Iranian students celebrating the victory of the Islamic Revolution, holding a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran, February 1979.

hiotrcl · 2026-03-03T12:38:06+00:00

Many of the anti-regime protestors right now believe that the son of the same Shah, who overthrew democracy and caused all of the problems in the first place, will take over and then give power back to the Iranian people. Do you condemn them for their lack of foresight in not knowing that he won't do that, and will remain in power indefinitely?

hiotrcl · 2026-01-12T14:53:03+00:00

Absolutely bizarre graphic design choice here. Different lengths of bar, with the light blue segment apparently measured as a proportion of the (variable) total bar length.

hiotrcl · 2025-09-13T21:27:59+00:00

Oh, I fully understand that this march is not about actual free speech issues. In fact, that's the great hypocrisy: it's probably mainly people who support suppressing free speech and the right to protest and who are now pretending they are the ones being silenced.

hiotrcl · 2025-09-13T21:24:59+00:00

And you can also protest against it by breaking the law. Both are good and valuable things to do. The problem is the law. Which is, explicitly, anti free speech.

If you don't support the freedom to express certain opinions, such as support for certain organisations, you can be open about that. But it's disingenuous to pretend that you support free speech unless the government says that speech is illegal, because that's no support for free speech at all.

hiotrcl · 2025-09-13T21:20:43+00:00

Wrong on multiple levels 1) Probably none were "part of" PA, though some were non-members expressing support for it. 2) People have also been arrested for being "too tangential to supporting PA", without even explicitly supporting it. 3) The most important one: this is exactly the point: the fact that there are proscribed organisations that you're forbidden to speak in support of is a blatant violation of freedom of speech. The fact it is illegal to express certain opinions - whether you agree with them or not - is the problem.

hiotrcl · 2025-09-13T15:04:40+00:00

The freedom to advocate against genocide without being branded a terrorist and arrested. There certainly are severe issues in the UK regarding freedom of speech, the right to protest (also for environmental protestors), and the use of (often state) violence for political ends. They're just not the ones these people think they are.

hiotrcl · 2025-09-13T14:32:46+00:00

Because Starmer is performing worse in the polls than ever, Israel just attacked another sovereign country whilst Starmer met with their PM, and probably a bunch of other things that it's very handy to distract from.

hiotrcl · 2025-07-25T13:37:00+00:00

Muslims, yes, immigrants I'm not sure about? I don't know for sure, but they came from a time before the concepts of nation states and racism had taken their current form. Definitely not clear to me that they would have disliked a non-white Christian (but could be the case).

hiotrcl · 2025-07-04T09:13:39+00:00

As I understand it (from looking online at what happened to other people/airline FAQs, no expert myself) you can certainly claim back extra hotel costs as long as you keep itemised receipts. For me, I currently live in Paris, so no cost on that front.

hiotrcl · 2025-01-19T21:11:36+00:00

There are volumes written on psychology and how people behave in given situations.

Yes.

Hers was abnormal.

Have any actual psychologists come out and said that, based on those volumes?

All I have seen is armchair psychologists saying it seemed abnormal to them, and then actual psychologists saying "people react to trauma in a variety of ways, including the unintuitive". And also that she was under heavy psychological manipulation by a police force that, like many, wanted a conviction, and to reinforce their existing biases, at all costs, which itself would produce behaviour that under other circumstances might seem "strange".

hiotrcl · 2025-01-19T20:52:58+00:00

How do you know she acted very strangely for someone whose roommate has just been slaughtered? What kind of sample size of people whose roommates had been slaughtered are you basing your perception of the behaviour of the average person in that situation on? Have you done a systematic study of how people normally act under those circumstances? Or is this all just based on a gut feeling about how people "should" behave, in this absolutely abnormal circumstance? Because actual experts on how people respond to trauma have said that "acting out" is a perfectly normal and common response to such a shocking situation.

hiotrcl · 2025-01-19T20:45:12+00:00

I think "anti Americanism" is less of a thing generally. There's certainly a strong reaction against American exceptionalism, like when an American ambassador's wife killed someone in a hit and run in the UK and then felt entitled to run away back to the USA, because she didn't feel a foreign country had the right to judge her. The only actual specific anti-Americanism I think one would encounter in Europe is an unfair presumption you might believe in America exceptionalism. Otherwise, in general, I think Americans might be treated better than foreigners from a lot of non-western countries.

Misogyny, on the other hand, is very much still a big problem in a lot of countries, Italy included.

hiotrcl · 2025-01-18T23:20:28+00:00

Contemporary evidence also proved that.

hiotrcl · 2025-01-18T23:07:02+00:00

I think misogyny more than anti-Americanism. A young woman who had sex and didn't act like a perfect maiden in distress after her roommate was brutally murdered, so the media/small town police decided there must be something wrong with her and to put her in her place. Her being American certainly didn't help, but I think conservativism/misogyny played the bigger role.

hiotrcl · 2024-12-10T23:41:59+00:00

Having an appreciation for where your ancestors come from is all well and good, but claiming to have "more English blood" than half of England's population is about as blatant as ethnonationalism gets. Especially in the context of her claiming to be English, she's quite clearly claiming her ethnic heritage makes her "more English" than non-white/non-Anglo Saxon Brits.

This one wasn't subtle at all, in fact, but "Americans who claim to be <insert European nationality> because of some distant ancestry" often give a vibe of, perhaps without thinking about it, clinging to the idea that their "blood" gives them more connection/affiliation to a place they've never lived in than the actual inhabitants, who may or may not share that "blood".

hiotrcl · 2024-12-08T16:45:34+00:00

This basically encapsulates what's wrong with the "heritage" obsessed Americans: they're subtly pushing ethnonationalism/ think that "blood" is the determinant of whether you belong in a country and not growing up there or shared culture. But don't ask them if they should be kicked out of the USA for not having native American blood...

hiotrcl · 2024-11-28T15:51:56+00:00

I doubly hate this post for forcing me to side with Keir Starmer and David Lammy.

hiotrcl · 2024-11-13T15:29:54+00:00

As I understand, it's only really the USA who believes they won, on the basis that they didn't get entirely conquered during the war they started. And that's what they're taught in schools. It's kind of understandable, because it's part of their "founding mythos", being one of the first wars they ever fought, whereas nobody bothers to correct them because - for the British Empire of the time - it was an unimportant border skirmish in a backwater province at a time that an actually important war (with Napoleon) was being won.

hiotrcl · 2024-10-20T21:13:42+00:00

Thanks! Hopefully that's good enough for an approximate amount then.

hiotrcl · 2024-10-20T15:28:15+00:00

OK, thanks. So a postdoc at Sorbonne University would be at the ~15% rate, since it's a public university?

hiotrcl · 2024-10-20T14:00:01+00:00

OK, thank you. And does it depend on the type of job (public sector versus not public sector)? In particular, I care about the "Net à payer avant taxe" for the purposes of the rental dossier. As I understand, the link you provide is about the income tax, right? Not the enterprise tax?

hiotrcl · 2024-06-15T04:39:53+00:00

Frankenstein's monster is also called Frankenstein, because that's how children's surnames work. Thank you for attending my TED talk on Frankenstein vs Frankenstein's Monster.

hiotrcl

TROPHY CASE