Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.

The US just can’t accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn’t biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/

But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there’s no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn’t a system to encourage it).

Chinese spyware… Hosted in the US. With communications going to US data centers.

Odd that you’d call it Chinese spyware, when the more fair assessment is that it’s American spyware that happens to run a content recommendation algorithm from a Chinese company…

They’re just Japanese war crime apologists. You get used to them.

They’re the same people who’ll say that only Jews suffered from the Holocaust and completely ignored the sacrifices of the Soviets and the Romani people (mostly because they were freed from those camps by the Red Army in the East and the West never saw it). They’re the same people who’ll say that US trade with Japan in support of Japan’s massacres in China was just business. They’re the same people who’ll claim that Japan did nothing wrong until Pearl Harbour.

They are delusional, and they’re not worth your time.

Republicans accept a post-truth society where everything is someone’s propaganda, that the federal government is out to get them and that the union would be better served as a union of state-level republics. Democrats still believe in the existence of a ground truth and want a union with centralized control (i.e., they are Federalists). Like the Federalists, the Democrats are backed by wealthy financial states (New York, California) as opposed to more rural/working-class states (Alabama, Ohio) and support heavy industrial subsidies (Biden’s IRA, CHIPS) as well as weak state governments.

This is a fundamental difference that explains a lot, actually. The role of government has always been to convince populations to pursue the policy goals of the elite. The foundations of representative democracy involve choosing which elites’ policy goals to follow. The Republicans want to follow state elites (to borrow a Chinese proverb, the mountains are high and the President is far away). The Democrats want to follow federal elites.

Here’s the real problem. The US gets to choose between a career politician and a career businessman (swindler, by definition). Who represents the working class? Who represents the people who actually built America’s economy?

Calling a spade a spade is a hit piece now? Truly the least propagandized people on the planet.

cute

Believe it or not, there’s nothing wrong with telling someone to sing more loudly.

Does the principle count, or do you consider that a teacher? What about the superintendent?

People want to make a good impression on their superiors. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The entire principle of authoritarianism is either public support or public apathy. An authoritarian regime is only as stable as its populace.

A government that butchers its people against the will of the populace cannot survive even if it is democratic. A government that butchers people with the will of the populace will survive regardless of whether or not it’s authoritarian.

See: Israel, America, Canada, Australia, UK

There’s no fundamental difference between a democratic and authoritarian government in this regard. The primary difference is (and has always been) whether property is managed as a function of the state (monarchies, socialism) or as a function of the individual (democracies, anarchy).

Well, that and the “people” that get killed in democracies are usually of a different skin colour than you, so maybe you just don’t care?

I remember getting scolded for not singing O Canada properly.

Why is this even a story? This shit happens in schools because wrestling kids to do stuff is hard.

Oh wait, I forgot, China bad.

Do you not understand how North Korean defection usually works?

North Korea doesn’t care, because they know that a vast quantity go back and can be used as propaganda.

entirely peaceful, not projecting power or antagonizing regional powers

I wonder who’s meddling in South American affairs again…

Germany x Fascism 2: Electric Boogaloo

The really shocking thing about this claim is that it means North Korea isn’t really afraid of defectors anymore. I guess since a huge chunk of defectors end up returning to North Korea anyway?

Does anybody actually dislike this result?

It’s Russia’s fault that the DNC was caught. Clearly Russia is to blame for the DNC’s corruption.

This strike is extremely confusing. It’s a space radar thats only other use case is as an early-warning radar for ICBMs (that is, in the event of nuclear war).

Why is Ukraine going after Russia’s nuclear triad? What the fuck is going on?

Honestly this is the problem with all road infrastructure. It’ll be interesting to see how countries like China manage it. China currently has the largest paved-road system in the world, and maintaining that will not come cheap.

Nobody commenting on this has ever visited Xinjiang. Nobody writing these articles has ever visited Xinjiang. Can you blame people for listening to the media they have access to?

There’s a funny thing about the notion of media literacy in China vs. the US: in China, media literacy is mostly “what is the media not telling me?” while in the US, media literacy is mostly “which media source is telling me the right thing?”