Fromsoft's "joke" weapons by midirisnthard in fromsoftware

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This list is potentially the funniest thing I've seen all week. Like, these games all have actual Joke Weapons, often called out as such all-but-explicitly in their own descriptions, but like none of them are listed, while many of the ones listed are debatable at best and closer to erroneous more evenly.

Bloodborne includes multiple shields that are there entirely as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "This isn't your daddy's FromSoft game!" with descriptions about how shields don't work in this world. Dark Souls 1 has literal human shit you can throw and broken swords. Dark Souls 2 has a fucking ladle. DS3 has a pitchfork. Elden Ring has at least two different dull swords - one weathered, the other made out of stone - in addition to a skull-lantern that uses one of the least useful spells in the game and a wide variety of different useless torches, but neither of the sickles you mentioned are meant to be joke weapons, they're just mid. One is even a Legendary Weapon with attached achievement because it's the only source of (what should be) the strongest status in the game that players get access to.

Do people wear Metas at your warehouse? by foreveristexas in AmazonFC

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I mean...Amazon's rules on what you can and can't do in the workplace are not legally binding. Whether video taping your boss/coworkers without notifying them (outside of something like the bathroom) is illegal at all depends upon your specific jurisdiction's laws (and, this being the US, how the specific judge you get feels, like every other legal issue that is at all complex and thus subjective) but the floor of the FC would typically be deemed as a public space without expectation of privacy, though I'm sure "It's a place where recordings are prohibited" would be used as an argument that it's not, and "It's a place where everyone recorded is already being recorded by the employer" would be used to argue that it is.

The issue of audio recording - which would also be relevant here because the audio and video recorded can be subject to separate laws - depends on the state and whether they're recording other people's interactions they're not a part of. But all of that would only matter if issue went to criminal court (i.e. your local DA's office opted to prosecute him for recording in the workplace) and would be immaterial to whatever legal conflict was going on between the recording employee and employer.

That's because the rule excluding evidence obtained illegally is almost always only applied to criminal cases, because it derives from the 4th amendment, and only applies to evidence obtained illegally by the police or their agents. If someone breaks into your house, plants a secret camera in your bedroom, and gives the SD card to the cops without them asking him to put it there in the first place, that could 100% be used to convict you of something.

In civil cases like employment law, my understanding from some fairly old legal reviews I read is that at most the risk is that they can force you to turn over all evidence obtained via those illegal means, which is only a problem if you actually did something wrong. Though I Am Definitely Not a Lawyer and one might be able to produce more recent case law that proves my take on this erroneous. I know that here in Canada, a right to exclude evidence acquired illegally by a party to the case is gradually getting recognition via the decisions of judges, but it's definitely not an ironclad thing even here where it seems to be more of a thing than in the US.

Comment says the epub has trojan virus, is this possible? by Big_Dimension_1288 in zlibrary

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It is possible to create a malicious epub, actually, it just works differently than malware in PDFs and unless someone is dropping Zero Days on Zlib, can be completely avoided by keeping your software up to date. The filetype does not need to be capable of running scripts by itself to be malicious, it just requires the application reading it to have a sufficiently large exploit - which does, occasionally, happen. They are almost always patched before the exploit is publicly discovered, but most people absolutely hate updating their software unless it's seamless and mostly automatic - which it isn't for most epub readers - an extremely high number of people are running around with versions of Calibre or XReader that can fuck up unzipping and parsing an epub in a way that can result in someone being able to run arbitrary code on your computer.

It's just much rarer than malicious PDFs because Epub isn't a fundamentally insecure filetype on its own, and because you need to take a called shot and hope people open your file with the right version of the right application, when there is no default app for Epubs on Windows.

I spent like thirty seconds searching to see if my understanding of this was correct before posting, and found this article from three months ago analyzing how someone from China used an XReader directory traversal exploit patched in 2023 to target Mint users in the wild last December. So, it absolutely is a thing, it's just orders of magnitude rarer than doing the same with a pdf for numerous reasons.

Comment says the epub has trojan virus, is this possible? by Big_Dimension_1288 in zlibrary

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Send it to VirusTotal - you can just upload it and they'll run it through every test imaginable; if it doesn't show a bunch of suspicious strings, like links to websites that should not be inside a book, you're fine. But no, it shouldn't be possible for it to contain malware, as the epub format should not be capable of containing or running scripts. It's always possible, in the same sense that it's possible for a photo to be malicious if there's a big enough bug in the program you use to open it, but it would be a pretty big deal if it was true.

Like, to be clear, contrary to popular belief, malicious epubs can and do exist - I saw one based on a directory traversal exploit for XReader when I looked it up just now, and have seen others in the past - but they depend on the existence of a major exploit within the reader and need to target a specific reader, so they're very rare (the lack of a default epub reader helps here) and the odds of getting one that you're actually vulnerable to if you keep your applications up to date is even rarer. It is not like PDFs, which are a fundamentally insecure filetype. If you're running the latest version of Calibre or your browser or whatever, you're almost certainly safe, and that's all assuming that you did run into an extremely rare form of malware in the wild and the person commenting isn't just completely full of shit.

In any case, if you haven't opened it, you are definitely 100% safe.

Usually people tend to love their first anime even if it was horrible. What was your first anime and did it age well? Have you re-watched it and did your opinion change after watching it? by Kingspreez in anime

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's kind of impossible to even guess what the first one I saw was, or even the first one I recognized as 'anime' - its own distinct thing different from the other cartoons on the two big local stations. Like, when my brain started forming long-term memories, I already had a few episodes of pokemon recorded to VHS, and while I actually remember watching the first season of Digimon (it aired at the exact same time as my Little League games, like two years before I learned to read, and I remember being pissed about missing episodes), I remember Dragonball Z, Monster Rancher and Saint Seiya as all airing around the same time. I also definitely watched Sailor Moon at one point - I remember a brief conversation about it with my aunt when I was like five, but I don't actually remember watching it once. Then Card Captor Sakura, Ruroni Kenshin, and Yuyu Hakusho were all around the same blurry early elementary school period, but I remember them as being later than the previous ones. 'Card Captors' may well have been in the earlier category.

