Islam is one of 570 Rohingya on the Elephant Response Team, known locally as the tusk force...
It's great that they managed to survive all of that horror while still making puns.
I read about the Rohingya some years back in the 2010 book "Monsoon". Supposedly, the group started when seven Sufi masters flew across the sea to Burma. The author was rather amazed at their apparently peaceful existence in what he had expected to be a hostile environment. What happened was not surprising. A totalitarian state forces people to live together. There is horrible repression, but the ethnic hatreds are repressed along with everything else. When the yoke is loosened, the long knives come out. Look at Yugoslavia after Tito, except the Rohingya had no province to return to. That, and fuck you Facebook and fuck you Zuckerberg. I've added that just on general principle. Marshall McLuhan would have called social networking a hot medium, like radio. It's a pity he isn't around today.
"I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."
3 would make sense, except that the Bama totalitarians have been at war with every other non-Bama group in the country the whole time since independence. Peaceful coexistence in Rakhine was the exception.
Marshall McLuhan would have called social networking a hot medium, like radio. It's a pity he isn't around today.
Seconding.
"What happened was not surprising. A totalitarian state forces people to live together. There is horrible repression, but the ethnic hatreds are repressed along with everything else. When the yoke is loosened, the long knives come out. Look at Yugoslavia after Tito"
Tito's Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian state and totalitarian states are far more prone to ethnic hatred and the mass killing of ethnic minorities than any other kind of state.
I swear I've seen that movie and I still have no idea what you people are on about.
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Speaking of, Barry, Godfather III watch/no-watch?
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8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E
9: I think it's not bad. Andy Garcia is really good in it. Barry can go to hell. Who died and made him movie pope?
Walt, so mean. Ok, fine, but you have to say something about Southeast Asia or I'll ignore you.
It's hot.
I liked the neighborhood I stayed in Bangkok, as a matter of urban planning. The nearest local train station was inside a giant mall. If you needed a short ride carrying stuff from the mall, you could flag down one of the tuk-tuks.
If you were a Rohingya refugee, you could flag down an elephant.
9 Only if you're a completist. It's pretty bad.
If you ask yourself "what would The Godfather be like if it tried as energetically as it could to be Die Hard" then your answer won't be far off what "The Godfather Part III" is actually like.
"This is a group going through forced societal change and women are finding new forms of confidence,"
It's there some kind of a general theory about that? Men, tending to be more constrained by social and cultural norms (or being unwilling to let go of norms because the patriarchy is really convenient for men at times), don't adapt as well. It seems like something I've read before, back when I read things.
17 gives us a vision of our Facebook Studios future.
I mean, that whole bit with the helicopter. What.
Spoilers. I'm gonna watch this thing.
18 would be interesting if true. For normal migration I think there's evidence both ways, in that first-wave emigrants are usually men, but for arranged marriages it's usually women who move (and have to deal with their mothers in law). But this is refugee movement.
Tito's Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian state
Says who?
Totalitarian has a specific meaning and it didn't apply to Tito's Yugoslavia.
In what ways didn't it apply? One party state; secret police; communist ideology ... ethic cleansing of hungarians to establish it - what more do you want?
What stopped the Serbs, Croats and Bosniacs from keeping their war going after 1945 wasn't a sudden rush of brotherly love. It was the ruthlessness of the winners. And Tito purged his own party pretty comprehensively of Stalinists after 1947.
I lived there as an admittedly very small child from 1957-63 and my parents certainly thought of it as a totalitarian state - just one that was not an enemy in the way that the Russian satellites were.
Authoritarian, not totalitarian. There's a massive difference between Tito's Yugoslavia and a real totalitarian state like Stalin's Russia or North Korea.
Trump will only say nice things about totalitarian states.
27: there we differ, as Tito did. He gradually loosened up over the decades, and ended up for a variety of reasons much more liberal than the contemporary Soviet Union but there was very little difference between him and Stalin in Stalin's lifetime.
By the Seventies things were very different. One of our maids (who had certainly been vetted by the secret police and presumably reported to them) was allowed to emigrate and did so. Stalin would have shot her family for that.
By 89, of course, almost every Eastern European government had fallen from the stern path of revolutionary virtue, even before the filthy Blairite Gorbachev wrecked the whole thing.
Serious thought: can you have a totalitarian province in an otherwise merely "authoritarian" state? I'm thinking of Xinjiang.
