Yeah, i’d like for the US to once again be seen as friend worth having. But nobody would want a war with the PRC, even if we didn’t depend on them so much to manufacture all our shit and buy all our shitty movies. It’s a problem, for sure.

Indeed. If they’re firing people because a movie makes $900 million instead of $1.2 billion, then they were going to fire them for any reason they felt like.

Dick Cheney.

Who would play Christian Bale?

In 1981, the Communist Party of China declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”

So here’s the thing — Taiwan is really a country and it’s a silly fiction when the Chinese tell themselves it isn’t, which becomes even sillier when they force foreigners to agree with their national fiction.

It’s potentially bigger than just that one franchise - though losing even that one franchise could cost Universal Studios millions of dollars in potential ticket revenue. If they were sufficiently pissed off, China’s government could refuse to allow any of Universal’s films to be shown in their country. And they could…

I think all of the people out there who harbor anti-US sentiments due to our history of doing an atrocious job of living up to our espoused ideals of individual liberty, self determination and representative democracy are going to be in for something of a disappointment when the new hegemon doesn’t even pretend to…

Christian Bale was pretty upset when he saw what was going on in China when he was tricked into being part of an anti-Japanese propaganda movie. He got attacked by Chinese guards after he tried to visit a human rights lawyer who was under house arrest. Bale was banned from the country, obviously, but it wasn’t a big…

Probably sometime around the time they were getting their shit pushed in by the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese war.

To be fair to him, it’s different when it’s your own career vs. tanking a franchise you just joined and the careers of everyone involved with it.

“I’m sorry you feel like you’re owed an apology.” - China, to the people of Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, the Uighurs and any of their own citizens that get thrown in jail for pro-democracy sentiments.

Cena’s “gaffe” was certainly unintentional, but at some point someone had to explain to him why he needed to apologize, and he ultimately decided that it would be best to go along with it. I don’t know if I can fault him: I always liked to think that if I made the kind of money someone like him did, at some point I…

Poor John didn’t know that proper study of East Asian geopolitics is now required reading for press tours these days.

She also did that weird chicken boat before she was famous.

I thought the problem it solved was it being too easy for governments to track your online purchases of drugs, guns, trafficked humans, etc. Also ransom payments.

I think she performed on SNL once though. I do feel for her about the panic attack though; that would fucking suck

The entire transaction network for bitcoin is intentionally designed to require an absurd amount of electricity and be slow to verify transactions, for security reasons. It’s one of many stupid things about it. The entire thing uses more electricity than the country of Argentina, and the electricity cost per bitcoin…

Exactly.  I mean I dare not throw around accusations, but Musk strikes me as exactly the kind of person who can/would manipulate through sheer force of personality.  He’s not the kind of person you can be with and expect to be a partner on equal footing.

Yeah it has a real stepford wives vibe; her persona just kind of got subsumed into his.