Glorifying a system can never be the answer.
Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don't need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.
Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system.
There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of "enemy" nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.
The anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.
Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn't a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It's just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.
Now many of the men are chosing to remove themselves without dying.
They're not. They're still fucking here, leaning over your shoulder at the bar and saying in a stage whisper "I just said you'd look prettier if you smiled more! You probably just couldn't hear me because your back was turned!"
But I’d rather be a painfully shy man, than an asshole.
A fundamental problem with the dating scene is finding the sweet shy himbo in the crowd of hooting screeching apes.
Talk to people that live within the system is all I can tell you.
You mean the relatives we were visiting?
China isn’t perfect either.
I'll never understand the absolute terror Americans have for "imperfect China"
The UK in two panels
none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other
I'm posed to snarl because I've seen this so many times before, as a justification to invade and destroy advanced industrial states that don't bend the knee to the US State Department.
The reason you get thorium reactors out of China and Mars landers out of India comes down to two words "Peace Dividend".
Our species is so cooked.
There's a brighter future on the horizon. But you don't get there by taking Marco Rubio at face value.
The UN inspection committee could not find evidence to support your claims.
Why are you asserting the existence of a genocide in Xinjiang while endorsing the engineered famine across the border in Afghanistan?
You want Iraq 2.0?
After Yemen, Syria, and Libya I think we're closer to Iraq 6.0
Every leader, even a dictator, needs public support.
They get it, implicitly, from the mass of people who continue about their business uninterrupted.
What protest seeks to do is to kick off a popularly supported disruption in a dictator's supply chain. But what they risk is taking the blame for the crisis, as a result.
The deeper they get their claws in, the less support they need. But Trump doesn’t have them in that deep yet.
He's got all the cabinet level offices and is purging the departments of opponents. There is nothing currently in his way
Might as well just poll the DHS at this point
While the president brags about his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and throttling its oil exports, its weapons sales to Russia get a pass.
In the spirit of bipartisanship, I think we can all agree it is time to invade Iran.
Touted 'Unfit'
By senators prior to his appointment?
No, by some anonymous posts on social media last week
So will this result in any actual consequences?
Absolutely not
Great
IT Crowd was three British goofballs doing elaborate running gags over 24 episodes.
BBT was four creepy bigots and a nice blonde woman doing pop culture references and calling one another stupid for 279 episodes before spinning out an 80s nostalgia prequel series.
It was the difference between a few cherished cleverly crafted comedy routines and endless derivative slop.
Some of this is about accepting bribes. A lot more is simply ideology.
Trump's people do not believe the IRS should exist and they are trying to dismantle it. DirectFile is just low hanging fruit, intended to make people more frustrated with tax filing and more easy to radicalized in an attempt dismantle and replace with tariffs.
Like, this is a real decades long project that goes way beyond Trump. Abolishing the income tax was Goldwater's wet dream.
The Western response to UN officials investigating Xinjiang and failing to find confirmation of the salacious rumors is to call the UN a failure.
The same criticisms hurled at UN investigators attempting to confirm these accusations today are mirrored by IAEA efforts to find nuclear weapons in Iraq. You've got Christian nationalists pushing far-right warmongering and fear mongering, in an attempt to curb China's growing economic clout in the region. And it has culminated in the Trump presidency, and the full collapse of the US as a credible source of intelligence.
Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.
In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.
At some point "Both Sides Are Bad" doesn't cut it. You have to address your own nation's sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.
Russia used to export a lot of refined products, so they loose the profits of doing the refining.
They liquidated a bunch of their industrial refining capacity in the late 90s/early 00s thanks to Yeltsin's implementation of Shock Doctrine economic reforms.
My home town of Houston hosts a bunch of Soviet made refinery equipment bought for pennies on the dollar from overseas.
That's got nothing to do with current EU sanctions. If anything, Russian reinvestment in heavy industry has been one of the brighter spots of the Putin Regime and a major source of his popularity.
Last year 17.5% of EUs LNG imports came from Russia. There is no reason for doing that more then three years after the full scale invasion.
There's a strong economic reason to obtain gas from the lowest cost provider. LNGs floated in from the US can't meet demand and cost 10x Russia rates at market.
Combine that with the US tariffing of trade deficits and insourcing of energy consumption for AI development and you've left Europe with no other option for gas power.
I can't speak to Shanghai. I've only been to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Zhuhai - just outside of Macau - and with family (my eight year old niece isn't much of a clubber yet).
But all the youth culture I experienced there was thriving. Not exactly going up and asking people their preferred sexuality, but there were plenty of groups that had all the iconography of queerness. There's still a social stigma against queermess that's held over from prior generations. But there also isn't mass shootings or vehicular manslaughter targeting queer communities.
My father in law (a diehard libertarian Cold Warrior type) was taken aback at how clean the cities were and how safe he felt the whole time he was there. Might be due to his overexposure to Western cinema that paints China (and Mexico and Brazil and South Africa and really any country without a critical mass of white people) as dens of vice and violence. But for some reason, having streets devoid of poverty in the US is aspirational. Having them devoid of poverty outside the US is dystopian.
