[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 2:02 am

This "longest surviving country/democracy" thing really annoys some people, for some reason. I guess it's tied up in nationalism? I brought this factoid up in a group of people, and I was very obviously messing around, but one person got really annoyed, and said "you arrogant Americans". This person was from China, btw, and was also upset by my followup that "China" only dates from 1949 (okay maybe this last was designed to piss them off...)

There's no value-judgement in these kinds of statements, but some people seem to feel there is and get offended. It's weird.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 2:28 am

phlapjackage wrote:This "longest surviving country/democracy" thing really annoys some people, for some reason. I guess it's tied up in nationalism? I brought this factoid up in a group of people, and I was very obviously messing around, but one person got really annoyed, and said "you arrogant Americans". This person was from China, btw, and was also upset by my followup that "China" only dates from 1949 (okay maybe this last was designed to piss them off...)

There's no value-judgement in these kinds of statements, but some people seem to feel there is and get offended. It's weird.

It can mean different things to different people. I had someone get a bug up their butt about Syria today being the exact same as the Syria listed in the Bible, cuz Biblical prophesies.

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 2:37 am

LargePrime wrote:I'll just leave this here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino#Government

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_San_Marino

Their first elections were in 1906.

Nice try.

LargePrime · Post by **LargePrime** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 3:01 am

Mord wrote:
LargePrime wrote:I'll just leave this here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino#Government
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_San_Marino

Their first elections were in 1906. Nice try.

they were having 'elections' long before 1906. they were not general elections, just like elections in the USA pre 1800 were not general elections.

more goal post moving

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 4:28 am

LargePrime wrote:
Mord wrote:
LargePrime wrote:I'll just leave this here...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino#Government
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_San_Marino

Their first elections were in 1906. Nice try.
they were having 'elections' long before 1906. they were not general elections, just like elections in the USA pre 1800 were not general elections.

more goal post moving

Prior to 1906 the Sammarinese governing body, the Grand and General Council, was composed of unelected members of the aristocratic Great Houses who served for life terms. Nothing I've found suggests that there was any public participation in the political process - members of the Council were not elected and thus not answerable to even an exclusive electorate.

If you want to continue to claim that there were "not general elections" (whatever that means) in which citizens who were not members of the hereditary aristocracy voted on proposed laws or voted for representatives to do lawmaking on their behalf prior to 1906, present some fucking evidence, because Wikipedia and its cited references say you're full of shit.

It's rich that you are attempting to invoke goalpost moving against me after disingenuously presenting an aristocratic republic as an example of a democratic government. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 6:39 am

San Marino was annexed by Germany in 1944 and has existed in its current form since it was liberated by the United States later that year. Not only did San Marino gain its independence in the twentieth century, it was literally given its independence by an already existent United States. I genuinely can't imagine why we'd be discussing San Marino as an example of an older country than the United States - that's epistemologically impossible.

-Username17

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 9:44 am

LargePrime wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:The earliest you can reasonably say New Zealand became independent was 1856.
Again, but that is a continuance of its democratic tradition.

Speaking as a Kiwi who studied a bit of our history - before 1840 there wasn't an NZ, there were various Maori tribes. From 1840-1860s it was being colonised by the UK and at the same time the Kingitanga movement was forming the idea of a nation on the Maori side. With the military defeat of that movement NZ was definitely a colony of the UK until at least the end of WW1. In reaction to the Kiwi deaths in that war NZ started slowly moving towards independence (not really opposed by the UK, they had severe financial problems & wanted to cut costs), and when it became absolutely obvious that the UK could not provide military protection in mid-WW2 they took the final steps.

Democracy was separate from independence. I'm not sure what 'continuance of its democratic tradition' means, the Maori didn't have one and NZs democracy was set up over decades after colonisation started. There's no way I'd call NZ one of the older countries in the world.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Thu Jan 24, 2019 2:35 pm

LargePrime has own goaled himself hard.

There's an argument to be made that the United States is 'the oldest Democracy'. I'm pretty sure I linked this article before where they cover the asterisks. Their summary:

PolitiFact wrote: Our rating

Ryan said the United States is "the oldest democracy."

