Macron himself and the entire French political circle love and are avid users of Telegram lol.

Macron has been a Telegram user since the early days of his first presidential campaign. Nearly a decade later, the app remains widely used by both cabinet members and political officials of all ranks and parties, particularly within pro-Macron circles.

It was very clearly politically motivated.

The devs are your typical misogynist bro types (“we don’t need female gamers!”) that unfortunately reflects the broader cultural brainrot on the Chinese internet, especially the g*mer type.

But the game itself is gorgeous and incredibly well made for a first time developer. Not to mention that literally every Chinese person is well familiar with the stories from the Journey to the West - a cultural foothold that has persisted for nearly a thousand years! You learn about the stories from local folklores, reading materials in schools, visual narration from TV shows, memes and jokes on the internet. It’s pervasive and so so deeply ingrained in the Chinese cultural sphere, that the game was already half successful simply from the source material alone lol!

Oh, I was talking about our leftist comrades here getting angry despite knowing what the Democratic Party is, not the libs outside.

This argument might still be convincing 1-2 years ago, but at this point the US has made it very clear that they will fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian”.

This is not a joke - you have to understand the literal meaning of this phrase. There is no rebuilding of Ukraine by the West unless as a Ponzi scheme to scam naive investors.

Since when? Have people forgotten that Joe Biden - the sitting president of the United States - was the champion of Iraq War for the Democratic Party and a fervent Zionist throughout his entire political career?

In what sense have the Democrats used to pretend that they aren’t evil? The Democratic Party in the post-Reagan/Thatcher era has always advertised itself as a neoliberal party and how can any leftist - especially after seeing what happened in Chile - with common sense ever judge the Democrats as not evil?

All good, but it’s missing a key piece to the puzzle: what is the game plan here for the UK? How would that benefit the British?

And most important of all, why would the US withdraw from Ukraine (only to be dragged back into it by the British)?

Kit’s tweets don’t provide an explanation to all these maneuvers at all.

A more plausible scenario is that the UK economy has gone to shit, and weapons export is seen as a major revenue to their crumbling economy. But who’s going to buy them? Ukraine. But where can Ukraine get the money to buy them? US foreign aid.

The British might hope that the Kursk incursion could accelerate another round of US foreign aid funding to Ukraine, from which the Ukrainians would then use the free dollars to import weapons from the UK.

In other words, this is not a case of US having its hands tied by the UK and being manipulated into a long-term conflict in Ukraine. This is the UK being so desperate that they wanted the US to spend billions more into Ukraine so they can earn some of those dollars by selling their weapons.

The position of the US empire remains unchanged. Ukraine remains a major front to dollarize Europe and the rest of the world. This is only a matter of how fast or how slow those dollars get pumped out.

It’s not difficult to understand at all.

If you have a left wing anti-imperialist anti-war rally, would you invite a right wing anti-imperialist chud as one of the speakers? Just because you both support anti-imperialism?

It perplexes me that people get perplexed by this. If we won’t do this on the left, then we should also understand that the right won’t do the same as well.

I hope this definitive answer from the DNC ends some of the naive thoughts around here that Biden was forced to step down because the pro-Palestinian protests were dragging his polls down.

No, it was the opposite. He was forced out because they were worried he might die or become so mentally degraded mid-term that he would not be able to finish the job competently.

You think they really cared about the voters in Michigan? Think again.

Apparently one of the reviews gave it a fairly low score citing “lack of diversity” (apparently because of a lack of female characters) and it sparked a controversy on the internet where the chuds went “this is DEI wokeness gone to the extreme trying to apply their standards to other cultures!” and some of the libs defended the decision with “this is proof that CCP does not respect women’s rights and the devs are misogynists!”

It’s kind of like that TERF Harry Potter game that came out a while ago where the controversy only brought more attention to the game and the sales actually went up because everyone was talking about it.

This is the equivalent of a leftist going to a Trump rally only to get kicked out when discovered.

