I don’t think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren’t already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and “get married” and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn’t mean that people can’t connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can “get married” at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I’m just saying that the thing that happens in a church is “marriage”, and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar’s office is called “civil union” regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Honestly I don’t know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can “get married” at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar’s office.

If you’re a bigot and don’t consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think “those two are not married” all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of “marriage” to defend, because you’ve already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.

The hater becomes the hated

I have not been paying much attention to this. What are some examples of AOC and Mamdani defending Jeffries?

I guess we are in agreement then

No, it is not.

Suppose I am a billionaire intent on paying as little in tax as possible. I own or control a huge company (or some other investments) whose profits I want to benefit from. Under current US tax laws, I could purchase a citizenship of a country with lenient tax laws, move there, and then renounce my American citizenship. All the shares of American companies I would sell to an American holding company, which I register in Delaware (which has very low corporate tax). That holding company would then be owned in full by a company which I register in a tax haven country like the Cayman Islands. I have the American company give ownership of things like the company’s intellectual property to the holding company, which it leases back to the original company. When the original company makes profit, the holding company then charges the original company for use of intellectual property, equal to the amount of profit I want to take. This money then flows to the Cayman Islands company, free of tax as it is a business expense. The Cayman Islands company then pays this money to me as salary or as dividends, on which I pay an extremely low tax rate as a legal citizen of the tax haven country.

Under a system where the ultimate beneficial owner of money earned in the US is subject to tax, all this holding company nonsense would be meaningless because it would actually not evade any tax liability at all. This could be enforced by taxing the flow of money leaving the US (e.g. funds transferred from the American company to the Caymanian company would be taxed as if the Caymanian company were myself).

One idea might be to tax based on where the money is earned rather than by where the taxpayers live. If you move from Country A, but still make money from a business which operates in Country A, invest in Country A’s stock market, and keep your money in Country A banks, you will be subject to Country A’s taxes. But by all means, feel free to abandon your real estate holdings in Country A and move to Shittistan if that’s more your drift.

If I had to guess this guy (or girl) is a Bitcoin millionaire or something. But that’s just based on the vibes of his speech with no concrete basis.

Question: how does this site differ in function to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine?

According to the article, they’re selling it for ¥97 billion but will lease it back, so they will post a ¥73.9 billion gain from the sale. But in the first half of 2025, they posted a loss of ¥221.9 billion. So selling their HQ will offset about two months’ worth of losses.

And you are correct. But it doesn’t matter to my original point. For any reason, people trust the Government. Because of this trust, policies like the one discussed in the original post don’t alarm the average Chinese netizen.

Although an interesting side note is that while some people think that saying anything bad at all about the Government will get you arrested in China, that’s not really true. You are free to talk all the smack you want about the Government, in private. It’s when you try to start some kind of political movement or organise something in public that now you will be labelled a threat to public order and state security.

I do not claim that. The Chinese government absolutely lies when they need to. I am just saying that they have a track record of not lying in this manner, because they don’t need to.

You are half right and half wrong.

The Government controls all media. There are no major independent news organisations in China. Therefore, they won’t allow negative press about it to spread.

Because the news and social media only ever have good or at worst neutral news about the Government, never critical news, the result is that people think the Government does a good job governing.

At the same time, the poverty alleviation and anti-corruption efforts of the CCP have indeed brought millions out of poverty (even though that poverty is largely a result of bad leadership decisions by the same CCP in the past) and eliminated most forms of petty corruption. That is something that the Government makes sure everyone knows about and is always talking about. And to their credit, it isn’t wrong.

I do not and will not suggest that popular support for the Government would be anywhere near what it is now if it weren’t for the Government’s propaganda efforts and the suppression of speech, dissent, and criticism.

In China, the level of trust people have in the Government is very high compared to the US and Europe. That is the reason why this policy would work and would have reasonable public support.

In the US or Europe, a policy that seems reasonable but could be exploited by the Government for political control is a bad policy. In China, people have already sort of accepted that the Government is pretty secure in its position so it really doesn’t need to suppress speech in roundabout ways; if the intention is to suppress speech then they will be explicit about it by using the words “this threatens state security” or “this is offensive to public morals”. The thing about being a secure authoritarian regime with reasonable popular support is that you don’t need to come up with pretexts to suppress speech or dissent. You can just say “this threatens our power” and put a stop to it. If the policy states the goal is to stop uninformed people from spewing nonsense on the Internet then people will accept that to be true, and the reality is that it probably is what the goal is.

I would not be surprised if Meta advertised such a thing to prospective employees as a legitimate benefit of the job. A built-in VR goon cave with 30 TB of material available. Limit 1 hour per person, bookings required 6 months in advance. Sessions subject to monitoring for security and training purposes. May contain trace amounts of Zuck.

The symbol in question:

The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

That’s the dual state for you. The normative state applies to all actions by Trump and his goons, everyone else is subject to the prerogative state. This case is just the normative state being used to protect the prerogative state.

I hear that people usually use a fake coin for unlocking the trolleys. But because they only have one fake coin people don’t want to lose it so the trolley is always returned.