I also learned that the name is not Megan Three Stallion.

I have asked about Ignoring Victor and I'm not allowed. He doesn't seem to want to ignore me.

There is already a containment thread for conspiracy theories like his, please start moving his posts there or figure out some other solution.

There is always getting yourself demodded or trying to see things from Victor's perspective.

I won't be demodding myself so I can use the ignore function.

I do try to see things from Victor's perspective. They belong in a conspiracy containment thread.

I'm the expert there-- what's the conspiracy that he's allegedly peddling?

October 7th was not a terrorist attack.

Yeah that's not a conspiracy theory that's just an alternative narrative. He isn't suggesting that the facts of what happened that day are different, only suggesting that those facts be viewed in a different way.

For it to be a conspiracy theory he would need to be suggesting that what you think are the facts are not actually facts.

Israel kills 90% civilians. not terrorism! the Resistance kills at most close to 50% civilians. terrorism!

Like with 9/11:

"They hate us for our freedom" vs "it was blowback for meddling too much in the middle east"

vs

"Cheney did it"

The first two are competing narratives; the last is a conspiracy theory.

You are not a good arbiter of what is a conspiracy theory.

he thinks they spent 2 years training and planning to attack a concert that wasnt even supposed to be going on that day. whos the conspiracist?

Nimble. They are dumb af, but the 2-year-plan was able to adapt in the moment to the good fortune.

I never said that, or anything remotely like that actually. I said the people at the concert were civilians, and they were murdered making it a terrorist attack. You deny that, with some justifications like "IDF killed some too, so we don't know how many were killed by Hamas", and "Hamas didn't mean to kill them, they just killed so many other people that they had spare time" despite that being completely false.

There's also all of the stuff regarding Ukrainians being Nazis, or Nazi led, or whatever other nonsense.


The Euromaidan snipers nonsense is absolutely conspiracy theory, even by Luckbox's standard.

With a Jew head of state, and it can be as true in Ukraine as anywhere else. There are a number of universal variables in any country.

According to a certin metric, The USA is in an incipient insurgency. The ideas and resultant behaviors can be forecast.

oh man, mod's can't have an ignore list, i have so much more empathy for them now

Factions: right, left and center. It's nothing new, and it's ubiquitous to one extent or another everywhere, even in a authoritarian place like China.. where they don't f around and reeducate lol.

Rick, tell us about China

a lot of chinese people over there

we think they want they want freedom and are oppressed

they would not agree with that assessment at all


they have deep roots to their history

where ancient greece/egypt/rome are abstract ideas to modern greeks/italians/egyptians who are all speaking different languages, living different cultures, & few can trace back their genetic history to the people who lived there 2,000 years ago - Chinese see themselves as the direct descendants who've maintained the same culture, language, & genetic makeup from the beginning

in china, it's not uncommon to read a poem from the 2nd century in your morning classes (in the original text), eat a meal for lunch where the recipe can be traced back to the 14th century, practice wushu in the afternoon which dates back to the 6th century and then go home and watch a tv show that's a modern reboot of a Song Dynasty story from the 12th century

they view everything with this long term perspective, so they're more concerned with comparing their lives not to how the economy is doing vs last year but rather how the country is doing vs how it's historically done

they see that the prosperous times in China were when there was a strong central authority, the times of famine and civil war where millions perished were when there were multiple factions vying for power in a weak decentralized state

they look back at the republic era of china, which was fundamentally an amalgamation of hundreds of city states all run by local warlords without much central authority nor unity - this is how japan was able to take large sections of the country in the 1930s wholly unopposed because no warlord would march his army north to fend off the Japanese because:

A) the Japanese were attacking his rival not him

and

B) the warlord worried if he marched his army away then some other warlord would take his land

this is just one of dozens of minor wars between various warlords that nobody has ever heard of during this time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second...93Fengtian_War

here's a map - but mind you, that map is overly simplifying things and putting groups of warlords who were at the time aligned together as a single entity


so Chinese have that very recent example of what happens when you have a weak decentralized state - local military people just carve out independent fiefdoms - which is also exactly what has happened many times throughout China's history

so the people don't even want democracy, they want a strong unified country run and the communist party, for all their faults, do an incredibly good job at it - they also don't do hereditary succession so you're not stuck with the children who aren't as capable - each new generation are incredibly smart people who spent their entire careers being trained and groomed for their role - in fact, the last few leaders of china are all engineers by training - Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer from their equivalent of MIT


