mike carey

I can see what's cumin here.

https://justfor.fans/welcome.php If you can find a link to his page there, there may be parts of it that are outside the paywall.

Happy Birthday!

I think it's useful not to tell someone that they are a racist because something that they did is racist, or based on racialised norms. Racism is a continuum, not a binary. Sometimes shaming is necessary, often education and creating awareness is what is most appropriate.

Of course! (Although Zhong Shan is not the same name as Yat Sen: While at school in Hong Kong he got the art name Yat-sen (Chinese: 逸仙; pinyin: Yìxiān). Sūn Zhōngshān (孫中山), the most popular of his Chinese names, is derived from his Japanese name Nakayama Shō (中山樵), the pseudonym given to him by Tōten Miyazaki while in hiding in Japan.)

I may have been arguing against a proposition from someone else that you were challenging in your post rather than what you actually said. Leaving aside the external references (King George etc), the PRC government is a successor of previous governments.

Support animals need to be trained, not some random animal that makes you feel 'happy'. And they need to be for a specific clinical condition. Self medication with your own ferret or peacock should not be acceptable. But trained support dogs for people with PTSD, yes.

'Could be argued' is a nonsense, the current government of the PRC is the legal successor of the republic, which in turn is the successor of the Qing dynasty. If you want to argue that Mao is a quasi-emperor, you should equally argue that Washington is the new king who replaced George III.

It's more, perhaps exclusively, about symmetry.

Ummm. I was speaking purely on a theoretical basis. … Really, I was.

Case in point when you are in the same bed at the same time. What am I saying?? Anyway ...

Beautifully put.

I'm not convinced there is much privacy anywhere, @Eric Hassan!

I was perfectly happy to use SMS and voice calls over the PSTN, but I found that many people in the US have phone numbers that can't receive (or in some cases send) calls or texts to foreign numbers. I don't have unlimited texts or calls on my phone, so I like the fact that I can use my home internet or public Wi-Fi to call at essentially no cost. I've had regular conversations with people in the US that I probably wouldn't have had without WhatsApp. When I'm in the US, it's a useful adjunct to using roaming on my phone - my phone plan makes texts and voice calls there expensive and data insanely prohibitive, so Wi-Fi and WhatsApp are great for me. I'm not familiar with the other apps referenced here.

Mandarin is as different from Cantonese as English is from French. The difference is the writing system is shared and mutually understood. (As is Japanese if it is written only in Kanji.) What we call Mandarin is the 'standard' and official language. 'Dialect' is a misnomer.

There was a war, the Chiang Kai-shek clique lost.

I can't think of a city name in China that memorialises a person. Not even the Yellow Emperor.

Canton is the name that westerners use, derived (I believe) from the Cantonese version of the name Guangdong (the province). Guangzhou is the name of the city, but we have used the name Canton for both. Thankfully, no one uses Xiang Gang instead of Hong Kong or Ao Men instead of Macau. That would confuse us too much.

I think it's valid to say that if species-like populations can't interbreed (with fertile progeny) they are definitely separate species, but I'm not sure the reverse is true.

The different pronunciations in English are based on Anglophone ignorance. 'Peking' is the way of rendering the name of the city in the Latin alphabet using the French post office romanisation system. The creators of that spelling would have pronounced it Beijing. And it is colloquially referred to as 'Bei Da', a contraction of Beijing Daxue. The Eastern Capital is usually pronounced using the local dialect, which is rendered in English as 'Tokyo'.

Lol. To an Australian, saying they were wearing 'a speedo' would be the equivalent of saying 'a trouser'. [if you asked one of us what a speedo was, we'd say the dial in your car that says how fast you are going.]

Existing phone. WhatsApp is an internet application, it doesn't use or interact with your voice connection on the phone. You have to have data services enabled on your phone or have a Wi-Fi connection to use it. Once you set it up, the phone number is a label for your connection, it doesn't need a PSTN connection to work and doesn't use your phone number via your telco. When you have the app, [my Samsung] contact list has a WhatsApp icon on contacts that also have the app.

@wklucas, Qatar is one of only two international airlines that fly from Canberra, so I'm tempted to use them. Their fares to NYC are competitive with the usual trans-Pacific airlines (although they don't have premium economy). Doubt I'd use them to fly to LAX, though!

Not if he's going to Doha. That is in Qatar which isn't one of the UAE emirates. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are currently blockading Qatar, and there is no travel between them. So airline yes, Emirates no. Probably Qatar Airways.