I used Iran as an example because they specifically have a religious leadership that uses exactly the Quran to justify their laws.

There are plenty of non-Muslim Iranians that have burned Qurans in anti-regime protests, specifically to separate the religious regime (symbolised by the Quran in that context) from the country and its culture as a whole. That is: They are specifically protesting the religious regime, and therefore don’t burn the flag, which they don’t associate with the regime.

I would elaborate a bit more, and I think you have a good analogy with “burning a cross in a black family’s yard”.

Just like burning a cross to protest the church is different from burning it in someone’s yard to threaten them, burning a Quran in the context of protesting against (for example) the Iranian regime is different from burning the same Quran while simultaneously encouraging violence towards Muslims.

If my understanding is correct he isn’t being punished for the Quran burning alone. It’s what he’s been saying while also burning the Quran.

A more similar example would be burning a flag while saying something along the lines of “All immigrants from X country are terrible people and we should use all possible means to force them out of the country”, with a strong “won’t someone rid me of this troublesome priest” connotation.

Essentially, burning a symbol would be ok in an isolated sense. Inciting hatred and violence, and using the burning of symbols to aid you in delivering that message is not.

Ok, I’ve done some double checking: The Bantu expansion is approximately what I thought it was. I believe the language group I was thinking about that survived the Bantu expansion was the Khoisan.

My (very coarse) knowledge of this comes from a mixture of reading Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) and from following it up with some Wikipedia. In short: The genetic makeup in a lot of the world is relatively dominated by the groups that were the first to adopt agriculture in their respective regions. Before the Bantu expansion, phenotypes south of Sahara were more varied, just like the phenotypes in the Americas were more varied before the corresponding “European expansion”, or the equivalent expansion that happened in South-East Asia (I don’t remember which society stood behind that one).

According to Diamond, we can trace a lot of (most?) surviving human phenotypes and languages back to relatively few societies, which after adopting agriculture, more or less wiped out / displaced neighbouring cultures due to increased resistance to a lot of infectious diseases and massively increased food production / need for land. This mostly happened less than 10 000 years ago, i.e. far too recently for natural selection to have a major impact on things like skin colour, hair type, height, facial features, etc. afterwards.

So: While major trends in phenotypes are of course a result of natural selection / evolutionary pressure in specific regions (resistance to skin cancer / sunburn vs. vitamin D production, or cooling down more efficiently with a wider nose vs. retaining heat with a slimmer one, or having an eye-shape that lets in more light vs. provides more shade), a lot of what we see today is simply a result of what phenotype the first group a given region that adopted agriculture had. This means that looking at the dominant phenotype in a region today will not necessarily give a good impression of what phenotype that is “optimally designed” to survive in the conditions of that region.

I seem to remember that the majority traits south of Sahara (black/very dark skin, and curly hair) can be traced back to something called the “great Bantu expansion”, which was essentially the result of a group of people with these traits developing agriculture and wiping out most other peoples south of Sahara, much like the Europeans did to the Americas.

Some cultures south of Sahara did survive, which can be seen both genetically, and in some languages that are completely from other languages in the area (I believe the family of languages with “clicking” sounds is an example).

I’m on my phone now, but I’ll have a double check and come back.

Wow, you really must be an actual idiot. I’m honestly kind of impressed.

Well if you need something to work with Fortran…

The whitespace doesn’t bother me at all, but holy hell! Any time I’m trying to understand a Python program/library that’s anything above a couple thousand lines of code, I instantly feel a burning hate for dynamic typing.

I love Python for scripting- in large part because of dynamic typing. IMO it’s just not a language made for building large infrastructures.

Sorry, but I honestly don’t get it. I I were to point out the crown jewel of open source, it’s gcc. gcc is the backbone and survival condition for so much modern industry that it’s not even remotely funny.

Take away gcc, and the world will likely burn for a substantial amount of time until people start making in-house or proprietary alternatives.

Being a phd. myself, I would say it seems likely that the person in question wasn’t aware of the research/sweeps that had been done, and was searching through literature with the express purpose of finding out what kind of work had been done on the subject, when they came across this data.

The way I usually find out about a research campaign is by reading articles from said campaign. It’s very rare that I’ll need to reach out to the authors to ask for more data than what is available in their publications.

If there’s any American reading this: Please vote. The world needs you and all your friends to vote. I’m begging you, please get out and vote.

I didn’t say that. I’m pointing out that we spent shitloads of money that could have gone to out own schools and healthcare, and a dozens of young soldiers lives (I’m not American), and we were clearly told by both the local population and a bunch of other countries to fuck off.

So yes. I’ll say it. Fuck em. We don’t owe them shit. We came down there, suppressed the Taliban, built s schools and hospitals, and secured elections, and when we left, the Afghan army, which we had trained and supplied, folded immediately.

We can’t be held responsible for them not revolting against a suppressive regime. We gave them all the tools to keep the taliban out, but they chose to fold. That’s on them.

It’s tragic, but that’s how it is. If they’re not willing to fight for their own rights, they won’t get to enjoy them.

I’ve heard this explanation before as well, that essentially nobody felt any loyalty to the national government. You could kind of tell why when the whole government just evacuated the country when the west left.

Are you suggesting that a new coalition goes back to Afghanistan to throw out the Taliban again? Remember how popular that was last time?

It just doesn’t stop baffling me how quickly the Afghan army folded to these people and accepted this as their future… just tragic all around

I’ve been wondering for a while: What is preventing a bunch of not-drowning-in-corruption countries from just not recognising FIFA any more, saying they’re sick of the blatant corruption, and starting their own international association? I would think you could get a lot of the major football nations to support something like that, because it looks like it’s mostly Quatar, Saudi-Arabia and the likes which benefit from the current system…

Totally justifiable IMO. In my day-to-day life its much more important that my shit works when I need it to than that I get whatever potentially something-breaking latest hotfix patch for everything on my system. Put simply: My OS, and the packages I use, work. If I don’t update, I’m sure it will also keep working. When I have time for an update to break something, or want to pull in some new feature or patch, I’ll run an update.

Don’t do that in Norway either - just bad luck if the holidays happen to land on a weekend. On the other hand, we have five weeks of paid vacation, and holidays are not counted into those, I’m not sure how that’s done in other countries?

I mean, it’s no secret that a bunch of countries are running massive disinformation campaigns in order to divide the populations of western countries. Attempting to destabilise another country by propping up certain political factions is a tactic that has been employed across the world for at least the past century (see: Lenin, and how he got in power).

Of course, we are responsible for ensuring that we do not become fascist states, but acting like theres no outside influence propping up the fascists is naive at best.

I guess, but the again, pretty much any sentient creature could tell you that drinking the marshy water with dead stuff in it is a bad idea. That’s a pretty basic survival instinct that I think we had figured out well before we had modern science.