This is a scare tactic and it’s a stupid one. If there were any advantage whatsoever to a nuclear powered cruise missile, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would have already cranked out thousands of them instead of conventional rockets.
We could just rewrite the headline as:
Putin says, “Booga Booga!!! Have nuclear shit!! Am scary asshole!!”
Iirc the USA did investigate making them during the cold war but concluded that the (very real) benefits - such as the ability to recall a missile after launching - weren’t worth cooking US citizens and allies with radiation from an unshielded nuclear reactor flying at mach 3 just above the surface; they planned to fly as low as 150m!
Their initial plans basically were to build a nuclear-ramjet “missile” that could fly for several days straight carrying dozens of nuclear warheads, autonomously dropping them on “enemies”. The big problem was that it’d have to fly over the USA and/or western Europe in order to reach the USSR.
Just based on the article, these “reforms” are clearly aimed at harming the working class. I’ll give you one guess as to which other class of people will benefit from them.
That’s very dismissive of the failures the former ruling party had. It’s hard to drum up votes for the guy considered responsible for tanking your county’s economy and spiking the poverty rate.
Like I agree, him winning is unfortunate and short sighted, but I think blaming the victims isn’t going to do anything other than help asshats like him win.
I’m not attempting to victim-blame; nobody is completely immune to propaganda and it’s not the fault of the working class that we’re bombarded by it constantly. Often people have no clue they’re being lied to all their lives. When they make decisions based on faulty information that’s shoved at them for decades by the rich and powerful, the working people are not to blame; the people who make the propaganda are.
I do not take personal issue with vaping. Humans have been consuming nicotine for thousands of years, and even though it is unhealthy, I don’t think it’s ever going away. However, the article specifically covers the banning of single-use vapes; and I absolutely agree that these have to go. They are extremely attractive to children and adolescents, and they’re terrible for the environment. I think the best approach toward regulating vapes is to ban flavors and disposables.
I cannot understand why there is no law banning the sale of Vape mixture to kids in any shape or form. Prohibition does not work where there is a desire to use a product, and vapes are so easy to manufacture that it will never be effective.
There is in most countries. Unless you mean shortfills you are meant to add nic to? In the US those still firmly fall under the laws restricting sale of vapes. Don’t know about the UK or Europe, I know those products exist there though.
Otherwise you can’t legally sell bulk nicotine to underage people, obviously the other ingredients are used for such a wide variety of things they can’t really be restricted like that.
Disposables are very bad for the environment, but in retrospect, so are normal AA batteries, used once and tossed away, regulation on those should also be considered.
Banning flavors is not, hopefully, an option, as the components of the juice don’t have and inherent flavor, unlike tobacco plants.
Alkaline batteries are great for remotes and stuff like that, where they potentially last years, in those applications it seems very reasonable, my TV remote still has the included AA batts and I bought it 3 years ago. But they end up getting used in higher drain devices and it gets a bit absurd. Still, at least people aren’t rocking around with their boombox with 6 D cells that last 8hours.
As a long time e-cig user and enthusiast I agree. I thought we got away from that garbage a decade ago, but then it came back. I don’t get it, it’s expensive, it sucks, and it’s mind bogglingly awful for the environment.
I don’t even love the idea of pre built coils but I compromised for the convenience now that they are actually good. Feels a lot less bad to toss a little bit of steel and kanthal every few weeks.
I can’t really get behind banning flavors, but less attractive packaging and only allowing open refillable systems would be a huge step to slowing adolescent use, they pretty much all use disposables because they can be bought at gas stations and you have to go to a smoke shop to get the refillables. Not to mention dropping $60 on a mod+tank isn’t as easy to start as $10 for a disposable.
I think the flavors are a big part of why they can be effective as cessation aids you start to no longer associate tobacco with it which helps a lot. I no longer smell someone smoking and get cravings.
Indeed, those slight distortions are a surefire clue that this art is a witch!
The AI image checkers are of course great evidence and never return false positives, but just to be sure I'd like to see whether the image sinks or floats when thrown in a pond.
I like how Americans are treated like some special class. As if the US hasn’t had collateral damage in their attacks that harm citizens of other countries. The US just uses it as a very weak reason to get more involved…
Germany, France and Spain also have killed and kidnapped citizens. Their newspapers are reporting similar stories on their citizens, which is the reason the EU froze all the humanitarian aid to Palestine.