The low homelessness might have something to do with China's stellar public housing policy. The dedication to clean streets and regular maintenance of buildings may have something to do with their prioritization of long term durability over short term profits. And the degree to which they've adopted industrial technology makes these enormous, low cost mixed use urban centers possible. It isn't just random people being wisked away to El Salvador at the whims of a partisan government.
Humans are all different, if you want to consider everyone’s opinion it takes a lot of time (which China did not have in the last few decades).
Chinese civil government doesn't operate in the same adversarial climate as in the US. You don't have Crossfire hosts screaming at each other or Palestine protesters and Zionists brawling on college campuses. You don't have bloggers and AM Radio guys stoking stochastic violence against minorities in order to generate private fortunes or billionaires buying up major publishers in order to suck up to or strong arm political leadership.
Mass Line theory of government tries to be more scientific in it's approach to polling public sentiment, reaching public policy, and mass marketing changes to traditional views. China's approach to domestic reform is slower, more small-c conservative, and focused within the party rather than between parties.
Americans don't understand that system, so it frightens them. But Americans have made an industry of frightening one another. So Sinophobia is just one more buggabo.
Every time I read a headline about how there's a genocide in Xinjiang, it's in the same newspaper that insists Israel Has The Right To Defend Itself and Yemen needs to be bombed to powder.
At some point, it reads like liberal agitprop. An excuse to scare liberals into hating a foreign country so we can justify... what? Tariffs? TikTok bans? Nuclear war?
Same with LGBTQ rights. We've got a DOGE department doing a pogrom on "woke" government workers while I still get an earful about how mean China is to minority groups?
What am I supposed to take away from this?
"Euro Bonds" are the two scariest words in the US Treasury's vernacular right now.
Someone wrote a book about it once, spawned a few big movements. Might have heard of it.
A few people wrote a few books, certainly.
Maybe it will be midterm votes, maybe it will be marches and protests, maybe it will be full on riots.
I mean, you're describing the 2008 to 2016 arc for liberal Democrats. The problem is that eight years of voting, marching, protesting, and - ultimately - rioting only ever seemed to move Democrats to the right.
By the time Hillary's failed 2008 bid had been resurrected, she was more hawkish than the "Oops, sorry, but I'm not sorry" candidate that lost to Obama eight years earlier. She was worse on civil rights. She was worse on public health care and education. She was worse on policing and immigration and trade and employment. She was worse on environmentalism. And she wasn't alone.
All because the degree of lobbying and corporate media had amplified itself, to the point at which DC Dems were absolutely deafened by it.
I don't see any of that changing. If anything, I see "Liberal America" increasingly tainted by the fascist fill inundating DC. More lay people are convinced MS-13 is around every corner and China is an existential threat to American Freedom^(TM). More media is plugging a liberalized version of libertarian capitalism, with privatized subscriptions for every public service. More revanchists popping up in liberal circles saying how Transgenderism is an attack on women's rights and being a celebrity billionaire is the highest goal of any true feminist.
It's fucking bleak out there
Did ChatGPT come up with Trump’s tariff rate formula? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same formula for reciprocal tariff calculations, several X users claim.
Artificial Generalized Incompetence
DOGE Descends on the Institute for Museum and Library Services
On Friday, president Donald Trump had signed an Executive Order, Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, directing severe cuts to IMLS, which provides resources to museums and libraries in all 50 states and territories, calling for it to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” within seven days. Staff had already been reduced, said the employee, due to steps like the termination of probationary employees.
Word quickly got out Thursday morning on a whistleblowers’ channel on Reddit. “The Institute of Museum and Library Services is being raided by DOGE and the new Acting Director (also somehow DepSec of Labor) Keith Sonderling with the express intent to shut it down,” wrote one anonymous poster. “Sonderling was sworn-in in the lobby of the office building and they are proceeding with quickly and quietly dismantling the agency. There are Department of Homeland Security personnel present—to bully a bunch of civil servants who administer grants to
Pro-Israel Jewish groups targeted Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University, days before ICE agents arrested him.
Ross Glick, a pro-Israel activist who previously shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities, said that he was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with members of Congress during the Barnard library demonstration and discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to “escalate” the issue. He said that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.
“This unfolded very quickly because it was obvious,” Glick said in an interview Monday.“Everybody was upset,” he recalled of his meetings on the Hill. “The guy was making it too easy for us.”
Dems "pissed" at liberal groups MoveOn, Indivisible
"Indivisible is urging people who are scared to call their member of Congress, whether they have a Democrat or Republican, and make specific procedural asks," Greenberg said.
"Our supporters are asking Democrats to demand specific red lines are met before they offer their vote to House Republicans on the budget, when Republicans inevitably fail to pass a bill on their own."
H.R.1161 - To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as "Red, White, and Blueland".
