In more "left-wing anti-Semites think opposition to anti-Semitism is a German rather than Jewish thing" news, Greta Thunberg held a rally in Leipzig against Israel a week ago. She lives in Sweden, where the national government has fascists with anti-Semitic roots in the coalition. White anti-anti-racists who don't socialize with minorities think anti-racism is an invention of guilty white liberals and human resources; left-wing anti-Semites think guilty Germans invented anti-anti-Semitism.
This says there were 200 people at the demonstration. It's not some solidarity with where a big protest was; in Stockholm, left-wing attitudes toward Israel are such that she could swing a bigger crowd, in front a suitable target like the Israeli embassy or a government building, with the force of a single tweet. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/kritik-thunberg-102.html
@jemmesedi@paninid@MagdaTeter For what it's worth: there was deterioration in the status of Jews in Spain when the Visigoths converted from Arianism to Catholicism, so recognizable medieval religious anti-Semitism goes back to very early in the Middle Ages.
I'm glad Gérald Darmanin is seeing anti-Semitic extremism at protests and banning them. Now, let's talk about Gilets Jaunes sympathizers, anti-immigration protests, anti-gay rights protests, and everyone else who Darmanin hopes will vote for him in four years (and won't, because they're captured by R-Haine)...
@PGLux@DiegoBeghin Inequality in quality of schooling is not a uniquely French problem - the US and UK have it to extreme extents too, and the US also has very high levels of racial segregation in schools precisely because it has very high levels of localism and devolution.
What's the least frequent intercity rail route anywhere in the world that's actually successful? I know some French lines with a train every three hours but they're not especially successful - the main TGV lines run every 1-1.5 hours, maybe with one irregular two-hour gap sometime. In Germany everything runs hourly.
Why are people boosting reactionary "medieval peasants actually were freer than modern office workers" shit into my feed? And why is it from kolektiva.social of all places? No, people, peasants who owed a heritable debt and had to give their best animal to the lord when the head of the household died and couldn't leave the farm were not actually free. Stop acting like your boredom at meetings is oppression and stop doing reactionary socialism.
Special demerits go to the line about how taxes then were lower than today. Taxes in absolutist regimes are lower than in democracies, because democracies first of all have rule of law making it possible to charge taxes without turning that into threat of extralegal extraction, and second because they have redistribution. Taxes in Hong Kong are much lower than in Sweden; where are workers freer?
The point Debin Ma makes in his papers is that in Qing China, taxes were low as a strategy to permit magistrates to take money from the commoners extralegally, for example by demanding bribes. This way, the magistrates got paid in a way that the emperor could not know in enough detail, guaranteeing them a measure of security since the emperor could otherwise expropriate them at will. Manorialism worked the same way; the exploitation is just invisible to people who don't care to look into it.
@Alon@nyrath On the moon you’d benefit a lot from a rail system that doesn’t rely on gravity to hold it to the tracks. Systems like that exist (e.g. for roller coasters). They don’t make sense on earth for HSR because gravity is already quite strong and banking beyond 45 degrees is too much total acceleration. But on the moon they probably would, and any extra friction they give is likely unimportant because the load is so much lighter.
@nyrath@Alon The moon is a hyperloop by default. Since moon dust is really nasty this make sense - you don't need to worry about leaks so the tube can be simpler and cheaper to design. No airlocks to get in/out. several thousand km/h speeds.
Of course the elephant in the room is this - no matter what the "this" is - will be expensive to build. I don't see the moon ever getting populated enough to be worth the costs to build anything other than off road vehicles. There just isn't enough to do there for more then a few scientific outposts. We will never teraform it to the point where a colony can be self sustaining. (Mars is the most likely planet to terrraform - and we are not sure. Maybe Venus could be done as well, but it is much harder)
@Alon I doubt they'll build it at this price, either they find a way to make it cheaper or it's a no build. From the reporting it seems they messed up the bidding, tried to offload too much construction risk on the contractors.
Iran is confirmed to have launched dozens of UAVs and cruise missiles to attack Israel, in retaliation for the assassination of an IRGC commander in Syria. The drones are slow and will take six to nine hours to get there; the missiles are faster and estimated to make contact in two hours.
@bdsint 7.10 rocket death patterns exhibited something similar - a few Bedouin rocket deaths, which Iron Dome should have intercepted. Of course the vast majority of the dead were Jews, but that's because the ground massacres targeted Jews, and in at least one case spared an Arab (not sure if Bedouin or not) who they would have killed or abducted were he Jewish.
