Messages

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: Today at 02:04:49 AM »

Illia Ponomarenko on Ukraine's internal problems (birdsite IAPonomarenko/status/1791440191615307900 )

There's one thing that one should keep in mind as he or she follows the developments in Ukraine.

The people of Ukraine are actually fighting two wars at the same time. Apart from the Russian invasion, the largest war of aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler, there's another war -- a domestic war of our people against so many things that undermine us from within.

It's about corrupt officials, it's about incompetent and populistic decision-makers, it's about those who embezzle our money allocated on fortifications and defenses, it's about those who give exemptions from military conscription to sports-betting firms (with very murky tax records), and don't it to charity foundations providing the military with fast and vital aid.

It's also, for instance, about entire departments of the SBU security service spying on anti-corruption investigating journalists during the war with Russia.

It's a war against so many things that try to drag us back to what we used to be - a weak and corrupt informal Russian colony.

Just like the "military" war with the foreign invader, this internal war for saving this country from its own dark side has had its victories and setbacks.

Every time high-profile malpractice is exposed in the open, it is fought daily, triggering a scandal and a public uproar.

And these two wars are interconnected.

A favorable outcome of the war against Russia's aggression is not possible without significant victories in this domestic war of ours.

That's our life and the struggle for national survival in the last... ten years!

And I must say that sometimes I look through the news, I can't help but keep thinking about the fact that so many of those insolent pen-pushers in high cabinets don't deserve to even hold a candle to all our men and women who save this country every single day and do the impossible on the fronts of Russia's war.

The Ukrainian military also seems to have both aspects, with those who figured out how to fight Russia to a standstill since 2014 on one side, and the older school of Soviet-minded commanders on the other.  I suspect that is one reason why expanded conscription is controversial, nobody wants to die because someone embezzled the money for fortifications and the commanding officer is stuck on doing things the way his textbooks told him to do it.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Sex education in the UK - an update

« on: May 16, 2024, 03:30:47 AM »

For sure, Russia and affiliated governments don't like any side of LGBTQ+ but I don't think they would like the model which I learned from queer people and feminists any better with concepts like performativity, the construction of gender, unachievable and self-contradictory gender ideals as a tool of social control, etc.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Sex education in the UK - an update

« on: May 15, 2024, 06:59:22 PM »

People who are closer to schools in Canada than I am think that gender ideology is spreading like Magic: the Gathering in the 1990s, but its hard to say whether teachers or social media are the main vectors (probably depends on the school!)  I would roughly define gender ideology as the belief that gender identity is real and important but biological sex is unimportant (and contrast it with the view that gender is a system of social categories and stereotypes which societies impose on biological sex).

The Vagina Museum had some social media posts about the UK's previous 'teachers, don't say gay' law from 1988.

Mandatory reminder that the relationship between parents and schools in societies with mandatory mass education is inherently fraught and that both parents and teachers can do horrible things to children

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Sex education in the UK - an update

« on: May 15, 2024, 06:52:56 PM »

There is a global war against sex work and the ability to pay for sexy art online too although those movements are a bit more of a 'horseshoe' where people who identify as feminists ally with religious reactionaries.

Edit: I wonder if there is a reactionary war on sex ed outside the rich Anglo countries?  Reactionaries and xenophobes network internationally but ideas spread faster when Canadian hears an American podcast regurgitate an Australian blog post.

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General Gaming - The Arcade / Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori

« on: May 14, 2024, 04:22:07 AM »

Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori where you play a postal rider in the Mongol Empire seems like an Exilian kind of game? https://store.steampowered.com/app/2697000/Windstorm_The_Legend_of_Khiimori/ (warning: very computation-intensive page!  I won't link to the YouTube video trailer because this forum software would embed it and that is not very privacy-friendly)

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Cultures are Weird

« on: May 11, 2024, 11:47:59 PM »

Doug Saunders has a journalistic essay from 2015 on the type of people who migrate from Africa and West Asia to Europe (a lot of people with training or education looking to turn a good-life-for-Nigeria into a good life and limited by state policies which make migration an all-or-nothing process rather than something you can try out for a few years) https://www.dougsaunders.net/2016/06/2395/

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: May 09, 2024, 04:39:55 PM »

Canada seems to have inherited Britain's allergy to formal coalitions.

