Bloomberg has regular interviews with analysts for giant investment firms. They had one who specializes in government debt. She said she talks to the people who work the front office for politicians. The Iran war and affordability come up regularly but the number one question they get is about the Epstein files.

These are 2 areas that are being fought over for strategic reasons. One is a mountain border that would be a strategic chokepoint for potential future invasions. At this point it’s such a farce that both sides voluntarily carry out hostilities with sticks. The 9-dash line is some pretty creative mapmaking but it has nothing to do with territory and everything to do with the straight of Malacca. They want to stop the US from doing the same thing Iran is doing at the straight of Hornuz.

Neither of those is an example of “absorbing people against their will”. There are no people who to be absorbed because one is water and the other a bunch of mountains.

I think your rose colored glasses are so thick you couldn’t balance them on your head.

I can only guess where you’re picking up this wild mix of fact and fiction but I think you need to check out some history books.

You still seem to think that the will of the Dalai Lama is at all related to the desires of the people of Tibet.

Aside from a CIA funded uprising half a century ago, there’s no evidence at all that China “absorbs people against their will.”

People love to conflate the Dalai Lama with the people of Tibet.

He was plucked from a rural Chinese village as a child and turned into the head of Tibet’s theocracy. At the time Tibet was a miserable feudal backwater. The vast majority of the population were oppressed, illiterate peasants. It may not have been as bad as the Chinese government claims, but every account from outside observers talks about the deprivations in Tibet.

Today Tibet has almost all children in compulsory bi-lingual education and the people have many more job options than tenant-farmer. The fact that the Dalai-Lama lives in a temple in India instead of Tibet makes no difference to the lives of Tibetans.

Anecdotes and intuition are useful tools but hard evidence is more reliable.

China certainly has its share of bigots. While the majority of China’s Muslims are concentrated in Xinjiang, they have huge Muslim populations all over the country. Shanghai, despite being a relatively young city, has mosques that were built before Europeans discovered America. Muslims have been integrated into the myths and culture of China for centuries.

It’s a bit of a stretch to call the US, “the most barbaric country ever”. There are some horrific policies and practices here but history is full of horrors. Look up “the tree” from the killing fields if you want a depressing read. It’s also a stretch to say the treat Muslims better than China. When I wandered around various parts of China, Muslims would roll prayer mats out on the street to pray and nobody would bat an eye. Public parks frequently have enclosed prayer areas. China has more mosques than the US and Europe combined. I was only there for a month but I saw a bunch of Muslims and no signs of oppression.

While there are clearly problems with China, “fascism” is entirely the wrong word to describe it. The “forced labor” story has no backing. China has huge rural populations and a comparatively small (by population) but growing industrial and commercial sector. The overwhelming trend is that there’s a line of people for any job opening in cities. Companies often have to offer overtime because they can’t find applicants for regular 9-5 jobs. A rampant hustle culture may not be good for people psychologically but they’re not running sweatshops and they have nothing to do with slavery.

That’s not critical reasoning. It’s just bigotry.

When I was in grade school I would have gotten reamed for trying to cite any of these as sources. It should go without saying that they should be primary sources, not periodicals.

Does a single one of those links cite even a single reliable source?

You don’t need to trust China. Just use the basic critical reasoning we we taught in school.

You don’t need to be a “tanky” to deny this. You just need to care about sources. Do they have any?

Whenever I dig into the sources for these reports they come down to the same handful:

1. Adrian Zens - the crackpot who believes he’s on a mission from god to destroy China.
2. Gordon Chang - the guy who’s been predicting the imminent collapse of China for nearly 3 decades.
3. A law student from Canada who claims you can see barbed wire in satellite photos.
4. Various anonymous “whistleblowers”.
5. The “Xinjiang Cables” - you can easily find English translations of these and see that they contain scary stuff like minimum amounts of times that detainees must be allowed visitors and prohibitions around guards having any weapons around minors. (The Amnesty article claims to mostly use this source)

I stopped believing in the Xinjiang genocide when I realized I couldn’t find a single source that I could independently corroborate and most of the “sources” I was able to find receive over 90% of their funding from the US government or were created by the US government.

Just about every Muslim country in the world denies on this claim. It seems that the only countries that try to claim a “Xinjiang Genocide” are the same ones that cheer every time the US bombs another Muslim country.

I’ve lived in the US for a really long time so a lot of this is out of date.

Waldviertel is a region near Vienna. They were poor farmers. When we used to visit family friends there, we’d pass the giant manure pile in the courtyard on the way into the living area. We’d walk right into the entrance/eating nook. There was one door to the kitchen, one to the bedrooms, and one that went directly to the pig stalls. You could hear and smell them while you were eating. They spoke a really thick Waldviertler dialect. I could not understand their grandmother at all. After the fall of the USSR that whole village slowly moved up the agriculture supply chain (ie storing grain, agricultural insurance, etc). Now they’re rich. The grand kids of those farmers converted the farm into a mansion and they all speak High German now.

Ottakring only became part of Vienna in 1892. For a long time it was an industrial working class neighborhood. My relatives and everyone I knew in the area went to “Volksschule”, that’s essentially vocational school. While a working class background is often romanticized, many people from that background want to disassociate with it.

I can’t understand old people when they speak Ottakringer but I still have enough of it that some people can identify me as coming from the 16th district, AKA Ottrakring. It’s kind of fun to dip into it when I speak with my family but there’s little reason to use it with other German speakers. Living in the US I have barely any reason to use German at all. Even when I run into people from Austria we usually find it easier to switch to English for actual work discussions.

This seems quite different.

Rather than stigmatizing their use in schools, they actively encourage them. China maintains dual language education in these languages. Literacy rates have gone from low single digit percentages to above 90 for every minority language in China I’ve checked.

