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caze

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Posts posted by caze

  1. 22 hours ago, ignatius said:

    you guys should read "Sapiens:  A Brief History of Human Kind" by Yuval Noah Harari.

    I've not read it, but should probably noted that most academic evolution and anthropology people seem to have a pretty poor view of this book (they also recommend avoiding that Rutger Bregman guy too). 

    • Facepalm 2
  2. 37 minutes ago, thefxbip said:

    Extremely reductive views of what constitutes a civilization, the worth of civilization or development imo.

    Very materialistic and technology centered.

    And very biased indeed.

    I never mentioned 'worth', you're still just making a bunch of dumb assumptions about moral judgements I haven't made. Civilization is defined around specific technological and social development (specifically including a writing system), it's just an objective measure of what has or hasn't occurred around that, the value of other aspects of their society, and their relative moral worth is a totally separate argument. Just because some people in the past made shitty moral judgements based around 'civilized people and barbarians' doesn't mean we have to today, we can recognise obvious historical facts without engaging in needless moralising.

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    Flashback of History books in high school describing entire cultures with two words ''hunter gatherers''.

    It's just such a lazy attempt at describing complex and varied cultures.

    I cringe everytime i hear those. And hell, are they used all the time still to this day to put the most reductive framework on many cultures around the world.

    All human societies were at one time hunter gatherers, there's nothing reductive or lazy about it, it's what we all did at one point before we figured out different ways of doing things. It simply describes what people spent a large part of their time doing, and doesn't discount all the other things they did, if it did the people who study these societies would have run out of stuff to do a long time ago - they have no problem referring to them as hunter gatherers and also documenting the complexity of their rituals and so on.

  3. 57 minutes ago, thefxbip said:

    But the lands were in near pristine state when europeans arrived. They did take care of the territory.

    They were also living at the whims of nature, and when crops failed and natural disasters occurred, the resulting stresses generally led to the genocidal warfare (again, like with any other society of a similar level of development - and what we'd return to if the eco-fascists and degrowthers got their way). Also, once they got a hold of some horses and guns their rep as living in harmony with nature took a serious beating, look what happened to all the buffalo.

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    And some of the tribes lived peacefully.

    ...and were preyed upon by the ones who didn't. Same as it ever was.

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    But the fact that you are so willing to only talk about indigenous society using words like ''widescale human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, large scale genocidal warfare'' and calling it pre/proto-civilization makes me wonder if you are not just a bit biased toward the good ol' ''barbarian uncivilized savages'' excuse to destroyed them.

    The only reason I'm talking about it at all was to disabuse you of the noble savage notions you seem to have. I also called the Europeans genocidal, to suggest I think they deserved it is absurd.

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    These were not proto-civilizations. They were STRAIGHT UP COMPLETE CIVILIZATIONS. With laws, systems, languages ,cultures and ways of living.

    There were a mix of hunter gatherers, nomadic warring tribes, and at times more settled agricultural systems (though nothing in North America that was very long lasting or left much of a permanent record). There was no large scale continent-wide agriculture based civilisation (just a few regional proto-civs that never fully got going, though they undoubtedly would have given the time). Things were a lot more developed in central/south America, where they also developed writing/astronomy/maths.

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    You see those things were and are still used to portray indigenous society as deserving no respect.

    I might be biased, i take notice but so are you.

    No, you're just making a lot of dumb assumptions.

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    My point is: of course things were never perfect, but RIGHT NOW Indigenous voices could help us tackle problems like climate change, destruction of biodiversity and political unrest if we listened to them more.

    Doubtful, unless they're big proponents of nuclear power and genetic engineering or something. I am a big fan of the anti-NIMBY guys in Vancouver though, more of this kind of thing would be great.

  4. 22 hours ago, thefxbip said:

    I personally have met and spent time with people from some of these Nations in Canada and they certainly were not genocidal bunch of assholes...

    Just saying ''meh the noble savage myth'' as a wild card to deny the entirety of the Indigenous various Nations, their knowledge and ways of life is a bit too nihilistic and wont just do it for me.

    You might be surprised to learn that people today are not the same as the people of the past, the descendants of the genocidal European colonists are no longer genocidal assholes either, people in general have got less genocidal. The native populations of the Americas practiced widescale human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, large scale genocidal warfare, etc (just like every other pre/proto-civilizational society on the planet). The only reason they mostly got wiped out rather than the other way around is the Europeans discovered big boats and guns first.

  5. On 6/26/2022 at 4:38 PM, thefxbip said:

    The USA nation experiment is a failure if you compare it to the old Nations that were successfully taking care of the land and lived there for millennia. 

    I mean the native population of the Americas were royally fucked by the Europeans, but lets not engage in some silly noble savage bullshit. They were just as murderous and genocidal a bunch of assholes as any other people on the planet sadly.

