International Events VII- Afghan Catastrophe

[Winterfell is Burning]

8 hours ago, Prue said:

Considering how many indigenous leaders have been murdered who fought to protect the rain forest, I find it extremely likely that the cattle and soy industry that pays Bolsonaro also succeeded to get his support to kill off as many inhabitants of the rain forest as possible, by any means.

 

8 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

Yes. While these murders haven't been done by state agents, the government has done nothing to stop them and actually the opposite. Brazilian government policies have incentivize the violence. On the other hand, successive Brazilian governments are at fault for this situation, not only Bolsonaro.

 

 

Well, first of all, the genocide accusation already been removed from the report since I last posted, in part because is something very difficult to prove- while Bolsonaro clearly doesn't cry a single tear over the indigenous population, to actively be plotting their genocide seems a stretch, and even if were true, near impossible to prove. There's already crimes enough against him not to indict him for something that will be controversial, unlikely to win and bring even some of his opposition against it.

Second, while it's true that all Brazilian governments have failed in protect the native populations, it's also true there hasn't been one as bad as Bolsonaro's in the last decades at least. Besides the financing by big some of the biggest farmers (which he wouldn't be the first), he also has the mentality of the military dictatorship that thought progress meant bulldozing the forest to bring "civilization". While the previous governments were not particularly great for the indigenous populations, they usually at least cared enough to avoid doing stuff that could bring them national and international criticism and sanctions.

 

[maarsen]

On 10/18/2021 at 2:49 PM, Zorral said:

Graeber's latest and last book argues this wasn't always the case.  He had three more works to follow this argument, but as he died in 09/20, we won't see them.

"Human History Gets a Rewrite
A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

https://bookshop.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/9780374157357

I finally got to read the article you linked and I have to say it was a letdown. Graeber's argument is stuff I was reading in my cultural anthropology textbooks way back in the 1970s. Even back then cultural anthropologists were well aware of the fact that there is no template or pattern to how any group of people, whether they were a small band of hunter/gatherers or an urbanized group of tens of thousands, to cultural development. They are about as many ways for people to live and interact together as there are people and there is normal or baseline against which any culture can be measured. For any group of any size the rules can be exceedingly complex such as you can't marry cross cousins but parallel cousins are perfectly fine  for someone to marry.

It is nice to see a wider audience for such a niche field as cultural anthropology but there is nothing groundbreaking. This is like an 11 year old boy figuring out a theorem about how to add a string of numbers  such as 1+2+3+...+1000, only to realize that the same theorem had been known long before. And yes, that was me.

 

[Zorral]

Researchers have pinpointed the region where our first domesticated equines emerged.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/horse-domestication-russia.html? 

Quote

 

.... As the researchers gradually mapped the horse genomes across time and space, the picture became sharper. A little over a year ago, they were able to pinpoint the precise location: the Volga-Don region in what is now Russia. ...

.... The study also knocked down ideas about horses’ role in earlier human history. For instance, one pre-existing theory suggested a pastoralist people called the Yamnaya were able to migrate on horseback in massive numbers into Europe around 5,000 years ago. But the new genetic map found no evidence; the researchers point out oxen, not horses, could have been the driving factor of their expansion.

The new paper also reveals domestic horses spread across Eurasia along with the Bronze Age Sintashta culture, which possessed spoke-wheeled chariots, around 3,800 years ago. ....

 

Those of us who follow equine matters are likely to know the last already, but it builds assurance to have it genomically as well as archaeologically confirmed.

[Winterfell is Burning]

On 10/19/2021 at 8:46 PM, Ran said:

I feel like useful context is that Carvajal is appearing to be making a play to get Spain to deny extradition to the U.S. for drug trafficking, after Spain rejected his asylum application.

On 10/19/2021 at 10:10 PM, Winterfell is Burning said:

 

I also doubt Spain would deny extradition, at most delay it.

 

 

They already decided to extradite him

[Ran]

1 minute ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

They already decided to extradite him

I see the article drew the exact same conclusion as I did.

[The Anti-Targ]

On 10/20/2021 at 7:01 PM, DireWolfSpirit said:

So a 25 mile radius of metro NY your looking at 20 million people. The thing being 24 miles off target is still a very lethal threat, especially if they could deliver about 4 at once.

Buh Bye east coast and pretty much Armageddon is unleashed between the two beligerants and ....oh hell it's the final conflict for all of mankind pretty quickly.

Didn't you get the memo? Armageddon was fought in WWI, and "we" won. Literally. The Turks and the allies fought the final battle before Turkish surrender on the plain of Megiddo. Armageddon literally meaning "of Megiddo". Kicked the Ottomans out of the Holy Land permanently, paving the way for the proper return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland (also as prophesied in the Bible) and the eventual establishment of the Jewish state. T.E. Lawrence being one of the great heroes of Armageddon.

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Didn't you get the memo? Armageddon was fought in WWI, and "we" won. Literally. The Turks and the allies fought the final battle before Turkish surrender on the plain of Megiddo. Armageddon literally meaning "of Megiddo". Kicked the Ottomans out of the Holy Land permanently, paving the way for the proper return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland (also as prophesied in the Bible) and the eventual establishment of the Jewish state. T.E. Lawrence being one of the great heroes of Armageddon.

