it will simply announce that, and not get a private company to make subtle UI changes to reflect a secret policy instead.
“Major provocation from China.”
If this is a major provocation I’d hate to see what he considers something more substantive than a UI change.
China is extremely offended when that happens — and should be held to the same standard, regarding others.
What this definitely is not is a major provocation.
Yes, that's bad. Hence, "should be held to the same standard". You may reasonably disagree with that, but as it stands your implication is that the more bad things a country does, the less we should care.
Google (used to?) opts for a different approach where some borders are drawn based on where they geolocated you to.
There certainly are geology and other scientific endeavours which perhaps don't care too much for countries, but even they probably need them when they interface with regular humans (I.e. This lake is in such and such country, this volcano is about to explode over there, etc)
Interfacing with humans does not necessarily have to be done along social borders. I'm sure it wasn't that way before the rise of the nation-state. Everyone knows where the Alps are, or where the Great Lakes are. Pretty much every place on Earth is covered by some geographical-not-political area name. Why shouldn't places be referred to in that way? It's harder to politically push for a change in the definition of the Gobi Desert than of an arbitrary administrative unit.
The planet is populated everywhere, and you need to know who's in power pretty much everywhere you're going, or else you might have a bad time.
Which I did not pick up from your initial post within this context, but fair enough!:)
On a global scale, when the country borders are removed, we find ourselves lost, despite the huge ecological and geological diversity of the place, which makes our - or at least mine - experience as a inhabitant of this amazing place so much poorer. Compare the difficulty of finding the Atacama desert versus Luxembourg. How often do you see a whole-Earth map with the desert marked but not the state?
It's not clear what effect "removing borders from maps" has - if you are suggesting having no borders as in your original comment, or having them, but just removing them from maps.
In the latter case it would be massively inconvenient to not know where borders are, if there are visa issues. Plus, there isn't really an equivalence to "illegally discriminating based on seeing the border". The appearance of a single, otherwise anon individual, versus international agreement on where the borders are seem to be v. different things.
As such, interpreting as the former; "maps are concerned with the concept of an area" - they are as concerned with navigation as anything else, so include roads, and borders plus border stops. "I have not encountered maps that explicitly mention the concept of a citizen" no, but they usually name the country - I mention citizen from the perspective on how it impacts travel; presumably removing borders means there are no territories, and thus no countries; but a country is as much a collection of people (citizens) so both diminish, unless you maintain a territory-less concept of citizenship.
Not clear to me "Nothing of value is lost" - tell me how this would impact, say, Israel? or anywhere bordering Russia. Or are you only taking from the about specific cherry-picked locales?
The problem is closer to: "the presence of pictures on CVs is detrimental to someone due to outside bias", "the presence of borders on maps is detrimental to Yandex due to outside bias". Not quite the same mechanism, but similar in spirit.
> they are as concerned with navigation as anything else
All maps are concerned with an area, some with navigation. A map of the Moon is still interesting to some non-astronauts.
I concede, if you use a map for navigation, a concept of a national border is still relevant. But in other cases, given the variety of possible geographical data, it rarely is.
Schengen says hi.
Also, Schengen borders are transparent only for full EU residents. If your visa and right of abode is restricted to a particular country, the borders are still very relevant.
Even for EU residents, the borders are still relevant as they demarcate places with quite different civil and penal law codes.
More seriously, as much as I’d love to live in a different world, borders are not going anywhere.
I can’t say for sure this is that, but I can say for sure that there is tremendous political power in cartography and the simplest act of choosing the label levels for placenames. This move has been done countless times before so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s intentional.
The more likely explanation is that the companies are catering to their custmer base. As in most of the world, there is huge public support to stop the killing of Gazans. Western companies, and companies in Wester-capured neocolonies, can't show support for Gaza. Maybe this is ALibaba testing out if it can. It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, or if it gets changed again in a few days. This should tell you more.
Tell that to the Austrailians and now the Israelis, where China has sent a naval task force. China is building aircraft carriers like nobody's businesss for force remote projection, which is the one thing they're really good at. China has the same desire to project force as the US, they simply lack the means to do so as effectively. Their recent actions in the Gulf is proof enough of that.
Also, it could easily be just opting to not display any disputed borders, which Israel has multiple of (Gaza, West Bank, Golan).