Hamas just fired rockets on Ashkelon (okay, it's war, that part I get), calling it a colonial city. And that's what I mean when I complain that Hamas has not articulated any war aim short of "ethnically cleanse the Jews out of Israel." It recently shot down talk of negotiations for a prisoner exchange. It downplays its own casualties, where usually it announces them in order to point out Israel is the stronger side as the occupier. Its intent, evinced in both words and actions, is genocidal.
@Alon@seachanger and in the wake of an attack against civilians of this scale, it really doesn't matter if Hamas has the practical means to carry out their ultimate goals.
It's possible to believe that the violence is an outcome of apartheid policies while also believing they are not in any way justified by the existence of those policies.
In Europe, we don't really have an inequality problem. We have a growth problem. Most required fixes are inequality-neutral:
Improving cross-border infrastructure, labor mobility, and corporate ownership to increase scale
Liberalizing labor migration
Increasing Anglophony
Some fixes are inequality-reducing, like combating Italian economic dwarfism. Some are inequality-increasing: reducing place-based subsidies to declining regions. But on net, what we need is growth, keeping ~0.3 Gini.
@PGLux@bilginveperk@DiegoBeghin American and Northern European pharma reduced corona from a killer to a bad cold. Cuban pharma has done what exactly - taken Cuba from having slightly better health outcomes than Southern Europe before the revolution to having slightly worse ones now?
When writing alt history, I like playing with the wank/screw dichotomy in the genre (wank = country or faction gets stronger/richer/portrayed more positively; screw = the opposite). For example, let's say Germany unifies under a Großdeutsche Lösung, is forced to democratize in 1885, avoids starting two world wars and the Holocaust... but it's so economically dominated by Junkers that it ends up a lot like real-life Italy, with a huge low-productivity traditional sector.
@violanders@acb Independent state, breaking free of Russian imperialism around the turn of the century. Subsequently it develops fast and has a lot of cultural cringe toward Scandinavia but remains somewhat poorer; it's viewed as one of a line of frontline states alongside Poland (much wealthier than in OTL due to no communism or 20c vassalage to Russia, if still poorer than Finland) and Romania (also wealthier than in OTL but less than the European core).
What are some examples of walkable urbanism in deserts? The American Southwest and the Gulf states are both famous for their total unwalkability; are there walkable desert cities?
For example... how walkable are Egyptian cities? Alexandria is busy building a giant highway on the waterfront; most people don't drive but that's poverty, not walkability.
@bluGill Tourist ghettos are almost always atypically walkable for their regions. When you're on vacation, you don't mind that the farmers' market charges three times as much as the hypermarket at the highway exit.
@Alon but in this, as many cases there are good bones in that the area was where people lived and walked for everything (because they had no choice 200 years ago). So you can find lots of useful things that work and still will work.
What are some examples of positive, non-stereotyped portrayal of nerds or smart protagonists on television and in film? I'm thinking of Malcolm in the Middle, Prison Break, and maybe the Ross arc on Friends (except it has held up poorly) - what else?
Coming to think of it, these are all male nerds, not female ones. Chloe on 24 is portrayed sympathetically, but is a supporting character.
@Alon gilmore girls (rory, lane, paris maybe). general hospital (spinelli - part stereotypical, lots of parts fantastic over the years). frasier (frasier, niles, lilith). macgyver.
In Israel, the main operational discussion right now is about the Philadelphi Axis - the route from Rafah Crossing to the rest of Gaza. Hamas is in control of it and thus of the distribution of all supplies into Gaza (except the parts under IDF control, which have only 10% of Gaza's population at this point). Israel would like to sever it, but is running into the issue of needing to plan how to administer the delivery, and so far it's been reluctant to talk at all about administering Gaza.
@george@MisuseCase Yep. The units monitoring the border with Gaza are mostly women, so when they said that they're seeing Hamas fighters move toward the border, the brass ignored them because of sexism.
@Alon I have been seeing news about it this morning. People thought the container ship mishaps with ships getting stuck in channels was cute but this is not cute. How does this happen? How is a bridge in a major shipping channel not able to stand up to this?
@MisuseCase@Alon If you look at European container terminals like Rotterdam, Antwerp-Bruges, or Hamburg , there is no bridge between the sea and the terminal, if there is a highway crossing, it is in a tunnel…