a speck of evidence for homemade laotian whiskey being popular?

there are hundreds of homemade bottles at every market.

each market seller or restaurant that has whiskey offers their own homemade laotian whiskey as well.

I’m not from Laos, but I lived there for a while.

easy to avoid if you want to avoid it.

I think you have a higher regard for the stringent ethics of poverty-stricken moonshiners than I do.

but what you’re saying certainly could have happened also.

I tasted it and immediately I had red flags go up in my mind, the bottles I tried(had to make sure) definitely tasted homemade and not completely divorced from methanol

The article keeps mentioning that the drinks could have been spiked, but that seems very unlikely and a weird way to poison someone, especially since there doesn’t seem to be a motive or relationship between the victims.

what’s much more likely, given it’s Laos, is that the whiskey was poorly homemade and the bar sourced their whiskey from that. unskillful distiller, laotian whiskey is a cultural tradition and whiskey is pretty easy to make. all you need is a still, but if you keep all of the distillation, the beginning of the liquid coming out is methanol, which is very poisonous. after the methanol is gone then it’s all ethanol, which is the alcohol you’re used to drinking and is less poisonous.

it sounds like this was in a bar, so the supplier of the bar probably got lazy or didn’t want to waste any of the distillate they were making and kept the methanol in through negligence or greed.

yep, I did a deep dive into the scientific paper mill industry and you are exactly correct.

the only other metric I have heard about(besides just buildings being built) for scientific advancement within China comes from the sheer volume of papers they submit which have been studied again and again and at least 20% are entirely fabricated, but the number is probably much higher and the academics don’t have time to weed out all the irrelevant ones so they just let the irrelevant ones go through, but there’s a dearth of innovative progressive science coming out of China as far as anyone can still tell.

they straight up have paper mills and it’s openly known that those papers are one either based on completely fabricated data, or two based on irrelevant already known data.

as far as editors trying to check all of these false papers out of China have reported, it’s sort of like if you were submitting an article to an automotive mechanics magazine, and you just did a book report on what a piston is.

like yeah, that’s what a piston is, but no knowledge is being gained from a report on an already known technology and its known applications.

so how do those papers get into the magazines?

very often those paper mills offer a grant to a legitimate scientist who needs to get a project done and they’ll agree to be credited as a co-author on these ersatz Chinese papers so that they’re more widely accepted.

there’s six different related articles about the same thing on that website, and the metric of declaring them “science cities” seems to be the amount of buildings they have built in the cities, rather than verified scientific advancement.

The youngest age of consent in the US is currently 16, unrestricted, but 14 if you’re within a few years of the 14-year-old.

I didn’t know the majority of the US age of consent was 16, I thought that was a European thing.

but only 12 states have the age of consent at 18.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_the_United_States

from 15, apparently

oh right. goodbye, biden’s billionaire tax.

as with their scientific paper mills, China produces quantity, not quality.

https://www.ft.com/content/32440f74-7804-4637-a662-6cdc8f3fba86

"The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality.”

their solution is for everybody to unilaterally accept Israel as the picture of morality despite concluding the genocide and colonization of Palestine.

you are in company.

“and the list goes on…”

yeah, The US backs down.

they backed down in Vietnam, they backed down in iran, somalia, they backed down investigating the Saudi Arabian terrorists in 9/11(which is almost all of them), and the list goes on.

the US is not often gracious about backing down or wise enough to back down prudently, but they do back down.

“The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week. Owing to compound interest…”

it’ll add up to a hell of a lot of justified reparations when the US backs down.

are you serious? and I don’t mean that as an insult, I’m actually unsure if you are serious.

a total collapse of Cuba is the whole reason the US has been blockading them for half a century.

infrastructure collapse is happening specifically because the US won’t allow Cuba to make infrastructure deals and technology deals with other countries without facing explicit and implicit sanctions and severe material limits.

desperate poverty is exactly what the US government has been working towards inflicting on Cuba for decades.

quebec?

https://www.showmeonething.com/p/quebec-bans-name-change

“I don’t think you can defend inaction regarding genocide”

have you stopped paying taxes that are funding Israel?

what is your defense regarding your inaction by rejecting your complicit funding of genocide?

“…within months by historians and other civilians, without a doubt that what was happening was genocide”

close, what happened was people started paying attention because the executions and bombings were happening more frequently than usual.

anyone who was aware of and understood the history of Israel’s colonization of Palestine for the past 50 years and they’re complete Power disparity agrees it was and is “without a doubt” a genocide years before 2023.

it’s just that most people only recently started paying attention.