Our democracy is imperfect and always evolving, but that’s the nature of democracy. The changes, for better or worse, reflect the will of the people.

While the United States is not the first to include elements of democracy, it is the oldest existing nation with a constitutional government in which the people elect their own government and representatives.

We rate the claim True.

It's okay if you choose not to accept that the United States is the world's oldest Democracy. You can decide that it isn't (or wasn't) Democratic enough for some definition of Democracy. But if you do that, you have to define your terms. If the United States isn't the world's oldest democracy, you should be able to positively identify a country that is. Now, once you do that we can debate whether it does or should qualify.

When we study history, we typically apply modern day place names to historical places. For example, when we learn about Babylonians, we're told that they lived in modern-day Iraq. Iraq is a country today; when you study the history of Iraq they cover the Babylonian period... That does not mean that Iraq is Babylon, no more than Italy is[/i] the Roman Empire. The fact that there are nations that maintain some level of continuity with the past can make things murky. France, as a country, existed more or less in its present geography since ~1000 (here's a wikiepdia page showing the territorial evolution of what is now France). It's still a difficult argument to accept that France was a country in 1200 - even if territorially and culturally we can track the development of France, a kingdom is very different from a republic.

Even if you accept it was a country all the way back to 1000 AD (or 1200, or 1500), there were major changes in the government (Kingdom to Republic to Empire to occupied territory to Republic).

By a permissive definition of country, the United States is very young. But even by a permissive definition of country, it's hard to assert an argument that another country has had a continuous version of democracy since its inception. Please note that the United States did change. We started with the Articles of Confederation, which weren't replaced by the Constitution until 1789. The Constitution itself allowed slavery and didn't allow for full participation by non-white men. The Constitution itself has been amended 27 times (with the last one ratified in 1992). That said, since the governing document is STILL BEING USED, rather than tossing it out and starting again, even a definition that REQUIRES the same form of government ought to count the United States from 1789 to today. Maybe not much longer, but who can say?

In any case, as a question of historical fact it is not intended to be contentious. There are some caveats, but the statement is GENERALLY TRUE. If you object to the statement, why? Is it simply that Americans claim greatness because of that fact? I assure you many would do so regardless. It's a tautology in the United States: the United States is the Greatest Country on Earth - however we do things (or did things) must have been great because we ARE great. That is a problem because in seeking a 'more perfect union', people have to convince other Americans that things aren't as great as they COULD be. And some people want to roll back those changes (that's what Make American Great AGAIN is saying - we were great, but now we're not, so let's go back to the 'old way').

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Mar 16, 2019 7:04 am

Fucking Nazi killed 49 people and wounded 80 more up the road a bit.

Because our stupid fucking gun laws had quietly fallen apart over the last few years under steady appeals by a gun shop chain, and our stupid fucking spies who just got a large funding increase and can do whatever the fuck they want had never bothered watching any local Nazi activity at all when there's so many unions and greenies to spy on, and also left wing politicians illegally because why not.

Plus, you know, the fucking Nazi. One guy, apparently a rich independent world traveller, and his fucking local Nazi friends who told him where to strike because they didn't like how some of the earthquake recovery that went on in the last few years replaced broken and unused churches with vibrant new mosques.

Thank y'all for always kicking the fucking Nazis out of here.

--

Govt. hopefully will just fucking ban the guns completely this time, the clean up after the previous Nazi shitshow down the road out on the coast just ended up useless with loopholes. Yes, this isn't the first one, won't be the last either I expect. Fucking fucks.

Fuck. Trump immediately blamed the victims. The Nazi of course praised Trump while murdering people.

And it was climate strike day. Like, fucking Nazis, man. Wrong front page.

Thaluikhain · Post by **Thaluikhain** » Sat Mar 16, 2019 1:34 pm

tussock wrote:Govt. hopefully will just fucking ban the guns completely this time, the clean up after the previous Nazi shitshow down the road out on the coast just ended up useless with loopholes. Yes, this isn't the first one, won't be the last either I expect. Fucking fucks.

