Red and Black posted:

quote:

Behind him, a drunk Uyghur man was yelling. Alcohol is forbidden for practicing Muslims, especially in the holy month of Ramadan.

“I’ve been drinking alcohol, I’m a little drunk, but that’s no problem. We can drink as we want now!” he shouted. “We can do what we want! Things are great now!”

At a nearby store, I notice liquor bottles lining the shelves. In another town, my colleague and I encounter a drunk Uyghur man, passed out by a trash bin in broad daylight. Though many Uyghurs in big cities like Urumqi have long indulged in drinking, such sights were once unimaginable in the pious rural areas of southern Xinjiang.

On a government sponsored tour, officials took us to meet Mamatjan Ahat, a truck driver, who declared he was back to drinking and smoking because he had recanted religion and extremism after a stint at one of Xinjiang’s infamous “training centers”.

“It made me more open-minded,” Ahat told reporters, as officials listened in.

Xinjiang officials say they aren’t forcing atheism on the Uyghurs, but rather defending freedom of belief against creeping extremism. “Not all Uyghurs are Muslim,” is a common refrain.

Red and Black posted:

I don’t know. I doubt it, but I can’t really evaluate that claim without knowing what the evidence is for it

crepeface posted:

quote:

that might have been true 20 years ago but china has been building a navy and developing their amphibious doctrine in a big way.

quote:

Don't talk Clancy plz.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

jeopardy answer: what is intergranular corrosion?

https://twitter.com/lubiephil/status/1125690989278973954

quote:

Concerns over the risk of metal stress and cracking were raised in 2017, the year before the next-generation fighters were due to come to Australia.

The FOI report obtained by the ABC said of the three bases where the jets would be based, only Williamtown, near Newcastle, had been identified as having potential problems.
...
The jets will also be based at Luke Airforce Base in the US state of Arizona, and the RAAF base at Tindall in the Northern Territory.

Comrade Koba posted:

so they’re going to…*adjusts glasses*…gas civilians with a paralyzing agent, hide them all in a shed or whatever, bring in fresh corpses (that they got from, uh, somewhere), photograph the corpses, then truck them off again and let the people they gassed just walk it off and go on with their lives?

this is some looney tunes poo poo

FuzzySlippers posted:

lol look at this China bump

(gallup)

I like the people not giving up on Iraq

sum posted:

It's a bit silly to spike the football on the invasion not happening while three-quarters of Russia's army is still parked on the border

Conspiratiorist posted:

The USmil has 1 million soldiers and only like 100k are actual troops.

What the Russians have deployed around Ukraine is about 60% of their frontline fighting power in terms of infantry and combat vehicles.

Fly Molo posted:

lmfao if this is afghanistan 2.0

how long is the afghan army going to hold out? at least 3 months
how many soldiers do they have? 200,000 well-equipped
how did it actually go? mass desertions, everybody died or fled, crumbled immediately under artillery

now what did the ukrainian army and the afghan army have in common??

Ok Comboomer posted:

I’m gonna disagree with this. literally everything you point out here is stuff pretty endemic to Putin’s Russia over the past several decades.

a lot of Russian dudes loving love violence.

also I would argue that the ad-hoc deputization of Russian citizens against undesirables (ie the official Russian attitude toward queerbashing, etc) reflects said fascist elements.

and also Russia’s spent two decades building up its military and military culture quite aggressively

also, I don’t know how you look at something like Russia’s Olympic doping programs and other related poo poo (and, like, which sports and fields they’re particularly interested in) and don’t conclude that they are loving obsessed with building a national myth through poo poo like physical domination, feats of athleticism, and traditional gendered weirdness.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

I dunno, an invasion this swift and decisive must have had a whole lot of planning behind even if it was plan C.

Shiroc posted:

He's a white American expat who was upset that the other people in Taiwan weren't acting as stressed.

Unless I'm missing something the whole real, material value to the PRC taking over governance of Taiwan would be to have control of the industry, knowledge workers and such. Blowing it up just to take the land doesn't seem worth anything unless the West heavily militarizes the island to threaten the mainland. But with Korea and Japan are also in close proximity with significant US military as is.

