@Færd Hmm not great.

@tchrist OK so moderately good news.

Or less bad news, I suppose.

No love, no tacos. I couldn't have said it better myself.

The Lancet: England has the lowest healthy life expectancy in western Europe, an the overall high BMI is causing many COVID-19 deaths, according to the 2019 GBD study

telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/…

@Færd Here's how you should feel about it: People here are no less idiotic than idiotic Americans. In fact, they prattle the same shitty excuses for not wearing a mask: "Covid is invisible. I only wear masks if I see it for myself" "I'm immune and I won't catch it"

And it could be that our healthcare is being overwhelmed while the US healthcare is still coping.

TBH, because of the unanimous distrust of authority, I did definitely see it coming; that people won't comply and wear their damn masks.

I think I even mentioned that here before

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad ip for hostname in body, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, link at beginning of body, pattern-matching product name in body, +3 more (532): 8 Signs You Made A Great Impact On Prime Green CBD Oil by user403089 on english.SE

@M.A.R. Umm, my point was the peculiar similarity between the ups and downs of the two curves. Nothing more.

One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Anna Gerasimova, shocked me by her anti-facemask statements.

She has several times said that masks are useless in her social network posts

And I thought she was highly intellectual.

She is a professional linguist and translator

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in answer, repeating characters in answer (167): Evaluating a sequence of logical clauses that are chained using "and" and "or" by Anton on english.SE

Citizen of Vologda left five comments in the Russian social network, and got 5 years of high-security prison for them.

Five years for a comment with 68 "likes". The rest of his comments are nothing to think of, they are replies to other remarks

They could have just deleted the comments, or imposed a fine.

The post was a news report on a young guy who blew himself up in an FSB building. A suicide terrorist attack in protest against FSB brutality.

The man wrote that "this guy should be awarded the title of the Hero of Russia" for his deed.

And just for this statement he got 5 years of penal colony.

Cracked me up!

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted user (71): Is an article required before a math variable? ✏️ by Anton on english.SE

I wonder why Anton is blacklisted by smokey?

@MattE.Эллен Good question. Blacklisted users usually are, you know, blacklisted.

@tchrist: Hope you're doing OK. Your fire is now making history in your state.

I think this happened to someone once before. A previous post got picked up by smokey and then that blacklisted the used for a few minutes until the incorrect flag was cleared.

Here's one for Anton:

The brainwashing machine seems to have kicked in after 2011.

It's curious that Ukraine is no longer a "big enemy", the Kremlin must have put it on the back burner.

@CowperKettle How much of that is a hangover from the Cold War?

@Robusto I don't know. Maybe it's all from the Cold War, which only paused from 1991 till 1999.

Word of the day: instant, meaning "of this month".

I've never seen "instant" used in this sense.

@CowperKettle This is an archaic usage meaning the current month.

@CowperKettle So it resumed with the accession of Putin to the presidency, I presume.

If I were writing in the style of British correspondents in the Crimean War, I would say that today is the 19th instant.

Meaning October 19.

@Robusto It resumed with the NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia

Putin or no Putin, the bombing of Yugoslavia and the accession of several Eastern European states to the NATO member status made it.

@CowperKettle As I recall, Yugoslavia had already splintered well before that time.

BTW, you wouldn't say "the NATO" ... just NATO.

@Robusto Yes, sorry. Bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis.

Fucking Balkans. Always causing trouble for everyone.

Serbs are slavs, and Kosovars are Muslims, and were seen as encroaching upon ancient Serbian land. Indeed Kosovo is to Serbs like Kievan Rus to Russians, a core piece of land defining the people's historical identity.

Yeah. Can't we all just get along?

Imagine the state of Texas deciding to rejoin Mexico, and Russian planes coming to bomb bridges and military installations across the US to force the US to let Texas go.

I'm all for getting along.

@CowperKettle I agree. The US should have been working to defuse the situation instead of playing everything with a high hand.

As should we all.