Aren't the majority of China's maritime borders disputed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_of_the_Pe...
They seem to have disputes with about half of the countries on their borders (land and maritime). That's a fair few. :/
It's more like a handful of privileged countries behaving as if they own the world, and their client states (who the first have no problem if they're theocratic or dictatorships or brutal far right as long as they are their allies), against the developing world and any country with claims to sovereignity.
I do not thing there is something wrong. That is why I asked because this 'colonial' narrative seems often too vague. It is often just 'the west'.
Sounds more like great power rivalry.
Then again, Russia would definitely benefit from the conflict if it heats up further.
In fact, still tries in the face of accusations that are flying around.
I love this kind of rhetoric, it implies we in the west are the democratic ones and dehumanizes the "enemy". The same wording has also been used to condone carpet bombing civilians the last weeks. "It's up to the democratic world".
I don't think we are that much better, our leaders are just better at hiding their bullshit. But people willingly fall for the myth that we are somehow the "good guys".
The way you put it's X, Y, Z and friends against us is also interesting. Have you considered it might be the other way around? Hasn't basically every president waited for a reason to fight the last boss in the middle east? We're very hungry for war in the west, don't fool yourself we're any better than the rest.
We're not content with what we have, we will keep destabilizing the world until we own it all. The day every so-called leader answers to the US that's when we have world peace.
China is very anti-Israel, the government has condemned Israel and called for a two-state solution. And the online discourse there is extremely anti-Semitic, the Chinese version of Twitter (Weibo) is basically Gab.
https://www.voanews.com/amp/antisemitic-comments-flood-china...
>"It's really the fault of Little Mustache," wrote a netizen. "If he had burned all of them (Jews), we wouldn't have this much trouble."
Nobody on the left or right in the west is that anti-Semitic, at least not publicly.
So what I was wanting to say was that gab is not the best comparison specifically now specifically for antisemitism. Mainstream twitter is
except for the neo-nazis..
Jews in the west are afraid to go to universities. Stars of david were drawn on many houses in France. In a Palestinian demonstration where they called for a Palestinian state from river to sea (elimination of Israel), the only arrested person is a Jewish woman who confronted them.
I don't rush to call people antisemitic, I think most of them are just "useful idiots" for the Hamas/Iran propaganda. But there are also some people who are letting old prejudice rise and using this as an opportunity. This isn't mainstream but that's how these things start...
It's a strange motte-and-bailey, where media outlets are factual ("here are a few tweets"), but are always interpreted in irrational ways ("XYZ group has a big problem with ABC"), since average people are known to falsely generalize based on anecdotes. I'll take such articles seriously when they start presenting quantified empirical data. I'll be waiting a while.
I'm curious what you're defining as antisemitic here. I've seen a lot of claims that being anti-Israeli-government is equivalent to antisemitism, but this is objectively not the case.
Since october 7th there I have observed (probably because a lot of people I follow on twitter are jewish, so they kinda amplify the nasty content) serious rise in "gas the jews" types of antisemithism on twitter.
Some of it edgelording of course, but a lot of the content there has serious bite.
I wonder how much that contributes to the viralness(virality?) of some of this hate speech? It's definitely not healthy and a good reason to get off social media.
Right now the main claim is about the university letters that claimed the fault of October 7th terrorist attacks are 100% due to Israel. This is dumb and devoid of factual basis. Also members of the squad said pretty ignorant things about the war.
It's a mistake even Jews make because of basic misunderstanding of the situation. E.g. the grand central demonstration.
This is all based on some correct notion: Israel has been terrible to the Palestinians. That's a fact that the Liberals are 100% correct about. There should be a Palestinian state and settlements should be removed...
But today in New York they had a demonstration which called for the formation of a Palestinian state from sea to river. That effectively means wiping out Israel.
That is the explicit charter of the Hamas. That is why it sabotaged the Oslo accord and stopped peace. Liberals are always against war, but in this case it's a war against a jihadi organization that has done everything to stop peace and a Palestinian state. Some violence is necessary to stop them.
They are also very media savvy and manipulate liberal sentiment with difficult pictures. I saw the Circus the other week. A young liberal was confronting Kamala Harris and said horrible things about Israel. He blamed Israel for the Hospital bombing and made pretty horrendous false claims. This is all false, but by the time it was proven false people don't notice it and move to the next piece of propaganda from the Hamas.
