A bunch of incels are calling Anne Hathaway a transwoman because they can’t masturbate to cis porn anymore and they don’t understand why.

I’m not trying to make light of this, but given what I’ve seen from the “best and brightest” ICE has to offer, I think we are gonna wind up with a bunch of morons with singed micro-penises.

Dozens! Did you hear? Dozens!

We’re gonna have to burn it all down…

Long cat is long.

My frame rate is locked at cap and I had no lag. I’m sure others are having issues, but I’m not. The game is a blast. Sucks about Linux, though.

What a handsome lil buddy

Yes, that’s right, for the price of the full game you can play it for 30 days!

I fucking love roller coasters, so if I ever visit, I gotta make sure to go.

I sit down with the players at Session 0 before anyone has rolled a character and set out the plotline and setting of the campaign, as well as major factions. Then, everyone rolls for who creates their character first. The first person does, based on the info given, and then the next person follows. The only rule I maintain is that all of the characters must be friendly and trusting of each other from the get go. I’ve had too many campaigns get derailed because someone wanted to be the guttersnipe and not trust anyone else in the party and then it just turns into a slog through trying to convince that one player that it’s OK to go along with the plan. Once the characters are rolled, I ask if there is a consensus as to who will be the default leader of the group. If there isn’t one, then I have them roll a CHA check, winner is the leader. It doesn’t have to stay that way, but it helps to keep the early game organized until players find their footing.

After all of that is taken care of, I’ll play through a quick one-shot intro to the campaign to make sure everyone is happy with their characters, then set up the hook for Session 1.

If there is punctuation in a puzzle it is revealed immediately.

I hate this graph. First, the ceiling is 2.5%, but the floor is -0.5%, which skews the data to look more impressive at the top end and show the floor more drastically. The second is that it starts at 1950, skips 30 years, and then goes in 20 year segments. Third is that half of the graph is guess work. Sure, maybe it’s a good guess, but estimating population growth 80 years into the future based on information from the baby boomer generation is wild. Over all, this is a graph with an agenda. Maybe the agenda is needed and necessary, but math isn’t biased. Math is absolute. Skewing the math to make it say what you want it to say is bad practices.

I adore Stephenson, he’s one of my favorites, but we have COMPLETELY different writing processes. I could never dream of writing on paper like that anymore. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the time sink is just too much for me to justify. I can’t work 40 hours a week and then go home and write on paper just to have to type it into a computer anyway.

However, this very much tracks with his brand of fiction. He doesn’t edit as he goes, and that’s apparent. Stories often don’t end where you think they will, and a lot of that probably comes from being forced to live with what you wrote 5 chapters ago instead of being able to go back and edit it in Word.

I hate my coworkers so much I want to suck all their dicks. I’m not gay, but damn, I feel like the only relief I can get is if they relieve themselves… in my mouth. And my throat. And maybe my butt… but I need to get these stress related hemorrhoids checked first. Shit, I forgot, I don’t have healthcare. Now I have to suck some nurse dick. It’s gonna be a long weekend. Maybe if I get everyone together in the same room we can get it all over at once. Just… not in my eyes, please.

No, you have to understand. The US is so much worse than NK. NK can only hurt 20 million of it’s own citizens, the US is killing the world. But also, this is western media, so it’s not true anyway. /tankie

I fucking hate those cunts.

Your argument is the difference between reactive and proactive legislation, and it’s what we need to do to actually succeed. We are constantly on the back foot because we are trying to stop one problem at a time, i.e. Data Center deforestation. Data Centers are a problem, but not the problem. Destruction of natural, irreplaceable resources is the real problem. Sure, it would be great to stop all data centers from ever being built, but then something else will just take its place. We need to protect our resources first, then it won’t matter what they want to build because they won’t be able to. Getting mad about data centers is good, we should be mad, but let’s make that anger work for us in the best way.

The caveat is that a lot of these protections can just be stripped away by whoever is in the oval office, as we’ve seen with this administration. When they don’t give a damn about poll numbers, they just do whatever they want with impunity. That’s why these need to be written into state constitutions and not just statutes, things that a Washington signature can’t undo. They need to be guarded in land trusts and conservation easements. Put too many stops between the bastards and their prize.

Ok, you offered goalposts, so let’s play. No Zenz. No RFA. Deal. In fact, I’ll give you the RFA point for free. The Kim Jong Un haircut story was fucking trash, and the unicorn thing was a mangled translation of North Korea’s own state media announcing a “unicorn lair” historical site, which is honestly funnier than the fake version. RFA has printed junk. Conceded. Here’s the thing though. My case never touched RFA, and it doesn’t need Zenz either.

