Fal's recent activity

  1. Comment on German court says far-right AfD is suspected of extremism in ~news

    Fal
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    Big fan of the 'far-fight' AfD

    Big fan of the 'far-fight' AfD

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Is Nebula worth it? in ~tech

    Fal
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    I don't want to be petty and only talk about your first paragraph; however I haven't watched the Vaush video and so can't comment on your analysis of it. It seems to me you're not really...

    I don't want to be petty and only talk about your first paragraph; however I haven't watched the Vaush video and so can't comment on your analysis of it.

    It seems to me you're not really addressing the twitter clip? Like sure maybe they haven't expressed the viewpoint that all Israelis are occupiers in the past, but in the clip they answer the question "Did the Palestinians take civilian hostages, or is that fake news?" with "I don't care, occupiers aren't civilians," which is pretty damning. Like maybe you could make the argument that the guy saying "occupiers aren't civilians" is starting a new line of thought, but that seems like a stretch.

    You're more familiar with their content than I am, so maybe I'm missing something, but I don't know how you could seriously argue that they aren't saying "the hostages taken aren't civilians, they're occupiers, therefore its ok to take them hostage."

    7 votes

  4. Comment on Is Nebula worth it? in ~tech

    Fal
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    In the twitter clip he's responding to a question about hostages taken though, no? He seems to be referring to all Israelis as 'occupiers', at least in the context of this clip.

    In the twitter clip he's responding to a question about hostages taken though, no? He seems to be referring to all Israelis as 'occupiers', at least in the context of this clip.

    8 votes

  5. Comment on Pikmin 4, Pikmin 3, and the scope of adaptive music in ~games

    Fal
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    A short video about how the different scopes of Pikmin 3 and 4's music systems resulted in differences in how their overworld soundtracks sound and function.

    A short video about how the different scopes of Pikmin 3 and 4's music systems resulted in differences in how their overworld soundtracks sound and function.

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Kendrick Lamar - Meet the Grahams (2024) in ~music

    Fal
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    Drake’s security guard ‘seriously injured’ in shooting at Toronto mansion

    Drake’s security guard ‘seriously injured’ in shooting at Toronto mansion

    A security guard at the mansion of Canadian hip-hop artist Drake has been “seriously injured” in a shooting outside the musician’s Toronto home.

    The victim, an adult male, was rushed to a Toronto hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries following the shooting early on Tuesday morning.

    Paul Krawczyk of the city’s police service told reporters on Tuesday that investigators had little information and were studying surveillance footage for leads.

    The assailant was reportedly spotted fleeing the area in a vehicle.

    7 votes

  10. Comment on The five futures of Russia in ~misc

    Fal
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    1. Russia as France 2. Russia retrenched 3. Russia as vassal 4. Russia as North Korea 5. Russia in chaos Continental cul-de-sac Archive

    Putin styles himself as a new tsar. But a real tsar would not have to worry about a looming succession crisis and what it might do to his grip on power in the present. Putin does; that is partly why he must simulate elections. He is now set in his office until 2030, when he will be in his 78th year. Male life expectancy in Russia does not even reach 67 years; those who live to 60 can expect to survive to around 80. Russia’s confirmed centenarians are few. Putin might one day join their ranks. But even Stalin died.

    Putin is not Stalin. The Georgian despot built a superpower while dispatching tens of millions to their deaths in famines, forced labor camps, execution cellars, and a mismanaged defensive war. Putin, by contrast, has jerry-rigged a rogue power while sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths in a war of choice. The juxtaposition is nevertheless instructive. Stalin’s system proved unable to survive without him, despite having an institutionalized ruling party. And yet, amid the breakdown that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union but lasted well beyond 1991, Putin consolidated a new autocracy. This fusion of fragility and path dependence derives from many factors that are not easily rewired: geography, a national-imperial identity, an ingrained strategic culture. (The nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin remarked of his country that everything changes dramatically every five to ten years but nothing changes in 200 years.) Still, whenever and however Putin might go, his personalistic autocracy and, more broadly, Russia already face questions about the future.

