FailForward @FailForward@social.cleverlibre.org

@z428 @closeuprussia Thanks for your take. Let me push it farther, it's good for clarifying thoughts and getting a good conversation.

> People on all sides of the fence/conflict that think in black/white patterns, in "us vs them" and ideas all along violence as the ... approach of choice.

I am with you there and would sign it. But there's something what bugs me over the last couple of years. So let me just expand on that position to see where it leads to.

As I am getting older, I observe this:
1. for cooperation, you need two+ willing parties
1. for a conflict, you need just one and what the other thinks is actually irrelevant, if one decides so, there will be a conflict

I want peace and cooperation, in my life I want to focus on making my life and life of others just a tad bit better. Now, if there is a party which decides, for whatever reason, they want to harm me, I have two options: 1) play a pacifist and get beaten (because, recall, the decision was already made by somebody else and that I do not want the conflict does not matter much); or 2) accept that there will be conflict and defend myself/work towards minimal harm/etc. Either way, it's a war footing.

Anyhow, if you chose the path #2, you end up in a place where you were forced into a "us vs. them" thinking and you accept it - again, the choice was not yours, but it's so. Maybe you have compassion with the bully, but either you get harmed, or you harm back - there's no middle ground there. Bullies by definition of them being a bully simply do not compromise.

To extend this: the middle-ground position is untenable in a hot conflict. You cannot claim "everybody is a fool" and think it absolves you from being a party to the conflict or from guilt. Just look what happened in Rwanda - I am absolutely not saying it resembles today's issues, but learning about what we did and didn't there was a brutal wake up call for me - an idealist by nature. There's a collective guilt of non-action in that conflict and others too we carry. That's where taking the passive middle-ground position leads to. An ugly place.

So I am now the reprehensible person on one side of the fence who thinks in black/white?

@jwildeboer Did you try this? https://archive.today/

@z428 @closeuprussia

> People who call for war are either idiots or criminals.

On that we agree. That was the easy part. Now to the tough one: who are those "people" in your opinion?

@pony @piggo Whatever those issues are, together with `vim` they serve me **very well** the last 20+ years.

I probably need to admit that I am an old fart, you see...

@piggo Why do you put up with that? Use [Mutt](http://www.mutt.org/).

## Pithivier-style meat pie

My first, somewhat improvised, incursion into the meat pie territory.

Very tasty. I did not have huge expectations for the first attempt, but it worked out surprisingly well. Worth further exploration of this recipe style.

_Meat pies to cheer up cold and sleazy winter days!_

Inspired by the recipe in The Guardian:
* https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/feb/16/how-to-make-the-perfect-cheese-and-potato-pithivier-recipe-felicity-cloake
* http://casarosada-algarve.blogspot.com/2022/01/cheese-leek-and-celeriac-pithivier.html

@hob

@piggo I thought so.

@piggo I know you do it for the lulz and all, but if you really want that data for real, there are better sources.

@rdarmila @kspatlas @onlmaps Ha. Thanks for the pointer. So it seems on all the warning and "permission"-type traffic signs the figure is walking, but on forbidding traffic signs the figure is standing.

I propose to re-interpret B-41 as "forbidden to stop and stand" for pedestrians. I.e, "keep moving, nothing to see here..."

@piggo Yes. This. For instance Audible completely ignores the TLD you use, it redirects you to what Amazon "thinks" should be right. E.g., having an account at audible.de, accessing it from NLD, it automatically lands me at audible.co.uk and displays a message that if I really want to go to the German version, I need to click "here".

... and then I am furious and my bathroom shines...

@piggo Yes. Mostly. When I procrastinate OR force myself.

Actually there's another situation when I clean the bathroom: when I am furious and angry. Does not happen too often, but then it _is_ truly clean.

@piggo Happens to me often.

@adamasnemesis Well, it's complicated actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_midpoint_of_Europe

@jwildeboer I am trying to check excess mortality as a perhaps more useful indicator: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid and you know what I found? It seems most interesting Asian countries do not report 🤔 .

@jwildeboer Not that I am going to dissect this too much, but what's your lament specifically about?

When I hear how they do it in China, I certainly am not ready to accept living in a society mimicking their ways of manipulation and isolationism. No clue how they do it in say Indonesia, or so, but I would also not have much trust in precision of reporting from India, or Bangladesh.

My personal guess would be that those plots you sent to a large extent reflect western societies being 1) open to the outside, as well as within; and 2) high degree of testing/diagnosis/reporting.

It's actually easy to achieve low profiles in such plots (as witnessed by many countries): close your eyes, stop testing and you are good.

So what are those lessons we should learn in Europe?

@pony Hmmm. That happens to me only once in a while when some e-mail bounces off of gmail.com. Otherwise I don't feel much either. As I don't feel much about hosting my own vacuum cleaner at my home since ever...