I caught the 2009 total eclipse here and it was awe-inspiring. It was also the longest solar eclipse expected for the 21st century at 6 minutes, 39 seconds, so it made a deep impression on everybody standing on the roof of the apartment block to watch it.

I don’t wish to see a second, though, because the next one will be in the year 2200 and that would mean I’d still be alive in 200 years. Not something I want.

I’ve seen the Aurora Borealis hundreds of times. (Living in the high arctic does that to you.) But I have heard them only once.

I’d like to hear them again.

Blue is supposed to be the colour, yes. The verbiage is that “blue is an ancient symbol—dating back to Ancient Rome—representing love, purity, and fidelity”. This is, however, absolute poppycock. Blue was a symbol of fidelity, this is true, but to the emperor, not in love. And indeed there is no single colour that symbolizes all three things in Roman times.

White symbolized purity and innocence. Yellow represented marriage and fidelity. Red represented violence (Mars), yes, but also passion and love. Green represented beauty, fertility, and love. Purple represented passion, but chiefly reserved for the royal classes.

Blue was not related to any kind of love symbolism whatsoever. The Victorians just made stuff up. Again. Like the so-called “medieval” torture devices (like iron maidens, etc.)

Oh, I didn’t notice the license plate.

They should have spray-painted the slogans on.

You’ll disagree with it. You won’t refute it. You’ll walk away feeling better and convinced that you “won” but in reality you’ll have just marked yourself as an “enemy” to be ignored. (The human brain is very adept at compartmentalizing things.)

Actual refutation of a toxic idea whose seed has been planted requires detailed deconstruction and reconstruction. It is time-consuming, it is exhausting, and it is unreliable to boot. (C.f. above that compartmentalizing of things.) There is a reason why governments and centuries come and go but culture remains recognizable over the millennia. Once minds are set, they’re ludicrously difficult to unset.

I’m going to guess, however, that you will not take this to heart. Ironically for the same reason that your “refutation” (actually mere disagreement) won’t take.

Looks like I hang out with the wrong (right?) people then.

I have literally never seen that “tradition” followed except on television or movies. No wedding ceremony I’ve ever attended had any of that going on.

Maybe I hang out with the wrong crowd.

Ideally you’d translate it into an idiom in the target language, yes. “Red booklet” would immediately be translated to “little red book” anyway. Red Note was better, but a little off idiomatically. There’s a reason, though, why there are actual marketing professionals who get a lot money for doing translations in branding.

Never underestimate the ignorance of people.

All the badge work is clearly non-Tesla, but a tiny amount of text has “TESL” in it so the ignorant and self-righteous strike hard!

It’s very wrong, though, isn’t it?

The Apartheid Manchild is not a nice guy, does not want a better world.

I did the moving to China bit almost 24 years ago. I still post in English comms. Weird, that.

No, it’s an accurate translation. It just doesn’t mean what people think it means because they don’t know what the Chinese call the so-called “Little Red Book” of Mao’s quotations.

Weird. Weird how I post about Chinese leadership quite often on Weibo and haven’t been canned.

Here’s a thought: maybe it’s how you go about it that counts?

Criticism of Mao in particular is perfectly cromulent here. The Party itself criticizes Mao, especially for the Cultural Revolution, with some fairly harsh language.

But if you don’t know how to do it or when, then … ah … yeah, you’re going to get people pissed off at you.

There’s a door, then. Make use of it. Vote with your feet and the adoring followers you brought with you will really show this place!

banned from a sub lemm.ee for asking if being against DEI equals being a nazi now

And the reason for the sudden concern for Nazis being suppressed is made clear now.

Would we not rather they utter their opinions in the open so they can be refuted?

It’s far easier to lie than it is to correct a lie. When the Nazis come out into the open they spew a stream of lies in minutes that can take months to refute, leaving the field to the lies to spread and fester.

And that’s even assuming you think refutation works at all. (Protip: it works so rarely that you can treat instances where it did as statistical aberration.)

It’s also probably made-up.

It was very difficult to navigate and no one would help her.

At airports and train stations in any major city in China, which includes any city that has an international airport, there is English signage everywhere. There are also information booths everywhere staffed by multilingual people. Further, even in the minor cities and such (if she somehow managed to wind up in a small city like, say, Jiujiang), white people have a common tactic they use: stand looking helpless and wait (it’s rarely over ten minutes) for someone to work up the courage to try their “very bad” (the words they will use) English on them and to help them.

