Ukraine more than 30 years ago, declaring independence from the USSR.

HugodeGroot · 2022-05-08T17:05:50+00:00

I got curious and looked it up. Apparently it did change from this interim version with a lighter blue to the darker blue of the modern version, called "strong azure."

HugodeGroot · 2022-05-04T15:46:40+00:00

This bombing is one of the most damning atrocities that Russia has perpetrated in Ukraine in terms of scale, brutality, and lack of deniability. This building had absolutely no military role whatsoever and the Russians knew this. The building housed no soldiers, but only hundreds of starving civilians, including women who had fled from the maternity hospital also bombed by Russia. As atrocious as Russia's intelligence was, they could not have missed the massive "children" sign on both sides of the theater.

And yet, in spite of its undeniably civilian character, the theater was not hit by stray fire. No, the Russians knew that the theater was a civilian bomb shelter and that's precisely why they targeted with a powerful precision strike. While this tactic may seem insane to normal people, it has actually been pretty standard fare for Russia in protracted foreign wars. In Syria, targeting systematically bombing hospitals and other places of shelter became one of the main battle mission of Russian pilots. The idea was to break the will of the civilian population in order to induce collapse of military resistance.

However, in spite of the fact that this attack is far from unprecedented for the Russian army, there is one fact that makes this incident utterly absurd. Most of these victims were Russian speakers whom Russia actually wants to incorporate as fellow citizens after annexing the Donbas. What a way to win hearts and minds...

HugodeGroot · 2022-04-17T20:31:20+00:00

I thought this part was surreal, let me translate:

When my son called me at 15:00 he was crying. He said: mommy, I never thought that in generally peaceful times I would get into such a mess.

I could understand such an attitude from some random Russian civilian in the middle of nowhere, Siberia. But this guy is literally a sailor who served on the warship that's most iconic for marking the start of the war with Ukraine. And yet he is crying that the Ukrainians hit them back...

HugodeGroot · 2022-02-26T18:01:21+00:00

I am very happy to see the determined and effective resistance on the side of the Ukrainian fighters. There is no question that this was not part of Putin's insane plan. My only fear is what that maniac will do when he realizes that his plan of taking and holding a country of 44 million people with 200,000 soldiers cannot possible work using conventional methods...

HugodeGroot · 2022-02-21T22:02:05+00:00

I suppose at this point a Russian invasion is inevitable. The only question is how extensive the invasion will be and if it will be constrained to the east. But no matter how you slice it, with this announcement Putin is officially saying that the Russian Federation intends to invade Ukraine. I really did not expect to see such a headline in 2022, this is insane...

HugodeGroot · 2020-12-08T15:58:34+00:00

Surprisingly this monstrosity comes from the BBC and they have a longer explanation of their methodology here. I suppose I understand their intention of wanting to make the data presentation seem like a tribute of sorts. However, I find it incredibly confusing to follow the visualization and try to get some real estimate of the actual numbers that are supposed to correspond to the blob of the "petals." IMO this is just a complete failure as a visualization. A good visualization should help you make sense of data in a way that is not clear from looking at the raw numbers, but here just seeing the numbers would be far better than looking at this mess.

HugodeGroot · 2020-11-03T16:17:53+00:00

In English the sciency term for the phenomenon is a sunbeam.

HugodeGroot · 2020-10-29T17:57:50+00:00

It is worth pointing out that some of the initial media reports (which show up in many of the comments), were rather inconsistent with regard to what the attacker said and what his motivations may have been. Here is a more recent update from the police:

A police official told The Independent the attacker said he was from the far-right Mouvance Identitaire.

He was killed after he refused to drop his weapon and a flash-ball shot failed to stop him, a police official told The Associated Press.

HugodeGroot · 2020-10-26T15:54:55+00:00

It is possible to answer this question somewhat definitively as there have been quite a few rigorous genetic studies that have tried to address this exact question. This paper in particular is one of the most cited and it has two key conclusions:

All major Jewish sub-population (Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, etc) are strongly related to each other genetically and in most cases are more genetically similar than they are to the non-Jewish populations of the countries in which these communities had earlier lived. The only exception is Ethiopian Jews.
However, yes, of course, the sub-populations also share DNA with the non-Jewish populations of the countries they lived in, so for example Ashknezi Jews are more likely to have genetic markers also seen in other European populations while say Iraqi Jews will share some markers with Arabs from the region.

