Thank you for the thread.

To have a brighter section: what are your favourite or most appreciated thing about the two states?

That’s fair, and I can see how that could be.

Thanks for explaining your view on it.

Question you might know the answer to as you live in Pakistan (at least sometimes):

Has their been an update on the Asma Batool and the other campaigner’s blasphemy case?

Even the PRC pays people to produce content to upload to YouTube for international optics, and I’m sure it’s easier to get a VPN in Pakistan regardless.

Qatar: rich, oil wealth, decent news reporting but also the gulf states use of practically (if not actual) slave labour and massive inequality, linked to racism. Mostly an unknown to me.

Pakistan: massive sexism and religious intolerance issues, expounded on with the beef with India and allied with the PRC.
Could be a mixing pot of people and ideas, but various ethnic groups feel exploited and get involved in armed resistance, meanwhile Ahminis and women have a habit of getting murdered and mob justice seems to support that… Which is sad. Instability in the government that transcends the love of cricket.
Would like to know more, met a few people from there and they’ve generally been decent folk, but also were glad to have moved to Europe…

How so?

In my eyes, decidedly adequate++ to alright. Some good moments, but nothing to really write home about. But it wasn’t good enough to make me watch past the first series, so maybe it falls off?

What about being able to swap the hard drive and/or RAM in a laptop.

I have an old Lenovo one which I love as it had access slots to remove and swap them easily, not have them under metal strips screwed into plastic casing and the circuit board. Despite buying it in 2013, it goes like a charm with 8gb of RAM and a 2tb hdd.

But there’s an old Dell I have that is locked down tighter than a Maga press-pool, so it’s time is coming to an end since even Linux ideally wants more than 2gb of RAM these days.

My open tabs across two windows all need to pass muster or be closed at the start of the week.

They usually number between 4 and 12. But mid process might get up into the 30s.

".

I’m going out on a limb and saying untrue.

How would the dish soap not “attack” the pigments on the crockery not covered by gunk, do you need to make sure that the plate is covered in an even spread? It’s a desurficant, iirc, with hydrophobic molecules to get into molecular scale sized spaces. Maybe unvarnished crockery could lose the colour… But eating off that and washing it wouldn’t be the best choice either.

Also, most dishwashers instruct you to rinse the worst off in the sink before loading. And we’ve followed that and most of our china still has good colours, the one that doesn’t I know was left in direct sunlight for over a summer.

Thank you for the insight.

Do you know if there was much space for the offspring of Portuguese settlers and native peoples?

I’ve heard it said that there was more space for the equivalent in Spanish than say English or French colonies, where the mixed race children generally seem to have been sidelined or else society pretending they didn’t exist (as a concept as much as an individual).

Bearing in mind:

I think this is the biggest issue, we’ve been talking at cross purposes. The point this dingbat has been trying to make the whole time has been the cultural continuity.

So you stating a long lasting Turkish cultural heritage going back to pre-Ottoman times does actually make my point for me. Even if I do want to slightly brighten that Ottoman culture:

As we both agree, imperial expansion and nation building tends to be built on a foundation of blood and bones, and generally involves at least a bit of light genocide. The establishment of the Ottoman Empire, did those same killings and warring that has seen nations rise and carve out territory across history.

However the Ottomans, as well as their Turkic antesscents, Seljuk and Orguz, were less bloodthirsty and murderous than your large post mostly about the atrocities committed at the end of the First World War as the Ottoman Empire fell. The area that they governed was, and despite the massacres and ethnic cleansing attempts of the 19th through 21st centuries remains, an area of huge religious and ethnic diversity.

Zoroastrians, Jews, a multitude of Christian (and indeed Islamic) denominations cover the region. And in fact, outside of the bloody establishment (as you tell us all nations are) and collapse of the Ottoman Empire for centuries it was a land of religious and ethnic tolerance, and many Jews and Dissenting Christians would flee to it for sanctuary from central Europe. Even the modern target if Turkish hate, the Kurds, had autonomy and self governance within the Ottoman Empire into the 19th century.

It is a shame that that part of Ottoman culture, respect, tolerance, and multiculturalism, has slipped away from modern Türkish culture and identity; as nationalism, alas, not a uniquely Türkish problem, has risen to take its place. The interplay of nationalism, nation building-butressing, and racism, is intriguing and perhaps has a lot of interesting and useful ideas to be explored to help solve modern problems around the world.

I’ll get to Türkiye soon, that’s a lot to respond to. But I’ll start here:

But that’s besides the point, we’re not talking about the cultural continuity or racial purity of new world countries, but rather how they came to be.

I think this is the biggest issue, we’ve been talking at cross purposes. The point this dingbat has been trying to make the whole time has been the cultural continuity. The US doesn’t have it because it put the break with Britain and monarchy, and the denigration of American Indian culture at its core.

