I sympathise with your position, but I need to throw a contrary perspective in here.
China hasn't fully recovered from the century of humiliation. Taiwan and Hong Kong aren't healing scars, they're open wounds. Western governments are trying their damndest to open new ones in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet.
How does it look to the Chinese comrades when Western comrades, instead of agitating their governments to leave China alone, abandon the revolutionary cause in their countries and ask for land in China? I mean we can call it a commune but it's essentially land that belongs to the Chinese people carved out as a living space for foreigners.
Maybe the better request would have been "Yours is looking good, help me with mine?" instead of "yours is looking good, give me some of it?"
Anyway, I think your best bet if you want to press on with it is to find your nearest Confucius Institute and mail them or even drop in. One if the few remaining needs China has of foreigners is helping to build and safeguard community abroad.
You'll probably have an easier time finding work in Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan. It's a lot easier to find work as a foreigner in those places. You'll be able to work on the language and qualifications to try for something more.
I'm sorry. It can be really tough and stressful planning the next class after a situation like that. I've been there.
One thing I think you've probably learned the hard way is that the rapport you can build with students in private tuition just doesn't work in larger classrooms.
You say you're undergoing formal education as a school teacher - is there a professor on your course that you could consult?
Classroom management techniques will vary vastly between our cultures. The teacher-student-parent dynamic is so different in different countries.
What are kids like at that age in your culture? Do they get self-conscious about how they look to their peers when they engage with teachers or anything like that?
With students in my culture, if I'd just gone through a class like the one you described, my next lesson plan would be very dry. Limited engagement, brief explanation of concepts and straight to textbook exercises and dictation. Trust was given last lesson and it was abused, so now trust is withheld. But that's with my culture. It might land very, very different with your studets.
That's why I think consulting one of the professors where you're studying would be the best course of action. The best advice will clme from there, or from your senior colleagues at the school (the ones who know you were hired 'early' in your training).
I have an Israeli friend living in Israel. I stayed with him and his family a while. They're good people. The bomb shelter/home cinema in the basement and automated armoured shutters on their windows were dissonant to the rest of the peaceful community vibe.
But it's the same with any Western community. The 'normal' creature comforts and luxury compared to the rest of the world is dressed benignly but it's all predicated on robbing the rest of the world. Israel was only different in that it's on a part of the global border between colonizers and colonized where the border is actively being pushed.
What's happening in Israel now is coming for the rest of the imperialist core as that core is stripped down like layers of an onion. It may come in the form of militants driving down your street taking their homes back, or it may come in the form of your energy bill shooting up because in some far-off land someone decided not to let your government steal their uranium anymore.
People are going to think they're being unjustly victimized because they're ignorant to the fact that they've been complicit in the victimization of others. And that's why westerners are so suddenly willfully ignoring what Israel has been doing to Palestine in plain sight: because as westerners their governments are doing the same, albeit more subtly. They're more than ready to acknowledge the crimes, but they're not ready to pay reparations beyond empty gestures.
I'd be disappointed if it wasn't so predictable. Instead I'm just disgusted.
And the disgust is mostly at the arrogance: they seem to think they have moral authority. If Israel sets off nukes, Westerners will make excuses for it.
If this liberation of the global South succeeds, the West will continue to be insist on being treated as first among equals in international discourse.
One group is dominant, controlling government and military
One group has higher social status, enjoying more rights and freedom of movement, while the oppressed group has no constitutional protections against its rights and property being revoked to make more room for settlers
The oppressed group is severely restricted in terms of movement, funding of public facilities, and legal protection
The dominant group uses collective punishment on the entirety of the oppressed group when it retaliates.
Groups are socially, economically and physically separated
At some level they know that if they engage with politics like you do, and acknowledge and learn the things you learn, they'll end up like you. So they don't. They protect the narrative that lets them chill in ignorance, even if your talks with them make them aware that they're embracing self-deception. Why?
They can see how angry and frustrated you are, and how little there is you can do to change anything. And they don't want to give up the comfort of being dumb fucking liberals for that.
So thing is, you've got to be chill about your passions. No you're not elitist, you're angry and impassioned. Don't make being a communist look like the most frustrating miserable option available to an American. Lower your expectation of how much difference you'll individually make and let the pressure off. The reality is, where you are in the world, you can't do much more than educate and spread class consciousness, and trying to do more will sabotage your ability to do even that. Keep your cool when liberals open their mouths, ask questions that lead them to their contradictions.
Don't judge yourself as a communist by your results - you'll frustrate yourself. Judge yourself by the work you put in towards those results.
