CornerOfUnrest

Akaekpuchionwa. I don't do room temperature. Extremism in all directions.

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

Weaponized sociology in particular, Nigeria as a case study

[Talmud Enjoyer 🇬🇧 🇮🇱 🧬 @jewndahalfmen]

One major, underappreciated development of the 21st century is that through a combination of improved surveillance technology and weaponised sociology, it is now basically impossible for a sufficiently entrenched dictatorship to be overthrown by popular movements.

[Muskan @_mussskan_]

only weak ppl with unstable emotions fear abt isolation

isolation is best thing to do, u learn detachment in isolation.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is a really fascinating paper that everyone interested in China's industrial policy should read.

It destroys so many myths (see below), and is written by deeply credible people who conducted over three years of fieldwork in China and interviewed 60+ Chinese officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers. When it comes to China studies, it literally doesn't get more rigorous than this.

First myth it destroys: contrary to popular belief, Beijing's industrial policy didn't build the companies that became China's EV champions. They rose largely **despite** it, through its cracks.

For sure, Beijing did favor EVs as an industry and pushed hard for it but their big bet was SOEs (State Owned Enterprises): research grants, pilot programs, licenses, cheap credit - virtually all of it flowed to state firms.

The result? China's actual EV champions - BYD, Geely, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, etc. - are overwhelmingly private firms that succeeded despite Beijing favoring their SOE competitors.

How so? Because, when favoring SOEs, the central government didn't just pick winning companies, it picked winning cities, each SOE being anchored in a specific city: Shanghai (SAIC), Changchun (FAW), Wuhan-Shiyan (Dongfeng), etc.

Which means that every city not on the list, that wanted a piece of the auto boom, had only one option left: team up with private entrepreneurs who were equally excluded from central government favor.

That's what truly fueled China's EV miracle: an alliance of the excluded, between local private entrepreneurs and local mayors.

This is the biggest misconception this paper destroys: the reality is that the "Chinese state capitalism" that many in the West think powered the EV boom actually tried to block many of these companies from existing. In effect, it was closer to an obstacle course that local actors (mayors and provinces) learned to game.

Geely - now the third largest automaker in China - is a fantastic example of this.

First of all, it started off illegal since, to build passenger cars, you had to have a central government license and they couldn't get one. Zhejiang Province told them to go ahead regardless because the province had hundreds of auto parts suppliers but no carmaker of its own.

It's only a couple of years later, recognizing the fait-accompli that Geely was producing cars and was competitive, that the central government admitted them to the National Sedan Catalog - effectively legalizing them retroactively because there were facts on the ground.

Then there was the Volvo acquisition in 2010, which is fair to say - looking back - proved to be the most strategically valuable acquisition in Chinese automotive history. Despite it being presented at the time (and still described this way today) as "China buying Volvo", all 3 major state-backed banks in China (Export-Import Bank, China Development Bank, Bank of China) refused to finance the deal. The only state-bank money Geely managed to get was a $200 million loan from a provincial branch of China Construction Bank - a tiny fraction of what the deal required.

Geely actually did the deal with Goldman Sachs money via Hong Kong plus loans and equity from four local governments (Chengdu, Zhangjiakou, Daqing, Shanghai's Jiading district), each of which bought in by securing a Volvo plant or headquarters for itself.

In effect, the doors that Beijing controlled were largely closed to Geely, but it made it because the doors subnational actors controlled were opened.

Which all means this paper destroys another very common myth: the big merit of the central government in all this was to be relatively chill about it, to NOT be dictatorial.

I just imagine if that had happened in France and you had - say - the mayor of Lyon or Marseilles open, fund and promote an unlicensed carmaker against Renault: the préfet would shut it down within weeks, and the mayor would be lucky to escape prosecution.

That's the irony: on industrial policy, the supposedly "totalitarian" Chinese state proved more tolerant of local defiance than most Western liberal democracies would be. Beijing's greatest contribution to the EV miracle wasn't the plan - it was looking the other way while the plan was being violated.