“they knew very well.”

Yes, this is what I said. it invalidates your next few assumptions:

“I think the conclusion should be that the relevant parts of US gov are either weak and careless, either exceptionally naive and old, or! there is something malicious that has been happening”

these are the simplest and most comfortable conclusions for someone unversed in politics to imagine.

blame it on simple, fundamental tragic and all-encompassing character flaws that you importantly don’t imagine apply to yourself, storybook infirmities that simply need to be remedied and then all of history and politics can be swept aside for a beautiful future, in which every world leader clasps the hands of every other.

something that you can point out and say “well that isn’t me, that isn’t a problem that we’ve all contributed to, this is the out of touch portions of my government”

but this isn’t a unique situation, this isn’t the only genocide currently happening, genocides don’t occur are allowed to continue because of carelessness.

this is another terrible situation among countless others, all of which are important and complex, that is not happening because the US government has some fundamental climactic “weak”, “careless”, “old” or “naive” flaw.

not least importantly because the US government does not have the power. you imagine it to have over other sovereign Nations.

as for your hopeful reasonings:

If they were careless, they would have believed the initial assessment and fabrications of Israel, sent US soldiers in and destroyed the rest of Palestine.

If they were weak or naive, they would have buckled under the first campus protest and stopped providing all aid to Israel.

if they were old… well, the government official you are likely most familiar with is old, but experience is not something to be discarded or sneered at.

these are fanciful single remedies that are irrelevant to the the complicated historical reality currently unfolding.

“there is something malicious that has been happening”

yes…Israel is concluding a genocide.

nefarious? not anymore so than it has been for the past 50 years.

Israel’s military superiority and support of US interests is valuable. despite their most recent actions, it is still valuable.

that assessment is not made carelessly or naively, and support for and departures from normal US policy regarding Israel and Palestine are not being made by weak people.

“throwing away all ideas of discussion”

you sure scribble down a lot of ideas for someone throwing away all ideas of discussion.

“you sure like to ad-hominem the other commenter”

their comments and ideas, not the “commenter”.

I don’t fault people for their ability or level of reasoning, but I do fault their presentation of unconsidered whimsical invective, baseless personal attacks and lack of respect for context, sources, facts and discussion.

particularly if they forget or ignore what the point they are supposedly responding to is, or respond to facts with demonstrably false assumptions or attacks they don’t bother to even briefly support with evidence or logic.

I agree that I could be more gracious in the likely event that their inconsiderate attacks or ignorance or disregard of the facts can be tied directly to their fundamental personal abilities.

I have been thinking about this recently.

"Name one single action they’re taken…’

“never actually sanctioned anyone.”

action:

https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-administration-sued-over-sanctions-israeli-settlers-2024-08-07/

The Biden administration is getting sued over all of their sanctions,

Just Google the things I write, you will find sources for them.

action:

publicly declared that the US won’t support an indefinite war.

action: met with netanyahu’s political ally after Netanyahu refused to de-escalate

action: cut down the weapons shipments they already agreed to send.

action: Biden is actively calling for a two-state solution

action: Biden has called for a halt to Israeli colonization of Palestinian land(that’s why those sanctions you didn’t r know about happened).

you may not value diplomatic actions, but diplomacy is important, and is what the US is going to try first with one of their oldest active mutual defense allies in the world.

The naive belief that US presidents have a switch in their office that lets them turn the actions of other countries on and off is inaccurate in the extreme.

there are dozens of countries financially and materally supporting Israel.

If the US stops supporting Israel, they

1. lose one of their most valuable allies in a part of the world very hostile toward the US.

2. have zero impact on the capability of Israel to continue waging the genocide. Israel has enough weapons and support to continue this as long as they want to.

3. push Netanyahu even further away; Netanyahu is under no obligation, as the leader of a sovereign nation, to follow the dictates of other countries.

should the US do more?

yes.

are they doing anything?

Yes, they are repeatedly trying various diplomatic and material actions and censures with which to deescalate the concluding chapter of an invasion that nearly the entire world has supported for 50 years that finally you are aware of and justifiably angry about while maintaining an ally that is crucial to US interests and national security.

The measures taken by the US against Israel are ramping up, and have consistently been ramping up for a year.

too slowly for many people’s taste, especially if they don’t understand how international diplomacy functions, but the spectators’ political blind spot doesn’t mean nothing is happening on the world stage.