I knew South Sudan got independence last decade, and I had some concept of a civil war there. I mainly knew it as a young and very poor republic with a lot of problems.
I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.
America is one of the last bastions of free speech left. Stuff like this, the tik tok ban, and the "anti-semitism" laws, are very disturbing developments.
It's weird that the government of America has fully gotten into the business of tone and morality policing, and banning the press for calling the Gulf of Mexico what it is.
That doesn't seem compatible with being a bastion of free anything.
The US has had pretty iron-fisted anti-free speech laws for most of its history under the guise of anti-obscenity rules. They'll probably come back, too, given the current regime.
That whole “freedom TO” vs “freedom FROM” is a meaningless word play. Every “freedom TO” can be reworded to a “freedom FROM” and vice verse.
The only meaningful difference is to use “TO” and “FROM” to illustrate 2 abstract types of “freedoms”. The absence of external constraints and the ability to make choices. Two concepts that are very intertwined. Some times discrete, but most of the time intertwined. You can’t assign left or right to either one.
Except the key "there is a freedom-to and a freedom-from" is far from being nonsense: it is a basic intellectual key in reasoning over the principles of liceity, "e.g. your freedom to play the drums and my right to (be free to) sleep".
Which is nonsense to associate with either the political right or left. The comment I was replying to was saying “the left wants their right to sleep while the right wants their right to play the drums” which is nonsense.
“The principles of liceity” is external control vs ability to make a choice that I mentioned. It’s not a political right vs political left distinction in how we understand “Freedom”. Both the political right and left view “Freedom” as a mix of both licitness.
The recent, bizarre, popularization of the freedom-to vs freedom-from in pop-culture happened after the 2016 election and was portrayed as the difference between how the right and the left views “freedom” which is woefully nonsensical.
It might be my liberal (or blue) bubble, but after 2016 is when I started hearing a lot of my friends trying to explain that “oh no, we want a freedom-from not a freedom-to. Here is an article explaining” it became clear how confused everyone was about a simple abstract distinction vs real life application of it.
So, (1) do not contribute to noise, and (2) do not strengthen nor help spread cancerous deliria. Your words:
> That whole “freedom TO” vs “freedom FROM” [would be] a meaningless word play. Every “freedom TO” can be reworded to a “freedom FROM” and vice verse
and you must have meant "that whole attribution of "freedom to vs from" to different political sides is nonsense and employed as meaningless word play".
(Incidentally, they half-jokingly say that "liberals are conservatives who have been mugged and conservatives are liberals who have been arrested": both sides appear to be heartfeltly tied to a freedom-from perspective.)
(Corrige: I swapped the labels in the rush (it is of course "conservatives are liberals who have been mugged, and liberals are conservatives who have been arrested") but you get the point.)
I was gonna say. The joke is usually that a liberal is a “conservative that’s been assaulted by institutional power” and a conservative is a “liberal that’s been assaulted by a perceived peer”
The funny thing is I know someone who is literally that. She grew up in a very conservative rural family, but when I knew her (in her early 20s) she was “super liberal”. Like the classic “basic liberal” type person in every way. 6 years later (in 2021) a homeless dude chased her downtown. She WAS traumatized. Like seriously traumatized. A month later I learned that she started carrying a gun and wouldn’t stop talking about Washington gun laws and how “she’s totally a liberal” but liberals are wrong about the homeless, gun laws, the police, and law and order.
The speed at which EU defense integration precedes is dizzying. In only:
- one month after the US openly said it won't be the primary security guarantor of Europe
- a month and a half after the second inauguration of a NATO sceptical president
- three years after the start of a major european land war bordering the EU
- 14 years after another US administration formally announced it's "Pivot to Asia"
... a European country has announced it's "open to discussion" about extending its nuclear umbrella. Not that it's offering the umbrella. Not that it has discussed offering the umbrella. But that it's open to start those discussions.
I really think too many people inside America do not properly understand how much the world now thinks it’s at risk from the US. The world sees what has happened as us turning into an autocracy that is now adversarial to democratic countries.
Words are actions in politics. They aren’t jokes or memes. We are threatening our neighbors. And for actions we have flipped on Ukraine and now withdrawn all aid, including intelligence, and just reported turned off their ability to target with GMLRS. We have even turned off our cybersecurity activities as it relates to Russia. Writing is very clear to people outside the US.
A few days ago the press secretary of the White House closed the session by commenting on a hockey game to be played that night between the US and "our soon-to-be 51st state", whilst grinning.
Tbf, nuclear proliferation really sucks for a number of reasons, and shifting priorities in democratically elected non-authoritarian regimes with checks and balances typically means pushing such an unpopular policy forward is going to take a while.