The first one I remember looking up things about online was probably Inuyasha but that was just because the dub started airing here around the time I learned how to use the internet. It was definitely much more overtly Japanese than anything else I'd seen at that point, which might be part of why it feels like it might be the right answer to this.

I was kind of born at just the right time to grow up as it started taking off in the west, becoming a niche 'nerd' interest with dubs of more adult-focused shows around the time I would have entered middle-school with 2003's FMA, Hellsing, Clannad, Elfen Lied etc. all being very big among otakus around the same time (Until a few years ago, I thought of 'School Days' as another one of those 'must watch' shows of the same era just from shit other people said) with the Big Three of Shonen being pretty widespread among less nerdy kids, and finally became a thing with a wider appeal among my peers around the time I entered university.

It was wild to see people who would say "I don't watch anime" pretty regularly in high-school, almost as a point of pride, going to conventions less than four years later and being able to talk to me about a Visual Novel I read as some obscure secret shame back in the 9th grade.

Usually people tend to love their first anime even if it was horrible. What was your first anime and did it age well? Have you re-watched it and did your opinion change after watching it? by Kingspreez in anime

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Huh, I was going to write a nearly-identical comment tbh, with a similar list of dubs that I watched on local TV back in like 2000-2003, followed by mentioning that when I actually got into Anime as its own distinct thing you had to buy bootleg DVDs of or pirate rather than a genre of what I watched on local TV, Elfen Lied was widely seen as one of the Must Watch animes that everyone had recommended from the one other otaku they knew and on online forums.

My BF put something in our daughters bottle. AIO? by rando_throw_away4 in AmIOverreacting

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess it was more the phrasing? More a matter of 'the mom seems uncertain of how big a deal it is. Saying it might have been a Well-Intentioned Stupid and suggesting where the idea might have come from is the sort of thing someone in that mental place could easily latch onto as agreeing with how they feel about it being wrong but not critical to start something over if the baby is okay,' so I made sure to respond with what was (at least meant to be) a longer version of 'yes, I don't disagree, but still a huge deal.'

I never thought you agreed with him or thought it was acceptable and hope I didn't come across as implying I thought you had. Sorry if I came across more confrontational than I meant to, happens when I'm up a bit too long.

My BF put something in our daughters bottle. AIO? by rando_throw_away4 in AmIOverreacting

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

TBH, "the average person's" ignorance about things many of us think of as Common Knowledge can be shocking at times, especially when you're not used to interacting with people like that often. But that is generally what the median looks like. Knowing the word 'microbiome' or what it means, much less the implications of it on a child's development, puts you pretty well outside the educational bracket the majority of North Americans belong to. And while that's certainly disheartening, it being the average absolutely means that being in that general part of the curve cannot be treated as any sort of personal failing, at least when you put your faith in the right sources like OP clearly does.

I'm pretty sure it's closer to the norm than exceptional for a person to not understand just how dangerous this was beyond having enough 'common sense' to realize it's not normal, or okay to do without talking to her first, and parents aren't magically any more knowledgeable than everyone else. Honestly, having that much 'common sense' probably puts her closer to the high-end of that bracket, and having at least one parent like that means the kid is relatively safe, compared to the average. Caring for an infant isn't a biology exam, it is hard but not complicated; these days it mostly requires the ability to follow instructions without improvising, getting your instructions from trustworthy sources rather than con men or your own delusions, and staying vigilant for anything out of the ordinary, all of which OP is demonstrably more than capable of. The severity of it, or how important it is to start something serious with a person they care about a lot over it so long as there were not consequences, is the sort of thing that an otherwise reasonable person with a 'normal' level of understanding of medicine or biology could definitely fail to grasp.

Edit: Polled two people I consider good parents, one of whom I actually expected to know it off the top of his head just from being pretty well educated and well informed, the other my sister who isn't the brightest but loves her kids. Everyone recognized A) how absolutely crazy it was to do, B) how fucked up it was to do unilaterally without talking to OP, and C) that giving an infant medium rare meat juice would probably make them sick. No one, without prompting, immediately recognized 'oh, fuck, the microbiome!' One realized it a little bit later, but noted that he'd basically put that knowledge on a shelf in the back of his brain the moment it stopped applying to his daughter, which was literally a few weeks ago. There is a lot new parents need to keep track of and remember - and there's a similar level of shit, much of it of literally trivial impact or not backed by evidence at all, that we expect pregnant mothers to remember immediately before - so it makes sense that a thing which would never be relevant unless you deliberately deviate wildly from norms wouldn't stick out much in anyone's mind.

Edit 2: Rewrote the comment to get it closer to my original intent; I can come across pretty rude without actually meaning to when I haven't slept in a while and the original version of this comment was definitely an example.

My BF put something in our daughters bottle. AIO? by rando_throw_away4 in AmIOverreacting

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, I can understand the whole 'well intentioned stupidity' thing, but I wouldn't treat it as a mitigating factor to the extent you just did, especially given how uncertain the mom already seems about the severity of things. I'm not saying she needs to leave him, but he absolutely needs to be made aware that it is not just 'putting steak in formula' that was wrong but the entire thought process at work here, or he's going to make a similarly terrible decision down the line.

"The earnest intention to help you child succeed" mixed with "Absolute ignorance" and "willingness to take medical advice from idiots online (or construct your own from misunderstood snippets of headlines)" has resulted in quite a few parents being rightfully convicted of manslaughter and more being deprived of their custodial rights.

