I hope this fixes my issues with bluetooth on Linux. When I'm on battery the audio breaks all the time. I've tried all sorts of obscure config tweaks with Pulseaudio.
We are quite hard on us. This is a nasty cultural trait of Spain, because this hinders our work. I work in science and I think we would do much better if we didn't have this inferiority complex.
I think, it also hinders you from holding your government (on all levels) accountable. Cases of corruption or incompetence don't seem to me quite as reflected in elections as it should. The excuse always seems to me, that people claim the other side is just as bad. Not denying that, but with that level of expectation there is no need to clean up your act.
Exactly, seriously why is everyone in Spain like this? Spain is a wonderful and advanced country in most ways. Although I think having an inferiority complex is probably good for the country because it's the only way to improve.
National identity is a social construct. Spain has always been the sum of several national identities. This has of course created frictions, but there wasn't the push that order countries had to eradicate those identities when the birth of most modern states happened.
Franco tried to change that (as well as eliminating a sizeable part of Spain that didn't fit with his values). To this day, many spaniards identify the spanish national identity with those Franco's values (despite being fairliy minoritary and Spain a very socially progressive country).
After the transition to democracy, regional governments had a lot of incentives to create or reinforce their own identities to gain economic leverage against the central government. This has always been extremely transparent and it's no coincidence that the two richest regions have the strongest independentist movement.
So yeah, there is a lot of self-hatred or internalised inferiority complex... But also dishonesty. Many of the comments you will read online are self-interested (catalonian independentists) or even straight propaganda from the catalonian government. Not that it would be hard to find any other spaniard to rage about how Spain is, actually, a 3rd world country.
Nah, not everyone. You will see all this people singing proud "I'm spanish!, spanish!, spanish!..." in the next UEFA champions league. I assume that we are just a little drama queens sometimes, but in the end we all are very similar to you. You will find exactly the same frolicking behavior in any basketball league.
Being young adults and trying to thrive in a big city is not easy of course, but this is not a problem exclusive from Spain
As a latin-american, I never understood why spain could not capitalize on their relationship and cultural ties with Latin America, like England did with the commonwealth. We speak the exact language across a really vast territory across two continents, some potential there must have been!
It is really austonding that there only a loose integration between spanish-speaking countries, despite sharing very similar (good and not so good) cultural values.
There is no "us" in Spain. There's castillian imperialists and people living in occupied territories. The only possible "us" right now for many Spanish passport-holders is Europe.
> There's castillian imperialists and people living in occupied territories
Sorry but the constitution grants to every citizen the right to work and live peacefully anywhere they wish inside the country boundaries.
I'm pleased to inform you that this includes the grant for YOU to live in MY place without being tagged as "invasive imperialist" or harassed by me to quit the area. That would be simply illegal (the words idiotic and ludicrous would be also good adjectives); but don't worry, we never would do that to your family.
in short, haters gonna hate... Anybody can go and create their own Cat-anon and rewrite the history to fit into their delusions if they want (Is a free country after all), but they only lie to themselves and the reality will hit like a ton of bricks eventually
It’s very frustrating that people are so vocal with extreme opinions such as this one. Whenever the topic of Spain comes up, someone will try to make it as if they have been conquered 10 years ago, trying hard to distort history that’s quite similar to most of the other countries.
I think it's easier to port everything elisp to Scheme (with some help by automation perhaps), than having an Emacs implementation in a Scheme that runs in all implementation of Scheme. I've worked many years in Scheme and the differences between compilers and interpreters are too large, especially when it comes to low-level functionality necessary for good performance.
I find it interesting that it’s ok to call it Spanish Flu (while it wasn’t even originated there), but is politically incorrect to call this one the Wuhan virus or the Chinese flu. Political correctness has always a political intention I guess.