    Readers seeking odds on Russia’s trajectory should consult the betting markets. What Western officials and other decision-makers need to do, instead, is to consider a set of scenarios: to extrapolate from current trends in a way that can facilitate contingency planning. Scenarios are about attempting to not be surprised. Needless to note, the world constantly surprises, and something impossible to foresee could occur: the proverbial black swan. Humility is in order. Still, five possible futures for Russia are currently imaginable, and the United States and its allies should bear them in mind.

    1. Russia as France

    France is a country with deep-seated bureaucratic and monarchical traditions—and also a fraught revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries abolished the monarchy only to see it return in the guise of both a king and an emperor and then disappear again, as republics came and went. France built and lost a vast empire of colonial possessions. For centuries, France’s rulers, none more than Napoleon, threatened the country’s neighbors.

    Russia, too, possesses a statist and monarchical tradition that will endure regardless of the nature of any future political system and a fraught revolutionary tradition that has also ceased to be an ongoing venture yet lives on in institutions and memories as a source of inspiration and warning. To be sure, the autocratic Romanovs were even less constrained than the absolutist Bourbons. Russia’s revolution was considerably more brutal and destructive than even the French one. Russia’s lost empire was contiguous, not overseas, and lasted far longer—indeed, for most of the existence of the modern Russian state. In Russia, Moscow’s domination of the rest of the country exceeds even that of Paris in France. Russia’s geographical expanse dwarfs France’s, enmeshing the country in Europe but also the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. Very few countries have much in common with Russia. But France has more than perhaps any other.

    One might be seduced by the notion that Russia needs its own de Gaulle to help consolidate a liberal order from above, even though no such deus ex machina looms on Russia’s immediate horizon. But only hagiographers believe that one man created today’s France. Notwithstanding the country’s moments of instability, over generations, France developed the impartial, professional institutions—a judiciary, a civil service, a free and open public sphere—of a democratic, republican nation. The problem was not mainly that Yeltsin was no de Gaulle. The problem was that Russia was much further from a stable, Western-style constitutional order in 1991 than France had been three decades earlier.

    2. Russia retrenched

    Some Russians might welcome a transformation into a country that resembles France, but others would find that outcome anathema. What the world now sees as Putinism first surfaced in the Russian-language periodicals and volunteer societies of the 1970s: an authoritarian, resentful, mystical nationalism grounded in anti-Westernism, espousing nominally traditional values, and borrowing incoherently from Slavophilism, Eurasianism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. One could imagine an authoritarian nationalist leader who embraces those views and who, like Putin, is unshakable in the belief that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction but who is also profoundly troubled by Russia’s cloudy long-term future—and willing to blame Putin for it. That is, someone who appeals to Putin’s base but makes the case that the war against Ukraine is damaging Russia.

    Although a Russian authoritarian regime has once again proved resilient in war, Putin’s grave lack of domestic investment and diversification, his furtherance of demographic distress, and his role in the country’s descent into technological backwardness could yet compel hardcore nationalists—among them many elites—to admit that Russia is on a self-defeating trajectory. Many have privately concluded that Putin conflates the survival of his aging personal regime with the storied country’s survival as a great power. Historically, at least, such realizations have precipitated a change of course, a turn from foreign overextension to domestic revitalization. Last summer, when the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death squad marched on Moscow, it did not elicit bandwagoning by military officers, which is one reason Prigozhin called it off. But neither did it galvanize the regime’s supporters to defend Putin in real time. The episode furnished an unwitting referendum on the regime, revealing a certain hollowness inside the repressive strength.

    3. Russia as vassal

    Defiantly pro-Putin Russian elites boast that they have developed an option that is better than the West. The Chinese-Russian bond has surprised many analysts aware of Beijing and Moscow’s prickly relations in the past, including the infamous Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which culminated in a short border war. Although that conflict was formally settled with a border demarcation, Russia remains the sole country that controls territory seized from the Qing empire in what the Chinese vilify as unfair treaties. That has not stopped China and Russia from bolstering ties, including by conducting large-scale joint military exercises, which have grown in frequency and geographic scope in the past 20 years. The two countries are fully aligned on Russia’s grievances regarding NATO expansion and Western meddling in Ukraine, where Chinese support for Russia continues to be crucial.