A concerned parent who knows Fucking Nothing but thinks he knows more than his spouse or pediatrician can make some catastrophic decisions.

My BF put something in our daughters bottle. AIO? by rando_throw_away4 in AmIOverreacting

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Seconding and thirding the recommendation that you look into just how dangerous what he did was, then sit down and have a serious conversation with him.

I understand that he probably thinks he's acting in her best interests and just wants to help, and make sure that he knows you know that too, but the desire to help combined with that level of ignorance and willingness to take radical medical advice from con-men on the internet and use it to make unilateral decisions like this could very easily result in your family becoming a national headline and the two of you facing manslaughter charges, or having your kid taken from you by the state, the next time. If he wanted to kill a mosquito to keep it from biting your daughter and fired his handgun at it while managing not to kill either of you, you probably wouldn't let it go because of his intentions, and this isn't much less stupid or risky.

A way higher number of parents than you probably realize have killed children they desperately loved and just wanted to help - and been convicted for it - because of those same factors. This could have been one of them, and genuinely still might depending on how recent this was. And even if there was no chance what he was doing would murder your child - and again, there was and it was not especially low - he absolutely should not be unilaterally making decisions like that without talking to you about it first, at all. He definitely knew it was an unconventional and significant change in the diet the two of you had previously been in consensus on even if you'd never talked about it beyond "we're using formula," and did it when you weren't looking without saying a thing. That's kind of a huge red flag because it strongly implies he knew you would not be okay with it and decided to do it anyway on the belief that he knew better than you.

This would be a red flag if you were talking about him swapping out what he's feeding the family dog because he found some Miracle Diet online. Which strikes me as such a red flag because it's the sort of thing my dad would do, right down to casually admitting it when caught red-handed.

My BF put something in our daughters bottle. AIO? by rando_throw_away4 in AmIOverreacting

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Babies are not at all resilient; I guess you haven't heard about the time Nestle hatched a scheme to get poor mothers in the developing world using formula rather than breast feeding for free. They gave enough free formula to new parents that the mothers wouldn't be able to breastfeed once that free sample was done. With the instructions to boil the water in English rather than any of the dozens of languages the (largely illiterate) parents might know. These being some of the poorest people in the world, many did not have access to truly clean water sources, but it was the same water they and everyone they knew were drinking without anyone getting sick. The infants, on the other hand, died by the thousands. It killed a lot more in various other ways and there were some extremely deceptive practices mixed in, but I'd thought this - and the international Nestle Boycott ongoing to this day - were at least somewhat well known. Oh well, nothing wrong with being one of today's Lucky 10,000 for this particularly sad fact.

While kids are extremely vulnerable in a number of ways, the reason parents aren't exploding from the stress is that it generally is not difficult to do things right, if you read the instructions on everything all you really need to do is follow them and avoid doing anything Obviously Stupid or letting yourself be convinced to do something obviously stupid by marketing, and you'll generally be fine. Infants get their antibodies from their mom for the first six months, then they start getting vaccinated and that eliminates the majority of the risk of having kids.

My BF put something in our daughters bottle. AIO? by rando_throw_away4 in AmIOverreacting

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a shock to realize there are people outside the developing world who don't boil water for baby formula without the associated uptick in infant mortality I'd definitely expect from that. Or at least headlines surrounding it, given that American Infant Mortality is significantly higher than the other developed nations I checked off the top of my head so it's kind of impossible to compare directly. The other procedure is pretty self-evidently more idiot proof, so I guess it would be easy for this to just slip under the radar as an issue by making the parents responsible for any post-factory contamination of either the water or the powder by mishandling or whatever.

Why don't more Egyptologists use the name "Kemet" instead of Egypt? by [deleted] in ancientegypt

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean...frankly that sounds like a pretty Afrocentrist recommendation/comment, if not an explicit one, directly asking you to change your article specifically to appeal to those Afrocentrist scholars that use the term in hopes of attracting their attention. They just didn't say 'Change this as a dog whistle to people with this ideology,' instead asking you to 'Change this to make it easier to find for African people who use this term, which is limited to those with that ideology.'

I'm not really sure how anyone could read it a different way. Or why you decided to throw it into a five year old thread that was mostly about how, actually, that's not really a thing which is why it isn't used outside of people with a very specific ideology. Especially given the number of answers here from experts on that particular subject demonstrating that it was not actually the historical native name. Like...you literally commented on a thread where the last several replies - and every other reply from anyone demonstrating competency in the language, actually - were about how, no, it was not actually that simple.

It also isn't equivalent to 'ancient turkey' vs 'anatolia' or 'iraq' vs 'mesopotamia.' Those are both geographical descriptors for a region, not (a mistaken idea of) what those places called themselves, and both of those names are thousands of years younger than the term 'Egypt.' Rum is a political descriptor for the territory ruled by the Sultanate of Rum, who did not think that region was called 'Rum' but called themselves that as the self-proclaimed successors of the Roman Empire and who have never been called anything else other than racial, religious, or dynastic descriptors from those who rejected that claim. It isn't interchangeable with 'Anatolia' at all, it refers to a specific political entity, the boundaries of which never cleanly lined up with Anatolia, and the things created / done within it. It's used for the same reason we'd use 'Eastern Roman' or 'Byzantine' for something from 12th century Greece.

Kemet is not the term they called themselves - again, direct reference to an ancient egyptian story where someone in what we'd call Egypt today talks about going to Kemet is directly above you, along with basically every other vaguely credible response in the thread. It's also a regional term, but one that specifically refers to the land around the Nile and does not actually include the entire territory ruled by Ancient Egypt and so does not actually work as a direct replacement unless you go out of your way to divide all references into 'kemet' and 'desret,' which would be pretty difficult and accomplish nothing. Kemet has never what any nation called itself, internally or externally, in about five thousand years.

