How did you know they were acid burns as opposed to the many other things that could burn someone?

I’m all for satire, but I also think this was kind of bullying in that they did something that was offensive specifically to a particular marginalized minority group.

So it’s not something that should be illegal or warrant a shooting, but I’m not exactly surprised. Just as if they published a story like “Fuck this one guy’s mother” showing a drawing of some random guy’s mother being fucked.* That guy doesn’t then have a right to shoot them and should go straight to prison if he does - but I wouldn’t be surprised and I don’t think we all need to identify with the paper or anything because they were being total pricks.

*And I know the response will be along the lines of “You can’t compare that drawing with a mere drawing of mohammed”. But that betrays a failure to take another perspective. Who’s to say that in a society even more liberal than our own, “fuck your mother” might be seen as not particularly insulting? After all, take away expectations of women being pure and you basically have “fuck your dad” which really doesn’t seem too insulting, it’s like sure if that’s what you’re into weirdo, but let me check with my dad first.

Obviously it’s easy to assume that because China has the most people, Chinese must be the most common language. But when you look at total people who know a language (as first, second, etc.) the most spoken language in the world is…English, with about 400 million more speakers than Chinese.

It’s hard to see the downside of everyone speaking Russian or German when compared with the current situation, but English would be better because 1) It would require the fewest people to learn a new language (sort by total speakers in the link above) 2) would be best for communicating with visitors and 3) fuck Russia

being billigual is really easy

Yeah but how easy is it becoming bilingual? Or in the case of Europe, centivigintitrilingual?

You all need to just start making English an official language across the EU. Yeah I know that’s very American imperialist of me to say, but most of you speak it already anyway and it would make travel and communication so much easier. It feels like you all are insisting on speaking different languages just to pretend you have unique cultures when let’s be real, once you welcome McDonalds that ship has sailed.

3 explanations, in order from what I believe most likely to least:

1. It could be selection bias. All communist nations originated from dictatorships, and as democracy isn’t a key part of communism, any democratic ideas get kicked to the side. It may require a dictatorship in the first place for a communist revolution to occur, as democracy may lead to people feeling content enough with the system that they may not feel it needs fundamental change.

2. The inevitable need for concentration of power in the hands of a few. Assume that the powerful will always try to concentrate power in their own hands one way or another. Capitalist societies use wealth (a.k.a. purchasing power) to replace the concentration of political power that a dictator would enjoy. As communist societies lack such a mechanism, the powers-that-be can only use political power to force their own superiority.

3. The centralization of economics leads to concentration of economic power that can be used effectively to buy loyalty from would-be challengers to a dictator’s power.

The whole point was to put this in your cubicle so you could pretend you had a personality that was more than being a cog in the machine. Then the pandemic happened.