Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Happy belated National Day to everyone in China! In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread.
Sadly I have been sent to a mental hospital because of thinking about suicide. The depression and anxiety that's caused by my autism has done it's thing throughout the 20 some years and I was no longer willing to continue. I am reading about Lenin, that and my family helps me going, but as you would guess it's terribly hard. If I get out of here, I'll try to join the party, maybe that will help me with my depression. Tomorrow is my evaluation, deciding what they want to do with me, hoping they will see that it's my autism causing the depression and they'd let me leave. Root for me guys, please.
Many of us here have been there. I promise if you can make it through the periods of your life that feel like a torture chamber, it will be worth it, it may take a very long time and there will be a struggle to keep trying when you don't see any fruits for your efforts but keep tending to your tree and it will indeed bear fruit once the frost lifts down the line. Best wishes, stay strong 💜
Get a VPN (I can personally recommend LetsVPN or Astril, both are good) or if you get a HK sim, an esim like holafly, or a roaming plan for your current sim you should be able to use your data without being subject to the great firewall
If you have an iPhone then apple maps is pretty decent, Baidu maps is better but in chinese only afaik
Get a payment app. I used Alipay as it accepts overseas cards but I think WeChat accepts them now too.
Download WeChat anyways because its so useful and you never know when you might want to add someone
Make use of the conversation feature on google translate and make sure to download the language packs in case you don’t have internet for whatever reason
I was walking and drinking Fireball on the phone with some California rapper friend and I drunkenly walked through the webs of not one but four orb weaver webs while tromping through the woods. I am usually very oOuOouUuoaeehGHAwawaw about bugs being on me, but I was drunk enough that I would just be like "ugh. Bro. Another web...? Fuck. Sigh... So anyways." Here is the largest one:
Was talking to this fellow yesterday (distant relative, we don't interact much). He's been going from time to time to Donetsk region, hauling humanitarian aid. Showed some disturbing stuff.
Apparently he went to Yasinovataya recently to help distribute aid - macaroni, buckwheat, you know the stuff provided to civilians. Mind you, the town went down from about 70-80k population to about 10 by his estimate (wikifedia says 30).
When they returned home, the vehicle base they went from got attacked. Cluster munitions. He showed me a video from the balcony, you could hear the telltale multiple boom of the clusters. And another one, which he said was a drone - meaning the strike was directed from the sky, and not just blind. So the AFU knew exactly what they were attacking.
There weren't any military vehicles in that base. Even if there were - they'd be impervious to shrapnel from the clusters. Civilian vehicles - not so much. Freshly delivered bus had its windows smahed out. The driver was wounded. Dump trucks had tires torn to shreds, windows smashed, several had engines sliced. Hydraulics, fuel lines, brakes - you name it, all sliced by shrapnel. There was a tractor - now it has a hole in the bloody dozer. Water tank truck - holes. There was a Niva parked next to the office building of the base - it caught fire. Burned out entirely, fire spread to the building and torched the first floor. And as a final insult, there was a cat living there - it hid under one of the trucks when the shelling began and got killed.
But nah, the western media keeps screeching about heroic Ukraine and heroic west. Russian media thumps about all going to plan, and little to no casualties. Meanwhile, this is the norm over there.
Wonder whether the Palestinian resistance and NATO losing in Ukraine are a coincidence? That loss has got to help Palestine. The US military is a big beast, but can it manage two (three if we include Taiwan/SEA) significant fronts at once?
The Palestine situation also reveals serious flaws in Western intelligence. Honestly didn't think it was possible to launch a surprise attack on such a scale nowadays. Also curious as to whether Russia has been telling Palestine what it's been learning about evading Western surveillance on the front.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens to the growing relationship between SA, Syria, and Iran. If SA backs Palestine or at least doesn't actively support Israel, some may suspect that China had a hand in facilitating the conditions for Palestine to free itself (i.e. by bringing SA/S/I back to talking).
I saw something about SA about to sign a telecoms and energy agreement or something with Israel and how those plans are now out the window. Thinking cynically, there's no reason why SA couldn't make the same deal with Palestine. It's not easy to predict who will align with who.
All this, alongside BRICS/BRI growth, African states breaking the colonial stranglehold, and Latin America swinging left (with Venezuela and China working more closely going forward, for example).
If we keep getting weeks where decades happen, it's going to feel like travelling through time.
I was doing some recon on Reddit, some redditcon if you will, and I made a funny little discovery about right wing subs: They're controlled opposition. r/conservative and r/conspiracy suddenly go full Liberal whenever the topic is about Ukraine or Putin, or at least the only comments getting upvoted are libs who regurgitate the approved narrative at you. I was a little surprised, you'd think crazy tradcons wouldn't let themselves be compromised in such a way, but you'd be wrong. Once the Feds running reddit pick a trajectory, you fall in line or you disappear.
No wonder they spend so much time talking about vaccines and making stupid memes. They aren't anymore allowed to be critical of the establishment than we are.
I said i was going to make a huge effort post about warsaw pact forces utterly outmatching NATO as late as 1984-1986 this weekend but holy shit, i think this is actually going to take me weeks, there's so much info to source and compare, so many graphs to look at, and then I have to write the damn thing? No wonder effortposting is only reserved to the best posters this shit is exhausting
Does anyone know the name of that bot where you ask it to choose between two things? Some here made it choose between saving Russia or the USA and it chose the US because “ideologically” they aligned? I need to look into it but I can’t remember what it’s called.
Lol my aunt being casually racist mentioning that chinese are genetically thin or smt and i am like "youve never been to china, or met chinese people" and she goes like "thats true but they were under mao tsetung regime so they are starved" outta nowhere 😂
Hey, I gotta ask, are reports on Lemmy of federated posts/comments sent to the source instance, or do they stay here on Lemmygrad? I think I remember Mastodon forwarding reports like that but I don't know if it's like that here, just wanna make sure I'm not alerting the admins of shitty instances with "CIA leftist" and "debate pervert" reports lol
If the post/comment is on another instance, it will also be sent to the admins and relevant mods of that instance. I'd assume reports on posts/comments on Lemmygrad stay here even if the poster is from another instance, but I can't confirm that
Although Veruca Salt's previous single Coper didn't recieve nearly the attention of it's followup, I consider both to be important moments in the genre