Yeah, it’s so annoying and masturbatory. “Everyone who criticizes my treat is just shrieking at me for liking it”. I don’t like people fixating on tech aspects (at least for indies and small publisher games, AAA can get fucked), but they do not, in my experience, shriek at me for liking things that run poorly.
It testing your patience when it is something you are ignorant about seems like the real root issue there. Do you get worked up over Zimbabwean municipal politics? Do you block people who complain about the notion of quantum probability when it is brought up?
It is true that there are big differences in the ideology of the PRK and the DPRK, but the DPRK still was made as a sort of reconstitution of the PRK government
Most of the useful conversation to be had is not from the west demanding they just adopt western culture. I don’t support censoring movies on homophobic grounds, but I think gay media produced and shown domestically (which absolutely does exist) is much more productive and important.
China is not perfect on the matter of right-to-housing, but it is very good. Everyone has a right to have some kind of housing unit, though they don’t necessarily (and in fact, I think usually don’t) “own” it and family homes are counted if the kid isn’t formally disowned. A very large number of the homeless population in China are “itinerant homeless,” those who do have a family home but have moved elsewhere and aren’t paying rent for an apartment (usually due to poverty, and therefore may live on the street) in order to try to get a job in the city with which to support themselves and possibly the rest of their family, who are usually back home in some rural area. This is very different from what homelessness typically looks like in the US, though it happens here too.
If a child is not formally disowned but is nonetheless forced out by their family, then it’s effectively a matter of child abuse to be handled by the appropriate government organization once it is discovered/reported, and either the family recants or they formally disown the child. If they are formally disowned, they are entitled to shelter.
Though not the same system by any means, I think the DPRK’s law on this subject is similar, though it’s much easier for poor families (and kids therein) to fall through the cracks, meaning that you are more likely* to find a homeless queer kid there as a consequence.
This is functionally a case of affirming the consequent or something similar. “Ball is life” is really expressing something more like “there is no life worth living except one involving ball”, so “fuck it we ball” is needed to keep living a worthwhile life if you assume that, but it’s not really an endorsement of living itself.
It’s like how, if I believe “drinking is the only reason I live”, saying “I want to drink” only endorses “I want to live” incidentally at best, rather than the two statements being equivalent. It’s like, in a mundane context, saying you want to eat. Eating is a condition of living, but the desire to eat is not identical to the desire to live, and a suicidal person can still be hungry and eat not to live but merely to relieve the pain of hunger. So too can the alcoholic lifestylist drink and the baller ball for the sake of their enjoyment of the respective activity (or aversion to how they feel without it) without there being a direct desire to live as such.
Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.
What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.
Why ten? How many does “lithium batteries are made with a substantial amount lithium” count for?
Beyond that, I’m not just some bullshit technocrat, I don’t believe that “innovating your way out of the apocalypse” is almost ever possible. Yeah, we should move away from car-centric infrastructure, which could be conflated for arguing for “green tech” because, compared to cars, trains, bikes, scooters, etc. are green tech, but overwhelmingly my suggestions are policy-side because stopping the destruction of the earth is not a sci-fi pipe dream, it is a materially feasible goal and has been for as long as capitalists have been destroying it.
Like climate change, this mostly is not an intellectual question. Good answers in theory don’t matter if you have a reactionary political establishment that refuses to implement it.
Like for climate change, waiting and doing nothing when we already have a wealth of research on the subject will do much more damage than even the worse solutions that the data still supports [rather than moronic, unsupported solutions like giant ice machines].
Like for climate change, the pushback is mainly based on people being paid to push back and the astroturfing funded by the same people in a litany of campaigns that have gone on for decades. People disagreeing do not, by the very fact of being “people disagreeing”, have a valid point, and usually they do not in the context of these subjects.
You have more fun with the FPS counter off (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)
Sure. Why not. Anything goes. (startrek.website)
Technically it's always the first in China until they get removed from the movie (startrek.website)
fuck it (mander.xyz)
Don't ask (lemmy.zip)
Does it not pierce thine very heart? (startrek.website)
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‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says the Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (lemmy.ml)