You know the more I think about it, the more I consider that even without US support, their primary adversary has already demonstrated their impotence as an offensive military power. Maybe they simply don't need to do much more than they're already doing.
A slight thawing of relations is a long way away from an alliance. Even then, would Russia take it? They might see more value in their current arrangement with China.
Still, long term maybe you're right. It does make geopolitical sense for the US to be more closely aligned with Russia. In a pivot to Asia it's much more useful to sow-discord in the Sino-Russian relationship, than it is to prop up the EU.
> It does make geopolitical sense for the US to be more closely aligned with Russia. In a pivot to Asia it's much more useful to sow-discord in the Sino-Russian relationship, than it is to prop up the EU
The EU have been loyal allies. Their defence production is also nothing to be sneezed at. If we found ourselves in a war of attrition with China and either Japan or Korea stood neutral, an America with Europe has a much higher chance of succeeding than an America alone.
And if we surrender to Xi the way Trump has to Putin, that puts the American homeland at direct risk in the next conflict from both sides.
This entire enterprise comes down to some Silicon Valley types not liking the EU. It's personal and irrational and unfortunately, with Trump an ersatz monarch for two years, an example of why extreme power concentration sacrifices the immortal goals of a nation for the personal whims of a mortal leader.
I think if we take the recency bias, emotion and partisanship out of this, we can see that the United States has been trying to pivot away from Europe, under both democratic and republican administrations, for over a decade now.
The fact is Europe can afford to defend itself. This isn't the cold war were the soviet military was 800km from Paris. It's 2025, where the shell of the Russian army is struggling to capture territory 2,400km from Paris.
If the USA in the 70s was willing to thaw relations with China to offset the USSR, it will surely thaw relations was the Russian Federation now to offset China. I do not think European arms production is a significant factor in any US/China conflict; any "Taiwan Emergency" will just by a factor of geography not be a long protracted conflict, and has much more potential to flair up into alarming levels than even this one.
Macron has been advocating for tighter European collaboration for years, insisting that there should be an integrated European army in 2018 and calling NATO "brain-dead" in 2019. The question is whether other European countries want to be integrated, and thus far the answer has been that they do not.
This is what people outside of Europe do not understand. We are not one country. We are 27 sovereign countries with their own parliament and their own final decisions that must coin a common European policy. This is an immense effort.
Even if you grant that perception of the US (which UK at least has explicitly stated it doesn't agree with), it doesn't resolve the practical obstacles where different member states don't necessarily agree on military action. One good example came up just today; France and the UK want to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to enforce a ceasefire, but Italy does not. In a unified European military, does Italy get a veto, or does the command structure somehow require Italian divisions to deploy somewhere the Italian government doesn't want them to go?
Well, the UK does not belong to the EU. So it really doesn't matter in this conversation all that much.
As for the EU, I imagine it will eventually create more integration tiers above the ones that currently exist. If I am not terribly mistaken Macron advocates for such a thing. Not a bad idea to be frank.
The trade off you make with these keyboards is that you have to learn a different muscle memory, in return for less finger contortions, more comfort, and less hand waving around the keyboard.
If that's not appealing to you, there's probably no reason to get into it. If it is appealing to you to live mostly on your homerow, then the learning curve is not all that great, maybe a couple of months.
Took a few weeks to get used to, but I love it now (Planck), and I'm just as fast, if not a bit faster, than on my laptop keyboard. It's also much easier for me to use my right small finger to hit P than it is on a "normal" keyboard.
I like low-profile in theory, but in practices there's so many high quality mx profile switches, and everything in low-profile land seems a bit substandard. I can't go back to unlubed linears, or scratchy brown clones.
Putting the micro-controllers at the far ends means the rest of the board can be lower, meaning less need for palm supports. Also I like you NOT having OLED screens - they're toys at best and one more thing to break at worse.
As for Ortho VS Staggered, ortho has the great advantage of things like WASD just being usable out of the box, and also flexibility with things like numpad layers. I've printed paper cut outs of things like the ferris sweep to see if pinky stagger would be comfortable for me, and the answer was negative. Probably very hand dependent.
Curious why aluminium and not steel? Steel is a heavier, and also has less of that pingy noise, though I have no idea about machining so perhaps it's a no go.
I would not put OLEDs for the reasons you mentioned, but also because it would drain the battery in 1 day vs 1 week.
Steel is likely better and surely stronger, but manufacturers charge 2x more for steel alloy machining. At that price level, titanium also becomes an interesting option.
I did not know the civil war was ongoing since 2012. That's tragic for a place that hasn't at all established itself.