I see USA solving it’s problems with their ancient traditions and sensibilities. Slavery. I’d say I’m surprised, but uh…

Am I missing the joke here? Your God damn right I’m going to be up eating the delicious breakfast buffet when I’m on vacation. And your also right that I’m going to sleep until lunch on the weekends so I don’t need to expend effort for breakfast. I literally can’t see doing this any other way.

It is isn’t it? I actually talked about that further in the thread. What’s up with that? I’m actually curious about it since well I’m not LGBTQ+ but I’m always interested in understanding more. It’s strange to me that women would prefer lesbian porn films as well as queer films. It doesn’t make sense to me, but statistically that’s what we find. I’d love for someone to explain this to me.

Edit: Also yes, I can agree it doesn’t show queer support, but it does show ambivalence. After all, it’s the government censors that are letting it through, and they aren’t LGBTQ+. So, they absolutely do not understand it’s targeted at women.

Whooo boy that’s a tough topic. So I’m sure what you’re realizing is that LGBTQ+ issues in China isn’t a government thing. The government doesn’t care. The families though, oh god, I mean if we’re going to say there’s oppression in China, it’s from the families. IF you’re lucky and have a good family, great. If you’re not, no one will help you.

So, of course your best bet is to find extended family that accepts you. This is how there’s a thriving LGBTQ+ community in China. And leads to all the things I was talking about where grandparents over rule parents, but it can also be aunts or other family members. OR and importantly OR because of how guanxi works, you can also find groups of like minded friends who take you in and help you get past these things.

I’m not here to tell you it’s a great system or it works well. Abuse IS a huge problem there. However, in the western mind it’s all tied to an oppressive government, it’s actually not. It’s a deep cultural issue that is only recently coming to light, and frankly if I’m honest it will get buried just as quickly with a few more rights for people, such as gay civil unions. It’s how China listens to the voice of the people. I know this is confusing, in the west people think of the voice of the people as a direct voice such as democracy. In China it’s complicated. In a weird way, everyone in China is free to do whatever they want, as long as you have the guanxi to back it.

Edit

I feel like I should add this has been the way the Chinese government has done things since imperial times. China isn’t communist, a better way of looking at them is they’ve returned to imperial China. It’s bad in many ways as you’ve noticed, parental abuse is an insanely huge problem there. On the other hand, it’s how they handle the rich getting too rich. It doesn’t matter how rich you are if you’ve destroyed all your guanxi, as Elon Musk is discovering.

Parent in this case means relative. It’s an Asian societal thing, nothing can happen without an agreement with the family as the family unit is more important than the individual. This is actually a thing in Japan as well.

So, you might be thinking couldn’t I just fake it. And the answer is yes and happens all the time. Here’s a Times article on it. It’s some what biased since it’s an American paper, but it has the issues fairly correct. The problem is calling it the black market isn’t exactly correct. It’s usually forged documents pretending that you have family consent.

https://time.com/6261675/china-transgender-hormones-black-market/

Of course, if you actually are alone and have no family, then you don’t need approval. However, that doesn’t really happen in China as they find your relatives for you, it’s actually what the police stations around the world are actually about. It’s a way for overseas Chinese to find familial contacts so they can proceed with whatever documentation they want.

Edit

Actually, hilariously if you get into a civil union with your boyfriend, they can act as consent for your trans gender therapy. So in that situation if you’ve already found a partner it’s totally fine and everyone gets whatever they want. This is actually part of a way China promotes marriages in order to try to get that birth rate up. It just happens they don’t have laws for gay people so it just default applies.

Edit 2

If you’re now also thinking couldn’t they just get the grandparents to do it? The answer is also yes. In fact, like 50% of Chinese dramas are about literally this. The grandparents going over the parent’s head and making decisions for their grandchildren. It’s quite a big deal in China. And I’m not talking about LGBTQ+, it’s literally every part of life. China isn’t so much a nation of individuals as it’s a nation of families and the families make all the decisions. It even leaks up to the political level. It’s confusing, but it all makes more sense if you study Chinese culture. This is what guanxi is about. It’s not exactly nepotism.

So good news on that, that’s changing too. The courts find gender conversion therapy illegal, although there’s no specific law against it. You can get gender affirming surgery as well as hormone therapy, though not all options. However, they do have a parental consent requirement. Though if you understand Chinese culture, that makes a lot more sense than if you do not. Like I said, with everything in China, not terrible, not great.