31 China seems to be getting increasingly totalitarian just about everywhere.
29: my impression was that Yugoslavia was always significantly more relaxed than the WP nations and the USSR, whenever you make that comparison; I think that "very little difference between Tito and Stalin" is a bit of an exaggeration because, you know, count the death camps per head of population, it's a good metric if you're playing #ratemystalinism.
31:Well, the definitions are pretty blurry. Any totalitarian state is going to be more totalitarian to some people than to others. If you're a senior party official, it's probably OK for you to do a bit of light smuggling during your foreign trips. If your dad was an official in the pre-revolutionary government, you'll get into trouble for wearing the wrong colour of hat.
But it is one of a very few examples of ethnic hatred being repressed under one authoritarian/totalitarian/whatever government and breaking out afterwards (even then it broke out largely because of the actions of the Milosevic government, and Milosevic was pretty authoritarian himself - it wasn't just 'ancient ethnic hatreds bubbling up', however much that line was pushed at the time).
Blazing new trails in [author/total]itarian control. At least the telescreen didn't demand your active engagement.
A couple of months ago the legendary Yugoslavian/Montenegrin rock star Rambo Amadeus (yes, really) who was big there in the 80s and 90s came to Arrakis. He's kind of like the Yugoslavian Frank Zappa.A Slovenian cow-orker and friend who shares some of my tastes in punk/post-punk told me about it and we went with a couple of other cow-orkers (Serbians). The audience was made up of people from all over the former Yugoslavia, I think I was the only non-Slav there, or at least one of the very few. The guy is pretty avant-garde but everyone knew his songs. His final number was a paean to Tito with lyrics (translated by my friend) going something like "Oh shepherd! where are you? Your flock needs you." Everyone knew the lyrics and everyone enthusiastically and energetically sung them; it was positively electric, both chilling and thrilling.
Just in general, I get the feeling that we (humanity, or the portion of humanity with sufficient influence to act) are making a choice between two futures and one of those futures is really shitty for everyone but a select few.
And Team Shitty is winning by convincing people they are or will be part of the few.
I reiterate my prediction that this is the Fargo Century and everyone in it is either a Marge, a Jerry or a Gaear. (Good-hearted but tragically ineffectual; small-minded, greedy and hopelessly out of his depth; embodiment of pure psychotic evil.)
Marge was only ineffective if you consider letting an innocent person be murdered and shoved into a wood chipper a failure.
I guess you could make a case for that.
33.3 Agreed. Milosevic and his gang were truly evil. Tito in some sense meant well. They did not. And Tito was morally superior to Stalin in almost every way, although that is a pretty low bar.
33.2 I think that some degree of corruption at the top is helpful in despotisms (see Putin) because it means everyone has a guilty secret, a bit like the gays in the Vatican.
33.1 Still disagree, I'm afraid. Tito killed 250,000 ethnic Hungarians in 45/46, according to Eric Hobsbawm who rather shocked me by saying this (he may, admittedly, have been trying to big him up as a good Stalinist). He killed, one way or another, all the Chetniks we sent back to him after the war (and some at least were worked to death: one of the loveliest and most peaceful spots I know in Slovenia had the water piped into it by a gang of such prisoners in 1945/6). Stalin needed the camps in the 30s because there was still a bourgeoisie and a peasantry to crush, but Yugoslavia had been so devastated by the war that there wasn't really any civil society to destroy.
OK. Perhaps that's the significant difference, and partly in your favour. Russia was a country with a real civilisation that Stalin had to break down into pieces to establish absolute power. Yugoslavia did not have that problem after the war. AIMHMB, we had to drive to Italy to buy anything made of plastic and that as late as 1961-2. Claud Cockburn mentions in his memoirs travelling while still a Communist through Yugoslavia ca 1946 and hearing of a railway bridge which had been rebuilt, owing to a shortage of nails, entirely out of wood, with wooden pegs holding it all together.
I don't want to get carried away. I think that Tito started as totalitarian and mellowed, or evolved, into an authoritarian. Yugoslav nationalism was an important factor in this. The comparison with the Kim dynasty, who also came to power after a devastating war, is very much in Tito's favour, and in ajay's. I still maintain, though, that he came to power as a Stalinist, a thoroughly convinced one, but also one who was determined to be his own dictator.
[I really wish my parents had not thrown away the wonderful servo-croat children's encyclopaedia we had, which taught me a lot of things that, it turned out, were not widely believed by English children]
/v/b/
ah, servo-croat: the language you can steer with your fingertips