Sheu Jeen 🍉

Social anthropologist | Crazy plant lady | @SOAS 2020/21 | @WWFMy | Views are my own

[Adrian Pereira #ViralisingSolidarity @liberationxxx]

When the most marginalised and vulnerable are oppressed, like the refugees in Malaysia, intellectuals & academia have a duty to speak out and defend them.

In Malaysia, intellectuals & academia will do focus group discussions, seminars & journal writing while the oppressed get brutalised by the state.

[شكينة @_nsyakinah]

nak ajar korang istilah baru
“third spaces” ruang ketiga, iaitu tempat untuk orang selain daripada rumah dan sekolah/tempat kerja.

third spaces sangaaaat penting untuk wellbeing masyarakat, terutamanya golongan muda. sepupu i kat AS bila jumpa kita kat msia

[aidil @climateaidil]

Why do we lack clear, consultative processes for this kind of development in KL? Are lands in the city just for corporate & capitalist expansions?

Stop investing in malls & data centres. Start investing in public facilities & green spaces that benefit the people’s wellbeing.

[aidil @climateaidil]

Just letting you know that the Department of Environment (DOE) has banned Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports from being downloaded because of “national security” reasons.

This means rural, coastal & indigenous communities will have the hardest time assessing EIAs.

[Norman Goh @imnormgoh]

🚨 TW: Femicide, gender-based violence

This is not just “another tragic case.”
This is brutality. This is targeted. This is systemic.

A 19-year-old student was stabbed 61 times and police say jealousy was the motive. Sixty-one times is not rage in a moment. It is overkill, possession and control.

We need to stop pretending these are isolated incidents. They are not.

This is what gender-based violence looks like when it escalates. This is what happens when entitlement over women’s bodies and choices is normalised, minimised, or laughed off.

Call it what it is: femicide and gender-based violence.

We’ve seen this pattern before, from the Bandar Utama school stabbing to countless unreported cases where violence is excused as “jealousy,” “relationship issues,” or “loss of control.”

But jealousy is not a motive, this is a justification people hide behind.

The real issue is deeper than trying to find out who did it but a slithering toxic culture. A culture that teaches men they are entitled to women. This is very wrong.

A society that tolerates misogyny until it turns violent. An online ecosystem where incel thinking quietly radicalises young men. This is not about one man. This is about a system that keeps producing them.

And if we don’t confront it openly, honestly, uncomfortably, it will keep happening. Over and over again.

Enough with headlines. Action now.

[Helter Skelter @Roshinee_M]

can't believe this random girl actually got 425 Malaysians to sign her rare parliamentary petition to discipline truant MPs 🤯 but now she wants to get 1K signatures pulak??

here is the full scoop on this story 🧵

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

This takes courage…

The Strokes closed their Coachella set flashing images of the governments the CIA has overthrown, the leaders the US has assassinated including MLK 👀, the war crimes the US is committing in Iran, and the genocide Israel is committing in occupied Palestine.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong.

If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough and governments did what’s in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about this. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.

You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more you learn about the way the world works, the more insane it all looks to you.

Have you ever had to explain war to a young child? It’s terrible. If you’re actually honest with them about what war is and why it is waged, it completely shatters their understanding of the world. They look at you like they’ve suddenly been transported into a strange alien universe where everything is backward.

Their reaction is correct. That is the sane and normal way to look at war. All the freakish mental contortions we do to try and normalize it is what’s crazy.

Everything about this dystopia is like this. If you could see it all with fresh eyes, you would scream in horror. The only reason anyone finds any of this tolerable is because we have become desensitized and accustomed to the madness.

Seeing somebody sleeping on the sidewalk should feel like a punch in the stomach. Seeing children killed by bombs on your social media feed should stop your whole world.

The fact that there are plutocrats profiting from war and militarism.

The fact that billionaire corporations are integrating surveillance technology into every facet of our society.

The fact that we’re destroying our biosphere and driving families into poverty to maximize shareholder value.

The fact that oligarchy has turned democracy into a sham where our votes don’t make any real difference.

The fact that there are people in the global south who are living like slaves so that those of us in the imperial core can have cheap bread and circuses to keep us docile and distracted.

