No need to reference Orwell, the Forever War is already its own piece of dystopian fiction

Was this photo taken some time around 2007 or did something change that made this year so bad?

He’s a very good boy though

The problem is it just brings people to talk about how awful these climate protestors are for vandalising things people feel culturally attached to. The conversation is never about climate change.

I’m using the term “allowed” in the sense of “China agreed to this and put it in its own law”. Freedom of navigations exercises are a way to tell a country “Do what you promised, we are willing to fight you about it if you don’t”. Since China has not actually stopped this exercise, it is following the treaty despite all its complaints. Even America follows the treaty, despite having not signed it.

Being signatories to a treaty is not decisive if no one follows the treaty.

Yeah, this is true. The treaty is just the specific set of terms (almost) everyone agreed to and continues to follow. Since everyone almost everyone agreed to it and everyome does follow it, it’s an easy point of reference to get international cooperation on. I’m sure the reaction would be quite different if China had fired on this ship vs if it had done so in a world with no agreements on territorial waters and innocent passage. In the latter case, a lot of countries would probably just tell Germany “well why did you sail a gunship where you weren’t supposed to?”

That stuff is cool, but I’m pretty sure they’re referring to stuff like throwing soup over famous paintings (or rather, the glass covering famous paintings). I have to agree with them if that is what they mean; these actions are far far too easy to present as just vandalism for its own sake, and there’s no obvious connection between the targets and the intention of the protests.

For what it’s worth, most of those JSO protests have been done in a way that would not damage the actual object. Like the Stonehenge one, it wasn’t paint, it was cornflour and food colouring that would just come off in the rain (and was, in the end, removed with just a leafblower). The Magna Carta one actually was doing damage though.

Regardless of that, I don’t personally think that they are effective protests. They’re far too easy to frame as mindless vandalism.

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Wasn’t Starlink saying it would refuse to comply with the court order to stop serving ex-Twitter in Brazil? Could this be related to that?

There is UNCLOS, which China signed up to. It defines the limits of territorial waters (they are not extensive enough to cover the whole Taiwan strait even if the same country controlled both sides) and also permits passage through straits even when they would otherwise be against that law so long as you only travel through and don’t stop

No, but it does include other things that mean Germany would be allowed to do this regardless of whether you consider Taiwan to be part of the PRC or not. Territorial waters don’t extend far enough to cover the whole strait, and you’re also allowed to sail through territorial waters - even with military vessels - so long as you stick to the middle and don’t stop.

I’m just going to take a wild guess that the two downvotes on your comment are two of the three ex-mods, based on their behaviour in this thread

That sounds like a prog rock band who wanted to cut loose and relax a bit, so they made a a side project to do punk music. Only, they still couldn’t quite resist the urge to play in 15/8 time.

Who decides what is an international water way?

Pretty sure this is a reference to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS. China and Germany are both parties to it, and doing what Germany did here is absolutely fine under it.

Ahh, thanks! My knowledge of the region isn’t great, I just remembered that story off hand - and of course, that’s the story as told by the British colonial administration too

Ahh fuck, stuff being published by them was usually a decent sign that it’d be interesting in some way. Best of luck to the actual team, I hope they can put something new together

It definitely is

I think part of the problem is the volume of it that is just completely uninteresting. You absolutely can do cool stuff with, I agree. It just seems like most people aren’t. In the same way that Duchamp managed to do something pretty cool with Fountain, but I would not give the slightest hint of a damn about a collection of other readymade art made in the same quantity and with the same thought as AI outputs

I kind of like the argument that Ecuador’s Chimborazo is the tallest on the basis that it’s the farthest point of Earth from the centre of the Earth

Funnily enough, the man it was named after was against calling it that. It came about because the Tibetans and Nepalis on either side of the mountain used different names for it (Qomolangma and Sagarmatha respectively), so British surveyors concluded that there was no accepted name to put on a map and they would simply give it a new one. In English. George Everest, the prior top British surveyor in India, objected on the grounds that his name couldn’t be written easily in Hindi, but the Royal Geographic Society ignored him and the used it anyway