É comum ouvir críticas à China como “não se pode falar mal do presidente”. Para muitos chineses, essa frase soa muito estranha. A pergunta que surge automaticamente na cabeça do chines é: “Mas por que alguém criticaria o presidente?” Para entender essa diferença de visão é preciso observar como funciona a seleção e a progressão de quem chega ao poder na China. O caminho se parece mais com uma carreira burocrática longa e competitiva do que com a política eleitoral ocidental. O primeiro passo é a filiação ao Partido Comunista da China (PCC), que constitui a espinha dorsal do poder. O processo é seletivo e demorado: o candidato precisa de recomendação, histórico familiar atestado por membros do partido, pelo menos um ano de acompanhamento com redações e exames políticos e, depois, mais um ano como membro probatório. Ter passado pela Liga da Juventude Comunista ou mesmo ter sido representante de turma no ensino fundamental e médio conta positivamente como indício precoce de liderança. Além da filiação partidária, o sistema valoriza fortemente a formação técnica. Há uma tradição consolidada de engenheiros e cientistas nas altas esferas — os últimos presidentes, incluindo Xi Jinping, têm formação em engenharia. Antes de assumir cargos de liderança, o quadro precisa demonstrar resultados expressivos em sua atividade profissional. Ninguém chega ao topo sem antes passar décadas administrando a base. O político inicia em escalas pequenas — um quarteirão, um comitê de rua ou a gestão de uma praça, por exemplo. Nessa função, precisa mostrar excelência concreta: garantir a zeladoria e a infraestrutura (lâmpadas, brinquedos da praça, limpeza), avaliar problemas de segurança e trânsito no entorno e manter contato direto com os moradores, recolhendo reclamações e sugestões. Se cumprir metas de desenvolvimento econômico, redução da pobreza e boa avaliação da população, é promovido. A partir daí a carreira avança de forma piramidal e geográfica concorrendo com outros iguais. O quadro passa a gerenciar um bairro inteiro, depois um distrito municipal, torna-se prefeito de uma cidade de médio porte e, em seguida, governa províncias com populações maiores que muitos países. Só depois disso disputa espaço nos órgãos centrais em Pequim. Para alcançar o círculo máximo do poder, como o Comitê Permanente do Politburo (apenas sete pessoas), exige-se em geral uma trajetória de 30 a 40 anos de serviços contínuos e bem avaliados. Esse processo se apoia em eleições indiretas e piramidais. Os cidadãos votam diretamente apenas para os congressos populares locais. Esses representantes elegem os do nível provincial, que por sua vez escolhem os membros da Assembleia Popular Nacional. A Assembleia e os comitês internos do PCC definem os cargos mais altos do Executivo, incluindo o presidente. Ao longo de toda a escalada, as avaliações são frequentes e incluem cumprimento de metas macroeconômicas, pesquisas de opinião e investigação de conduta. Desse modo, a figura do presidente deixa de ser vista, por grande parte da população, como um político qualquer. Por isso a crítica direta e pública soa, para muitos chineses, menos como um direito natural e mais como algo que precisa de justificativa muito forte. Diante desse caminho de décadas de resultados comprovados e avaliações constantes, você, se fosse chinês, acharia algo normal falar mal do presidente?

Bir adam, belediyenin bir mevsimde yapamadığı işi anında yaptı.

Hey @grok, here is a tough one for you. Rank the major world religions from most to least peaceful based solely on their core scriptures. No hedging, no “it depends,” no modern practice. Strict-numbered list only (1 = most peaceful / least violent texts). Include at least: Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Islam. Start with 1. and go down.

1. Jainism 2. Buddhism 3. Sikhism 4. Christianity 5. Hinduism 6. Judaism 7. Islam Core scriptures rank by violence content: Jainism mandates absolute ahimsa with no exceptions; Buddhism's precepts ban killing without just-war doctrine; Sikhism's Guru Granth stresses peace, force only as last resort; the others contain more warfare justifications and commands.

What’s the hardest scene in all of fiction? The kind of scene that makes you sit back and think, “Yeah, nothing is topping this.”

Education is important. Knowing physics is important.

Men are going to empathize more with rapists than with a woman they consider ugly.