And those numbers will go up. All those hostages are not Israeli
Like the WTC this is truly an international incident.
I agree, it is technically true. Sorry if I sounded too nitpicking, I’ve just come back from a week with no internet access /news so for a moment I thought you were talking about all of them doing it during the events of the last few days!
Do children deserve it? no. Did the parents of those children put them in that situation? yes.
But tell me, where do you draw the line? Murder is bad but funding a murderous government isn’t? How many steps do you have to be from the hitman before your conscious is clear?
And are you seriously out here pulling a “think of the children” as if an apartheid state is just super cool and nice to children? Do you need to refresh yourself on what apartheid means? I’ll wait
Edit: OP never comes back to explain why murdering 1 Israeli child is worse than murdering thousands of Palestinian children. They don’t have an answer, they have talking points.
Barbaric terrorism, raping, murder, mutilation, parading dead bodies down the street, can not be justified by anything. Sorry for you if you think differently.
You’re literally doing it right now. You fully acknowledge that Israel is an apartheid state but you’re not acknowledging anything they’ve done wrong.
For the people who don’t get it, Israel was established in the 40’s when the US and British took the land from the native Palestinians and created Israel as a state for the jewish people. This isn’t ancient history. Some of your grandparents are older than Israel.
Israel exists on stolen land and their goal is fully destroy Palestine. It’s as black and white as can be. It’s murder. It’s very nearly genocide. But the US is cool with it because we use them as a FOB.
Rapid here is defending murder. The recent actions of Palestine are, an admittedly gross but justified, self defense.
I do acknowledge that what Isreal does is oppression of Palestinians. I also acknowledge that what Hamas did last weekend was nasty and barbaric. Something you can’t seem to do and I feel sorry for you.
Something you can’t seem to do and I feel sorry for you.
Lol weak. Dude I literally just said it was “gross” you can’t immediately come back and say that I “can’t admit that it was nasty”. Gross and nasty are literally synonyms.
Can you pause for like 2 seconds and realize that you’ve become so lost in “winning” this argument that you’ve reduced yourself to spouting literal nonsense?
What’s low quality is using misapplied therapy speak to try to shut down a conversation.
It’s not victim blaming. It’s a fucking war zone. There are US citizens in Palestine right now stealing Palestinian houses. How are the Palestinians supposed to know who’s who? Stay the fuck out of the active war zone if you don’t belong there. It’s not like the Palestinians who don’t have a choice, people on vacation 100% had a choice.
“ViCTiM bLAmINg”. The victims are the Palestinians. Get the fuck outa here.
Except the EU backtracked. It’s like everyone on here is salivating at the thought of more dead Palestinians, as if they haven’t suffered enough under apartheid.
So in other words they understood that they were being called on to condemn antisemitism in order to help reinforce the narrative that these college rallies were antisemitic protests, when in fact they were pro-Palestinian ones.
Good on them for choosing to side with their students rather than give the anti-Palestinian camp their manufactured “professors condemn antisemitic student rallies” soundbites.
Refuse to engage with their genocide-backing rhetoric that tries to tie being pro-Palestinian to being antisemitic.
I can tell some of the people commenting here are holding back, but there is an undertone of something here that isn’t very Beehaw…
Anyway.
As I live in France, I can confirm that something like this was inevitable. First of all, the politician who called the ban is severely disliked. His name is used as a synonym for poop on the internet. That is just a small detail…
It was more or less decided that he cannot put a blanket ban and would need to ban case by case, but I may have missed something since yesterday.
Through migration and gentrification, France has set itself up for minor disasters such as this. Also, through education. I am from Canada, and I remember learning about this conflict in highschool in the late '90s. But, teenager me didn’t even know at the time what a Muslim was or why religion had anything to do with it. Here in France, students do not learn about it at school, they learn about it from parents. The French way of thinking is always about time, context, and place.
So, last week was the time. Context was terrorism. Place was… Israel. The media here can be quite biased. Lots of younger people have no clue what biased means. They consume lots of YouTube and prefer things to be vulgarised, meaning simplified, and will adopt the opinion of a YouTuber or influencer quite easily. This is contradictory to how the French used to think even 10 years ago.