Cup Runneth Over posted:

What do you think is more likely, the Russians seeded hundreds of saboteurs into cities across the country, or paranoid Ukrainians encouraged by state propaganda are turning on foreigners and the mentally ill and beating the poo poo out of them?

Danann posted:

lmao imagine taking adrian zenz at his word when it's all bullshit

https://twitter.com/abovetheclouds/status/1308481116203036679

quote:

Your IUD will protect you from pregnancy for 3 to 12 years, but your doctor or nurse can take it out any time before that if you like. Removal is simple.

Where can I get my IUD removed?
You can usually get your IUD removed at the same health center that put it in for you. But any nurse or doctor who puts in IUDs can also remove them. The nurses and doctors at Planned Parenthood health centers, family planning clinics, and private gynecologist offices can all do IUD removal. Use our health center locator to find a Planned Parenthood health center that offers IUD removal near you.

Can I remove my IUD at home?
It’s best to have a nurse or doctor take out your IUD. IUD removal is usually a pretty simple process, but there’s a chance you could hurt yourself if you try to take your own IUD out.

Very rarely, there can be complications during an IUD removal — the IUD may be embedded (stuck) in the tissue in your uterus, it may have moved, or a piece may break off. This is super uncommon, but if a complication does happen, a nurse or doctor will know what to do to safely remove your IUD.

So try to have a nurse or doctor remove your IUD if you can. Use our health center locator to find a Planned Parenthood health center that offers IUD removal near you.

Nonsense posted:

China is barbaric and has no value for it's billion population of slaves.

https://twitter.com/liusiqi_64/status/1510968781769953282?s=20

caelxii posted:

Sounds like Wang correctly identified the problems neoconservatism and neoliberalism would cause in America and worked hard to prevent that from happening to China. So of course he’s a monster.

quote:

But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

quote:

Either way, our world is witnessing a grand experiment that’s now underway: China and the West, facing very similar societal problems, have now, thanks to Wang Huning, embarked on radically different approaches to addressing them. And with China increasingly challenging the United States for a position of global geopolitical and ideological leadership, the conclusion of this experiment could very well shape the global future of governance for the century ahead.

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/maxfras/status/1514358741319225360

FrancisFukyomama posted:

excess deaths can be tricky since when the hospitals hit 100% capacity every 3 months the people who die of easily treatable conditions in the waiting rooms won’t count of having died of Covid by any measure but Covid clearly was a causal factor there

i have heard a lot of anti lockdown people go off about people in Shanghai being refused service in hospitals bc of capacity issues as an atrocity of the lockdown and I think in the us people dying of heart attacks in the waiting rooms/awaiting surgery bc ICUs are full have just become expected during peaks

A National Acrobat posted:

these part where they clapped at themselves, grown people, beating kids in tugging a rope and messing up their game is mindboggling

Frosted Flake posted:

It's Time to Consider Raiding, Again

Al-Saqr posted:

after todays Supreme Court decision China is officially a better, more progressive and humane country to live in than america. all hail the CCP. you can ride trains, be a girl boss and get an abortion.

Dasar posted:

Have australians always hated china or is it mostly just now due to china suffering from success?

gradenko_2000 posted:

I'll humor Mirello by saying that you could probably do something like a permanent mask mandate, strict ventilation/filtration standards, and a permanent reduction in indoor capacity limits and keep COVID down to something you might call an "acceptable" level of always sitting below 1.0 r-naught, but:

A. that necessitates crossing the threshold of thinking and saying "we are okay with some people dying of preventable disease, by design"

B. once you cross that threshold, it becomes easier and easier to revise the target upwards to relax restrictions more and more

C. which leads to just going full Open Biden... which is why nobody ever actually practices this sort of "middle-ground" approach

Once you give up, there's no taking it back.

Antonymous posted:

this is loving disgusting what the gently caress

Antonymous posted:

taking a tragedy and immediately turning it into some "that's the chinese for you, and yes I have decided he is chinese more than his other identities" thing is more what bugs me

Fly Molo posted:

Traffic accidents kill about 60,000 people in China each year, and that number will only increase as more Chinese people get to own personal vehicles. Should he ban driving?

