Hmm. Yup, looks like I’m remembering changes to make it possible to authorise gay marriages, and laws passed around the same time against anti-gay hate. Pretty close but not exactly the same.

To clarify, I meant SE Asia as the region, and I was mentally comparing against Africa or the rest of Asia. It’s not the West, but Thailand and Singapore have legal gay marriage now.

Do I dare ask about which part?

Has any place in the world ever been actively “flooded” with migrants of a vastly different culture in recent history?

Any place that borders a very culturally different country that has a massive crisis. They usually get banned from working and shoved in refugee camps, though.

But anyway,

Why are humans like this?

Probably stuff that happened in prehistory, some quirk of evolution. It’s definitely not rational.

The really successful religions and eventually empires just happened to be homophobic, so anyone conservative globally is likely to be homophobic.

It’s actually a pretty LGBT friendly region anyway, it’s legal in most of Indonesia, even, but they border Malaysia where gay stuff gets hard prison time.

Edit: As in, SE Asia is a relatively gay-friendly region, for whatever reason. It’s not because social conservatism is out of style.

Indonesia itself is meh. Better than Malaysia, worse than Thailand. And the Muslim part will cane you for it, per the article.

Arabia hasn’t been closely involved for a long time. Actually, I don’t know if it ever was or the someone like the Mughals were an intermediary, off the top of my head. It’s far away from the Middle East.

Religious conservatives gonna religious conservative. If you go back to ancient history sometimes they were fine with homosexuality, or even expected some amount, but that died out along the way. Because of the European empires, but only because they were more successful, so I wouldn’t blame Europe either.

Maybe it’s like the smoky tomatoes you can buy in cans?

What do you mean? Almost everyone wants more, and will gladly take it if they have an opportunity. That’s why lotteries exist, right?

Big history is full of open questions, but there’s counterexamples. Short-lived republics are a dime a dozen, while Egypt lasted for thousands of years. There are known cases where inequality actually increases with the end of an empire, like how Roman Britain with it’s public bathhouses directly gives way to dark ages Britain with feudal lords and manors. In some cases, a disenfranchised group getting a bit of power is destabilising.

Ah yes, pretending intransigence isn’t happening to stop different intransigence. Definitely a sustainable strategy, and definitely not part of why Hamas doesn’t trust US negotiators in the first place. /s

The short term plans have been shit like this. The long term “plan” has been slogans and platitudes. Repeat for decades and unsurprisingly it escalates to genocide. This has been the shame of the West in my lifetime.

Yeah, that was another red flag. Margins of error on any kind of calculation like this are going to be big; “roughly half” would be a strong claim. Coming out with an exact percentage about a social sciences issue is crackpot territory.

He’s makes his money as a popular writer, and actual historians say he’s a hack.

Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.

This seems no more or less likely than before.

What did they teach about the Trump stuff? A lot of things are happening, or not happening but widely believed to be happening, that aren’t supposed to. Did they discuss the possibility that traditional system of government might not survive?

Yeah, “people used to be better” has been a popular sentiment since Socrates, at least.

So, a timeframe isn’t given here, and it’s not even clear who’s being interviewed (Alain Herzog is the photographer), but it doesn’t sound too out there. That’s a 200% increase, given Switzerland’s current use, and it’s specifically renewable capacity to overcome variability. If you provide some kind of V2G or grid storage, or something more responsive like nuclear, that’s going to go down, because the figure is essentially what’s needed to avoid disruption on a hot day that’s also very cloudy.

it’s happening NOW.

Oh, so it’s over a moment from NOW?

Nah, it’s slowly and continuously happening. It has been for decades, although with greater rate as we’ve ignored it.

buildout all the grid you can, it won’t be enough for everyone, and when it collapses, everyone’s fucked.

We’ll need X amount of power. If the grid can supply that, we won’t directly cook. It’s more than now, but not massively more.

Did your parents have any children that lived? I bet they regret that.

No u.

Yes, and there’s also bog or ice mummies that are preserved totally different ways. The Egyptian ones that are filled with preservatives and dehydrated probably do just need air that’s super dry.

Really? I was assuming you’d need pretty significant climate control. Although it probably varies by type.

I have seen mummies stored like under a bench FWIW.

Was that correct, or was that one of those OMG moments?

Ticks, you bet. Rainforests have massive biodiversity, and that includes the parasites. There’s even terrestrial leeches that will latch on to you!

Yes, I gather that Stalin was the iron fist type, rising though pure ruthlessness,

That gives him too much credit. Stalin was relatively inconsequential in the rise and initial rule of the Bolsheviks, which happened under Lenin with Trotsky as a strong second in command. He just managed to palace intrigue his way to the top after Lenin died.

He did keep his power by purging everyone all the time, which is another thing that seems to work better on humans than pure rationality would suggest it should. People were never risk-tolerant enough to stop him, but also never risk-averse enough to avoid working for him, probably out of hubris.

I’m currently working with a German guy, and am trying to.figure out how to broach the subject of how did common, decent people become so indoctrinated to an extreme right ideology.

I’m going to recommend Ordinary Men, which is a book cataloging and analysing accounts of members of one of the battalions responsible for machine gunning people into ditches.

A random German won’t necessarily be super into history. A random Israeli is liable to say it had nothing to do with fascism and everyone is always against the Jews specifically. History is still going on there, and there’s no objectivity.