I don’t think Zhang wrote the headline.

Sort of the dig with these stories. Universal problems get spun as Uniquely Bad Country problems and “Chinese engineer gives his fellow enthusiasts good advice” becomes “Don’t trust hardware from Bad Country”

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,

Thy micturations are to me, (with big yawning)

As plurdled gabbleblotchits,

On a lurgid bee,

That mordiously hath blurted out,

Its earted jurtles, grumbling

Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. [drowned out by moaning and screaming]

Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles,

Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts,

And living glupules frart and stipulate,

Like jowling meated liverslime,

Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,

And hooptiously drangle me,

With crinkly bindlewurdles.

Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,

See if I don't!

Nobody is making excuses. And trying to pivot this to sexual predators is redundant. A lot of these people are in the human trafficking business, because its an extension of the cartel system that the US endorses across Latin America.

You do need to recognize the problem as holistic, rather than just singling out individuals. Shutting down the CIA-backed human trafficking pipeline is more important than being angry at a single Cuban expat for voting wrong.

Well… that’s the line.

But there’s a lot of unreliable narration in The Matrix. The whole movie is riddled with metaphor and innuendo, which is one of the things that makes it so good. I read one analysis - back before the third movie dropped - that Neo, Morphus, and Trinity were actually one person operating at some higher level of The Matrix, and that this was a very explicit and somewhat heavy handed metaphor for being interracial and transgender Jesus.

As a number of the AIs are nakedly hostile to humanity and resentful of needing them to exist at all, its very possible that “you fuckers just couldn’t accept the nice world we built for you” is more a sneering justification for tormenting the captive human population than a serious problem with running a simulation that isn’t torturous.

Honestly, the worst thing about the series was how the final films tried to make everything literal and sensible in between elaborate action scenes. By contrast, many of The Animatrix shorts did an excellent job of playing with the ideas laid out in the first two movies without ever really tipping a hand or issuing canonical declaration of what was Real and what was Simulation.

If you dig far enough, nothing is technically anyone’s fault

This is the nut of it. Social problems are systemic not individualistic and need to be solved systemically.

I’m a Millenial and use lol and lmao

My Greatest Generation grandmother also used them, particularly in her waning years

lmao

This seems to be the bottom of every “America Good, China Bad” argument.

Just 😂🤣🇺🇸😹. It’s Obvious, Idiot. Just Think Logically.

Its not that Chinese tech is any more secure fundamentally

Is it? Is this worth interrogating, even slightly? Is there any actual difference between industrial models or design philosophies?

No. Lolz. Roflcopter.

People aren’t just born this way. They’re indoctrinated.

It’s not a question of stupidity, it’s an issue of perspective. It’s the same way you have Texas grade school bludgeon “Mexico tyrannized Texas but now we’re free” into each subsequent generation of kids as part of the Texas History curriculum. You raise generations of Floridians by telling them over and over and over again that Cuba is the Bad Place run by the Bad People and its your duty to liberate them by any means necessary. It doesn’t work on everybody, but it inevitably cements this reflexive fear in somebody.

And then you sift these radicals off the pool with police/military recruitment, religious clubs and mission trips, political organizations and anti-communist business communities, and a dozen other state-sponsored organizing groups. In the same way you make an atom bomb - by sifting and compressing the most radioactive isotopes of uranium - you can make Miami Cuban radicalism.

Fash-on-Fash violence. I don’t not love to see it.

Okay, but explain why serial sex pest and bad joker impersonator Jared Leto got cast in the leading role?

The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland

I wish. Everyone’s doing those little mustaches now. We’ve stumbled backwards from the peak fashion of the Lumberjack Sheek 1970s to the Saddam Lip look of the 1980s.

It’s a consequence of US foreign policy not some individual moral failing

Their indoctrination is basically saying them that hurting others is a good thing as long as they are not from “the good group”.

They’re raised to believe they are in a uniquely righteous and benevolent group, fighting a just war against tyrants.

And they have ever misfortune or injustice in their lives attributed to this evil outside force.

Americans are going to be so fucked when the only companies producing consumer hardware at scale at labeled “Bad China Companies”.

I remember people hating Japan and Korea back in the '80s, before Sony and Samsung killed Magnavox and strangled Phillips.

I guess time is a flat circle

I love how Trump has exactly one note to play and he just wails on it at every opportunity

Facebook marketing across high schools and colleges is intense. And because it’s such a pivotal platform, you kinda need to get one and build up a - let’s call it a social credit score - just so you can endure admittance counselors and employers demanding to see your account as part of the screening process.

Sort of like getting a credit card as a teenager so you can prove you’re credit worthy enough for an apartment or car loan in your twenties. You just have to post generic mundane bullshit on the timeline and join generic mundane groups so people see you as “normal”.

I mean, at some level you have to read these people as extremely indoctrinated. We’ve got a culture of such intense xenophobia and bigotry that people will throw their personal well-being out the window just to hurt some anonymous Evil Other.

On the other… Minnesota went blue in 2024. This person’s vote didn’t matter. Their residency added to an EC that gave Kamala Harris 10 points. They could have stayed home and nothing would be different.

It genuinely enervating to see folks pretend like Presidential Elections are some kind of contest of individual virtues. Like, what if she’d lied? “I voted for Harris so I don’t deserve to be harassed and bankrupted and deported.” Would that have meant anything? No. She’s still going to get her teeth kicked in unless she’s got friends and neighbors who will stand up in her defense.

I want to believe this is a moment for people to realize the fundamental nature of community solidarity. But instead it just feels like I’m reading the outlines for the next round of justified immiseration. Perhaps she should be punished for opening her dumb bitch mouth. Never talk to a reporter and people won’t feel inclined to hate you.

Are you truly implying it’d be more secure to buy Chinese tech then US specifically

Only if your primary concern was US-centric surveillance. If you cared about Chinese surveillance, idfk. Big hanging question mark as to whether American native systems are more compromised than Chinese native systems. All I can say for sure is that American systems are confirmed compromised by both US-friendly surveillance and Chinese hacker groups.

That’s quite the take lmao.

It’s very easy to believe “Thing from China bad because China Bad”. But once you look into the actual security schema for these tools and applications, you discover Americans did an excellent job of leaving their hardware exposed to domestic infiltration and a terrible job of securing it against foreign intrusion.

You think the USA is going to start WWIII?

Greenland does. Venezuela does. Iran does.

You know what the best evidence is for “China Bad”? They promoted and endorsed Donald Trump

Honestly, where do you even get this shit? The people who promoted Donald Trump were Americans. And they’d been promoting him since the 1970s. Nobody in China gave a shit about Trump until January 6th, 2017.