echognomics

Damn those moralists and their checks notes good governance.

The entire game is set in a Moralist-controlled deindustrialised slum area where drug abuse is rampant, and almost everyone lives in abject poverty.

Nice to see Anwar finally taking a principled anti-imperialist stand against his paymasters at the NED. /s

Seriously though, from a local perspective, I'm a bit ambivalent on all this vocal official government solidarity with Palestine. I mean, it's great that solidarity with Palestine is so ubiquitous in mainstream Malaysian society that even the neoliberals and conservatives support it, but I can't help suspecting that Anwar and PH/BN is cynically playing up this present dispute with on the Palestine issue in order to distract from systemic failures on the domestic front. Apart from cost-of-living inflation caused by the ringgit weakening to record levels, just last week Parti Sosialis Malaysia activists protesting against an extremely shady eviction of tenant farmers in Anwar's home constituency were physically brutalised and arrested.

Apparently posted, or reposted(?), on weibo by user 帽子载缝苏菲 (or on a meme page with that name? Not familiar with chinese social media) - Sophie Hatter from Howl's Moving Castle.

Not only are Chinese weebs more politically-informed and better posters than their western counterparts, it seems they also have better tastes in anime.

No, it's AOC. There's apparently a trilogy starring her by the same people?

Finally, the web-crawling latina superheroine from Queens that all the fans have been asking for!

History repeats itself: first as , then as .

I don't think he's even being as generous or sophisticated as "the government is unable to do nice things because of LaWs oF eCoNoMiCs", really. The guy's rhetoric sounds to me more like "these nice things may sound nice to you, but actually they are complete lies which those city-slicker commie liberals tell us honest god-fearing folks to get into power and once in office they'll take do all the bad things that we don't like (i.e. the same bipartisan neoliberal and neoimperial policies with a trendy new "progressive" veneer instead of good old-fashioned American flag aesthetics) instead of any of these good things which they promised".

edit: Which isn't better, I guess, but kinda interesting as an illustration of how while the two US ruling parties want effectively the same things policy-wise, Republicans operate with the assumption that Democrats are always acting in bad faith/with treasonous intent.

If the Democrats are so centre-left why hasn't Pelosi gone on The Adam Friedland Show, huh? Ever thought about that?

Apple-brain syndrome would explain the existence of liberal

Geez, it's about time you guys offered me a seat. I've been waiting here for almost 9 minutes...

Nah, I think you're totally misremembering the film: not only does the US not attack/nuke China, at no point in the film is the US state portrayed as an initial or arbitrary aggressor. The film only shows the US "rationally" reacting to the aggression and secretiveness of other nations/parties. The film makes sure to show that the US only halts their communication/information-sharing with the other nations only after China and Russia have already themselves gone off the grid.

The only time US can even remotely be interpreted as an unprovoked aggressor was when the alien spacecraft that the main characters were at was bombed by US soldiers. Even then, the bombing was orchestrated by rogue Army grunts radicalised by Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorists - there's a scene near the 58-minute mark where a couple of soldiers in a medical tent are watching an internet video where some rando with a talk radio microphone rant about the alien contact being handled by "the same government that ruined our healthcare and bankrupted our military" and pushing for a preemptive "show of force" against the aliens, which sets up the implied motivation of the renegade soldiers - so that movie audience are reassured that American war crimes are just the unfortunate/unintended result of unwashed and uneducated individual bad apples in lower/middle echelons of the US military and that the eminently levelheaded leadership/intitutions of American military/state would never dream of recklessly provoking conflict for their material and/or strategic advantage...

I haven't read the original short story, but I'm sure that it didn't have this element.

Yup, there was no overarching "hostile nations learn the valuable moral lesson of international cooperation" plot in the original short story - no Orientalist story beats about the ruthless Russians summarily executing their scientists to maintain state secrets or irrational Chinese general inciting for war against the super-advanced spacefaring aliens based on mahjong (you would think that the Chinese linguists would also realise that there may be a competitve bias in mahjong-based communication, but apparently Amy Adams can understand Chinese culture better than all the Chinese scientists combined🙄... I wonder why ). The heptapods in the short story sent down to Earth 112 two-way communication "looking glasses" (instead of 12 spaceships in the film) and the main character was a linguist assigned to 1 of the 9 looking glasses within US borders. If there's any "political" commentary/conflict in the short story, it was between the American linguists/scientists who are motivated by the opportunitiy to gain alien knowledge/exchange knowledge with the heptapods, the US state apparatus (i.e., the Army colonel & State Depatment ghoul supervising the scientists) which can only view the alien encounter as a belligerent and zero sum competition (between the US and the aliens, and between the US and other nations). Instead of the geopolitics, the short story focused a little more on the main character's relationship with her future daughter and also went much deeper into the maths/linguistic theory behind the heptapod language.

I don't really have any solid evidence to back this up, but given that the movie was released around late 2016, my theory is that the adaptation's "China/Russia bad" elements come from Eric Heisserer (the adaptation scriptwriter) ambiently absorbing the illegal immigrant discourse lingering in the American ideological atmosphere in the lead-up to the Trump/Hillary elections and unconsciously distorting the ideas of American xenophobia/paranoia/military bloodthirst into a narrative about non-American countries being xenophobic/brutal (after all, it's almost impossible for Americans to truly imagine themselves as actually being the evil empire; Heisserer seems to be an apolitical but generally liberal type, so I doubt that he gave too much deliberate thought to the extended implications of the international geopolitics plot additions of his script). Either that, or it was studio interference to add a "sexy" political thriller type plot conflict instead of focusing purely on egghead debates about physics and phonemes, and/or a mandate from the DoD for the filming to get access to US military resources.