Here is the Xinjiang case built entirely from sources you didn’t exclude:

The Xinjiang Police Files. Thousands of internal Chinese police records, detainee mugshots, and shoot-to-kill escape protocols, hacked directly from police servers in Xinjiang and authenticated by a consortium of 14 international news outlets. This is the Chinese government describing its own camps in its own internal paperwork.

The China Cables. Leaked internal CCP operations manuals for running the facilities, classified as secret, describing locked compounds, mandatory “no escapes” protocols, and points systems for ideological transformation. Again, their own documents, in their own words.

The 2022 UN OHCHR assessment, published over Beijing’s screaming objections, finding the detention system may constitute crimes against humanity. Not a US agency. The UN human rights office.

AP’s birth suppression reporting, which was built partly on China’s own published health statistics. Their own yearbooks show sterilization procedures collapsing nationwide while spiking massively in Xinjiang during the same years. That’s their math, not mine. And China’s own white papers, which openly admit to operating “vocational education and training centers” at mass scale. The existence of the facilities was never in dispute. The only dispute is what to call a locked compound you can be sent to without a charge, a trial, or a lawyer.

On to the kids, now. You wanted extraordinary evidence. The evidence is Chinese government paperwork. State documents on “centralized care” boarding facilities for children of detained parents, reported from the government’s own education bureau records. I didn’t make that shit up. They wrote that shit down.

You said you’d concede. Every source above is leaked CCP internal documentation, Chinese government statistics, Chinese government admissions, or a UN body. Zero Zenz. Zero RFA. The ball is in your court.

Now, the “prove it’s worse than US prisons AND CECOT” framing. I’m not going to play misery Olympics, but I will give you the El Salvador point straight, because it’s your strongest play. The CECOT renditions are the most Xinjiang-shaped thing the US has done in years. People shipped to a foreign mega-prison without due process, including wrongful deportations the government shrugged at. That’s real and it’s disgusting. But look at what surrounds it: Emergency litigation. Supreme Court orders. Front page coverage. Congressmen physically flying to El Salvador. The act resembles the authoritarian playbook. The reaction is the difference. One system commits a horror and the alarm goes off everywhere. The other system commits a horror and arrests the alarm.

And the categorical difference with prisons still stands. Every US prisoner, in the worst prison we have, passed through a charge, a trial, a sentence, and an appeal. Unequal and broken as that process is, it exists. Xinjiang internment required no crime, no trial, no sentence, and no lawyer. Selection was by ethnicity. Those are not the same institution.

Your free speech theory eats itself, also. You said the US tolerates dissent because it doesn’t feel threatened. McCarthyism and COINTELPRO are on YOUR list, and they are exactly what the US did when it DID feel threatened. So your theory predicts American repression under threat, history delivers it, and then what happened? It was exposed by American activists, published by American papers, investigated by the Church Committee, ended, condemned, and put in textbooks. Meanwhile China at the absolute peak of its power and security passed the Hong Kong National Security Law. Repression under threat is universal. The question is whether the system can catch it and reverse it. One of these systems does that. The other one imprisons the people who try. He’s the lawyer this whole thread is about.

Now the big one. Your metric is “harm to other countries’ people,” and I want you to look hard at what that scoping deletes. The Great Leap Forward, tens of millions dead. The Cultural Revolution. North Korea’s famine in the 90s. The gulags. The largest atrocities of the twentieth century were governments destroying their own populations, and your framework scores every single one of them at zero because the victims held the perpetrator’s passport. “The US has done more harm to North Koreans than the NK government” only works if three generations of camps and famine count for nothing because Pyongyang did it to its own people. That’s not a moral framework. That’s a border shaped loophole, drawn so the crimes of the states you defend land outside the measuring area.

And I’ll concede the true thing inside your Korea point, because it’s real and most Americans don’t know it. The Korean War air campaign was annihilating. US commanders themselves described leveling most of the North’s cities. That happened and it was monstrous. It still doesn’t outweigh seventy years of totalitarianism unless domestic victims are worth zero, which is the exact math your ledger runs on.

Taliban, partial credit at best. The US funded the mujahideen. The Taliban emerged from Pakistani madrassas and the post Soviet civil war a decade later. And even at full credit, “the US contributed to the Taliban existing” doesn’t fucking cash out as “the US is worse than the Taliban,” which is what your actual thesis requires.