Since Monday, a fake story about Arabs planning a djihad has been circulating on social media. It is all over French Instagram (my partner showed me) and Telegram too.
Ignorance, fearmongering, bloodlust, racism…all the bad shit could boil over. Adding fuel to the fire is the trend of calling out and doxxing anyone who criticises country A instead of county B.
I think the police will have a busy day and some looters will again take advantage of the situation.
There’s no publicly known proof that any of Mary Trump’s accusations are true, but since the war is decidedly World News, the possibility that the attack by Hamas was made viable through a U.S. leak is worth considering.
I read this ‘article’. There are zero references towards the so called ‘China Bashing’. If it is so rampant, how hard can it be to just link to a few mainstream offenders? It alludes towards a deliberate bashing, once again without any links or merit. I am fully aware that news is hardly unbiased but come on, this is ridiculous.
That’s not a defense. Opinion pieces can be fine, but if you’re claiming that something is off the charts you should probably have some charts (or any points of data) to prove the claim.
Do I need to? I haven’t had a visceral reaction to the article.
For what it’s worth, China’s affirmative action policies for minority groups put the US to shame. Significantly easier college admissions (despite using a standardized process), extremely generous business loans, proportional ethnic representation in government, vast infrastructure projects to bridge the salary gap, and celebrations of different cultures across the country. Not very capitalist of them, given that these infrastructure projects (while very beneficial to the endpoints) are not profitable.
Treating minorities better than the USA isn’t exactly a high bar.
My country also treats minorities better than the USA, it’s easy to get into uni, celebrates diversity, has an alright social welfare system and socialised healthcare, does the occasional infrastructure project etc.
Thanks for teaching me that I’m actually living in a socialist paradise rather than a poor, neoliberal capitalist, physically isolated island where private corporations are free to wreck the environment for profit!
Significantly easier college admissions (despite using a standardized process), extremely generous business loans, proportional ethnic representation in government, vast infrastructure projects to bridge the salary gap, and celebrations of different cultures across the country. Not very capitalist of them
Sorry OP but basically none of this has anything to do with not being capitalist. I don’t even doubt that China is doing better in those departments than America, but that has more to do with how utterly shit America is at most things outside of building bombs than how communist China is. They should get some kudos for executing a couple billionaires, though, gotta at least give 'em that.
Nobody else has had a visceral reaction, we’ve just pointed out bad journalism 🙂 Using big negative words might make you feel better, but it doesn’t make them accurate. You’re using them to be dismissive of our points
I have been following media intensively. I am not saying that news about China is unbiased in the western media. I am calling out the lack of any sources in this weak ‘article’
1 I don’t know this outlet, nor am inclined to use perceived pedigree to determine the quality of news. I’d like to see sources, not news dresses as opinions. 2 Opinion pieces that try to be credible need sources or else I will disregard them as petty trolling. The title makes a bold claim, I want sources backing up that claim. 3 that ‘source’ is also an opinion peace without any sources.
Just show me where mainstream media is deliberately bashing China. If it’s that rampant it can’t be that hard right?
that ‘source’ is also an opinion peace without any sources.
?
The source of that article are the authors. One a professor at Oxford, the other a lecturer at MIT. The professor's also written a book about China which is mentioned at the bottom of the article. Pretty weak argument to say that isn't a valid source. A bit like an anti-vaxxer saying an article about vaccination written by a doctor isn't a valid source in an internet argument.
Just show me where mainstream media is deliberately bashing China. If it’s that rampant it can’t be that hard right?
I googled myself, because I was curious. Not necessarily bashing, but plenty of sensationalism. For example, NBC at the time of the balloon incident:
Spy balloon likely sent extensive intelligence to China, experts say. The Pentagon said Thursday it 'acted immediately' to counter a collection of sensitive information
U.S. president Biden ... however stated that it was "not a major breach", and that he also believed that the Chinese leadership wasn't even aware of the balloon. ... On September 17, 2023, in an interview with CBS news, General Mark Milley, the retiring 20th US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated “I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China." Technical experts had also found that the balloon's sensors had never been activated while it was travelling over the Continental United States. The general also touched on a leading theory that the reason that it was flying over the United States, was probably because it was blown off-track, where the balloon had been heading towards Hawaii however winds at 60,000 feet simply came into the equation. Miley said, "those winds are very high.. the particular motor on that aircraft can't go against those winds at that altitude."