It’s closer to how kids all over Europe were taught English. There are certainly many local dialects that are dying off but it’s by choice. When I was a kid in Austria, the “Waldviertler” dialect was generally considered low-class, as was my own “Ottakringer” dialect. Those have mostly died off but there are a bunch of people who keep “Wienerisch” alive because they think it’s cool.

Almost all the people I knew growing up in Austria speak English. It’s the language of business, TV, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. My dad thinks it’s cool when he can speak Shanghainese or Cantonese to people but he likes that he can speak Mandarine with people who natively speak one of the many other dialects.

There are serious practical benefits for people in China to learn Mandarin. It doesn’t seem to interfere with their ability to learn their native languages.

Cooking nerd here. You can kind of make your own chocolate.

You almost certainly can’t make chocolate from scratch. You could, in theory do all the steps but even in the old days it was an industrial process and it’s nearly impossible to get the quality control tight enough at home. The fermentation, roasting, and grinding steps all have to be done under very precise conditions or you won’t get good chocolate.

You could just go really old school and use the Aztec recipes but that’s not “chocolate” as most people would know it. It’s more like a spiced tea.

Home cooks can buy chocolate (it’s worth it to splurge and get nice chocolate if you’re going through this much trouble) and mix it and shape it. You can make a wide array of flavored ganaches, coat things in chocolate, fill chocolate shells with stuff, etc.

The hardest part is tempering. Chocolate is actually a crystal. The short version is that if you don’t control that crystal formation through careful temperature and movement control, your chocolate will get weird and chalky; if you get that all right it’s smooth and snappy. There are books and videos on it but you’ll need to mess up a bunch of batches before you learn it.

It’s a stark contrast to the basic Confucian primer.

人之初 性本善 性相近 习相远

tldr we start good but we turn bad if we aren’t properly educated

The problem is that there are in fact many conspiracies. It litteraly just involves 2 or more people plotting to do something harmful.

As boring as common conspiracies are, we have ex-post evidence that many of the fairly wild conspiracy theories, were actual correct.

The CIA actually conducted MKUltra. They also conducted a bunch of zany experiments around remote sensing and other psychic powers.

The US really was part of covert data sharing agreement called Echelon to spy on its own citizens. They continue to do so today under the “five eyes” program.

There really was/is a huge network of powerful people engaged in sex trafficking and international blackmail.

It’s less a questions of if conspiracy theories are right or wrong and more about which parts are right. The common theme of the correct ones is that they’re based off of externally verifiable information and the explanations are consistent with other observable facts.

You clearly can’t have a secret basement operation in pizzeria with no basement. We know that people are conspiring about Epstein because we keep catching them in their lies.

As does Ring, Flock, Samsung, Apple, Google and so on. Some random person with any other hidden camera can easily upload them to creepy servers and do automatic face recognition on them too.

Steve Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor) has been doing that for a long time.

They can produce better video than some cameras but not as good as others. 12MP ultrawide is pretty standard on security cameras and they’re already all over the place.

Do you think that the current smart glasses are making surveillance more normalized or do you think that they’re getting more common because we’ve already normalized constant surveillance?

I’d point out that the PATRIOT act passed a quarter century ago with only one “No” and one abstention.

If I understand your response correctly, you’re arguing that the glasses themselves aren’t the issue, it’s the shifts that come with accepting the glasses.

They may ironically have the reverse effect. I guarantee that corporations are already cataloging your facial expressions. Between Ring, Flock, Apple, Google, Netflix, Samsung, etc. there are many pictures of all our faces with rich annotation. Currently most people don’t even think about how thoroughly they’re being watched. These douchy glasses may actually draw attention to the matter.

I dislike Facebook and deleted my account even before they changed to “Meta”. I also value privacy.

But what privacy violations do “smart glasses” provide that weren’t already trivially available? Tiny cameras are insanely cheap. A reasonably handy person could hide several on their person and there are plenty of “spy shops” that sell actual wearable hidden cameras.

The “I love ICE” kid was wearing Meta Ray Bans but the first video I saw of it was from someone else’ camera. I can’t leave the house without getting filmed from multiple angles. The only thing those glasses do is make it really obvious that the wearer is a dumbass.

Many of them likely aren’t immediately useful to most people but here goes.

1 I got older, got a few degrees, got paid a bunch and have been living in areas with extremely low street crime. I could probably pass out in front of my house with a Benji sticking out of my fly and it would still be there in the morning.

2 I quit drinking. That wasn’t an issue when I was a kid but later on it provided 2 huge benefits: 2.a) My situational awareness is never impaired. 2.b) It eliminated the vast majority of situations where someone might find me an interesting target.

3 I spent an absurd amount of time practicing and studying martial arts. The fighting parts of that aren’t that useful but many RBSD (Reality Based Self Defense) classes are actually practical. tl;dr It’s now fairly easy to find actual statistics on many forms of violence, look up the most likely ones for you, find the proven counters and practice those. For example, I’ve done a ton of drills that are a variation of shoving an attacker, yelling “Get away from me you PERVERT” (because while people tend to ignore cries for help, everyone wants to know who the pervert is), and running away.

4 Closely related to 3 is the general realization that you don’t need to make yourself immune to violence. It’s hard to be a good fighter and it’s hard to make yourself the least attractive target. It’s pretty easy to avoid being the most attractive target. For example, men are often targeted by men who want to exert dominance. Looking tough is counter productive because the attacker gets more glory from taking down a tough guy than a wimp. Looking batshit crazy is pretty effective; if I feel like I’m being followed and there isn’t a convenient escape I smack my head a few times and start arguing with “the voices”.

Thank you. I’ve taken a much more holistic approach. It’s worked very well. Haven’t been mugged in decades.