Fun fact, Tank Man at Tiananmen wasn’t run over by a tank, and despite the event being called the “Tiananmen massacre” leaked US embassy cables say no one was shot at the square.
In 2009, James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops [ …] There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre”.
Western media also never seem to mention the dozen or so police officers who were killed and immolated before the repression started, somehow that’s irrelevant or something. Can you imagine how things would have gone if a dozen police officer had been murdered and burnt during the WTC protests in 1999, or BLM?
No, leaked official cables of the secret designation is not the same thing as an anonymous source. The secret designation only denotes that these cables were intended for people with a clearance level of secret (as opposed to say No foreign, Top Secret, etc). The cables authenticity leave no doubt and have been thoroughly investigated by journalists.
You can read these cables for yourself on WikiLeaks (I don’t know why the telegraph wouldn’t simply link to them).
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF EVENTS AT TIANANMEN SQUARE. ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE. THEY WERE ABLE TO ENTER AND LEAVE THE SQUARE SEVERAL TIMES AND WERE NOT HARASSED BY TROOPS. REMAINING WITH STUDENTS BY THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE’S HEROES UNTIL THE FINAL WITHDRAWAL, THE DIPLOMAT SAID THERE WERE NO MASS SHOOTINGS OF STUDENTS IN THE SQUARE OR AT THE MONUMENT. END SUMMARY.
my favorite part about these kinds of comments is that the article they commonly cite basically says there was no tiananmen massacre because the massacre happened outside of the square in the rest of beijing, and that’s treated like it’s some big gotcha
The fact that the official statements are decisively false is a gotcha yes. Why would you trust the rest of the reporting and official story when you know they lied about basic things like this. What makes you think that the number they throw around is anywhere close to reality when they can’t even tell you where the events happen?
It’s not like China even denies that people died.
You can look at the pictures I linked too, plenty of dead people in them. These are available from the Chinese state.
I’m less concerned about the specifics of where it happened and how many people died, and more concerned about how military personnel shot live ammunition at citizens.
According to the Tiananmen Papers, a collection of internal Communist party files, soldiers started using live ammunition at around 10.30pm, after trying and failing to disperse the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Yes I know it’s crazy right, even the Chinese government doesn’t deny they shot people after at least a dozen police/soliders were killed and immolated and others taken hostage… In a similar situation, I am absolutely sure that the west would not use lethal force…
I don’t think you are proving the point you think you’re proving.
Not fifteen years before in the US the national guards shot at a group of 300 protestors who hadn’t been occupying the place for months, didn’t have Molotov cocktails, didn’t take hostages, didn’t immolate anyone. They killed four, and wounded nine.
Though counterpoint: if someone is willing to spend $3000+ on an apple computer and cool swag. The ads already worked.
However, if the Q/A on your product is so bad, that someone who spends $3000+ would rather install an ad-block to get rid of that experience, maybe the quality assurance on those ads or products aren't as good as people think.
If that dude’s outfit was animated and played noise, and the guy jumped in front of whatever I was looking at and wouldn’t go away, and sometimes he put random shit in my pockets or got me sick, then I’d hate that guy just as much as internet ads
Hmm, whether PPC or PPI (pay per click / impression), I don’t believe advertisers are spending anything on you. I believe it’s whoever is paying the web host who’s losing, and it’s potential revenue instead of an expenditure.
Certain ad blockers click ads for you. Assuming these clicks aren’t registered as coming from a bot (a big assumption, I know), then those clicks should count as interactions on the ads.
True but don’t forget that we probably enjoy the benefits of ad-based internet. If way more people would adblock than currently, then a lot of sites may need to resort to paywalled or whatever other type of monetisation. Happy UbO user tho.
They cry about not being able to serve ads while serving ads that are straight malware and scams. It’s especially funny when a platform goes out of their way to censor (suppress ad revenue) on videos which have even a chance of being misinformation and then proceed to play back to back ads of somebody selling their get rich quick webinar.
On YouTube, AI Musk has been telling me every other day about some amazing get rich quick scheme. I report it and days later YouTube emails me saying “Our investigation concluded that this is not a scam or spam”. As if.
In general: non-intrusive, non-tracking ads, with robust verification (i.e. not scams or lies), such as the ones you find on modrinth.com, or duckduckgo
Agreed on both, though if I ever get a personnal macbook (which I’m definitely considering, their silicon is so good), it’s definitely gonna involve a sticker
But they’re overpriced and have made many anti-consumer choices and as a consequence have made other platforms worse, because many other companies like to follow Apple.
I spent a little bit of time looking for true alternatives to a MacBook that would fit my needs, but there really aren’t any. Once you check out laptops with 16+ hour of battery life, then add a bright, HDR, color-accurate display, then add the performance of the M-series chips (which are not THE best, but certainly close to the best options from AMD and Intel), and decent speakers, there really isn’t anything to compete.
A base 14" M3 Pro is around $1750, which isn’t that far out of line for high-performing laptops in general. If someone needs something cheaper, they can get a used 14" M1 Pro for around $900-$1k. Also, if you’re someone that already owns an iPhone, it’s kind of hard to even see why you would go with something else unless you are required to use Windows applications or want to play a bunch of AAA games.
I’m beginning to think that people that diss MacBooks are just people that never owned them.
For people that are really struggling financially, but still want the above features, the 2020 13" M1 Air w/16GB RAM and 256GB storage can be found for about $500.
I was an Apple employee, though… And they’d bin it and give me a new one every 24 months because upgrading’s not an option. Wouldn’t even wipe them and hand them/sell them to employees.
