This is an odd card to play here because the protagonist only comes to value her appearance by seeing it through the lens of the male gaze. Ursula LeGuin or Becky Chambers would be far better places to look in that respect.

Lots of people love AI too, but that doesn’t make Midjourney an artist. Liking the taste of slop doesn’t make it not slop.

I’m sure it’ll have the “not like the other girls” protagonist who is smoking hot and doesn’t know it, but will it also retain the cringey dialogue and cliché teenage love triangle of the book? Those are the most important elements of that literary slopfest. It could truly become the next Marvel franchise.

Putin is just the latest in a long line of Muscovite imperialists. Russia has always been an imperialist project, just lke China and the USA.

This is pretty much what I imagine whenever I read “slams” in a headline.

“Cosmicrookie SLAMS wsws.org - you won’t believe what happens next”

Huh, I thought they lived in Italy.

Ouch, you’re unironically trying to play that card? Embarrassing.

She was asking for it, did you see what she was wearing?

TFW bias is when I consistently apply the belief that everybody should have agency rather than lick the boots of totalitarians

I should have disengaged as soon as you spewed out that abhorrent take on Palestine, but you people are always a fountain of otherwise entertaining word salad. Re-read my comment - I never said the CPC was a state, I said the CPC’s state (i.e. the PRC). Note the possessive. All states are ultumately bullshit, even the hypercapitalist dystopia you’re slobbering over. It’s all arbitrary and the only thing that really matters is what the people on the ground want. In the case of Palestine, it’s unequivocally NOT to be a part of Israel. For the Taiwanese, >90% do NOT want to join the mainland. It’s only authoritarian imperialists like you and Likud who still choose to impose their will on others despite their most vehement refusals.

Likewise, you are attempting to recognize the existence of a Taiwanese state when there is no such thing to recognize. It has never been a nation-state, it has never claimed to be a nation-state, and no government has ever recognized as a nation-state.

I’m going to assume you’re just trolling at this point, because this is a bald-faced lie even by tankie standards. Not only is this obviously false if we consider Taiwan a de facto state as most western countries do, several other countries even still support Taiwan’s claim over the mainland (which is absurd, but that’s another story)

All of Palestine was declared Terra Nullus by the imperialist. It is they who setup the system of Westphalian nation-states. This is, as they call it, the rules-based order. The reality is that Palestine should have been granted nation-state status by the entire world decades ago, but racism prevented that from happening, and now we have the situation we have. Some nation states have officially recognized Palestine’s status as a nation-state, but it has not been enough and it is far too late to have immediate impacts.

Wow, that’s convenient for your argument - what a remarkable coincidence. Some nations recognize it, others don’t, so who’s to say? It’s just too complicated and too late. 1948 was soooo long ago, unlike 1949 which is recent history. Plus the cession of Taiwan by Japan after WWII was definitely unambiguous, unlike Israel/Palestine. No issues there at all.

As for whether my understanding is strange, I would ask you to consider why the KMT itself did not claim Taiwan to be an independent nation state for the 50 years where it was a one-party fascist dictatorship on the island. Why did they find it so important to establish that they were still a faction within China and not a secessionary movement away from China?

Do you consider the fact that the civil war never officially ended may be a mitigating factor here?

I didn’t decide that that’s what they would do. My understanding is fully inline with the understanding of the KMT and the CPC and the rest of official governments of the world. It’s really only the uninformed and the politically biased that have a strange understanding whereby the rules don’t matter, the never matter, and only what they believe is the correct moral answer, given their limited understanding, could ever be the right answer.

If that’s the case, why did over two decades pass until the west recognized the CPC’s state at all? Was everybody uninformed until Nixon educated us?

You have a pretty peculiar understanding of how nation-states claim territory. Using your own logic, I take it you believe that Gaza and the West bank are rightfully Israeli territory? if not, what’s the difference?*

* “Murica bad” is not a valid answer

Ukraine is still being actively devastated after three years by a country far inferior to China - I’m sure the Taiwanese would prefer to avoid that fate. Finland’s “victory” came at the cost of collaoration with the Nazis, which maybe was the right choice at the time, but not great in hindsight to say the least. It’s also hard to quantify the political cost when discussing a one-party state - it’s not like the CCP will lose the next election. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying I’d prefer to support Taiwan to such a great extent that we don’t have to cross our fingers.

My question was how exactly it was “stripped away from the CCP’s control”, which you didn’t address at any point in your colourful answer. You yourself admit it was always Republican territory. so which is it, then?

While this is all true, the aggressor being the largest green-water navy in the world skews the equation, plus the naval angle is of course only one of multiple avenues of attack. We can’t be complacent about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, no more than we could say for example that Finland could hold off Russia alone.

an island that was stripped away from one’s direct control by imperialists

Can you elaborate on this? I love watching gymnastics.

That’s really the crux of the issue. If China finally move against Taiwan, who will help? Japan seems the most reliable ally at the moment, and perhaps Australia. The US are untrustworthy.

AFAIK they don’t have that many of the newer ASMs, and anyway a thousand isn’t really that many, especially given that Taiwan’s missiles are on the smaller end of the spectrum - we’re not talking KH-22 sizes here.

10 cent army? I want to see Taiwan armed to the teeth. They can’t solo the CCP in their current state.