i was ranting abt this w my wife last nite like. i think people have forgotten the whole “dont assume stuff about people based on their appearence” thing and that it also applies to people who are “straight-looking” “cis-looking” “normal-looking” etc. ultimately you dont know anything about how someone identifies or what their life is like unless they tell you, especially not at a glance. dont project your ideas onto strangers, its weird.
and like examine what the traits that mark people out as “straight and cis” to you are. is it a physical feature they have no control over? their voice? how old they are? or is the way they present? are they wearing a work uniform that leaves little room for self expression? or are they just wearing casual clothes you wouldnt consider “gay-coded”? why do you get to choose what certain clothes mean? those clothes could mean something completely different to them. assume that you know nothing.
Azerbaijan has blocked all the roads to Nagorno-Karabakh for over 7 months now. People are starving, not receiving the medical help they need, there’s no fuel… It is a “silent genocide.”
The article above doesn’t explain why other countries aren’t doing anything, but my local paper where I saw this news did, and it is a combination of the following things:
– Azerbaijan is allied with Turkey, which “Western” countries are trying not to annoy at the moment, because of the situation at the Black Sea being a bit delicate rn.
– Azerbaijan also has a lot of natural resources related to energy, which the EU is horny for.
– BP has also invested massively in Azerbaijan energy stuff, so Britain is also not gonna do anything to endanger all that money.
– Russia is busy with its war in Ukraine, so it is not doing its part in keeping the road open as agreed in the cease fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
I have to explain what is going on in the UK, because it is absurd.
So, this is Gary Lineker:
ALT
He’s known for a fair few things over here.
He was a very good (association) footballer, playing for England in the 1986 and 1990 World Cups, winning the Golden Boot in 1986, and managing to never get a single yellow card in his playing career. He played for Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, and Tottenham, before finishing his career in Japan.
But if you aren’t in your mid 30s, you probably know actually know him him for a couple of other things.
The first is the role of spokesman for another Leicester icon, Walkers Crisps (which are sort of equivalent to Lays, but hit different), as pictured above. Despite being a notably clean player, he used to play a cheeky serial crisp thief. I don’t think he’s done that for well over a decade, but his ads were on the telly a lot when I was a kid and it’s a bit like learning that the hamburglar was an incredibly clean (American) football player or something.
The second thing Gary is widely known for is having presented Match of the Day, the big football program on the BBC, the sort-of state broadcaster, since 1999. He is, incidentally, very well paid for this (though with a consensus that he could get even more if he went to one of the non-free-to-view broadcasters because he is very good at the job).
He also has a twitter account. And political opinions.
So, the UK government has got itself dead set upon doing heinous stuff that will totally somehow work to prevent people who want to come to the UK making the perilous crossing of the Channel (between England and France).
By heinous, I mean “openly advertise that they won’t attempt to protect victims of modern slavery” stuff.
It’s very obviously using a legal hammer to victimise a marginalised group of people in order to win votes.
And, uh, I should clarify that by “legal” I mean “using the passage of laws” - the policy is, in addition to all the other ways it’s awful, probably incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the UK’s international law obligations.
Gary, top lad that he is, objected to this.
On Tuesday 7th March, he made a quote Tweet of a video of the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, bigging up the policy, he wrote “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.”.
This got a bunch of backlash from extremely right-wingers, and then he made the tweet that really got him in trouble (with right-wingers): “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”.
Now, I am not actually subjecting myself to watching a video of Suella Braverman bigging up a cruel policy to say whether the specific comparison of the language to 1930s Germany is accurate.
But needless to say, Ms Braverman was amongst the many figures on the right of UK politics objecting to Gary’s rhetoric.
And here’s the part where a fact about the BBC comes in: it is nominally neutral and impartial (and so, of course, is routinely accused of bias from all sides but particularly the right-wing), and has something of a code for its contributors to this effect.
Now, that code has previously been applied to Gary Lineker, over a comment about whether governing Conservative Party would hand back donations from figures linked to the Russian regime.
But it generally hasn’t been applied too strongly to people like Gary, whose roles have nothing to do with politics (such as presenting a “here’s what happened on the footie today” show), on the basis that, well, their roles have nothing to do with politics.
However, when directly asked about whether the BBC should punish Gary Lineker for his tweets, government figures basically went “well, that’s a them problem”.
But a couple of days passed, and it seemed like Gary’s approach of “standing his ground because he did nothing wrong” was working and everything would die down. He was set to get ‘a talking to’ but not much more than that. The Conservative right, after all their fire and fury earlier, had gotten bored and moved onto something else.
And then, on Friday 10th March, the BBC announced that he would be suspended from hosting Match of the Day this weekend.
But it could still go ahead, because there are, like, other hosts!
Except, well, funnily enough, when you take a beloved figure off air, for making a fairly anodyne tweet, no one wants to be the scab who actually takes up the role of replacing him.
Gary’s two co-hosts, Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, said that they would not appear without him.
People who (co-)host Match of the Day on other days followed suit.
The net result is that Match of the Day is currently set to air without hosts, BBC commentary, or global feed commentary.
And the solidarity shown to Gary Lineker, over what is very flagrantly actual cancel culture and an attack on freedom of speech (the logic implied is that institutional impartiality requires that no one say anything too critical of the government ever), has continued to grow.
And, as of 17:30 on Saturday 11th March, the situation shows no signs of improvement, though some are calling for the Chairman Richard Sharp, who is separately facing corruption allegations, to resign (yes I linked to the BBC itself there, there is nothing, nothing, the BBC loves more than going into great detail about how much the BBC sucks).
Just to update on this, the BBC has now capitulated on this and Lineker et al will be back on Match Of The Day this weekend.
A friend of mine described this as “possibly the most successful wildcat strike ever” and it’s worth noting how quickly this escalated out of the BBC’s control because of the solidarity of his fellow presenters (most of whom are also ex-footballers). It began with Wright and Shearer announcing they wouldn’t go on MOTD without Lineker, and then Alex Scott announced that she not only wouldn’t host MOTD, but she wouldn’t present Football Focus (her regular show and the other part of the BBC’s Saturday football bookends) and suddenly their entire schedule fell apart. Current players then announced that they wouldn’t do interviews with the BBC to show their support for Lineker, and it then became a question of how long it would be before it backed down, and who in BBC management might be forced out over this - both the Chair (Tory donor and Borish Johnson loan arranger Richard Sharp) and Director-General (former Tory election candidate Tim Davie) are on very shaky ground right now.
We are in the era after it caused SO MUCH, and caused so many sites to put in blocks and other restrictions to stop it from scraping everything
If they are forced to wipe their entire dataset then they won’t be able to get even a fraction of it back!
Not only that, but they would be forced to get permission of the owners for everything they use. Which would IMO, actually kill most of the issues with AI and actually make the technology into something actually useful.
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
at their communal tables, spartans ate nutritious but bland food, sometimes described as soup or gruel. asimov relates there was a contemporary greek joke, of course spartans don’t fear death, if all you have to look forward to is gruel every day, death seems preferable.
i posted similar thoughts on livejournal back in the day, i watched 300 and laughed out loud in the theater.
I think it’s only fair that two thousand years of idolising the Spartans is followed by two thousand years of roasting them to heck.
Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc
Notice how removing seating doesnt actually prevent people from sitting it just makes them uncomfortable and makes public spaces more hostile it doesnt actually work at controlling their behavior not till a pig comes along anyways and they’ll harass a homeless person/teen whatever they’re sitting on.
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