Interesting Links for 13-11-2022
Nov. 13th, 2022 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
- 1. A material normally only found in meteorites has now been made artificially, and may solve our issues with some rare earth metals
- (tags:materials meteor space technology viaSwampers )
- 2. German transphobe also a Holocaust denier
- (tags:Holocaust transgender Germany viaSwampers LGBT )
- 3. Iran Votes to Execute Protesters (there are 15,000 in prison right now)
- (tags:Iran protest death_penalty OhForFucksSake )
- 4. English people encounter pizza for the first time
- (tags:pizza history )
- 5. Discovery of bronze statue rewrites Italy's Etruscan-Roman history
- (tags:history archeology Italy )
- 6. Why do so few women excel at maths? Sexism, of course
- (tags:sexism women mathematics )
- 7. Major ad firm Omnicom recommends clients pause Twitter ad spend (clients include Apple and McDonalds, and 5,000 more)
- (tags:Twitter advertising Doom )
- 8. How "Wordle editor" became a real job at The New York Times
- (tags:games language )
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Date: 2022-11-13 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 12:26 pm (UTC)Having Italian (Umbrian) ancestry, this used to plain puzzle me! :o)
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Date: 2022-11-13 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 12:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-18 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-22 07:02 pm (UTC)There's really no single concept of American Pizza at this point. There's a lot of old-fashioned neighborhood pizza (much of which is kind of terrible), and many home-grown styles like Detroit Pizza or Chicago Deep Dish that are weird but delightful when made well, but variations of Italian varieties are pretty common at this point, including some places that make solidly good Neapolitan-style. (Albeit less often with an authentically Italian selection of toppings.)
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Date: 2022-11-22 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-22 08:52 pm (UTC)Right -- my point is mainly that sometimes (although by no means always) it is Italian-style. (This is a thing for me mainly because my favorite weeknight restaurant does very good Neapolitan pizza, and I have it often.)
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Date: 2022-11-13 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 10:07 pm (UTC)Claiming that trans people weren't targeted may be factually wrong, and may even be morally wrong to some extent, but it is not remotely equivalent to denying genocide, and suggesting that it is makes me feel uncomfortably like a pawn.
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Date: 2022-11-14 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 08:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 09:27 am (UTC)How on earth is it not denying part of the Holocaust to say that it a group wasn't deliberately targetted for extermination, because that group was smaller?
Are you really saying "Hey, there weren't many of group X, so it's fine to say that they weren't targetted?" In what world is that anything even close to not morally reprehensible?
Chunks of my family died during the Holocaust. I'm Jewish, and large chunks of my mother's side are just gone. I toured chunks of Poland and the Czech Republic looking for records with my father and uncle. I am *totally* on board with the idea that Jews were the central part of it.
But saying that it's okay to discount the attempted genocide of any group is wrong. It's just morally hideous.
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Date: 2022-11-14 10:21 am (UTC)The thing is that I don't think that there was a systematic attempt to exterminate trans people. I think that individual trans people were targeted for being visibly queer, rather than for their transness qua transness. And that was bad, and claiming that it didn't happen is bad, but it isn't the same as trying to discount an attempted genocide, and that distinction matters.
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Date: 2022-11-14 12:03 pm (UTC)If you're not aware this it is because Holocaust education is extremely terrible and because the Allied countries, which were also homophobic and transphobic for most of the second half of the 20th century, actively suppressed this history. Read this, it is scholarly and well-referenced, and extremely horrific but I'm not apologizing for that:
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4188-the-eradication-of-talmudic-abstractions-anti-semitism-transmisogyny-and-the-national-socialist-project
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Date: 2022-11-14 12:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 02:13 pm (UTC)Very much this.
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Date: 2022-11-13 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 08:55 am (UTC)It's that prosecutors in Germany are doing this.
There are certain expressions of support for National Socialism that are *not* free speech in Germany, and Holocaust Denial is one of them.
It hasn't been prosecuted in this context before.
And prosecutions under this particular law carry a huge weight in German public opinion.
I don't think that this significance is communicated in the article, but why would it be? The target audience is immersed in it, no-one even needs to say that it's important, nor why.
...And we, as outsiders, see the detailed arguments - which the German public are following very closely indeed - without realising that the context is more important than the detail.
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Date: 2022-11-14 08:40 am (UTC)...And next-to nothing about tetrataenite, which is *fascinating*, and the actual subject of the article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrataenite
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Date: 2022-11-14 04:19 pm (UTC)2
Date: 2022-11-14 11:32 am (UTC)Anyway, perhaps a distinction without a difference. I was mulling over the distinction between genocide and persecuting people because of their sexuality or how they experience gender or their politics and then was reminded of the times I studied Nazi jurisprudence during Jurisprudence and then Civil Liberties classes. It was mostly gibberish designed to put a veneer on the Nazi's main creed that they were going to kill some people because they didn't like them and they could and also because the Nazis had become powerful by telling one group of people it was entirely the fault of some other groups of people that they were having a difficult time and they couldn't back of out of that once they were in charge.