  6. I was mostly scrolling through twitter while watching it, real snoozefest, atrocious. Not sure why I bothered. The fight scenes with Vader really highlighted how childish and dumb this shit was and still is, should've left all the old stuff in the past, tried to do something new (well, they did try that too in the recent movies, and that also failed - bar maybe Rogue One, so maybe they should just stop trying altogether).

  7. On 7/25/2021 at 4:42 AM, Rubin Farr said:

    I’m guessing this is just the first book? Wonder what source material the TV series will draw from.

    First half of the first book, up to the bit when they arrive at Sietch Tabr or thereabouts. 

    TV series not based on anything afaik, unless it's from his son's awful books (he did a few prequels I think). It's gonna be a Bene Gesserit focused prequel thing.

  8. 33 minutes ago, Satans Little Helper said:

    Here's another opinion: the publicly/governmentally funded space programs seem to have had their biggest push in development and innovation years/decades ago. Many of those programs have been cut in one way or another. So it kind of makes sense for commercial programs to spice things up a bit.

    Yes, this exactly. Even some of the big NASA funded missions which are still going ahead, like Artemis, are only doing so because of politics (congresspeople ensuring money earmarked for their state stays there - I think all 50 states have a hand in the Artemis pie in some way or another). Artemis is going to cost 10x what SpaceX could do by themselves, NASA did try to cut some costs a bit by choosing SpaceX only for the moon lander, but now this decision is in review because of the aforementioned congress-graft. There's also an element of use-it-or-lose-it, NASA needs to demand money for these big projects to ensure it keeps getting funding for other things it thinks are more important, like space astronomy and interplanetary probes for doing basic space science, when cuts are needed they can take them from the bigger project - (which they did with cancelling the Mars aspect of Artemis - probably for the best, doing that in addition to the Moon with all the same technology would have been a colossal waste of money). This will hopefully become a moot point in the future if these commercial developments pay off, NASA will start requiring a much smaller budget (it's already relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but still). Signs are pretty good they will pay off though.

    • Like 1
  9. The space tourism thing with them is more of a side-project, they can use it to fund development of their main operations - which will be sub-orbital supersonic passenger flights, and flexible small satellite launches - which they can launch from pretty much anywhere by flying their converted 747 launch vehicle around, containing all required ground operations equipment, making satellite launching accessible to a lot more nations for much much cheaper (It's limited to low-earth orbit for the time being though, they've had one successful launch so far, back in January, not something which is going to be fully competing with SpaceX or other rocket based things any time soon).

    • Like 1
  10. On 7/10/2021 at 2:26 PM, auxien said:

    seems some are making some possibly important technological leaps, or getting closer to.

    no, just the usual completely unproven nonsense which violates the laws of physics.

    • Haha 1
    • Burger 2
  11. 7 hours ago, chronical said:

    It's strange that we live in a reality where our government unearths a bunch of UFO footage and nobody gives a shit. 

    why would anyone give a shit? they're just planes and balloons and shit.

    • Facepalm 1
  12. 17 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

    property > life according to sick fascists

    perfectly reasonable to bomb palestinian children? maybe for a fascist

    fuck israel

    Bombings have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Neither side is justified in their current bombing campaigns (though it was Hamas who started this current round, as usual, so the ultimate responsibility lies with them). Do you think it's reasonable for Hamas to bomb Israeli children? At least one has died so far.

    Also, how many of the Palestinian dead are from Hamas rockets which land in Gaza? At least one incident involving multiple deaths, including children, came from one of their rockets. Around 20% of them land in Gaza.

    • Facepalm 1
  13. 14 minutes ago, auxien said:

    the article you linked suggested that some of the Palestinians were forcibly removed, correct? that seems worth not omitting. a state kicking out residents then taking the property seems....idk, wrong? who gives a fuck if 40 years later they tell the descendants they'll pay some restitution. 

    nobody has been forcibly removed as of yet afaik, the supreme court hasn't reached a judgement.

    16 minutes ago, auxien said:

    also please define when the Jewish persons owned these properties from 'long before' the foundation of Israel. are we talking 10 years before? 100 years? 1000? why did they at some point in the past supposedly own the land in Sheikh Jarrah then suddenly at some point before 1948 not own it? how? why? when? i honestly have no clue on this and your linked article, again, is lacking in clarity (seems to have plenty of bias at least!). 

    from the 1870s or thereabouts. they never stopped owning it, but they were kicked off the land by the Jordanians in 1948, the area was then taken by Israel in '67 war.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamization_of_East_Jerusalem_under_Jordanian_rule

    “During Jordanian rule, 34 out of the Old City’s 35 synagogues were dynamited.” [8] The Western Wall was transformed into an exclusively Muslim holy site associated with al-Buraq.[9] 38,000 Jewish graves in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were systematically destroyed (used as pavement and latrines),[10][11] and Jews were not allowed to be buried there.[5][6] This was all in violation of the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement Article VIII - 2 "...; free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives;...."[12] Following the Arab Legion's expulsion of the Jewish residents of the Old City in the 1948 War, Jordan allowed Arab Muslim refugees to settle in the vacated Jewish Quarter.[13] Later, after some of these refugees were moved to Shuafat, migrants from Hebron took their place.[14] Abdullah el Tell, a commander of the Arab Legion, remarked:

    For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible 

     

  14. ...note that I'm just talking about this specific case here, not Israeli settlements in the West Bank in general, which are frequently unjust (IIRC only a minority represent what you might consider normal legal transfers of property, with outright theft and coercion a common tactic in many cases).

