The Democrats knew this was going to happen. There’s no way they couldn’t. And I don’t mean Democrat supporters, many of whom were vehement that Biden was fine like so many anecdotes in this thread recount. I mean the Democrat leadership, who manage his campaign and more than likely manage his presidency. Unlike the public, they have access to him. They have his medical records, the reports of his doctors and caregivers, everything. There’s no way they didn’t know this would happen if he debated.

They might start seeding support for a different candidate into their supporter’s discourse after this, but they will have been planning for this outcome long ago. And when a left-leaning (left from a US Overton window) news platform hosts a debate that shows him up that badly and then publishes commentary like this, you have to wonder if that caused friction with the DNC or if they assented to it.

As the party starts singling out a replacement, the question I hope people start asking is why they didn’t replace Biden earlier? Did they need to wait until the urgency of imminent elections made their new candidate more palatable? And if they don’t replace Biden, why are they letting Trump win?

https://youtu.be/PkqftJRoSXo

Forked-tongued ghouls, all of them.

He gives lots of reasons, but if one of them isn’t “oil-producing countries are starting to escape US hegemony and your gas-guzzling motor industry is on borrowed time” then I don’t think he’s really appealing to the US government’s interests.

They should start calling them seasons, and produce teaser/release trailers and behind-the-scenes interviews with the sanctions architects to build up more hype and anticipation for each season’s package drop. Maybe that way, the Russian economy might actually be interested. Or affected.

Or it’s a glimpse at Rom’s Dengist arc

The kicker is that Rom eventually becomes Grand Nagus and starts transforming Ferengi society.

The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene,

I love that scene. It’s so authentic: hearing a white American describe his successful living arrangement as literal communism but saying it’s not communism, and a black American correcting him. 100 years of Red Scare and minority struggle captured in a few lines of dialogue.

That’s not just research, molten salt heliostats are in active use already.

How’d that work out for Australia and Gough Whitlam trying to close Pine Gap?

It doesn’t matter what the people outside China think. The people inside China - on both sides of the Taiwan strait - think Taiwan is part of China. They all call themselves Chinese except the tiny minority that speak with American accents. There are indigenous ethnic minorities on Taiwan whose ancestors were not part of China, but they didn’t call themselves ‘Taiwan’ because that’s a Chinese word.

The US has already done so much harm to my family in the Philippines by propping up Marcos Sr., and now this.

They are monsters.

If anyone watching that decides to check out the books or the Tencent version then it’s a win.

Everything the Netflix show does to reinforce inherent Sinophobia is just a drop in the bucket compared to what Westerners get in their daily diet already. If libs choose between 100 different kinds of garbage when they watch Netflix I’d prefer them watching the kind that will see some of them picking up a Liu Cixin book.

Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m pretty sure Washington’s current string of geopolitical strategic blunders and failures is a result of their fellating themselves with their echo chamber media so much that they started swallowing their own bullshit.

Firstly, while i am no expert on the subject, it appears to me that this is a clear legacy of colonialism. Secondly, judging by how many modifications the Vietnamese alphabet has, all the various diacritics and tone indicators that are necessary to make it work, this would suggest to me that the Latin alphabet is just not a good fit for the specific phonology and tonal nature of the Vietnamese language.

This is correct. France’s particular style of colonialism was particularly aggressive about erasing native languages and forcing them to adopt French. Do an image search for a map of Francophone countries and you can see the scar they left across West Africa, for example. In Vietnam, they were starting to use Latin alphabet as an alternative to using Chinese characters before the French came, but the French pushed them towards exclusively using the Latin alphabet as part of their process of converting them to Francophones.

There’s not really a historical writing system to re-adopt - the Chinese character system and its derivatives are just as ‘imported’ as Latin, and I think if you go back earlier than that there’s multiple cultures and ethnic groups and not really a unifying language on the peninsula.

I’m not sure why the Vietnamese haven’t created a new writing system, but I know they’ve considered it multiple times and chose to stick to what they have. Completely switching the writing system is a lot of work. Shifting the infrastructure and education systems and planning a transitional phase where both systems are used is a huge effort on top of everything else the new government had on its plate.

The second last paragraph in the article is lowkey saying China is stealing Uyghur’s Sun! They just can’t resist the urge to editorialize.

“You keep saying how we’re all one big family, so give me a share of the business ownership and add my name to your will.”

isn’t there a single candidate that thinks more about the humans than for the money.

Yes, plenty.

Any of them that will be allowed anywhere near power?

No, none.

They are becoming more progressive, just slowly. They tried going faster in the cultural revolution, and it was disastrous.

It might feel painfully slow compared to Western progressivism, but that’s because it’s educating and incrementing generationally so that the changes happen with the popular support of billions of people, and they stick.

In the West they will force progressive values into law while half or more of the population still oppose it, and so they move 3 steps forward but then 2-4 steps backward as they flutter between parties in their circus democracies.

Look at women’s rights like abortion and workplace equality. The gig economy is less than 10 years old and China and Vietnam look after the welfare of workers in that new industry better. China and Vietnam are already ahead of the West in a lot of progressive respects. We’ll see China having better LGBTQ rights than the West in our lifetimes.

In the meantime be wary of letting liberals cherry pick the benchmarks for measuring which place is more progressive - they’ll always hyperfocus on LGBTQ for progressivism until the day the West falls behind on it (and it will), and then they’ll find something else.

[edit for typo]

I think you have access to the Hong Kong stock exchange from the US?