Why would a foreigner visit the US when you may be detained and treated like an animal at any time for the most trivial of reasons? Furthermore, why would you visit a country that's actively undermining others around the world? Why would you provide your financial support to that? It's the same reason Tesla sales have fallen off a cliff. You can only mistreat people so much before they push back.

I find this topic of fermented foods in different cultures pretty interesting. Surely they enabled people to survive a rough winter with food shortages. From an evolutionary perspective, it could be said that those peoples who didn't learn to produce fermented foods might've perished from starvation. It is an art that shouldn't be lost.

"and remains unproven"

Did that not happen? [0] shows an increase of £47bn on the department of health and social care from 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. That's £900m/week. If you compare to post-covid years then it's more like an increase of £28b or £540m/week. From the article linked in your comment, it seems to make a overly large "smoking gun" out of the fact that a referendum campaign website changed their website to reflect the fact that the referendum was now over.

[0] https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...

British politicians have been very keen to say this isn't the fault of Brexit because a) energy costs, and b) weather issues affecting production. But those things still don't necessarily lead to shortages if retailers can rapidly move produce around or make temporary orders with different suppliers to plug the gaps, like they can on the continent. That's what Brexit has made a lot harder. So it can be "Brexit's fault" or not "Brexit's fault" depending on what side of the fence you sit on.

I'm not, but I'm in contact with a Uyhur as well as a non-Uyghur Xinjiang resident, and I've researched this topic for a long time. See also my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34789836

TLDR: heavy-handed anti-terrorism response, even if it deserves criticism, is not at all the same as "millions in concentration camps", "forced labor" or even "genocide". Many allegations you read in the media are grave distortions of reality for the purpose of geopolitical attacks and fostering consent for a war against China.

I'm Chinese. I'm not commenting on Russia but please keep China out of "trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens". Chinese citizen have been found to be far more satisfied with their government and their future prospects than for example the US. This "propaganda"-sounding fact is even something found by western institutions such as Harvard, York University and Democracy Perception Index! Even here in the Netherlands, Chinese diaspora that I know and that have come here in the past 10-15 years are very positive about China. In China, police don't wear guns, and women can safely walk on the streets during the night — something which you can't say about many western countries.

Of course China still has many of its own problems. But the cartoonish notion that it's some sort of totalitarian police state dictatorship where everybody wants to flee from is propaganda. China and the west both have their own problems and their own strong points.