@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

Alon

@Alon@mastodon.social

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

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scott, to random
@scott@carfree.city avatar

"There is no other definition of bigotry in the world that equates criticism of a state, even harsh and unfair criticism, with discrimination or bigotry against the state’s people. If one claimed that denunciations of the violent foundations of the Russian empire are 'anti-Slavic'[...] we would immediately see through that as just an instrumentalist defense of Russian state interests."

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4666860-the-antisemitism-awareness-act-bars-the-teaching-of-modern-jewish-history/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@esther_alter @dynamic @scott The history of anti-Zionist Jews is not at all the same as JVP, is the point. On the left, the alternative to Labor Zionism was Bundism... but the Bundists' views of Israel in the 1960s and 70s, and even into the 2000s among the ones who were still alive were the same as those of Meretz and the left side of Labor. The forced Yiddishization we see in some radical left spaces is much more like Soviet anti-Semitism than like any Jewish ideology.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@esther_alter @dynamic @scott The article is especially bad, since it lumps Labor Zionist criticism of Revisionist Zionism with anti-Zionism. Calling the Irgun a fascist militia was basically state policy under Ben-Gurion; it took Herut 15-20 years of dediabolization to get treated as a serious political party. In the 1990s, to launder the assassination of Rabin, some right-wingers accused him of having personally ordered the attack on the Altalena, their anti-state grievances are so deep.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@esther_alter @dynamic @scott Well, Ratz didn't exist until 1973. In the 1960s, the Bundists' take on Six-Day War was similar to that of Labor Zionists. The Meretz invocation is of Marek Edelman's criticism of Israel's behavior in the Second Intifada.

The prewar Bundists were, well, prewar. It matters how their ideology evolved later (again, Edelman), just as it matters that as Stalin's crimes became better known, Mapam (a party that had always IDed as Zionist) dropped the Stalin worship.

kechpaja, to linguistics
@kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com avatar

I'm at the in Prague, for the first time since right before the pandemic (2019).

One highlight so far: "If you think Indonesian and Malay are easy, you haven't met the rest of the family" - Brian Loo, in his talk on comparative phonology and grammar of Austronesian languages. This also holds if your primary exposure to Austronesian languages was Polynesian (Hawai'ian, Māori, etc).

Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person trying to wear a mask in indoor spaces, even at an event with over 800 people. I haven't gotten any pushback on this, but the combination of mask + queer hair + bad at pretending to be neurotypical does occasionally draw looks.

Overall, the feel of the event is definitely different from when it was 200-some people jammed into a youth hostel in Berlin, but similar to the Bratislava years (I never got to the Polish instances).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@kechpaja I'm surprised the other people at polyglot conferences are neurotypical...

CelloMomOnCars, to thailand
@CelloMomOnCars@mastodon.social avatar

Indonesia is moving its capital to Kalimantan island. And now,

" may have to consider relocating its capital because of rising sea levels.

Bangkok’s city government is exploring measures that include building dikes, along the lines of those used in the Netherlands, he said.

But “we’ve been thinking about moving”, Pavich said, noting that the discussions were still hypothetical and the issue was “very complex”."

https://borneobulletin.com.bn/climate-change-could-force-bangkok-to-move-official-warns/

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@CelloMomOnCars Nusantara needs to be understood not as a reaction to climate change, but as a combination of two different trends, both negative: the Transmigrasi program sending out Javans to the rest of Indonesia to act as, essentially, settlers amidst the local population; and the general hostility of both nationalists and populists to large cities, which violate their sense of rural-national values. "We must decentralize, the capital city is too big" has been a common trope for generations.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@CelloMomOnCars (A third reason to move the capital in some countries is to insulate an authoritarian government from popular pressure; Naypyidaw and the planned new capital for Egypt are both designed for this. The urban planning in such cities is designed to make it hard to protest and easy for the military to repress protesters. Nusantara has the same urban planning, but I don't know if that's part of its purpose or just convergent evolution in bad urban design.)

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Colinvparker @CelloMomOnCars "Develop the interior," I believe? @DiegoBeghin

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@CelloMomOnCars @DiegoBeghin @Colinvparker Some articles online about Naypyidaw:

https://www.yangongui.de/thematic-essays/naypyidaw-built-by-lonely-kings/
https://disegnojournal.com/newsfeed/naypyidaw-urban-design-myanmar-junta
https://averyreview.com/issues/24/auspicious-urbanisms
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/06/myanmars-military-built-new-capital-haven-power-other-countries-have-tried-that-too/
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/19/burmas-capital-naypyidaw-post-apocalypse-suburbia-highways-wifi

And on Egypt's New Administrative Capital (NAC):