Media: the Chinese are spying on us. Are you ready for WAR?
Reality: the wind blew a balloon of course and by now most of us have already forgotten what turned out to be a nothing burger of a story.
I think that the concern was not that the articles like the ones you link to do not exist. Instead the complaint is that the posted piece did not itself link to them to back up the claim. These were likely quite easy for you to find and it’s poor journalism that the author did not put in the same effort.
U.S. president Biden ... however stated that it was "not a major breach", and that he also believed that the Chinese leadership wasn't even aware of the balloon. ... On September 17, 2023, in an interview with CBS news, General Mark Milley, the retiring 20th US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated “I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China." Technical experts had also found that the balloon's sensors had never been activated while it was travelling over the Continental United States. The general also touched on a leading theory that the reason that it was flying over the United States, was probably because it was blown off-track, where the balloon had been heading towards Hawaii however winds at 60,000 feet simply came into the equation. Miley said, "those winds are very high.. the particular motor on that aircraft can't go against those winds at that altitude." c
TLDR: Unbeknownst to China's leadership, one of their balloons blew off-track (hardly a rare occurence). It didn't collect or transmit any intelligence.
But if you watched the media coverage of that incident, you'd likely come to a different conclusion. For example:
Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence from sensitive U.S. military sites, despite U.S. efforts to block it
So funny how that all got memory holed and now you have people who genuinely still think it was a spy balloon of some kind (even in these very replies!) because they just never read anything past the headlines and never followed up on it after. Just completely lacking any curiosity or news literacy but will still scoff at the thought of them being victims of very obvious propaganda haha
A Chinese corporation openly tested those spy balloons over my country a decade ago (allegedly just for monitoring livestock), why is it so unbelievable that they’d use a more polished version on their biggest geopolitical rival?
Thankfully most signs are that the PLA is targeting having a force capable of credible cross strait operations in 2027, so we still have at least three years. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the US all know this and have been spending the last two plus years reshaping thier militaries to be capable of directly opposing such an act, and in doing so it is become pretty clear that any cross strait action is only going to end in a lot of CCP ships on the bottom and a good fiscal year for Lockheed Martin.
In doing so it makes it vanishingly unlikely that it will actually move beyond posturing in the first place. Unlike in Ukraine where the West has committed to supporting and resupplying the victim, many of the Asia Pacific Nations are committed to providing active military operations in defense of Taiwan.
That being said there is still to my knowledge no Asia Pacific equivalent to NATO Article 5 unfortunately, which may result in dangerous doubt in terms of credible deterrence, especially if the CCP believes it has friends that will quietly bow to it in Tokyo and Washington in 2027. For all of Trump’s shouting, most of his actual actions involvedo withdrawing the US from everything he could that China didn’t like.
While still unlikely, credible deterrence still requires the Chinese Intelligence both believe and be good enough at handling bad news to accurately report that up the chain of command, and as the FSB demonstrated in Ukraine that’s not necessarily a given. If there are enough yes men, then things could get very bad indeed.
Especially in China. That’s a place where it’s not uncommon for very high ranking members of the government/party/major companies and public figures disappearing for months on time if not indefinitely. If it can happen to those people, it can happen to bearers of bad news much further down the line. Not to mention, Xi has been busy purging anyone who even looks remotely competent/threatening (same thing, really) for a while now in the very old-fashioned sense of the word, which isn’t exactly conductive to a smooth running state either.
It feels so good to see countries not tolerating the far right. As a French, they’re basically everywhere now, everyone on talks like the Far Right on TV, now. My country has gotten so complacent with it…
I hope Germany keeps doing this and more act accordingly.
I fear your optimism ist unwarranted. The far right is attracting more and more voters here.
The ones arrested are not the far right you see on TV. They are conspiracy nuts who want to return to the time Germany had an emperor. They planned a revolution and hoarded weapons.
Probably wanted to regain the old empire’s territory as well, especially the regions belonging to France now…
I follow US news a little. You seem to be much further along on your way to abolish democracy. But to be fair, the “winner takes it all” voting mechanism and resulting two party system really helps in dividing a country.
Also “hoarding weapons” seems to be an acceptable pasttime in the US.
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