Just to be clear, you’re on board with America bombing Iran then? Their entire modern political identity has been based around American antagonism (or Great Satan if you prefer) and they’ve been tied by proxy to violence that has killed Americans.

Or if not, are we going to talk about how Taiwan has been consistently ranked among the top countries in democratic representation since the end of martial law nearly 40 years ago? Maybe this Taiwan authoritarian boogeyman is only being propped up by the PRC’s saber rattling?

If there wasn’t a constant threat across the water, we’d probably find that the Taiwan populace isn’t in favor of the war hawk conservatives but also isn’t in favor of reunification. But the status quo is better for everyone: China gets to keep its “liberation” card, Taiwan regressives get to keep their national security platform and the USA gets a plausible excuse to expand their military sphere of dominance.

Keep waving your team colors though 👍

It’s textbook sea lioning: asking for information you can easily find yourself as a civil question and now backing out of it to some other tangential sticking point.

The missile comment was a tongue in cheek reference to the third Taiwan strait missile crisis. Even worse than accidental, they just straight up said “[the missile tests] attacked the power of the ‘Taiwan separatists’”. There’s no way to reconcile that with your imagined warm and fuzzy peaceful-reunification world super power.

previous, highly oppressive, government to and is currently a vassal …

Ah there it is. Does an oppressive government give you free reign to attack the sovereignty of a neighbor? That sure smells a lot like America-style “liberation”. But of course when America does it we call it imperialist.

And spare me this cold war era quid pro quo defense. No superpower in history has ever been in such desperate straits that aggressive action against a minor power was critical to their security. It’s just a convenient excuse to play international power games.

Which neighbors is it threatening to invade?

“It’s not threatening to invade, we’re just coincidentally running an amphibious assault war game right across the strai-- oops don’t mind those missiles, shot those a little too far 🤭”

If you’re going to be a disingenuous sea lion at least skip to claiming “it’s a valid casus belli and blah blah blah”. It’d save us all a lot of time.

Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

• Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn’t be suing to stop this if they didn’t think it was a major threat to their platform.
• The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
• A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
• Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).

You can covertly buy and take illicit drugs all by yourself and have a good time. Bypassing a ban to get on a social platform with very few of your social peers is… pointless?

So what if you get to watch a tiktok from the other side of the world, none of the kids in your class are sharing that experience and building the peer pressure.

Not if we stop tracking it 🤠

I’ll take a crack at it:

• It’s a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
• It’s another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what’s getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can’t spoof the real world in front of you.
• It’s unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you’d get from your phone with the added benefit of… not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it…
• It’s a distraction in a way that other tech can’t touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won’t end well.
• It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren’t designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision

1. Apparently we can’t disagree if your comments are anything to go by, regardless of how much reading we do
2. Calling your highly touted T h e o r y a science is laughable. It’s descriptive philosophy and as such has no predictive/prescriptive value

There’s a reason you have to call it theory and why that theory gets bent like a pretzel whenever something runs counter to it. It must be correct because at its core it’s theology for the disillusioned. The material conditions weren’t right bro, trust me bro, just one more vanguard party bro, we’re gonna be stateless I promise, just need a little more critical support for these fascists bro…

Weird way to “listen” by suppressing their voices. Zero Covid was the “right call” in a narrow lens of limiting direct disease transmission, but it was completely untenable as a true long term strategy and had no foresight.

The protests weren’t due to solely to the restrictions on personal freedom, it was also the total lack of sane administration and fallback plans. The enforcement and vaccine rollout was entirely scattershot. The government had no realistic approach to the problem beyond rigid policing.

When their authority to enforce the policy was stretched to its limits they did an about face and pretended the problem didn’t exist, leaving their vulnerable populations in the lurch with no offramp. The core problem of inept administration was completely unaddressed. I wouldn’t give them credit for “listening to the protesters” any more than I would give Tsar Nicholas credit for listening to his striking workers.

COVID lockdowns when minor protests broke out

“Solve” is an interesting verb for suppression of legitimate mass discontent at being physically locked into their apartments. That “solution” worked so well for those “minor protests” that they decided to do a 180° turn from the Zero Covid policy to no restrictions overnight.

Truly a bastion of free speech, except for any real discontent is labeled capitalist subterfuge so we’ll just disregard that.

I have! Have you been on it in China? Have you contrasted the foreign feed to a citizen’s? Have you seen the coordinated response to genuine spreading political discontent vs mundane petty scandals? Because it kinda sounds like you haven’t if you think that’s a killer response.

Never claimed to be any kind of China expert but it’s absurd to claim “much more open discourse” if you’ve spent any appreciable amount of time in the countries being discussed. You can literally just walk + talk in public and see the difference.

Like all these asserted freedoms it just magically happens better and free’er but you definitely can’t verify it because “media”. The open political discourse I see and hear in major EU/US cities pales in comparison to the uh… hidden… open discourse in T1/T2 Chinese cities? Definitely heard some first/second hand political discourse but it was never, ever, ever a public forum.

By all means, give me evidence to the contrary. Maybe I just keep catching China with a bad case of the Mondays. Have you been? Can you point to any discourse on domestic politics? Where is the asserted diversity of opinion on hotbed issues? Can you show me any strong opposition to the party line on a public stage?

Crazy how you can literally just look this stuff up and find out what’s true instead of discarding arguments.

Independent trade unions are illegal in China. The single, state sanctioned trade union is widely criticized by international trade union orgs for not faithfully representing its workers. By most accounts it exists to funnel labor disputes through a bureaucratic meat grinder of mediation to maintain the status quo. With the exception of a handful of actions for international leverage, all strikes are wildcat.

If you’re actually interested in labor relations in China I’d recommend this article for starters. It’s older but the situation hasn’t improved under recent leadership.

Complete list of banned books in the US

Lmao what? Do you know what “banning” a book means? It’s just not on offer in schools or a library for that specific state. It’s completely normal to just buy it for yourself and there are even organizations dedicated to distributing banned books.

It’s hilarious to try and dunk on America with this of all things. Media restricted/censored in China is entirely unavailable. It’s actually very interesting how the censorship manifests in daily life, but I imagine any .ml reader will discard those anecdotes (or any verifiable reports) and try to redirect back to the West somehow.

I’ll take “things foreigners say when they’ve never been to China” for 500 Alex

Dudes probably just at a private golf outing or a child sex trafficking party or out hunting endangered animals to extinction

There’s a lot of comments about how digital devices are viable/helpful for note-taking and just as good as a pen. I think that’s missing the crucial point: virtually every device we own today is designed as a distraction machine.

A pen + paper isn’t going have any notifications or reminders or updates or emails or texts or ads or alarms or alerts. If there’s any device without those that’s as reliable and as cheap as a notebook, I’ve never heard of it.

But it’s not possible to get unbiased content on the internet. Everything exists with an agenda behind it, for the sole reason that hosting anything is going to constantly cost money.

This wasn’t a huge deal when individuals were paying to host and share content to a small audience, it was a small amount of money and you could see their motives clearly (a forum for a hobby, a passion project, an online store, etc…).

Social media is different because it presents itself as a public forum where anything can be shared and hosted (for free) to as many people as you want. But they’re still footing a very large bill and the wide net of content makes their motives completely opaque. Nobody cares that much about the headaches of maintaining a free and open public forum, and any profit motive is just another way to sell manipulation.