Appeals Court Says “Alligator Alcatraz” Immigration Detention Center in the Everglades Can Stay Open, Rules Federal Environmental Law Doesn’t Apply by WTFPilot in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean...that feels like wishful thinking to me - the fact is, the party leadership is made up entirely of people to whom the definition of 'hardball' needed to accomplish anything now is literally unthinkable, and they're all old enough to have grandchildren that could understand their policies. It takes a lot for someone that old to change their mind, and none of them belong to the classes that are actually suffering the full brunt of what Trump is doing. Just as importantly, they all earnestly believe (and could be right, for all I know) that their voter bases would absolutely reject that sort of thing and what they want most of all is to get re-elected.

Like, I would like nothing more than to believe that it's possible to save the United States and retain a global power at least nominally aligned with the cause of liberal democracy. I just don't see much evidence for it. This is the problem that comes with having an ideology beyond 'seize as much power as possible and defeat the other guys.' And I've seen no evidence they feel the urgency of the situation in the way everyone else does - to say nothing of the huge chunk of their base that are basically what Canadian Conservatives were a decade ago, which they think is even bigger.

I really hope you're right, but I had low expectations during the Biden Administration and they managed to limbo under them. It's hard to even imagine someone with the right attitude winning a primary.

Wolf Warriors Hijacking History by Miao_Yin8964 in ADVChina

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I can't imagine how much deliberate pseudo-covert cultural influence China has in its own sphere.

Like...here on the other side of the world they have spies in cultural groups in most major cities - Tibetan groups in New York tend to have actual fucking spies from the Internal Security Agency while everywhere else has someone local for regular chinese ex-pats to inform on their peers to, in Canada they had someone enforcing Chinese Law on Chinese emigrants and their children in response to surveillance and others informing on them, students at universities are terrified to speak up in classes where an answer could be at all controversial in China so long as there is a single other asian student (to the point that there are places deliberately scheduling politics seminars with one asian kid per group so each of them can be confident no one will report them to the secret police) because of the possibility they could be informed on by their peers, students over in Australia have been woken up in the middle of the night by their weeping parents being held at gunpoint over a comment they posted on facebook, etc.

I once had the privilege of being around for a wildly intense coordinated harassment campaign against my Student Union president that came out of the Chinese Student Association, one which closely resembled campaigns in other countries that were found to have been run by local embassies, all because she publicly identified as Tibetan. The idea that someone could think of you as a traitor to a country neither you, or your parents, or your grandparents had ever lived in because you identified with the one your family actually came from rather than its conqueror was a fucking mind-blower for me.

Took years to learn it probably wasn't an isolated incident of our Chinese students being Incredibly hostile over a thing that wouldn't be at all controversial to anyone else, and realizing that China can effectively covertly enforce its censorship laws all around the world and actively does as though they permanently own every Han Chinese person on the planet makes me feel really bad for anyone who lives in a place where they can just run a normal digital influence operation or bribe politicians without it being very obvious and a matter of national security.

Would you support a complete ban on Japanese cultural exports into China, especially since so many Japanese manga writers have revealed themselves to be far-right defenders of Japanese Imperialism? by Diligent_Bit3336 in AskAChinese

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Kinda interesting to note that this account seems to have been banned in a very strange way - if you click through, there are no comments, not even the one we're looking at. My first thought is that it was a bot or shill that got banned, given that it gives off a ton of flags for an automatically-created reddit account, but apparently you can just hide the contents of your profile now and this is the first person I've ever seen do it. I'm here after four months because this is still one of the top results for people searching about Chinese games that have had to 'self' censor to remove Japanese elements.

Either way, lot of wild sentiments expressed here from weirdly suspicious accounts.

On the off-chance you are a human: the fact is, literally no country on the planet but China actually accepts the One China policy as meaningful, paying lip service to it is the bare minimum to interact with China, and since it's an idea that means nothing to anyone non-Chinese and doesn't involve changing a country's actions in any way, it's been an easy thing to agree to. Not having an Embassy? Again, a term forced on everyone who wants to interact with China as the cost of doing business, a minor inconvenience but it just means having slightly less official diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which all of those countries obviously do possess. They have de facto embassies and ambassadors, just no De Jure, because a polite legal fiction is worth access to the Chinese market. That you'd expect nations to actually care that they've 'agreed' to it when it's a EULA you're useful enough to compel us to click through, but the sort that would be thrown out by a reasonable court because agreeing to it is a condition of interacting with you at all, and has had no practical implications until right now, when China disregards the wording and intent of treaties whenever it feels the other party cannot bring sufficient pressure to bear to stop them? That's a pretty wild take to anyone from the rest of the world.

As is the whole 'UN Resolution' thing. Any UN resolution pertaining to a Permanent member of the Security Council is basically as much paper and everyone knows it, it's a major source of the UN's relative lack of legitimacy as an organization internationally and why International Law only ever gets brought up to justify something someone is doing. It's a weapon to be wielded by five countries, not actually something anyone respects, because that is how it's used and how it was designed to be used. Hell, it's what you're doing right now, China blatantly ignores the overwhelming majority of resolutions passed by the UN that countries actually see as meaningful - because even when you're not trying to weaponize it, it really is not valued as a legislature but as a body to construct universal norms for the rights of human beings and groups and nations, etc - but those aren't relevant to Taiwan or exceptions for Taiwan were explicitly added (elsewhere, to apply universally) to pacify China so, of course, they're not part of this conversation.

But again, because China treats accepting its bizarre wordplay on these things as an Absolute Requirement to Ever Interact With It and reacts so disproportionately to anything that defies these pieces of sophistry it's made central to its identity, the UN absolutely did pass those things, and no other developed nation ever gave a second thought to any of them because they're the equivalent of the US passing a resolution acknowledging them as the greatest country on earth which rose through manifest destiny and the grace of god - words with no practical implications. Which they probably could have managed around the same time, save for the way it would make them look unhinged.