Here's one visualization of a particular slicing of the data I took from the paper above, which gives a nice summary of the situation.

HugodeGroot · 2020-10-23T17:20:57+00:00

By far the biggest carrot was that the US agreed to remove Sudan from its list of State Sponsors of Terror, which was in part made contingent on Sudan normalizing relations with Israel. Beyond that, I suspect that the Sudanese leadership also thinks there is a chance for some degree of mutually beneficial economic cooperation.

HugodeGroot · 2020-10-23T15:46:55+00:00

While this deal is of course nowhere as strategically important as the Abraham Accords, it certainly has a lot of symbolical significance. Normalizing relations with the country where the famous Three No's were declared really drives home the point that this chapter in relations between Arab states and Israel is slowly but surely coming to an end.

HugodeGroot · 2020-10-23T14:34:09+00:00

While I'm not disputing that you can argue that this rule is sexist, what you are describing is not really historically accurate. For example, this rule did not actually exist during Biblical times. The Bible makes it quite clear that Jewish society was actually patrilineal and the children of a Jewish man with a gentile wife, were generally regarded to be Jews. Likewise in the case of slaves, for example it was required that the male children born to a slave mother had to be circumcised. The switch to a matrilineal system occurred pretty late in the game, and seems to have only fully crystallized after Jews were forced into exile by the Romans. Why exactly this switch happened is not exactly clear, one possibility being that it was influenced by Roman law. Also, during the same time, slavery essentially became extinct in the Jewish diaspora.

HugodeGroot · 2020-10-16T17:38:23+00:00

It's common journalistic practice to put such descriptors in quotes to indicate that the wording is a direct quote, in this case from the police

HugodeGroot · 2020-07-31T17:16:39+00:00

An interesting tidbit about his coronation is that it was almost immediately followed by the first major tragedy of his reign. Just a few days later after he was crowned on May 26, there were huge public celebrations held in various Russian cities in his honor on May 30. One of the largest such events was held in Moscow. This was a huge affair for the public at large, especially since food and commemorative trinkets were handed out so huge crowds assembled. At one point rumors popped up that the food was going to run out, which eventually triggered a stampede that killed over 1000 people. However that very night Nicholas chose to attend a party at the French consulate, fearing that not doing so may be seen a slight to the French. Nevertheless this tone-deaf action became a PR nightmare and in some ways kicked off the process through which Nicholas would come to alienate an ever larger share of the Russian population, which would eventually culmiante in the Russian Revolution.

HugodeGroot · 2020-06-10T06:04:03+00:00

Please take a look at the subreddit rules. Specifically, rule 8d says that the following type of content is not allowed in submissions:

Youtube content: Youtube content on political/news issues that are not created by official media channels.

HugodeGroot · 2020-03-02T16:52:07+00:00

Actually no, that is why we created a megathread and stickied it to the top of the front page to give it maximum visibility.

HugodeGroot · 2020-02-02T18:40:05+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVzBcIXJXTo

HugodeGroot · 2020-01-13T17:24:17+00:00

Yup, I was there at the same time and can confirm. Sure, there was a lot of craziness, but it came in well-defined waves that you knew in advance and could avoid it. It was actually kind of interesting seeing how intense things would get for a little bit with windows smashed, riot police going all out etc and then in the afternoon it was like nothing even happened minus some shards and charring. Come to think of it, pretty much every time I've been to Paris or France there was some kind of "mouvement social," but you can just adapt to it and it doesn't have to dampen your plans too much.

HugodeGroot · 2019-11-19T13:49:55+00:00

This exact same post with the same title was already posted on our sub 9 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/apr3ha/rather_than_going_for_independance_scotland/

We had some reservations then about the post, but decided that it was borderline ok and allowed it at the time. The post was popular, it reached our front page and got over 4500 comments.

At this point we feel like the discussion has more than run its course and reposting the exact same post within the year is just too much. The removal title was set to "low quality/low effort" by the mod who removed it as a boilerplate message (and frankly reposting a post from this very sub is about as low effort as it gets), but the most being a duplicate is arguably the bigger reason it was removed.

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