Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Hong Kong
The slow but inexorable march toward the complete indistinguishability of Hong Kong from any other mainland China city continues: Hong Kong unveils its second national security law, aligning city more closely with mainland China
The proposed law, while somewhat similar to western measures on its face includes broad definitions for purported national security concerns. Penalties for violation can include up to life in prison.
Of note, this was initially proposed in 2003 and sparked the massive scale protests then. Full text of the proposed article here.
Uggg...The loss of HK as a unique 3rd space style culture is really a blow to worldwide travel and experience. This sucks.
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Ireland
The arson attacks have died down (barring one seemingly apolitical attempt to burn down 5 shops in one day in Cork city) and the government has hardened their attitude somewhat towards the abuses of the asylum system, sending one man to prison and arresting dozens of others for showing up at Dublin airport without a passport and promising to resume deportations of failed asylum seekers on chartered flights (the covid response involved putting a moratorium on deportations).
I'm a bit late with this news but it turns out the man charged with setting fire to a Luas tram during the Dublin riot is a member of the National Party, so there is some evidence to the claims that far-right agitators are taking advantage of these protests to commit crimes. Stirring up violence is about all the National Party seems capable of, right now there are two self-proclaimed leaders of the party since Justin Barrett was ousted as party leader (something he denies) after a controversy over a large amount of stolen gold and a police investigation into who actually owns it.
Another slightly out of date headline is that the number of asylum seekers without state provided accommodation broke the 1,000 figure last month, but given the rate of increase it is likely still higher today:
Many of these asylum seekers have pitched tents outside the International Protection Office and are protesting the breach of their human rights given the sometimes freezing temperatures and constant rain. It has been the case for a while now that if you show up in Ireland claiming asylum that you will be sleeping on the street, but that doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.
I'm surprised that you didn't mention that today Ireland is holding its fifth constitutional referendum in less than a decade. The proposal involves two amendments.
The first proposed amendment concerns two clauses defining the family. Currently, family is defined as a natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, based on the legal institution of marriage. The consitution pledges to protect the institution of marriage (on which families are based) from attack. The proposed wording will amend this so that families can be based on marriage or "other durable relationships".
The second proposed amendment concerns two clauses regarding the role of women in Irish society. As it stands, in the constitution acknowledges the contribution women make to the state within the home, and hence promises that the state shall "endeavour" to ensure that women are not obliged by economic necessity to labour and hence neglect their duties (These clauses have been widely strawmanned and misrepresented as the constitution asserting that "women's place is in the home", including by no less than government ministers.) The proposal is to replace these with a clause reading "The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”
The government are touting the proposal as feminist (no coincidence that the referendum is being held on International Women's Day) and all of the major political parties are backing it. Various NGOs are in favour, on the grounds that unmarried parents ought to be legally recognised as just as legitimate in the eyes of the law as married parents (I must confess I've never really understood why, if you already have children and a mortgage together, it's apparently such an ordeal to spend an afternoon walking down to city hall and signing a marriage license, but whatever).
Traditional feminists are worried that the government are washing their hands of any commitment to provide financial support to mothers who don't work, particularly single mothers (of note is how the proposed amendment ties into our Taoiseach's* open admission that he doesn't think it's the state's responsibility to provide for people who are unable to provide for themselves). At least one article I read made hay of the fact that the proposed wording mentions only that the government shall strive to support families in the provision of care (i.e. "we'll try to help out, but no promises"), although I'll note that the wording as it currently stands similarly states that the government shall endeavour to ensure that women don't have to neglect their duties in the home by reasons of economic necessity. One could argue that this is a much of a muchness. Gender-critical groups are very suspicious of the government's desire to remove the words "woman" and "mother" from the constitution. Social conservatives are concerned that acknowledging that families can be based on "durable relationships" might result in legal recognition of polycules. Anti-immigration activists argue that a Yes vote will result in increased immigration from overseas (I confess I don't quite get the reasoning on this last point and it seems like a knowing attempt to sow FUD by piggybacking on anti-immigration sentiment).
*Prime minister
I didn’t mention it because I couldn’t have done it justice like you have!
It looks like both proposed amendments have failed to pass, but I won’t be surprised if they try again in a few years.
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Wait, why does a political party just have gold bars in a vault? Collateral for finances?
Also, was the insufficient housing an issue before the arsons, or is it currently a direct result of such?
The gold is a mystery to me. Apparently it was there in case of a collapse in fiat currency.
Accommodation has been expensive and in short supply for years but the ‘making it to Ireland be homeless’ thing is new, we took in a lot of Ukrainian refugees and the normal asylum seeker numbers increased a lot too following this.
As for the arsons, unless there’s a deterrent effect in play I doubt they’ve changed things much. I doubt many people have been deterred, there’s a lot of money to be made from hosting asylum seekers and insurance still pays out in cases of arson. Iirc the homelessness thing was picking up steam before the arson became common (there have been arson attacks going back years ago but it picked up a lot in the past few months).