All the actual workhorse machines were Lenovo. If you worked with external clients, you’d get a Surface Pro so they didn’t have to work around your incompatibilities with their software, systems, and enterprise environments.
Also used to use an old Pentium 4 we found as a team server because multi-threading and 64-bit wasn’t available for some MS Enterprise applications in macOS then, but 365 and applications like Power BI is obviously what Apple runs on. This ancient box had a 4:3 monitor and an IBM logo on it, so it was made some time before 2005. But 64-bit CPU and no macOS, so it crunched calculations faster than the 6-core i7 in the MBPs. The day we could finally use all cores and 64-bit on the macOS systems was amazing, but we still kept the old IBM box around to monitor and log connections. I like to think my old friend is still kicking on…
Find another well build machine in a similar form factor that performs similarly, and gets even comparable battery life. Raw benchmarking performance isn’t the only value to a laptop.
The dell xps 13+ maybe? But that’s 13th Gen. intel and battery life is pretty awful.
But its all chained to shit rabidly anti consumer borderline soyware proprietary ecosystem software, so it’s basically trash.
Also, they’ve been making some really fucking stupid design decisions. Fucking camera in the middle of my fucking screen? Kill yourself, I’d rather just not have it.
Most people probably wouldn’t even recognize the gateway logo anymore. It would work on me though. My past experience with gateways is entirely negative.
I don’t necessarily agree. If a brand makes high quality stuff I’m not gonna avoid them just because they put their logo on their stuff. I have a kickass Adidas backpack from 2014 that is by far my favorite, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna get rid of it just because it has an Adidas logo on it.
I also have perfectly good clothes with various brands on them, and I’m not just gonna throw them away because that’s wasteful as hell. I don’t go out of my way to buy stuff with brands on them, but that won’t stop me from buying something I genuinely like and find to be high quality.
Dale Earnhardt, a deceased American race car driver that is being appropriated in a sorta sarcastic manner. He was a NASCAR driver, so very popular with the twats that think immigration is brown/black people stealing white people jobs and that contrails, idk, can control your mind or something. Using him for messages like bashin the fascists is extra kooky, as the aforementioned twats who worship Dale also happen to be going the way of fascism nowadays.
As someone that grew up in the 90s watching NASCAR Dale was also hella legit. He hated the Confederate flag and was quoted as saying, “racism is a moral commitment to ignorance.” I miss when rednecks understood the fight and also hated cops. Now they suck and give the rest of us a bad name.
He was also a good guy in his community. A church called his number once by accident when asking for donations for reparis and he was like “hold on a minute” and went down to the church with a check for the full amount they had been trying to raise, telling them something like ‘I better not see a word about this in the paper’.
i grew up in a rural area where nascar is very popular (i personally never cared for it or paid much attention) and never understood the seemingly irrational hatred some people seemed to have for mr earnheardt, but that one quote makes it all make sense. thanks for clearing that up for me.
That is badass, I would define driving cars so fast that you are a celebrity and then using that celebrity status to stick a middle finger up to racism rampant in the fanbase and culture of the motorsport your career hinges on as “Living The Dream”.
Its Java and this is a personal project. Might as well say, “loving you is like developing an api for an insurance company. I can’t bear to touch you without two drinks and a subscription to jetbrains” This is how relationships end up on the garbage heap.
I had a family member like this… They’d go off about how awful capitalism is, and the shit that goes with it (to which I’d generally agree) but have a house full of google home devices, brag about how much they buy on amazon, and simp for the giant megacorp for which they worked a retail job…
Varoufakis is just one of many people who have come up with fancy new terms for capitalism and imperialism. It’s not to say that he doesn’t have an important perspective on some things, but coming up with new terms for things defined over a century ago only serves to distract.
Wouldn’t the best term be mercantilism? Power through the accumulation of wealth, but instead of nations it’s now corporations. It’s definitely not capitalist since capitalism is about having competition, and that doesn’t happen without constant government intervention to break up monopolies and trusts.
over a century ago Lenin has defined imperialism as capitalism in decay, monopoly capitalism, capitalism that has outgrown competition, that has stopped playing a progressive role in history and became solely a force of reaction, and since then not much has changed
I think the problem with capitalism isn’t the cool stuff that has been produced under it, it’s everything else about it. Literally the only reason to forgo buying a MacBook or a Google Home device as some sort of anti-capitalism spite move is to have the upper hand in conversations like this. In reality, you not making those purchases won’t move the needle in any way. If it did, it would be in the negative. Our entire economic system and system of employment relies on making purchases like that. Consumer spending is the economy.
Fundamentally there is no difference between buying an iPhone vs any other phone in terms of its support for capitalism. If anything, an iPhone might be better. Apple actually inspects its factories and at least pays lip service to stopping the most egregious abuses like forced or child labour. That white box Chinese android phone? If anything was built by forced or child labour, it’s that.
So targeting individuals for their purchases is both pointless and counterproductive. If you want to affect change, then vote, protest, organize. Push for and support proper regulation and controls. Make it so that people’s employment isn’t required for them to get healthcare, services, shelter. Make it so that an economic recession impacts those with the most, not those with the least.
Stressing about trying to make the least capitalist choice under a capitalist system just does exactly what they want you to do. The more time you spend judging your neighbour, the less time you spend looking up and see who’s really fucking you.
Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to express my opinion on this matter, and you pretty much did. We’re all allies in this, just by virtue of the fact that we were born into it. Let your fellow man do their thing, knowing they probably made the best decision possible with the information they had, and focus on systemic improvements, instead of trying to control one dude at the end of the line.
I spose you missed the part where I generally agreed with his criticisms (as someone who is also part of the system), and how the focus of my reply was the simping and bragging.
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