I agree with all of what you’re saying, but this:

Take a breath, break the rumination spiral, and remember what a loving world that values human life is about.

Is easier said than done. You’ll maybe break out of the spiral for a few days or even months, but it’s so easy to slip into the spiral again and the further you spiral the easier it is to drop back into it, until one day even on the days where you’re mentally healthy in all other respects, you live the fuck out of those days because the realist in your mind knows those days are numbered.

And I’m willing to bet the 12 feet of rope that I ordered off the internet that OP also agrees with everything you said and won’t break out of the spiral so easily, either.

I have a few different plans for ways to check out. One of them is designed so that it’ll just take one moment of courage and then I won’t be able to back out of it. Another is really slow and painful by design. Another one is designed so that no one would find my remains - and if I quit my job beforehand, the few people I care about not hurting would never find out.

When I ask myself why I haven’t done the deed yet, I don’t actually know how to answer. But I do know that there’s no reason to hurry, so there’s also no reason to answer the ‘why’ yet.

Typing all of that out hits home how fucked up those thoughts are. But on the other hand, having those plans gives us a sense of agency over it. Whatever shit you’re dealing with, you’re making the choice to keep dealing with it and I think there’s a comfort in that. There’s also a bit of freedom in the perspective that I’m already dead and none of what I do from this point on matters.

It’s not getting worse here in Hong Kong, it’s slowly getting better. The British brainrot is taking a long time to unfuck; there are full grown adults who were babies at the handover passing down romanticised stories about British rule to their kids that they were told by their boomer parents, and the eldest generation who remember how it was practically apartheid pre-Maclehose reforms are all elderly. But the education system and the reality checks from what’s happening in the States, Ukraine and Palestine are all pushing back.

It might seem like a strange question but people tend to have wildly different pespectives and understanding about China depending on what part of the world they’re in, what the media they consume says about it, and whether they’ve lived there or not. So even if we agreed with each other it’d still be worth going through because we’re in a public forum where it’s helpful for others to be more illustrative.

“up to a point” is doing massive work here.

China has capitalism: in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Macao. When you cross the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen it’s like night and day. Shenzhen ain’t no backwater either, but the cost of living, quality of life, environment, air pollution (the prevalence of electric cars makes so much difference that despite being less strict about smoking in public, it’s still cleaner in SZ), advertising, cleanliness of public facilities, parks in walking distance of everywhere… when they say ‘take the bad with the good’ that doesn’t mean not doing anything about the bad, and the difference a government can make in dealing with the bad is huge.

but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west.

Can you please give any examples of the Chinese government allowing capitalists to do harmful things to the Chinese people?

They are against it because anything bad that could come of further adoption of AI will happen if it’s profitable for the capitalists. Even now NVIDIA is continuing to pump the bubble when everyone knows it’s a bubble, because of the profits.

The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated. But nobody who is vehemently against AI is aware of the difference and likely will tell you China is capitalist. So all the problems that arise from capitalist control of AI are ascribed to AI alone as well.

“starting a company in X country for dummies.”

A lot of people don’t know how to do this in their own countries. All the paperwork and red tape etc. It’s left opaque because if everyone knew how to do it everyone would also realise how easy it is if you have the starting capital, and then they’d have more questions…

If Hasan were “Thanos snapped” out of the equation, it would be a reach to think that the people watching his stream aren’t going to up and read Lenin or find their way here or join their local Marxist org.

But I agree that if we are going to basically give people pacifiers that they should had least not be laced with poison.

We’re not giving people pacifiers that are/aren’t laced with poison. Bezos is giving people pacifiers, and one of them is significantly more left than the others. If we had the means to stop Hasan from speaking, his audience are not going to get up off their couches. They would just tune into other (likely further-right) influencers. Don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.

He wouldn’t need to be defended if he wasn’t consistently attacked. The real question is why does he need to be attacked?

In terms of being a pipeline, he’s definitely not pushing his audience to the right. He’s not pushing them toward the dead-end false-left Democrats either. He actively speaks against both of those groups. And then he makes his viewers aware of efforts like The Deprogram.

It’s literally the definition of the mouth of a pipeline. His content is mild enough for the the capitalists who control all the modern public fora to allow him to draw in huge viewership numbers, and that viewership has its overton window shifted left enough for them to discover further-left materia that they otherwise would never have known existed.

At worst he’s inconsequential, at best he’s feeding left. To the real left. There’s no opportunity cost to him doing his thing. His chat is a cavalcade of lumpenproles and kids spamming ‘top kek’ and ‘goated’ and pepe emojis. They’re certainly not moving left on their own.

Only use firefox or adjacent browsers

Is firefox much better? The names on the Mozilla foundation don’t inspire a lot of confidence

I’m not even American so it’s not like I can complain to my local senator.

lol

Like a local senator would interrupt his brunch at the country club for something like this

AKA the first island chain

‘Strong’ is a vague term that could mean ‘power projection’ or ‘resilience’ and I don’t think you folks need to decide which one ‘strong’ refers to by default when you already agree on the relevant details:

• US has power projection.

• China has no interest in power projection.

• US doesn’t have anywhere near enough power projection to defeat China in China.

Except in the picture on the left, someone’s actually reading it.

Something’s gone wrong if you’re looking in the node_modules folder.

Considering how LLMs work, you might be one of them.

willing to negotate on this still,

Removing the possibility of negotiation only galvanizes someone’s will to fight back. Never put an enemy in a fight-or-die situation, because as bloodthirsty and vicious as they are now, they can get a lot worse.

Keeping the possibility of negotiation open reduces an enemy’s will to fight.

It just has to be bad enough that all of the “dual-citizenship” settlers get rattled, unsettle, and fuck off back to where they came from. It’s not a country but a project, and its viability ends if it doesn’t have enough participants.

Opened the article.

RFA? That sounds familiar

Oh it’s Radio Free Asia

Closed the article

Heard his video on Xinjiang though?

Same. I also still have my placenta and even though my umbilical cord has long ago withered and fallen off, I keep it with me just in case.