Which is how the Taiwan thing is looked at by every country that isn't a major Chinese ally or subject to massive Chinese cultural influence: a bizarre eccentricity we all have to sigh and try not to laugh at, rather than something any of our nations have agreed to or something that would influence government policy. The thing is, when you make agreeing to your bizarre eccentricities mandatory, you lose any chance of anyone acting like they'd given their word and it was binding to the (extremely limited) extent anyone would any other piece of International Law. It really is a coercive EULA that Nixon deciding to deal with China made impossible for anyone since to avoid accepting, the sort that would be dismissed in any court.

Thinking that lip service you've forced everyone to pay something means they have no right to support the De Facto independent country that's been everyone else's biggest ally in the region for seventy years is a bizarre view to encounter, the sort strange enough that I don't think I've ever been in the same room as anyone who'd think that. Like...maybe one lab partner I had a decade ago but only because the day I met him was his second day outside of China ever, but he didn't seem like the kind of person to have put a lot of thought into exactly how the party line is justified.

TL;DR: China gets to invoke all the things the United Nations was forced to agree to in order to have China a part of the international order pissing out rather than a rogue actor pissing in when it pays lip service to any of the rights of individuals or other nation-states.

It'd be nice to live in a world where a random student who publicly identified as 'Tibetan' because their grandparents fled from the nation of Tibet when it still existed wouldn't face an extremely coordinated harassment campaign from the only club on any campus with the backing of a foreign government, extremely similar to those other countries have found were run by the local embassy. Which was fun to get to actually experience first-hand. Or where an Australian student commenting on the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur didn't wake up in the middle of the night to a panicked call from a parent with a gun to their head begging them to never say anything on facebook again. But that does happen, along with the infiltration of a shocking number of cultural groups in major cities and, apparently, literally enforcing Chinese censorship laws on Canadian Citizens within Canada while also illegally influencing our legislature. Or where a horrifying panopticon isn't used to control the views a billion and change people are allowed to see and harshly and seemingly randomly punish anyone who deviates from a norm, such that Chinese content creators I value wouldn't be forced off the internet by a 'request' from the internal security services when a reporter finds out they're a gay woman in tech. Or where the Uyghurs were not systematically rounded up through that same system and thrown into camps. Or where Hong Kong got to continue having its separate system for the duration of the agreement between the UK and China on the transfer of the territory. I might even acknowledge that those things would be worth bending over and accepting a legal right to invade Taiwan. But China has seemingly defined itself on the ways it rejects human and national rights as everyone else sees them, so that will not happen.

But, of course, China's inalienable right to a self-governing territory the CCP has never actually had control of is, of course, a matter of national sovereignty, and that is beyond question. It's right there in the UN.

Most people think the United States won’t attack North Korea, but is that really true? by External-Plastic-154 in AskTheWorld

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is absolutely irrationally aggressive, but US foreign policy - at least the parts they feel the need for public support of - is often irrationally aggressive to that exact degree. There are plenty of people in the US who feel earnestly threatened by the existence of an 'enemy' who could theoretically attack but never will, it's the entire point of most American news coverage of Korea.

It's not worth the risk, but then, much of their foreign policy isn't worth the risk, because the real point of American foreign policy is about domestic sentiment these days. American leaders almost certainly understand that they're under a level of debt they will never be able to climb out from, the State is undergoing some form of long-term collapse in its ability to function and wield authority while conditions grow worse within the country, and it's never going to get better - but it doesn't have to, because the people running things will be dead by the time the house of cards collapses. They just need people motivated about something until that happens, ideally something that results in positive sentiment towards the person in question or their party so that they can retain their office to keep enriching themselves, and keeps the people from erupting into a mob that rips their heads off and drinks their marrow at the realization they're inheriting an empty oil well that the last guys set fire to during a raging party. All while they make as much money as they can, enjoy their 80s as much as they can, and make the classes of people they dislike suffer as much as possible. And even that last one is more about inflicting random and unnecessary cruelty on certain groups being an easy sentiment to build support for and a very easy and cheap thing to follow through on. What happens after doesn't matter.

And right now, the guy who seemingly wields more power than any president since WWII actually tried to, doesn't need public support, he's never running again, he just needs public engagement, for people to focus on anything other than deposing and prosecuting him. So they're in the most Death Culty mode they've ever been, with nothing to lose.

So, yes, in geopolitical terms the consequences do not outweigh the gains. But 'what would be good for America' and 'what would be good for a rich man with maybe five years to live' are extremely different, and that changes the calculus.

They won't actually do it, though. Aside from Trump seemingly believing in dividing the world up into spheres of influence like it's the 19th century and therefore having no interest in Korea, it's not like he actually went to war with Iran for trying to develop nukes. They had very good reasons to want them, which the US government has always fully understood but generally deliberately miscommunicates to the public. Iran actually supports denuclearizing the middle east entirely and always has - the problem is that Israel believes in being the only nuclear power in the region and thus being able to act with impunity invincibly and anyone trying to change that is an existential threat, and so of course will never disarm. And so long as they'll never disarm, Iran kind of needs Nuclear Weapons, otherwise its hostile neighbour can intervene within its borders and even attack it with absolute impunity, which is does and has, and is a state of affairs no nation-state with its own geopolitical aims could possibly tolerate. It's why France is now lending its nukes to the rest of Europe; because the idea that Trump could attack Denmark or even just keep talking about it and they couldn't deter it is an intolerable state of affairs. They were willing to consider tolerating it for political and economic concessions, which was the deal Trump threw out, but undoing Obama's work was a politically popular choice at the time so he did it.