Last thing, and I’m answering this one straight because I think you asked it straight. You asked why it’s so easy for me to forgive napalming Vietnamese villages. It isn’t, and I don’t. The napalming of Vietnamese villages was an atrocity, full stop. Nothing in my position requires forgiving it, and if you’ve read me as saying foreign harm is fine as long as your own citizens are comfy, you’ve read the opposite of my argument. My argument is about what happened next. That atrocity was photographed by American journalists, published by American outlets, and it blew up inside the country that committed it. The antiwar movement. The Pentagon Papers. Congress cutting the funding. The War Powers Act. The draft, gone. The war became America’s permanent byword for a shameful war. Slow, partial, and paid for with Vietnamese lives that no accountability ever restored. All true. But the machinery turned against its own war.

So here’s my question back, and it’s the only one that matters. When China moves on Taiwan, what’s the Chinese antiwar movement that stops it? Who publishes the napalm girl photo in the People’s Daily? You already know what happens to the person who tries, because we’ve spent this whole thread talking about him.

The surveillance point is half-right and I’ve conceded it elsewhere in this thread. US corporate data collection is a disgrace. But “the only difference”? Scroll up. There’s a lawyer serving five years for WeChat posts in this very thread, tried in secret, family notified after. Meta sells your data… it doesn’t disappear you. Both are bad. They are not the same kind of bad, and “both should be avoided” is a luxury position, just ask the people who can’t avoid theirs.

Forced labor camps? You mean like private prisons, where in the US the incarceration rate is the highest in the world?

I invite you to go look at a prison, and then go look at a Uyghur camp. I’m not trying to say that the US prison system doesn’t need reform, it’s horrific and I won’t argue that, but we are on orders of magnitudes of difference going by first hand accounts of what is being done in Chinese forced labor camps. The difference, though is that you can read about how bad the prison system is while you live in the US. You can’t read about how bad the concentration camps are while you live in China.

That follows into your next point about freedom of speech. All of the things you’ve listed are real, and shameful. However, you know about them because of the freedoms in the US. You can’t read about shit like that from China because when it happens, China erases the person that reported it. Again, orders of magnitude. You posted a western media source that criticizes the party in power. Try that in China and see where it gets you. Then you can have your own first hand experiences in the forced labor camps. Don’t worry, they’ll make sure your family joins you. They’ve got schools for your kids and everything in there…

US corporate surveillance is a disgrace, I won’t fight you there. No federal privacy law, black market data brokers selling to the pigs. And you are right that the EU is helping the US, but California also has the CCPA, which is how we are attempting to fight it at home. I’ll concede that we need help on that front, no push back. However, China has everything you described plus the State. Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law legally obligates every Chinese citizen and company to cooperate with state intelligence. That’s why we had to push back on Huawei and TikTok. They don’t need a back door. They wrote the front door into law. There is no courtroom standoff where Meta has to answer for its crimes to a panel. These companies work for the CCP. It says so on the sticker. In the US our problem is holding people accountable. In China the accountability is welded on, and not in a good way.

I won’t push back on the emissions, it’s a point I’ve conceded in other responses. However, I will remind you that their internal reports are validated by the State, and if you counter them, the State will punish you. I’m not going to claim their math is wrong, but I won’t take it at face value when I know that the alternative for anyone speaking against the narrative is jail time at best.

And lastly, you claim that the US is the single worst country in the world… Which makes them worse than North Korea? Eritrea? Taliban Afghanistan? I mean… I understand that hyperbole is a fun thing to fall back on, but you’ve been lacing historic examples against modern practices for your entire argument, so do we put the US against Colonial Britain? The Mongol Empire? If we are scoring the present by the past, no one survives the calculus, China included (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, et al.). Pick your arguments wisely.

I’m actually gonna take this in reverse order, because I feel like it will make for a more interesting read.

1. Yes. Trump took a whole bunch of billionaires to China and they begged for stupid shit. No one is saying China doesn’t hold power. I’d be an idiot to claim that. So, not sure what your point is here, power was never in dispute, conduct is. The USSR had a space program…

2. Yes, they are dominating in trade, infrastructure, and EVs and renewables. I’ve talked about this in another reply here. No contesting it. What they make and how they treat their own people are two different axis.

