How did they rule out COVID or the flu? Most tests that US doctors use are not very good at ruling out either, just confirming. They can do true positives but are not as good at true negatives. Also, to be blunt, many people are in denial about COVID and fib to themselves and others about it. “They ruled it out” might really mean, “we downplayed some of our symptoms and the doctor said that might mean COVID is unlikely”.

But there are many respiratory illnesses aside from COVID and the flu and ones that cause a scratchy throat aside from strep throat, which is caused by just one type of bacteria.

I recommend masking in shared indoor spaces to protect yourself. This will also make you better able to help them if needed. And wash your hands + avoid touching your face when around them.

You are trying to now tell me that your warning is to be wary because people who are particilating in this thread are… participating in this thread?

You say you are confused but I have already explained. Feel free to directly respond to what I said if you don’t understand my point.

Saying “certain people” is a good example of the passive aggression I’m noting.

Just share your actual opinion or acknowledge that you’re afraid to do so.

Being direct and honest with your actual opinions, of course. Issuing vague warnings rather than actually engaging. These are cowardly behaviors.

This is a propaganda video where most of the “erie” parys are just video editing and commentary, not demonstrated through evidence or interviews. It is a good example for developing your own media criticism skills. I’ll make note of one outright falsehood and invite you to critically analyze the video further.

They lied when they said those attending didn’t go home. They literally show them arriving and going home on buses multiple times. Rather than note their own inconsistency in narrative, they try to characterize this as erie and scary as well. Oh people line up to get on buses! Follow that bus! Oh it just goes to a “government facility” and they leave to do whatever they want to afterwards? What government facility? They say they are “processed” first. Where is the evidence of this? All they show is people leaving while the bus they were on is stopped.

The BBC has a history of pushing this kind of bad faith propaganda. They even do things like get down into ditches to make “scary” angles for boring things and desaturate the videos like it’s reality TV and you need to emotionally manipulated to know what the bad things are.

It’s not really a documentary, more commentary with background images to make it seem relevant. Notice the music choices and editing to really try and make images of boring and normal lockers and classrooms seem sinister. Notice that it is the narrator making most of the allegations and how very short the edited-in clips of “responses” are. Not one “interview” segment shown was longer than 10 seconds.

Example: “[China want you to believe those at the vocational center are] being willingly guided away from extremism” with a cut to video of a 360 surveillance camera outside. How sinister and coercive! Surely London doesn’t have these on virtually every street falsehoodsS they do regularly lie in that “documentary” via the narrator. For example, the vast majority of people went home every day and the documentary literally shows this with buses but doesn’t provide a commentary to note the inconsistency.

This is actually a very good test case for sharpening your skills at critically engaging with propaganda. Can you spot any other examples of msnipulation, misleading statements, or falswhoods in the video?

If cowering in fear were a comment.

Generally speaking people on a forum can only give you breadcrumbs. Rather than spend time polling libs that know nothing but propaganda and memes, it would be a better use of time for you to personally critically research the claims made, those who made them, and exercise media criticism in doing so. Check sourcing, funding, affiliations, and loaded language and content.

I mean, you certainly can poll the libs, but you will just hear things that you will need to later unlearn, and it is easier to build understanding by doing things in the opposite order: learn the material and then hear (and spot) the BS.

If this only happened once it may be a coincidence.

If you did in any way visit another page with this term then it is still possible for Google to embed trackers in pages and use your IP and fingerprinting techniques to gather data and use it for recommendations. Note that using a VPN and cromite does not prevent all means of fingerprinting. But if you did not visit any pages other than the search engine then either that privacy-focused search engine is sharing your searches with Google or it was a coincidence.

This is frankly just orientalism. There is no basis to this claim but it gains traction because it is easy for casual chauvinists to believe that the asiatic hordes depend on slave labor.

Xinjiang is a large, multicultural region with millions and millions of people living there. There are many different experiences there, different industries, different ways of life. There are factory workers, industrialized farmersquitell-scale shepherds, nomads, tech workers, artists, performers, etc etc and often speaking different languages (though most speaking a good amount of Mandarin as well).

Regarding the state, I believe you are speaking specifically to the anti-terrorist policies (with wide applications) taken up in response to repeated deadly attacks by separatist extremists, primarily those influenced by a form of politicized islam not in any way native to the region, but imported from Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. Hundreds were killed, repeatedly, targeting transit centers, public events, markets, etc. Civilians were targeted, widely.

The state’s response to this was, broadly, to:

1. Invest in economic “modernization” in Xinjiang. Namely, to raise thr economic floor in the region and change economic relations so as to be less amenable to these kinds of activities. Greater prospects for the people of Xinjiang and greater integration into China as a whole, i.e. moving away from economic isolation and personal experiences being isolated.

2. Increased monitoring of social media and movements to track down potential radicalization. Focused on that imported form of politicized idlam, again quite different from Uyghur traditional islamic practices.

