It costs virtually nothing to give someone a cup of tap water, and 7 dollars for water is a fucking scam. Why are you taking the side of the bourgeois?

At least the like 2 public restrooms we have are free.

It irritates me because the family member who attributes random occurrences to god intervening in daily life and a great evil we are fighting on earth that also intervenes is catholic; this mystic shit is heretical as hell.

They had a few hundred troops there as part of a UN peace-keeping force, who left with the rest of the UN troops in 2020 when the new government asked them to.

His current job is also as a spoke person for Chinese electric vehicles

The CEO of Ford? What are you talking about?

Well that’s simply incorrect, here’s a screenshot of my desktop on wifi in Nanning, loading apnews.com.

they allow everything.

Hahah no they block so much, youtube, google, probably 80% of western media, just not apnews, despite AP news historically just being a state department mouthpiece peddling whichever lies for whatever war.

They block stuff mostly to promote domestic media, but also to block foreign propaganda and stuff old folk deem immoral. Personally I think the Great Firewall was a necessary evil that xhs proved had largely outlived its use now that China is capable of producing counter-programming or just connecting Chinese users with real Americans to counter western propaganda, but now in the era of AI, who the fuck knows?

AP isn’t blocked here. But while in China, I can access anything that is blocked via VPN, like any chinese person. Its common enough a cop or security guy in Tianjin airport helped me install a hk-based esim via alipay that gets around the Great Firewall when I arrived the first time and couldn’t pull up my gmail.

That said it is still a nuisance.

China doesn’t have free healthcare, but they build hospitals and train doctors to keep healthcare cheap. There’s also state run insurance. I got a ortho consult for 1.5USD, and a retainer reattached for 15 USD, as a walk-in. Last year I got a consult, x-ray, and ultrasound for like 12 USD in a more rural hospital after a motorbike accident. Also antibiotics and wound cleaning, but I don’t recall the price. Non-perscription meds are weirdly expensive.

Cuba is a better model given that they’ve done so much with so little.

As far as real estate goes, I’m staying in an apartment converted into hotel for 9 USD/night. Rent is hilariously cheap.

Nobody needs to be comfortable around people who take offense to being alerted they’re carrying water for antisemites. But some people would rather create an echo chamber than accept even the mildest criticism of the things they say I guess.

Yall are using 2 different definitions of liberalism. The cable news definition means like socially permissible and supporting social welfare. The academic definition refers to the philosophy of capitalism. Here’s a book going over every major liberal philosopher and how they dealt with the contradictions inherent to liberalism (tldr: In the end, it’s the freedom of the dominant group to exploit the working class). Here’s Huey P Newton talking about his experience with liberals.

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Don’t be wrong and offensive and people won’t correct you lmao.

“Democrats are really like the center right in Europe.”

But they are lol.

The Arabs as semites thing is weird, while yes if you use a definition of semitism from a century ago and make technical arguments sure you can logic yourself there, but that’s not how language works. When someone says antisemitism, they’re specifically referring to bigotry against jews. It’s like all the debates about whether hotdogs are sandwiches, if sushi is a type of taco, etc. If you say “antisemitism” or sandwich or taco, nobody is going to understand you’re talking about racism against arabs or hotdogs or sushi.

As far as “I like the ideas of communism, but the average person isn’t ready for it”, maybe just accept that you haven’t read any works by any communists, and don’t know how AES states work, like 99% of westerners instead of opining on a subject your understanding of comes entirely from adversarial sources. It’s not even wrong, it’s just indicating that you’re unfamiliar with the subject.

What were you saying that got angry attacks lol.

I wish there was a way to break through to liberals. They’re able to see how fucking dumb conservatives are when they inoculate themselves against education by letting other conservatives tell them about wokeness, then do the same exact thing for anybody to their left.

Has a single lib reading this thread looked at the communists saying “That’s not what dictatorship of the proletariat means” and didn’t immediately go “No, I know better, you want 1 single person in charge of everything and accountable to nobody and also you’re racist and like genocide”?

I am in China right now, I will be back in Vietnam in a week, I talk to people all the time, is there something specific you want the opinion of the next rando I talk to on?

Deng: Mao was about 80% good, 20% bad. I don’t think I need to list Deng’s mistakes. Or mention Hu Jintao.

The USSR beat the Nazis, turned hundreds of millions of farmers living under feudalism into a space-faring civilization with living standards comparable to the west within a single lifetime, and materially supported positive social movements all over the planet, but if you want to talk about any particular period, I can talk about things that in hindsight weren’t great, even with proper context.

Space-based data centers are wildly impractical to bordering on not physically possible. The largest feature on the ISS, which you can resolve from earth with a pair of binoculars, is the radiators, and it generates 70 kW. Large data centers use >100MW of electricity. You’d be looking at large fractions of a square mile of just radiators.

Yeah no if you’re calling the Khmer Rouge, whom authoritarian communist, Ho Chi Minh, kicked out and the US armed and supported in exile until the 90s, an example of leftists, no shit you’ll get banned, clearly you’re not there to have an actual discussion.

As far as the USSR and Mao, communist circles tend to have much deeper understanding and criticisms of these things because we actually engage with what actually happened, why it happened, it’s effects, how it’s perceived by modern historians, etc, as opposed to liberals who don’t actually care beyond its utility in jerking off while grunting “communism bad”.

Wtf are you talking about?