It's kind of a complicated issue. I do think that we should refer to the 1918 flu as just that. However, since that's so far back in the past, you won't find a lot of people pointing their fingers at Spain and accusing Spaniards of being inhuman scum. On the other hand, you have a LOT of people saying "Chinese flu" who then jump to the conclusion that the Chinese people themselves are to blame and inherently 'bad', aggravating racism against the Chinese. The Chinese government deserve a lot of criticism for so many things, including their persecution (and most likely execution in some cases) of Chinese citizens who reported on the pandemic. But hate crimes happening right now against Chinese, and people who happen to look remotely Chinese, are very real. I see little benefit in referring to the 2019 Coronavirus/COVID-19 as a "Chinese flu", while I see huge downsides.
In sum, while I think "Spanish" flu is more factually incorrect, I see talk about a "Chinese" flu as more acutely harmful. So - 1918 flu, COVID-19, IMO.
I mostly agree with your comment. My main counterpoint to this angle, which is strictly correct, is that many people lack the same kind of context that you described, and do interpret “Spanish flu” and “Wuhan/Chinese flu” as “caused by them”, and in some cases even missing the historical perspective. There might be something to be said about blame in one case and the other, but I don’t think is that relevant (although perhaps at some point there should be some debate on the responsibility of China -if any- in this pandemic)
"Citizens reporting on the epidemic have been made to disappear" would be a more factual description. And as can be seen from the first article linked above, "disappearance" doesn't necessarily lead to a fatal end.
But again, I think you were right to call me out on speculating. We just don't know, and if there's one thing we don't need more of right now, it's speculation from non-experts like me. Thank you.
I think intent matters here. Spanish Flu is from so long ago it already has a universal name, whereas I think referring to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus is usually only done by people who'd like to blame China.
In what way does assigning any blame help? Magically US citizens will be able to successfully sue China for lost wages? Magically there will be less deaths?
Accountability matters. When things go wrong it's important to assign blame to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future.
So in this particular case, a way blaming might help would be to recognize those organizations and governments that were incapable of preventing the spread of the disease and to recognize in the future a quicker need to mitigate and not to assume China will take care of it, assuming China deserves blame. It may also help by recuperating the economic loss by holding those responsible for it and requiring payments. These are common things that happen in all walks of life and the international context is no different. People and countries shouldn't get to walk away from massive fuck ups if it is possible to hold them to account. At least we can try.
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem.
I'm a reasonable man, I find accountability a positive virtue. I'm also not a foolish one, for I understand trying to assign blame for an act of god is definitely NOT normal. And I understand the "blameless post-mortem" is a tech-industry standard well understood, so I am surprised to find the "blame game" card being played here. Consider:
Every time a hurricane rolls off the coast of west Africa and trashes the Eastern seaboard, you don't see the US blaming west Africa.
You don't see Missouri trying to pin the Joplin tornado onto neighboring Kansas/Oklahoma in order to recoup billions of dollars of damages and loss of human life. You DO get a technical NIST report that is blameless (I have worked with this particular data) [0].
When an earthquake originates in one country but flattens the city in a neighboring country, you don't see one sue the other.
When a typhoon hits SE Asia, they aren't trying to readily assign blame.
What can be assigned blame is a nation's reaction to this force majeure. At that point the people should be holding their own leaders accountable, as the assumption should always be that the neighbors are incompetent, and our own leaders are the best. That is inconvenient for the current President precisely because he politicized the disease. If he had not politicized it, his followers would be more amenable for blameless post-mortems (literal post-mortems, let's remember people are dying). Unfortunately his response was lackluster, and rather than taking accountability (you know, the virtue I agreed w/ y'all on at the beginning), he would rather shift blame. But this implies that he was relying on China to do its part. Which then begs the question: If the US President wants to blame China, why was he sitting back and relying on China on good faith when no other nation was?
To summarize why I don't believe the bullshit that is "assigning blame" for SARS-Cov-2:
- Accountability is a virtue
- Blameless postmortem is a huge cross-industry technical standard, so abandoning that is immediately suspect
- US President politicized the disease; due to this he has political motivations to avoid the virtue of accountability and how he guided the US response (making the act of "blaming" even more suspect as being a political reaction)
- Doublethink of "Did the US President really rely on the Chinese response? Blame them, not him!" (only enabled because of politicization)
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem. But that's now been politicized.
