I’ve not seen inside one, so I can’t say. From the outside they do look a lot like prisons though.

But the word 学校 (school) is essentially a swear word in Xinjiang now and has an impact on the atmosphere. It irks me that pretty much all coverage and reporting is done for US benefits and as a stick to beat China with. Not actually out of care or respect for the ethnic groups going into them.

China isn’t a big, irrational, evil. It’s a big place led by people making decisions. You won’t find any nation-state, let alone a large powerful one acting in a moral way.

I hope you can find a chance to visit it for a time. It’s a cliche, but English teaching is an easy route to take to get in and have a chance to see China for yourself.

Can it be a police state dystopia if the people self censor to stay out of trouble, corruption, and racism run rampant?

That said, the PRC is a complicated place and the standard of living and health conditions of pretty much everyone have gone from mostly poor to generally good over a single generation. I think it’s fair, yet sad, to say that wouldn’t have happened any other way.

The public transport is amazing. And if you’re willing to conform, and be Han or a model minority in a traditionally Han dominant area, you’re living well. Purchasing power is generally high, and even the vast vast majority of the poorest people have houses and food.

Source: speak Mandarin and worked in China for a few years.

Yes. The Second World War had a deathtoll about 60 times higher. (.3 is much more than I gave it credit for.)

Korean War probably more than 3 million.

Returning to smaller scale war is not an end of war. Nor even close to ending wars. Imperialism causes wider ranging wars is all, as whole networks of military apparatus are mobilised. Modern empires are more nebulous.

Edit: also, your WW2 figure is including civilians and acts of genocide. I think your Vietnamese figure is combatants only.

Yes, the Korean war was the biggest with soldiers from dozens of countries dying in action, with a localised theatre.

But how many of those civil wars were hot parts of the Cold War? Can we not lump them into a single Cold War total?

The death toll of the world wars is huge, but equally the death tolls of the strife across Saharan and Central Africa and the Middle East isn’t insignificant. Do we just leave it off the record because the combatants are only our proxies? Fighting with our guns, for our benefit, rather than a war on land we’ve yet to relinquish control over?

Edit: though I’ve gone on a massive tangent. My original point that I let my mind forget and spout off on a tangent, was that there have been lots of wars with coalitions of allies feeding arms to the sides, as we now see in Ukraine in the intervening 70 years. Just less close to home.

That was more my point.

Exporting the death and suffering to far off parts of the world and calling it world peace. The only difference with Ukraine is it is closer to home, for most of the G7 anyhow.

Chinese Civil War pII?

Korean War?

Vietnam War?

6 Day War?

Somalian Civil War?

Nigerian Civil War?

Yemeni Civil War?

Cunk on Earth

That’s not generative, since it’s just copying player input. Feasible without AI, just storing strings for later recall.

The French are, understandibly, less willing to overlook Nazism than anglophones.

Then again, no one should be overlooking Nazism.

Obama? Billy C.? Though maybe that’s my feels from being younger and less media savvy.

Though if I’m honest I don’t think any US president has been progressive.

I’m intrigued.

What five policies of Biden make him the most progressive president of the last 50 years?

Exactly. And he didn’t. For whatever reasons he wasn’t able to do anything but allow, if not actively encourage, the actions of Netanyahu and the IDF that led to the deaths of dozens to hundreds of Israelis, and tens of thousands of Palestinians.

You seem to have mistaken not materially different to Palestinians as equal to equivalent.

And that I didn’t talk about the bad stuff done by Biden and Obama, and the Bushes, and (the) Clinton(s).

Maybe if the Democratic party was more willing to make more materialistic changes we wouldn’t’ve had first Trump, let alone Trump 2. It is naive to hope that, and things for American sexual and ethnic minorities would be, generally, better under democrats. But they’re a holding pattern until the Republicans get in, and Dems don’t have people’s backs.

But my original point was that if you’re so blinkered to not even be able to understand why progressives and anti-imperialist would sit out of the 2024 election, you’re not going to be able to talk them round to vote for Your Guy™ if there is an election again in the future.

Rather than understand a dissenting point of view, you dismiss and villify people you should be trying to work with and understand.

Get friendly with Black Bloc and maybe we can all make things better for everyone at home and in the Middle East.

And you’re too high on American exceptionalism to realise that the words coming out of the White House have zero impact on the experience of Palestians.

The war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and indeed genocide would be happening the same. The only difference is you need to make up for thinking it would be less horrific if you had a leader who’d wasn’t so mask off about it.

Biden wasn’t able to hold back the tide ethnic cleansing and war crimes the IDF has inflicted on the Palestinians. It is very unlikely that a Harris win would have reigned in the killings, bombings, and all that have taken place since the election.

If you can’t understand why people would abstain from supporting one of two genocide supporting candidates who had shown no interest in making things better, you’re just as much to blame for the current US admin as those who did not vote.

So when you said “break up Steam” you didn’t mean it in the usual, anti-monopoly sense where bits of a company are spun out into independent entities or sold off?

You meant let everything be done by enthusiasts and have it kinda interoperable?

I’m not against that, but I think there are bigger dragons of capitalism to slay first before we hope that splitting forums off of Steam doesn’t send them the way of the IMDB forums.

Negatively.

In money for servers as well as time. And that’s for something with far less users than Steam.

Apart from all the non-profitable features divorced from meaning.

The forums would go in the blink of an eye.

And then each section would try to make itself complete in itself to hoard user time, and at least one would start selling advertising space.

Because they fired the guy whose job it was to tell the press who got fired. So there is no longer an official record.

All of Europe? All EU leaders? Just the EU president, who has a mostly ceremonial role?

I’m being nitpicky, no state is anyone’s friend and no superpower (or wannabe) comes even half as close as a state to being on your side.