My benign Reddit hug of death

China's malicious censorship of data

lol lmao even

This is either a state actor operating under a fake name or it deserves to be one.

The perpetrator, "Jia Tan," let's assume has last name 陈. In Mandarin, this is pronounced as Chen, in Hong Kong as Chan, while in Minnan this is pronounced as Tan. Minnan is prevalent in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other southeast Asian countries as well as in parts of Fujian, China (where it originated).

A common feature of early Chinese expat communities was that they were overwhelmingly from Guangdong (think Gold Rush era). However, more recently, there's been a massive wave of Taiwan and Hong Kong emigration... The relevant takeaway here is that Tan is much more common of a pronunciation in expat communities than it is in China.

Of course, they could also have the last name 谭, but that's a good bit rarer. 陈 is the most common Chinese surname overseas and the 5th most common in China, while 谭 is something like 54th most common in China. Odds are high that, if this was a persona constructed by a state actor, it did not come from China but from an overseas actor for which Tan is a more common romanization.

Yeah, that's probably fair. The scale of the US intervention may have been different, though.

No one in the region considers the South China Sea to be international waters.

Everyone just disputes who's waters they should be. Don't talk about things you know nothing about.

Pocket, concentration camp, all the same really

Ansarallah already showed the world what a boarding operation would look like.

The crew is safe and being treated as appropriate by Islamic law.

I'd rather take fucking Venezuela. BRICS is an uplifting mechanism as much as it is a global faction.

Growth in trade amongst BRICS is immense and that's exactly what Venezuela needs right now.

Isn't iodine like... Extremely, absurdly common in ocean water?

US aircraft carriers were a liability the moment the nuclear weapon was invented. The only pure-military target that can justify a nuclear strike is a carrier, and a carrier is such a weapon that it might legitimately not trigger MAD protocols.

L5? No. L4? Of course. IIRC it's even been exported to the UAE.

Edit: London has more security cameras per capita than Beijing. I'm not sure what your point is?

jordanlund and YoBuckStopsHere are terrible mods who have a complete lack of communication with the rest of the mod team.

Haaretz is sus