To be sure, the paper doesn't hide the costs of this system: ferocious local competition also produced what's known today in China as "involution" (内卷-Neijuan, basically a hypercompetitive price war), as well as some spectacular failures. For instance one county lost 6.6 billion yuan on a carmaker that never really made cars.

But that's precisely the point: this is a high-risk, high-reward model of decentralized experimentation, the very opposite of the careful central planning Westerners imagine.

I've repeated this countless times but it bears repeating again: the single greatest misconception people have about China is - probably because we wrongly associate communism with centralized control - that it is a monolith run from Beijing. Some even say it's run by "one man."

The reality is the exact opposite: China is, in practice, one of the most decentralized countries on earth. Roughly 85% of government spending in China happens at the subnational level - against about 30% in the average OECD country (and even less in France, which is actually one of the most centrally controlled countries on earth). A Chinese mayor commands fiscal resources, land, investment funds and policy latitude that virtually no Western mayor could dream of.

Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to mention what the paper has to say on the positive legacy of Mao and its role in the rise of EVs (given I myself wrote an article titled "Mao's economic record wasn't bad, actually": https://t.co/1NZgHqBHwg).

When it comes to China myths, none is more entrenched than the idea that Mao left behind nothing but ruins.

This paper confirms a key argument of my article: Mao's deliberate dispersal of industry across China (during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution decentralizations) left dozens of cities with their own small auto works. Inefficient, yes - but these scattered factories survived into the 1990s and became the seed stock of everything that followed: the industrial base, the engineers, and the production licenses that EV startups would use to enter the market.

The paper even says it outright: the fragmentation that industrial policy "sought to eradicate" is "precisely" what "ironically enabled" the EV sector's rapid rise.

This is exactly the mechanism I described in my Mao article: structures built in the Mao era - communes becoming township governments, commune enterprises becoming TVEs, Third Front factories seeding interior industrialization - became load-bearing foundations of the reform miracle.

Fittingly, the spark for China's first municipal carmaker adventure was literally a TVE (Township and Village Enterprise), the institutional descendants of Mao's commune enterprises: Tongbao, a kit-car maker in Wuhu whose success stunned local officials into building what became Chery (one of China's biggest carmakers today). You can't tell the story of China's EV miracle without crediting the legacy of Mao.

What's the biggest lesson in all this for Western policymakers?

The obvious one is that the part of industrial policy that most people assume China does and that they sometimes want to copy - i.e. the state picking winners - is actually the part that failed.

The part that did succeed is the China nobody in the West believes exists: a radically decentralized system with a high degree of tolerance for disobedience and experimentation.

We imagine China as a country where nothing happens without Beijing's approval when the reality is closer to the opposite: China's EV miracle happened precisely because localities asked for forgiveness rather than permission.

All in all, and this is the lesson I often come back to, this is yet another illustration of the importance of understanding China for what it is as opposed to the caricature we've built of it. This matters whichever "camp" you're in. If you see China as a rival, you can't compete with someone you don't understand. If you see them as a source of lessons, you can't emulate what you've misunderstood. Whatever you want from China - to compete with it or learn from it - the entry fee is the same: genuinely understanding it.

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

@nzemmili The only way Europe found for it to work was WW1 & 2. They killed each other so much that the scale astounded them even by their own historical standards.

EU is a modern day miracle, but only because of post WWII realities.

[Ulrich Speck @ulrichspeck]

This leaves the German-French relationship in bad shape. Yet there is no way out of the new reality in which Germany becomes a significant military power — in response to Russian aggression. France needs to adapt to that change. Both countries need to find a new balance.

[A-129 Mangusta @NichoConcu]

🇮🇹🇶🇦
Another rare look at the Italian M23 C-series midget Submarine destined for the Qatari Navy recently conducting some trials before delivery. 2 of these submarines have been purchased from M23 s.r.l, unfortunately info on this platform is quite scarce.

