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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

    CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.



  • alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation

    The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content

    Sounds more like the Pentagon did tell them so they could whitelist the Pentagon trolls from getting banned. Then social media companies got nervous that the troll farm was sloppy and going to get caught by someone not under NDA sooner or later, and a new admin was an opportunity to lobby to get out of this bad PR situation.




  • Sometimes people are assigned progressive by social expectations and start playing that role without really thinking about it. She tried to write an apolitical generic kids book, and everybody’s white, fat people are evil, and bankers are big nosed goblins. Then other people read it and started pointing things out, but she couldn’t detect any of this herself so when she tried to be inclusive she just added Ching Chong the asian and a minstrel slave race. Need to make someone black, I said Hermione has ugly frizzy hair so I guess it’s her. Need a gay, make it the asexual grandpa so it’s not gross. Eventually something comes along that cracks their assumption that they must be progressive and they come out as right wing on Twitter.


  • The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

    “Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.