@yogthos@mas.to is a good follow for leftist stuff. Posts a lot of good stuff, and reposts (boosts) a lot of other leftists which makes them a great way to discover more people.
toots.matapacos.dog is a leftist server, so looking in the local timeline there is another good place to find people to follow.
Remember that to follow someone on a different server, you can't click 'follow' while on the other server's page. Search for the user (@username@server) to get them in the search results of your own server pages, and follow from there.
Maybe he's as bad as The West insists he is. Maybe all the evidence of his war crimes and crimes against humanity are real and not fabricated.
It doesn't matter.
We Westerners (and we people discussing it in English) are the last people entitled to an opinion after what we did to Libya and Iraq. Maybe a lot of people here were just kids when Libya was destroyed, and a lot of people here weren't alive when Iraq was destroyed, but when you say "this Assad guy seems a little off" that's what leftists were saying about Qaddafi with his weird plastic surgery lips and chin and his 'Bodyguard Harem'.
We don't get to sit here and weigh up the mountains of evidence against Assad and discuss amongst ourselves what's real and fake and come up with a net positive or negative opinion. Every time those kinds of discussions has happened in English, it's just ended up enabling and approving atrocities.
We need to recognize that we don't have enough reliable information about him - especially those of us in The West - and we need to recognize that feeling the need to have an opinion is a symptom of our interventionist culture.
Just imagine being dragged kicking and screaming from your carboard boxes behind a dumpster by the local cadre and through the front door of one of these monstrosities. Staring despondently into the distance as the cadre official explains that they've drawn a warm bath for you, that there are fresh towels in the airing cupboard and she'll leave the keys on the kitchen counter.
Imagine how worried you'd be if they did that to a family member.
You might as well be describing the founding members of the CPC on a boat on Nanhu Lake 100 years ago.
Or many of the people in this community, for that matter.
I sympathise with your position, but I need to throw a contrary perspective in here.
China hasn't fully recovered from the century of humiliation. Taiwan and Hong Kong aren't healing scars, they're open wounds. Western governments are trying their damndest to open new ones in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet.
How does it look to the Chinese comrades when Western comrades, instead of agitating their governments to leave China alone, abandon the revolutionary cause in their countries and ask for land in China? I mean we can call it a commune but it's essentially land that belongs to the Chinese people carved out as a living space for foreigners.
Maybe the better request would have been "Yours is looking good, help me with mine?" instead of "yours is looking good, give me some of it?"
Anyway, I think your best bet if you want to press on with it is to find your nearest Confucius Institute and mail them or even drop in. One if the few remaining needs China has of foreigners is helping to build and safeguard community abroad.
Audiobooks and some meditative activity/chore?
You'll probably have an easier time finding work in Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan. It's a lot easier to find work as a foreigner in those places. You'll be able to work on the language and qualifications to try for something more.
I'm sorry. It can be really tough and stressful planning the next class after a situation like that. I've been there.
One thing I think you've probably learned the hard way is that the rapport you can build with students in private tuition just doesn't work in larger classrooms.
You say you're undergoing formal education as a school teacher - is there a professor on your course that you could consult?
Classroom management techniques will vary vastly between our cultures. The teacher-student-parent dynamic is so different in different countries.
What are kids like at that age in your culture? Do they get self-conscious about how they look to their peers when they engage with teachers or anything like that?
With students in my culture, if I'd just gone through a class like the one you described, my next lesson plan would be very dry. Limited engagement, brief explanation of concepts and straight to textbook exercises and dictation. Trust was given last lesson and it was abused, so now trust is withheld. But that's with my culture. It might land very, very different with your studets.
That's why I think consulting one of the professors where you're studying would be the best course of action. The best advice will clme from there, or from your senior colleagues at the school (the ones who know you were hired 'early' in your training).
I have an Israeli friend living in Israel. I stayed with him and his family a while. They're good people. The bomb shelter/home cinema in the basement and automated armoured shutters on their windows were dissonant to the rest of the peaceful community vibe.
But it's the same with any Western community. The 'normal' creature comforts and luxury compared to the rest of the world is dressed benignly but it's all predicated on robbing the rest of the world. Israel was only different in that it's on a part of the global border between colonizers and colonized where the border is actively being pushed.
What's happening in Israel now is coming for the rest of the imperialist core as that core is stripped down like layers of an onion. It may come in the form of militants driving down your street taking their homes back, or it may come in the form of your energy bill shooting up because in some far-off land someone decided not to let your government steal their uranium anymore.