  15. 3 hours ago, auxien said:

    sure sounds like the state of Israel took property from Palestinians who'd been forcibly ejected and used it to publicly house the influx of Jewish peoples being shipped in to enable an ethnostate. that's based on essentially just the article (which, i repeat, seems fishy/biased/trash) so assumptions incorrect or not are based on yet a third read of it (it gets worse the more i've read it).

    the 'perfectly reasonable' part doesn't work because the state of Israel, which at that time had only existed for a couple of years, was seizing lands of Palestinians who had in some cases been forced out. if there's a flaw in what i'm understanding please point out exactly where.

    Israel took land/property in West Jerusalem - which was abandoned by Palestinians fleeing to Jordanian annexed land in 1948, and used it to house Jewish refugees fleeing Arab and Iranian persecution across the middle east. And conversely Palestinian refugees took land/property abandoned by Jewish people in East Jerusalem fleeing to Israel. Not sure what's hard about this for you to understand. The trigger for the current conflict was a civil legal dispute between private individuals over Jewish property in East Jerusalem, it's 'perfectly reasonable' because the land in question wasn't seized by the Israeli government, it was the property of Jews from long before the foundation of the state of Israel. The only unreasonable part of this is a separate dispute between the presumably soon to be evicted Palestinians and the Israeli state for compensation/resettlement for their own loss of land in 1948 (I don't know the specific details of the individuals involved, and what kind of claim they have, but compensation has been given out by Israel in the past). Population transfers, loss and gains of territory are commonplace in times of conflict, it's weird that Jews are treated differently from everyone else in these matters by so many, I wonder why that could be?

    • Thanks 1
    • Facepalm 1
  16. 1 hour ago, auxien said:

    i'm not familiar enough with the details of the establishment of the Israeli state (edit: and the current legal details of those in Sheikh Jarrah trying to keep their property) to know what i'm missing that the author is breezing through, but it sure sounds like those in Sheikh Jarrah are trying to litigate the existence of Israel as a state allowable to impose things like imminent domain. ...which i think is the basic thrust of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yeah? 

    No, it's got nothing to do with eminent domain, the owners of the land in question (who are Jewish) have been trying since the 70s to regain land which was taken from them in 1948 by the Jordanians, which they had owned going back to the late 1800s. Initially they just wanted the Palestinians to pay rent, but it has escalated into trying to get them evicted. As he points out in the article, while this is perfectly reasonable by itself, there is big unfairness here as the Palestinians in question similarly lost their land (either in West Jerusalem, or elsewhere in Israel, not sure) and are not being offered any restitution.

  17. On 3/4/2021 at 9:55 AM, MaartenVC said:

    I wrongly assumed that the SpaceX Starships were the first fully reusable launch vehicles, but apparently there were already functional prototypes of fully reusable launch vehicles built in the '90s!

    DC-XA.jpg

    McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper
    "The DC-X, short for Delta Clipper or Delta Clipper Experimental, was an uncrewed prototype of a reusable single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle built by McDonnell Douglas in conjunction with the United States Department of Defense's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) from 1991 to 1993. Starting 1994 until 1995, testing continued through funding of the US civil space agency NASA. In 1996, the DC-X technology was completely transferred to NASA, which upgraded the design for improved performance to create the DC-XA." ... "...cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their home grown Lockheed Martin X-33 / VentureStar project." ... "...cancelled..."
    McDonnell Douglas DC-X Launch 8
    "On July 7, 1995 a rocket known as the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X)  launched into the sky.  This is the world's first fully reusable rocket vehicle. Flight 8 proved that the vehicle could turn over into a re-entry profile and re-orient itself for landing.  This flight took place at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico."

    Beautiful. ♥
    It was sub-orbital and didn't carry a lot of payload though, but still: an amazing achievement.
    Nasa should've developed it further imo.
    (also, most of their tests didn't explode, lol)

    My favourite design was the X-33:

    Lockheed Martin X-33 - Wikipedia

    X-33 Venture Star - Gunter's Space Page

    ...mostly because of the aerospike engine (and the fact that it just looks cool), which gets rid of the need for 2-stage rockets because it's just as efficient at low altitudes as high (and more fuel efficient overall, allowing for a much greater payload capacity than the DC-X). In the end they had too many manufacturing issues with the fuel tanks, but they solved those problems after the project was cancelled, so will be interesting to see if anyone ever tries again with this design.

    Lockheed Martin X-33 - KSP Cinematic - YouTube

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