Given that she arrived from the USA she started in a major city. Chengdu is another major city. I’m calling a lie on this unless she did this in, like, the 1980s. (That era of China was definitely a different world from today.)

The gym she was working for had banned weights in their gym, weights!

I’m in my 24th year here. I’ve lived in three cities and I’ve visited dozens more. I have never, not even once, seen a gym that didn’t have weights. Indeed most of the time, to my frustration, all they have are weights and a too-small mat for other exercises.

Again, I’m calling this made-up.

Where she stayed was a more safe area (where her friend lived).

LMFAO! The “safest” areas of New York City are far more dangerous than the most dangerous portions of the worst cities in China! Even in a city as tame as Ottawa (that’s in Canada for any Americans reading) there were neighbourhoods I didn’t feel comfortable walking through in the daytime and would not set foot in at night.

In China, by comparison, I cheerfully walked down the darkest of alleys at night even in economically depressed small cities like Huangshi. (You wouldn’t know of it. Just like you’d never heard of Wuhan before 2020.)

Anybody American (of all people!) thinking that parts of China are “dangerous” is incredibly obtuse.

They took her out to dinner once, and that was it, they left her to fend on her own.

Do you really want literally every American immigrant (or even non-white visitor, or Hell, even your own citizens!) in history to face you with her oh-so-privileged attitude here? Really? You might want a brief refresher.

The inability of Americans to look at how they treat others all while whining how they’re treated is truly stunning sometimes.

Finally on her way back, she had her final surprise. My wife is generally a nervous flyer, and this event put her off from flying for a bit. On her plane back (she can’t remember what company) while they were passing over Japan, they hit the most turbulence she had ever been on. The plan started to violently shake and lose control, the oxygen masks deployed and everyone started crying.

And this here seals the deal. The “trauma” wasn’t even caused by the Chinese or China. It was caused by air.

So here’s my take from the story (a take informed by almost a quarter of a century of watching Americans in China):

A whiny, middle-class white American woman wasn’t waited on hand and foot by the Chinese. Combined with the fact that she likely already had bigoted expectations of China led her to melt down into an even whinier pool of self-pity, interpreted everything around her in the most negative light possible, then confabulated even worse things, and finally got “traumatized” by the AIR (literally). And blames that on China too. (And likely blames sunspots on China as well.)

If she went to China in the '80s or maybe even the '90s her experiences with people staring at her and laughing might be true (though it’s odd that someone who at the beginning of the story didn’t speak a word of Mandarin somehow knew what people were calling her), though she likely misinterpreted the laughter and its intent. (Laughter and its usage varies across culture, but Americans are not exactly known for understanding that other cultures even exist not to mention subtle details like this.)

Again maybe in the '80s or '90s her observations of corrugated roofs next to palaces may be legit (although grossly exaggerated), but if this happened at any point in the '00s onward she’s just flatly lying. Chengdu today is a far more modern and good-looking city than any American city, including New York. (Perhaps especially New York since that whole thing of slums interspersed with palaces is something I saw in NYC…)

I won’t comment on being paid to spy on other gyms. I lack any experience with how gyms operate (though I might point out that literally anybody can just walk into a gym, pay a visitor’s fee plus an instructor’s fee, and get to see the operations of a gym directly in first person). That part could be true; there’s shady businesses everywhere (yes, including the USA) who do dumb things. That part gets dumped into the “I don’t know” pile along with a few other minor details mentioned above.

But most of that story? Reeks to high heaven.

They always do. Aside from guns, the single identifying feature of American culture is the “instant expert”.

They read a newspaper article on a topic and they’re instant experts. Someone says something they don’t like and they’ll make an incompetent Google search and become instant experts.

If I had 一元人民币 for every time some American instant expert told me how things really are where I live I could retire tomorrow.

Neither the knee-jerk Americans nor you are being honest.

You don’t serve a cause, whatever cause it may be, by lying.

No, that’s just people who don’t know what words mean and recited something they didn’t understand in an incorrect context.

Rather like people who say things like “for all intensive purposes” or “hunger pains” or “I could care less” or such.