To be clear, I believe that tone and other nonverbal communication can be hard to convey over text (even with our great deal of Hexbear emoji), that dictionaries merely describe and do not prescribe meanings, and that one’s worldview and experience will shape the connotations of words. To give a relevant example, a methodological naturalist will assume there must be a purely natural explanation for every natural phenomenon, whereas someone who is not might ascribe a supernatural explanation for the same phenomenon. Another is the meaning of “magic” which has multiple very different meanings — it’s impossible to have a constructive conversation if, for example, I were talking about illusions and sleight of hand, someone else was talking about a feeling of enchantment, yet another about ritual incantations but in a purely natural sense, and you were talking about supernatural power.

The article link appears to be at: https://news.sky.com/story/the-young-military-leader-strengthening-relations-with-russia-and-china-13529478

Our shared request for a translator or live translation equipment was refused, and we were warned that even a single utterance of English would bring the broadcast to an abrupt end.

Lol, lmao even.

the meaning of the words, from which, oh…98% of the meaning of a text is derived, comes from YOU.

To what extent is that actually the case? Sure, if I say there is a paucity of obsequious sesquipedalian words on this site, you may or may not understand what I meant, but if I claimed that “sesquipedalian” meant “Marxist”, you could disagree with that even if you didn’t know the word because there are definitions of words that describe how they are actually used

Thanks for the correction, I wasn’t sure which one was which

I’m speaking!

How does anyone come up with that response against genocide protestors unless you’re trying to be 110% Hitler?

In a way, it also makes it all the more amazing that Cuba can be a socialist country so close to the US and hasn’t been completely annihilated yet

You can force the towering over behavior everywhere (even Hexbear) in your own comments by messing with the alt title text to force them as full image size rather than emoji size.

For instance,

Compare ![dprk-soldier](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/22221ee3-921c-49c4-98d1-ff8751aa4666.png "emoji dprk-soldier") and
![dprk-soldier](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/22221ee3-921c-49c4-98d1-ff8751aa4666.png "dprk-soldier-kaiju")

will render as:

Compare and

The legacy syntax is easier to use than the regular emoji picker sometimes

Mahatma Gandhi non-violence during the Holocaust moment

That depends if you’re referring to

My more serious response is that as Western political scientists would put it, this is the first time in history where a developing country is now one of the world’s largest economies, whereas the EU economy is relatively stagnant and not growing. It is entirely possible that China’s economy can and will exceed the entire EU bloc (assuming it continues as it is rather than doing a Japan-style bubble burst), and the idea that might not be running the world anymore after centuries in charge is terrifying to them. Yeah, China actually hasn’t been acting as a threat, but from their perspective, a new superpower is always a security risk.

That’s weird, why is domestic trade with China listed as 35% of its international trading partners?

My title wasn’t intended to be taken seriously because it’s a US lib think tank writing the article.

That said, while there have been crackdowns on corruption in recent years, I believe corruption in China looks different than the US because the incentive structure for how officials gain power is different: private businesses might agree to help a local official’s project to try to get noticed for promotion, take the public blame for something local governments are doing in exchange for political favor, etc.

I hear what you’re saying about “don’t assume maliciousness what can be ascribed to incompetence” in ordinary times, but they’ve had two years before the UN commission finding to educate themselves and another half a year after the UN commission finding. I’m not going to give them the “uwu smol bean genocide defender” excuse. This isn’t even a high standard, if they want to be seen otherwise, the bar is in hell to admit first they didn’t know what they were talking about and that they shouldn’t have trivialized a genocide without being educated.

:

Ackshually this is because Europe is in the Atlantic theater

At this rate, they probably actually believe that.

Meanwhile in Canada, the majority of Canadians are open to joining the EU

That’s a great idea, how about a hexagonal-shaped —

— hey, how did you get in here?