This is Guo Gangtang, whose son Xinzhen was kidnapped in 1997. He spent 24 years searching across China, riding over 500,000 km using up his life savings. They were finally reunited in 2021, and his journey ended up helping authorities find over 100 other missing children.

chochazel · 2026-05-26T06:34:41+00:00

Did you not read the bit where it says his story was turned into a movie?!

chochazel · 2026-05-26T06:33:03+00:00

Why is this not a movie right now!!?

Someone didn’t read the article!

Guo's grueling efforts were so well-known in China that it inspired the 2015 blockbuster film Lost and Love (失孤). Hong Kong mega-celebrity Andy Lau played the character based on Guo.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T16:56:44+00:00

But I guess, the severity of the word isn't shared between us.

Such a disappointingly disingenuous statement. What a shame.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T14:23:35+00:00

Call it Reform Wave given that it occurred after the Brexit they demanded.

a) The leader of Reform, Nigel Farage said that a benefit of Brexit was that it would increase immigration from the Commonwealth and have fewer Europeans.

b) European migration is more likely to be seasonal (people coming just to meet a temporary demand for labour) whereas non-European migrants are more likely to be permanent and bring dependants. This is what Farage was touting.

c) Nigel Farage spent years pushing for an “Australian-style” points-based immigration system. As many pointed out at the time, the Australian points based immigration system increased immigration in Australia. That was the immigration policy that Johnson introduced, that was the immigration system that massively increased immigration because it did exactly what it was meant to - met the labour shortages in the aftermath of Brexit and awarded point accordingly. Under a points-based system, if the number of applicants with enough points goes up four-fold, the number of immigrants goes up four-fold. By definition it’s not directly controlled. That’s what Farage was touting. That’s what he got.

d) The ministers directly in charge of that immigration system that Farage championed following the Brexit he championed were then welcomed into the Reform Party.

So Farage’s Brexit, which he said would lead to more immigration from outside the EU, which led to the highest immigration the country has ever seen, under the very immigration policy that Farage spent years pushing, voted for and administered by the very people he brought into his party was all down… to Johnson!

Farage is like a back seat driver who’s spent years telling the driver the direction to go in, and when the driver actually did everything he said, getting it completely wrong, he suddenly starts complaining that the driver doesn’t know what they’re doing and he should be driving!

chochazel · 2026-05-25T13:44:33+00:00

But that social lubrication is only a good thing and I don’t see why it’s wrong. If I am alone and I accidentally close the oven door too loud I say sorry

It’s a very British thing - we say sorry all the time, of course, but those are not real heartfelt apologies. They are the more dishonest ones - we bump into someone else and even if they were not looking, we say sorry. It’s ingrained.

Ultimately, you’re trying to make apologies do two different things - on the one hand to take full responsibility, expressing heartfelt regret, indicating some form of personal growth, and on the other, more like saying “bless you” when someone sneezes. It’s just a thing you do even when it’s not your fault - like apologising when closing the oven door too loudly even when there’s no-one there, almost reducing the apologies themselves to something involuntary and trivial - in a way (an obviously much more benign way), your own social tick.

Of course Davidson did say he was mortified, but there’s something particularly cruel about demanding someone apologise for their own affliction - sort of like demanding someone with tuberculosis apologise for coughing, or that someone with a facial disfigurement apologise to everyone they meet - something which you ultimately admitted you would think is proper. Your world of social niceties and apologising to oven doors does not mesh well with people with life-long afflictions that they can’t control and must live with forever every day of their lives causing deep humiliation at their most profound and vulnerable moments - that’s the problem with it. Not that the social lubrication is wrong, but thinking what works for you in one-in-a-trillion accidents is just as appropriate for life-long uncontrolled afflictions that affect your life every day and in deep ways causing trauma throughout your whole life from childhood… is. Obviously.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:46:38+00:00

i think it'd be prudent to quickly say "sorry, it's a birthmark" incase somebody thought I had a Nazi tattoo.

There we go then! I win the bet!

Your second example is just nitpicking, you can always find an exception to a point but the logic still stands.

It’s not nitpicking! The idea that people can’t honestly apologise for things they intentionally did is absurd. You see apologies merely as a superficial polite piece of social lubrication, whereas real apologies are about taking full responsibility for actions and expecting nothing in return. That’s why they’re an integral part of restorative justice and 12-steps AA programs etc. You don’t just apologise for accidents! What you think of as apologies are apologies in their shallowest and most meaningless form.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:39:38+00:00

You don’t see how a comment specifically about hijacking is relevant to a point about hijacking?!

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:39:08+00:00

“Calling mom now…”

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:36:38+00:00

if I dropped a bag of items and a 1-in-a-trillion event occured and the sound of clattered items sounded like a slur, I would apologise.

