Raja

terminally online / middle-aged uncle by twitter standards

[T. 📚☕️ @levantophile]

Unfortunately, the campaign against the Druze presence in Syria continues. This time, it took the form of a terrorist attack targeting a minibus in Jaramana, a Damascus suburb that is home to the capital region’s largest Druze community.

Caught between the existential trauma of last summer’s massacres and the continued state repression that followed those events, on the one hand, and the ongoing wave of kidnappings, random killings, and other acts of terror targeting Druze civilians, on the other, Syria’s Druze population is likely to decline precipitously in the years ahead.

Over the past year, there has already been a steady stream of Syrian Druze leaving for Lebanon or emigrating to established Druze diaspora communities, particularly in the Gulf states and West Africa. Their rapid disappearance from their ancestral homeland may come to resemble the fate of Iraq’s Christians, who constituted roughly 3% of Iraq’s population on the eve of the Iraq War, similar to the proportion Druze represent in Syria today.

That said, the future of the Druze in Syria, and their fate as a people as a whole, hinges largely on what happens in Suwayda. The outcome there will determine whether the Druze remain primarily rooted in their ancestral homelands in the Levant, as they have been for the past millennium, or whether they become a predominantly diasporic people dispersed across the world.

[Sylvar🌲 @TheSylvar]

Marx did not consider the fact that the proletariat deserve to be oppressed

[Raja @radiant_raja]

Based on QTs/comments, there are a lot of status games in LW circles regarding language that normie Indians don't know how to play

So when we do try to explain our POV to other people, they think we sound cringe or hysterical because we don't understand these language games

[Indian Aesthetics @IndianAesthetik]

genuinely asking why is indian left so hinduphobic? every religion had it's problem but their scrutiny is only for hinduism. hinduism is the oldest religion in the world, that gave yoga, meditation, mantras, vedas,etc but the level of hate?!

can anyone from left answer this?

[Raja @radiant_raja]

@sharghzadeh Retvrn to monke

[Pizza @number_pizza111]

India also willfully destroyed their textile industry because they thought starving it of machinery would force the capital goods to instead kickstart heavy industrial development.

Needless to say, it did not.

[Raja @radiant_raja]

@maa_bhaishiiH There are some Muslim leftists that do that. They pin the terrorism on Salafis and Wahhabis. China also does that when explaining what they're doing in Xinjiang. That it's a byproduct of the CIA/Saudis backing Salafi/Wahhabi Uyghur extremists in the region.

[Zoso🇺🇳(🇮🇶) @MesoAnglic]

In the 60s, Fairchild, that Fairchild, personally went to India because they wanted their first offshore manufacturer to be there.
They wanted to produce 10 million transistors yearly; the government explicitly told them to produce only 600k.
They decided to leave for Hong Kong.

[Raja @radiant_raja]

At least from a diaspora POV, a common perception that many 2nd gens have of a BJP supporter is a "rude uncouth foaming at the mouth WhatsApp uncle who gets ragebaited easily" (ex the guys having shouting matches on Indian TV)

Might not be fair, but this perception is common 🤷‍♂️

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

Why do conservative parents have children who turn leftist? I will narrate my own childhood experience.

I studied 6th to 9th standard in a free government aided school started by a DMK affiliated person. I did not hear any DMK messaging there.

Then 10th to 12th, I moved to a free school funded by an RSS affilated person and had an RSS man as trustee. I did not even know what the RSS was and heard nothing about the RSS as a student.

But in my 10th standard in that school, I had a Marxist Tamil teacher. His entire class was about the coming Marxist revolution (this was in 1982-83). For a period I became a Marxist and atheist thanks to him. I was 14.

He taught us to question everything and question authority and I asked him "Sir, when the revolution comes and everything is owned by the government, would everything become corrupt like the electricity board or the telephone department?" and he said "After the revolution, people will develop socialist consciousness and so everything will work better".

I could not accept that answer so Marxism lost its appeal for me but thanks to his influence that one year, I remained an atheist for many years. My mother saw this transformation in me (I used to be a religious kid) and always blamed him for it but even she would say "you must respect the Guru".

This is what conservative parents have to endure. Their very respect for the educational system has been weaponized by the Marxists.

Remember that the school had an RSS man as trustee and as a student I had not heard one word about RSS, yet the Marxist teacher was free to brainwash kids like me. That is right vs left for you.

[Raja @radiant_raja]

@Zoomerjeet There are many people who hate the Pakistani army, but for reasons that differ from why Indians hate them.

[Vishal Ganesan @vjgtweets]

This complaint about the Indian diaspora, the hang-wringing about the ideological deviance of Gen-Z protesters in India, the obsession with "deep state" conspiracies targeting India are all IMO downstream from a deep-seated Indian tendency to see all behavior and values as downstream from identity.

For Brahma, it is taken as a given that Indians will lobby on behalf of India's interests in America because, well, they are Indian. The fact that many of these Indians are grounded in American society, loyal to America, and consciously seeking American citizenship is irrelevant to this expectation.

Similarly, older Indians are at a loss to understand their own children because they are not capable of seeing them as individuals outside of the bounds of family, caste, religion, etc. In this context it is natural to attribute any national calamity or political failing to malicious outside forces b/c they can't grasp the fact that individuals, whether in India or abroad, might have an independent sense of self, with their own values and perspectives.

