True, they have gotten away with it every time before, including everytime this has been done to Palestine in the past. They probably were pretty confident they would be able to use the same playbook yet again and not get any attention.

“Mr. Biden’s critics on the left are angry about his willingness to provide more weapons to Israel, though the legislation also includes $1 billion for humanitarian aid that the president said will be rushed to Gaza.”

In what world can ANYBODY spin this in a way that makes sense. This is the most positive take they could manage and they still are literally saying that the US is supplying aid for victims of the weapons that the US is supplying.

You know what US let’s call it even. Just stop sending any more weapons to Israel and we won’t expect you to send any aid, let other countries handle that. There, you save billions!

They managed to sell the “Russia bad, Ukraine heroes of democracy” line so well, I wonder if they just are at a loss when it comes to the Palestine narrative. Like they expected everyone to fall in line [yet again] and support a genocide.

Honestly, part of me would have expected the same, though I suppose even libs can only handle so much overt lying.

This is always what I use. That is one reason, but I also don’t want to group all of the Americas in with the US and it makes that distinction pretty clear.

I think some people do it out of being extremely petty, as a way to “own” China. Like China cares what John Youtube calls their party. There is also the attempts to deligitimatize it from standard Communist Party naming conventions (Communist Part of Country) and to highlight racial elements instead.

I honestly think a lot of people just do it out of ignorance. The first group is so pervasive that I think a lot of people just legitimtately think CCP is the correct term without knowing better.

It’s super common like ComradeSalad said, but it works and it makes for super easy PR messaging too. Add some unpopular bill into a totally unrelated one. Oh you want to vote against the Ukraine war? Well, we put it in the same bill as a package for supplies for US military troops, so if you vote against it you will be comitting political suicide.

“Senator Pumpanddump voted against the America Loves Our Troops Act. Does this mean he hates our troops, you decide!”

The practice should be illegal, but so should half the things the US government does.

God a WeChat ban would be absolutely crippling, I can’t imagine that has any real traction.
I work in hospitality, and a very large percentage of our guests at all properties globally are Chinese (about 40% of all of the guests at mine). Consequently we support transactions with WeChat, and have always heard from our guests that they appreciate we support the platform and that is a big reason they use us.

Now I am not in the US, but my chain originates there. It would absolutely cripple us if WeChat were banned. I wouldn’t put it past the government to try, but I have to think that corporations wouldn’t let them.

Obviously you haven’t considered that the ban is a wonderful thing because China Bad. Therefore any other argument is moot.

I have actually seen a few people saying that only American social media companies should be allowed to operate in the US. Yet somehow China is the dystopia.

On one hand, we have a well documented campaign of murdreing civilians and trying to drive them out of their territory permanently, with constant video and photographic evidence to back it up.

On the other hand, we have some questionable anecdotes and blurry satellite photos of some schools and governmental facilities in a country with over a billion people walking around with video cameras in their pockets.

Guess which one the US considers a clear genocide.

Yeah I would try to read it in Mandarin but I am pretty sure the technical language is beyond me, at least as of right now. Would love to work into it eventually though.

re: Finkelstein, I think his writing is arguably better than his speeches, you can tell he has devoted his life to that subject. They can be lengthy but honestly they never feel like it.

I used to go to a couple local shops when I lived in the city, but we don’t have great book options where I live right now.

I tend to prefer reading in English rather than my local language, so I mostly get books digitally and read them on my tablet. I only very rarely read fiction, but I am reading through Dark Forest again right now as a rare treat. Just before Dark Forest I read Three Body Problem, obviously, and Finkelstein’s “Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom”.

I can totally understand doing a non-DF run, they are a cool challenge in the early game and their special buildings can really help with ramping up late game but they can be a bit annoying to deal with. The DF Lab in particular is a huge help if you are going for one of the big science achievements, because I think it is 2x as fast as a base lab. I wouldn’t play with DF again myself until they flesh out the space combat more, dealing with the space hive right now is kind of cumbersome because it hasn’t really been fully implemented yet.

