No, there’s a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They’ve even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada

There is more urgency to find alternative revenue sources

What revenue, they’re a government

Technical aptitude is born of need. Of course this will limit most, but at least some will figure out bypasses.

I want Palestinian lives to be saved

Harris is going to continue Biden’s policy of calling Bibi an asshole behind closed doors and sending billions of dollars of bombs while structuring shipments to avoid congressional oversight.

I want Ukrainian lives to be saved

Harris is going to continue sending billions of dollars of support to Ukraine so more Ukrainians can be fed into the meat grinder, because it’s good for the military industrial complex, and the less of Ukraine there is left standing, the more can be sold for pennies to privatization interests. Russia has been offering peace for a long time and Ukraine has been made continuously to reject it by Western nations because it’s in their interest to burn Russian military assets and sell Western ones.

I want American lives to be saved

Harris does not support universal healthcare and talks about wanting the deadliest army on Earth, a thing that you cannot have without killing people.

I want clean air and water for the generations to come.

Harris supports bailing out crypto investors. If she gave a shit about the environment she wouldn’t subsidize the Planet Burning Funny Money. She’d also perhaps distance herself from Biden, who has signed more oil & gas leases than Trump did.

I want everyone, not just Americans, to have a chance at a better life and control over their own lives and bodies.

The American Hegemony is one in which millions must starve to death every year and billions live in substandard conditions to support the excess of a few million privileged consuming monsters. If Harris cared to improve lives she wouldn’t support the continued wars in Israel and Ukraine, she’d support M4A, she’d break with the neoliberal doctrine she’s run with her whole life, she’d name and reject the neocolonialism that keeps America floating on top of the broken bodies of the global south. She will never do these things, but she will put a Republican in her cabinet.

Harris is further right than Biden. Trump is an uncontrolled rabid ape, correct, but Harris will be no less vile or murderous a leader, just less openly rude. Her border plan is more extreme than Trump’s was.

History has showed us that voting for the lesser evil doesn’t work. There is no righting of the ship, just more and more steps towards greater evil. The Democrats serve capital, just as the Republicans do. They didn’t grant abortion, a Supreme Court decision did. They didn’t legalize gay marriage, a Supreme Court decision did. They never enshrined them in law, but stole credit for the work of radical activists when polling told them it would boost their voter count.

Are the Dems less repugnant than the GOP? Yes and no. They don’t want to ban abortion federally, great, but they’re not going to legalize it either, and they’re not going to stop the GOP from banning it state by state. That’s how they are on every issue.

You speak of voting between 100% Hitler and 99% Hitler as the only choice you have. I reject that framing. Local political action is vastly more effective than voting for President unless you’re one of the lucky 100,000 that live in the right swing districts. Join the DSA or the PSL. Go to school board meetings and tell the book burners driving cross-county to try and ban transgender students to fuck off. Read revolutionary theory and discuss it with others.

Didn’t Galadriel straight up say that if she were given the power of the Ring she’d turn into a tyrant? Like, if the choices are Sauron (tyrant, given the power) and Galadriel (tyrant, given the power) it seems most correct to pick Frodo (trying to unmake the source of corruptive and destroying power).

Like, if anyone wielding the Ring for any purpose will be subordinate to its will no matter their intentions, and ultimately will subjugate all others, then the dichotomy is not which wielder, but whether the Ring should exist or not.

Israel wants that land, it seems unlikely they’d be going around irradiating the place. And there’s plenty of countries that have the ability to detect nuclear events and the interest in reporting if Israel is doing it. Seems conspiratorial

The ape is merely a representational avatar! The true value of the rune lies in possessing it, for it identifies you as a member of an elite cadre of ape rune possessors.

Read as Greek names it works

No money for salaries, the private jet lease and corporate penthouse really dig into our profits. Work harder and maybe we can afford a bigger jet!

There’s two kinds of conspiracies:

1. Ultimately antisemitic nonsense

2. Admitted to by the government thirty years after the fact

Yes, but the iss has dedicated exercise stations that help slow down the loss

China has successfully prototyped a 1000 km/h train, which is faster than commercial aircraft, and is researching the viability of trains moving up to 4000 km/h.

