iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 2h

I'm sure the offshore counties will be really happy to lose their only direct connections to Taipei. Taoyuan will ofc be thrilled to add more flights to the over capacity terminals (that they'll have to segregate for domestic flights now)

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Bob From Brockley @bobfrombrockley.bsky.social · 16h

Vital reporting by the great journalist @chloehadj.bsky.social who tracked down a key witness to the 2018 Douma chemical weapons atrocity. At 11, Hassan was locked up & forced to give false testimony on film, used in Assad/Putin’s disinformation campaign… observer.co.uk/news/interna...

observer.co.uk

At 11 he was forced to lie about Assad’s chlorine attack....

After a video showed Hassan Diab in the aftermath of a chemical attack on Douma, Syria and Russia pushed him to call it a fiction. Eight years later, he and his family finally feel safe enough to spea...

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 16h

Quite a lot of Indigenous place names hidden under layers of hokkien+japanese+mandarin reinterpretations that people just never realise, which I also wrote a bit about a little while ago www.taipeitimes.com/News/editori...

taipeitimes.com

Names can tell us more of Taiwan’s whole story - Taipei Times

Bringing Taiwan to the World and the World to Taiwan

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 17h

There are more places I have an easy internet connection than I have a reliable mobile signal

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The interpreter should also frankly be expelled from the profession for the blatant ethical and professional violations of refusing to interpret phrases they happened to disagree with

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Do you think a country that gets its embassies to go out of their way to force the cancellation of local book talks at the risk of causing a diplomatic incident, just because of the author's nationality, is going to be open to reasonable dialogue www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/...

taipeitimes.com

China pressured Munich institute to cancel author event - Taipei Times

The Chinese consulate in Munich last week unsuccessfully pressured a local literary institute to cancel a talk by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi (楊?子), said Chao Yen-ching (趙彥清), director-general of ...

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Niao Collective @niaocollective.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There’s a reason you see ‘Disney-fied’ Shangri-La and Kashgar and this is it: sanitized versions of these places erase distinct cultural identity, which in turn means the people there are easier to assimilate into the greater China project

For the Communist Party, the battle for ethnic Tibetan hearts and minds runs
through this path to prosperity. By bringing ethnic Tibetans into a more urbanized, Mandarin-speaking mainstream, they are raising living conditions while also seeking to extinguish a sense of distinctness that has fueled fears in Beijing of separatist sentiment.

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Median class size this semester is only 5 damn I really bored/scared everyone away huh

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The US role, especially in the anti Assad part, is basically a handful of slap on the wrist sanctions over literal war crimes and a couple of runways having to be repaired

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Aron Lund @aronlund.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Former OPCW IIT investigator Al Borrelli argues that Russia could not, by 2018, have been unaware of the Syrian Tiger Forces’ habit of using chlorine, and concludes that Russia’s level of insight or involvement in the Douma attack should be investigated. commandwatch.substack.com/p/russia-the...

commandwatch.substack.com

Russia, the Tiger Forces, and the Douma Chemical Attack

An analysis of the Eastern Ghouta campaign and what Russian operational integration means for understanding what happened in Douma in 2018.

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Global Voices @globalvoices.org · 01/10/2026

Beijing is carrying an older geography of extraction into the AI era, turning Uyghur land, energy and labour into computing power while remaining silent about coercion and surveillance. Donate to support our #GVSpotlight: globalvoices.org/2026/08/24...

globalvoices.org

West-to-east energy, east-to-west computing: The Uyghur costs of China’s digital order

Beijing is carrying an older geography of extraction into the AI era, turning Uyghur land, energy and labour into computing power while remaining silent about coercion and surveillance.

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Iirc Beijing has imposed a semi-official ban on Chinese filmmakers participating in the Golden Awards for a good few years now

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Merz's CDU teaming up with the modern nazis to ban a holocaust memorial project in one town, if you were believing the party was actually taking the AfD threat seriously www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

theguardian.com

The German town where the right has banned new ‘stumbling stones’ for Nazi victims

Heidenau council has halted the laying of Stolpersteine installed to remember individual victims of the Nazis

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Don't worry they excluded all the corruption charges from it

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Why even have a court at this point (this may well be the KMT's aim tbf)

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Court of experienced constitutional experts to interpret what's allowed? No! the Median Voter knows how it all really works

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We're never getting a real social safety net are we

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Double Ten Day celebrates an uprising that happened in China at a time when Taiwan literally wasn't even nominally part of the country. Many people still hate the connotations in Taiwan! But Beijing manages to fumble and force everyone's hand to shifting views

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's ironic that Double Ten day is an extremely ROC feature inherited by Taiwan but Beijing's sheer refusal to acknowledge or accept *anything* done differently in Taiwan has somehow pushed it in recent years into becoming a fully localised Taiwanese national day

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YTSL @ytsl.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

“The Chinese government’s ongoing reliance on torture isn’t a function of gaps in law or process—it’s a political choice,” said @sophiedrich.bsky.social... “When every safeguard against torture is ignored—year after year, nationwide—impunity for police, courts, and officials is all but guaranteed.”