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1536323814753173508

quote:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has pushed back on a central pillar of US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, arguing it is overly simplistic to see modern geopolitics as a contest between democracies and authoritarian regimes such as China given the world is “bloody messy”.

Slavvy posted:

Extremely funny to think jacinda is not a liberal

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/winstonszeto/status/1545409644029349889

quote:

"It's really not possible for her to renew her Chinese passport either through the consulate or through a return to China," he said.

"It makes them quite aware of your presence … it often prompts an investigation of the person."

quote:

A wave of regulatory policies targeting the private sector, most notably private education and China's tech giants, has has also taken its toll on the perception of the level prosperity and freedom that is realistically achievable for regular Chinese citizens

Meng's Shanghai business has downsized from 140 employees to around 50 in recent years.

"I deal with local officials and am affected by this ... there are too many examples of unreasonable stuff that makes life difficult," he said, adding that he is ready to dispose of some 10 million yuan in assets and leave the country for good.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Where is

?

quote:

Opposite the $100 million Australian-funded Blackrock Peacekeeping Camp in Fiji, a farm is using grass funded by Chinese President Xi Jinping to grow its fortune.

The Juncao grass towers over Fijian farmers Vinit Lal and Chaya Kumar in Nadi. Its thick, green stalk is hardy enough to withstand the cyclones that buffet this tropical island. When it breaks down it fertilises the soil and helps stop the erosion that has come to define Fiji’s landscape and its struggle to contain the threat of climate change.

The grass – a genetically modified combination of 30 plants - has come a long way from Fujian in south-eastern China, where Xi, describing it as “magic”, funded its development while local governor in the 1990s.

It now has a second purpose on Lal and Kumar’s farm: it is used to replace wood as the dominant base for cultivating Bula mushrooms. Farmers once had to cut down trees to grow mushrooms out of wood on a commercial scale, now they just fill shipping containers with Juncao grass and mushroom seeds. The margins are high, the costs relatively low, and Fiji has its sights set on becoming a major mushroom exporter to China.

“We’re very thankful to the Chinese government to be giving us that aid, for giving us that foresight and a new commodity to work on,” says Kumar.

Lal and Kumar are among the most advanced of the Juncao mushroom producers, but more than 2000 farmers have had some sort of training. China’s aid programs – once blunt and brazen, filled with broken buildings, highways to nowhere, and recipients saddled with debt – are becoming more sophisticated. The Juncao farmers may be the first sign of smarter diplomacy by Beijing in the Pacific.

“The only thing they want is to make clear that China brought this new commodity into the community,” says Lal.

China Aid branding dominates parts of Nadi. Chinese seafood and hot pot restaurants dot the China Railway Corporation-built highway through the middle of town. The city’s largest building, the Nalagi Hotel, was built with Chinese development funds.

Further north on Vanua Levu – a 30-minute flight from the capital Suva – the Australian Army now occupies a China Railway Corporation compound that has become the site of a soft-power tussle between Canberra and Beijing.

The base housed Chinese state-owned company workers when they built roads all down this remote northern part of Fiji between 2011 and 2015. When Cyclone Yasa hit in 2020, the Chinese-built primary school in Lekutu sheltered the villagers. After the category-five storm passed it was one of the few buildings left standing. Down the road, the secondary school was wiped out.

quote:

The soft-power of Australia’s cultural links has perhaps been underestimated – particularly across language, sport and news services like the ABC. On Wednesday, Albanese watched the State of Origin in Suva with Puna, Papua New Guinea’s James Marape and Tonga’s Siaosi Sovaleni.

“These cultural connections are something that Australia can offer to people and very few countries elsewhere,” says Australia’s Pacific Minister Pat Conroy.

“You’re not going to get a Pacific rugby league team in the Chinese rugby league competition for example.”

Delta-Wye posted:

it looks like a run of the mill michael bay movie

its interesting to me because other than the obvious substitution of plan marines, it looks like any american agitprop set in a modern east conflict. it gives me the impression they are culturally starting to view themselves as world police?

president xi, gently caress ya!!!