What else would learning R mean? The programming language?

No one is attacking your “factual and informative” comment.

No one is disputing the difficulties you’ve highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won’t be able to achieve this.

And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

Your argument is that “Hard science doesn’t care about politics,” so I assume you don’t want to imply that you’re critiquing the capabilities of China’s political system. So what’s left? Is it racism? The removed can’t achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don’t just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

No one is asking you to?

because there are not actually two parties

“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

• Julius Nyerere

I haven’t read through all of the responses in that thread yet to see if someone else addressed the point I’m about to make, but the definition used in the UN resolution is intentionally vague.

To give a brief history of where genocide originates from as a legal concept to the definition we have now, we’re gonna have to talk about legal scholar Raphael Lemkin.

When Lemkin was studying genocide and attempting to draft a law that would cover all aspects of what makes something a genocide, he made note of a few things. One was that genocide as a crime was unique in the sense that the entity carrying out this crime was usually itself a nation-state or working on behalf/under the jurisdiction of a nation-state. Therefore, a legal solution to address/prosecute a genocide could not be administered as a national law, since if a nation was in the process of carrying out a genocide then the entity responsible for prosecuting that crime is already complicit in the crime. So in order to pass a law that would have any effect with regards to deterring/prosecuting a genocide that law would need to be enforced by an international body.

This led to Lemkin petitioning the UN to adopt the UN resolution on genocide. In the original drafts Lemkin presented to the UN when he proposed that they adopt this resolution, the legal definition of genocide that he drafted was far more broad than the definition the UN ended up adopting. It included provisions for stripping a national group of cultural practices and the ability to participate in society in their native language, campaigns of forced assimilation, economic policy that created barriers to the economic participation in society on the basis of nationality/ethnicity, theft of land/wealth based on nationality/ethnicity, and in general any act that was designed to weaken a specific national group in whole or in part in order to benefit the national group who was wielding state power to carry out these acts. These acts of discrimination/disenfranchisement could eventually lead to the slaughter/destruction of the national group being targeted, but in Lemkin’s original drafts the slaughter/elimination of a national group was not necessary to prosecute something as a genocide. An attempt to infringe upon and disrupt the pattern of life of a given national group targeting people on the basis of their identity as part of that national group was sufficient to prosecute something as a genocide.

The problem with this definition is that in order to be ratified in the UN, it would need to pass a vote from the UN member states. And a large number of countries refused to ratify the resolution with its original wording because they were concerned that the existing wording could be used to prosecute their country. With notable examples being the USA still having Jim Crow laws in full effect at the time, as well the legal status of Native Americans and “Indian Reservations” being called into question by the original resolution, as well as the legal status of every colonial government held by the various countries of Europe falling under the jurisdiction of the original resolution.

Lemkin fought hard to keep those provisions in the resolution he drafted, but eventually relented because he saw a weaker resolution with the force of international law behind it as being preferable to a stronger resolution that only had partial support. But the result is that the current language of the UN resolution on genocide is the result of a process where the criminals were allowed to rewrite the law until they were no longer guilty.

Because the remaining language is so vague, it gives cover for powerful countries to legally squirm their way out of repercussions on pure technicality, while also giving those countries the ability to weaponize the resolution based on technicalities to accuse their geopolitical opponents of genocide as a pretext/justification for intervention and adversarial foreign policy. For example, the language in the UN resolution which references attempts to prevent births in a national group has been used in international politics to target developing countries. As different areas of a country become more economically developed, that development also usually results in greater accessibility to medical resources, which includes contraceptives. As families are given more control over when they choose to have a child, the overall effect is usually a decline in birth rates among a given population. This data showing declining birth rates will then be presented as evidence that a country’s policy is resulting in births being prevented in a national group, which is sufficient grounds for accusing a country of genocide under the current language of the resolution. And whether that accusation is ultimately prosecuted by the UN, the pretext of “Human Rights Concerns” is usually all that countries like the US need in order to initiate “Non-combatant warfare” against a country in the form of imposing unilateral sanctions on them as a way to gain leverage against a geopolitical entity that controls resources which are valuable to US state/business interests.

Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.

Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren’t murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.

Israelis don’t have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they’re just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can’t get along.

mismanagement

When talking about the US, it’s more often correct to assume malice rather than incompetence

Real

Yeah, we’re on the same page. I never said that Americans had exhausted all their other options yet.

There are a lot of good reasons why someone might fight the British empire so it’s a true testament to American ingenuity that they managed to find an evil reason

“Americans can be trusted to do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted every other option”

US citizens don’t lack access to those things because of a lack of budget. The threat of homelessness, hunger, and health insecurity are all forms of worker discipline. The barrier to solving those things is ideological, not budgetary.

