Wonder if it’s just me, or somewhat of a general ADHD thing, of finding “doer” speeches annoying at times. Mind you, I don’t mean stuff like targeted calls to action, I don’t think, because in that case it feels like a “let’s do this” - it’s more focused on the we, with the speaker being included in it.

I guess what bothers me is the sort of individualist kind of “put on your adult pants” talk, where like no matter how diplomatic the tone of it, the underlying implication is that there’s some kind of action you’re not taking that you’re “supposed to” take and that you have missed the fact that you could be doing this action. And for some people some of the time, that’s probably helpful. I think for me and why I bring up ADHD, is most of the time I already kinda know what I could be doing (sometimes to an absurd degree relative to proportional action because of gathering more info in lieu of actually doing). It’s the mechanics of executive functioning that are more so the struggle rather than a lack of knowing. And I suspect if there’s any trend to it and it’s not just me, what people like me probably more often need is emotional support, an actual physical “I will go do this with you” if necessary (like for body doubling), and in general, a certain amount of trust that we’re capable; that the problem isn’t so much ignorance as just needing more support (or even just space, not being distracting) to get started.

Not about anything I’ve seen here BTW. More a general thing I’ve seen in various ways, some of which may be rugged individualism culture, though I’m not certain because I don’t know how well executive functioning struggles are recognized in general, in the world.

Fair enough. I think I see what you’re going for, yeah.

So that sounds like a lack of actively trying to put pressure on the US with express intention to hurt them, which is not the same as capitulating. As disappointing as it may be for those who wish to see the US tank as fast as possible, it seems to me like business as usual for China, who consistently appears to have a line something like “if you are willing to be cooperative, we will be cooperative with you. If you are belligerent, we will not bow.”

Within the current mode of things, it seems this is a critical stance for them to have, in order to replace the US as a dominant economic force and work toward a multipolar world, without being perceived as, or materially operating as, “new flavor of empire.” The fact alone that the US was not able to make China bow is already significant in and of itself. That China is not in turn trying to make the US bow is arguably significant in its own way, continuing to affirm their commitment to a cooperative mode of operating on the world stage.

We know the US / western empire will not go down willingly and I think it’s safe to say with 100% confidence that China is well aware of this too. It would be kind of chauvinistic I think to believe China is somehow ignorant and confused on this matter. But there is the question of how much can be shifted in the balance of power through economics without firing a shot, and the US recklessly decoupling from China and going full warhawk is arguably more dangerous to the burgeoning multipolarity than a deescalation that is not an immediate leg sweep of the US.

In short, I don’t think the takeaway here should be “capitulation”. It should be: The US tried to play mask off mob boss with the world. China said no and organized with other countries to be less tied up in this volatility. Now China is stronger, the US hurt itself in confusion, and China is still the level-headed cooperative-minded entity that it was before, taking a leading role in building a multipolar world.

P.S. Open to disagreement if I’m missing critical information in how this went down, but that is how it strikes me based on what I’ve observed.

How exactly is this capitulating? I’m so confused.

“We’re going to have the biggest tariff reductions you’ve ever seen, folks. The biggest, we’re going to halve them, and then we’re going to keep going, until there aren’t any tariffs. People said it couldn’t be done, they say no one has ever brought tariffs so far down before. And China… China is a big country, very big country, but you know, they don’t make tariffs like we do here in America. All those people and they can’t produce a single tariff, but we said, we can do that, we can produce tariffs like never before. And we can take them away too. All these people, they say why is he doing so many tariffs, we’ve never seen so many tariffs in all of history. And I make it simple for them, I say, all you have to do, is you get out a piece of paper. A little piece of paper. And you write it on ‘Trump is the greatest.’ That’s all it takes, folks. One little paragraph and the tariffs go away. But the Chinese, you know, they don’t want to admit it. So we came to them and we said, we’ll keep reducing the tariffs until you listen. And believe me, they’ve been listening very hard. For any of the hundreds of voice mails I left them. Every hour, I send off another. The most amazing voice mails you’ve ever heard. But we’re going to get the tariffs down. Or up, whichever one it takes.”

This is a joke, but I mean, is it impossible he’d say something like this.

“How dare they use the kind of rhetoric against Britain that Britain has been using against other countries for hundreds of years!”

I have some fear about it, but then, I also have fears about a lot of things. In general, it feels hard to muster much headspace for it with everything else going on in the world. Plus like, I don’t even really understand it and I don’t want to do a bothsidesism unfairly, so there’s not much for me to do with the information coming out about it.

He also did a podcast together with the now very vocally Zionist Ethan Klein who is married to an IDF war criminal.

This is kind of an unfair “bad by association” thing. I’m not sure why Hasan would carry water for AOC or Bernie at this point, but from things I have heard, he is very clear on it being a genocide and had a very public falling out with Ethan Klein as a result of them differing so strongly on that issue after the October 7th stuff happened. Actually, falling out is an understatement, as it has become this whole thing where Ethan is spiraling in a victim complex, lashing out at anyone and everyone, and behaving like a pathological liar, as zionists tend to do.

At a distance, it probably looks like internet spat nonsense (and to a large extent, I think it is, in the sense that it doesn’t materially matter much other than hearts and minds of some impressionable podcast and streamer viewership). But Ethan and Hasan are two pretty different people. Ethan has turned into a raging black hole of zionism and dishonesty. And my impression of Hasan is that he’s at worst an anti-imperialist whose left tendencies can sometimes sound a bit hazy in that realm of anti-state / anarchist / ultra-left something or other. But I’m not sure it’d be possible for him to be a principled marxist-leninist, for example, and have the streaming size that he does in the west. So these things go hand in hand to an extent. I could also be misunderstanding how he navigates it and underestimating the extent to which he supports AES states. I mainly learned more recently due to the drama spiral going on, I am not a “fan” of any of these people.

He should have known that English has been around in the exact same form for 6,000 years, back when Noah wrote the Bible while riding the Ark of the Covenant.

He was this guy who got extremely good grades in school, so one day, somebody called him Carl Marks and it stuck. Then he went on to write Capital, an in-depth guide on uppercase, lowercase, and all things grammatical, and anti-comma-use English professors have hated him ever since.

What about it is scam-like behavior to you? I’m not real familiar with it myself.

I just know from what people said in this thread, it sounds like some of the products can be low quality, some high quality, kind of a mixed bag: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7336237