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captain_price7

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Sorry, but this seems too strange to be true. Are you sure you didn't miss anything?

Particularly strange since moving train (i.e. vehicle) is about the most common way doppler effect is explained in textbooks- it's not like you need any big "eureka" moment to get to this solution either.

If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage...

This whole paragraph seems utterly bizarre.

US did NOT "end" ISIS, certainly not alone. Most of the fighting and dying was done by Shia and Kurdi forces inside Iraq whose lives literally depended on stopping ISIS. US failed in Afghanistan precisely because no such ally existed.

And, what exactly do you mean by "rampage"? There seems to be an awful implication- "if US forces didn't bother about civilian casualties, Taliban could be surely defeated". Which I suppose is true, there can't be any Taliban if there isn't any more afghan.

I think you're overestimating Pakistan's capability. It gave Taliban leaders shelter at their worst moment, and that is about the only leverage ISI had.

The moment Taliban started to carve out territory inside Afghanistan, that leverage was gone. There's some gratitude, but also lots of resentment among Taliban leadership about the way they were treated by the Pakistani authority.

Because things aren't so bad.

I live in Bangladesh, now, and I don't think we're much improvement over India (except the caste problem). I once witnessed the aftermath of a policeman beaten by public because he assaulted a shopkeeper. So while people doesn't have much legal recourse, they aren't exactly powerless either.

Similarly rich & powerful evade justice, but I wouldn't go as far as saying "there's rarely any justice for anyone". The state may fail to provide justice, but people find their ways, and that sort of keeps the worst impulses of the powerful in check.

I'm hesitant to call the slum population "homeless". We have people in the parks, footpaths too, and that's very different from people living in many of these slums.

Here are a few facts: some of these slums are 100+ yrs old. A lot of them have "permanent" homes, something lot harder to uproot than tents. And lastly, if the government attempted to destroy them, it won't be just poor people, almost entire society will be outraged. Something similar happened here in Dhaka.

We have something called Cadet College here in Bangladesh (grade 7-12), and British public schools were I think the primary inspiration behind them (actually first few principals were all British). It was just as brutal as you say, if not more.

But the attitude of "ex-cadets" here is that of extreme pride, many consider it to be the best 6 years of their life. And this feeling is almost universal.

I have now several times come across criticism of British public schools by their own alumni, I wonder why there's so much difference in attitude.

The author pesters us with an imputation on Hume as an analytically bankrupt political thinker but fails to deliver any concrete proof.

"analytically bankrupt political thinker" - I didn't think the author implied something so strong.

"but fails to deliver any concrete proof" - Not sure what constitutes "proof" in conversation like this. But I think the author did show that Hume came close to understanding the many problems of his society- racism, divorce, wealth inequality- but his over-skepticism led him to dismiss any social change. The central point is that while Hume was skeptical of change, he wasn't equally skeptical of established order.

I'm not that big fan of this article either. But I think you're being unnecessarily harsh.

Love it when a bunch of new users join the discussion to spread anti-Israeli propaganda.

You've made like 10 comments in this thread. I'm not accusing you of anything. But before you accuse others of "propaganda", maybe take a look at yourself and see who's behaving somewhat suspiciously in this thread.

While I agree with the main point, the specific criticisms author presented here made me even more confused than the NYT article he was criticizing. For example:

The “though they’d like it if you’d follow them on Instagram” aside doesn’t even make any sense. What does big social media making community feel global have to do with soliciting likes on Instagram?

It means although The Drunken Canal was created as a reaction to giant online media, they (i.e. The Drunken Canal ) still use at least one such media (i.e. Instagram) themselves.

I agree with your broader point- one shouldn't tell others that their life isn't worth living. But I'm afraid maybe you're downplaying the struggles a poor Bangladeshi have to go through.

I currently live in Bangladesh. And my father made a off-handed comment few days ago about how there isn't many "thin" people in our village anymore. When he grew up in 60s, a big chunk of our village people didn't have two meals regularly, people dying of hunger wasn't so uncommon. Just two days ago a doctor friend told me hundreds of people die in his hospital every week due to lack of proper equipment. I have several times witnessed the heartbreaking scene in pharmacies where people ask for the price of a medicine, and then turn away without buying anything after hearing the price.

Overpopulation at least partly contributes to this, if not the biggest contributor. It may not be a global problem, but it definitely is a problem for a country like Bangladesh (and maybe India too). I'm not saying this people's life is worthless, but I would definitely not want a new generation of people to go through this.

Population control here is not just the pragmatic and necessary option, it's also the most humane thing to do.

I loved so much reading it, I was thinking that if someone were to write fictional, sherlock holmes like fantasy story where our sherlock would take some (maybe fictional) widely used software at each episode, investigate it like this, and reveal some (fictional) grand bug in the end- I'd totally read it.

Yeah I know it sounds stupid, but I suspect real Sherlock Holmes was inspired by a true story like this one too, and at least some contemporary detectives started to enjoy reading them.

Unis spend so much time teaching CAD software, processes, etc, you wonder how much understanding engineering grads actually have

That's interesting. The popular sentiment in programming world seem to be Unis don't tech practical stuff enough, or interviews for (junior) developers don't test their practical knowledge enough- a point I always found a bit strange.

Outside of the sliver of people that research religion that remain religious...

I come from the rural area of a developing Muslim country (Bangladesh), most people around me didn't have much secular or religious education, and yet I think absolutely everyone around me knew Islam is a continuation of Christianity.

The idea is that current generation of Christians have lost their way (and one of their greatest sins is worshipping Jesus), that's why God had to reveal Islam, but the "true Christians" of past were righteous and worshipped the same God as ours.

I think you're not aware of how big a deal is shirk- the idea of attributing God-like power to humans- is in (Sunni-) Islam.

The bit I found most interesting:

They found that the total number of “all cause” deaths reported between May and August almost doubled in India compared with the same period in each of the past five years.

“Is that because the number of covid deaths in the country has been vastly underestimated?” I asked.

“It’s impossible to have a decisive answer,” Shah told me. “But the pattern of the excess deaths doesn’t really shout out covid as the cause. It just doesn’t... The telltale signatures of covid just aren’t there,” he said. He won’t venture any hypotheses about the cause of the excess deaths. But among the possible candidates are indirect consequences of the pandemic: wage loss, displacement, malnourishment, forced migration, and disruptions in health care...