The F? He got ‘convicted’ for child enticement after he started agitating against the Iraq War. He was a US weapons inspector in Iraq, and was on the ground checking for WMDs pre-war and found none.

I’ll cite some previous comments I made, with sources:

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5319924/4836806

Just in case anyone brings up his weird history of child sexual offenses, he was never prosecuted for harming actual children. Both prosecuted offenses were supposedly sting operations (aka entrapment) by FBI and police, which makes them super suspicious. For example, the first one in 2001 was conveniently timed to interfere with his anti-Iraq War advocacy.

The US government seized his passport in early June just to stop him from attending the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and derail his planned tour of Russia, where he would’ve gotten more coverage of his antiwar advocacy.

I would not be surprised if the FBI makes up a new sex offense charge based on this raid to try to shut him up about Russia, since that got the media so riled up the last 2 times. Another kind of bogus charge also wouldn’t be a surprise.

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5319924/4838261

The 2001 sting operation was so conveniently timed that even Fox News had to point out how sus it looked: Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter: Timing of Arrest Reports Suspicious

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Before he publicly came out against the Iraq war and denounced all claims of Iraq having WMDs, AIPAC even tried to buy Ritter off for 6 million dollars and a lifetime of luxury in exchange for him making up shit about how evil Iraq is. Ritter turns them down because he would not lie about Iraq’s WMDs.

Ritter talks about this on Danny Haiphong’s show here.

Ritter’s non-cooperation obviously has made him a massive target, especially because of his deep knowledge on the ground in Iraq and the military apparatus.

If Scott really just wanted to molest children for free, why didn’t he simply go to Israel and get his million-dollar book deal? After all, that’s what all the Zionist pedophiles in the U.S. do.

Scott Ritter isn’t a principled socialist due to his military background and career. Still, he is a valuable voice for anti-US-empire military analysis, since leftists with military training are few and far between. Politically, he falls in the same camp as military-analyst-turned libertarian anti-imperialists Ray Mcgovern, Larry Wilkerson, and Larry Johnson.

We do not and should not listen to libertarians’ proposals of domestic policy, but on fighting imperialist American foreign policy we are aligned.

Vampires are the ultimate bad-boy romantic aesthetic. How skilled at romance must a woman to wrap an immortal being around her finger? In that sense it’s kinda empowering.

Right now, werewolf romance novels are rather popular on reddit romance novel communities. This is the exact same kind of dude as a vampire except you also get animalistic boinking.

Pretty much, yes. Having read both, the horny energy is exactly the same.

I think allos (myself included) ship other people so we can live vicariously through them. I don’t have time or energy for a romantic relationship RN, but watching others get together is kinda fun.

This practice is kinda harmless for fictional characters (and romantic subplots are usually the norm in said shows), but can definitely make IRL aces uncomfortable. Sorry about that, we should probably stick to fictional characters only.

I think vampires (specifically the hot mysterious dude kind of vampire) are popular mostly because they fulfill a certain niche of romantic fantasy. This niche used to be filled by the plethora of romance novels, which are mostly consumed by women. Today, romance novels have been supplanted by many more types of content, including stuff about vampires. Also, you can’t really blame normal, horny people for thinking about banging anything. R34 is a thing for a reason.

Scott Ritter’s house was raided by the Biden admin, so he is understandably pissed at them. Scott Ritter also knows people in the Trump administration personally, so he clearly hoped that he would have more influence over Trump and co’s actions. He has never ‘glazed’ Trump. He had hopes Trump would follow through on his peace plans.

Now that he sees that isn’t the case, Scott is also becoming quite vocal at criticizing Trump. He has repeatedly come out against the Houthi airstrikes.

The issues with local leadership in China has to do with how the Chinese political system is set up in a multi-tiered electoral system. Let’s say you live in a big city. You’ll elect someone you’ll probably know to the district congress. Then the district congress will elect people to the city congress. Then the city congress elects someone amongst themselves to the provincial congress and the provincial congress elects someone to the National People’s Congress. ^[1]

Communist party officials, governors and other non-congressional civil servants have to follow a very similar tiered election process. For example, before becoming General Secretary and President, Xi Jinping governed a village for 6 years, a county for 3 years, three cities for 11 years and three provinces for another 11 years ^[2] The CPC deliberately moves aspiring governors between different cities and provinces where they do not have connections to test whether they can fix problems even in unfamiliar environments and without benefitting from local connections.

