Something that’s wild to me is just how much everyone ‘accepts’ ads everywhere but also will literally pay to not see ads. It’s even more wild to me how much door-to-door salesmen and cold callers see absolutely nothing wrong with what they’re doing. Like, not even the inconvenience registers with them. I get that not everyone is super into moral philosophy or whatever, but what the fuck?

OHMYGOD, THAT’S THE FUCKING POINT.

Just a poorly made and poorly received joke about aggressively not caring about the problems fifa/the world cup are facing. Sure, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, but we’re not always playing hockey, ya know?

This is my point exactly. Thank you for putting it more concisely than what I’m apparently capable of.

I mean, it should be obvious to Christians today that Jesus repeatedly and consistently made a clear distinction between the “kingdom of heaven” and secular nations. Separation of church and state was absolutely one of the premises the early church worked off of as a teaching of Jesus himself. The idea of a “Christian Nation” is indeed antithetical to the very foundations of Christianity. The early history of Christianity is pretty lost on people today and people are quite unaware of just how drastic the changes in Christianity were in the early 300s, and how gigantic of a deal it was for the Roman state to adopt Christianity at the time.

Eh, I don’t think there’s much merit to whether or not Jesus was a real person. The focus should be on the obviously fantastical claims because Christian apologists tend to get all caught up in the idea of Jesus being a “historical person” rather than the wild claim of Jesus being a literal god. I don’t reject the validity of Christianity because I’m unsure if Jesus really did exist or not, but rather that the supernatural claims fall embarrassingly short of such tall claims.

How would you even know about this? What are you, some kinda nerd?

We might be wise to see the real headline here: American intelligence is getting… stupid. As more resources get poured into near-literal witch hunts, wildly unreliable tools become routinely abused, competent staff continues getting cut, and some absolute dipshits keep filling decision making roles, the ability to keep some pretty intense existential threat vectors at bay looks to be getting very uncomfortably diminished. I’m no fan of the American intelligence community myself, nor of any state in general anyway, but we might want to consider the consequences for all of us if a generally competent intelligence community protecting a state with an apocalyptic amount of nuclear weapons starts getting… stupid. I’m worried enough about the instability in Russia and Putin’s growing paranoia.

Oh, damn… so have yall seen some of the crazy shit people have been doing with home automation these days? Setting up a whole ass brewery with such precision on temperature, pressure, and specific gravity in their own house.

Yeah, I think that really is the foundational tension in China; the internal power struggle of a deeply authoritarian CCP versus the cooperative stance needed to gain/build political capital worldwide. As it stands, their system will resist any legitimately populist movement and disincintivize honest efforts to dismantle harsh authoritarian policies and violent state oppression. You don’t maintain power (or your life) in a quasi-dictatorial party without keeping those who benefit from the system happy.

It’s certainly an opportunity in global soft power for the CCP, but I think the headline here is better framed as a shift in global economic power, specifically in tech. The current American government is certainly fucking things up for American soft power globally, but the political capital built up over the decades just can’t be ignored as that just doesn’t disappear overnight. Not to mention the human rights violations in Xinjiang, government corruption problems, aggressive naval maneuvering, and recent isolationist past that the Chinese CCP needs to overcome to become a serious contender as the new number one. They’re kinda making their way through it, but it’s definitely not inevitable, and too many short-term and long-term metrics are working against them. This particular situation could certainly be a solid foundation to build on, but the CCP and many Chinese vulture capitalists have a history of shooting themselves in the foot for short-term gains.

Yep, I keep forgetting about Chinese EVs. However, and pretty much exactly to your point, I think the US and western corpos are gonna have a much harder time keeping out Chinese RAM versus the relative ease of keeping out very conspicuous (in more than one way) Chinese EVs. The US government can make trade protectionism work, but that requires serious investment in domestic production in the same targeted sectors that get tariffed and uhhh… well. Happy early birthday, Chinese renewables, I guess?

Pretty sure the primary driver is the cheap labor. The poor working conditions kinda go hand in hand with that. However, with a shift toward domestic Chinese firms directly dependent on domestic Chinese labor, that gives the workers there a ton more leverage versus when it’s western corporations that can threaten to move elsewhere. A win for Chinese workers is a win for all of us.

Man, China as a country is certainly poised at this point to really pull some wild political optics with this move. Their manufacturing quality has been noticeably improving in recent years and their tech industry has a huge opportunity to show up western firms by undercutting the shit out of them in consumer NAND and DRAM. It would be wise of them to take QA extra seriously over the next couple of years to make themselves the “heroes” of the people by delivering better quality and dramatically lower prices than those bloated western companies. Hell, I’m even possibly in the market for it soon if the price is right. I have a feeling western corpos will continue snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and not notice that some of these Chinese corporations already quietly got their shit together a while back and probably won’t shoot themselves in the foot this time. This could be the optical turning point for China as an economic power.

Hopefully the Chinese people can continue making progress in fighting the CCP bourgeois for better labor rights, especially with western corporations losing access to terrible enforcement of already inadequate CCP labor laws. The Chinese workers will start having a hell of a lot better bargaining position with this development and the ACFTU/CCP can get fucked.

I wonder how cost effective this will be in the long run considering how much they’ll have to deal with corrosion. I imagine the maintenance will become pretty overwhelming in a year or two.

To nitpick further…

It’s yet another iteration of the rich destructively oppressing everyone else. Capitalism is yet another system built and modified by the rich to keep themselves in power. While it may be a preferable system over most of what came before, it’s still not good enough to protect the rest of us and the world from their destruction. When their greed yet again goes too far, the cycle will repeat yet again. We might want to take that opportunity to build a better system specifically without the rich dipshits.

I can’t help but notice you went straight to ad hominem and didn’t engage with any argument. It seems as though you more so just want to be angry than anything else. Where I can definitely personally sympathize with what appears to be a strong anger toward Christianity/Christians, it’s pretty counterproductive to lash out because of it. What good is it to do so when it only perpetuates your own anger and serves to cause Christians to double down on confirmation bias? Making sweeping generalizations about Christianity would only serve to put Christians on the defensive and make them extremely unreceptive. What good is that other than causing more discord and anger?

This is a pretty silly take. Look, I’m an atheist myself and I’m someone who is of the opinion that religion has been a net negative for humanity, but I also know pretty well what I’m talking about when it comes to Christian theology, eschatology, and biblical principles, and I can tell you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to this subject. There’s plenty to be critical of the Bible about, but you haven’t really hit any of the points at all. If you don’t know the subject very well, you probably shouldn’t form such strong opinions on it.

ABSOLUTELY. I love the book of Revelation, but too many don’t understand how to read apocalyptic literature, nor do they understand the source material to contextualize the heavy symbolism. I blame a ton of the dumbshit premillenial dispensationalism crudely hobbled together to resemble a form of eschatology on a poor understanding of Revelation, Dallas Theological Seminary for spreading the fuck out of it, and Schofield for being the dipass to keep it from remaining the obscure hallucinogenic ramblings of a (probably) sick pentecostal woman in England. Man there are so many cool things about the theology of hope and some strong influences of Stoic philosophy(again), but man does American theology love to fetishize about the unbelievers facing a gruesome divine genocide…

Did you read the post? The Spyware specifically targeted whatsapp, hence my mentioning it.