By David Futrelle
The Epoch Times is a weirdo right-wing newspaper that loves Donald Trump nearly as much as it loves running stories about UFOs and past lives. It’s run by Falun Gong, a genuinely oppressed Chinese religious group that might also be just a bit on the culty side. Naturally, it’s huge on Facebook.
I went to the Epoch Times website today to see if this august publication had any hot takes on feminism, men’s rights. or any of the other regular topics of this here blog. But I never got to the feminism, as I was quickly distracted by the site’s ongoing coverage of the burning issue of … people holding hands.
I should say its ongoing CREEPY AS FUCK coverage of people holding hands, mainly because their stories tend to involve newborn babies. And dead people, Lots of dead people. Take a look at the stories on the site’s dedicated HOLDING HANDS page and I think you’ll see what I mean.
Oh, it gets creepier.
I don’t even want to know how they know that.
If you enjoy stories of recently deceased people holding hands, you’ll probably love this story about centuries-old dead people holding hands. It even features some very evocative “conceptual art” to help you visualize what the once happy, now extremely dead, couple might have looked like in their prime.
The Epoch Times is not what you’d call a big fan of the Chinese government, what with the religious oppression and all, so it’s not altogether surprised to see the site’s handhoding coverage get political. Though I am a bit shocked that the handholders in this story are neither babies nor dead people.
I’m going to have to reconsider my own take on handholding, which up until now I’ve seen largely as a good thing, if sometimes also a little sweaty. But after seeing all these headlines I’m not sure I want to hold a hand ever again — even if it’s attached to a living human being..
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@WWTH
Just took the quiz. My husky is a hufflefluff.
I’d have gone with Dogwarts; but that’s still ever so cute.
Speaking of house sorting…
My friend and I decided that cats are all Slytherin.
@weirwoodtreehugger – aww, that’s adorable!
Also, your last comment made me think: what’s if snakes could be sorted into Harry Potter houses…and none of them went to Slytherin? 🙂
@WWTH & Naglfar:
my Heinz 57 is also a Hufflefluff, but I prefer to call her my Hobbit dog.
@Hambeast:
You get ads on YouTube?
Hie thee to thy nearest extension repository and get uBlock Origin! They will then pester you no more.
@Naglfar:
There has never yet been a true Communist government on earth. For true Communism requires that the people own (control, and derive the dividends from) the means of production. If the government owns the means of production (as in all so-called “state communism” governments thus far), but is not representative or answerable to the people in any way, then the people don’t really own the means of production, do they? Did Soviet steelworkers, even collectively, have any more voice in how their factories were run than American ones? Less, I suspect, than American ones working for a union shop, and certainly less say in their government. So if anything the Soviet Union was less communist than America, as are any latter-day imitators (particularly North Korea).
The closest analogue I can find to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Jong-Un’s systems is actually a kind of neofeudalism, with some degree of socialism within (and confined within) the ruling class while for the peasants they might as well be living under any of the assorted kings, barons, dukes, earls, and emperors of old.
No surprise at how easily these systems can turn into oligarchic capitalism, as under Putin and Jinping. That just requires the ruling class to stop sharing the wealth internally among themselves, and that just requires what feudalism does best: feuds.
Actually, oligarchic capitalism is clearly something of an attractor state. The only fascist state to survive WW II, Franco’s Spain, turned into a generic Putin-style illiberal oligarchy, and the United States went from non-oligarchic capitalism to oligarchic capitalism twice, in the late 1800s under the railroad tycoons and again in the 1970s under a more varied assortment of monopolists, mostly in banking, tech, defense, oil, and telco (with the recent addition of more troubling and dubious relations of defense: surveillance, mercenaries, and prison corporations — consider Booz Allen-Hamilton, where Snowden worked, Blackwater and Halliburton, and GEO Group, respectively).
Also @Naglfar:
Libertarians: we should be free to collude within our industry!
(workers start talking unionization, while consumers organize a boycott)
Also libertarians: Waaaah, no fair ganging up on us!
@Surplus
That’s been the general attitude of every libertarian I’ve ever met: loves having no rules for themselves, throws a fit whenever anyone else has any sort of freedom.
Surplus – Thanks! I shall look into it.