Maybe, but there are better options now.

And if it was, it was framed as an example of how brainwashed we are.

I’d suggest getting started by getting in touch with the prolewiki people. They might be able to help you get the ball rolling: they have established infrastructure, community and organisation.

Poor Stephen.

One of them thinks the US’s Xinjiang propaganda is real, one of them doesn’t.

David Rovics

Song for the Houthi Army: https://youtu.be/GJugXEu-nQ0

St. Patrick Battalion: https://youtu.be/XQ9_y3tyeFI (lots of covers of this one out there)

Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro-Ruz: https://youtu.be/blIj9oeS-m0

It just so happens that under Russian rule, Russian rulers will be making profit instead of Ukrainian rulers.

I think we’re missing a couple of nuances here, no? Although it’s a stretch to call them nuance. The way Ukrainian rulers have been making money has been through privatization. And because there’s so much privatization we need to look at who owns Ukraine’s economy. It’s only escalated since Russia invaded, with national assets being sold off to foreign private sectors so cheaply that one has to wonder why they did it when the gains are a drop in the bucket compared to the direct aid they’ve been getting from Western public sectors.

If Ukraine emerges from this conflict with its own sovereignty, it’ll be sovereignty over a flag, a presidential palace and a state framework that protects foreign companies’ investments from hungry Ukrainians.

Like Homelander

Yes. But this white guy was telling me it’s because of the “CCP”

I got a new one yesterday. White guy in Hong Kong says to me “no you mustn’t eat pork when you go to the Mainland, that’s how they hide the bodies.” This was from someone who takes as a point of pride that they read the NYT cover-to-cover every day, but idk where they got this gem from.

So in case anyone’s wondering, according to this guy the “CCP” has been promoting pork as a major part of Chinese cuisine (Which Chinese cuisine you ask? All of them) because it tastes similar to human flesh. He says “you’ve got to tip your hat to them” because it’s evil genius: it lets them hide evidence of their crimes and it solves famine issues.

The best bit, he then says to me, dead serious: “how else do you think North Korea did so well in the Olympics?”

They were really good at battlefield coordination because they shared the one butt sponge and wore no pants.

They all had identical gut biomes, and that allowed them to coordinate. If one soldier on the front line got scared or killed he’d shit himself, and that would alert the gut biome of every soldier who smelled it. It meant that their instincts were intensely accurate.

The term ‘ass kisser’ actually originated from Gaius Julius Caesar’s senior officers while he was on campaign. Every officer observed the practice which ensured that any soldiers close enough to smell his breath would know that he spoke with Caesar’s authority.

Those feel like legitimate worries.

Legitimate worries, but still a drop in the bucket compared to the death and misery that US foreign policy is serving up. Of course, thousands of deaths from direct bombing and sanctions starvation doesn’t weigh up to bodily autonomy oppression when the latter are voters and the former are half a world away.

Meanwhile Jill Stein is anti-war, pro-Palestine and pro-bodily autonomy, but ask any liberal why they refuse to vote for her and it’s because they don’t want to ‘waste their vote’ because every other liberal isn’t voting for her.

Economic Scholar TH3H3LLR41S3R gives us the lowdown on Capatism.

“You activated my trap clause.”

Oof that burns harder than the ISS will when it gets de-orbited

tens of Ukrainian soldiers

Tens, so… all of them?

In North Korea nobody calls kimchi just ‘kimchi’ because it has the Dear Leader’s surname in it, u have to call it ‘Thank you kimchi’ and ppl in North Korea can’t even make proper Kimchi anyway because they don’t have vegetables, instead they use a mix of hair and skin from the dead bodies of rats and babies and use leaked reactor water as the pickling agent.

I wish the video had some specific walkthroughs of using multiple large features in a super app

I can give you an IRL example. On AlipayHK (Hong Kong has a unique version of the app) there’s a sub-app called ‘cross-border zone’. If I open that, it turns out it’s a collection of other sub-apps all related to making visits to the mainland from Hong Kong. There’s a train booking app, a ride share app specifically for cross-border trips (which specifically requires cars that have dual license plates), a hotel booking app, Klook (a ticket booking app for attractions on either side of the border), and even a dental appointment booker (Mainland dentists are cheaper and don’t try to scam you, so they get a lot of business from Hong Kongers).

The dental appoinment booker is essentially a directory of dental clinic ads.

If I wanted to spend Firday night in Shenzhen and get my teeth cleaned in the morning, I can do all the planning and booking through Alipay sub-apps, with varying degrees of integration. The dental booking one opens individual clinic websites in an in-app browser that has standard buttons at the bottom to have the clinic I’m looking at either text me or call me. The ride share app is as full-fledged as Uber.

Everything will have been vetted with Alipay, so the different apps can get data (and obviously payment) from the platform and there’s nigh zero form-filling for each service even if I’ve never used them before. The video talks about clutter design giving reassurance by giving more information, but there’s more reassurance (IMO) in the knowledge that by encapsulating these apps, Alipay is essentially vouching for them.

And the kicker is: the service Alipay provides is free for us as users. They don’t charge transaction fees, even when exchanging currencies. Alipay makes money by having the businesses pay to be on the app. Apart from the core infrastructure and government services, the sub apps pay to be sub apps. And below the list of popular sub-apps on the front page, there’s reams and reams of ‘coupons’. Businesses pay Alipay to offer you discount coupons for their products and services.

I need to say something for the ads on super apps like Alipay. It’s a weird experience. It’s viscerally different from ads on, say, Google. On Google, you’re the product. Businesses pay to place themselves at the top of the search results. You don’t benefit from that in any way: the price for your search results is that the top results aren’t the best results for you but the best results for Google and its customers.

On Alipay, the payment platform stuff is at the top, followed by the sub-apps, and then the ads infinite-scroll underneath. There’s no ads on top like on Google, there’s no full-screen ad or video that you have to wait 15 seconds to skip. The ads are skipped by default, and those ads have to offer some additional motivation for you to choose to scroll through them. So all the ads are coupons. There’s just thousands and thousands of discount deals, and you tap on them to ‘claim’ the coupon, and in most cases Alipay automatically applies the discount within its payment system. You’re still the product, but you opt-in, and you get a cut.

I swear Alipay is a manifest rebuttal to the accusation that China is capitalist. It superficially looks capitalism-dystopian as fuck when you look at the UI, but the experience of using it is experiencing a system that serves public interests instead of corporate interests.

That’s interesting as I’m getting the complete opposite. I’m not following the Olympics directly because fuck the IOC, but any time the Olympics snakes its way into my news feed, it’s articles about Australian swim coaches saying there’s no way the Chinese won without doping vs rebuttals about how the Chinese team are tested 8 times more than Western teams, and quotes from Western athletes being butthurt about losing. The only Olympics news for me that hasn’t been about Sinophobia was a couple of articles about swimming athletes getting hospitalized after drinking some Seine, and the IOC appropriating revolutionary aesthetics in their opening ceremony.