Maybe it’s the masochism, but nobody said you have to go. You brought the humiliation upon yourself.

The point is that with no government formed even months after the election, Macron gets to dictate all as the president. The divide among the French left is exactly what Macron needed to solidify his executive branch as the sole governing body of the country.

It’s the other way around: the Democrats have skinwalked the Republican Party that the latter no longer has a platform other than the most deranged MAGA shit.

Everything that the Republican Party used to champion is being superseded, and done more competently, by the Democrats.

Who is ever going to say Kopmala is bad for the police? The low ranking chuds might fall for cheap propaganda, but there is no way the higher ups don’t know what’s going on.

The Democrats have now deported more immigrants and asylum seekers than the Republicans could ever dream of. When Trump tries to do anything like this, he faced obstacles everywhere. When the Democrats want to do something, everyone just lets them do it. Life is not fair lol!

Who has done more for the military industrial complex for the past 3 years by literally starting a war in Ukraine? Trump talks big about increasing NATO spending but nobody - literally nobody - ever took up his offer on that.

Biden forced their hands by starting a war and then proceeded to blow up Nord Stream, and turned the US into a net oil and gas exporter again. Killing two birds in one stone.

Anti-China? Biden just slapped on the heaviest tariffs against Chinese EVs and solar panels, while sanctioning China’s access to semiconductor technology, to which China has no proportional response to. Trump’s petty trade war with China looked like a joke in comparison.

Remember when Republicans were dooming about recession when the inflation started to rise in 2022? Remember when everyone was predicting how Biden was going to destroy America’s economy? Well guess what, not only has there been no recession (at least there won’t be one until the election), the rising stock market and the consolidation of wealth by the bourgeois class have only accelerated under Biden.

We don’t even have to talk about support for Zionism and their genocide against Palestinians.

What else can the Republicans talk about? There is nothing else the Republican Party can do at this point other than to cry about the Culture War stuff. This is why you see them pushing so hard with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBT policies.

This has been a deliberate skinwalking strategy from the Democratic Party to corner the Republicans and take over the core of their ideological platform, and it is working out exactly as intended.

See my reply to another comment. The words were in response to Lin Biao interrupting him, and it’s both him laughing and the answer that evoked laughter among the audience.

TL;DR: Mao was serious about Qin Shi Huang not going far enough, but he also has this very distinct manner of speech (very vulgar) which often makes his quote very funny (many other bangers in the speech). In other words, you can see why Mao thought the Cultural Revolution was necessary to transform China.

The quote was Mao’s response to Lin Biao interrupting him, which evoked laughter among the audience.

This precedes immediately before the quote:

范文澜同志最近写的一篇文章，我看了很高兴。（这时站起来讲话了）这篇文章引了许多事实，证明了厚今薄古是我国的传统，引了司马光……可惜没有引秦始皇。秦始皇主张“以古非今者族’，秦始皇是厚今薄古的专家。当然。我也不赞成引秦始皇。（林彪同志插话：秦始皇焚书坑儒）

my rough translation:

Comrade Fan Wenlan recently wrote an article, I was very happy to read it. (Standing up to speak) His article quoted many facts, proving that ”stressing the present while belittling the past” is indeed the tradition of our nation, he brought up Sima Guang… unfortunately he didn’t bring up Qin Shi Huang. Qin Shi Huang had advocated for the execution those who brought up the past to criticize the present, Qin Shi Huang was indeed the expert in “stressing the present while belittling the past”. As such, I don’t actually agree with bringing up Qin Shi Huang. (Comrade Lin Biao interrupted: “Qin Shi Huang burned books and buried scholars alive”)

In other words, Mao was explaining why burning the books and burying the scholars by Qin Shi Huang were necessary actions.

