Why isn’t this bigger news?
Maybe you're reading the wrong stuff. It's been popping up on a semi-daily basis for me for a couple weeks but then, I seek out the geopolitics.
If you're watching CNN or MSNBC it's the all-the-time Trump Show. This allows stuff like China's ethnic cleansing and reeducation camps in Tibet to get a pass. It means you don't know about Chinese labor protests. Americans (all nationalities) care a lot more about what's going on within their borders than without and while we've been watching our democracy suffer the Chinese have, too.
It's not that the world is pretending it's "business as usual" it's that Interpol only works by international cooperation and when one fifth of the world's population and fifteen percent of the world's economy decides not to play by the rules, your options for reprisal or correction are limited. And the tricky thing about government crackdowns, according to George Friedman, is that whenever a country veers authoritarian it shows that they're weak, not strong. Xi Jinping's current moves don't telegraph a leader confident in his position, they indicate a regime facing pressure and that can break in difficult, unfortunate ways.
Like kidnapping the chief of Interpol.
I get phone alerts from:
- WaPo
- NYT
- WSJ
I pay for:
- NYT
- WSJ
- The Week
Every morning I read:
- Daily Beast Cheat Sheet
- The Week Top 10
- The Week Daily Business Briefing
- NYT briefing
- NYT opinion
- WSJ Briefing
- WSJ Hedge Fund Manager's Briefing (or whatever the hell they call it)
- WSJ Capital Journal
- WSJ Tech briefing
- WaPo Today's Worldview
- Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Breakfast
- WatchPro's whatevertheycallit (only if you give a shit about watches)
When it shows up every week or so I read
- NYT The Interpreter
- Rohit Bhargava's Non-obvious
- MIT's Blockchain newsletter
- The Engineer's tech briefings (UK)
- Quill & Pad's newsletter (which only matters if you care about watches)
- a dozen other things I'm forgetting about
And sweet baby jesus every now and then I find something interesting from outraged liberal friends on Facebook.
I should also mention that I get a hilarious newsletter from a hedge fund that used to be in Zurich until Swiss banking laws changed to favor greater disclosure and poof the Zurich - based hedge fund became a Liechtenstein-based hedge fund.
Nothing at all suspicious about that.