This tiered selection and election process means that any incompetence is filtered out and judged by other congresspeople, and creates a competitive political ladder. If a local politician ever commits any grave mistakes, the other ambitious congresspeople will tear him a new one.

Naturally, this also means that the highest concentration of incompetence will be at the lowest governmental levels, which is why Chinese people tend to have more grievances with them compared to the upper levels. Of course, if you compare the trust Chinese people have in their overall political system with the complete failure of the U.S. governmental system, the difference in quality becomes very clear. ^[3]

In the US, local government officials have more approval because the national politicians are so useless in comparison. In China, the national politicians have been selected to be the best of the best, such that compared to them, the local officials look a lot worse.

Of course, Westoids will complain that because Chinese people can’t elect someone as incompetent as Marjorie Taylor Greene directly to the National People’s Congress, that the Chinese system is undemocratic.

Other tools do exist for using the mouse with your keyboard, but this is the first one I’ve ever found that brings up a grid and lets you click in the grid.

Other software lets you move the cursor left, right, up, down, and click, but that will never be faster than just switching to the mouse. I’ve used some before and they feel like a painful crutch.

Instead, Mouseless lets you click immediately in any location, making it even faster than switching the mouse. You can practice clicking with it using https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/aim .

I bought this. The dev has a Mac version and just came out with a Windows beta version. It’s super useful. I can completely eliminate my use of the mouse if I want to, which helps a ton when working on my laptop since I don’t really like using touchpads.

The lifetime license for the software has per-country pricing. In the USA, it’s priced at $20, which is pretty good for such a useful tool. I’d much rather pay a lifetime license than a subscription.

This belongs in Technology, not GenZedong.

The difference is that capitalists aren’t desperate. They commit crimes just to make numbers get bigger. Just fining corporations for doing crimes doesn’t do anything, because then it just becomes a cost of doing business. You must attack the people in the corporations making the decisions to make money, and the death penalty is one of the tools for that.

To understand the use of the death penalty, imagine how many worker hours a capitalist who steals a billion dollars takes away. Assuming the average US salary (~$66,000) and working lifespan (77.43 years - 20 yr childhood), they’ve stolen the entire life earnings of 264 Americans. These calcs look even worse for any non-U.S. country because the theft is usually done in USD, but all the workers make a much less valuable currency.

As of now, China mostly uses death sentence with reprieve for financial crimes, which means that if the sentenced person doesn’t commit another crime in a couple years, their sentence gets demoted to life sentence. Actual execution has only been used for extreme cases, such as Sichuan mining tycoon Liu Han, worth $6.4 billion, for his crime syndicate of gambling, loan sharking, illicit arms trading, contract killing, and actual lethal shootings.^[1]

When the heck did I say that LLMs are going to run society? AI is much more than just LLMs, though LLMs are the manifestation of the current stage of development of AI.

Companies like Walmart are already using automated systems to optimize product distribution and maximize profit.^[1] There is no reason why we can’t use improved versions of these AI systems to centrally plan country-wide economics in the future to maximize well-being and other democratically-defined goals.

Perhaps the punishment should be set after consultation with the victim. Sexual abuse absolutely must be punished and prevented though.

Definitely. I hope China will be the first country to find a good solution to the birth crisis faced by all developed countries, since no capitalist country has found a solution yet. Reducing working hours, providing social support, increasing household wealth and living standards, and decreasing stress from raising kids should hopefully fix this.

But better AI should be able to pick stickier shits, which will save work in the long run. I agree that AI should not be used to hurt workers, but will be very important for fully automated luxury communism.

Thanks for the tip! I’ll gather a few more answers here and make a separate post in a day or two.

I agree on allowing culture to change naturally. When you try to abrupty impose social policies that oppose aspects of people’s culture, they naturally push back. I feel that much of the hostility towards LGBT and the like seems to be due to people’s desperation so they think that doing what “God” likes will get them more stuff. Naturally, if everyone has all the stuff they need, then no one will need to care much.

Death penalty is good actually, as long as it isn’t used just on minorities. Super useful to scare capitalists.

At this point, I can’t tell if people like him talk about this because they believe it, or they talk about this just to make the article acceptable to an American audience.