    Defiantly pro-Putin Russian elites boast that they have developed an option that is better than the West. The Chinese-Russian bond has surprised many analysts aware of Beijing and Moscow’s prickly relations in the past, including the infamous Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which culminated in a short border war. Although that conflict was formally settled with a border demarcation, Russia remains the sole country that controls territory seized from the Qing empire in what the Chinese vilify as unfair treaties. That has not stopped China and Russia from bolstering ties, including by conducting large-scale joint military exercises, which have grown in frequency and geographic scope in the past 20 years. The two countries are fully aligned on Russia’s grievances regarding NATO expansion and Western meddling in Ukraine, where Chinese support for Russia continues to be crucial.

    The great and growing imbalance in the relationship has induced analysts to speak of Russia as China’s vassal. But only China decides whether a country becomes its vassal, whereby Beijing dictates Russian policy and even personnel, and assumes the burden of responsibility. It has no binding treaty obligations with Russia. Putin possesses only the 70-year-old Xi’s word—and Xi, too, is mortal. Nonetheless, the two leaders continue to denounce the United States’ bid for hegemony and cooperate closely. A shared commitment to render the world order safe for their respective dictatorships and dominate their regions is driving a de facto vassalage that neither fancies.

    4. Russia as North Korea

    In deepening Russia’s dependence on China, Putin or his successor could draw paradoxical inspiration from the experience of North Korea, which in turn could give Xi or his successor pause.

    Russia and North Korea could scarcely be more different. The former is more than 142 times as large as the latter in territory. North Korea possesses the kind of dynasty that Russia does not, even though each Kim family successor gets rubber-stamped as leader by a party congress. North Korea is also a formal treaty ally of China, Beijing’s only such ally in the world, the two having signed a mutual defense pact in 1961. (Some Chinese commentary has suggested China is no longer obliged to come to North Korea’s defense in the event of an attack because of Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons, but the pact has not been repealed.) North Korea faces a rival Korean state in the form of South Korea, making it more akin to East Germany (which of course is long gone) than to Russia.

    Despite these and other differences, Russia could become something of a gigantic North Korea: domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons, and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing.

    5. Russia in chaos

    Putin’s regime wields the threat of chaos and the unknown to ward off internal challenges and change. But while keenly sowing chaos abroad, from eastern Europe to central Africa and the Middle East, Russia itself could fall victim to it. The Putin regime has looked more or less stable even under the extreme pressures of large-scale war, and predictions of collapse under far-reaching Western sanctions have not been borne out. But Russian states overseen from St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, both disintegrated in the past 100-odd years, both times unexpectedly yet completely. There are many plausible hypothetical causes for a breakdown in the near future: a domestic mutiny that spirals out of control, one or more natural catastrophes beyond the authorities’ capacity to manage, an accident or intentional sabotage of nuclear facilities, or the accidental or nonaccidental death of a leader. Countries such as Russia with corroded institutions and legitimacy deficits can be susceptible to cascades in a sudden stress test. Chaos could well be the price for a failure to retrench.

    Continental cul-de-sac

    A Russian future missing here is the one prevalent among the Putin regime’s mouthpieces as well as its extreme-right critics: Moscow as a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs. “We need to find ourselves and understand who we are,” the Kremlin loyalist Sergei Karaganov mused last year. “We are a great Eurasian power, Northern Eurasia, a liberator of peoples, a guarantor of peace, and the military-political core of the World Majority. This is our manifest destiny.” The so-called global South—or as Karaganov rendered it, “the World Majority”—does not exist as a coherent entity, let alone one with Russia as its core. The project of Russia as a self-reliant supercontinent, bestride Europe and Asia, has already failed. The Soviet Union forcibly held not just an inner empire on the Baltic and Black Seas but also an outer empire of satellites, ultimately to no avail.

    Russia’s influence in its immediate neighborhood has been diminishing, too. The bulk of non-Russians in the former Soviet borderlands want less and less to do with their former overlord and certainly do not want to be reabsorbed by it. Eurasianism and Slavophilism are mostly dead letters: the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-Russian Slavs joined or are clamoring to join the European Union and NATO. Without Russia menacing its European neighbors, NATO’s reason for being becomes uncertain. But that means Russia could break NATO only by developing into a durable rule-of-law state, precisely what Putin resists with all his being.

