The Gaming Den

Right, so a friend of mine lives in China. Used to be Australian, but like all of our raw materials, was exported to China. Er, I mean, she fucked off to China to study, get a boyfriend and/or husband, and with intentions of getting permanent residency. That's all well and good.

Now it seems her main reasons for disliking Australia (there are many reasons why one could - I could provide heaps of my own!) and like China are:
1. She likes Asian men
2. See above
3. She hates Christianity slightly more than I do, and China made evangelism illegal - if your religion requires you to harass other people, your options are to go to Hell or go to jail.

Now, let's leave out anything from sankakucomplex, as they love Japan so much they hate China, so they go out of their way to cherrypick bad stuff happening in China due to quality control or whatever. Though... it happens an awful lot.

Here's the thing. She loves the place, and whenever she talks about it, it comes across as an advertisement. She's frequently said I need to go visit it and check it out. The thing is, yes, there's a dinosaur theme park, and a Romance of the Three Kingdoms theme park, and a "What Suikoden is based on" theme park. But it would literally take another Maoist famine or about 30 Red Cliffs for me to get close to visiting it.

I don't like people. I don't like being around people. It sickens me to sit on a bus, cramped in with all these other people and their stench. Living near a shopping centre was awesome, but I would only go there, get my shopping done, and fuck off very quickly.

She loves being around people and indeed being the centre of attention. So China is perfect for her. Because as part of the advertising thing she said how you have no privacy there and people are interested in what other people are doing - so will look at what you're reading, or walk up and offer advice based on what you're eating. Understand that when a stranger walks up and tells me biscuits are bad, soup is better for me, that's the third strike:
1. Existing without my express permission
2. Walking up to me uninvited and starting a conversation/looking into my affairs
3. Giving unsolicited advice

The third strike is an automatic kick to the head without trial. Apparently this is illegal in some countries, which may be a problem.

From the sound of it, I would be kicking people all fucking day. No wonder Lu Bu was so angry and had a habit of slaughtering people.

Granted, I totally helped the argument happen - she mentioned how they will just give traditional Chinese medicine based advice, and my response was "Ask them 'if traditional medicine works so well, why are they building so many hospitals*?'" She said they do use traditional medicine in the hospitals there. Now, my knowledge of TCM actually is that of an ignorant foreigner: tiger cock for impotence/infertility, rhino horn for headaches/fevers. Apparently they use plants, and have been using trials and double-blind tests and so on to weed out the ones that don't work, and their main problem is the placebo effect.

So my bad. Because my reply was basically "Have they tried something that actually works, instead?" Because traditional medicine in the West is a joke, and we have a word for alternative medicine that works: medicine. It stops being alternative because people use it. Apparently they like a more gradual approach (take X every day for ten years, and improve your diet and exercise and stop smoking and drinking, as opposed to "Here, we'll fix it but it might fuck your liver up"). Which does shit me, because the big problems typically require very aggressive treatment.

This caused an argument, and well, at the end of the day, you can suggest whatever fucking magic bean you want for cancer, but you actually need surgery, blasts of dangerous radiation, and incredibly toxic chemicals. Likewise there are really only two ways to stop serious pain: stop it from sending pain signals out from that area (the drugs that end in -caine), or tell the CNS to not transmit/register any received pain signals (opiates). And China shoots people who import the really big ones there, so shit like codeine and hydrocodone are tightly controlled. Her response to that is that it's no more controlled than the rest of Asia (which just hangs you for being a drug trafficker), which is not a defence, it just shows that the entire area is really shit in that field.

I did make it clear that anything Asia has that I want, I will import, and I have no intention of ever going there. Because I hate being crowded and surrounded by people, and although I've kicked the habit over a year ago, I still frequently have severe, crippling pains that actually need powerful prescription medication. And when it comes to general culture and the views of the government, I'll pick the one that rates top in the world in every field other than Freedom (ie "Being America").

I get that she hates Australia and thinks everyone needs to leave it (and I agree with the idea that more Australians need to journey outside to other places a bit), but my choice is not "The place that is ideal for her", it's Sweden, which is looking pretty ideal to me.

*There's a big push by the government to have a first-world public health care system to rivalhumiliate America. As a side-effect of this, they're encouraging people not to smoke, because they know who'll be footing the bill for that down the track.