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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« on: Today at 07:37:42 PM »
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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024
« on: May 16, 2024, 08:48:44 PM »
European political news: the headline bit is that Robert Fico, hard-authoritarian prime minister of Slovakia, has narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The trigger seems to have been his attempts to bring state media under closer government control. I've often wondered why more people don't get assassinated in politics: don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it would be a good thing, but I think one can point to a fair number of prominent cases where it's worked in achieving political goals from the assassin's perspective. I think the main explanation is that senior political actors are much more scared of eroding norms against assassination than they are of, say, going to war, because the latter only involves a bunch of other people getting shot rather than themselves. I do worry that in Slovakia the failed attempt will now be used as a pretext for cracking down on the opposition.
Georgia is in turmoil and with continual protests over its 'foreign agent' law. I'm really personally sad seeing the country becoming more authoritarian: the new legislation adds large invasive monitoring obligations on anyone who recieves significant funding or payments from abroad, and is generally mostly intended as an attack on civil society institutions.
Also the Dutch now have a government! It's not a very good government, and we're still not sure who's going to be prime minister, but the four right-wing parties who were involved in coalition talks now have a coalition agreement, perhaps in large part spurred by polls showing that if the country had another election the far-right PVV would do even better at the expense of their now coalition partners, such that said partners had a strong negotiating incentive. The parties evidently hate each other and there are clearly VVD and NSC members who hate working with the PVV in particular so we'll see how that goes.
Georgia is in turmoil and with continual protests over its 'foreign agent' law. I'm really personally sad seeing the country becoming more authoritarian: the new legislation adds large invasive monitoring obligations on anyone who recieves significant funding or payments from abroad, and is generally mostly intended as an attack on civil society institutions.
Also the Dutch now have a government! It's not a very good government, and we're still not sure who's going to be prime minister, but the four right-wing parties who were involved in coalition talks now have a coalition agreement, perhaps in large part spurred by polls showing that if the country had another election the far-right PVV would do even better at the expense of their now coalition partners, such that said partners had a strong negotiating incentive. The parties evidently hate each other and there are clearly VVD and NSC members who hate working with the PVV in particular so we'll see how that goes.
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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Sex education in the UK - an update
« on: May 16, 2024, 01:02:25 AM »
Certainly eastern Europe has examples of similar positions on eg gender theory: Hungary's government has been very aggressive on this, it's appeared in Slovak rhetoric, in Russia too, and in Georgia.
I wonder if specifically sex ed in schools might be an Anglosphere/west issue because I'm not sure how many other countries were teaching it to afart with or, of those that do, had it holding those cultural connotations. It would be a really interesting thing to have a good international survey of.
I wonder if specifically sex ed in schools might be an Anglosphere/west issue because I'm not sure how many other countries were teaching it to afart with or, of those that do, had it holding those cultural connotations. It would be a really interesting thing to have a good international survey of.
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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Sex education in the UK - an update
« on: May 15, 2024, 05:24:16 PM »
Yeah, it's very damaging extreme conservative politics. The idea of "protecting the children" is just used as a bludgeon to damage young people's ability to navigate the world beyond the limited bubble of conservative imaginations - and yes, making it more likely they'll get bad information and advice making them much more vulnerable. It's quite scary really.
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General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: May pub - 30th or 31st?
« on: May 15, 2024, 11:25:33 AM »
Well, I think Jafeth's mild preference is as much of a vote as anyone has cast, so we'll probably go with the 30th 
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Exilian Media / Re: MUSIC: Jubal Sings Stuff!
« on: May 14, 2024, 08:50:53 AM »
Not sure how pleased I am with this one (or more accurately I'm rather dissatisfied with how it came out), but anyway here's a cover of Coral Crown from Hades II.