I kept talking about Central and South American nations to highlight the difference. Maybe I could’ve been cleared, but go back and reread my posts with that in mind.

That I mean cultural continuity and heritage is also why I’d trace Russia back to Kievan Rus and the shared Slavic origins. Yes, all the genocide and imperialism against all the other people are bad, and also a part of Russian national heritage at this point. It’s also very grim and beyond the scope of this conversation, so I’ll acknowledge it, agree it is and continues to be an atrocity.

And In fact, that the disagreement comes from my failing to clearly articulate that I meant cultural continuity and heritage. Not modern carving out of the land that makes up modern borders.

Maybe you’re muddling stuff up with someone else in another comment chain said?

I, and please double check my posts, don’t think I’ve said (and hopefully not said anything that implies) I think there is mass murder of Uighurs.

We’ve also in this conversation not mentioned the camps being closed, and while I’ve yet to see conclusive evidence of that my use of “is/was” was intended to allow the possibility.

I thought your main point, and what we were discussing was:

there isn’t a shred of photographic evidence of violence against the Uyghur people. The claims start on 2019-2020, and in FIVE YEARS, it hasn’t been possible to capture photographic evidence of the harrowing genocide?

And hence the focus on these files, which maybe don’t show the hyperbolic levels of “harrowing genocide”, do, I think, show that there is/was evidence of harrowing violence against the Uighur people - which you yourself seem just about ready to admit to as “a certain degree of police violence”, in addition to the state violence of mass incaerations and guilt by association that these documents show.

Would you be more convinced if we moved the goalposts to that old Right Wing nutjob phrase “cultural genocide”?

Throwing people into camps for traditional values, guilt by association or proximity, (from the files, along with goals of sinisation).

And the imposition of modern wage labour, while removing local language and lifestyles.

Or will you at least conced that if those files are real, then there is/was a huge mass detention campaign that bordered upon, if not being one, a crime against humanity?

Origins, sure.

Colombus was such a racist dick he was recalled by the King of Spain for poor treatment of indigenous people.

But I also mentioned the integration and how there is less of a divide. Obviously still a divide when you look at racism, discrimination, the likelyhood of indigenous people to have joined a guerilla movement such as FARC or the Zapatista.

But that’s more than the US generally gives, and it was starting to change… But Trump terms 1 and 2 have certainly put up roadblocks.

The way that indigenous identity and partisan politics in South America also doesn’t help and may well be putting their causes back as the right and left continue to coalesce about USAian talking points.

And yes, the destruction and loss of central American cultures due to the Spanish conquest and destruction is terrible, as is the loss of any culture and it’s artefacts and legacy.

Really? A calculator only puts out what you put in.

A LLM gives you what has been put into it by it’s massive illegally scraped training dataset.

A better question would be is there a point to closed book/non-reference material exams, and in that setting is there a place for LLMs?

You’re welcome, I’m glad to share it.

I very much appreciate it being Al Jezeera, too. So the claims of US/Western/NATO bias/mouthpiece hold no weight.

Most countries in South and Central America have a less exclusionary relation with their indigenous people, and having a rebellion against their ruling classes with indigenous participation rather than switching one set of white rich property holders for another.

Part of that due to the Spanish settlers marrying and having kids with indigenous peoples, and the metizos being a large part of the population, rather than US focused pure European ancestry without one drop of black/native blood. Meaning the US has a lack of tie to pre-settler culture and history that these nations don’t to the same degree.

I do agree that Canada has an issue with it too, as does Australia. New Zealand has been working to integrate Maori culture over the last decade or so and made big strides to integration.

The old world cases are also more complicated, you could say South Africa but that history of oppression and apartheid and recognised and have been integrated somewhat to self identity, though obviously a long way to go and the ANC being corrupt and infighty hasn’t help one jot. Maybe the party will collapse and South Africa can finally start to move in the right direction?

Russia has had a long history of culture as well as imperial expansion. Yes, the people of Siberia and Central Asia have suffered a lot, but there’s a Russian identity that goes back over 1000 years anchored to (albiet mostly western Russia places and events).

For Türkiye, Morroco, Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, I’m gonna need your notes to begin to comprehend what your point is with them - probably due to my own ignorance on their history. (Except Türkiye, I just think you’re wrong there, but intrigued to see your logic.)

Moe is a cutsey anime style, iirc.

I can imagine it’s harder to have a national identity when your nation is based on forced removal of indigenous people and their persecution (not to mention all the slavery), because my normal line is usually “everywhere has the same amount of history”, but if the US doesn’t see the history of the American Indians as theirs, or at least as something to honour and commemorate, then I can see perhaps that that might cause a mental malaise.