Honestly, I don’t know what China has to gain from taking Taiwan by force versus what they can gain much more cheaply by just befriending and trading with it.

They could arrange an on-paper reunification. The key is to choose your words carefully to avoid upsetting anyone and give as much lip service as possible to Beijing while giving many of the “real” benefits to Taipei.

• The Republic of China is dissolved. The government in Taipei will continue and is renamed to just “Taiwan”. All legal documents will be issued under the name “Taiwan”. Former officials of the Republic of China continue in office as officials of Taiwan. The leader of the Taiwanese people is the president of Taiwan (台湾总统) and the administrative organs that govern their portion of Greater China (大中华) is the Government of Taiwan (台湾政府). Other than that, the status quo is acceptable and shall continue indefinitely.
• Taiwan acknowledges it is a part of Greater China (大中华) and that Taiwanese people are members of the Chinese nation (中华民族). Note that the Chinese terms used here refer to the cultural idea of “China” and not the country.
• In international affairs, all instances of “Chinese Taipei” (中华台北) are replaced with “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾). Note the use of the cultural “Chinese” rather than “Chinese” referring to that which relates the People’s Republic of China. All mainland publications will adopt the Xinhua News Agency’s style guide recommendation of referring to Taiwan as merely “Taiwan” rather than “Taiwan Province” (台湾省).
• The People’s Republic of China recognises that Taiwanese people have a right to self-government and disclaims all rights of government (政权) to the people of Taiwan. Taiwan does the same to the mainland. Sovereignty (主权) is held collectively by the Chinese cultural nation (中华民族) as a whole and cannot be exercised unilaterally, but the respective governments have the right to defend the Chinese nation’s sovereignty on their respective territories against external threats.
• Taiwan’s right to build up its military for the purposes of deterring external threats is recognised. Taiwan and China agree that their respective militaries will not be used against each other. Each military defends its own side of the strait and neither is obligated to help the other in any conflict whatsoever.
• The Taiwanese people will decide when they would like the adopt the socialist system. There is no deadline for this to occur. The mainland respects the right of the Taiwanese people to choose and will not force the matter nor will it interfere in the internal politics of Taiwan.
• Taiwan agrees to publicly support Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, agrees that such region belongs to the Chinese nation, and disclaims all interests whatsoever beyond 22 km from its coast (note: equivalent distance to a country’s territorial waters). The portion of the exclusive economic zone of China east of the island Taiwan and west into the centre of the Taiwan Strait is reserved for the sole use and benefit of the Taiwanese people. Anything more than 22 km south of Cape Eluanbi is disclaimed by Taiwan and for the exclusive use and benefit of the mainland. Taiwan is not obligated to use its naval forces to enforce any claims laid to portions of China’s EEZ not reserved for it.
• The People’s Republic of China will respect the Taiwanese government’s ability to interact with foreign nations even if such interacts disagree with the way mainlanders choose to relate with that nation. To that end, the PRC will support Taiwan’s participation in international organisations as a member non-state entity. If such a designation is not allowed by the organisation’s rules then Taiwan will apply as a state but never style itself as such once admitted, always referring to its delegations as representing “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾).

The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.

sanctions evasion? In my drug-buying app?

What replacement services are available? The American service actually works. Making your own would cost an order of magnitude more (as your contractors mysteriously “lose” half the money and bill the defence ministry 10 million roubles for “pens”) and a decade of your time.

Maybe they could hire Chinese firms to do it but I think China has a tendency to keep its military technology to itself.

Did you assume I was defending Putin on this?

Putin’s a piece of shit and I hope all his crap gets plundered and the proceeds transferred to the Ukrainian drone fund.

When the US did this, everyone was quick to call it piracy. Which, to be fair, it practically was, although I can’t say I have any sympathy for Putin.

The Venezuelan government might. But according to some DW reporting and footage earlier today, the actual reaction of ordinary Venezuelans is mixed, and mostly concern and confusion rather than anger or fear. Maduro is generally not popular in Venezuela but I doubt many people really wanted the US to come and kidnap him. And understandably those who supported him are in the streets calling for his release.

Major news organisations in general are really scared when it comes to pointing out things which are extreme, because they believe describing those things as extreme will lead to accusations of sensationalism. The reason they think that is because sensationalist outlets are indeed more likely to describe everything as extreme and make unjustified comparisons to extremities, so major media outlets often think that to be “unbiased” is to refuse to acknowledge that an action is extreme.

Vox described this as the “this is fine” bias.

In America, €120 million could buy half of Congress.

Well, yeah. Her job kinda depends on believing this.

I don’t think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren’t already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and “get married” and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn’t mean that people can’t connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can “get married” at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I’m just saying that the thing that happens in a church is “marriage”, and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar’s office is called “civil union” regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Honestly I don’t know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can “get married” at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar’s office.

If you’re a bigot and don’t consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think “those two are not married” all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of “marriage” to defend, because you’ve already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.

According to the article, they’re selling it for ¥97 billion but will lease it back, so they will post a ¥73.9 billion gain from the sale. But in the first half of 2025, they posted a loss of ¥221.9 billion. So selling their HQ will offset about two months’ worth of losses.

And you are correct. But it doesn’t matter to my original point. For any reason, people trust the Government. Because of this trust, policies like the one discussed in the original post don’t alarm the average Chinese netizen.

Although an interesting side note is that while some people think that saying anything bad at all about the Government will get you arrested in China, that’s not really true. You are free to talk all the smack you want about the Government, in private. It’s when you try to start some kind of political movement or organise something in public that now you will be labelled a threat to public order and state security.

I do not claim that. The Chinese government absolutely lies when they need to. I am just saying that they have a track record of not lying in this manner, because they don’t need to.

You are half right and half wrong.

The Government controls all media. There are no major independent news organisations in China. Therefore, they won’t allow negative press about it to spread.

Because the news and social media only ever have good or at worst neutral news about the Government, never critical news, the result is that people think the Government does a good job governing.

At the same time, the poverty alleviation and anti-corruption efforts of the CCP have indeed brought millions out of poverty (even though that poverty is largely a result of bad leadership decisions by the same CCP in the past) and eliminated most forms of petty corruption. That is something that the Government makes sure everyone knows about and is always talking about. And to their credit, it isn’t wrong.

I do not and will not suggest that popular support for the Government would be anywhere near what it is now if it weren’t for the Government’s propaganda efforts and the suppression of speech, dissent, and criticism.

In China, the level of trust people have in the Government is very high compared to the US and Europe. That is the reason why this policy would work and would have reasonable public support.

In the US or Europe, a policy that seems reasonable but could be exploited by the Government for political control is a bad policy. In China, people have already sort of accepted that the Government is pretty secure in its position so it really doesn’t need to suppress speech in roundabout ways; if the intention is to suppress speech then they will be explicit about it by using the words “this threatens state security” or “this is offensive to public morals”. The thing about being a secure authoritarian regime with reasonable popular support is that you don’t need to come up with pretexts to suppress speech or dissent. You can just say “this threatens our power” and put a stop to it. If the policy states the goal is to stop uninformed people from spewing nonsense on the Internet then people will accept that to be true, and the reality is that it probably is what the goal is.

The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

Linux has 2.6% on the Steam Hardware Survey.

Nay, once every week for the past four years, I go to McDonald’s and order a hamburger for $3, but they ask me for $3.27, so I only put down $3 on the counter and then loudly proclaim I refuse to pay the sales tax on it. Then I walk out of the restaurant to force them to accept my money.

(I have not eaten a hamburger in four years)