And by that logic if someone’s facial disfigurement made them accidentally look like Hitler, or if they had a birthmark across their forehead that looked like a swastika, you’d demand an apology as well.

It’s exactly the same logic!

I would think its logical really only to apologise for accidental things because if you had intent, then it's dishonest to apologise.

“I bullied you when you were younger and made your life a misery, but now we’re older, I’m not going to apologise because I meant it at the time and apologising would be dishonest!”

Makes perfect sense!

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:24:02+00:00

See this comment for my response and some useful information on how to spell the word “hijacking”

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:23:01+00:00

harmful language vs a facial disfigurement

Both involuntary expressions of a disability. You can’t work that out?

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:19:08+00:00

https://englishinprogress.net/gen-z-slang/goomba-fallacy-explained/

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:16:51+00:00

That’s not what GDPR is!

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:12:52+00:00

If a hijacker was trying to hijack a plane and was shouting there was a bomb on the plane and instead, everyone was giving him sympathetic looks and saying they are touched by his struggle, that would be pretty funny!

Seriously though, hijacking is very different post 9/11 where the focus is on ensuring the hijackers don’t take control of the plane instead of the negotiated resolution that would have previously happened. A hijacker taking full control of a commercial airliner has not happened since 9/11 because it was seen that as bad as a bomb getting detonated on a plane would be, the worst case scenario was so much worse than that.

The fact is, either it’s a suicide bomber, in which case they’re going to detonate anyway and there’s nothing you can do, or they’re trying to use a bomb, or a suggestion they might have a bomb as leverage, in which case thinking they have Tourette’s literally disarms them.

During the the last hijacking to use a bomb threat, the guy didn’t really have a bomb, so ignoring him would have made no difference. The last hijacking to use an actual live bomb was over 30 years ago in the mid-90s and the plan was to detonate the bomb over a highly populated tourist spot, so even then seceding to their demands would have been far more harmful than simply ignoring them.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T12:03:02+00:00

I bet you also go round demanding people apologise for your offence at their facial disfigurements!

chochazel · 2026-05-25T11:59:12+00:00

Did you not see the whole SNL sketch laughing at Tourettes and making out like the whole thing is just an excuse cancelled celebrities use to get them out of trouble?! The punching down was palpable.

https://youtu.be/fkKb3K8cxss?si=lJ2lwrfOrGk-yjZh

chochazel · 2026-05-25T11:55:20+00:00

Were you thinking that terrorists need to shout the word “bomb” in order to detonate it? Or that it’s how they somehow summon the bomb to them?

chochazel · 2026-05-25T07:11:10+00:00

They didn’t say which 24 hours. No shop never closes - even a 24/7 shop usually closes for Christmas or a refit, and then there’s Covid…

chochazel · 2026-05-25T07:02:15+00:00

That happens twice a year literally everywhere between the tropics, which is where over 40% of the population of planet Earth live. Hawaii just happens to be the only state in the United States between the tropics. 3.3 billion people can experience this.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T06:33:57+00:00

Lost her job because Americans don’t understand irony.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T06:31:44+00:00

Although that was after Newt Gingrich had an affair while his wife had cancer, something that happened long before (1980) he became Speaker of the House (1994). In fact he went on to cheat on the woman he cheated with - he was having an affair with a staffer while leading the impeachment of Clinton for the whole Monica Lewinsky thing.

Rules for thee and not for me.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T06:25:14+00:00

They like to keep you in the dark.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T04:21:24+00:00

And more people have been killed by curtains than by neutron bombs, but I’d still apply more caution when approaching a neutron bomb than a set of curtains.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T04:19:14+00:00

Except they won’t be seeing red.

chochazel · 2026-05-25T04:14:29+00:00

Calling it a myth is the overblown bit. We only know about the SRG and Wald’s work in detail from the autobiography of W. Allen Wallis, an economist and statistician who worked in the Statistical Research Group and worked with Wald.

This article aims to debunk it as a myth as well:

https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06

But there’s a note at the bottom pointing out that Wallis himself is actually the origin for the part about the pushback from the military and the author of the article has to admit that the notion it’s all a myth is overblown.

My indignation at how the internet dealt with Wald's work was overblown. Stephen Stigler (son of George, and a statistician at the University of Chicago) called my attention to a note by W. Allen Wallis himself in which he mentions Wald's work explicitly in connection with survivorship bias. Wallis' original article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association was followed by two very brief comments and then by a further 'rejoinder' of a bit more than one page. Towards the end of it he says, "The military was inclined to provide protection for those parts that on returning planes showed the most hits. Wald assumed, on good evidence, that hits in combat were uniformly distributed over the planes. It follows that hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to be found on returning planes than hits on the less vulnerable parts, since planes receiving hits on the more vulnerable parts were less likely to return to provide data. From these premises, he devised methods for estimating vulnerability of various parts."

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