Its another of those leftovers from the 19th century, where many Older and Wiser Heads act like Canada has a two-party system even though that has not been true since the NDP were founded in the 1950s (the Reform Party of Canada in 1987, Bloc Quebecois in 1991) and Canada's parliament has as many parties as most European countries.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: May 06, 2024, 07:28:16 PM »

This blog is mostly thoughts on US politics, but it has a post on the Negev Bedouin, one of the groups in the former Mandate of Palestine which people outside the region rarely think about https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-invisible-occupation

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2024

« on: May 06, 2024, 07:17:41 PM »

How do the British parties line up around Israeli-Palestinian relations? In Canada the Tories are strongly for the Israeli government, the Liberals moderately so in practice but occasionally speak against their land grabbing and repression, the NDP and Greens have some representatives who are more pro-Palestinian.  I am not sure about the Quebec parties which are often ethno-nationalist.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: May 04, 2024, 05:30:29 PM »

Pretty good long-form essay on why the Trudeau government in Canada is so unpopular https://thewalrus.ca/justin-trudeaus-last-stand/ Skips pipelines, the Tories' threats to end the carbon tax and defund the CBC, and the full scale of Canada's foreign policy problems in India, China, the USA (they have an election coming up and their own populists), and the Arab world (Canadian troops are in Syria and Iraq and the Canadian government has a position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)

Canada Post is in a rough financial situation and is another traditional target for right-wing governments.

Three Indian citizens have been arrested in Canada and charged with the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar; police are investigating whether three other murders by gunfire were related https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nijjar-killing-arrests-made-1.7192807

Edit: fourth arrest in Burnaby https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-police-announce-arrest-of-fourth-suspect-in-hardeep-singh-nijjar/

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate

« on: May 01, 2024, 05:20:17 PM »

The difference in boiling points is why things are fried in hot oil (and why deep friers are so dangerous).

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK Politics 2024

« on: April 28, 2024, 05:23:06 PM »

I can't make sense of the contrast between the UK as chronically depressed (low on energy, fixated on the past, self-destructive, and unable to see actions which might lead to a better future - the way Labour refuses to state clearly which disastrous Tory policies they would reject is symptomatic) and that people on the continent are still risking their lives to get there.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Cultures are Weird

« on: April 25, 2024, 07:36:49 PM »

Stormy Daniels' life after suing Donald Trump included a ghost-hunting vlog https://www.patheos.com/blogs/fivefoldlaw/2021/06/21/stormy-justice-and-justice-for-stormy/  Ghost hunting and the paranormal appeal to rural older men with less formal education in the USA, so I guess this fits her tours of rural strip clubs?  All forms of video rely on putting cute people with melodious voices in front, although you can succeed in any of them without being cute and pleasant-sounding.  The trouble with doing so online is that many of the SoCal tech firms keep blacklists of uppity women to suppress (15 years ago it was literal text files which they traded, today its probably a little bit more complex).

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate

« on: April 18, 2024, 06:27:54 AM »

People often demonstrate quenching a blade in oil, pulling it out, watching it catch on fire, quenching it in oil again, and repeating until it stops igniting.  https://yewtu.be/iQ4_mWnGn6E?t=411

Quenching plate armour is difficult because its large thin pieces with complex three-dimensional shapes which can easily distort.  Armourers today usually fasten the parts temporarily together with wire.  I remember that the PBS Nova on reproducing a Greenwich armour had some good clips https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-shining-knight-preview-em5biq/

Europeans wrote basically nothing about iron production and ironworking before the 16th century.  It was just another dirty manual trade like pottery or pig farming.  Theophilius only touches on ironworking because he decided he wanted to write about how to make tools for working glass, ivory, and precious metals.  And iron is unstable and often has villainous things done to it by conservators collectors and metal detectorists, whether that is assigning conscripts to scrub the palace armoury clean, or baking the sword they just dug up to stabilize it, or applying modern browning and bluing solutions.  So its hard to be sure of lots of the details, especially because arms & armour studies never became institutionalized.  Its a few curators, a few archaeologists, and a lot of people without academic jobs.

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Questions and Suggestions - The High Court / Re: Styling Blockquotes

« on: April 14, 2024, 07:20:18 PM »

Thanks for taking the time to fix this!  I did not know that there was a shortcut to refresh the stylesheet for a page.