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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.

    The US just can’t accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn’t biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/

    But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there’s no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn’t a system to encourage it).





















  • 60 million people is almost no one?

    Geez it’s like you people want poor people to stay poor. There’s more than enough capacity for solar deployments in the nations East - it’s explicit policy that’s put deployments further West. Beijing is happy to build some UHV lines if it means that prosperity can be driven into the West - it’s the same argument as for the HSR line to Lanzhou and then to Urumqi. It’s the same argument as for the HSR line to Hohhot and the HrSR from Chengdu to Lhasa. Beijing knows that these infrastructure projects are inefficient, but Beijing is more concerned with equity of growth than the growth itself - they’d rather see 10% growth in the West and 3% growth in the East for 5% growth nationally than 6% growth nationally, but coming entirely from already established tier 1 population centers.

    It’s not only mutual prosperity, but also an effort to reduce internal migration towards tier 1 cities.


  • I mean, yeah. It’ll be interesting to see if that means that they’ll still pursue those legislative ideals (just without a platform or unifying cry or whatever), or if they’re happy to push the responsibility down to the states.

    My opinion is that the Republicans see the writing on the wall: why make unpopular decisions federally when you can make popular decisions at the state-level? They can maintain a christofascist state in their home ground without having to project onto states that’ll ignore their legislation anyway.


  • sigh

    Do you have the memory of a goldfish? Status quo under the previous KMT administration was very healthy. No talks of invasion, lots of talk about economic ties and cultural exchange. It was great, actually. Xi and Ma met, which was the first meeting between leaders since the start of the civil war. Ma is a true statesman and a symbol of what proper Taiwanese governance should be. Peace across the strait was possible for once.

    Then, the DPP got elected, started sucking America’s cock, started inviting top US officials for state visits, received awards from American state-funded institutions (like the National Endowment for Democracy), increasingly remilitarized, invited the US to sail through the Taiwan Strait… And the rest is history. Odd how it’s always the US-backed government that’s the “victim” in Western media, isn’t it? Surely China violated the status quo with respect to crossing the median line on their own accord, not because just a few weeks ago a US warship was invited to sail through the strait? Do you even remember what the status quo was?

    Taiwan claims territory that conflicts not only with China, but with: Mongolia, Myanmar, Bhutan, India, Japan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Russia, Pakistan, and also Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. Recognizing Taiwanese sovereignty violates the sovereignty of not only China, but also all of those countries… Which is absurd. Cut the crap and look at a map. ROC sovereignty would basically wipe Mongolia off the map. The funny thing is that Taiwan recognizing the sovereignty of the territory that conflicts with all of these other nations would have no bearing or impact on their sovereignty claim with China itself… Taiwan simply refuses to do so. The only claim that Taiwan cannot make freely is one that shrinks the borders of modern China (e.g. in the Arunachal Pradesh area and the South China Sea), but for everything else they have complete legislative authority to recognize foreign claims (after all, China has already done so, so doing so would not violate One China policy). They won’t, of course, because they refuse to recognize China’s negotiations in those territories as valid.


  • The lack of promises with regards to abortion and same-sex marriage is huge. It’s a colossal shift. Trump has always been more of a traditional Jeffersonian Republican than a Federalist - he’s in favour of shifting power from the federal government to the states. This is an increasing indicator that the states will be what decides on these social topics, not the feds.

    That also explains why he’s getting so much funding and support from the elite in Silicon Valley - they would like nothing more than for California to decide legislation rather than DC.

    It’s increasingly apparent that Trump views the role of the federal government as an arbiter of the economy and the role of the United States (as a concept) as a way of unifying the disparate interests of different states with regards to foreign policy. By gutting federal agencies, the only logical result is pushing power down to the individual states.





  • The new platform softened language on abortion, excised old language referring obliquely to gay conversion therapy and culled a section about reducing a national debt that Mr. Trump had increased by nearly $8 trillion during his term in office.

    Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone. He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler — and, in some cases, vaguer. He was especially focused on the language about abortion, which he recognized was a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He wanted nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to attack him, and he made clear to aides that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives, for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority.

    Mr. Trump also stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation: “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage.”

    One person involved in the process recalled Mr. Trump saying privately: “Sanctity of marriage. Don’t define it.”