Hotspur

Wait so is he an elite, a counter-elite, or a counter-cointer-elite now?

Yeah good thoughts—certainly for local/domestic cash would probably be a good way to go.

Lots of excellent info here, thanks for the detailed response—appreciated. When I went to China a while back, I brought and old iPhone I still had and got a Chinese sim so I could search and navigate—idea being ok I’ll sever iCloud and they can mine whatever they want off the phone, etc. the thing there was not immigration I was worried about, but having my phone compromised via the sim/software, so I still had my main phone also at the time, it was just offline and turned off mostly.

Almost makes me want to adopt a similar approach for any travel where I’m crossing boarders now—just kit up the old phone with a pay as you go sim, strip out anything non utility on it, etc. probably wouldn’t help that much for any really intrusive hacking stuff they would do back room, but might be boring enough to not interest them.

lol shit you’re so right. Douglas does not deserve that. The dilbert men’s rights asshole Scott Adam’s is exactly who I meant.

This is an older event for me, but I basically haven’t spoken to someone who I would have called my best and closest friend for a decade, and for similar reasons. Very similar trajectory—we both knew about our political leanings, but it got to a point where I just couldn’t handle it anymore and being at distance I just let it go away.

This was a person who was genuinely one of the smartest people I’ve met, and having them tell me how much they’re into Douglas Adam’s book was just like, “fuck what happened to you man, how can you actually think that’s smart stuff, you used to be into right wing philosophy at least that was hard to read but fucking men’s rights dilbert shit?”

Another question I have that is related, I guess, but are their ways to safely or anonymously donate to causes? And I don’t really just mean to like Palestinian Aid stuff (which I’ve heard is notoriously hard to do in the first place because they spend so much time chasing it and getting platforms and banks to refuse to engage with it) but I’ve gotten increasingly more paranoid that the admin will declare environmental groups or civil liberties groups terror organizations at some point, and one’s casual donation to southern poverty law center or whatever will now be something they use to try and get you, etc. not supporting causes is precisely what they want, so it would suck to give up on that, but then I realize I don’t know if it’s even possible to donate anonymously for real to any NGO etc.

Yeah so I was wondering about this—they’re searching Americans cellphones as well? And if they find, say, a JD Vance meme in a WhatsApp group chat, what can they do to you about it, I guess make you miserable by searching you for hours in secondary?

There’s a real horrible level of liability going on here where stuff that most Americans think is legal is being treated as a crime by CPB, to the point where it’s even almost retroactive crime, ie the fact that you said free Palestine 5 years ago means that you lied on your customs form 2 ‘’minutes ago when you said “you don’t materially support terrorist groups” because CPB has decided that Palestinians are all a terrorist group and that a typed tweet counts as material support.

I understand how they get away with this when it comes to visitor visa people like that Norwegian who got bounced over the Vance meme, because they have huge legal leeway to do whatever with non-citizens, but I’m less clear on how they approach doing this to standard US citizens, so curious if you know?

I saw that memo about going after naturalized us citizens guilty of “crimes” so it does seem like it’s basically open season on everyone very soon.

.world is truly a piece of work. I’m not an aggro-poster myself, but I had to finally personally block that instance in my .ml account after the nth time of being told “STFU Russian bot” when I engaged in good faith and asked a real question on a news article that was vaguely critical of the premise.

I thought I’d miss the news comm on there or something, but no, it was totally fine. Figure it’s a win-win for both: they have no interest in discussion and want their instance experience to be a pure echo chamber, and I don’t care to casually stumble into whatever bullshit they’re up to.

Have no idea if the pic is from China, but during a trip there, I saw people growing vegetables in the most incredible ways, lots of apartments with plastic bucket gardens and such. My favorite was this hutong courtyard building where we did a cooking class as a tourist thing—the courtyard had a trellis over it for sun blocking, but the trellis was grown out by a bunch of different types of squash—such a neat combo because the squash leaves were great at max blocking direct sun, and there were all these perfectly spherical squash hanging overhead. The cook grabbed one off a vine during the class for the recipe we were making. Have wanted to try that method ever since.

Yeah they have been pretty clear eyed about the potential threat in climate change. Even Trump 1 had a report that was good about climate change, they ignored it of course.

Worth pointing out that those gov budget tables use the number in thousands so what you’re looking at is millions and millions being slashed at NOAA. All while weather is getting visibly more insane year to year. This is one that I’ve never been able to fully understand—I know they’re trying to erase climate change as a concept, but all of the other important function that is getting destroyed… I guess they figured no way to talk about bad storms and heat domes without mentioning climate change, so just shut it all down except what you need for military operation and private jets and such…

For real. I look back on that and think like, how is it possible, but when you’re young, everything you see and hear mostly supports this basic premise. You have to be out in the world a while before your own observations and interactions start to lead to questions about received info.

I thought of another one: about a decade back I would describe my general opinion about China was pretty bog-standard media take of the time: sorta backwards country with “human rights abuses,” poor and authoritarian, but good manufacturing and food. Chinese “people” didn’t really factor as a thing in my mind, just kind of a mass of indistinct humanity. Mostly I just didn’t directly think about it much.

I got the opportunity to go to Beijing and environs for about two weeks, and, of course, I discover the depth of western propaganda messaging that I had been slurping up. It felt like going to the future. Not all of it was my specific cup of tea, but it was not poor, it was far higher tech than the US, and you could just tell that there was a more community than individual culture. Mass transit was fantastic, brand new high speed rail that made a formerly 14-hr trip to xian 2.5, with more snaking out in every direction or under development. Domestic smartphones selling for more than iPhones. Public bathrooms. Everyone grows vegetables everywhere and the food is so much better than Americanized Chinese cuisine usually is.

Anyhow I could go on and on, it was a really memorable experience, but being there, interacting with Chinese people (guess what? Turns out they’re people like everyone else? Who knew?) just completely blew my old impression out of the water. It made me wish there was more ways for people of different cultures to interact and exchange, because that human connection really defuses a lot of the bullshit tricks that get played on us. I enjoyed seeing that TikTok exodus to the Chinese app last year for this reason.