If Australia could do it after Port Arthur, I daresay NZ can bring in properly draconian gun laws.

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Sun Mar 17, 2019 3:53 am

Thaluikhain wrote:
tussock wrote:Govt. hopefully will just fucking ban the guns completely this time, the clean up after the previous Nazi shitshow down the road out on the coast just ended up useless with loopholes. Yes, this isn't the first one, won't be the last either I expect. Fucking fucks.
If Australia could do it after Port Arthur, I daresay NZ can bring in properly draconian gun laws.

You'd think, but at least one politician has cold feet already.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Mar 17, 2019 10:21 am

Yeah, the public mood is just massively in favour of banning the fucking things, because most people thought they already were after the previous one.

Another died this morning, 50 now, lots still on the edge in intensive care, all the pictures coming out of the people he killed, their stories, little kids, women, people that tried to stop him. Some guy just walking past ran at him, didn't make it.

He's a fucking 4chan guy, personal trainer, gun nut, been visiting eastern Europe and reading Rein*Heigen's Nazi apologetics and various other old crusader myths from over there. Basically a fucking standard neckbeard, dropped easily into the local Nazi crowds.

Worships the US Republicans, of course.

The gun club he was in that yesterday said they were shocked and never heard him say a racist word, is today accused of being reported to the police previously on account of the constant racist garbage talk that went on during their meetings. Mmm. Not at all a lone wolf, but they never really are.

--

Record sales of semi-automatic weapons over the weekend. Nazis are arming up based off ludicrous memes born in the US. It's not a good feeling. Like, what's the plan there? Nothing sane.

All the local media Nazis begging everyone to not politicise this, of course, because Nazis gunna Nazi, and gun bunnies (always been Nazi-adjacent) demanding they keep their semi-automatic room-clearers for hunting. By which they seem to mean brown people.

Hopefully the politicians get their shit together. Doesn't feel much like the cops are going to round up his buddies, mostly because they've been sternly ignoring the 4chan creeps for most of a decade now.

Lots of people mentioning the cops have told them previously "hard to take these guys seriously", which is exactly how they've been hiding in plain sight, getting away with massive organised campaigns of harassment and recruiting.

1.5 million uploads of the livestream to facebook alone. This is not a small movement.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Mon Mar 18, 2019 1:14 pm

tussock wrote: Lots of people mentioning the cops have told them previously "hard to take these guys seriously", which is exactly how they've been hiding in plain sight, getting away with massive organised campaigns of harassment and recruiting.

1.5 million uploads of the livestream to facebook alone. This is not a small movement.

To be fair, they expected police to stop fascists, not support them. Going to the police about that just informs them whose side you're on.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Mar 20, 2019 5:47 am

Yes. It is a bit.

The official excuses have progressed through
1: they didn't fail to prevent this, because you can't fail at things you don't even try.
2: it would've been quite hard work anyway, because hateful racist white people with automatic weapons making Nazi solutes and talking about race war are everywhere and their support is growing so fast.
3: They did try to look, obviously, but didn't find anything, because, like, the pictures with the guns and Nazi solutes were a different post to the ones talking about killing everyone and that's far too common to check in on.

4: Also very busy checking all the Muslims, everyone who wasn't white, really. Like everyone was telling them to all the time up until the recent change of govt.

5: Also the previous govt. seems to have told them to stop looking at Nazis, explicitly, so they had lost all their people with expertise in the problems of fascism.

--

Oh, and facebook said they couldn't spot the livestream in time because, check this, the thousands of people watching it live, no one complained, no one reported it, no one called the cops. Just thousands of Nazis watching live mass murder and recording it to spread the message.

Twenty minutes after it ended, the arrest had been made, the cops noticed the gopro, the phone, they had it taken down.

Just thousands of channers, having a laugh, in the meantime, copied everywhere. At least the local ones are getting fired and arrested, yes they used their work computers, one business owner used his own company computers, arrested and charged. Objectionable material, go the chief censor. Glorious day to not have unlimited freedom of speech.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Wed Mar 20, 2019 12:55 pm

tussock wrote:Yes. It is a bit.

