#Land borders

[mapsontheweb]

The Theoretical land border between France and Canada

[beenasarwar]

Head in South Asian sand

‘Southasia’ has become an accepted term for academia and media, lay persons as well as professionals. Political analyst Happymon Jacob’s prediction about the death of Southasia regionalism is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, grossly exaggerated. How can regionalism be deemed a failure when it has not really been tried? By Kanak Mani Dixit / Sapan News There are those who believe that the concept of…

[eightbitpale]

Help me obi wan kenobi youre my favourite ghost

[obscureenthusiast]

-Brutus and as many as 60 co-conspirators, circa March 14th, 44 BC

[justacynicalromantic]

In early 2014, Ukraine was a neutral country, with a pro-Russian president, and with 70% of Ukraine's population against NATO membership. Yet Russia bluntly violated Ukraine's neutrality and annexed Crimea, then launched a covert invasion of Ukraine in the east.

Petro Poroshenko won the presidential election later in 2014 having promised a settlement with Russia, keeping a special status of the Russian language in Ukraine. He was initially sceptical regarding NATO accession, underlined Ukraine must rely on its own strength to provide security.

Did Putin meet Poroshenko halfway? Not at all. The regular Russian army entered the Ukrainian territory in mid-2014 to fight the Ukrainian troops, which led to the Minsk-1 agreement signed in September 2014.

Further text - down under the cut, or you can follow the Twitter link to the original post:

Few weeks later, Ukraine's parliament adopted a law that would guarantee the then Russia-controlled part of Donetsk and Luhansk regions additional economic, financial and cultural powers.

How did Putin react? Russia staged sham local elections in the occupied Donbas, and then sent the regular army again to Ukraine in early 2015, which led to the Minsk-2 agreement signed in February 2015.

Zelensky was even more sceptical regarding NATO accession. Asked about NATO, he once famously said he never pays anyone a visit if he has not been invited. He won the presidential election promising to compromise with Russia - to stop shooting, sit down with Putin and talk.

Did Putin meet Zelensky halfway? Not at all. He actually raised the stakes by issuing the Russian passports on the occupied territories of Ukraine even before Zelensky assumed the office, putting him in a difficult political position since the start.

Zelensky was ready to drop Ukraine's NATO bid in an exchange for the Russian troops withdrawing from Ukraine. The talks were held already before 2022. What did Putin do? He launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the first weeks of the invasion, Zelensky was yet again ready to drop Ukraine's NATO bid. But he wanted to obtain international security guarantees. What did Putin do? He demanded that Russia must be consulted before any aid would be given to Ukraine in the event of aggression.

To sum up, Ukraine has consistently tried to reach a deal with Russia over the last decade, and was open to giving up on its NATO bid in exchange for the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukraine. Russia never reciprocated, never showed a good will, kept raising the stakes.

Both Poroshenko and Zelensky were initially sceptical regarding Ukraine's accession to NATO. Both wanted to get a deal with Putin. And Putin himself pushed both of them to seek NATO membership out of no other viable alternatives.

Up till now, Putin has shown absolutely no willingness to compromise with Ukraine. His war aims remain maximalist - subjugating Ukraine and changing its regime. He seeks Ukraine's partition, and will turn what is left of Ukraine into Russian protectorate.

Russia's imperial self-conception is that of Russian elites at large, and not just Vladimir Putin. The Russian leadership simply cannot reconcile with the existence of a sovereign Ukrainian statehood.

Therefore any sustainable Ukrainian-Russian compromise is currently not possible unless the Russian cost-benefit calculus changes. Only credible risk to the stability of the Russian regime would impact this calculus. The easiest way goes through defeating Russia in Ukraine.

[griancraft]

Question for Americans who genuinely will not be voting or are choosing to vote third party, what do you think will happen to you if the Republicans win? You cannot realistically fight for others if you yourself are in a bad situation. Genuinely, what do you think will happen when protections for marginalized people are rolled back?

Do you think you will actually be able to protest anything, let alone stuff not happening on US soil like the war in Gaza? We already see heavily armed police at protests and it's just been getting worse. I'm struggling to find the logic in not voting for the only viable option that won't kill you. I'm aware it's maintaining a shitty status quo but that's better than the alternative, isn't it?

[justaz]

merlin being forced to confront the fact that he’s failing his people bc he’s sitting idly by while uther slaughters them all and coming to the decision that he has to act to save them but that’ll make him camelot enemy no. 1 but technically he already was they just didn’t know it. merlin spending a week all morose but unwilling to talk about it and spending as much time with his friends as possible. on his last night in camelot, he goes to arthur’s chambers and the prince is confused on why he’s there. merlin drops a sealed letter on his desk before pulling arthur into a gentle and emotional kiss. they barely separate, their lips hardly a breath apart, and merlin asks for forgiveness. arthur, thinking he’s apologizing for the kiss, tells him there’s nothing to forgive and goes in for a second kiss but merlin pulls away, knowing that that one brief kiss was all he could handle. if he lets arthur kiss him the way he’s dreamt of being kissed, he won’t be able to do what he needs to do, he won’t be able to leave. merlin tells him good night and leaves before arthur can react. he’s gone by dawn.

