https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1737771585153499494
Lmao, not a piracy problem. Just the Yemenis carrying out legitimate naval interdiction operations and interference from Israel’s allies. Mfkers pretending this is a piracy problem like off the coast of Somalia when it’s just ships affiliated with Israel being interdicted.
China is not trying to erase those other languages. They are working harder to preserve them than any in the west ever did. However creating a unified language so everyone can communicate has obvious benefits. I see the pragmatism there.
As to Taiwan, I am under the impression most people are ambivalent the way any liberal citizen is about politics. However, they are a small island nation in a geologically active zone. Self determination is not an option. They are going to be in the US sphere of influence or the Chinese. It can only be obvious based on past performance. How poorly the US would end up treating Taiwan. So if you actually care about the future of Taiwanese people than you would hope China presses their legal right to govern the area.
So first off, I am by no means purporting to be some kind of expert on China, especially as I cannot read or speak any Chinese dialect to be able to actually experience their media, news, culture etc.
That being said:
If the entire European union /somehow/ decided to standardize language to… I dont know, Esperanto, or Interlingua, and as a matter of policy, forbade schools generally accessible to the vast majority of public school children from teaching the language of the country they are from, would you consider that ‘erasing languages’?
Well, I think there is a large difference between self determination and being in a sphere of influence.
Ukraine is now very, very much more obviously in the NATO sphere of influence militarily, and the EU’s sphere of influence economically. But they still have self determination. They can elect leaders, vote, blah blah liberal democracy, but the self determination does functionally exist.
True they are not an island, but they were considered to be a weak, liberal democracy, contested by two powerful spheres of influence… should the ideal situation for be either loss of self determination and formal annexation/absorption into Russia, or perhaps Poland?
Conversely, (though also not an island) the Palestinians have barely had any real self determination since the Nakba, as they have been made, and are still, so totally beholden to Israel economically that even though they do have their own government, its decisions and goals are constantly rendered functionally void as they have no real effective means to alter their situation meaningfully on their own.
They have even less functional power to use their self determined leaders and government and quasi governmental organizations to meaningfully act on their own, and are basically totally economically beholden to Israel, and basically in military terms are caught between Israel + US, and various other Middle Eastern states and organizations.
Should they give up what little self determination they have left, and formally just join Israel (who certainly will not let them do this as they are currently busy genociding them) or a nearby Arab state (all of whom will nearly certainly also not do this?)
You can go even further with your logic here.
Should the Kurds give up their struggle to carve out a formal right of self determination and simply acquiesce to being ruled, divided, by autocrats who claim the territories where most of them live, or simply all migrate their territory within one bordering autocratic state and just hope to not be oppressed there?
The point I am trying to make here is that I do not believe that the general principle of a small, relatively weak people should simply acquiesce to a total loss of self-determination simply because they are massively influenced by larger nearby powers.
If, as another commenter mentioned to me somewhere in this thread, the Taiwanese people actually use their self-determination to voluntarily integrate with the PRC, I would respect that.
But just using the logic of ‘they have powerful neighbors so they must obviously give up their autonomy to one of them’ is not compelling to me at all.
It is my understanding that in China they do schooling in local languages and have a policy of respecting local culture. Maybe we are talking about diffrent things but you can see in Tibetan schools for example they go to great lengths to preserve the culture and language there.
Ukraine is the perfect example. The average citizen would live much better if the were annexed by Russia. The local government is weak, corrupt, and infiltrated by the US. The other example you give is Gaza. Implying that China is an inherently hostile and exploitative alien power. Which doesn’t fit observable patterns at all. So yes, it does sound scary if you think of things without context that is not real life. In real life things have history and context you can observe. So just kinda guessing at what things could be like is silly when there are real examples of how it has gone to observe. So I don’t care if you like it or not, they are pawns in a great game. We can be liberals and pretend material circumstance don’t exist. Or we can observe reality. Will a small Asian nation between empires get left alone? No. Does the US treat small Asian territories under it’s influence well? No. Will the people’s voices be heard in a liberal democracy? No. The two options are the Chinese people work together for common good or America uses the threat of violence to enforce a liberal marketplace. Which is better for the average person on the island?
Where is your evidence that China is doing this? I’ve read that it’s teaching Mandarin in schools alongside the local language. It’s more like, you know, schools in the EU teaching English while also teaching German or French, etc
Damn that’s crazy cuz I heard Ukraine cancelled its election, banned opposition parties, and keeps a kill list of foreign and domestic journalists, is this the new model of liberal democracy?
Edit: also is self determination when your new government is chosen by Victoria Nuland, then a few years later you elect some literal joker to put an end to the civil war, then he fucks around with multiple treaties and ceasefires, then finds out, then gives a standing ovation to an Original Vintage Nazi, lol lmao