and, they don't like foreigners very much, historically, China has been isolated from the rest of the world that they've really gone in their own separate path - if you spent any time reading the Chinese version of children's fables, the lessons are completely insane to us because their perspective on things are so different - there's so many times when I read something and was like "oh the lesson here is don't steal" but no, that's not the lesson at all, the lesson was don't steal from someone who do something about it if you get caught. - that's just something i made up but stuff like that is super common

like this is a popular character dating back to the 10th century


as you can imagine, he does whatever he pleases, he's an absolutely despicable character - but he's the hero

not even like an anti-hero or anything either, he's just a bully, the dozens of children's tv shows, and books, and movies made around this character just show him randomly beating up dragons and stuff

so this godly kid nezha just beat up most people in the dragon's court and even killed his son for good measure and then used his carcass as a toy afterwards, so he went up to heaven to appeal for justice from the higher authorities - nezha doesn't want to get into trouble so naturally he intercepts the dragon and beats him and threatens to make it worse if the tries to tattle on him again - imagine if woody from toy story just galavanted around slaying people's children and then threatened harm to them if they called the cops - that's this beloved Chinese children's character that's been made into a dozen movies and tv shows


here's a more modern version of nezha where he's bullying and beating up other children who are so terrified of him they banded together in order to try fighting back


so they're not like us in the slightest and they genuinely think we're soft and stupid - which frankly i agree with

i see a world where china and us are on friendly terms, but we'll never be allies because they also believe in "China First"

a good example of that is it would never occur to them to make an "America First, China Second" satirical video the way many comics around the globe did about their own countries

A) because obviously it should be "My country first" only an idiot wouldn't view it that way
B) they'd never make a satirical video because that would be accepting an inferior role to the USA, which is unacceptable even as a joke

tellingly, you can't find a China Second video that's made by actual Chinese people, there's one out, but it's put out by an education company run by these folks




they don't like us
china #1
really good food

hype!

Thx, bro

I agree with a lot of that, but I think Nezha's story is missing some key components. The story is largely an outlet to express rebellion against unjust authorities. Usually the conflict that kicks this story off is some demand by the Dragon King which is damaging to humans, such as ritual sacrifice. Nezha's actions are celebrated because he's able to enact justice against an unimaginably powerful authority. I always viewed the violence as an expression of what people wish they could do to those who oppress them, but are so powerful that they are untouchable.

If the story were to leave out the start of the story, and the reason for the conflict, I think that would say a lot more about censorship and what is allowed under the current regime. It would be saying a lot less about the values supposed to be learned from the traditional story. In other words that version of the story would seem to me like the current powers are not worried about teaching morality if it's at the cost of diminishing their authority.

good points, in the older one i believe the dragon occasionally ate a few children but IIRC it was mostly framed as nezha just wanting to fight and the dragons were good combatants rather than he was expressly taking revenge but i could be mistaken

the more modern one, i honestly don't recall any provocations, it's nezha being a jerk the entire time and then there's this bad thing happening and he uses his power to save them (but i think he's still a jerk)

i just recalled one of the things that really stuck with me - called - grinding an iron rod into a needle

it goes something along the lines of this:

*the above is not a good translation IMO, the old lady is grinding an iron rod into a needle

here's an image


so I read this and my takeaway was:

this boy skipped out on school, ran into a stupid peasant doing stupid peasant things and thought to himself, "jfc, i need to go back to school and get an education so i don't wind up like that stupid old lady"

the Chinese takeaway is:

if you can grind an iron rod into a needle with hard work, then you can accomplish anything with hard work, therefore Li Bai got inspired and went back to school so he could work hard and accomplish things

also, China still has living memory of foreign occupation by the Japanese who did horrendous things as well as incredible famine

you'd be very hard pressed to find someone how doesn't have a great grandparent who died in the war or subsequent famines

families who now live comfortably, own a car, travel abroad on vacation, have savings, etc all grew up in near starvation in a village hut like this which lacked plumbing and electricity


they all think the government is crushing it and don't give af that they couldn't run as an opposition party etc etc, they are just grateful they aren't being killed in another civil war, foreign invasion, or famine

Goat

Meanwhile, we have prominent thought leaders like Alex Jones. Some freedom.

That is true in Ukraine and Russia as well.

It's also true of Zelenskyy, whose grandfather was the only one of four brothers not to die fighting the Nazis, and whose great-grandparents were massacred by Nazis. These things are felt far more in that area.



More directly to what you're talking about: Putin was able to continually become more authoritarian because oil prices were going up. As long as the people were able to live in relative peace and become wealthier, it didn't really matter that he was tightening his grip on their rights, life was still way better. It didn't come back to bite them until very recently.