worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us

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.

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?

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