for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids
the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch
child me yearned for the spreadsheets
obligatory mentions for tengger cavalry, nine treasures and SULD
i’m a freshwater guy myself but i also do paludariums and vivariums. always wanted to try a topoff only saltwater system based around mangrove filtration with macro and seagrass but am too nervous to make the plunge lol
what is hegemony? what is the balance of power? what is security? why did we need security from iraq? from libya? who or what was this security for? what was wrought by these conflicts that changed the lives of the average american for the better or more secure?
the MIC supported continuation of vietnam, who else supported it? who stood against? why? how was it ultimately settled? what were the consequences? why were these consequences? where are these people and parties today?
you invest it in (foreign) right wing radical organizations bent on overthrowing their democratically elected government. that way, when these groups eventually succeed due to your generous contributions they will allow you to swoop in and buy up their country’s previously nationalized natural monopolies at bargain bin prices through local intermediaries at which point you can cut costs and inflate prices for the citizens of the entire country and receive many orders of magnitude ROI
it’s win-win so long as you propagandize enough people about how this specific thing that you’re doing is actually defined as democracy, they’ll be totally ok with it and won’t suspect a thing
should have just called him names to begin with, this was one of the most pathetic interactions i’ve had online in recent memory
although i guess it’s possible he’s like 11 and can’t really come up with anything else
you expressed confusion with my use of the english language and so i have adjusted my communication style to suit your apparent needs. if you feel this somehow reflects poorly on your personal character it is no fault of mine.
the entire point of me linking the time article was to point out that it was cognitive laziness (and likely bad faith) on your part to invoke a third party ‘bias checker’ (that in all likelihood is itself biased) as some impartial mediator of reality. typically, the next logical step to take here would be to engage with the points of the articles in question and judge their merits through consensus based on verifiable fact, but it seems you got lost somewhere along the way and now you appear to be resisting attempts to shepherd you back on topic.
notice how i didn’t prepend that post with a brief summary of rhetorical techniques like i said i would? that’s because i didn’t use any. ditto this post.
sorry, i thought native english speakers would be more familiar with the concept of hyperbole. i will take the time to write a brief summary of relevant semantic techniques used in subsequent posts to help out the more rhetorically challenged members of our community.
time ran the exact same article, what is your point?
jfc, points for trying to turn this into a semantics game but sorry, fuck you
lets look at bbc, first result we get when we search "台独民意调查“ on google.hk because apparently google.tw is too spicy for google’s techbro commissariat. whatever, close enough:
2020年的数据首先反映在统独立场。台湾人偏向“台湾独立”的支持度为27.7%，是历年最高；“尽快独立”的民意有7.4%。此外，希望“两岸统一”则占5.1%，是历年最低。选择“维持现状再决定”的民众比例为28.7%，而且在持续下降中。“永远维持现状”者占23.6%
even tries to reframe it by breaking up de facto status quo supporters into two camps but plurality still supports status quo
how about cn language natopedia
2020, NCCU (same as the bbc study):
2021, united news:
2022, ‘taiwanese public opinion foundation’ (read: cia cutout):
look at how they progressively split the status quo category (the size of which does not demonstrably change) into smaller and smaller demos to try and push an agenda
let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and more closely examine what is obviously the most compromised source here. this is the cia cutout’s (shitty and completely unprofessional) paper from this year. they’d probably lose funding if they put something as damning as actual independence vs status quo numbers out there so they decided to go with plausibly deniable second order opinion sets and STILL get blown the fuck out
just take the L dude, taiwanese are completely cognizant of the fact they’re being primed to be the next ukraine and most of them understandably want no part of that
and a plurality of people believe that maintaining the status quo == independence
where is the gotcha?
i can’t believe i enabled images for this
they’re not even figures, they’re just snippets of text from natopedia that somehow unequivocally support my claim
what am i supposed to do with this? gloat?
group of people overwhelmingly wish to separate
this is just not true. the overwhelming majority want a return to the status quo, a status quo that was very consistently gravitating towards china before the US decided to stir shit using its DPP puppets. the taiwanese people are perfectly capable of understanding which side their bread is buttered on and that their families cannot subsist on a diet of freedom and democracy.
you realize that the uptick in frequency of these ‘provocations’ only started in response to the pelosi visit? the incident that had a considerable portion of the entire chinese population howling for the cpc to shoot down the plane and engulf the world in nuclear fire? this is the cpc’s way of appeasing its very large and very rabid nationalist constituency (who are very disappointed that they have not died in a nuclear armageddon, btw) and it is a meme on the chinese internet that despite all of its rhetoric, this pathetic level of ‘not touching you’ fuckery is somehow the lowest that the cpc is willing to stoop to when faced with a de jure violation of its sovereignty.
entity with the time, resources to try to sway public opinion
why would any foreign political entity waste its valuable english proficient resources on astroturfing an online backwater filled with politically illiterate nobodies? peak liberal solipsism
the GLF was economic policy made in response to withdrawal of soviet technological and financial aid during the sino-soviet split, one of the primary motivating factors of which being soviet insistence on china essentially allowing the soviets to recolonize the port of dalian to build a naval base from which to deploy its pacific fleet.
on top of being under sanctions from the west, the sino-soviet split further deprived china of markets with which to support its all-important capital intensive industries and so china was forced to resort to agricultural export as a method of making up the shortfall. collectivization was also pursued simultaneously to pool domestic capital for internal consumption, but due to various geographical, technical and political considerations, internal consumption was not sufficiently stimulated to support manufacturing, and so agricultural export became the primary way to finance china’s continued industrialization. most accounts that are not hysterically anti-communist (including liberal darling amartya sen) of the period around the 1958 famine have records of aggregate production being more than sufficient to sustain the overall population, with the primary points of failure being overzealous local governments in highly productive areas, as opposed to popular western conceptions of overbearing central government mandated directives.
all this to say that hitler and the holocaust’s relevance as a point of comparison to mao and the GLF as anything beyond ‘people died when he was in charge’ is laughably superficial and mostly only functions as a thought terminating associative fallacy for juicing your dopamine receptors in order to immunize your brain against more correct opinions.
i am sure the success or failure of those domestic policies were not in the least contingent on international political conditions. the economic policies of an island that imports 97% of its energy with a food self sufficiency rate of around 30% and exports accounting for 70% of gdp can in no way be considered to be overexposed or at risk to trade fluctuations and even if that were the case, i am sure that foreign policy would not play an outsize role in determining the magnitude or periodicity of said trade fluctuations.
Because the people were disappointed in what DPP had done with the economy
inciting conflict with your biggest trading partner does tend to have negative effects on the economy
this is my pet concern as well and it’s always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it’ll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won’t evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.