People are going to think they're being unjustly victimized because they're ignorant to the fact that they've been complicit in the victimization of others. And that's why westerners are so suddenly willfully ignoring what Israel has been doing to Palestine in plain sight: because as westerners their governments are doing the same, albeit more subtly. They're more than ready to acknowledge the crimes, but they're not ready to pay reparations beyond empty gestures.
I'd be disappointed if it wasn't so predictable. Instead I'm just disgusted.
And the disgust is mostly at the arrogance: they seem to think they have moral authority. If Israel sets off nukes, Westerners will make excuses for it.
If this liberation of the global South succeeds, the West will continue to be insist on being treated as first among equals in international discourse.
Racial segragation
One group is dominant, controlling government and military
One group has higher social status, enjoying more rights and freedom of movement, while the oppressed group has no constitutional protections against its rights and property being revoked to make more room for settlers
The oppressed group is severely restricted in terms of movement, funding of public facilities, and legal protection
The dominant group uses collective punishment on the entirety of the oppressed group when it retaliates.
Groups are socially, economically and physically separated
From the river to the sea ❤️
Full video of the speech and Q&A is in this article: https://www.rt.com/russia/584154-putin-valdai-club-speech/
It's a coping mechanism on their part.
At some level they know that if they engage with politics like you do, and acknowledge and learn the things you learn, they'll end up like you. So they don't. They protect the narrative that lets them chill in ignorance, even if your talks with them make them aware that they're embracing self-deception. Why?
They can see how angry and frustrated you are, and how little there is you can do to change anything. And they don't want to give up the comfort of being dumb fucking liberals for that.
So thing is, you've got to be chill about your passions. No you're not elitist, you're angry and impassioned. Don't make being a communist look like the most frustrating miserable option available to an American. Lower your expectation of how much difference you'll individually make and let the pressure off. The reality is, where you are in the world, you can't do much more than educate and spread class consciousness, and trying to do more will sabotage your ability to do even that. Keep your cool when liberals open their mouths, ask questions that lead them to their contradictions.
Don't judge yourself as a communist by your results - you'll frustrate yourself. Judge yourself by the work you put in towards those results.
@yogthos@mas.to is a good follow for leftist stuff. Posts a lot of good stuff, and reposts (boosts) a lot of other leftists which makes them a great way to discover more people.
toots.matapacos.dog is a leftist server, so looking in the local timeline there is another good place to find people to follow.
Remember that to follow someone on a different server, you can't click 'follow' while on the other server's page. Search for the user (@username@server) to get them in the search results of your own server pages, and follow from there.
Usually it's the breath. We all have the same breath because we all use the same toothbrush.
Maybe he's as bad as The West insists he is. Maybe all the evidence of his war crimes and crimes against humanity are real and not fabricated.
It doesn't matter.
We Westerners (and we people discussing it in English) are the last people entitled to an opinion after what we did to Libya and Iraq. Maybe a lot of people here were just kids when Libya was destroyed, and a lot of people here weren't alive when Iraq was destroyed, but when you say "this Assad guy seems a little off" that's what leftists were saying about Qaddafi with his weird plastic surgery lips and chin and his 'Bodyguard Harem'.
We don't get to sit here and weigh up the mountains of evidence against Assad and discuss amongst ourselves what's real and fake and come up with a net positive or negative opinion. Every time those kinds of discussions has happened in English, it's just ended up enabling and approving atrocities.
We need to recognize that we don't have enough reliable information about him - especially those of us in The West - and we need to recognize that feeling the need to have an opinion is a symptom of our interventionist culture.
Just imagine being dragged kicking and screaming from your carboard boxes behind a dumpster by the local cadre and through the front door of one of these monstrosities. Staring despondently into the distance as the cadre official explains that they've drawn a warm bath for you, that there are fresh towels in the airing cupboard and she'll leave the keys on the kitchen counter.
Imagine how worried you'd be if they did that to a family member.
Happy National Day everyone!
Xi Jinping's instagram has been posting a bunch of parade videos.
In Hong Kong we're getting a long weekend; the public holiday was moved to tomorrow and Saturday was a holiday as well for the moon festival.
Bring back Biarritz and attach it to an independent Basque Country and you have my support
"Invasion has been going on for a while" says the first comment.
Yeah no shit, the US started it's invasion of Mexico in 1846 and it's about time they fucked off.
If you want to be a teacher in Hong Kong mow, you have to sit an exam on the constitution and on the Hong Kong National Security Law.
Best guess: before 2030.
Best guess, specific year: 2024.
Too busy to type out a 'why' but just want to throw my prediction into the hat.