09 Sep 24 Monday Briefing

A queen who isn’t crowned

News Roundup

The Maoris get a new queen (not crowned but a bible is placed on her head, interestingly), Japan faces a rice shortage (terrible news for any Asian country dependent on such an intensive crop to cultivate) the way it faces a shortage of marriages, yet another orang gila (Malay for looney-tunes) claims to be related to a deity, Fyre Festival 2.0 is back on (yes, really 😂), and sometimes activism can work – the state of West Bengal India passed a law seeking the death penalty for rape.

Watch/Scroll

Much ink and bytes have been spilled about VW’s impending factory closures in Europe, but here’s a handy tweet (?) / X (?) thread about the implications of the sort of ticking-time-bomb economic model that VW represents in a continent that’s struggling to keep up with the times. h/t my better. half

Is Southeast Asia worth investing in? I’ll let you decide. What I can say is that despite the chaos of Bangkok last week at the Asia-Pacific Futures Network conference, I left invigorated by its promise of growth and development, the spectre of aging demographics aside. Political dynasties? Maybe let Southeast Asians work their own systems with some degree of self-determination without sanctimonious hand wringing.

Read

Whither inter-species procreating?

Try-hard Try Guys (some of them, anyway) are finding some financial success in a subscription model, but here’s the thing – as Freddie deBoer puts it, decency and integrity do not grow out of performative harmlessness. Progressive Millennial culture – or specifically, that US flavour of it – is as morally empty as it is meaningless.

Ponder

The west, led by the US, seems to have decided that their circus’s new juggling act is about how they will simultaneously (1) curb China’s access to critical chip technologies and (2) secure economically critical metals. Too bad the rest of the world has free tickets to the circus, some of us more front row than others.