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Got the card so now I can celebrate again

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

There was a lot of this kind of discourse during Trump 1 because he put on this kind of rhetoric and (probably accidentally) answered Tsai's phone call. Until Biden it also didn't help pro/anti China perceptions in Taiwan that Democrat presidents almost always coincided with KMT presidents

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

As an unrecognised nation Taiwanese often put a lot of weight on these kinds of symbolic things, and there's still a lot of lingering faith in the "anti communism" alliance of the cold war, despite what the world is now

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The worst part of this isn't Beijing's inevitable (mostly inconsequential) tantrum over it but actually another round of Taiwanese convinced republicans are on their side (and Democrats somehow not) because they accidentally said the magic word

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Eli Friedman @elifriedman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"Two Day Weekend Shopping" 双休购 is an app that allowed Chinese consumers to shop at businesses that provide workers with a real two day weekend, based on worker-provided info. The app blew up, reflecting widespread dissatisfaction with overwork. Then it was banned.

bbc.com

「雙休購」的爆紅與下架：一個網購平臺如何撬動中國勞工權益討論 - BBC News 中文

提倡雙休的民間自發平台「雙休購」曇花一現後快速被下架，中國打工人開始在社交媒體上要求雙休正當權利。學者指這樣的消費抵制是正向的發展。

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Niao Collective @niaocollective.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Note how a good number of activists were convicted under British colonial-era sedition laws

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

OK but writing labour really annoys the labourites

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I need some beef noodle soup it's been a while

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Niao Collective @niaocollective.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

A reminder that functional constituencies basically grant business interests more voting power than your average citizen in HK

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

They can't just keep banging on about AI when half the country isn't feeling any of the boom. They've lost the vision they once had and risk losing it to the KMT, whose vision is just pain and destruction but are the only viable alternative

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The DPP continues to invite disaster with these bare minimum wage increases. There will be a time (already passed for local elections) when identity just won't cut it to span the growing wealth gap www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/a...

taipeitimes.com

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

They definitely held last year's raise to $29,500 just so they could do the big 30 for the election

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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The Knesset barred today the only two Palestinian led parties from running in the coming election. According to an overwhelming majority in the Knesset, the constitutional meaning of a Jewish State is a state where Palestinian citizens cannot run for parliament.

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Nathan Ruser @nrg8000.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A BBC Verify investigation found that Apple Maps' censoring of Chinese Military and Government sites has included arbitrary detention sites in Xinjiang, including the prison where Ilham Tohti is detained. Watch the investigation.

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Is it a good that the rising power's only two consistent guiding principles are insisting on its inherent right to invade a neighbour and ignore human rights

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I never figured if it was a complement or insult and now I want to know even less

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It is not a good time to be someone people semi regularly say resembles a certain UK singer

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YTSL @ytsl.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Periodic reminder that the most recent time that actual democratic elections were held in Hong Kong (back in November 2019), the result was a "yellow (pro-democracy) tsunami". Re the map below: if the Islands District had fully consisted of elected officials, it would have been yellow too.

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Eli Friedman @elifriedman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

“If you want to organise a public event, anything explicitly related to feminism or LGBT issues is basically not possible, at least in Beijing." Great news that she's out, but this article highlights how much worse things are now than in 2018... which in turn was more restrictive than 2010.

theguardian.com

‘People had naive expectations’: How MeToo has changed in China

On Friday, MeToo journalist Sophia Huang Xueqin was released from prison. She returns to a landscape changed by censorship, and a new generation of feminists

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Niao Collective @niaocollective.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A reminder that as much as CCP is ‘socialist’ and workers of the world unite and all that, China treats its workers appallingly

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Thomas Batchelor @tobbinatorscw.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

A key part to becoming a world power is developing a new crank theory that your people got to New Zealand before Maori did and simply disappeared

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Sinan Kose @thesinankose.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Genuinely: where is the Prime Minister? Critical infrastructure has been occupied by a fascist paramilitary, volunteers who save people's lives have been threatened and it seems to have gone unremarked upon.

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