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I was reading a bit about the slow-moving disaster in Haiti today, thanks to Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier's declaration:
I'm only vaguely familiar with the events that got Haiti where it is--unchecked rise in gang power, assassination of the President by "foreign mercenaries"--Columbians and Haitian-Americans--apparently hoping to win contracts under a new regime). Apparently Haitians are now in general "angry" with the U.S.:
Because I am hopelessly pedantic, the thing that bothered me most about what I was reading was the notion of "genocide." Now, this is of course a loaded and often contested word. What most people mean by "genocide" is the extermination or perhaps only expulsion of a race or ethnicity, at minimum within certain geographic boundaries. But the internet tells me that Haiti is 95% African, and almost all the rest "mixed European-African." Furthermore:
And from Wikipedia:
So I'm left wondering--what's the "genocide" on offer, here? Is the Haitian gang leader threatening to just... murder everyone? The French speakers? The Protestants and/or Catholics? The infinitesimal population of non-blacks? The country has spent basically its entire existence lurching from crisis to crisis, prompting academics to for some reason describe its history as
and
It would probably be double-pendantic to point out that the inhabitants of Haiti are colonizers, for all their ancestors were brought there on slave ships; descendants of the island's earlier inhabitants are still reportedly out there--just not in Haiti. I say this in part because I have a lot of problems with "colonization" rhetoric, and Haiti helps to illustrate some of the central absurdities. But more than that, I want to drive home the idea that there doesn't seem to be an ethnic minority for Mr. Barbecue to cleanse.
It's possible he intends for "genocide" to simply mean "lots and lots of killing," but of course--he seems to be the one threatening to do the killing.
Civil war, I understand. Military-versus-gangland would be ugly in a so many ways. And given Haiti's history, I can even understand why "international interference" is a sore spot, despite the fact that Haiti seems to do much better under the rule of others than it does when left to its own devices. I am also aware of the urge some readers of this post will doubtless feel to start talking about "magic soil" or the like. But when it comes to Barbecue's prediction-slash-threat of genocide, I find myself quite at a loss. Whose race or tribe ("genos") is supposed to be under threat, here?
Ok, internet search was no help here - what does "magic soil" mean?
Yeah, sorry, @ArjinFerman is correct, though I've certainly seen both versions. "Magic dirt" is a shorthand way of criticizing arguments that seem to be about places when they should be about people, on account of there being nothing magical about the specific dirt people live on.
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I think "magic dirt" is the more common usage, but it might not yield any results since it's a term used by deplorables. It's a sneering term for how some people think our elites look at assimilation - if you bring, say, a million Syrians to Germany, they'll become culturally indistinguishable from Germans just through osmosis / occupying the same approximate location / the magic dirt will make them German.
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Oh man I have sort of a dread reaction whenever someone mentions Haiti. I've listened to some wicked podcasts about the colonization of the Caribbean, oddly the best one was about Napoleon and the French revolution.
The conditions on the sugarcane plantations were basically the 9th circle of hell and the Tainos were not able to handle it and a good chunk of them were murdered straight up or died from disease, the rest made "poor slaves" and most died on the plantations.
The Spanish & French imported african labor as they could stand up to the harsh conditions a bit better. It was one of the most brutal places on earth at the time, it wasn't all race related, a lot of mixed race, Tanios and africans also became tied up in the terrible society that developed there.
"The inability to maintain slave numbers without constant resupply from Africa meant that at all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born" It was so bad they couldn't even maintain the attrition rates without resupply. But it was worth it as vast fortunes were made and it was the jewel of the empire cash flow wise. Turning human pain into coin on a vast scale.
It isn't a puzzle to me that they have had problems ever since. Mississippi and other deep south states are still the lowest ranked in our country, and that is with the backing of the rest of the great US of A. It takes hundreds of years to recover from that type of shit human society.
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Genocide is just the magic word that gets Westerners all excited and interventiony. Hey, it worked in Libya.
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I think this is a barbarian chieftain using big words he doesn’t really understand except that the romans really care about them to make vague threats.
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Very low stakes but very funny international happenings:
//Alt headline: Putting the trans in transnational news
After an alleged assault by a gang of (illegal) transsexual Filipino sex workers on their (legal) Thai cousins, the country saw something between a drunken catfight and a riot when a horde of the latter's compatriots showed up to restore justice after the perpetrators were being "shielded" in police custody.
Lots of punches being thrown, someone got scalped (or their wig got torn out), and all of Thailand stands in solidarity with their transfolk, with the online Filipino community hanging their head in shame. Highlights include an absolutely ripped Chad who stood up for Trans Rights (and was the only one arrested by the cops), who received a standing ovation when he was let out of custody.
I spent too long on Twitter and ended up on the wrong side of the tracks. I have absolutely no idea what to make of the whole situation, so I'll just link the Twitter threads that made me wonder if someone spiked my drink:
https://x.com/sighyam/status/1765002618773164043?s=20
https://x.com/sighyam/status/1765016774167146690?s=20
Well, I saw for myself that trans sex work was highly normalized when I visited the country (for far less prurient reasons), but this thread had me wheezing.
Also from India and sex related, but not very funny: a gang rape of a Brazilian-Spanish female tourist in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. It could be gang rapes of female tourists are common, no matter the destination, but international media has a narrative of India=gang rape central and is more likely to publicize stories of such crimes, if they are from the subcontinent.
I'm afraid that while Thai language and culture has great Indic influence, they're not that close. Certainly would have saved on the plane ticket!
Edit: I had a classmate who had a friend who fucked a cow, in Jharkhand. I wouldn't go there myself, I suspect that I'm alluring than a cow. I can only pity anyone who decided that of all the places in India to visit, that's the one.
Was his friend also a bovine by any chance?
Apart from his mount of choice, I saw no evidence for that assertion.
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