Aung San Suu Kyi has pretty much blown her reputation. She basically comes from an old-school elite family and she's reverting to type.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...lence-rohingya

Her father was a privileged intellectual Communist who sided with the Japanese until, gradually, in 1943-4, he worked out that the Japanese were going to lose and sided with the British for reasons of expediency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San

And she's both-sidesing it, like Trump.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-a...-suu-kyi-think

Yeah, Aung San Suu Kyi is apparently calling these reports of ethnic cleansing a terrorist campaign of lies.

Geopolitics doesnt have much to do with acid attacks in london. Thats a pretty local thing even if it happens in other countries as well.

With regard to geopolitics im afraid of what technology is doing to the world. Things are getting very complex, i can name a whole lot of stuff that is worrysome.

Let me know if there is more questions. For example maybe you think i have suggested a link between grenade attacks in sweeden and acid attacks in london also. Or maybe i have suggested a link between geopolitics and grenade attacks in sweeden. We shall see!

Dutertes son accused of smuggling drugs at large scale. Street value 125MUSD.

The basis for rule of law at the domestic level becomes increasingly applicable at the global level as technology facilitates the socialization/communitization of the peoples of the world.

One can regard this as a late-stage capitalist inevitability, as an early socialist precondition, or as a libertarian infrastructural guarantor.

Regardless of ideology, political isolationism is less and less feasible, regardless of whether it is desirable to begin with.

The nation-state autonomy ushered in by the Westphalian peace has not been practicable at least since the end of WW2. At its inception, its purpose was to insulate the nobles, not to protect the people. I'm not sure its purpose has moved very far from this up into today.

Fellow Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu is not too happy with what she's up to.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...e-is-too-steep

There certainly are Rohingya militants, who killed 12 people with knives and home-made bombs in an attack on police posts on 25 August, but the government is responding with excessive force, involving helicopter gunships and so on, amounting to ethnic cleansing. The government has been doing this for quite some time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37968090

And Aung San Suu Kyi just says Buddhists are rightly worried by these scary Muslims.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41160679

A good summary of the Rohingya situation on the NYT op ed page today with some damning photos.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...kyi-shame.html

One piece of footage there in particular supports the theory that the ethnic cleansing campaign is a military project, which Suu Kyi goes along with out of a kind of "support the troops" political obeisance. Apologizing for this level of military abuse would always be a cowardly way of playing politics, but it seems grotesquely worse given Suu Kyi's position on the world stage.

Not sure if this thread is good or whether it should be rolled into LC, but let's give this a go.

The State Parliament of the Australian state of Victoria (which is where Melbourne is) is preparing to debate a bill on voluntary euthanasia. The law is subsequent to a 10-month inquiry into end of life care by the Victorian Senate. Under the law, the person wishing to end their life must be terminally ill, of sound mind, and must make 3 requests to die in 10 days, one of which must be written and witnessed by two adults. At least one of the adults must not be related to the person, nor appear in their will.

Not sure exactly when the bill will go before the Parliament. Under the conventions of our system, normally MPs must vote along party lines or risk expulsion from the party. A vote where members are permitted to disregard party lines and vote as individuals is called a conscience vote, that's what the euthanasia bill will be. As a result, I have no idea if the bill will pass or not. Although it's a conscience vote, the bill is being introduced by the governing center-left Labor Party, so you'd have to think it's a decent chance.

Good post. I hope it passes. Hard to imagine what objections people who are not religitards could raise given all the prerequisites. "Every life is sacred which is why you must spend endless months dying in agony," is pretty much all opponents got here afaics.

There's actually a 15 min campaign film just been put out here, called "Stop the Horror", chronicles the last 2 weeks in the life of a guy and his family as he slowly and painfully dies. I haven't watched it and never will, but it's supposed to be unwatchably horrifying. Not sure I'm a fan of that, I support euthanasia but there are policies I support despite the fact that I am aware some suffering occurs as a result of them. While "you're not allowed to tell people they have to suffer" is the main basis of the argument for euthanasia, I just don't think trying to emotionally manipulate people is how discourse should happen.

If I had to guess, I think the bill will pass, but it's hard to say. Australia has a strong bias towards the status quo and parliaments tend more conservative than the population, but this bill has come about as a result of a parliamentary inquiry, which should hopefully mean it represents consensus about what needs to happen.