[Archy✝️ | Richard Nixon Democrat @ArchysLife]

Imagine being so incompetent that they not only lay you off but abolish your position

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

@ReHorizon3 @yourphilarmy What chassis is that?

[The Odd Tank Poster @KrypTanko]

Today's "Odd Tank" is the 🇫🇷 French 'Leclerc Evolution'

First revealed during Eurosatory 2024, this prototype MBT is based on an upgraded Leclerc hull. The tank uses the manned ASCALON turret which is a low profile turret that keeps the crew low in the hull for better protection and it has integrated TROPHY Active Protection Systems (a hard kill APS). Only one example has been built.

The main armament is a 120mm ASCALON gun, the turret system can also easily upgrade to the ASCALON 140mm gun.
Other weapons include a remote ARX30 30mm autocannon with airburst ammunition for anti-drone defense and a 3-tube launcher for loitering munitions.

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

@ReHorizon3 @TeamAFP The camo is 🔥

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

I wonder when we’d build jet fighters in Africa(Not including North Africa), are we ever going to compete at the global stage doing great things in Africa?

Our mediocrity is so tiring.

[Aeronaves Militares Españolas @Web_AME]

Con la suspensión del FCAS nos quedamos sin relevo para nuestros Eurofighter.
Pero algo más cercano y necesario es el relevo 2035/40 de nuestros EF-18M. Y que por ahora serán con Eurofighter (25 Halcón II) y..
Opciones:
El KAAN según resultados con el Hürjet y fechas cuadraría🤔

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

During the Cold War, America sold itself as the free world, the antithesis of the Iron Curtain. It’s 2026, hosting a World Cup while denying entry to match officials. They’ve inherited the role of the Iron Curtain.

[SG @04gully]

Chat is this normal for the WORLD cup?

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

I believe that they’re actually independent, just that the interest of exploitation is shared with the foreign capital.

You underestimate the sheer stupidity and selfishness of these men.

[Àyànfè @Danny456080]

Africa’s ruling class isn’t a fully independent bourgeoisie, they’re intermediaries.

They manage extraction on behalf of foreign capital in exchange for personal accumulation

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

@nwoko_greg62705 The long winding road remains just as long and winding today, but it is less beautiful now and littered.

[Greg Nwoko 🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬 @nwoko_greg62705]

How did 9th Mile at Enugu get its name: Photo: Circa 1940;

The bustling transit and industrial hub of 9th Mile (or Ninth Mile Corner) in Enugu got its name during the colonial era.

British engineers who were surveying and building roads to connect major cities calculated the distance from this specific crossroads to Enugu city, which measured exactly 9 miles.

Photo: Circa 1940;

"Signboard at a highway junction near Enugu", Eastern Region Nigeria.

Source: E. H. Duckworth Photograph Collection, Northwestern University Libraries' Digital Collections.

Now you know.
#followers

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

Similar to a criticism I shared about the Nigerian society few weeks ago.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[The Japan Times @japantimes]

South Korea insists its plan to build nuclear-powered submarines is aimed squarely at countering North Korea. But the decision carries implications far beyond this, with one country watching particularly closely: China. https://t.co/IkizhBNB6P

[CornerOfUnrest @UnlearnedLaw]

I’m always shocked at how developed Guadalajara is compared to its global perception as a capital of a drug infested region.

[julio⚡️Caronte @jmscaronte]

The Tactical Operations Group of the Jalisco State Police will provide security at the World Cup matches to be played in Zapopan.
#mexico

[European Propagandist 🇪🇺🏴‍☠️ @EuropaAdAstra]

So FCAS is now officially dead.
According to Merz they couldn't reach an agreement "because the Bundeswehr currently does not need a nuclear arms- and carrier-capable aircraft"

AAAAAAAA