以古非今者族 came from Sima Qian’s Annals of Qin Shi Huang, in which Li Si explained to Qin Shi Huang that past institutions could not be applied to the present rule because the times have changed and the circumstances are now different. The new generation of legalist scholars should strive to enact new legal institutions to cultivate for a new society that can keep up with the changing times. However, many Confucian scholars still preferred to emulate the old traditions/institutions, and often brought up ancient laws to criticize the current regime, evoking fear in public sentiment. They were seen as obstacles to establishing a new institution.

Mao was saying that Qin Shi Huang was nowhere near as determined in his resolve to decisively break from the traditions. And that for China to emerge as a nation that can catch up with the times, it has to break from the traditions completely. Even more so than Qin Shi Huang’s. These were the precursors to the Cultural Revolution a few years later.

The quote is real, from the 8th National Congress of the CPC, second session (May 8th, 1958)

秦始皇算什么？他只坑了四百六十个儒，我们坑了四万六干儒。我们镇反。还没有杀掉反革命的知识分子吗？我与民主人士辩论过，你骂我们是秦始皇，不对，我们超过了秦始皇一百倍。骂我们是秦始皇独裁者，我们一贯承认，可惜的是，你们说的不够，往往要我们加以补充。（大笑）

Fun fact: only four copies of the earliest known iteration of the Journey to the West survived to this day, and none of them in mainland China!

The anonymously authored Journey to the West was a scathing political satire of the 16th century late Ming imperial court dominated by the eunuch factions. The anonymous author, rumored to be Wu Cheng’en though no consensus was ever reached, stitched together a bunch of popular folklores and turned it into an epic 20-volume novel about the power struggle between the Buddhist and Taoist regimes vying for control over the 7th century Tang court.

Accordingly, the Buddhist regime engineered a nightmare seeded into Emperor Tang Taizong’s (Li Shimin) dream, where he was transported to the Underworld, and through this surreal journey insinuated that he would be condemned to a dreadful fate in his eventual reincarnation given his past massacres of his own kins to take the throne - hinting that only by embracing Buddhism could his own soul be transcended upon his death.

And thus began the journey of Xuanzang and his companions to India in their quest for Buddhist scriptures. The ongoing power struggles, conspiracies and open conflicts between the Buddhist and Taoist regimes would be manifested in the various challenges encountered by Xuanzang’s traveling party.

After the Journey to the West was published by a Jinlin (present day Nanjing) based printing press company in 1592, this “original” edition would quickly disappear from the public consciousness due to its high price, and the eventual literary persecution by Emperor Qianlong during the Qing Dynasty in the 1700s, where it is estimated that up to 150,000 volumes of subversive texts had been destroyed. It would not be recovered until the 1930s.

Instead, the stories about the Journey to the West persisted throughout the Qing Dynasty from the 1600s to 1900s in various fan fiction formats, each with their own additions and truncations and interpretations from their respective authors.

Interestingly, 4 copies of the 1592 edition were purchased and brought to Japan - two copies collected by some Japanese daimyos, and another two safekept in Buddhist temples. Another fun fact: one copy was kept in the Asano Library owned by the Asano daimyo in Hiroshima (now Hiroshima Central City Library), which was destroyed during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Fortunately, many of the texts had been relocated prior to the bombing and thus managed to escape destruction.

Only in 1933 did a Chinese patriot accidentally discovered a copy of the book in some random Japanese bookstore, and brought it back to mainland China (eventually ended up in Taiwan after the Nationalist defeat in the Chinese Civil War).

As such, the most widely read editions of the novel in China (both the 1955 and 1980 editions) were amalgamation of the 1592 edition plus many of the fan fictions that proliferated during the Qing dynasty. And only in 2013 did China officially published the original 1952 edition in its entirety (620k characters).

Today, only four original copies of the texts remain - one in Taiwan and another three in Japan.

It’s not banned. There are literally dozens and dozens of Taiwanese streamers live streaming the playthrough right now on Youtube and Twitch as we speak.

People will just believe anything on the internet about China (like the one about a Chinese company giving a day off for its employees to play the game lol) like they believed the social credit rating in China.