How do you prevent a hurricane? The coronavirus could have been stopped. The wildlife markets could have been shut down. The spread could have been prevented. The transparency could have been better. I'm not saying China actually does deserve blame, maybe it was way out of control before it was possible to do anything, but this has been a horrible disaster the likes we normally don't see and we need to do what we can to prevent it from ever happening again or if it does to handle it better. Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.
> Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.
I've demonstrated that everything except blame is useful when doing analyses of engineering failures or disaster analysis. I have professional experience in this both in the computer science world and in the traditional engineering world.
Identifying root causes like "lack of testing prevented deployment of limited resources optimally which exacerbated these effects: X, Y, ..." is a useful and actionable way to identify and address problems. And then people can look at these blameless analyses and make their tough decision, and then go beyond and demonstrate accountability for their choice. This can be repeated as many times as necessary all around the world, within nations or across nations in a collaborative response (such as the joint vaccine development initiatives).
Adding "blame" just exacerbates emotions (political or personal or what have you), clouds judgement, and usually results in a worse outcome by whatever measure of the disaster (usually number of deaths). That's my "unstated reason": blaming is an active choice that leads to more deaths as history has shown repeatedly, whether by famine due to supply chain issues plus political rejection of food aid, or a "not invented here syndrome" of rejecting medical supplies, or societal instability resulting in mass protest and political revolution (and more death and starvation), for example.
I don't blame Trump for Covid. Just like I don't blame China for Covid. There are a set of things China could have done differently, just like Trump could have done things differently. "Blame" is really saying "Trump should have never had to do any preparation differently because China should have done things differently," which is the definition of living in an alternate reality. Life says "tough shit" and doesn't treat him like a special snowflake. Plus it does not inspire confidence in the kind of leadership principles the President is following: just how many other things is he relying on others like China to do so that he doesn't have to make any preparations?
If I were inclined to distrust China, instead of blaming them I would be crapping my pants with how emphatic the President repeatedly assures the American people that he relied on them to manage such a disaster for him (and us). That is what he is saying when he tries to blame them.
I think China did as well as they could -- it was a bad outcome because it escaped -- but shutting down their entire society for a few months to bring their new cases down to 0 was effective for them. Sucks it escaped their borders but it's no longer their problem at that point. And it is scary that the whole free world is looking at the authoritarian regieme and going "gee they got down to 0 new cases" and then look at the Leader of Free World USA's high daily new case load and cringing. And then looking in horror at Want-To-Be European Leader Of Free World Germany reopening and watching their daily case rate rise.
Why is it "interesting" to you? Is it not an entirely natural progression, that people would start realizing the stigma arising from associating diseases to geographical locations, and start changing the status quo?
I agree with the stigma associated to locations. I believe this stigma also affects past events, even if less so. So I think the argument for renaming the 1918 pandemic holds as strongly as not naming any new one based on the geographical location.
This is a false equivalence and you even hint at that very fact yourself ("Spanish Flu" => Spanish first broke worldwide censorship vs "Wuhan Flu" => Place of origination).
There was no worldwide censorship of Covid-19. So what must be "interesting" is the lack of any real argument being made in your post, instead leaving a convenient gap where an argument should be so everyone can get into a trollsy debate about projecting their own political feelings upon this awful contentless comment.
Correct, my comment was devoid of opinion or arguments, it was just that, a comment. I also don’t see how your last paragraph contributes any better to a healthy debate though.
Regarding the false equivalence though, I didn’t imply that, since I don’t think you need to go so deep into the interpretation of words. If any point was to be made in my comment is just the plain wording “Spanish/Chinese flu” associates the location and its people to the stigma. This, repeated over time, contributes to the social imaginary. Not every one knows the historical facts so well, and many people hearing the words “Spanish flu”, missing the context, will still make the negative associations. And let’s not forget that for a considerable part of the population in USA (not in Europe though), Spanish means “speaks Spanish”.
Very cool! I use Clojure on a daily basis for coding, this is a great addition to the arsenal :)
Actually, my main argument against _not using it_ is that Bash has this awkward syntax that is hard to remember if you don't use it often...
But anyway, I keep forgetting it after years so I might as well embrace it and take the leap to use this.
Thanks for the initiative!