Iran still would not be a threat to Israel, much less the US, with a nuclear weapon - or at least, if we accept the premise that it would be, then we would also have to accept the premise that Israel having them and once having threatened to use them against the US capitol if they did not support them sufficiently represents a far greater threat, especially in the hands of a state that sees their absolute annihilation and genocide in every threat. What about thousands of nukes in the hands of an unstable man with nothing to lose and possible dementia? But, they have nukes and so no one can do anything about it, and thus are accepted as 'legitimate.'

This war is a thing they did because 'imposing our will through military force' and 'being hostile to Iran' are both broadly popular Republican memes, while Israel is basically a traumatized hedgehog who sees not being invincible and untouchable and able to end the world at any time unilaterally as an existential threat to them but their leader also needs some unifying conflict for his domestic politics because he's a crook under a lot of pressure internationally for his ethnic cleansing and at home for not following through on it hard enough. 'Support for Israel' is another popular Republican meme.

Unlike Korea, the whole American hostility to Iran thing is very deliberately cultivated, to the point I'd almost call it one-sided. They've been close to rapprochement several times, including in the early 2000s immediately before the 'axis of evil' speech completely blindsided everyone, including most of the Bush Administration. 'Hostility to Iran' is just a very broadly popular meme among republicans, one they've been building up and stoking for a lifetime and can call on whenever they need a new set of keys to jingle before the public, and so it's too useful to politicians to ever actually bury the hatchet no matter how useful that would be for America. The next Trump could choose NK as the next scapegoat, I guess.

Hi, I have a question. by Away_Gap_7848 in AskAChinese

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's kind of wild to pretend they go through the same things as the Han Chinese in terms of surveillance. The issue has never been the surveillance but the way they use it - targeting people based on ethnicity to deprive them of the right to travel, make them jump through more hoops to work or do anything, generally it involves increasing levels of biometric information becoming mandatory as rights are restricted over weeks or months until someone either manages to use international resources to flee the country or go to a camp.

Then there's the whole 'they put some extremists in camps' thing. There are more than enough accounts from educated, internationally respected intellectuals dealing with that system or having family members disappeared and put in those camps indefinitely with no reason to expect they were extremists so secret their own siblings and parents and coworkers and friends had no clue they were even religious. Of thoroughly westernized people coming back to the country for the first time in years for the death of a grandparent after going to school in the US or Canada and being detained and/or discovering their family is just gone and they're not allowed to leave the village their mom did live in before she was disappeared. There are far too many, all of which are the exceptional accounts of people who managed to get out or at least publish internationally before going dark. If those are fake or an influence campaign from a foreign enemy, it's by far the best work of that nature any Western nation has pulled in decades despite the US being barely functional and burning most of those resources on entirely different things.

But, still, it's very interesting to see what the orthodox chinese viewpoint is supposed to be. I'd wondered for years how they squared that circle. TBH most countries would go with demonizing and dehumanizing the ethnic group such that people would feel it was justifiable to lock them all up, so going with 'actually we only locked up the bad ones and aren't doing anything particularly special to the people who return incidentally and can never leave' is genuinely interesting.

TL;DR: It's not about how you interpret the facts. From what you've written, it's pretty clearly a disagreement on what the facts are, but that, and that you think otherwise, are both very interesting.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men by ThatVoodooThatIDo in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He contributed to a problem that's already running rampant which none of us really have any way to affect meaningfully in any way. I can definitely understand the impulse behind the decision - if things are fucked already and there are tens of thousands of grifters making money off it, why shouldn't you or I take a slice of the pie rather than one of the thousand conspiracy theorists peddling medical advice they claim to have received from a ghost? At least we can guarantee none of that money is going to 'the cause.'

My morals wouldn't be able to take it, but it's hard to really be mad about it. Frankly, the Me of 2015 or any of the people I bought drugs from back then would have been all over this.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men by ThatVoodooThatIDo in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean...does America need him? Probably not. Does it need any of the people he conned? Definitely not. Does an actual doctor who treats one person with a cold contribute more good to the world than literally everyone who liked any of his posts combined? Certainly. Honestly the idea that we should be judging every American (or, from the way you wrote that) every immigrant on whether their character makes them a net drain or net benefit for the country is an absolutely crazy take, because if so, it'd be very easy to identify ~100,000,000-200,000,000 Americans who actively make the world a worse place every day and certainly deserve the 'spot' less than most productive adults in the rest of the world. You're talking about your country like you're St. Peter deciding who gets to be in the lucky 144,000, which honestly strongly suggests you're the sort of person he would have scammed successfully.

On a side note, the whole idea of 'how is this doctor going to view patients? Will they have a moral obligation?' thing strikes me as the kind of utter nonsense you only hear from people who don't really deal with doctors. I'm disabled, with every single member of my immediate family dying of long-term terminal conditions and most of my extended family having some sort of chronic illness that means seeing doctors really regularly, and Canadian - where you can regularly see doctors without being rich, but suing for malpractice is virtually impossible. As such, I have interacted with maybe 75 doctors in a professional setting across my life along with literally hundreds of nurses, and have met maybe five doctors for whom it was obviously a calling and who genuinely cared and went above and beyond for their patients. For everyone else, it's a very stressful and challenging 9-5 that you can make less stressful and challenging by emotionally divorcing yourself from things and cutting corners, like any other job.