We all know deep down inside that these are intolerable abuses, but they’ve been so normalized and compartmentalized in our psychology that it all just fades into this kind of eerie dissonance in the background of our attention.

The more conscious you become of what’s going on in the world, the more that dissonance moves into the foreground, and the less tolerable this dystopia becomes for you. As Terence McKenna said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

And that’s a good thing. Injustice and abuse should not feel tolerable. We should allow our discomfort with this intolerable situation to drive us to action and resistance.

And as uncomfortable as it can feel to stare into the unmasked face of the empire in all its beastly fury, this clarity also brings with it a degree of relief, because when it comes online you finally understand why nothing has ever felt right about this civilization you were born into. You understand that your intuitive discomfort and revulsion you felt as a child at the madness you were being indoctrinated into accepting was one hundred percent accurate, and that everyone who taught you to accept the unacceptable was wrong.

Trust that childhood intuition. You’ve always had the truth inside you. Let it guide you as you read and inform yourself to help your mind catch up with what you already know in your heart. Let your heart inform your mind, let your mind inform your actions, and let your actions help awaken humanity to the truth we’ve been hiding from ourselves all these years.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They took the gold.

They took the diamonds.

They took the rubber.

They took the ivory.

They took the palm oil.

They took the copper.

They took the uranium, including the uranium used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which came from the Belgian Congo.

They took the labor, for centuries, in chains, across an ocean, in the largest forced migration in human history.

They took the land.

They took the governance structures and replaced them with administrative systems designed to serve extraction.

They took the educated class and either exiled, imprisoned, or assassinated those who resisted.

They took Patrice Lumumba and had him killed.

They took Thomas Sankara and had him killed.

They took the future these men represented and replaced it with regimes that served the extraction.

And then they looked at what remained and called it proof that Africa could not govern itself.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

If there were a thousand people living on an island, and one of them was making life miserable for everyone else, soon there would be 999 people living on the island.

How strange, then, that a few oligarchs and empire managers get to push around an entire planet full of humans.

I mean, right now we're all sitting around hoping a few sociopaths in Washington and Tel Aviv don't collapse the global economy with their reckless warmongering against Iran. There are so many of us and so few of them, and yet everyone's sitting around going "Golly gosh I sure hope I'll be able to afford food in the next few months, hopefully the orange guy acts sane and normal for a while so my family gets to eat."

These are not gods sitting on Mount Olympus exerting omnipotent control over our fate from on high. These are ordinary men with ordinary flesh and bone bodies, walking upon the same earth we walk on. They have soft skin and internal organs. Their heads must remain firmly attached to their necks if they're to continue to draw breath.

And yet they are permitted to terrorize the people with whom they share a planet.

I am reminded of a quote from Scientific American about an Inuit tribe's perspective on the problem of psychopathy:

"In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe 'a man who … repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women—someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.' When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, 'Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.'”

In our society, we do not push psychopaths off the ice when nobody is looking. In our society, we let them rule the world.

We've set up systems which elevate those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top, and which protect them once they get there. The ones with the most wealth are the ones who crushed their competitors and exploited the working class the most ruthlessly. The ones who get elected to office are the ones who agree to protect the interests of the rich and powerful no matter how underhanded they have to be. The ones who get promoted to leadership in the military and spy agencies are the ones who've demonstrated unwavering loyalty to the bloodthirsty empire they serve.

These systems shield people from the natural consequences of their actions. If you have a lot of money your survival doesn't depend on getting along with the other members of your tribe; you can just buy whatever services you need, and you can treat the people providing those services like garbage if you pay them enough. If you get elected to office your survival doesn't depend on advancing the interests of the electorate; you can be as horrible as you like and rely on your security services to protect you.

This is a perversion of the natural order of things. The rich and the powerful should not be allowed to do whatever they want to us and get away with it. They are massively outnumbered. Everything they have, they only have because of us.

Their wealth is dependent on workers and consumers. Their power is dependent on our collectively agreeing to treat made-up rules about government and law like real things. Their lives are dependent on our collectively agreeing not to turn against them in massive numbers and tear them to pieces.