The official excuses have progressed through
1: they didn't fail to prevent this, because you can't fail at things you don't even try.
2: it would've been quite hard work anyway, because hateful racist white people with automatic weapons making Nazi solutes and talking about race war are everywhere and their support is growing so fast.
3: They did try to look, obviously, but didn't find anything, because, like, the pictures with the guns and Nazi solutes were a different post to the ones talking about killing everyone and that's far too common to check in on.

4: Also very busy checking all the Muslims, everyone who wasn't white, really. Like everyone was telling them to all the time up until the recent change of govt.

5: Also the previous govt. seems to have told them to stop looking at Nazis, explicitly, so they had lost all their people with expertise in the problems of fascism.

--

Oh, and facebook said they couldn't spot the livestream in time because, check this, the thousands of people watching it live, no one complained, no one reported it, no one called the cops. Just thousands of Nazis watching live mass murder and recording it to spread the message.

Twenty minutes after it ended, the arrest had been made, the cops noticed the gopro, the phone, they had it taken down.

Just thousands of channers, having a laugh, in the meantime, copied everywhere. At least the local ones are getting fired and arrested, yes they used their work computers, one business owner used his own company computers, arrested and charged. Objectionable material, go the chief censor. Glorious day to not have unlimited freedom of speech.

At least in the US they would be guilty of (and duly not charged) for not reporting the crime. Unless it was one of those dangerous not-white terrorists. The lack of unlimited (unless the government decides it was dangerous speech) freedom of speech doesn't change the fact that the government actually did their jobs here.

So congratulations government? Do those words go together?

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:53 am

To be fair, free speech in America does not used to mean that Nazi's and similar filth have had the unlimited ability to say whatever shit they want and have nothing happen to them. It means meant that they have the right to express themselves, but that right does did not extend to protection of their expressed statements or ideals. It also doesn't didn't mean that a person can't couldn't be held accountable for what they say.

Unfortunately, we have a mentally retarded, sub-human Nazi piece of stillborn afterbirth shitscum as President who is a walking advertisement for abortion, so the constitution and morality are dead and none of the above is true anymore

Orca · Post by **Orca** » Fri Mar 22, 2019 3:51 am

I was worried when NZ's attorney general seemed to be backing away, but the govt did carry through with making semi-automatic guns other than .22s restricted weapons. It may not have any effect on most homicides but it should make massacres like that in Christchurch a lot harder to accomplish.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Mar 22, 2019 11:16 pm

Chinese government burns entire print run of a Call of Cthulhu product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Urosc-JEY

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:10 am

Um... why?

edit: having seen the video, I'm still somewhat unclear as to why they did it. Like, did it have to do with that "secret agent" thing he mentioned?

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sat Mar 23, 2019 1:41 am

Clearly it was too close to the TRUTH!

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Mar 23, 2019 10:09 am

Shrapnel wrote:Um... why?

edit: having seen the video, I'm still somewhat unclear as to why they did it. Like, did it have to do with that "secret agent" thing he mentioned?

My suspicion is it had something to do with his off-hand description of Zhou Enlai as a "true hero." Zhou Enlai is an important figure in the history of the People's Republic of China and worked with and against a lot of other important figures in the history of the PRC at various points.

If you use him as a major character in a low fantasy historical fiction, you will necessarily ascribe some motivations and factional allegiances to him - which may or may not fit with whatever narrative the part of the government that is reading your book happens to want to promote.

A description of a historical figure can be positive and still offensive. Think of the various Republicans who talk about how great Martin Luther King was and how he'd totally support whatever their favorite position is at the moment. It's broadly speaking a positive portrayal, but actual fans of MLK are justifiably angry about it.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sun Mar 24, 2019 10:11 pm

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Mon Mar 25, 2019 9:51 am

They shouldn't have added Winnie the Pooh to the Great Old Ones.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Mar 26, 2019 4:14 pm

The EU parliament just voted in article 13, which if you are more familiar with U.S. digital copyright law you should understand to mean that there will no longer be a safe harbor provision for content hosts in the EU. If you are not familiar with any digital copyright law, I will explain.