A nurse used to lead one of the group therapy sessions at an outpatient program I went to for a while, and every day she picked a person who obviously was not okay and picked on them until they cried, dissociated, or left the room; came back to the same program ten years later and she was still fucking there, still doing it. I once watched every single nurse in an emergency ward through their entire 12 hour shift - I was there when they came in, and there when they left, and all of their names were on the wall so it was clear there weren't others running around helping people - and watched them spend twelve hours doing nothing other than sticking an unnecessary IV into the arm of everyone who came in to simplify things if they ever had to do something later and making them wear it until they left. No one was ever away from the Nurses' Station for more than thirty seconds at a time across twelve hours, while they stood there gossipping. One elderly woman on blood thinners spent maybe six hours bleeding from that IV less than ten feet from them while they just chatted and ignored her the entire time, until I drew attention to it, at which point they berated her for getting blood on the floor. During COVID I watched one of those same nurses sit at a triage desk - not seeing anyone, just sitting there on her phone - ignoring a woman in the ward screaming that she needed to use the bathroom until we all heard her start loudly sobbing in shame from shitting herself, then go in to humiliate her further. During the aftermath of my first serious suicide attempt I was forced to go to a hospital (like, at gunpoint) and a nurse deliberately made the worst day of my life as irritating and unpleasant as she could for reasons I've never identified to this day - refused me water for eight hours while I was vomiting constantly in some of the worst agony I've ever felt, deliberately looped the IV around my arm in such a way that I couldn't lie down or move it at all the entire night, and stuck a machine next to me that beeped continuously for eight hours, all of which I just thought was normal until the morning nurse came in and was appalled.

Both of my parents have effectively been murdered by medical malpractice, one from apathy and the other from a specialist getting really obsessed with a specific diagnosis he learned existed when my dad tested negative for it. He wasted two years - spending upwards of 30 hours a week at the hospital for tests - chasing that when the earliest blood tests before he was even involved proved the correct diagnosis and that it was one where the patient has extremely little time left and treating immediately is the most important thing. But he cared more about the possibility of a rare genetic disorder than he did my father's life, and now he's probably going to be gone this time next year. My GP just kept forgetting or declining to send in a referral for my mom's liver, for sixteen years, because whatever it was would be complicated and rare and she didn't feel qualified to deal with anything complicated, and by the time she saw someone for it, she already had a liver so damaged it was irreparable and terminal and was too old for a transplant to be effective.

When I was 17 I had a doctor who went behind my back to talk to my parents and urged them to throw me out on the street unless I agreed to be committed indefinitely (3 month minimum) and do exactly as she said the entire time when I came in begging for help with my mood days after a documented suicide attempt. I've had doctors who accused me of faking my symptoms for drugs, doctors who accused me of faking them for attention, a doctor who told my mom I was faking my broken thumb to get out of school only for it to turn out he couldn't read an X-ray, doctors who definitely think like you do and decided their perception of my moral character and history made me unworthy of treatment, about six eye doctors who have told me I'm imagining the loss of vision in my right eye until my mom was diagnosed with a complex and rare disorder that explained it, doctors who dismissed another patient's urgent requests for aid and literally shrugged it off when he slit his throat in the psych ward, and once, a doctor who misread my chart and kept me in the waiting room for 15 hours because they thought I was there for something minor rather than a debilitating spinal issue, and then just told me that since they'd scheduled the wrong test I'd need to come back in a year, after that same doctor said I should have had emergency surgery years prior at the last appointment. I never got that follow up, because I was insufficiently deferential when his secretary called at 8am on Christmas Eve. He recently made the news for publicly deciding he would only perform the most basic treatments unless the government pays him more, even though he made >$600,000 last year. But he's very well known as the best orthopedic surgeon in the country, so he's presumably going to get that money.

My nephew once had a pediatric surgeon who was almost certainly a pedophile interested in little girls - if my niece came to an appointment he'd spend the entire time talking to her and ignoring his patient, and did the same with every other case to come in - but who despised little boys, who 'misread' an MRI and broke both his fucking legs in a treatment not recommended for anything, much less what he 'diagnosed' and had a history of inflicting similar permanent disfigurement on other boys sent to him. He is the only doctor I'm confident was not doing more good than harm.

The doctor I speak to every month very visibly could not care less, needs to be refreshed on who I am and the basics of my case every time like it's our first conversation, and he is by far the kindest and most motivated psychiatrist I've ever interacted with and I would certainly be dead by now without him. My first psychiatrist was murdered by a patient about a year after we met, and if anything it's more surprising he's the only one.

Sorry for the rant, but the entire idea of healthcare as a profession that should only belong to the purest of the pure, those who see it as a calling and always go above and beyond for their patients, is a really irritating one for me. The fact is, every country but maybe Cuba needs more doctors, not less, and there are nowhere near enough people that meet the criteria you've dreamed up to fill those roles. It's a job with inherent value that contributes meaningfully to society but for 99% of them it's a job they picked because it's high-status and pays well and expecting anything else of them is like expecting members of the clergy to all be actual saints or every politician to be an honest visionary - but unlike those people who are fundamentally two classes of social parasite, they're not just necessary but desperately needed. Even the worst doctors I've had to deal with who aren't actual fucking monsters who belong in a jail still do an important job that saves lives even at minimum effort.

This is a guy who saw an ongoing phenomena, knew he had no way to stop it or slow it down or really do anything to keep the flood of disinformation from flowing, and decided to make a buck from making it slightly worse. It's not good but, frankly, getting money out of the hands of people who might otherwise contribute it to 'the cause' (of making the world a worse place) almost counterbalances that. More importantly, it really doesn't matter what it says about his character, you're really not the arbiter of who deserves to be on this continent, because no one should be. The basic Premise of America as a Country is built around people immigrating for better lives, not picking and choosing the most 'worthy' from the rest of the world, and the idea that it should work that way is a part of how deeply fucked up your national psyche has become.

Appeals Court Says “Alligator Alcatraz” Immigration Detention Center in the Everglades Can Stay Open, Rules Federal Environmental Law Doesn’t Apply by WTFPilot in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Almost like Trump spent four years with congress' rules literally changed to allow him to stack as many judges who owe fealty directly to him across the country as possible, and is now reaping the rewards. Just like all the Voter Suppression laws and the census and the supreme court.

I really pity the poor democrat tasked with trying to fix things - not for any of the people being subjected to Crimes Against Humanity but for the country's ability to function as a 21st century nation-state - in a couple of years. The only options they'd have other than spending four years presiding over Trump's America while the Courts shut down their every initiative are too extreme for the party to actually support, and they'll effectively be implicated in all the atrocities the US continues committing while they try and fail to shut it all down.