    Archive

    26 votes

  13. Comment on Arizona governor Katie Hobbs signs abortion ban repeal bill in ~health

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    The ban, which dates to early territorial days in 1864, forbids doctors from providing abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother. The repeal will allow a 2022 law permitting abortions through 15 weeks of pregnancy to take effect.

    16 votes

  15. Comment on Why Israel should declare a unilateral cease-fire in Gaza in ~misc

    Fal
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    Its pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: one side of the conflict declares a ceasefire; whether or not the other side also ceases hostilities is up to them (you can type 'unilateral...

    I mean it takes two to tango, I’m not sure what a “unilateral ceasefire” would even mean.

    Its pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: one side of the conflict declares a ceasefire; whether or not the other side also ceases hostilities is up to them (you can type 'unilateral ceasefire' into Wikipedia to get a wide array of examples, including the 2008 Gaza war). In this case, the benefit of Israel declaring a unilateral ceasefire is that Israel isn't seeking to negotiate with Hamas - the ceasefire is a show of good faith towards the Saudis in the hopes of pursuing normalization. Hamas' thoughts on the matter are largely irrelevant, beyond whatever military action they may try in response.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Why Israel should declare a unilateral cease-fire in Gaza in ~misc

    Fal
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    Until last month, the war between Iran and Israel was largely fought in the shadows. The Iranians decided to take it out of the shadows, openly attacking Israeli territory directly, from Iranian soil, for the first time in the Islamic Republic’s history. Some observers have argued that Iran’s April 13 drone and missile assault on Israel was a symbolic gesture. Yet given the quantity of drones and missiles fired at Israel and their payloads, Iran clearly meant to inflict serious damage.

    Israel seemingly recognized that the best way to deal with the threat Iran and its proxies pose is to work with a coalition. This, too, is without precedent. The idea that Americans, Europeans, and Arabs would come together to help intercept drones and cruise missiles Iran launched against Israel would, in the recent past, have seemed like a fantasy—and, to Israel, undesirable. Israel’s ethos on defense has always been: “We defend ourselves by ourselves.” This has been both a source of pride and a principle—that no one besides Israelis would have to pick up weapons on Israel’s behalf.

    But now that Israel faces not only Iran but multiple Iranian proxy groups, the cost of taking on all these fronts by itself is simply becoming too high. This development, as well as the willingness that Arab states showed in April to join Israel to confront the threat Iran and its proxies pose, suggests that a window has opened for the creation of a regional coalition pursuing a common strategy to counter Iran and its proxies.

    To take advantage of this opening, however, Israel, the United States, and Arab countries—particularly Saudi Arabia—need to recognize the unique nature of the moment and seize it. A U.S.-brokered breakthrough in a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia would do a great deal to cement this emerging coalition. If the Saudis, whose king is the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, made peace with Israel, that would likely transform Israel’s relationship with other Sunni-majority states within and outside the Middle East following suit. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, as well as Israeli and Saudi leaders, indicate that they would still like to see such a deal happen soon. But the Biden administration believes that the fighting in Gaza must be paused before negotiations about normalization can proceed.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on US announces $6 billion long-term military aid package for Ukraine in ~news

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    US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Friday a $6 billion long-term military aid package for Ukraine — the largest to date — which will allow the US to purchase new equipment produced by the American defense industry for the Ukrainian military.

    The announcement comes just days after the US announced a $1 billion package that would quickly provide equipment to Ukraine to help its fight against Russia from US stocks.

    8 votes

  19. Comment on Mount Fuji view to be blocked as tourists overcrowd popular photo spot in ~travel

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    A huge barrier to block views of Mount Fuji will be installed at a popular photo spot by Japanese authorities exasperated by crowds of badly behaved foreign tourists.

    Construction of the mesh net – 2.5 metres (8ft) high and the length of a cricket pitch at 20 metres – will begin as early as next week, an official from Fujikawaguchiko town said on Friday.

    “It’s regrettable we have to do this, because of some tourists who can’t respect rules,” leaving litter behind and ignoring traffic regulations, he told Agence France-Presse.

    10 votes