The locomotive number is Mao's birth year, which is why it has this plaque!

It's already a red flag when a factory/workshop has one of these days without injury things, it's a deep, blood stained scarlet flag when this isn't on a whiteboard, not on a piece of paper, hell not even on a simple plaque with changeable number inserts, but a fully printed and laminated metal sign with an electronic counter.

Credit: https://octodon.social/@aspensmonster/109224357840045377

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2145640/Mikiwam_Solarpunk_Herbalism/

First of all, consider that most major media content from official sources like TV shows and movies are geolocked to approved countries. This has way more to do with copyright and licensing than censorship, but it's what it is.

Second, consider the fact that every VPN around the world advertise that "if you're in China, you can use us to get past censorship" in their marketing. Now, how many VPNs that Westerns use have an actual endpoint inside Mainland China? Totally legal to do btw, but how many prividers actually do it? Which, fun fact, the simple act of jumping the great firewall isn't illegal. It's only illegal of you commit a crime while bypassing the firewall, like if you were posting on a Western porn site or something, in which case it could be used to increase sentencing in court. Technically you can only use VPNs by Chinese companies (many of which still let you jump the firewall BTW), but as far as I know they don't enforce it that much considering how prevalent Western VPNs are over there, and the fact they if they really cared they would have blocked all the major foreign VPN endpoints. Watching even explicitly state censored stuff isn't illegal, it's only illegal if you make, advertise, duplicate, or distribute it. Actually, additional fun fact, access and possession of porn is generally legal in China, they only criminalize, again, making, distributing, duplicating, or advertising it, that's just their general philosophy when it comes to banned media.

Third, consider piracy. How often do you see Chinese media on western torrent sites or illegal streaming sites? I dunno about you, but pretty much never for me. Meanwhile, plenty of Chinese illegal streaming sites have all the Western shows you could want, and Chinese people torrent stuff all the time. Piracy is technically illegal in China, especially since torrenting counts as distribution, but I've personally never heard it enforced for regular Western movies and TV shows, only for porn and stuff like that. (Source: Am Chinese, lived in China) And there are tons of Chinese streaming sites, hosted in China, which you'd think would be pretty easy for them to shut down if they actually cared about it.

All in all, Chinese people aren't starving for Western "freedom" media. The West is starving for Chinese media.

Okay, to be clear, I'm not actually saying you should do drugs. I just found this picture funny and kind of insightful. I intended the title not to be a command, but as an 'if this then that" observation.

In case you had any doubt that the GOPigs aren't disgusting.

In case you had any doubt that the GOPigs aren't disgusting.

I swear, I'll be watching a video about Linux, or cooking, or science, or cute animals and BAM! "Why China is the Devil" or "We Should Nuke North Korea" video smack in the middle of the recommendations! I don't even watch any political stuff on YouTube (because it's a shitshow), and I have my browser set to auto-delete all of Google's cookies as soon as the browser is closed. Doesn't matter if I'm on the actual YouTube website, NewPipe, or Invidious. Prey tell, YouTube, how is "Top 10 Reasons Why China Should Be Mainland Taiwan" at all a related video to "Maintainable Object Oriented Development in PHP, Part 4"? Especially when you somehow always fail to fetch the next part of the series for me?