Here’s the article’s claims point-by-point:

Palmer is perfectly correct about corruption in the CPC; that’s well-documented.

This is why Xi Jinping did a massive anti-corruption campaign and initiated reforms of China’s anti-corruption state institutions. In 2018, China transferred the task of investigating corruption to a new department from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the National Supervisory Commission (国家监察委员会), which has broader powers to investigate corruption within both the government and the Communist Party via its co-located sister agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中国共产党中央纪律检查委员会). This lets China attack corruption at the state and party level.

In the US, corruption is legalized as lobbying or conveniently free vacation gifts.

China also has the awful distinction of executing the most people of any country on Earth, including for non-violent drug crimes.

All the US-funded sources just say 1000+ executions per year, no hard numbers, IDK where their stats come from. Give me hard per-capita numbers. China is the 2nd-largest country on Earth, so should on average execute the 2nd-most number of people. IDK why India doesn’t execute anyone, lots of gang rapists there deserve it.

Culturally, Chinese people broadly support execution. China doesn’t have US-style racism, so minorities aren’t falsely executed.

The cited WaPo article talks about China executing 4 Chinese citizens, who failed to report their Canadian citizenship to the Chinese government, on drug smuggling charges. Think about how many people’s lives those drugs could have destroyed. I think they deserve it. Interestingly, Canada didn’t complain about their arrest, imprisonment, or sentencing, only their execution to make China look bad.

Its human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority— although cynically seized upon by anti-China politicians like Marco Rubio who couldn’t care less about human rights—are still real and horrifying.

How can “socialists” still believe this debunked shit? Is China bombing Xinjiang like Israel is nuking Palestine?

Working conditions in many Chinese sweatshops and factories are abominable, just like the European factories and sweatshops of the 19th century that Karl Marx railed against.

See below: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7521254/6211053

Perhaps not by coincidence, the Chinese government has even cracked down on Marxist students and banned websites dedicated to Maoism—a curious action for a supposedly communist state.

I’m not super knowledgable on the first bunch of cases. Can someone else look into this?

The first article talks about several cases, including one where students were arrested for supporting an independent trade union. China has an official national union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Interestingly, most independent trade unions in China operate as US-funded NGOs.

The second article talks about fallout after the arrest of Bo Xilai, Party Secretary of Chongqing, and associates for corruption and corruption-initiated murder. According to court proceedings, Wang Lijun, chief of police and vice-mayor of Chongqing, learned that Bo Xilai’s wife Gu Kailai murdered British businessman Neil Heywood because he charged too high a fee for illegally sending tons of money out of China. After finding out and trying to talk about the issue with Bo Xilai, Bo retaliated against Wang Lijun, first demoting him and then attempting to arrest him. In fear of his life, Wang Lijun went to the US embassy for protection, then to Beijing once the Chinese government found out. Initially, the central government did not believe Wang Lijun’s accusations, denouncing him as a traitor. Later they changed their tune and arrested Bo, probably after finding out the depth of Bo Xilai and co’s corruption. Because Bo Xilai had a lot of political allies, and had garnered some public support due to some of his policies, his takedown caused a bunch of chaos that the Chinese government tried to calm with selective censoring.

The entire saga is somewhat reminiscent of the corruption case shown in the Chinese TV show In the Name of the People. Watch that to understand the political chaos that ensued.

Feminist activists, too, have been imprisoned for things like reporting on the #MeToo movement or handing out stickers.

I’m not knowledgable on these cases. Can someone else look into this?

Other restrictions on public speech and artistic expression are equally impossible to defend, like the ban on supernatural horror films and all forms of pornography (including eating a banana in a way authorities deem too “erotic”).

China is culturally conservative. Pornography of real people is probably not good for people’s development.

Not any messaging app funded by the NED’s software funding arm, the Open Technology Fund:

Current funding: https://www.opentech.fund/projects-we-support/supported-projects/

Past funding: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opentech.fund%2Fprojects-we-support%2Fsupported-projects%2F

Agree. I assume Disney pushed this through simply because they already put money into it, and they saw that they still managed to make money off of live-action Ariel.

In theory, casting non-white actors helps to sell their movies to a more global audience, thus making more money. In practice, I think global audiences prefer companies to put more effort into actually telling their stories rather than just shoving them into white stories.