news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
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To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
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To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
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To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
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Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
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Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
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Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
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Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
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Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
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Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
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Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
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American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
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Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
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AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
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Oh, 100%. It's a well-known phenomenon. The most famous recent example is "Leprechaun Economics" in Ireland. In 2015, their GDP supposedly grew by a completely insane 26%. Everyone knew this was fantasy. It turned out to be almost entirely on-paper growth from a few tech and pharma multinationals, like Apple, moving their massive IP assets to Ireland for tax purposes. It had basically nothing to do with the actual domestic Irish economy, which was just chugging along. The distortion was so bad that Ireland's own statisticians had to invent a new metric, Modified Gross National Income, just to filter out the "leprechaun" money and get a realistic view of their own economy.
This is just a modern, high-tech version of the classic Dutch Disease where a particular sector booms, and foreign money floods in, which makes the country's currency super strong. That sounds good, but it's a disaster for every other sector. Suddenly, local farmers and factories can't export anything because their goods are too expensive on the world market. So, while the headline GDP looks great, the rest of the economy, especially manufacturing and agriculture, gets hollowed out and stagnates.
It also happens in non-resource economies. A good example would be island nations like the Maldives, where tourism is the entire economy. Or think of countries like Switzerland or Luxembourg, where the financial sector is so enormous that its performance can easily mask underlying weaknesses in their domestic retail or manufacturing sectors. So yeah, it's very common for analysts to have to surgically remove a single, over-performing sector from the data just to see what the actual health of the economy looks like. The headline GDP number is more of a statistical illusion than a useful metric in these cases.