We can have revolutionary change whenever we want to. We already have the numbers. All we need is the will.

[Sheu Jeen 🍉 @sheujeen]

Retired residents find new purpose tending to plants at Klang riverbank https://t.co/K8gZheWemN

[SIS Forum Malaysia @SISForumMY]

When a woman chooses to move forward, why does society push back?

The recent engagement of Bella Astillah has sparked not just celebration but also a wave of criticism.

Across platforms, including posts circulating, some comments question:

“Why move on so fast?”
“Shouldn’t she focus on her children instead?”
“Is this appropriate after what happened before?”

These are not just casual opinions. They reflect something deeper about how women are judged.

[James Chin @jameschin110]

RENOWNED historian Ranjit Singh Malhi has apparently rued the fact that Orang Asli have almost disappeared from Malaysian secondary school history textbooks today.

There is no reference to them as the indigenous people or “first people” of Peninsular Malaysia despite a 2019 Form Four History textbook having described them as “the original people of Tanah Melayu“.“To me, the erasure of this basic historical truth is nothing less than an ‘intellectual crime’,” he opined in a recent statement posted on the Facebook page of NGO Centre for Orang Asli Concerns (COAC).“Previous generations of Malaysian history textbooks acknowledged the Orang Asli with honesty and respect, providing pupils with a proper account of their existence and recognising them as the ‘original inhabitants of Tanah Melayu“.”

“Malaysia was not built by a single ethnic or religious group. It was forged through the blood, sweat, sacrifice and hard work of the many communities – of different ethnicities, cultures and beliefs – who together shaped this country. “History must be told as it really happened, not as we wish it to happen. Only when history is told honestly and inclusively can it achieve its highest purpose: to unite a nation and inspire its people.”

Prior to defending the Oramg Asli, Ranjit has previously heavily criticised Malaysian history textbooks for omitting or downplaying the crucial role of Yap Ah Loy in re-building and developing Kuala Lumpur. He argues that modern KL was developed largely by Yap Ah Loy, arguing against attempts to diminish the roles of Chinese and Indian pioneers. As the Orang Asli community vouched for the correctness of Ranjit’s statement, rightists – presumably those with Malay supremacy complex – accused him of trying “to pit the Bumiputera (son of the soil) community in a fight”. – March 16, 2026

#Malaysia #SpeakTruth #FirstPeople #FakeHistory
https://t.co/9dfwfb3Pdk

[Maryam @hell_line0]

I walked into a restaurant bathroom yesterday and a man changing a baby at the changing table apologized profusely about being in the ladies room. I was like you’re good. My immediate feeling was not “oh dear how can I pee in the same place as a man?” It was “it’s 2026, how tf are places still not putting changing tables in all the bathrooms?”

[BFM News @NewsBFM]

The Pahang Orang Asli community has appealed to Sultan Abdullah to reconsider his statement denying the existence of customary land in the state.

"Tanah tersebut adalah tanah adat yang kami warisi dari nenek moyang kami, dan tanah kehidupan kami," they said.

🧵1

[Maryam @hell_line0]

The birth rate in South Korea is plummeting exponentially. This is a collective quote from the women there; “I will not give birth to a life that will discriminate against my gender, my own flesh and blood must not become a blade turned against me. If the world born from my body oppresses me, I will not let that world exist.”
This ignites my whole soul. Women have the ability to collectively decide to end civilization unless things change. That my friends, is what real power looks like.

[BFM News @NewsBFM]

The Madani government increased its use of draconian laws by 23.3% in 2025, said the Centre for Independent Journalism.

Its report noted a shift away from the Najib-era focus on political targeting, as enforcement now addresses both political criticism and public morality.

🧵1

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

The attempts by Western institutions to normalise Israel since the ceasefire are disgusting and absurd.

First, Israel has not stopped killing Palestinians, and by all accounts is eager to do more of it.

Second, you do not normalise with a state for stopping a genocide. You isolate them until the genocidal government has been dismantled, the perpetrators have been arrested and prosecuted, and reparations have been made.

They want us to let bygones be bygones, sweep the pesky genocide under the rug. We will never accept this.

[Arif Rafhan @ArifRafhanDraw]

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