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/50877/cairos-panopticon-20
https://dawnmena.org/egypts-new-administrative-capital-is-another-desert-folly/
https://www.nyusternedg.org/blog/the-new-administrative-capital-smart-city-vanity-project-or-military-stronghold
https://edition.cnn.com/world/egypt-new-administrative-capital-spc-intl/index.html

JonnElledge, to random
@JonnElledge@mastodon.london avatar

Never mind Starmer's speech - the one pledge on MY card is to double the size of Plymouth and give the southwest the major city it deserves.

https://jonn.substack.com/p/wanderlust

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@JonnElledge What's wrong with Bristol?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@JonnElledge Several hours? Do we need to crayon better interregional and intercity rail connections?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@JonnElledge Ouch. Is rail electrification at all in the works? I know Network Rail's working on it elsewhere, but has it gotten itself to the point of being able to build for the same 2-3 million €/km that it costs to electrify a double-track railway here?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@JonnElledge Yeah, that's why I'm bringing up electrification - EMUs can change speed faster than diesels, same reason why it's become a priority to electrify commuter lines with many stops (e.g. in and around Cardiff). Just in general, Britain has little electrification by European standards, let alone Indian/Chinese/Korean/Japaneese ones.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@JonnElledge I doubt the viaducts slow things down - there are some bridge-related slowdowns in the US, but that's a) very poor bridge construction standards whereas the UK built to high standards in the 19th century, and b) the Americans are being too conservative on top of that.

The curves look pretty bad, yeah. But the one randomly selected tight one I checked, at South Brent, looks like R = 480, so it's doable at 100 km/h. Not high-speed or anything, but should be faster than this...

ww3real, to random
@ww3real@mastodon.social avatar

Battle lines as of 2037-05-15. Higher-resolution images of all maps can be found at https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/ww3euroland370515.png, https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/ww3levant370515.png, https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/ww3thailand370515.png.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Truckasauruslex @ww3real One thing I could do is share all the maps in a single folder; then if you load them on your computer and click the arrow buttons they'll go one at a time, in chronological order per front (since the file names go front then date).

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@Truckasauruslex @ww3real They're all in the same folder in my computer, so for me it's very easy to do this scrolling. Only question is whether I have to upload a .png for each map or if there's a way to generate this from one .svg to save space.

Alon, to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

The only campus organization I want to see challenge Hillel for Jewish religious life had better be named Shammai.

scott, to random
@scott@carfree.city avatar

that's... a lot of money raised against @deanpreston

only way to beat it is with personal conversations, esp. early. get out there and door-knock for him if you can https://dean2024.com

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@scott Is Preston still NIMBYing any building larger than a luxury single-family house?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@edgeworth Why do you need environmental impact studies for apartment buildings?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@edgeworth It's the delays and modifications produced by the system, producing less housing as a result, more than outright denials.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@edgeworth Building code regulations in the US are not the same as environmental reviews, and also don't reduce accident fatalities but rather increase them because of the prohibition on single-stair mid-rises.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@edgeworth Not when he keeps delaying housing applications saying additional reviews are needed.

qkslvrwolf, to random
@qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social avatar

I like to follow rational lefties because I often get good news from them that I don't see even with my fairly left leaning, definitely not centrist set of stuff. But they seem to go off the rails at a fairly high rate.

Palestine has them jumping the shark at like 5x the normal rate, though.

Russian influence ops are just reveling in this shit.

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@qkslvrwolf I don't think it's even Russian influence ops - there's a lot of anti-Semitic conspiracism in any group that self-IDs as radical, and one of the things that can set it off is anything about Israel. It can also set off for separate reasons, like anything related to the Rothschilds or finance in general (compare how much "Goldman Sachs is destroying the economy" meming there was in the Great Recession with how little there was about banks without Jewish names, like Morgan Stanley).

DiegoBeghin, to random
@DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social avatar

Green NIMBYism is a mindset of "let's make our city really pleasant to live in... but let's not share it with anybody else". If you create a nice place but don't build housing, rents rise, excluding the poor. Sure, some of your housing may be public/subsidised but those will get waiting lists if you don't build more of them.

(Sorry about the rant, thoughts triggered by my election thread)

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin But Riviera cities are not run by the New Left - Estrosi is thoroughly right-wing...

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

@DiegoBeghin @failedLyndonLaRouchite @djasa Yes, and this is bad - Tempelhofer Feld is adjacent to real parks already.

Alon, (edited ) to random
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

What will happen first?

Alon,
@Alon@mastodon.social avatar

In the Holocaust, 75% of Dutch Jews were killed. The Dutch state just kept functioning and followed orders to surveil and deport.

Anyway, the Netherlands just announced a new extreme right coalition. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-dutch-government-look-opt-out-eu-asylum-rules-2024-05-16/

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