Once upon a time, I took a HSK1 class thinking I could improve my Mandarin that way. It wasn't. After spending half of 2023 researching strategies to improve my Mandarin fluency, I now have a plan in place, detailed in this post below:
#USNavy sailor pleads guilty to selling information to #China.
> Zhao admitted sending his Chinese handler plans for US military exercises in the Indo-Pacific region, operational orders and electrical diagrams and blueprints for a radar system on a US military base in Okinawa, Japan, according to court documents and US officials. He was arrested in August.
I think Henry Kissinger thinks that #Ukraine joining #NATO would freeze the war at the current footprint and allow #Russia to claim victory while preventing them from expanding their footprint in the future. However, I think this is premature.
The time to freeze footprints is after #Putin's invasion forces and puppet states are displaced from most or all Ukrainian territory. Meanwhile, negotiations would encourage a future repeat unless there is nothing gained from the invasion.
This could be bad news for peace and stability. A nation where the revered and respected elders are too numerous for their workforce to support? In other lands, raising the retirement age and reducing benefits to force able-bodied retirees back into the workforce have been tried. Can China do this?
I don't recall how the discussion got there, but we were talking about shutting down schools due to the #COVID-19 pandemic and he said that "we knew from the beginning that it basically did not affect children and that we didn't need to do that". I pointed out that we did not know any such thing, and that despite generally less severe effects, those kids live with parents, grandparents, and other adults ... sending them into germ factories unmasked (as he'd have wanted) would have been a death sentence for many of the adults in these kids' lives.
Then I mentioned that most schools have ventilation issues and many are in buildings that date back 50-100 years. (And in fact, one of the facilities we were supporting was in an old school that was probably built in the late 1940s or early 1950s. In this case, it was an area of small towns where almost everyone under 50 had left to find jobs, so most of the schools closed.) He insisted that all schools had done ventilation upgrades in 2020 as the pandemic spread across the nation.
At that point, I understood that this person likely ingested too much propaganda from a certain "news" channel, much of which is probably originally designed in Moscow, so I stopped responding.
He was probably a normal or nearly-normal person until the fear that #2019-nCoV was a plot by #China and the #Democrats to displace #Trump came about. I don't have any indication that this is what he believed / believes, but I think a lot of #anti-vaxxers and #anti-maskers started there and moved on to their extreme beliefs afterward.
@lxo In my opinion, Assange wasn't subject to US law. He was not a citizen and AFAIK, was not in US territory when the leaks were collected or published. Now, I could see if they pressured countries where he holds citizenship or was physically present to enforce their own laws, but I do not agree that the US should seek to prosecute him.
I don't classify him as a journalist, since he doesn't seem to publish secrets from other countries such as #Russia or #China. It seems to be mostly #USA. So it _is_ plausible to consider #Wikileaks as a non-governmental foreign intelligence service, in which case, I think every government reserves the right to strike back. So, as you can see, I'm conflicted, with my primary view being that the USA should not be pursuing Assange, but rather the leakers who served as his sources.
(As a federal employee, I'm not allowed to read anything that leaked, but from what I've seen others write, Manning was very careless about leaking, with some documents identifying undercover agents who had nothing to do with the crimes that were revealed. So this wasn't really whistleblowing, as the leaked materials covered a lot more than waste, fraud, abuse, and crime. The restrictions also make it difficult to form any kind of intelligent opinion.)
I think the funniest thing to that's happened this year was that literally within a week or so of the #Ukraine invasion, when the West hadn't even taken a breath after saying "nooo #Russia can't invade another country! It's not right! It doesn't matter if it was caused by NATO encroaching into Ukraine or not!" a major Australian news outlet wrote an op-ed on how #Australia "must be ready to" invade the Solomon Islands because they agreed to a military alliance with #China. Zero self awareness.
Was die Tagesschau nicht berichtete: #Ukraine's Präsident Selenskyj prangerte im Bundestag an, Deutschland stelle "die Wirtschaft, die Wirtschaft, die Wirtschaft" über Moral und Menschlichkeit. Siehe schon #China, #Türkei, #Usbekistan... Politiker, zeigt endlich Rückgrat!
Started from March 14th, Shenzhen has enacted a sort of lockdown: all residential, industrial areas are closed. Commercial sectors exc. market, drugstore, etc are closed. But citizens are allowed to go out of their communities with a pass card. Everyone is required to take covid test daily.
The reason that the West must accuse #China of doing horrible things (like genociding a whole race of people) is because it's a trump card in discourse. Whenever someone brings up any of China's achievements, they can simply point to their accusation and say "at what cost". This gives them free reign to cast China as the villain no matter what happens, and absolves themselves of any pressures to emulate any good that China is doing, because in the narrative they created, China can never be good.