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1. Sol Chadguy (detectivehyde@thechad.zone)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jul-2018 22:03:16 UTC Sol Chadguy
   Watching a documentary right now about "far right extremism in Mongolia." (For those who know/care about UK TV, it's Ross Kemp Extreme World)
   
   The situation isn't terribly complex, but it illustrates something that the average western liberal likes to pretend doesn't happen.
   
   When we tuned in, he was talking to people who had been victims of the violence and intimidation perpetuated by nationalist groups like the Blue Mongols. This one woman ran an auto shop, and while she was ethnically Mongolian, she was married to a Vietnamese man, and thus she was targeted. She seemed pretty genuinely afraid.
   
   He then went to talk to people who supported Mongolian nationalism and examined their lives. The particular cross-section he chose to examine was coal miners in this one region where that's the only kind of work there is anymore.
   
   The workers had their own small mine that they ran for ethnic Mongols. It was nothing like the large, well equipped mines run by Chinese multinationals. They said that they had to set this "artisinal" coal mine up in opposition because foreign corporations generally only employ foreigners, and the Chinese are the worst with this. They said that the few Mongolians who are employed by these foreign companies are given only the most menial, humiliating and low-paid jobs, and that the Chinese miners often beat them up.
   
   The safety standards are awful even in the Chinese mines and the conditions in this Mongol mine were even worse. These men were descending 100 metres to the coal face in a tin bath, and then at the bottom they were supporting shafts with bare hewn timbers. A previous shaft had caved in, and they were scrambling into the collapsed tunnel to take all the coal they could from it. Everyone working down there had some kind of injury.
   
   These men were earning $30 a day.
   
   Back at the top, he interviewed one of the miners who was wearing a shirt with a swastika on it. He asked him whether the man had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. The guy's response was "I don't know much about him. I've heard he was a great man and he used this symbol. We use this symbol to resist the Chinese and show that this is our land."
   
   This whole time, he's been using terms like "The worrying rise of the far right in Mongolia."
   
   He went to a Blue Mongols barbecue/feast on the plains beyond the capital. He ate with them, asked them the question "Do you think it's realistic to try to save this pastoral way of life? Will Mongolians still be herdsmen in a hundred years?"
   
   The Blue Mongols guy's reply: "Isn't it obvious what we're fighting for? We're fighting to save our land and our clear waters. Chemicals from the mines could contaminate our food and water, starting with our livestock. Is our mineral wealth really more important than our health and way of life?"
   
   He showed dead herds that died of thirst in the expansion of the Gobi desert. (Which has tripled in size in just 40 years.)
   
   People flock to the capital. They live in unplanned shanty owns. The men he talked to there used to have huge herds of hundreds of animals on the plains, and now they work on a fucking rubbish tip, poking around in TRASH with breather masks.
   
   These are proud people doing work so humiliating that most of them don't even want to be filmed.
   
   Do you fucking understand now? Do you understand that our relentless march into industrialisation, into modernisation, has this kind of cost? That our increasing globalisation, our weak and pathetic rhetoric that says things like "corporations are people!", "the free market makes people free!" and "all people are the same as long as they're here legally!" are just blinkers used to justify the increasingly intense downward spiral of our quality of life, our environmental condition, our relationship with nature and ourselves?
   
   Would ANY of this shit be happening if the Chinese weren't in Mongolia chasing mineral wealth? Maybe. But only because the ridiculous fucking ideas we have about money, about jobs, about "progress", would have infected Mongolia through our obnoxious international propaganda media.
   
   I don't know how to be any clearer. These people survived for centuries, for millennia, without any of that garbage. They lived under open skies, they grazed their herds on rolling grass plains, they had lives defined by opportunity, by nobility. They traded for what they couldn't make or find themselves.
   
   NOTHING THE INDUSTRIAL OR MODERN WORLD HAS BROUGHT THEM HAS MEANINGFULLY IMPROVED THEIR LIVES.
   
   NOTHING THAT CAPITALISM HAS BROUGHT THEM HAS MEANINGFULLY IMPROVED THEIR LIVES.
   
   NO, RETARDED FUCKING "POST-CAPITALIST" OR "POST-MODERN" IDEAS WOULDN'T SAVE THEM OR IMPROVE THEIR LIVES IN A MEANINGFUL FUCKING WAY.
   
   YOUR MEME POLITICS ARE NOT THE ANSWER TO THESE PEOPLE'S PROBLEMS.
   
   *ALL* THAT KIND OF THINKING HAS DONE IS *CAUSE* THESE PROBLEMS.
   
   It makes me fucking SICK. Go on. Argue about Left and Right. Wave your flags. Idolise idiots. What a waste of fucking time.
   • 御園はくい repeated this.
   • 御園はくい (hakui@freezepeach.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 01-Jul-2018 22:52:29 UTC 御園はくい

     in reply to
     @detectivehyde uncle ted did nothing wrong