Imo a film about a horrible death is fair. That's the issue and it's not like it's rare.

What's the other side of this issue? They're going to hell?

The other side can be presented as the burden of choosing. In a society where euthanasia is not allowed there is no choice to make, by giving people that choice you force people to choose when they may feel pressure to protect families etc against their own preferences.

I don't agree with the argument but it doesn't rely on anyone going to hell.

The (rational) other side is stuff like this:

Doctor who asked dementia patient's family to hold her down while she gave lethal injection cleared

I mean, that doesn't seem great right there, but these are difficult issues.

What we need is someone to prove the simulation theory, then we can all kill ourselves at the right time.

Are you suggesting that concerns about coercive pressure aren't rational?

quick google cos I'm not home yet

San Diego Tribune Coercion risk clouds euthanasia bill

Some theoretical arguments.

J. David Velleman argues that the considerations raised by Yale Kamisar that offering a choice to a gravely ill person risks

weighs against giving people a choice rather than against euthanasia in those situations where the person is unable to choose, it also doesn't require the external pressures in the practical objections I raised above and both types of argument seem to meet a standard of rational irrespective of whether I think they are compelling. At the level of theory the rights and wrongs of euthanasia aren't, to my knowledge, debated on the grounds of whether or not we'd require families to restrain their loved ones as they are euthanised.

The above is from Ethics in Practice Hugh La Follette ed which is a decent primer on ethical theory and practical considerations.

Uproar in Turkey over removing evolution from biology class

Other contentious changes include teaching about jihad or holy war in religion classes as the “love of homeland,” and a lessened emphasis on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic who is revered by Turkey’s secularists. Ataturk instituted the separation of state and religion, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party has challenged that strict split with a more religious approach.

Students will also learn about the groups that Turkey is fighting: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, the Islamic State group and the network of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Turkey’s education system is already reeling from the trauma of the failed July 15, 2016 coup attempt — and the new scholastic program highlights that government victory as “a legendary, heroic story.”

More than 33,000 of the nation’s teachers — about 4 percent — have been purged in a government crackdown after the coup, nearly 5,600 academics have been dismissed and some 880 schools shuttered for alleged links to terror groups.

Many who lost their jobs say the government is using the failed coup as a way to silence its critics.

Turkey blames Gulen for orchestrating the coup, which he denies.

Ataturk also instituted the separation of Armenians from their lives. Just pointing that out because in these anti-Islamist days Ataturk seems to be held up as something good.

german election next sunday. the 15 most important issues over the last couple of decades (einwanderung is immigration, soziale ungerechtigkeit is social injustice/poverty/lack of support, bildung is education, rente is pension, arbeitslosigkeit is unemployment)



https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/pro...tagswahl-2017/

(hat tip https://twitter.com/COdendahl/status/909690761880449027)

Ataturk did carry out actions against Armenians in the 1919-21 period, but he is not normally held to bear any direct responsibility for the bulk of the Armenian Genocide, which occurred in 1915-16 while he was distinctly occupied at the other end of the country, as a divisional commander defending Gallipoli and later with the Edirne garrison. He would later refer to the genocide as a 'shameful act' and even told an American journalist that 'millions' of Armenians had been expelled and killed. This was part of his critique of the sultan's ancien regime. (Though of course he had himself been a member of the Young Turk party which was responsible.)

Ok. Hitler apparently loved Ataturk. I figured killing was part of the attraction.

Hitler admired Ataturk as a nation-forging dictator who remade the country in his own image (but Ataturk succeeded and Hitler failed), and Hitler infamously said, 'Who now remembers the Armenians?' -- suggesting that genocide in wartime would go unnoticed. (Hitler pretty massively failed again there.) But although Armenians understandably point to Ataturk's military actions against Armenians circa 1920 (when he was still simply an army officer, not a political leader), he didn't have anything to do with what is normally called the Armenian Genocide in 1915, because he was a mere half-colonel fighting the Anzacs and British at Gallipoli.

good piece on the next isreal - hizbollah war https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...a-iran/540105/

Spanish police raiding newspaper and printing offices to suppress Catalonian independence referendum

RIP tacit consent

It's like something ripped from the headlines of 1936.