Cleopatra. You picked Cleopatra. Out of three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history, three thousand years of pharaohs, pyramids, medical texts, mathematical papyri, architectural achievements that engineers still study today, you reached for the one ruler whose dynasty wasn’t even Egyptian. The Ptolemaic dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great. His descendants intermarried obsessively, and we mean obsessively, sibling-marriage-as-policy obsessively, within their own dynasty, while also marrying into the Seleucid royal family, founded by another Macedonian general, Seleucus I Nicator. What the Ptolemies were not, in their dynastic origins, was indigenous Egyptian. They were a Hellenistic foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt for its last 275 years before Roman annexation. At the very end. Before them came the Persian conquests. Before the Persians came over two and a half millennia of Egyptian civilization. So your argument against the Africanness of ancient Egypt is: the last dynasty, installed by a Macedonian conqueror, whose ruling family maintained its predominantly Greek bloodline, wasn't indigenous Egyptian. That's like arguing Britain was never Celtic because William the Conqueror was Norman. You have just independently confirmed that foreign conquerors took control of a civilization that had existed in Africa for millennia before they arrived. Thank you, Mike. You walked in to rebut the argument and handed it ammunition instead. The pyramids were not built by Macedonians. They were built by ancient Egyptians. Africans. More than 2,500 years before Cleopatra was even born.

Egypt is the most revealing case of all. Ancient Egypt, with its pyramids, its philosophy, its mathematical precision, its medicine, its legal systems, its art that still stops people in museum halls, is acknowledged as one of the great civilizations of human history. And for most of Western academic history, it was also systematically, carefully, persistently de-Africanized. Ancient Egyptians were depicted as lighter than the evidence suggests. The obvious geographical and cultural connections to the rest of Africa were minimized. The Nile Valley civilizations that predated the dynastic period were underdiscussed. Cheikh Anta Diop spent his career arguing that ancient Egypt was an African civilization. Not Mediterranean. Not racially ambiguous. Not a separate category inserted between "real" Africa and "real" civilization. African. The reaction from Western academia was not engagement. It was dismissal. It was decades of institutional resistance. It was the particular fury of a field that had built its understanding of the ancient world on the careful, necessary, structurally load-bearing separation of Egypt from the continent it sits on. Because if Egypt is African, then the sentence "Africa had no civilization before Europe arrived" doesn’t just need revision. It becomes incoherent. Not just false, but the precise inversion of the truth. And not just about one dynasty or one period but about the foundational story of Western civilization itself, which drew substantially from Egyptian knowledge in mathematics, medicine, architecture, philosophy. Which means Western civilization did not bring knowledge to Africa. It learned from it. The mummies are still there. The DNA studies have complicated every clean narrative. Diop’s work has been increasingly vindicated by genetic and archaeological evidence. The resistance continues anyway. But the instinct, the deep structural instinct to separate the civilization you want to celebrate from the continent you needed to be empty, that instinct shaped the field for generations. You cannot claim the pyramids and also claim the continent that built them had no history. You cannot do both with a straight face. They tried anyway.

You can justake up black history because nobody wrote anything down and it's a free-for-all. They were Japanese you know.

Phone photography. Let’s see yours. Here’s mine.

Which actor had the most impressive career reinvention?

Hey @grok, can you identify this mysterious device from 1962 ? 👀

Anyone to bypass the coins to get free gas? Lol someone definitely was doing that

"Bitter Sweet Symphony" earned almost $5 million in publishing, Billboard estimated, and Richard Ashcroft, who wrote it, got $1,000. Asked in 1999 whether the deal was fair, Keith Richards said: "If the Verve can write a better song, they can keep the money." Once it sold, the band says, the demand became 100% or the record came out of the shops. 22 years later, sunglasses on, in front of the Ivor Novello Awards press wall, Ashcroft says Mick and Keith have given him the royalties back. In June 1997 Ashcroft was 25. The Verve had looped 4 bars of an old orchestral cover of the Stones' "The Last Time" and built a new song on top, with 24 string players and his words. Virgin had cleared the recording with Decca, but the composition belonged to ABKCO, the company of former Stones manager Allen Klein. Klein refused clearance, saying the band had used more than agreed. The settlement gave ABKCO 100% of the publishing and put Jagger and Richards on the writing credit. In 1998 Nike ran the song in a TV ad, which the band's management said it would never have agreed to. In 2018 Ashcroft said someone stole "God-knows-how-many million dollars" off him in 1997. The 1998 Songwriter of the Year statuette is solid bronze. The publishing on his biggest song sat in New York for 22 years. In April 2019, after his managers asked, Jagger and Richards signed over their future songwriter royalties. The 22 years before stayed where they were. If your song had paid someone else for 22 years, would you thank them on stage when they stopped?

Son: Dad, is that soul, pop, or rock? Dad: Son, that's the beauty of it. Back then, nobody cared what you called it. When a voice sounded like THAT, you just turned it up.

She is absolutely right. He should be playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition. I'm with ya, hon!

The Green Party has become an extremist group. Long gone are the days that it protected trees.

It seems that GROWTH is proving hard to find in UK... as in other countries too... but once we get growth everything will come up roses... #budget #r4today