3. This is the big one, because I’m not sure what histories you are reading. The CCP is the most prolific controller of women’s reproductive rights in human history. One-child policy? Forced abortions? Forced Sterilizations? Late term terminations? Fines and job loss after an unauthorized birth? Yeah. Those are things that really happened under the CCP. So… I’m not sure where you want to go with women’s reproductive rights under the CCP. Also, keep in mind, all of the shit that is being done to women in the US is being fought in the courts. You can’t do that in China. They just make a rule and suddenly your pregnancy is invalid. But, you say. “The CCP isn’t like that any more!” Yes, they are, but in reverse. Declining birthrates and a lack of new labor has forced them to course correct. Now they want all of their women to have children and reproduce because the pension system isn’t going to fund itself. And while they are pressuring Han women to have more babies they are sterilizing Uyghur women in Xinjiang. Same government, same time, different orders depending on whose womb it is. That isn’t reproductive rights, that’s supply side genocide.

4. And how am I sure I’m not the one drinking the kool-aid? Multiple. Independent. Sources. I triangulate my facts. I look at everything from multiple angles to make sure I’m seeing the whole picture. I’ve talked about this before in the thread, but I’ll say it again now. I don’t rely exclusively on western press. I don’t rely on clickbait and ad revenue driven sources. I trust independent sources, and the more corroboration I get in my sources, the more I can tell between fact and propaganda.

Quick correction before anything else: you keep saying “your sources,” plural, Western, aligned. I’ve cited exactly two things in this entire thread: Human Rights Watch and a UN Working Group. Neither is a newspaper. Neither ran a single word of Iraq WMD coverage. One of them attacks US policy for a living (check HRW’s reports on Guantanamo, the border, Israel… Washington hates them monthly), and the other isn’t Western at all, it’s a multinational panel of jurists. If you want to argue against the NYT’s 2003 war reporting, find someone who cited the NYT. Your propaganda model runs on advertising revenue and profit-driven ownership. Which of my two sources sells ads?

Now, Iraq is a fair hit, and I’ll give it to you straight: the WMD coverage was a genuine press failure. The Times published a mea culpa over its own reporting. But notice how you know that. Western journalists exposed it, Western papers apologized for it, and it’s taught in Western journalism schools as the canonical screwup. The system indicted itself, in public, on the record. That’s the difference in kind I keep pointing at. Where’s CGTN’s Iraq moment? What’s the Chinese state media mea culpa for its Xinjiang coverage? Self-correction requires the legal right to self-accuse, and only one of these systems has it.

And here’s the thing about the theory you’re running… it’s Chomsky’s, and Chomsky is his own counterexample. He called the American press a propaganda machine in a bestseller, from an endowed chair at MIT, for fifty years, and he’ll likely die famous and unarrested. The most successful critique of Western media was published, promoted, and taught by the West. The guy who tried that career in China is the lawyer this whole thread is about, and he’s in a cell in Changsha.

Even if I grant your model completely: profit bias, ownership concentration, wartime framing, all of it… it explains emphasis. Which stories get pushed, what gets buried. It does not explain forgery. What’s the capitalist profit motive for inventing a specific prisoner, a specific court, a specific date, and a specific fine, corroborated by a UN panel and announced by the man’s own family from exile? Your theory covers which stories get told loudly. It doesn’t cover a fabricated human being, and that’s what you’d need it to cover. Last thing: you listed Gaza as proof of uniform framing? Gaza coverage is Western media in open civil war with itself. Resignations in both directions, terminology fights, outlets contradicting each other daily. That’s not manufactured consent. That’s what the absence of a manufacturer looks like.

You’ve now argued with sources I didn’t cite and experiences I didn’t claim. At some point you have to respond to what’s actually in the thread. It’s two sources and one prisoner. Start there.

And merging your other reply here so we can get back to one thread:

Tour? Do you think people traveling to China are only allowed to travel in tour groups and talk to pre-approved actors, including uhygurs outside China? The point isn’t that I verify literally everything, but that I have seen exactly how distorted media coverage is.

Fair hit on “tour”, its a sloppy word. Travel in China is genuinely free, no minders. But the correction doesn’t rescue the method. Xie Yang’s family moved freely through their own country and still didn’t know his trial happened. Nobody vacations their way into a secret proceeding; the secrecy is load-bearing. And “Uyghurs outside China”… those diaspora accounts aren’t a counterexample to my sourcing, they’re a pillar of it. HRW and the UN built their documentation partly on exactly those testimonies. You’re pointing at my evidence and calling it your rebuttal.

“The point isn’t that I verify literally everything.” Ok, but two posts ago the point was exactly that: your words were that you assume anything unverified firsthand is wildly distorted narrative-pushing. Now the claim is ‘media coverage is often distorted,’ which, yes. Agreed. That’s why my method is corroboration across unaligned sources, which is what I did, which is what you’ve been arguing against for four posts. Welcome to my position; the Mai Tais are cold, but you can have a hot one if you like. I’ve never tried it, so I don’t know how good it is.