3. The creation of hybrid deradicalization/vocational centers, sometimes with mandatory attendance. Those who attended learned civics, Mandarin, base skills for getting modernized jobs, and the opportunity for better job placement in or out of Xinjiang. They would attend on weekdays and generally did not actually live at these centers. When attendance was required it was sometimes due to flagging for radicalization, for which the justifications varied from attending meetinga with separatists to posting separatiat or violent rhetoric online to quoting Wahhabists or putting up Wahhabist pictures in their homes or just being a family member of someone who did such things - your social network could flag you.

This program has largely worked and the vocational centers have been wound fown as they do not have nearly as many people attending them anymore. Xinjiang’s economy has modernized and industrialized to a larger extent and is increasingly integrated with both the rest of China and the world.

The West’s response to this, which is to say, the imperialists who fund and arm people like those whose who did the terrorist attacks in the first place and who have repeatedly destrpyed entire Muslim nations, has been to cook up a host of faux-intellectual bullshit through its NGO pipelines, and to try and reverse China’s approach to economic improvementa by sanctioning or boycotting Xinjiang products. They fundamentally agree that improving material conditions in Xinjiang will address this form of radialized, but they actually want to stoke it by making people there poorer. The NGO apparatus is actually wuite small and is full of charalatans that do not visit China, let alone Xinjiang, do not speak the relevant languages, and insulate themselves from criticism while promoting their work politically - to justify policies against China, against Xinjiang, against Uyghurs.

For one example, you may have heard about claims of the destruction of ancient mosques. None of this is ever verified, it comes exclusively from someone looking at blurry satellite images and making guesses. This comes from ASPI, part of Australia’s equivalent of the state/war department, and has mostly been done by an amateur whosr published work was mostly done as a teenager. That’s right, a random Australian teenager making things up is a large part of the basis for these claims and is published in the so-called UN human rights “report”, itself just a laundering of these fmcharacters’ work, as they were aware that only citing Zenz and ASPI was becoming conspicuous. And where is this “work” handled critically? Nowhere professionally, I can tell you that. It is not part of any real critical academic domain, it is only in the political, and you have to go find people who do speak the languages or otherwise expose this grifter behavior to tease it apart.

The “researchers” in no way demonstrate that “AI” replaced any of the jobs lost. They don’t even raise the question of whether “AI” is used to discipline labor despite not being much of a productivity aid.

Generative LLM and so on is just pattern recognition and generation. It may do this several levels deep, but it doesn’t break free of this fundamental limitation.

You are noticing that it is just doing patterns and noticing them yourself. Lines flow a bit oddly. Real objects have recognizable textures but are missing parts of the coherent whole. Comic panels that would be copy + paste for an artist are actually “redrawn” by the generative algorithms and that feels odd. Context changes oddly - e.g. the backgrounds.

It’s mostly just parlor tricks. Entertaining but rarely actually that useful.

Automation is just using technology to replace human labor, so yes. The exact mechanism doesn’t change that. “AI” is a buzzword but LLMs have replaced human labor already in various ways even though most of the applications are hype / BS. For example, it has certainly taken a bite out of stock images and product graphic design.

Individual capitalists must seek out automation because reducing labor cost without decreasing productivity means a higher profit for them. Capital in aggregate seeks automation because it disciplines labor, means you can threaten and mistreat labor more easily. In that sense “AI” is serving the same purpose as historical automation even when it fails to substitute labor as a productive aspect. Companies can threaten their employees with “AI” that doesn’t work and they can rebrand firings as layoffs using media discourse that overhypes “AI” on their behalf, it is part of the PR universe.

I would say you have to be the stupidest person on earth to vote 3rd party but I know that Magidiots exist.

Yep just big dum-dums that won’t support your genocider candidate. If only they were smart like you and supported 98% Hitler!

You do nothing but enable genocide by voting 3rd party. A Democrat loss in November GUARANTEES the genocide continues.

You know Dems are doing the genocide, right? And at the point where they have the most to fear from supporting it, they aren’t even pandering.

You’re the baddies, bud.

The Republican Party is the party of Israel and they would bend over backwards to give them whatever is necessary to bring back Jesus Christ

The Democratic Party is also the party of Israel.

It’s impressive that you’re calling people names while writing polemic that obviously applies to “your team”.

Sometimes being principled in your vote is a good first step towards doing something politically meaningful. Many liberals are chained to the idea that their vote is their political being. And then they go vote for genociders!

That first step of pulling at their chains can lead to further political education.

Countries are countries, not people, and cannot really be friends. Countries, today, are all nation-states and therefore inextricable from the global caoitalist system, so to be free of politics would be to end every country. In this context, countries can be allies, usually due to shared interests to meet strategic goals.

Inversely, countries are enemies due to their inherent political nature, the global unstable system of exploitation. To imagine an end to inter-country hostility is to imagine the end of capitalism and nation-states themselves. Under such events the people who live in what is now Chile could love those in Saudi Arabia as much as those in Tanzania.