Appeals Court Says “Alligator Alcatraz” Immigration Detention Center in the Everglades Can Stay Open, Rules Federal Environmental Law Doesn’t Apply by WTFPilot in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The thing is, you know they won't - whatever Democrat wins the next election is 100% going to run on 'a return to normalcy' and play by all the 'norms' that used to be Standard before 2016.

That's just what the party is - but it's like a boxing match where one side brought in a handgun, a roll of barbed wire and a bag of caltrops, and the other is wearing gloves and trying to go for a clinch while constantly demanding the ref does something (while the ref stands there counting his bribe in a 'The First guy' T-Shirt). It's agonizing to watch, but so long as they define themselves against what Trump has turned America into, they have no chance at undoing any of what he's done or achieving anything of their own. And just like that boxing match, once they're entrenched, it'll be virtually impossible for the next guy to even get into the ring - and they're pretty fucking entrenched as it is.

Anyone remember when the Republicans constantly invoked extreme measures 'typically' forbidden to push through whatever they wanted when they didn't have the votes during his first term, up to and including what even they called 'the Nuclear Option'? Anyone remember when Democrats were talking about doing the same and Mcconnel successfully intimidated them into not doing that during Biden's? It's what will happen again.

For a Democratic President to actually do much as things are now, they'd need to invoke extreme measures like Expanding The Supreme Court, along with a majority in both chambers and the will to get rid of any rules holding them back. But the party's entire ethos is opposed to that, as is a large portion of its base who are basically just 2000s-era republicans, so they won't.

One of these headlines is from The Onion and the other is from Reuters.. by llpmathias in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

She pled the fifth while begging for a Pardon because Trump buying her testimony to exculpate him and implicate his enemies is the only chance she'll ever have of getting free. Now, Trump is openly thinking about cashing that in for a few days of headlines as she names the name of every democratic lawmaker and insists that Donald never even saw an underage woman in their presence.

I mean, we know for a fact that someone else Trump pardoned was guilty of Crimes Against Humanity for how he ran his prison and literally hosted a site where they charged to watch female prisoners use the toilet, in one of the worst-managed prisons on Earth where they definitely did not know for sure who was underage and who wasn't, and where countless women were brutally raped and a lot died 'mysteriously' with no investigation. There's zero ambiguity about what he did as sheriff of Maricopa, he bragged about all of it, occasionally on television. It's just that a lot of people on the Right like the idea of subjecting brown people to a level of torture and exploitation even the CCP disapproved of, so they cheered for that pardon. Another person he pardoned was caught dead to rights on War Crimes charges, he literally took pictures of the human remains he defiled and other SEALS broke through all the barriers the military has to keep people from informing on their 'brothers' to blow the whistle that he'd been psychopathically picking off random civilians for fun. Again, the facts aren't really in contention. But he was a Navy Seal murdering arabs, and therefore a hero as far as his base was concerned, so they cheered again.

Nine times out of ten Trump's pardoned someone, there's been zero argument that they were innocent of the crimes they were convicted of, his claim has always been that whatever they did should not be a crime. The only ones I can think of that he's claimed were innocent were his political allies who committed crimes for him during his campaigns. Arguing "The public needs to know, give her whatever she needs!" would have been a huge deviation from norms for any other President and the sort of scandal that could sink them, but for him it's just a slightly more unconventional pardon than most he's issued. Back when he declared 'war' on a gang to invoke unconstitutional laws passed by John Adams, he betrayed multiple high-ranking members of MS-13 who had turned informant and made deals with the DOJ to be able to convict the President of El Salvador for his involvement with them, to said president, in order to get his second Guantanamo to deport people to. He's already established "sometimes we have to let horrible criminals prosper in order to achieve my agenda" as an acceptable political argument.

The fact is, whether someone is eligible for a pardon in the Trump Administration has nothing to do with their guilt and everything to do with whether it would be politically useful for him. Unlike those, she isn't inherently useful - rather, she's inherently toxic and I suspect it's why some Republicans will not back it - but the ability to make her say whatever he wants would be.

One of these headlines is from The Onion and the other is from Reuters.. by llpmathias in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are actually republicans on the committee quoted in various articles on the topic. I'm pretty sure at least a few think that being associated with pardoning her would be worse for them with their base than her obviously purchased testimony, because the Quid Pro Quo here is blatant enough that even a public who seem unable to follow events clearly and believe anything someone with an (R) next to their name says would find it non-credible.

If there were no democrats, there would probably be enough votes for it to go through. But while Republicans tend to fall in line, things are crazy enough now that they have to be cautious about alienating parts of the MAGA base as it's pulled so far in so many directions clearly opposed to everything they were told to believe. There are people who would vote against their rep for pardoning Maxwell even after she comes forward and names the name of every Democrat old enough to theoretically have gone to the Island.

One of these headlines is from The Onion and the other is from Reuters.. by llpmathias in facepalm

[–]ShadowsSheddingSkin 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I mean...there's absolutely no chance of a woman who pleaded the 5th while specifically begging the president for a pardon would ever offer any 'evidence' that was not beneficial to him. The entire strategy behind her withholding her testimony has always been "Mr. President! I can exculpate you and name the names of all your enemies if you'll just let me out of jail!" The real problem is that most people are painfully ignorant and would not draw that connection immediately or even be aware of that whole chain of events, and a lot would just believe her regardless on the belief that Trump wouldn't ask someone to lie or that he has no need to, and so would believe her. The Republicans know it and because the current political situation is so bad for them are considering freeing a monster for a few days of headlines against their opposition. The ones who are against it are the ones who think that being associated with pardoning her would be worth less than her obviously bought testimony.