Seriously, the people of this world really need to work at getting along or there isn't going to be any world left for anybody.

Which shows you why I would make a very unsuccessful politician.

@Robusto Well said, for what it's worth.

@FaheemMitha I know, it sounds rather Pollyanna-ish. But that doesn't prevent it from being maybe the only solution we have.

@Robusto Not Pollyanna-ish at all.

It's the only chance of survival our species has. And right now, it's not looking too good. But that's not exactly news to anyone who has been paying attention.

@FaheemMitha It's only news to people who refuse to see it.

@Robusto That's one way of putting it. :-)

I see Porter's novel still survives in that adjective. But I wonder how many know it is a novel, let alone have read it.

@FaheemMitha You may as well ask how many people these days actually read novels.

When thinking about human survival, I often think of Eric Blair's essay - orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws

Originally published in 1941, but still as relevant as the day it was written.

The world has changed very little in the last 80 years.

I've read that essay many times, but I'm still not sure I understand what it means.

@FaheemMitha I'll have a go when I get a minute. But I'll have to narrow the browser window drastically to make it readable.

@Robusto There are other versions of that essay available online.

Though the orwell.ru archives are quite stable.

No, this is fine. I just have to pop the tab out and make it narrow enough to be a readable column.

That is, about an alphabet and a half in width ... or 39-ish characters.

Like that.

@Robusto Oh. That's not how it shows up in my browser.

Of course not. The column width is allowed to flow to the width of the browser. A common failing for people who are unconcerned with readability.

People don't usually think about readability.

Despite how very important it is.

This essay was written not long after the Battle of Britain. A time that now seems somewhat distance, perhaps.

@Robusto Why is that a bad thing?

Look at your average novel, for example. It has page widths of ... yep, an alphabet and a half.

@FaheemMitha It is simply easier for the eye to follow a narrow column than a wide one. Very long lines of type are quite fatiguing to the eye.

@Robusto I see. I've never thought of that. Though I don't think I've personally had much difficulty.

Usually online publications will come in at around 50-75 characters per line (cpl), which is still quite readable.

The narrowest I am able to get the Orwell essay is in that range. And that's fine.

Side note: it is useful to break up large blocks of text into smaller paragraphs to enhance readability.

@FaheemMitha Here's one thing that caught me up short:

> But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories.

@Robusto Ok. What of it?

He's talking about Wells, and that seems to describe someone who did not live in England in the Victorian era, which was certainly not "non-military."

England didn't acquire and keep most of the planet as colonies by being non-military.

@Robusto I think his point was that Wells was not all from a background which values or cares about military stuff.

Though it must also be said that Wells' life was extremely unusual, in a number of respects.

@FaheemMitha Perhaps. If true, however, he was dreadfully imprecise in his choice of words.

People with his sort of background don't generally grow up to be successful. Let alone one of the most influential people on the planet. In his day.

He's spot on in this comment:

> The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves.

@Robusto Call Britian a "non-military nation" is a curious choice, I agree.

But perhaps in Eric's mind there were multiple nations in the British Isles.

@Robusto How much do you know about H. G. Wells?

Little more than reading his books. I read his Outline of History at a very young age, probably grammar school.

And of course I read his science fiction.

I knew the outlines of his life, but nothing in depth.

I'm not exactly sure what he means by his final sentence:

> But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.

@Robusto His story is an unusual one. Most people who read his stuff don't realise that.

@Robusto He means (I think) it's good (or enviable, or creditable) that Wells did have talents in the first place. Whether he "squandered" them or not.

But it's certainly not a clearly written sentence.

That's what I surmised, though it could have been stated in plainer terms than he did.

But, yes, he does accurately describe Wells as being someone incapable of understanding fascism.

I don't think "The Outline of History" is much read any more. Though I've seen it on library shelves, at least in India.

@Robusto That's his opinion, anyway.

Wells dreamed of world government as utopia, as though he was blind to the base nature of human beings.

