I wonder if the guard was like “Oh this guy is a journalist? Lets googlebaidu what he writes- Oh it’s just sinophobic nonsense. Tell him he has to come back tomorrow so we can waste more of his time”

I just have a fear I might mess up somehow and start a fire or something

It takes some effort to start a fire. Most oils flash points are >600 F, which you might get a pan to to sear a steak, but to heat a pan of oil for deepfrying or something to >600 F, which would be a dangerous situation, requires you to continue heating it after it started billowing smoke between ~350F and ~525.

In any case, if you manage to have an oil fire, say by spilling some on the burner, just let it burn out if it’s a small amount or turn off the heat and throw a towel over it if it’s like a cup’s worth.

Minor burns aren’t uncommon when you’re learning, but that’s just a very quick way to learn “wrap the handle of the cast iron you just took out of the oven with a towel so you don’t grab it like a moron” or “use tongs to place things on hot oil so it doesn’t splatter on your hand”

From the things I saw about the US election, the Dems were the side with plans for the economy - minimum wage adjustments, unions, taxing the rich, etc

The dems are in power now, they didn’t do those things, so nobody believed they’d actually do it if they were elected again.

Additionally, parading around endorsements from Dick and Liz Cheney, and promising to build a border wall, tax breaks for small businesses, and other republican policies from 2016 didn’t help the perception that the dems weren’t going to help people.

Ukraine

You’re not understanding, the arms and money we send Ukraine enables them to continue the war. Last year, Russia offered a peace deal, giving up a portion of the territory they occupied at the time. Ukraine declined and says they won’t settle for less than all their territory, including Crimea. Without the weapons, they’d be forced to agree to a deal. Given that Russia probably knows they can’t deal with the insurgency outside of Russian-speaking Ukraine, they’ll probably agree to borders similar to what exists now.

China would have wanted Taiwan regardless

I mean the Republic of China is a part of China, it’s eventual reunification is inevitable, but they obviously see that reunification by invasion would be very expensive, both in cost of the invasion, cost of the insurgency, and resulting sanctions from their third-biggest trading partner. The only case where they’d waste billions of dollars and hundreds of thousand of lives is if the US made that option better than the alternative.

The same calculation happened with Russia; after the maidan coup, the civil war on their border caused them to strategic infrastructure and terrorist attacks. They erroneously calculated the cost of having a hostile, NATO-backed state on the border would be greater than a quick invasion and replacing the US puppet with another Russian one.

You need to look closer to understand what pressures cause countries to do things, these places aren’t cartoons who just decide to self-destruct their economies and send an entire generation into a meat grinder because aUTHoriTariaNism.

We’ve already sent troops to help Israel in Palestine, remember that aid pier that Israel used to do warcrimes, and now there’s troops operating aircraft and a missile defense system to prevent anyone from interfering with Israel’s genocide.

help out Russia in Ukraine

Just not sending weapons and money should be enough to get Ukraine back to the peace table and stop the bloodshed.

help out China in Taiwan

Ironically if we didn’t try to use Taiwan for geopolitical goals, China would have no reason to invade, since a peaceful reintegration over time is far more advantageous than the destruction and insurgency that comes with a military option.

the USA is now going to join WW3 on the side of the bad guys

What do you mean “join”?

The evil empire that militarily supports dictators across the global south to prevent economic development and keep cheap labor and resources flowing out are the bad guys, this hasn’t and will not change short of a revolution or the empire’s control collapsing.

Sadly it’s unlikely to go off anytime soon; people who study this sort of thing say the magma reservoir is not filling.

If your “urban fabric” doesn’t have public transit that’s faster and cheaper than driving, it’s just an overbuilt suburb. America has one city, NYC.

Yeah no, you’re not wrong, cow milk is just another type of milk, there is no one “real” milk, animal or plant based.

It might be less weird in other contexts, but the in the context of our current farming practices, the fact that it needs to be pasteurized due to the likely presence of dangerous pathogens and has bio-available hormones, is weird as fuck.

I think practicality is the only important thing here, if something looks and tastes like milk, and can be used as milk in 98% of cases, it’s fine to call it a type of milk.

Certainly if we’re gonna call peanut butter peanut butter just because it spreads like butter, despite having no other similarity, there’s no reason to split hairs over things that are interchangeable with milk.

One of the admins, Nakoichi, is an anarchist. But please point me at the queerphobia, I’m not banned from hb, I’ll report it, I have faith they’ll do something about it.

By supporting Israel, you are not supporting Jews. Israel, being a settler colonial ethnostate whose national project requires the conquest and ethnic cleansing of territory, cannot be a safe place for Jewish people.

Associating Jewish people with the genocidal actions of Israel is antisemitic as fuck.

Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have ‘communists’ arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin

That’s an instaban from hb, grad, and .ml, did you report that post?

.world is the one that “preemptively defederated HB and grad, as a last resort” due to such scary views as opposing NATO and the IMF.

The rule against using firearms in the octagon.

China is so salty that karate can’t survive the age of the Internet they are blackballing it’s critics.

Karate is Japanese.

Did you mean Wushu?

It’s closer to Pro Wrestling than a form of self-defense, like they often have storylines and everything.

Whoever told you that Chinese people are mad over a performance art is literally just making shit up.

A thousand people can take guesses, but only a skilled player can say “Oh yeah, that foliage looks like San Juan or some other mountainous region of Argentina”, or “That black electrical tape is a Nigeria thing”

People who live in those places aren’t likely to notice how their electrical poles are different.

Do you always use a banana tree as your desk?

DocToPdf Disrespect was quietly banned from twitch, and then responded to allegations that he was sexting minors with “age of consent varies between states, what I did wasn’t even illegal and what even is sexting? This is just haters trying to ruin my day”

Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning.

There’s a few major flaws:

Trying to out-flank republicans on the right with immigration and crime; instead of counter-messaging that republican claims of migrant crime are false and migrants commit less crime than average, and crime as a whole is declining, her campaign promotes how tough she is on crime. This is essentially campaigning for the republicans. The people who are terrified of immigrants and criminals are voting republican.

Trying to out-flank republicans on the right in foreign policy. Harris can promise rivers of Muslim, North Korean, and Russian blood, and the people who want that will still vote republican. Talking about how lethal the US military will be and how hostile the US will be to other countries decreases turnout. War is not popular. Trump’s campaign is already hitting Harris on supporting the genocide in Palestine.

Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore

Huh. Wonder what that US reaper drone was doing over Yemen.