The cumulative effect of this tendency is a chronic unwillingness to engage in persuasion. The righteousness of one's cause is simply taken for granted, and someone's failure to understand that is reflexively chalked up to nefarious external forces.

[Kevork Almassian @KevorkAlmassian]

Surprise! Syria's first "diplomat" to the United States after ousting Assad has turned out to be a notorious terrorist in al-Qaeda.

[Raja @radiant_raja]

@TheEmissaryCo Negative polarization is pushing younger Indian Americans to get more cultured, but there's a chance they'll be South Asian-adjacent because of clownery like below

"Hindus and Muslims are teaming up to take over Texas and eradicate the Christians"

https://t.co/61VwxP9Dn2

[Carlos Turcios @Carlos__Turcios]

🚨FRISCO, TEXAS🚨Conservative activist Jake Lang SLAMMED the Frisco City Council, saying they are “selling out this country.” He pointed out how the Boy Scouts are now all Indians and how Hindus and Muslims are negatively transforming Frisco and Texas.

Follow:
@Carlos__Turcios

[TPS @thepeaceseekr]

This is Sofia Farooq Maududi, granddaughter of Jamat-e-Islami founder and ideological figure Abul Ala Maududi. Sofia is active in USA’s Republican politics (ট্রাম্পের পার্টি).
Her lapel pin nice 🎭

[RT @RT_com]

SAUDI ARABIA DOESN'T GET IRAN TREATMENT — TRUMP GREENLIGHTS URANIUM ENRICHMENT

Trump AGREES to 30-year, multi-billion-dollar DEAL to build Saudi Arabia's CIVILIAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM

WH says safeguards will ensure it cannot be diverted for 'MILITARY PURPOSES'

[Russians With Attitude @RWApodcast]

To be fair, pretty much everyone I know is more interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

So much grief is caused by structuring society around high-stakes bottlenecks—exams in South Korea and India, elite school admissions in the United States.

This is a social choice. It doesn't exist in Canada/Germany/Aus, where top colleges are widely accessible and you distinguish yourself by what you do in/after college, not before.

[Ankit M (Currently Inactive) @AnkitM997]

The narrative of being denied “education for 3,000 years” is laughable, simplistic, and anachronistic. Mass education is a very recent phenomenon, emerging largely with industrialisation and the modern bureaucratic state. For most of human history, in India as elsewhere, the+

[Swarajya @SwarajyaMag]

The most effective use of state power is often the one that leaves no mark at all. A durable political authority so often comes not using the harshest instruments, but from holding them back.

Think about it this way. When a government executes a terrorist, it wins the case and loses the story. The person becomes a martyr, and his cause outlives him by years. Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon are the examples the authors points to.

The government shouldn't be soft. It has to be precise. And precision, it turns out, is a far more devastating instrument than spectacle.

So what works better? The authors turn to Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore for the answer.

Their reading of his method is simple. Use only the minimum force needed to neutralise a challenge. Then quietly rebuild the system around it so the same challenge cannot recur.

The punitive act is just the trigger. The redesign is the prime act.

The central claim of the authors is that India's current establishment has begun operating on the same logic. And that the street protests keep failing for reasons this theory predicts.

They point to NGO licences cancelled through FCRA leaving no image of activists being dragged away. The clinical execution of Article 370 as a legislative resolution rather than conquest.

The point of the selectivity, they argue, is not to punish everyone but to make cooperation look safer than confrontation.

Read the full piece by Ritik Bhandari and Urvashi Agrawal — Leave No Martyrs: Why Calibrated Coercion Beats Brutal Force

https://t.co/tddb3AVNiu

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇵🇰 🇺🇸 Pakistan has asked the U.S. for a $10 billion “Bilateral Exchange Stabilization Support Facility,” a financial backstop with a maturity of up to five years, according to Reuters, as a reward for its role brokering talks between the U.S. and Iran.

The fund would be aimed at relieving pressure on Pakistan’s currency reserves and reducing its dependency on foreign financing, according to Reuters.

The request came as Pakistani Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb met Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Washington on Tuesday.

[Vishal Ganesan @vjgtweets]

I haven't been following the India protests that closely, but it seems to me that they reflect a basic contradiction in India's political economy that will naturally get more acute as the country grows economically. At a very basic level, the path to political power in India is through the rural poor and the farmers. This plays out at the central and state level, with governments at every level regularly extracting resources from surplus-producing urban areas to fund welfare for the hinterlands. As long as this basic political logic remains, Indian politicians will neglect the aspirations of the electorally insignificant urban middle class who form the bulk of the protesters.

The BJP has somewhat successfully bridged this divide through Hindutva politics: When it comes to economic policy they double down on rural development (water connections, electricity, welfare etc.) while pushing cultural and religious nationalism to satisfy the ascendant Hindu middle class that has the luxury of voting on ideological lines. But this is not sustainable in the long run. As the urban middle class grows, the demand for greater economic opportunity, a better standard of living, and the promise of a better future will naturally increase in intensity.

Retorts about the depredations of the Congress-era, even if true, are little consolation to the young who have only known BJP-led India. The reflexive tendency of BJP supporters to see protests as a "foreign conspiracy" reflects a basic inability to see the world through the eyes of others. That there are bad actors is no doubt true, but this does not detract from the legitimacy of the complaints about corruption, stagnation, urban misgovernance etc.

Modi and the BJP have spent years referring to their era of electoral dominance as a "golden age" of Indian economic and cultural regeneration. Turns out when you set expectations high, people will expect you meet them. Who would have thought?