Uh, you can have a civil union in China if your gay. They also have tons of what they call boy love movies. Additionally, there’s gay bars in every major city in China. In fact, Chengdu is known as the gay capital of China.

The issues are they do have are, you can’t show kissing in those movies and they don’t allow parades anymore. Also, no legal protections for discrimination, though all discrimination laws apply. So while you can’t say they fired you because your gay, you still have protections that they can’t randomly fire you without cause and being gay isn’t a cause.

Here’s an article about what I am talking about.

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-relationships/article/3114633/lgbtq-people-china-picture-mixed-global-report-finds

Not terrible, also, not great. That kind of described China as a whole though so take that how you will.

Edit

Here’s a list of boy love films if your interested.

https://trakt.tv/users/133dle/lists/rainbow-cn-china-boys-love-bl-gay?sort=released%2Casc

Surprisingly they’re more popular with women as opposed to men. Not entirely sure why.

Oh it’s totally going to get far fucking worse. I’m just pointing out the problems are already here. Fingers crossed we don’t nuke ourselves to cavemen times. Or maybe we’ll get to live the fall out games. Better than caveman times so we got that going for us.

Uh, I’m pretty sure we are already seeing water wars. The India Pakistan conflict has a large amount due to India blocking the Indus river. China’s south China seas claims is largely over control of bodies of water. The reason Turkey cares so much about Syria is because of the Eufrates basin. Hell, even Trump’s wildly insane conflict over Greenland is over the artic water ways. And that’s a short list. I’m pretty sure we are screwed…

It’s worse than that. Sure China is huge, but the entire world is boycotting US goods. It’s far far worse than what your pointing out. But we’ll, maybe this is a good thing. Fuck USA.

Trying to force the EU to buy these at gun point. The problem is the EU is calling their bluff.

Oh I know, I’m just pointing out that China has no reason to make the first call, which some how, and this blows my mind, Bessent seems to believe that somehow it’s going to be so bad for China that China will call first. Why would the winner call first? What strange world would this happen?

It might not be sustainable for USA, but China is doing just fine. Their stock market is flatlining and they expect growth to drop 2.2% to 3% growth. Not great, but definitely sustainable. That seems to be a big problem for US negotiations.

Oh yeah, completely agree. Misunderstood that my bad.

I think differently actually. And unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s going to work out for Zelensky, but I don’t blame him for trying.

So China is not directly supplying weapons. Zelensky implied as much so far. What he’s saying is China is supplying gun powder and artillery shells. With the obvious implication that Russia is filling the shells with the gun powder and making them live. This had probably been happening the whole time. This is the complaints about dual use.

So why now? Well, it’s a good time to get China riled up so they’ll comment. Zelensky needs weapons, even if China doesn’t stop selling to Russia, selling to Ukraine as well would be good. In which case Zelensky can turn around and say then come talk to us, if your neutral you’ll let us buy too. Which might have been a good plan if USA wasn’t completely fucking insane and keeping China from even talking because they got other shit to deal with.

And USA is tariffing everyone. But China the hardest. Forcing all nations to have to trade heavily with China just to survive now. This trade war is USA’s greatest gift to Xi ever.

I don’t have proof, but I’m pretty sure China and Russia bought the current US government. It’s the only thing that makes sense. And the heavy China tariffs are here just to put the nail in the US coffin while convincing idiots to cheer China bad.

Your right. It could be both. I mean, my wife said to me the other day that she heard Trump was doing the tariffs to lower the bond interest rates. I said while in some types of recessions that’s true, that wouldn’t work in this case and you’d have to be an idiot to think it would. Sure enough the next day Trump puts a stay on tariffs to most of the world because the bond market got rocked. All I could think of is omg, are they really that fucking stupid?

I wish it was that. No, this is actual evil, not incompetence. Trump has turned the US economy into the largest pump and dump scheme ever. Worse, he’s bragging about how his friends made billions. I can’t even believe this is happening. I’m in utter shock. I knew Trump would be bad, but straight up flaunting corruption like it’s a joke and even bringing the SCOTUS on board with this. I’m just gob smacked.

That’s not a bad way to put it. Yes, and bonds will sink slower. It just still will sink. I mean, if I were investing at all, it’d be in bonds. However, I’m not going to pretend it’s safe either.

Sort of? Bonds will be safer, however it also is incredibly dependent on the forward inflation. The flation part of stagflation. If inflation outstrips your bond’s interest, you’re still losing money. So bonds are way safer than other assets, but sadly in this kind of a situation not really safe either.