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2 yr. ago

  • land for poor farmers or displaced people, as part of a bid to increase agricultural output and boost peace efforts

    It seems Reuters decided that displaced peoples weren't worthy of making the headline. I can make some guesses why.

    Purchasing efforts can be slow ... to ensure the properties do not have displaced claimants who were forced to leave by armed groups.

    The conflict [that has killed up to 450k people]... originally began as a fight for land rights.

    So the Colombian leader is claiming to be actively systemically compensating people who lost their land to war and crime and providing them with guaranteed work (or something to lease out if they're not physically able to work it themselves). And he is claiming that this is being done with the goal of the new owners growing food to contribute to the economy and public welfare.

    Colombia's government also redistributes land confiscated from criminals and rebel groups and is making a push to formalize ownership for farmers who have worked land for generations without formal deeds.

    And the government claims to be confiscating the proceeds of crime to fund it. Whether any of these claims are true or having the intended effects or compensatingvl deserving people, i have no idea. I don't know anything about modern Colombia. But I do know Reuters decided on the headline "Colombia spends billions to buy land for poor farmers".

    This is one of the reasons I really don't love "post title and article title must match" rules being the norm. Reuters provides the live content for a disproportionate share of the world's media through its "Reuters Connect" platform, for both state and private media companies. In a world where people are reacting based on headlines because there are so many, having a large amount of news filtered through a single company is a pretty big risk. No matter their historical track record, or intentions, it's relying on a single source for data collection, editing and dissemination. That's like relying on a single unrepeated experiment in your home kitchen as the only evidence for a new scientific claim. Yeah, your interpretation of the experiment might be objectively right... but it is also possible you missed some weird shit that you didn't know could affect the results. This is why we rely on repeat experiments with multiple witnesses, but in live event coverage that's obviously much harder without endangering more people.

    Perhaps Reuters could have instead chosen the headline : "Colombia provides civil war survivors and agricultural workers with repossessed land in bid for peace and productivity"... but they didn't. I can make some guesses why.

    Tl;dr we all have bias, and bias does not imply bad intent, it just means we all have perspectives and judgements shaped by our limited personal experiences. But filtering data through only a few pathways means that large parts of the system are impacted if a pipe breaks. And right now, Reuters looks to me like one of the bottlenecks in global live news.

  • When the pandemic shut a lot of the world down for a bit, I turned into Snake Plisskin from "Escape from LA" like some of apocalyptic Cinderella. Didn't everyone? /s

    Army-of-one renegade lone-wolf badass-hero natural-confidence-leader fiction was a cultural mistake.

  • Thanks for the math! Here's hoping we can fling the records of our civilisation far enough out for another civilisation to learn about our demise. And not, like, just accidentally flinging it into a burning star or space imperialist Klingons or something. Even though that would be poetically appropriate too.

  • Lol I missed this image entirely.

    I can definitely see the word porphyry here, which is super cool, but I forgot that the Greeks and Romans had another annoying resource-saving technique of not putting spaces between words or sometimes just using interpuncts•like•this. We didn't start using word spaces in texts until centuries later.

    I can get behind continuous writing when the word boundaries are otherwise obvious, but it's super irritating for foreigners hundreds of years later trying to make out the details.

    The researchers got fucking lucky this person had nice educated handwriting, at least. Sometimes you just get shit like this grocery list instead.

  • It's definitely a process that will yield some false positives, if for no other reason than Romans were notorious users of abbreviations to save on resources which can make things ambiguous. But from an object cataloguing mountainous backlog perspective? fuck yeah. Scan all the tablets everywhere, and then pick out the super interesting ones for human review.

  • No numbers, just awkward analogies, but yes it's trillion:

    If all the lost ice was piled on London, it would stand over 2 km tall - or 7.4 times the height of the Shard. If it were to cover Manhattan, it would stand at 61 km – or 137 Empire State Buildings placed on top of one another. 
    I think this from March is the research they reference

    Original paper(?): Davison, B.J., Hogg, A.E., Rigby, R. et al. Sea level rise from West Antarctic mass loss significantly modified by large snowfall anomalies. Nat Commun 14, 1479 (2023).

  • I think it's more than just revenge, I think the Ukraine war provides additional cover for finally entirely taking the Gaza strip. It is a convenient time to 'end' the conflict while Western and EU cash / human rights organisations are tied up on the Russian front.

    Edited to add: my foggy covid memory has some recollection of five-eyes intelligence or other credibleish rumours this was being planned for earlier, but the risk from the new pandemic was too uncertain for it to proceed. Mid-2021 maybe? Israelis were getting the shits with Netanyahu (again), and he was getting internal political competition / resistance at the time and so he used the IDF to provoke religious tensions just a little harder than usual. That way he was able to justify a defence rationale for a 'new' military campaign and revive his image. I mostly just remember that the warnings were getting more frequent after the Ukraine invasion kicked off.

    Edit 2: that's right, he lost power for a bit with several elections and there had been talks about international courts looking into apartheid at the same time too, and he made deals with the far-right to cement power. What a mess.

  • It's a real pity. Some of us use the archive links because modern websites ignore accessibility guidelines and create hostile UX. So many popups and animations and autoplay videos with sound.

    While I understand their motives, the result is a move towards an internet that excludes people further

  • I feel like I've heard about beheaded children for the last 20 years whenever there's an Islamic military group involved in a conflict. But the story is never confirmed by other sources and it just falls quietly off the 24 hour news cycle. Whereas stories with evidence, like the beaten unconscious/dead woman being driven around stick longer because there's some confirmation.

    It would obviously help a great deal if Islamic military groups didn't have a truly horrific habit of beheading people at all, but it also doesn't help much if our media is (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing stories that are based on a possible lie.

    There are most certainly stories that are based on lies published about any global conflict, this isn't Middle-East-specific, and it's not a condemnation of the individual journalists reporting on live eye-witness accounts, but I dont see many formal retractions and apology from agencies to correct the record on much reporting, live or otherwise.

    Given that it eventually fully came out that Iraq's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" were a lie that was used to justify a "pre-emptive strike", and all the media that supported that line at the time, what has changed enough about our media machinery to rely on the accuracy of stories like these now? How can we better ensure that the headlines we read are based on the most-confirmed and accurate information? How many retractions or corrections do media agencies publish on average anyway? Do they just publish an update somewhere and be done with it?

    Sorry for the train of thought, this is just something that has been bothering me about conflict-reporting accuracy for a while. I want to make decisions and judgements that are both accurate and cause the least damage, but when history is written by the victor, how can I know the foundations of my judgement are solid? Realistically I don't think I can, and I do not like that concept at all.

  • I don't think cult, culture (including subculture and superculture) are mutually exclusive on the Venn diagram.

    I tend to lean towards the definition that cults are groups that venerate persons and/or objects, rely on secret knowledge as a form of social status within those communities. Historically it has a negative connotation, but it can sometimes be entirely neutral, like when someone says Taylor Swift has a cult following or that they love cult films. Or the names of ancient spin-off religions like the Cult of Zeus Ammon.

    Whereas cultures are just groups of people who share a common conceptual connection. Like 'blood' or 'employer' or 'nationality' or even 'hobby' or 'profession'.

    I think that it's possible to have a subculture also be a superculture. Eg. The Baptist church is a subculture of the religion Christianity, but a superculture of its denominations like the Northern and Southern Baptist Convention.

    I would consider the church of Scientology a cult, it has a culture of greed and secrecy, and it is a subculture of faith-based marketing, the unholy love child of economic and religious imperialism.