"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."
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.)
@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).
@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.
I'm at the #PolyglotGathering 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).
@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?
@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.
@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...