Sodium_nitride
Why? What happened O_O?
Economic worries have taken center stage as the slump in the housing market deepened, fueling pessimism among consumers. Where once was a gilded age, social media users now refer to the present era as the “garbage time of history.” Coco Li, 46, used to spend about HK$600,000 ($77,000) a year — or roughly 20% of her income — buying luxury items. After losing her job as an executive at a multinational company in Hong Kong, she’s curtailed her habit and put some of her Hermes handbags up for sale on mainland Chinese online platforms.
The things the petty bourgeoise say sometimes are just completely unhinged.
As far as I can understand, the stages are
- The sign is considered to bear a close resemblance to its refferant
- The sign is considered to be a distorted image of the thing being referred to
- There is an absence of the referred to object. Sometimes we might question whether or not it even existed, but we know what is being refered to, even if we know nothing about the referred to object.
- The sign has no relation to the original referred to object. It just is, and few/no one knows or bothers to find out the original context.
An example that I found online:
Stage 1: You have a word processor that saves the paper you wrote to a floppy disk with a button. The button has an icon that looks like a floppy disk.
The sign (floppy disk button) directly refers to the action of saving on an actual floppy disk.
Stage 2: Your word processor saves the paper you wrote to somewhere on your computer. You can choose to save to a floppy disk with it, or to your hard drive, or perhaps some other location. The button has an icon of a floppy disk, as that is what save buttons do.
The floppy disk icon is misleading, as you don’t have to save on a floppy disk. But you can still save on a floppy disk if you want.
Stage 3: You have a word processor that saves your paper to someplace, perhaps your hard drive, perhaps one of these newfangled CDs. The save icon retains the image of a floppy disk.
*The floppy disk is gone, but you still remember it. *
Stage 4: You write your paper in google docs, you click the save icon and it is saved to the cloud. You know it’s the save icon because it’s the save icon everywhere. You don’t know what it depicts; you were born in 2005 and have never heard of a “floppy disk”
In the case of pepe the frog, it is an alt right symbol. Why? I don’t know and most people don’t know. It just is. For the squirrel/garbage image, we know what is being referred to since it happened very recently, so at most it is stage 3. The symbol is also still referring to the original stories of PNUT and Biden’s “garbage” comment. So it is actually stage 2. I wouldn’t call it stage 1 because the symbol is combining 2 stories that had no original relation and creating new meaning out of it. There is a distortion of the original.
Yes, because historical materialism is now racism.
It is also racist to consider that the history of power structures in a country/region will impact future power structures.
That isn’t what you said. You said, and I quote
My whole point on the Xinjiang topic was that you all chose to ignore chinese history that goes pretty much as far as we have written history of it, explaining the whole way of dealing with minorities by forced assimilation, coming from the clanic and dynastic organization of Chinese provinces for millenias.
Which is pure bullshit and completely flies in the face of historical materialism. Not only have you failed to explain how “clanic and dynastic organisation of chinese provinces” is relevant to the forced assimilation of minorities, but you have also failed to explain how this “impacts future power structures”. Are you saying that the PRC is organised on clan and dynastic lines?
And furthermore, the idea that thousands of years of forced assimilation of minorities would be continued despite the transition of the mode of production from slavery all the way to primitive socialism is completely absurd and flies in the face of historical materialism. You have not posited a historically contingent/transient process, you have posited a static unchanging constant of Chinese culture, which is apparently to genocide minorities.
You chose to ignore the whole area of study about sinicization, which is pretty much that subject, and you also chose to ignore how similar the situation is between the PRC and provinces that want to be independant, to what Israel is doing with Palestine, which stems from the same imperialistic logic. You chose to ignore that the acceleration in the settlement and ethnic erasure of the Xinjiang province is strangely close to the acceleration of the BRI project.
You have not even considered that the so called “sinicization” occuring today in China amongst minorities is simply the natural result of economic integration. Any nation is constituted of community of people united by language, territory and economic life. When underdeveloped minority regions are integrated into the broader national economy, they gradually loose their minority character. How do you think France came to be? Did the French nation simply exist from the beginning of time? Or did it form after various minority groups were brought under the same government under one market?
Furthermore, that you would compare palestine to xinjang betrays your lack of understand of either region’s history and utterly privileged position as an imperialist, who cannot tell the difference between live streamed mass murder and economic development where God forbid, a people’s culture is changing in ways you don’t like.
even if they claim to “disagree” with the methods.
Nah, they don’t even pretend. Just watch them talk about “terrorists”. Liberals unsurprisingly have a full on statist view of violence. Their violence to protect property is legitimate and all other violence is illegitimate.