There's a liberal desire to help the weak, I'm a liberal and have that same desire. As a
Quoting in hopes that you read your own words and think about them a bit longer.
That's just completely false. China and Israel has always had a decently warm relationship, so much so Israel was selling weapons to China until the U.S. forced them to stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Israel_relations...
The Israel-Palestine conflict is one place where they have disagreement, but overall the two countries are on friendly terms.
And you do know Voice of America is an U.S. government funded propaganda outlet right?
They would very much like to see Israel knocked down a peg as Israel serves as a demo of the US army capabilities.
China is very much anti-Muslim because Islamists pose a threat to its absolute power and its projected illusion of unity.
China is also anti-Israel because Israel is a close ally of the US and majority Muslim countries normalising relationships with Israel aligns them closer with the US.
Also, the non-Chinese version of Weibo (Twitter, or X) is also basically Gab at this point and flooded with antisemitic and anti-Israel (but also anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim) posts. The owner has even shared antisemitic accounts and posts himself. That doesn't seem to be a good yardstick for anything.
A muslim is not an islamist [1], your simplification is concerning, China officially recognize Islam [2], and Uyghurs weren't subject to the 1 child policy
Stick to the facts please
[1] - https://humanists.international/blog/the-difference-between-...
[2] - https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-r....
It is far worse than the one child policy. Many were subjected to sterilization and involuntary birth control.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide
https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713
Your narrative is full of contradiction
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-saudi-arabia-...
https://apnews.com/article/syria-ap-top-news-riots-internati...
Now that the security crackdown has eased, journalists have changed their tone, or perhaps strategy ;)
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...
None of your links refute anything to do with sterilization and forced contraception, despite the numerous reports, research, and overwhelming conclusion of their validity. Your links do describe bulldozing mosques, putting Uyghars in campus, and moving in ethic Chinese Hans. Stalin did a similar thing (forcibly relocating Tartars and replacing them with Russians) when trying to eliminate the Crimean Tartars.
> Now that the security crackdown has eased, journalists have changed their tone, or perhaps strategy ;)
Those links paint a picture of a brutal (and vile) crackdown. "Joking" about a supposed cross continental conspiracy between various researchers and new agencies is pretty dark. I don't think we have anything more to discuss.
Terrorism is bad and should be fought no matter what, we seen what happens when you are not pro-active (Hamas and its deadly attack in Israel)
I wish MI6 cared as much about the Palestinians as they do about the Uyghurs ;)
I'm not saying anything negative about Islam here. If there were a similar international network of political Christians, China would likely be very concerned about Christian minorities as well, but as it is, Islamists pose the most direct risk of promoting separatist sentiments and this makes Muslims suspect, whether their religion is officially tolerated or not.
Heck, Tibet is another obvious example with separatist sentiments being directly tied to the religious/spiritual structure of the region and its opposition to the absolute claims to power of the central government. It's just a consequence of trying to project a monolithic structure for a territory this vast with this many ethnic groups and cultures within. Probably the weirdest and most impractical manifestation of this is in the single Chinese timezone.
A lot of countries use the Israel-Palestinian issue as a distraction from their own abuses of their Muslim populations.
All of the stans seem to get quite well with China, they are buddies with Iran and the Gulf and they make major investments in the green crescent in africa. They also get well with Malaysia.
That is quite pro muslim. The only muslims they have problems with are the one inside their borders. So less than 1% of the total muslims in the world.
That's very much not pro-muslim, then.
"Google Maps accused of deleting Palestine" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/10/google-ma...
For Baidu, it's probably just a mistake, they would have communicated it otherwise
A funny thing I just noted that could lead to this behaviour is that if you wanted to place the label for Israel at the centre of Israel then I think it would be in Palestine.
I'm not 100% sure because Google Maps doesn't show a label for Palestine.
--
If I play with the zoom I see many small countries without labels (no idea what they say) -- cyprus, israel, and lebenon included
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#Disappearance_from_the...
Wikipedia is good for many things, but not for hot-button political topics. Those sorts of pages are usually written by politically motivated editors, so you're seeing whatever spin the dominant group of editors at that page wants you to see.