The specific laws vary of course, but a person cannot receive work related income from a foreign entity without reporting it correctly, both in the country in which the company is located and the country in which the employee is located. Even within the EU for example, with its freedom of movement for people, goods, and capital, cross border income must be correctly accounted for by both parties.
This is just a sovereign government doing what all sovereign nations do. If nations didn't do this the consequences for even just tax collection would be immense, not to mention the many other negatives.
There's no need to throw China bashing into every subject under the stars just because that's apparently what counts for journalism these days.
I also remember seeing an Intercept article talking about new generation of Homeland Security Mexico border surveillance tech being tested on Gaza and the West Bank first.
Way to miss the forest for the lichen on the trees.
No. I don't trust the Swiss. They're tied up with US intelligence and they'll do anything for money (that's why they're always neutral). I've gotten shit on here before for saying Protonmail might be a honeypot but I'm sticking by it.
All countries will confiscate illegally obtained income. Want to work cross-border? Do it with the proper visas, permissions, tax reporting, residencies, etc. There's no story here, just more China hate to help beat the drums of war.
This person is talking out of their ass.
I guess you could make a really stretched semantic argument that surplus isn't the correct term, as it implies that the labourer also receives some of the value of their labour. Even so, the labourer produces something of value, which an owner then reaps the rewards of. That's surplus value.
I guess you could also make a historical argument in that the concept of surplus value only came about contemporaneously to wage labour, but that's also quite weak. Value and labour existed before wage labour, so surplus value also existed, regardless of when it was first formally conceptualized.
I didn't mean it in that the US capitalists care about Palestinians or even Israelis specifically, just that the region functions as a sort of laboratory to test out new means of oppression.
Indeed they are. Test the means of oppression abroad, bring it back home once the bugs have been worked out.
In a lot of ways Israel is the testing grounds for new weapons and tactics. Once tried, tested, and perfected, they are brought back to the core.
A Canadian member of parliament called Nelson Mandela a terrorist on the floor of parliament.
The privately owned permanent war economy continues to eat its own tail.
The "harm reduction we just have to get him elected and then we'll push him left" blue maga president everyone.
Science is not decided in a courtroom.
Weird, I could have sworn there was an extra 4GW of climate neutral generation capacity around last winter. Strange that these horribly toxic coal plants need to get fired up just for 2GW. Where did those 4GW go I wonder...
What I got out of this was learning that there was a "Nazis in Canada" investigation (Deschênes Commission) in the 1980s which came up with specific names, and those names have not been declassified to this day. The commission also decided the Galician wasn't responsible for war crimes, even though other nations had already found the SS as a whole guilty in previous decades.
Yet most of the criticism detailed on the Wikipedia page is from Nazi apologists who seem to think that the KGB was making some immigrants in Canada look like Nazis when they supposedly weren't.
Fiction: In the Name of the People by Zhou Meisen. It's a really fun political thriller detailing the case of a corrupt cadre in a Chinese city. It was made into a TV/streaming series in the last two years and was apparently very popular in China.
Non-fiction: American Exception by Aaron Good. It's surprisingly readable for what is essentially a PhD thesis, and very interesting both in terms of history and what it means for the present and future.
I don't have any books that I'm necessarily hesitant to start, I just have such a long reading list it's hard to prioritize.
Berlin Travel Tips
I'll be in Berlin for a couple days soon and I'd like to see some DDR stuff while I'm there.
The DDR Museum looks interesting, even if it's just to look at the visual representations of everyday life while ignoring the lib remarks on Stasi oppression and whatnot.
Also happy DDR annexation celebration day. /s
Politico's corporate owner Springer likely got seed money from the CIA, in exchange for an uncompromising pro-US perspective.
Reading recommendations (not theory)
I've been back into reading fiction over the last three years or so after a long time away. It's been really nice to slow down and read a book for entertainment rather than always going for a series or movie (when I'm not reading theory of course). For somewhat nostalgic reasons I'm missing some easy reading spy thriller type novels. There's plenty loaded with CIA/MI6 propaganda but I've had a hard time finding anything with similar pacing from outside of the imperial core. Most of the "best translated / English Chinese authors to read" lists are chock full of liberal emigrants and the like, which isn't a perspective I'm terribly interested in while reading for fun. I also enjoy sci fi, but there it seems to be a bit easier to find non western authors.
Does anyone have anything to recommend? Unfortunately it's gotta be available in English or maybe German at the moment.
New global warming study just dropped
A preprinted study by James Hansen and collaborators suggests that we've all but locked in 2°C warming by 2050. They go on to calculate a likely equilibrium warming of 10°C considering current GHG levels and known feedback loops.
I know we need to take this as yet another call to action, but at the same time I think so many of us feel absolutely paralyzed by the enormity and incomprehensibility of the situation.