I may have honestly played every factory game on steam at this point. Shapez was great, I am looking forward to shapez 2. DSP / Factorio / Satisfactory is the holy trinity of factory games to me at this point, but I think everyone knows those.

Captain of Industry is a great one with more real-world production chains and some light colony-management as well. It’s pretty challenging and you can get locked into a death spiral pretty easily. There are difficulty settings that can be adjusted on the fly that help with that though. I like more of a sci-fi setting usually, but this is a pretty cool adaptation of real industry.

Desynced is a lesser known SF factory builder that adds some programming elements. Basically everything are logistic bots rather than belts, but all the bots can be programmed with a decently robust visual programming language. All the buildings/bots you build are modular too, with components that you slot in. I like shoving some solar panels on all my carrier bots so that they contribute to my power grid while transporting cargo.

They didn’t capitulate to western powers, and are in fact still at war with them. Plus it lets them demonize China by proxy, which is always something western powers are looking to do.

Also all that is exacerbated by the fact that they are fairly isolated and not many people go there. People propagandaize about China all the time, but that is always in conflict with the fact that many people can and do go visit and see the reality for themselves. Not nearly as many people visit the DPRK, though if they do they will also find out it isn’t remotely like what they have had.

My undergrad was…I think 50k/year? At the time, I think it is closer to 70-80k/year now. My graduate degreee (which was not in the US) was like…5k/year, and that was at one of the more expensive private unis in my country.

I don’t regret my time in uni, it was extremely valuable to me besides the piece of paper I got at the end (which I do not use in my current career at all anyway). The cost is absolutely ridiculous though, I was in an extremely privileged position to be able to go and would not recommend many people do the same when they could make much better career choices.

Which is depressing. Education should not need to be a luxury.

My oldest brother ended up learning welding from a community college, it was a great career move initially. Unfortunately he immediately ended up surrounded by far-right extremists in the first job he took and became a literal neo-nazi. Like joining neo-nazi marches and posting swastikas level.

We aren’t on speaking terms anymore. It obviously isn’t the trade’s fault (and is more on him always conforming to whatever he is surrounded by) but I have maybe a slightly visceral reaction anytime I hear welding.

Learn welding, but maybe vet your future employers too.

DSP is my favourite factory game by far, great to see someone else playing that one. I just polished off my first Dark Fog game, so was poking around at some other up and coming factory games before I started another run.

What did you think of Millenia? Honestly I like it more than most, there are a lot of basic design choices that I think are cool, but it definitely needs more time in balancing. It feels more like an EA game than a 1.0 release honestly. I did a couple playthroughs and will probably come back to it again after it [hopefully] gets some updates.

I liked Forbidden West way more than I expected to.

I loved Zero Dawn, but a lot of what I loved about that game was the discovery of finding out what happened in the events that led up to the game. The sequel obviously didn’t have that, so I was very skeptical about it. I was thankfully quite wrong.

Subnautica is a fantastic game that either helped me discover I had thalassophobia or gave it to me. My playtime probably got inflated by ten hours as I spent so much time sprucing up my base instead of progressing to the end of the story.

It balances the curated story elements so well with the open world survivalbox type gameplay. Not many games hit that balance so well.

I have been playing the Anomaly DLC of Rimworld (which remains my favourite game of all time).

It’s pretty good, it captures the “Cabin in the Woods” / SPC vibe very well. However, I think Rimworld DLCs are the best when they provide frameworks that let modders go crazy. Anomaly seems more like a content dlc that I will sometimes use and sometimes disable. I could definitely see myself disabling Anomaly after I do a couple games with it turned on.

Favourite Genres: JRPGs, Factory/Automation Games, Colony Builders.

I am pretty excited on the factory game front for this year. We have the expansion for Factorio, v 1.0 release of Satisfactory, and there are pretty good odds we get another big Dyson Sphere Program update this year. Of those, Dyson Sphere Program remains my favourite by far.