• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • It depends. By default, it uses a weaker encryption than WhatsApp. You can turn on e2e encryption, but not in group chats.

    On the other hand, it has multiple FOSS clients, will work on pretty much any platform, and has a great UI.

    If you want a fairly secure chat app that your grandparents can use, then Telegram is perfect. If you’re sending highly confidential stuff, then no.

    It’s also suitable for project groups, because of the better tools (and moderation bots) available to the mods.


  • To translate from one language to another, you need to know both languages very well, including puns, idioms, etc., and have a deep understanding of both cultures involved. A word for word translation will rarely do; you may even have to come up with new jokes / references to replace ones that don’t work in the target language.

    If you have read translations of manga by, say, Rumiko Takahashi, you might have seen footnotes explaining all the puns and references. And even this is not ideal, since it breaks the reader’s flow.



  • As far as we know we have not found the colonialism gene, and there is no evidence that Europeans are somehow genetically different at this locus. So we can, at least for now, ignore the possibility that Europeans are inherently evil, or predisposed towards colonialism. Rather, the actions of any people must be understood as a consequence of their circumstances and culture.

    due to all that’s happened in history, white people today are, while not intrinsically or genetically evil, tainted by the colonialism that has already happened and are therefore more likely to be the exploiters than the exploited due to their historical advantage.

    White people are not only the beneficiaries of the colonialism that has already happened, they are often also the beneficiaries of colonialism that is currently happening. The CIA didn’t coup random Central American countries because they were bored. The IMF and World Bank don’t give loans to African countries for humanitarian reasons.

    But human societies are not species and human-human interactions are not strictly ecological. For one, human societies have overarching coordination and collective will that species don’t have, and human societies as a whole often show more characteristics akin to a single organism than a species (though even that is apples to oranges)

    I feel that the same principles that govern other animals should apply, more or less, to humans too. Although it might be more appropriate to compare human societies to populations of social animals (such as ant colonies or beehives) than to different species.

    Does that imply that Imperial China was less evil than Imperial Europe? Or are they just as evil but in a different way (land-based conquest instead of sea based)? Or did they just not have the resources to do what Europe did but absolutely would have if they did? I don’t know hence why I’m asking.

    I think the difference is that historically China had excellent agricultural land, a relatively modern and stable economy, and was surrounded by poorer and less advanced countries. So people had all the resources they wanted, and had little incentive to go far away. In contrast, Europe was fragmented, with Scotland, the Netherlands and Portugal actually having poor / too little land, and so there was a push for both raw materials and markets.



  • Yogthos, Cowbee etc. have given very detailed answers below. From what I know, the things they said are mostly correct. However, one point to note is that a very small minority of Uyghur people, who were influenced by fundamentalist Wahhabi teachings, carried out terrorist attacks against non-Uyghur people in the 2010s. So there was an atmosphere of fear and suspicion against all the Uyghurs, and many innocent people were subjected to searches, arrests, and so on. This has been documented by the UN. Of course, this is not dissimilar to the way Muslims were treated in France or the US after terrorist attacks. In fact, representatives from Muslim countries who visited Xinjiang praised the government’s response, as it included a lot of job creation and infrastructure projects to turn people away from extremism.









  • Materialism is the ultimate means of oppression.

    Materialism was historically just one way of understanding the world. Over time, it got accepted more and more because it could make testable (and useful) predictions, and they turned out to be right.

    And it’s something you’ve been conditioned to believe in since birth.

    Because it works.

    Socialists, communists etc. still rely on materialism to drive their ideology

    Because it works.