The USA has failed to develop infrastructure because it’s been hollowed out by decades of finance capitalism. The neoliberal government is now not only unwilling but unable to do anything but hand money to billionaires.

Why does it matter if the processor is faster, I’m not watching videos at double speed anyways

I feel that as climate change and the environment more generally become increasingly pressing issues it’s hard to see the plant lady as a villain

God, imagine wearing a fancy ass cap like that while reclining in your multi-million dollar vehicle absolutely blowing through the countryside. Love trains

This risk does not arise principally from political causes, even though I have been criticizing the Chinese Communist Party in op-eds, interviews and books over the past two decades.

But wait, evil CCP??? Social credit score?? Was all of that meaningless? You mean posting against the CCP won’t get you arrested??

China has taken on a reputation like Russia’s: that of a hostile land with a legal system subject to the whims of political leaders.

Most US state has a set of laws designed to persecute specific groups of people, and DAs have broad powers to prosecute or let people off based on their wealth or whiteness.

Under Chinese law, closing the company entailed paying more than a year’s salary each to a couple of people. They are honest and hard-working people who deserve to be paid, and we are doing that, but incrementally. Meanwhile, I could be prohibited from leaving the country until that debt is settled.

In bad country, you are liable for your debts to others

Visiting foreigners feel they are playing Russian roulette with their freedom the minute they step over the border.

Most are concerned about political missteps: Have they written something that could be construed as anti-China?

But you’ve been writing opeds openly against China for 20 years and you’re fine to go back except for those pesky debts?

Australian mystery writer Yang Hengjun was detained when he flew to Guangzhou in 2019, then jailed for three years and given a suspended death sentence, apparently because of pro-democracy blogging (although he was accused of being a spy).

Sounds like he was arrested for being a spy, not for apparently blogging, because like you pointed out, you’ve been writing against China for 20 years and you’re not worried.

Most commonly, foreigners are detained over a commercial dispute or debt. If a foreign company owes money to a Chinese company or individual, even a few thousand dollars, Chinese law often allows the purported creditor to seize anyone tangentially attached to the company and hold them in a guesthouse or hotel, with guards to prevent departure, until that debt is cleared. This is infuriating.

I’ve never amassed a debt of “even a few” thousands of dollars to a foreign company or individual, seems like a skill issue. Maybe don’t try capital flight? Also, seems a lot less bad than going to jail for stealing money, which is what you’ve described yourself doing by not settling your debts.

Sometimes, people with only the most tenuous relationship to the company involved in a dispute are simply refused exit from China — a so-called exit ban. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported on an American who had been kept in China for more than six years following a dispute between his company’s head office and its Shanghai subsidiary.

You don’t mention that he was an executive, not someone tenuously related to it.

Exit bans may be imposed on executives of large banks or asset-management companies based on a debt owed by a client firm.

Oh no! Consequences for the wealthy!

A particularly problematic aspect of exit bans is that the subject often does not know the ban exists. The U.S. State Department says: “In most cases, U.S. citizens only become aware of an exit ban when they attempt to depart the [People’s Republic of China], and there is no reliable mechanism or legal process to find out how long the ban might continue or to contest it in a court of law.”

How public is the no-fly list again? How do you remove your name from it? Are you put on it for financial crime or for being brown with a suspicious name?

Many Chinese companies resent what my company does: deep research into listed businesses that commit fraud. Corruption operates much more blatantly at the local than the national level, and it can be easy for a big company in a small city or town to buy the complicity of police and courts.

Quick google reveals that our author is the cofounder of J Capital Research, which is an activist research firm which provides investment advice, mostly around which firms should be shorted. Of course they’d be resentful, but don’t pretend that buying the courts is unique to China, where judges can be elected at the local level and even the supreme court is wholly owned by special interests. Blatant corruption? Look homewards.

It feels as though a family matter ought to be sheltered from the political winds chilling China’s relationship with the West

This isn’t a political matter, you stole money from your employees and owe them a debt.

the Chinese government has long viewed entering or leaving the country as a privilege that only it can bestow

That’s what sovereignty is and every country has that “privilege”. What kind of bullshit framing is this?

Truly one of the most smooth brained statements ever composed