is referring to the upvotes my comment has?

This isn’t Reddit. Nobody cares about your karma score

Is this English?

And, lo and behold, people came screaming out of the woodwork

Ah, the resident troll

You are literally angry that no one is gonna let you argue in bad faith

Nothing “Bad Faith” about it. You’re presented with facts, you reject them for propaganda.

The conversation dead ends as people downvote anything that rattles their priors.

Because the US is shit, doesn’t mean China can use that as a standard

Because the US is ideological, you reject that any other county might be doing better.

You only get called a wumao if you parrot the official CCP line

Anything that isn’t reactionary propaganda against China is “the official CCP line”. You can say the most inane shit about their high speed rail network or post pretty pictures from the fucking Panda Sanctuary and it’s CCP propaganda.

Also trying to paint China and it’s government as flawless or deflecting any criticism

You’re just proving my point. How can you engage in any kind of serious discussion when the rebuttal is “You think China is perfect!” and “Stop talking about non-China countries for comparison!”

How do you have a serious discussion when even the most minor concession is met by “So you admit China Bad! I win!” Nevermind when there’s actual criticism rather than paranoid bullshit, and its just ignored because it doesn’t sound critical enough.

Sadly, any serious analysis is meet with “Wumao Bot Tankie” on reflex.

More than two word of a post that don’t begin “China Bad” bounce right off the mental deflector dish reactionaries shelter under.

Anyone can fake a chat stream. And Owens is a notorious hack who will happily just make shit up for her rube base.

Publicly, Kirk was never anti-Israel.

Grifting requires an audience to grift to

In 2024, Kirk channeled $85M through his organization, largely via the Mercer and Adelson families. He was getting this windfall precisely because Tucker (their former leading conservative flak) had started drinking his own kool-aid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun#Racism_and_admiration_for_Hitler

Woof.

No. He died because he got shot in the neck with a bullet at a Utah far-right pep rally.

His friend Candice Owens has been pumping out a bunch of conspiracy theories that Kirk was secretly anti-Semitic. His other friend Ben Shapiro keeps insisting Kirk was always an AIPAC loyalist. And that’s created a ton of friction at the latest CPAC convention.

But there’s no reason to believe Kirk had a dog in the fight one way or another. Charlie’s primary goal was raising money for Republican candidates and organizing college Republicans to do free labor in exchange for invitations to the various keggers and orgies TPUSA became known for. He wasn’t outspoken on Israel either way before his death. That made him a great blank slate for the various sycophants in his orbit to project their own reactionary ideology onto.

This is what most of China’s rapid construction projects end up being.

Well, I think I found the logic behind the boot. Wildly different to say construction standards are a problem than to conclude the majority of buildings are defective and dangerously prone to collapse.

Might also be noted that this isn’t something that’s gone unaddressed. Police in China arrest 9 people linked to Changsha building collapse that left dozens missing

At the same time, you’ll have western media insisting the draconian Chinese police state is cruelly persecuting businessmen in the country.

Guo Wengui is a great example - a man who turned “Exiled Persecuted Chinese Businessman” into a cottage industry, bouncing from cable news show to right-wing radio program to complain about the villainous evil far-left authoritarian communist police state that was harassing him illegally for fake crimes he’s falsely accused of. And then he gets caught running scams in the US using the same modus operandi Chinese prosecutors sought him out over.

Worker and civilian safety is not a priority in China

This is flatly untrue, particularly since the Xi administration began cracking down on corruption at the municipal level nationwide. But it is routinely asserted that instances where corruption and malfeasance occur are “normal”. Meanwhile, instances where the police investigate and arrest corrupt and incompetent administrators are “persecution”.

It’s “heads-China-bad” / “tails-China-bad”.

What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and the Reds

Turns out we’re a nation of immigrants. Therefore, everyone’s eligible to be deported.

Does raise some questions about why ICE exists to begin with and what its purpose has actually been.

Bezos isn’t a bootlicker. WaPo is a commodity and he’s more than happy to shove it into the woodchipper if the pellets that come out are worth more than what he put in. He’s been profitably trading on his WaPo investment in exactly this way since he bought it.

Bezos has outsourced the bootlicking to a third party. If WaPo exists to do anything, its to lick his boots while others watch. And, occasionally, he farms them out for a handsome ROI to lick the boots of others desperate for the attention.

Flinging an investigative journalist under the bus is just one more way to trade on WaPo’s credibility for his personal gain.

ICE, DHS, and the Border Patrol precursors have historically treated native peoples with some of the most cruelty. This goes straight back to Bush, Reagan, even Eisenhower (Operation Wetback swept up a ton of First Nations people in the southern border states).

Really puts the exclamation point on how much of a lie “Immigration Enforcement” is as public policy. It’s ethnic cleansing and always has been. Anyone defending ICE is defending white supremacy.

Getting maybe 20% of the features of Notepad++ standard was nice out of the box. For a fleeting moment, I almost kept it as my default.

Gmail has started injecting a fat “Suggestions for responding to emails” feature into my composition space. Really fucking annoying when you’re trying to type something out on a phone. No idea how to begin disabling it, I couldn’t find configurations anywhere in the settings.

I’ve had this email address for over 20 years. Not looking forward to changing it. But enshitification won’t stop.

Games Workshop using AI really would be the snake eating its own tail. So much of AI is trained on the iconic imagery of the Warhammer universe. You’d really be getting a copy of a copy of a copy if you tried to insert it into new official publications.

Cardinals fans are on notice