NO PRISONERS!

 

[Zorral]

"Why Does China Have 1.4 Billion People and No Good Bands?
Mongolia rocks out while its giant neighbor slumbers."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/11/mogolia-music-china-hu-review/

 

[The Anti-Targ]

I think that question has such an obvious answer that there is really no need to even ask it.

[kiko]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I think that question has such an obvious answer that there is really no need to even ask it.

I don't get it 

[DireWolfSpirit]

Sudan's military has arrested the countries Prime Minister.

https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-africa-sudan-arrests-omar-al-bashir-c8d027c0a9e250fcb5a595bdc987d282

[The Anti-Targ]

4 hours ago, kiko said:

I don't get it 

Good art challenges authority, and questions the status quo, at least some of it does. There is no place for that kind of art in an authoritarian state, hence no good bands in a country of 1.4bn people.

[Ran]

That article makes me raise my eyebrow in a lot of ways in how the (western) author confidently tells us about how Chinese people see their music and culture.

It's also weird to cite a single example of an internationally popular Mongolian band (Hu) to make some sort of critique of China. 

 This article gives a very different view of the Chinese music scene than the FP piece.

[Zorral]

6 hours ago, Ran said:

This article gives a very different view of the Chinese music scene than the FP piece

Not written by a Chinese either?  https://radiichina.com/author/krishraghav/

Like the author of the previous piece referenced, his work is involved with China.

But mostly I found the previous piece most interesting because one sees ancient conflicts between Mongolian and Chinese cultures being played out in the present cultures. Which is related too, to the genocide the Chinese are committing on Uyghurs.

But I will admit the Mongolian throat singing tradition and sense of rhythm is appealing to me personally. 

 

[Ran]

5 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Not written by a Chinese either?

No, but he lives in Shanghai now rather than having lived in them previously. Still, the point is that the measure of what makes a music scene vibrant is deeply weird since it's essentially breaking through to a Western audience that appears to be what matters in the FP piece. Which is a weird way to talk about culture.

[Rippounet]

Not sure where to put this, as I don't think this is a particularly Australian problem (the spirit of the COP26 is very much the same throughout the world):

Honest Government Ad | COP26 Climate Summit

 

[Zorral]

My sense of it is the piece praising younger Mongols in pop music for marrying various popular music trends with their more traditional styles and instruments is at least as much political commentary and discussion.  One has to be very careful what one says about anything Chinese these days if one wishes to keep the heavy hand of authority coming down.  Sheesh, this applies even to international powerhouses like Big Tech, Hollywood,  etc.

[kiko]

On 10/27/2021 at 11:59 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

Good art challenges authority, and questions the status quo, at least some of it does. There is no place for that kind of art in an authoritarian state, hence no good bands in a country of 1.4bn people.

I'm sorry but you got that wrong. I grew up in an authoritarian state and that is exactly the place to challenge authority's and produce good art in the process. Challenging the authorities in NZ is not exactly an achievement, right? It may not always be easy to discover or decipher it for people outside of that closed environment though. 

There is good and/or successful art in China. They just usually don't care for the western market and neither does the western market cares for them. I should know because that's a constant hot topic in our mixed household.

[Zorral]

Poland's electoral politics and FB:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/27/poland-facebook-algorithm/

Quote

 

.... ‘Like a war’
It was the presidential election in 2015 that woke Polish politics to the powers of Facebook, said Pawel Rybicki, who worked on the campaign for President Andrzej Duda. “We used social media full-scale,” Rybicki said. Duda, an ally of Law and Justice, had been considered the underdog but won with 51.5 percent of the vote.

“It was like a war, and social media was the new gun for Polish political parties,” recalled Rybicki, who met with the Facebook team when it was in Warsaw but said he largely raised concerns regarding moderation.

A consultant to the social media team for the Civic Platform party, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss that party’s social media strategy, described those days as the “wild West,” with apparently little content-moderation on Facebook. He said that he, like others, noticed a shift in 2018 with more-extreme content breaking through.

Facebook says it has had teams reviewing content in Polish prior to 2015 and currently has 40,000 people working on safety and security.

“The walls of the bubbles are thicker and thicker,” he said, referring to the echo chambers that different parts of society occupy on social media. “One bubble, that mainly delivers anti-democratic statements, [is] much more shown by Facebook.” ....

 

Links to the Reports on the Investigations into FB follow here:

Quote

 

The Facebook Papers are a set of internal documents that were provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.

The trove of documents show how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has, at times, contradicted, downplayed or failed to disclose company findings on the impact of its products and platforms.

The documents also provided new details of the social media platform’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds.

Read more from The Post’s investigation:

Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers

How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India

How Facebook shapes your feed

 

 

[argonak]

22 hours ago, Zorral said:

Poland's electoral politics and FB:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/27/poland-facebook-algorithm/

Links to the Reports on the Investigations into FB follow here:

 

social media is looking to have been a pretty rotten idea all around.