Sponsor: Rep. Carter, Earl L. "Buddy" [R-GA-1] (Introduced 02/10/2025)
Committees: House - Foreign Affairs; Natural Resources
Latest Action: House - 02/10/2025 Referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and in addition to the Committee on Natural Resources, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned
The Executive Chairman of the LA Times is an RFK Jr loving quack.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Explore Seeking Trump Pardon for Son
Preparing for the Worst: Americans are steeling themselves for the federal government to storm into their communities
From the church to the schoolyard to the legislature, Americans are making plans to protect themselves and their loved ones from deportation.
Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has said that any immigrants who pose “public safety and national security threats” will be targeted for deportation first. Rhetoric that paints America’s 45 million immigrants as “threats” to public safety is a key Republican strategy to drum up support for mass deportations. One of the first bills passed by the Republican House in the new Congress was the Laken Riley Act, after the 22-year-old nursing student who was killed in February 2024 by a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally. The bill would require any undocumented person or DACA recipient arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting-related offenses to be detained, even if they are ultimately never charged with a crime.
ICE agents denied entry to South Side elementary school: Chicago Public Schools
The U.S. Secret Service told the I-Team they approached a South Side school Friday. Chicago Public Schools officials had initially said the agents were from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"CPS will continue to protect our students and their families in alignment with the Illinois TRUST Act and Chicago's Welcoming City Ordinance," one school official said.
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates called the situation "unprecedented" at a news conference Friday afternoon.
After receiving the text for the ad quoted above, a representative from the advertising team suggested AFSC use the word “war” instead of “genocide” – a word with an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law. When AFSC rejected this approach, the New York Times Ad Acceptability Team sent an email that read in part: “Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions.”
Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.
After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”
In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.
It was addressed to me.
The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a
She told a police officer she was in labor. The Louisville Metro Police Department lieutenant cited her for unlawful camping as the ambulance arrived. She had a baby later that day.
Body camera footage shows the moment an LMPD officer hands a woman in labor a citation for unlawful camping as she waits for an ambulance.
The Center for U.S. and Mexico’s Mexico Country Outlook 2025 offers expert insights on key issues shaping the future of the region, including economic reforms, regulatory changes, security concerns, and shifting political dynamics. This annual report also examines major challenges facing the Sheinba...
In 2025, Mexico’s current challenges are likely to worsen, as the recently inaugurated Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo administration (2024–30) has shown an unwillingness to depart from the policy playbook of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration (2018–24) — a playbook that has already proven unable to resolve most of the country’s problems.Political and diplomatic relations are headed for a rocky year, as Mexico drifts further away from a strategic allyship position with the United States on several items.
South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol declares emergency martial law - live updates
Demonstrators who had gathered to protest the sudden introduction of military rule are now celebrating.
Yoon has been a lame duck president since the latest general election when the opposition won a landslide.
He was not able to pass the laws he wanted, instead, he was reduced to vetoing desperately any bills that the opposition had been passing.
Yoon is also mired in several scandals, mainly one around his wife, who is accused of corruption. She is also accused of influence peddling. The opposition has been trying to launch a special investigation against her.
This week, the opposition slashed budgets that the government and ruling party had put forward - and the budget bill cannot be vetoed.
In the same week, the opposition is moving to impeach cabinet members, mainly the head of the government audit agency, for failing to investigate the first lady.
Yoon has gone for the nuclear option - he claims it is to restore order when "anti-state" forces he says are trying to paralyse the country.
Edit: [South Korea Parliament Votes to End Martial Law, Opposing President’s Decree. The C
China has announced a ban on exports to the United States of gallium, germanium and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications.
China has near global monopolies on these exports, accounting for 98% of global gallium production, 93% of germanium production, and 49% of antimony production.
The state's attorney is prosecuting University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students over last April's encampments.
Over the summer months, UIUC police and Champaign County State’s Attorney Julia Rietz joined forces to send a clear and heavy-handed message about how they intend to handle pro-Palestinian student speech going forward. Rietz — who has been on the faculty of UIUC’s law school since 2009 — began issuing summonses starting in July 2024, to students who are alleged to have participated in the encampment. A great deal of effort and resources seemingly went into targeting these students: University police utilized surveillance technology, including the use of license plate readers, as well as students’ social media posts and body camera footage. And the resulting summonses were not for misdemeanors — they contained mandates to appear in court for Class Four felony mob action charges, which carry up to three years in prison. Several students were charged, including one Palestinian student.
On August 16, 2024, Rietz publicly stated during a local radio spot that these charges were pursued at
Tucker Carlson appeared to blame abortions for the deadly hurricanes that have ravaged the United States over the last few months.
You can't do that, you can't kill children on purpose knowing that you're doing that in exchange for power, freedom or happiness whatever you think you're getting in return. You can't participate in human sacrifice without consequences
Elon Musk lawyer says $1 mln voter giveaway winners are not random
Elon Musk's pro-Trump group does not choose the winners of its $1 million-a-day giveaway to registered voters at random, but instead picks people who would be good spokespeople for its agenda, a lawyer for the billionaire said on Monday.
...
"There is no prize to be won, instead recipients must fulfill contractual obligations to serve as a spokesperson for the PAC," Gober said in the hearing before Judge Angelo Foglietta, referring to Musk's political action committee, known as America PAC.