Kaplya

It’s not for everyone and I can understand why some won’t like it.

On its own, it’s quite an interesting sci-fi though it has some of your typical Chinese boomer nationalist brainworms.

But it helps to understand why it has gained such a cult status in China (even among the highest bureaucratic circles). The book was written in the early 2000s when China was much weaker both militarily and technologically and it reflected the anxiety of a rising country/civilization that is surrounded by much stronger imperialist powers with hostile intentions, and the various attitudes of the Chinese society toward it (some people think we should just open up and embrace the Western world, some think we should be cautious about it. Very common views about Americans and the West up until Trump).

In fact, in Ball Lightning

Honestly, American imperialism is not just war machines killing people and I think we’re not doing ourselves favors by just sticking to talking about the military destruction aspect of US imperialism. If anything, the military is the least scary part of US imperialism in the 21st century.

Economic devastation, engineered famine, control of global capital flows are affecting hundreds of millions, if not billions of lives all the across the world right now. It is nearly impossible to out-compete the Americans on this front.

Just raising the Fed rate by a few % is enough to send dozens of African countries to the brink of default. That’s what’s so scary about the US imperialism, and this is just the monetary aspect of its imperialistic arms.

Yes, that’s true, but by forgoing this detail in the show, there are consequences in how to explain some of the later events.

The Netflix series have altered a lot of the book’s plot.

You remembered correctly about the books, the Trisolarians did not care about humans surpassing themselves as you mentioned the Sophons were already locking out their basic sciences. They were only worried about humans discovering the deterrent.

The show changed a few characteristics about the Trisolarians to make it seem much weaker than they should be. They are traveling at 1% light speed in the show! In the books, they were already reaching 10% light speed at that point.

Book spoilers.

That is not the reason why they had to leave their home planet. In fact, their calculations could go pretty far, but it also predicted that the planet will eventually become engulfed by one of the stars.

They further corroborated this with the observations that there used to be multiple planets in their star system (which have all since been engulfed by the stars) and the one that they are living on has been cracked into two by the last great cataclysm which further deteriorated whatever conditions it was on the original planet.

I’ve been thinking, does a leader come before a movement, or do you need to develop a movement first and a leader will naturally appear out of the movement?

Like, if you were to establish a vanguard party in the UK, how would that work? If you have a small group of revolutionaries fomenting a movement, will a leader emerge out of the movement as it grows larger? Or you need a strong charismatic leader to propel the movement in the first place?

It’s kind of a chicken and egg question and I can’t seem to figure out how does one begin. In Russia and China, those were chaotic times and there were already a bunch of politically aware people involved in all kinds of movements interweaving with all kinds of historic events, and it’s hard to identify the origin of such vanguard revolutionary movement.

Nord Stream bombing was a message.

Honestly you gotta hand it to Biden on this one. Trump would never be able to achieve anything like this. I still cringe at that clip of Trump in front of EU leaders, thinking he’s some kind of the Art of the Deal master, asking the European leaders to spend 2% of their GDP on NATO defense, and the whole room couldn’t stop laughing at him. Biden wiped that smirk off their face pretty fast I suppose.

Completely understandable. Sitting at the table together sharing skewers and jokes has been the cultural staple of pandas for thousands of years. Do not judge them based on your pathetic human culture.

The general election is this year? Does Corbyn have a chance at all?

The Ghost of Buenos Aires cometh

In communist China, pandas are fake and people are being grabbed off the streets and forced into a panda suit to act like they’re the animals representing the national symbol of China.

With all the details leaked (or rather, reported) by very credible sources about the peace negotiations that was deliberately sabotaged by London and Washington, it has become very difficult to attribute the large part of criminal responsibility to any parties other than these two.