OMFG. "A deep commitment to sustainability made the ABBA members interested in Oceanbird, a concept for wind powered vessels developed by Wallenius Marine. The parties soon discovered that they shared several joint values and an unique partnership started to take form."
Today I was digging in bookmarks for something else; found this; boosted it; and got accused of condemning "Chinese propaganda" in the first two posts
Meanwhile whole thread is snarking at infrastructural sublime propaganda, but some people don't read closely 🤷
Anyway here is a really good reading on empire and infrastructure for anyone who might need such a thing (if anyone lacks access but wants to read, you can lmk)
@inquiline wait, Belt and Road is socialist infrastructure designed to benefit the Global South, where it's desperately needed. This isn't at all the same as more luxury flights between adjacent rich American cities that are already connected by highway
@sofiav Capitalism's demand for resource extraction is one of the things driving this infrastructural expansion. (I'm certainly not saying the GS shouldn't have infrastructure)
@inquiline this comes across as blaming GS countries for wanting to sell our resources to the GN within the global capitalist framework, when that's the only way we've been left with to gain the money necessary to help our people after centuries of colonialism followed by decades of anticommunist coups
@sofiav Capitalist & socialist economies alike can severely degrade ecologies & threaten ecological boundaries, tho, again, the only blame I've actually enumerated is capitalist demand. My point is that e.g. roadbuilding comes with costs no matter who's doing it. It's not to say that no one should build roads
*Also, it's worth looking at the whole thread which isn't about the infrastructures but about promos for the infrastructures. Objections I was voicing here are 1, scale; & 2, aesthetic
@inquiline I'm out so I can't watch the video with sound rn, but from the thumbnail it looks like an intentionally silly/dumb song with a cute dancing panda, which is far from the worst capitalist crime against Art that's ever been committed. It kind of seems like you just think everything that China does is just inherently EVIL because REASONS
@sofiav Lol. Lmao. You didn’t review either the text (by which I mean video), or (clearly) the rest of thread, which makes fun of both Chinese and Western infrastructural sublimes, but you’re still gonna come at me with an outright projection?
Cos I know I didn’t say literally any of what you’ve been accusing me of this whole exchange
I'd really suggest reading more closely before coming at me here
@sofiav@inquiline I cannot agree with you here. Belt and Road is a transparent attempt to transform its African partners, particularly, into client states dependent on an imperial metropole – a textbook inscription of exploitive and extractive neocolonial relations, reliant on the intercession of an exceedingly narrow comprador class in each polity it touches. If China understood soft power better, and was capable of not being racist, I might even take it seriously.
@adamgreenfield@inquiline as someone living in a country that stands to benefit greatly from Belt & Road, I completely disagree. They're offering investment that will allow us to develop on OUR terms, when the GN countries/corporations either offer debt traps or just try to buy out our resources for peanuts. Eg shortly after the 2016 coup in Brazil, the new US-backed coup gov announced that they would auction off the pre-salt oil deposit that the previous gov had said would fund education
@adamgreenfield@inquiline China isn't immune to anti-Black racism, but they're a thousand times better than the US or Europe. Blaming them for situations caused by Western colonialism is ridiculous
@sofiav@adamgreenfield@inquiline Blaming them for creating levers of exploitation wasn't the case here, from what I'm understanding here.
But China has, more often than that, used those levers to gain favor with these places and has made little effort to help people escape them (like petitioning to IMF to cancel any loans that these regions have that choke funds or providing support to local labor institutions to allow people to gain autonomy through work or even support strong social campaigns).
It's not an extension but it's neither an attempt to do any better.
@jalcine@sofiav@adamgreenfield@inquiline Chinese infrastructure projects here I guess would be the Maya Train, which is shoddily built, caused perhaps irreparable environmental damage and involved the expropriation of indigenous lands. Is it worse than us or European investments in Mexico? Definitely not. Is it better? Also definitely not
@julieofthespirits Yeah, this. Whole point here, in context of 100s of my other posts, is how infrastructural projects at scale, resulting in moving extracted resources around the globe at scale, have devastating effects, & gussying them up w wind power ain't it.
Nonetheless @sofiav accused me of one-sidedly coming down on China for infrastructural propaganda, projecting disdain for GS. As it happens I did use that word, but about Maersk, so 🤔
@inquiline@sofiav@jalcine@adamgreenfield yeah I mean anyone who follows you knows that you tend to complain about this shit in general, you're not singling anyone out here
@julieofthespirits Yeah Sofia was following me(!) but after they doubled down about seven times including subtooting me I softblocked. I had a very special day of reply-chorus yesterday (& surely, surely did not comport myself with total equanimity but it was ridiculous, this place can be SO annoying)
@inquiline@julieofthespirits I just noticed that the original post is from last year so I'm not sure why it's getting boosted again now (and I don't remember who boosted it onto my tl). I didn't mean to revive an old thread, but I'm going to keep disagreeing with any effort to paint the BRI as "the worst of global capitalism" when it is, at minimum, an attempt to do better
@sofiav Your repeated, willful misreading of this thread is your prerogative, but you can absolutely feel free to leave me out of it.
If I wrote back to someone to correct them but had ignored relevant context, I might then simply say "oh I now see the context for what you said, and oh btw I want to make sure this misreading isn't what you're saying, I hope?" but instead you kept attributing things to me that I never said. Over and over. And you're still doing it. Respectfully, enough!
@sofiav@adamgreenfield@inquiline that said, I could be wrong about this tomorrow and China's leveraging its weight industrially to demonstrate these places having competitive autonomous power in a global economy provided funding and they step out.
But Xi has yet to show anything of a resemblance of interest towards that. I wish it were the case
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