This website contains reviews of TTRPG products. Those reviews often contain text excerpts of the product being reviewed. Reviews are fair use, but let's be real; fair use is an affirmative defense, it is something you have to stand up in a court of law and assert, and fbmf isn't going to go to bat in a court of law for any of us any time soon. If a rightsholder sent fbmf a cease and desist, he would cease and desist, and that's fine - lawyers are scary. And that would be the end of it; by complying with the cease and desist he would have fulfilled the conditions necessary to avoid liability for the material we'd uploaded to his website and he would be safe from the scary, scary lawyers.

That is no longer how things would work in the EU under article 13. Fbmf is simply liable for the content of those reviews, period, because the reviews are being hosted on his website. Rightsholders can skip the cease and desist and go straight to naming fbmf in their copyright lawsuit and there is nothing fbmf can do at that point except lawyer up and argue that he was correct to permit that material to be uploaded to his site because it qualified as fair use. Fbmf fucking obviously does not want to be named in any lawsuits, so what he actually needs to do is check every post we make against the entirety of all copyrights currently recognized by the EU and make sure we never upload anything that will put him at risk.

And that's obviously fucking impossible,, but thankfully Google has been building and "refining" this technology for years, and they're 100% going to go commercial with it sometime in the next two years to beat these deadlines and make money off attempts to comply. So fbmf actually just needs to fork over some cash to Google and feed all our posts through for approval by the algorithm. It'll probably be super fucking expensive when Google is the only one on the market with it, but Microsoft and Facebook and etc, etc will inevitably get their own versions to market and eventually there will be throughput-based pricing viable for small businesses and hobbyists

The whole 'review' thing is fucking toast, though. Letting your users quote copyrighted material? That's fucking insane. And occasionally people's posts are just going to randomly contain a string of words which sufficiently match something in a database of copyright texts and get blocked. And occasionally someone is going to take something someone's posted and claim it in the database. These are all the things that happen at websites that currently use automated filters, we don't have a solution for them, so they're going to happen everywhere now.

This law is insane and, frankly, impossible to implement. I have no idea what the fuck will actually happen. Will the internet just kind of limp on, everyone in a constant state of failing to uphold the law, with massive corporations occasionally abusing that fact to crush tiny annoyances with lawsuits only one side can afford to participate in? Sort of like it does now, only noticeably more so? Or will the titans of media be litigious enough that it effectively cable-izes the internet? "Your in-house legal department must be this tall to participate in the internet." YouTube continues to exist. It's just really shitty, and the smaller you are the shittier it is. But YouTube negotiated the system it uses voluntarily from a position of some power. This is not like that.

However it works out, it's a fucking disaster. Compliance is impossible. Simply fucking impossible. The technology doesn't exist - you may as well pass a law telling people to spend the 30th of February on Mars licking their elbows. No one is going to successfully comply, it's just a question of who we choose to subject to the law and who not to.

(To be clear, there are exemptions for very small sites that I'm not entirely familiar with, and tgdmb probably qualifies, and so fbmf does not need to start geoblocking the EU in order to avoid getting random legal summons from Romania or what the fuck ever.)

GreatGreyShrike · Post by **GreatGreyShrike** » Tue Mar 26, 2019 7:17 pm

This Wired Article states that [bolding mine]:

The final wording of Article 13 sets out exactly which platforms will need upload filters and which ones won't. The only way a site that hosts user-generated content can avoid putting in place a upload filter is if it fulfils all three of the following criteria: it has been available for fewer than three years; it has an annual turnover below €10 million; it had fewer than five million unique monthly visitors.

I am not a lawyer - maybe they're misinterpreting the law or outright lying. But to me that looks like TGD, by virtue of having been around for a long time, is squarely within the 'not exempt' category. So are millions of other small sites.

As a workaround - it's time for every small site to close down shop and rename / rebrand itself every 2y 50 weeks or so?

Overall - if this is actually the letter of the law, it's totally moronic and terrible.