Also reminded of the words of AJP Taylor I think - you have to remember that they were mad.
So I'm not 100% convinced that delving in to the intentions of the Nazis when thinking about their crimes is helpful.
(My mum and I had been having a slow conversation about Natural Law and the differences between crimes against humanity and crimes against peace and war crimes. Sadly she was a German Legal Postivist about this sort of thing. There's no helping some people.)
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 11:40 am (UTC)No. She was *called* a Holocaust denier, asked a court to say that they weren't allowed to call her that, and the court said "They can totally call you that, because you are one".
This is not the same as being found guilty of Holocaust Denial. But now that a court has said that she is one, it's entirely possible that the justice system is taking note and she will be. Or that they might decide that the balance of evidence is good enough for individuals to call her one, but not good enough for the state to charge her as one.
I think that in any large group, once you start telling people that X is to blame, and then enough of them join because of your stated hatred of X, then the group probably counts as being an X-hating group.
Also, if you're willing to send people off to the gas chambers for being X because it furthers your goals, then you're treating them as effectively sub-human, and thus can probably be justifiably called X-hating, even if your actual feelings are stark indifference to their fate.
I'd be delighted to understand more about your loathing of legal positivism :-)
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 12:22 pm (UTC)(2a) "I think that in any large group, once you start telling people that X is to blame, and then enough of them join because of your stated hatred of X, then the group probably counts as being an X-hating group."
I agree.
(2b) "
Also, if you're willing to send people off to the gas chambers for being X because it furthers your goals, then you're treating them as effectively sub-human, and thus can probably be justifiably called X-hating, even if your actual feelings are stark indifference to their fate."
I also agree. I also think that if you are sending lots of people (or groups of people to be mass murdered is pretty secondary to your reasons for being an X-hating or Y-hating organisation.
(3) Specifically German Legal Positivism, mostly because it divorces the study of law from the law's grounding as a useful tool for human society and as something either grounded in morality (or at least shared systems of ethics) or designed to advance morality in society. It is similar to my concerns about how economics as a science behaves - cut away from the actual humans and humanity in the system.
I think you can establish some objective moral positions in a *human* society. Even you can't, I still think it is legitimate to say that a commonly shared moral position has some legitimacy especially when it is linked to some genuine improvements in utility. I am both a strong form and weak form Natural Lawyer. I also think that law is a tool that helps humans live in dense, complex urban environments and therefore contributes to our material and cultural richness. I also think that law has a role in actively shaping our morality and our ethics. We can agree that we *ought* to do more X and less Y and then make laws that support us in achieving that goal.
So my gripe with German Legal Positivism is that it sees the law as an abstract thing and not as a human tool for humans to use.
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 12:28 pm (UTC)The idea that law is wholly a system that can merely operate as a set of rules was, I hoped, made to look very foolish when AI/"logical rules system" approaches to law failed utterly in the 80s, and also when postmodern approaches to language made it clear that language/logic/reality all inhabit different levels of abstraction and cannot perfectly map onto each other.
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 12:55 pm (UTC)I do think there is a role for studying law in the abstract. I think any properly constituted legal system ought to have a great deal of internally consistent logic in it and be amenable to prediction. You can be a useful legal technician without knowing why a particular law is the law. But a legal system isn't dealing in spherical cows *and* I object to the notion that one *ought* to separate the law from its function in human society.
(And some of the same thinking informs my scepticism about block-chain as a contractual or monetary tool - some of this stuff is very messy *and* the legitimacy of decisions might actually rest on them being made by a human. )
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 02:45 pm (UTC)I agree that predictable law is good - if you can't make a good stab at telling both whether you are breaking the law, and how close you are to a legal grey area then it makes life vastly more risky. But yeah, law is a tool for making society better, and we need to keep that in mind.
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 03:18 pm (UTC)Condictio causa data causa non secuta being a type of legal action one can raise in Scots Law and known - at least in my Unjustified Enrichment class as the Condictio Cows and Ducks and Cows and Sheep.
Re: 2
Date: 2022-11-14 03:32 pm (UTC)Discovery of bronze statue rewrites Italy's Etruscan-Roman history
Date: 2022-11-18 03:27 pm (UTC)So the idea that Roman and Etruscan gods were worshipped together is completely unsurprising.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-22 07:06 pm (UTC)3 - I'm behind on the news, so perhaps events have passed me by, but a cynical part of me looks at this as a ploy so that Khamenei can show how magnanimous he is by ordering that their executions be commuted in exchange for, oh, a mere ten-year prison sentence...