Are you using those links to go to the current unlocked mega threads for News?
Antifascism is locked from making posts (but not comments), but it looks like its been locked for 3 years for anybody who isn't a moderator. (not sure why though, maybe to keep potentially important things from not being seen by enough users).
Politics isn't locked for me.
Clicked randomly around the communities list and besides Antifascism, none show as locked.
A viral or bacterial plague could be stopped, much easier, through Capital working in its own self interest and generating some type of treatment/cure.
I'm pretty sure that prions are a problem because an "infection" can't be treated or cured with antibiotics, the spread can only be stopped when the infected organism dies and its remains are treated in a way that can chemically denature the malformed proteins. Its a cascade of malformed proteins causing other proteins to fold in a bad way which causes other proteins to fold in a bad way...
Maybe there's some meta context there about "social contagion" or the "cascading failures" of capitalism or "the domino theory" from the Western world during the Cold War.
Pam Bondi suceeds in getting Luigi tried with a death penalty for a guilty verdict. The threshold for guilt with this punishment is much, much higher than it would have been for a life sentence. Prosecutors have such a shitty case against Luigi that they lose. Luigi walks.
Okay, so instead of walking through a line and being handed a plate of food during the three times a day that the dining halls are open... you have to slow everything down to think about how much "freedom bucks" you're spending per item, per meal. And if you guess wrong, slow down the lines even more to pull out cash or debit/credit card to pay the remainder if you go over.
With an "all day" chow hall, I expect the amount of food waste will be increased dramatically.
There should be an "The Onion" article about the troops being charged for every gallon of fuel and bullet fired.
Back in my day, your pay was auto deducted every 2~4 weeks to pay for the dining facilities. This was pulled out, even if you didn't eat at the dining facilities. There was/is paperwork to get reimbursed if you are unable to get to a dining facility when in garrison (and not training out in the field) but most of us never bothered with it. I think when doing training/deployments and being fed, the dining facility deduction was stopped but I can't remember with any certainty.
Biden has been in politics pretty much his entire adult working life... he had ample time to know what the fuck was up and play "if I were President of the USA, here's what I could do with that power".
So doing a google search for "2023 Gallup research poll lonliness" brings up a bunch of articles saynig that, on average, across the world about 1 in 4 people are lonely. (Even with me misspelling "loneliness")
The article gives the number of lonely people in China as 23%.
Which is is about 1 in 4 people.
So this seems less like a "crisis" and more that China is a fairly average country when it comes to self reported loneliness of its people.
China’s one-child policy has been singled out as a cause of this wave of loneliness, but that might not hold in light of international comparisons. Japan, which has a comparable total fertility rate to China, is less lonely.
The one child policy has been done away with for over 10 years now. There is no discussion about why having more children in a society would make its people report being less lonely. The link in this article goes to, "Too many men: China and India battle with the consequences of gender imbalance", which is another SCMP blogpost from 2018 that seems fairly obsessed about the number of unmarried men in China, men not having sex, and the amount of money not being spent on having what I'm assuming to be a typical Western-style nuclear family (mortgage, childcare expenses and medical bills, education bills, all the consumer spending that goes on with children who outgrow clothes and toys, etc).
There could be a critique of cultures that have an expectation of having a "family" that looks a particular way (in this case, I'm guessing its a one husband with one wife and 2.5 kids along with all the trappings).
But I have the sneaking suspicion that the South China Morning Post's blogposters doen't have any problems with that.
This article just seems to be focusing on "science as magic" stuff... which I think of as "fantasy stories where there's space ships instead of dragons". Which, makes sense with the successes of the Game of Thrones and Twilight franchises. Publishers are going to green light more manuscripts with supernatural critters to get horny over and sword swinging hack and slash renfaire setpieces that might have dragons.
We don't know these people personally, most of us don't obsessively follow the statements made by these people, and out only mental touchpoint is a reference to a narrow body of their work from the entirety of their lifetime.
Outside of "Manufacturing Consent" and some "free speech" documentaries that had clips of a speech or talk, it takes people harping on these "revelations" to either keep reminding us filthy casuals that some of our potential faves (Chomsky) ... shouldn't.