He could not conceive that anyone could love Hitler. Or Trump, for that matter.

Something like that, yes.

Certainly relevant to our present day circumstances.

Indeed.

I don't know if I agree with him about Wells. Who certainly believed in the transformative possibilities of human beings.

Whether he was delusional, it's hard to say.

I think it takes both a Wells and a Blair to correctly plumb civilization.

It's now forgotten how enormously influential Wells was in his time. These days he's mostly remembered as the author of some early SF novels.

And likely a Voltaire as well.

He probably changed the world quite a lot himself. Because he believed in the possibility of change.

I know I read The Outline of History before I knew anything about history.

I read it because it was readable, and most history books I'd seen weren't.

@Robusto What did you think of it?

In retrospect it was colored by his world view, of course, but that could apply to any writer's history.

I think the real reason Wells was so influential was precisely because he was so readable. His works slip down like oysters.

I don't think I've read that one, but I've read other things he's written. Some of his early work is very good.

The stuff I've read is mostly fiction, though.

@Robusto Perhaps so.

Eric takes a moment to sneer at the Sankey Declaration of Human Rights, but that was actually quite important.

Of course, he's entitled to his point of view.

> What has Wells to set against the ‘screaming little defective in Berlin’? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency.

It probably will not surprise anyone to learn that Wells wasn't happy with that essay.

I refuse to believe that the true vision of the future is "a boot stamping on a human face forever," but that certainly remains a possibility.

@Robusto He just thought it was a possibility. Suitably dramatized, of course.

Wells didn't live to read that book. He died in 1946.

@FaheemMitha If I understand his dismissal of that document correctly is that 1) it is a toothless document, capable of doing precisely nothing, and 2) that it is not organic to human beings; it's like some Esperanto ideal that everyone should embrace because it's "a good idea" without reference to the real language of emotion that people actually harbor within themselves.

@Robusto Well, it led to one of the foundational documents of the United Nations.

@FaheemMitha Um, I rest my case.

The main criticism of the UN is that it is a toothless construct, capable of doing precisely nothing.

It's aspirational, yes. But without something to aspire towards, where are we?

@Robusto Not a fan of the UN, I take it?

@FaheemMitha I agree with you. Wholeheartedly so.

The UN gets a lot of bad press. Much of it coming from the United States. But they do a lot of stuff.

@FaheemMitha Not at all. I think it's important, probably even necessary, but when has it prevented a single atrocity? When has a UN declaration "deploring" something had any effect at all?

They're not very good at enforcing the peace, but it's unclear what they could really be reasonably be expected to do.

@Robusto People usually pay attention to UN resolutions when it's convenient to them, yes. But they do other things.

UNICEF, for example.

Yes, but I think people expect more than that.

Unreasonably so, no doubt.

If they expect the UN to magically enforce peace, that really is delusional.

That would need a World Government. We don't have that.

I understand. But people tend to be delusional, even unreasonably so.

@Robusto Do you feel you learned something from "The Outline of History"? Just curious.

@FaheemMitha As an eighth-grade kid? Sure.

If I were to read it today I would no doubt find it lacking in nuance and depth.

As would be expected of an outline.

@Robusto Oh, so you read it a long time ago.

@FaheemMitha Yes. As I said earlier.

I remember feeling a sense of empowerment from reading it, because it was my first view of world history. It was also a bit chilling, as I recall, since he stated at the outset that he was writing it because, given the times, it was important to set down certain things in case we were to face a new Dark Ages.

Or words to that effect.

@Robusto - Everyone in Texas wants their own Brian. Who can blame them?

@Robusto That was in the 1930s, a time when Fascism was on the rise in Europe. So not an unreasonable thing to start with.

@Robusto "Grammar school" is a British term. At least it used to be.

Actually, a type of British school.

> Help me with the second movement (first not done yet).

@FaheemMitha I think it was written in 1920.

@FaheemMitha Yes. I consciously used that because I thought it might be more familiar to you than "grade school" would be.