Feynman was the epitome of "think outside the box" for physics, revisiting most topics with a personnal, "back to first principles" angle. Therefore his lecture notes are engaging and entertaining like no others, and a perfect complementary text to normal text books. When I was in college we used to pair the Feynman lecture notes with the much more dry Landau textbooks. A perfect mix, although probably already outdated at the time.
Educated immigrants often consider countries interchangeable. They are in a country, because they found an opportunity and took it. But they are not committed to stay, because better opportunities could arise elsewhere. When you have already immigrated once, doing it again is only going to get easier.
Immigrants with fewer opportunities are more likely to try to learn the language and integrate. When a country is offering them something they can't find anywhere else, it makes more sense to go through all that effort. Even knowing that they will probably never fully fit in.
> I am reminded that the only real power comes from violence
Rather from numbers in my opinion. "Divide and conquer", or its modern equivalent "confuse and manipulate", is what makes violence effective. It is always striking to compare how much people are similar, even in our divided society, versus how much dissimilar they think they are. I'm used to help organize long boat trips with all kind of people from various backgrounds, and it's funny to watch.
In the past it was easy to convince people that "the other" was strange and dangerous, due to physical distance. Today we achieve the same with social media.
Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.
And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.
But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.
I once (>20 years ago) had luch with our sales representative in ... was it Malaysia or the Philippines? In his custom made blue suit, he told me in perfect Oxford English how his grand father had to kill several fighters from enemy villages in order to be allowed to marry his grand mother...
I don't know how exagerated that was, but yes sometimes things go fast:)
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination
Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before
Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.
So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination
Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.
Entire history of Ukraine since russia became a thing is a constant struggle for preserving its own language.
Look at what happens now:
1. russia demands russian language to be declared official in Ukraine.
2. russia targets Ukrainian cultural institutions in its airstrikes, trying to destroy anything Ukrainian
3. first things russians do after occupying a territory is "reeducation" of Ukrainian-speaking representatives of the population and burning Ukrainian books
I can continue this list.
Seeing original post at times like this is genuinely confusing. But OTOH, many still choose to be wrong understanding russia's warv against Ukraine. pUtin explicitly said he intends to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all.
My reply is about what happened within borders of Russia to indigenous languages and cultures. if you think I'm commenting about war against another country you are very wrong
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
i have tatarian friends. they would like a word with you on this topic.
when they are over my place for more than a couple of hours, there is always conversation about russia trying to suppress anything tatarian: both culture and language.
this is their first hand expirience. from few past decades
well... it's not something that they will discuss. especially given that many try to assimilate or already lost their native culture or don't even care about it.
don't like posts of type "ai told me so", but google nicely summarized things in this case
Language Suppression: The most significant recent development was the 2017 law that ended the mandatory study of the Tatar language in schools, making it an optional subject. This has led to a decline in new generations of Tatar speakers and marginalized the language in administration and higher education. Efforts by Tatarstan to revert their script to the Latin alphabet were also blocked by Moscow.
Political and Civic Crackdowns: The Russian government has systematically eroded the political autonomy that Tatarstan gained in the 1990s. Tatar national organizations, such as the All-Tatar Public Center, have been labeled "extremist" and banned, with activists facing fines, detention, and imprisonment for speaking out against the policies.
Historical Revisionism: Moscow promotes a single, "imperial doctrine" of history, suppressing narratives that contradict it. This includes the erasure of Tatar national heroes and the promotion of figures who align with the Kremlin's narrative. Public memorial events related to historical injustices, such as the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars, are restricted or prohibited in Russian-occupied territories like Crimea.
Control over Identity: The official state policy focuses on a conventional, apolitical interpretation of Tatar culture, ignoring the community's desire for genuine self-determination. The goal appears to be the destruction of distinct national identities and the creation of a unified, unitary Russian state.
this is essentially what they told me (this is why copy/pasted slop as it's easier than typing half a page), +him been dragged to FSB for "conversation" due to "extremism"
if typing is too much to make an argument then maybe it's not worth it.
extremism laws are no joke, talking about gay things is "extremism", talking about secession also "extremism". But that is true for anyone even if you're white
Every state has a long history of opressing others, I'm sure Russia did it too, but to be honest being from western Europe I have my own colonial history to come to terms with before looking at others'. What I know about XXth century Russia, though, is that at some point and in some places at least they went as far as inventing writing systems for local languages that had none so that teaching could be done in that language; so that exemple alone is enough to tell me that your viewpoint lacks nuance, to put it very mildly.
History of civilizations is certainly interresting but this is not even the point; the point was: why should the interrest of a text from Nabokov about the Russian language be seen through the lense of some modern episode of political violence? This is obvious nonsense, yet it appears to come up frequently, sometimes, with some people. Why? And what can be done to stop the contagion before mankind revert back to clan warfare? (because if we want to look for reasons to hate each others in past or modern politics, sure enough we will get there!)
Yes, and that machine was exceptionally good; by far the best laptop i ever owned: mate screen, good keyboard, small and lightweight for the time, and exceptionally open and well supported for Linux despite being a mips arch. I would gladly get myself another one if I could.
It's not about the science, I keep all the deprecated or rendered wrong/irrelevant books because they shaped me at some point and I'm proud of that. But finding out an author sitting on your bookshelf can possibly be a child abuser and definitely in-ties with Epstein disgusts me and I no longer keep anything from them.
I actually put in the time and searched many times. Again and again. I'm more confident of his guilt than of innocence. The very fact that he even walked past Epstein devalues his work altogether. I don't need to hear of his guilt, just the fact that he required Epstein's help with his finances makes him no one to talk about the elites in power.
My guess is better road design means less miles driven by cars (as opposed to other, safer vehicles) and therefore fewer accidents overall, even if car crash statistics remain the same.
