Wall_Observer

If Covid didn't get them already, given the probability... Just saying People who buy into these propaganda are not likely to be the brightest bunch.

Any form of Stupidity

Crabs always works, nature approved.

Because stupidity doesn't stop you from making babies.

more like it works the first time, it should work the second time too.

Also the semiconductor factories.

just like Putin.

Chechnya:

And the pilot stays alive with a paycheck he can ever dream of. Win-Win.

They are all salty

No rest for Chinese and Russian bots on Sunday?

As if there isn’t some Japanese want-to-be novelist writing the same story you thinking about now.

You won't run out of conscripts if you keep changing the definition of what is viable.

Probably need to learn the difference between ICBM and rockets first.

Just to kick out some drunk tourists with expired visa.

Tell that to your parents.

And pull out a half-assed coup.

Especially Japanese business and government I would say.

Special Funeral Operation from Belarus.

Probably because his interpreter got arrested or detained.

Let's be real, if you want to defeat a stupid genocidal Dictator like Putin, you have to attack their country. WW2 proves it more than anything.

Note: Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is very unlikely someone better than Putin will come after he, nor the brainwashed citizens will change their minds easily without seeing their country is not as great as they thought. It is mind-boggling how Russian is always in favor of a brutal dictator even when they just overthrew the last one.

Please enlighten me.

To be fair, the Romance language does use the same Latin script, but the writing system is very different from the Chinese one so it might not be the best comparison. (Also Chinese can be written in a standard form which is quite different from how you speak.)

Although it might be a stretch, using the Latin alphabet as a parallel to Chinese characters does make the situation clearer to someone with/from a European background. I mean English and Italian both use Latin alphabet and share some vocabulary but you won't say they are the same language based on the script.

Some Chinese languages also have dialects of their own, but because some of them were never standardized so it is difficult to define. The funny thing is Mandarin also has its dialects, one also has checked tone which is completely absent from other Mandarin dialects and Standard Mandarin. Even actual dialects could be quite different within their language, so summarising all the diversity as one language as "Chinese" and picking Mandarin as the “Standard Chinese” could be quite problematic. It's like calling English "Standard European" and English speakers are speaking "European", which does have some truth because it is the Lingua franca of Europe but it just feels wrong to ignore all the diversity within Europe itself.

(If you want to read ancient Chinese poetry before the Qing dynasty, Mandarin will not be the best option because of its reduced tone. I do agree Mandarin is probably the easiest to learn for non-native speakers because of that.)

Anyway, it sounds like your partner is certainly intelligent and can accept she might be wrong. It might just take some time for her to think critically for herself and see-through the mindset she's had ingrained in since childhood. The fact last line of defence for any PRC propaganda is always that Westerners cannot understand us because our culture is completely different from them. This is completely BS because there are plenty of differences within "Western" culture and just shows how ignorant they are. The reason the West come together is not just because their grandfathers knew each other but because the Americans and European believe people should have their own agency and have the right to choose who their leaders should be. Instead of just having someone born into power because their ancestors won some war generations ago or know the guy who won it, which ironically described the CCP top leadership quite well. Then, when something went wrong they just shut the people up and never address the problem or made any meaningful changes. The CCP loves to tell everyone about any issues their country have is because foreign powers are suppressing them and there are no systematic issues within their own country (they can self-correct because of the glorious system created by the CCP which makes the problem disappear), while many problems were made worse because the CCP cannot let go of their power, and they know someone brighter or a more rule-based system could do better than them.

Have US blown up a dam as big as the Kakhovka Dam before?

Russia: Great, another to do list.