Back in the early xbox days when open world destructible environments were still novel, there were quite a few games where just running around and breaking shit was a core part of the gameplay. I’m thinking of games like “Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.” After a while, destructible environments just became just became a bullet point on a lot of games, usually scaled back and refined so that you still had areas with sensible level design after things were broken. But I can’t recall any games where destruction was a core part of the experience being made in a long time.

So I’d love to see a game like Ultimate Destruction made to modern standards with modern physics and such. I know Red Faction: Guerilla is known for having destructible environments with very complex physics that required you to think about how a building was constructed and which supports were load bearing if you wanted to topple a building over, and that is certainly the kind of attention to detail I’d want, but it still doesn’t scratch the same itch. The environment is certainly very destructible, but your tools for destroying the environment are much more limited and the game play is much more focused on the combat with the destructible environment offering an option for how you can approach combat.

“Break things apart sandboxes” probably aren’t made anymore because it’s not actually that engaging, and I only liked it because I was a dumb kid, but I would love to see a break the world with outrageous power style of game made to modern standards.

My feeling is that it is important to uphold the legacy of the first worker state ever attempted on this scale. Of course mistakes were made, many of them horrendous, but the more I try to understand this period of history the more I come away with the impression that the people fighting for the liberation of mankind from the shackles of capitalism, and the brutality of imperialism and colonialism were people who were honestly fighting for a better world and were responsible for trying to craft completely new organizations and relations of production, with very little in the way of blueprints on how to do so, all while facing some of the most fierce repression from an alliance of liberal capitalist military super powers that history has to offer.

Of course mistakes are going to be made in those conditions, and we should do our best to learn from those mistakes so that we don’t repeat them. But millions of lives were improved tremendously as a result of these efforts. Both inside and outside of the Soviet Union. Average life expectancies increased by decades because of these new kinds of organization, and for the first time in history workers were guaranteed rights like healthcare, sick leave, vacations, a 40 hour work week, workplace safety standards, disability benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. This was an incredibly powerful precedent, and showed the world that you could have an economy organized around advancing the interests of the working class, and also become an economic super power while doing so.

My dad is alive because of this precedent. Before the Soviet Union was established, workers rights were abysmal. At the turn of the century it was common to have 12-14 hour work days, 6-7 days a week. Child labor was common, and often necessary to provide for a family. People were worked to the bone until their bodies were crippled, and once they could no longer work they simply lost their job and was thrown out on the street to die. Or if they were lucky they had a family that could take care of them who end up falling deeper and deeper in debt in the process due to the burden of caretaking combined with the loss in income.

It was only because of the precedent that the Soviet Union set that labor rights organizers were ever able to win concessions from the capitalist ruling class. A ruling class who was suddenly terrified that their workers could see what was possible and attempt to emulate the Soviet Union and revolt against the exploiters. This terror finally made them willing to concede to establishing all of the workers rights we take for granted today, and without programs that came out of this like social security disability benefits, when my dad got crippled on the job he would’ve just been left to die.

There’s so much casual cruelty and brutality that is just inherent to how capitalism is structured, and it’s difficult to overstate just how monumentally important the Soviet Union was at the time in fighting for the rights of workers around the globe. It’s hard to look back on this history and see a timeline littered with mistakes and horrible crimes, the ever present capitalist encirclement, threat of bombing and destruction and invasion by the capitalist powers, relentless propaganda and subterfuge and sabotage and sanction and embargo and blockade, and on top of the unrelenting pressure of these external contradictions you have the pressure of internal contradictions, institutions of military power and coercion, secret police, bureaucracies that were plagued with opportunists and careerism, and so on. And it difficult to synthesize all of this history and understand which parts were mistakes on their part, which parts were victories on behalf of their enemies, which parts were “necessary evils” to combat both the casual and active cruelty of capitalism and Czarism, what failures or victories may have resulted from doing things differently, and so on. In other words, to separate which things are mistakes that we need to learn from, and which things are slander from a capitalist class who desperately wants us to believe that “the cure is worse than the disease,” so that no one ever attempts to emulate the soviet union and establish a world that has no need for them.

But I can’t help but conclude that the project that the Soviet Union set out on was an important step forward in advancing humanity past the predatory stage of development. And that there is still value in upholding the victories they were able to achieve, on both a national and international scale, and regarding them as the beacons of hope of a future without capitalism that they rightfully deserve, even though it is plagued by a complicated history. The terror that the idea of the Soviet Union still inspires in our enemies to this day is proof of that value, and it feels difficult to let go of that.