[ookaookaooka]

the ranch i used to go to camp at as a kid and still volunteer at occasionally (which is now more like a nature preserve slash ranch slash camp slash cemetery) has been working on a forestry project for a long time and now after ten years (TEN YEARS) was finally able to do a controlled burn 🥹🥹🥹🥹 i'm gonna cry im so happy

[sunnwalker]

If Vaughn Borderlands has a million fans I am one of them

If Vaughn Borderlands has 5 fans I am one of them

If Vaughn Borderlands has 1 fan that one is me

If Vaughn Borderlands has no fans I'm no longer alive

If the world is against Vaughn Borderlands I'm against the entire world

Till my last breath I'll support Vaughn Borderlands

[dkettchen]

Brennan: in the mountains of Luxembourg

me, from Luxembourg: *gets jumpscared*

me: mf we ain't got mountains in Luxembourg

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[utahunfiltered]

On the border of Colorado and Utah, driving on old US 6. The old Highway has been abandoned and is no longer maintained on the Utah side.

[tanadrin]

BDS is a political program with the practical end result of "mass murder of jews," so yes it's pretty definitively antisemitic.

I don't think I've ever specifically mentioned BDS, have I?

In general, I think arguments of the form "X program would have Y result, therefore supporters of X support Y" are very weak unless you can make a very direct argument that X is inextricable from Y. It is not clear to me that the objectives of BDS, which per Wikipedia are

to pressure Israel to meet what the BDS movement describes as Israel's obligations under international law,[7] defined as withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and "respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties".[8]

is inevitably functionally equivalent to "mass murder of jews." There seems to be a pretty long inferential chain there that I guess I'm missing.

[darkwood-sleddog]

Thank you for bringing up the CDC changes. I had no idea. I’m on the southern border and drive across to Mexico for errands, family, travel … I cross around 10x per year. Sometimes I bring my dogs. I also have transported rescue animals to vets across the border. We bring rabies vaccine proof but documentation is never requested by border authorities. One time when I had puppies they just asked how many puppies, I guess 3 was okay. To go from that to these new policies is very surprising, even hard to believe. I can’t imagine they were thinking of our border culture when they made these decisions. It’s a privilege to travel freely and benefit from the exchange rate in MX. I’m concerned how this all plays out and what it means for us. I’ll try calling the representatives and doing the petition, thanks for that.

It's absolutely my pleasure to talk about these things and I'm glad you found my posts beneficial in some way. There has been ZERO consideration for the cross border culture that is established at both of the United State's shared borders and especially zero consideration for the Canadians and Mexicans that cross into the United States on a frequent and legal basis to spend money in our economy etc. AND the people living in enclave communities that have to cross just to go to work, groceries, etc. I know people that live in the United States and have vets in Canada, which they now cannot bring their puppies to. Sometimes this is the closest vet to some rural communities.

I have the exact same experience you have in that border patrol has not once, not ever asked to look at my extensive paperwork. I keep a three ring binder for each dog with their entire medical history and they constantly tell me that it is unneeded. When I did the containment agreement with Sigurd as a puppy I was so nervous that I didn't have all my paperwork in order (I did) and that they wouldn't let me cross with him. They didn't even look at my CDC issued containment agreement paperwork, didn't even make issue with the fact it was a puppy too young for a rabies vaccine. It seems silly to think they wouldn't try actually educating and requiring border control to ask for these things and be a bit more strict with what's coming in before moving to such an extreme as we see now.

From what I saw from the draft of the "why we did this" that went around the reasoning they say they are making these rules blanketed across all countries with no nuance is to "streamline" things. To me it is flat out lazy to do this, reads as they don't feel like training border control on how to work with any sort of nuance in regards to CDC regulations. It's ridiculous. It also reads like they don't want to actual try and curb retail rescues falsifying paperwork and bringing in diseased dogs beyond these sort of over arching regulations. There's a lot that can be done, but doing what they've done is not the way. The rescues falsifying paperwork will still do so unless true action and consequences are given.

[fatehbaz]

Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria, by Brock Cutler, begins with an account of food poisoning in nineteenth-century French Algeria. A deep rural crisis of drought and famine in the late 1860s had reduced the amount of fuelwood coming into the city of Algiers, leading one baker to use construction debris shipped to the colony from Paris to fire his bread oven in early 1869. The lead paint on that metropolitan rubble, product of Baron Haussmann’s transformation of the French capital, became a toxic element in the bread that sickened settlers in the colony. The author [...] treats this small episode as a microcosm of the divides, the unruly circulations, and the nonhuman actants and processes that characterized the early decades of colonial rule in Algeria, which the French invaded in 1830.

These divisions and circulations include those between metropole and colony, between modern and not modern, between person and environment, between human and nonhuman, and across the colonial frontier with Tunisia. [...]

---

The first [of three major narrative veins in Cutler's study involves] [...] bread [...], the consumption of wheat grown on the Mediterranean plains of Algeria [...]. The toxic bread affair of 1869, however, was a reminder that the distance between metropole and colony was not so great. [...] The second vein examines the production of new ecosystem relations [...]. [T]he violence of decades of uneven conquest and the confiscation, appropriation, and enclosure of land and its reorientation toward regional and international [European] markets between 1830 and 1870 thoroughly destabilized rural Algerian life. This fragility turned lethal in the final years of the 1860s, when a series of environmental crises - locust plagues and drought - caused widespread famine and ultimately the deaths of up to eight hundred thousand Algerians. [...] The emptied land and cheap labor that were outcomes of the environmental crises enabled [France] to complete the capitalist transformation of rural Algeria [...]. Another outcome of the environmental crisis was an increase in the number of rural Algerians migrating to cities, where they were perceived as both a threat to public order and a reservoir of potential labor energy. [...]

[D]ivisionary logics, including the line between city and countryside and the modern gendered subject, were being performed, produced, and reproduced in the context of environmental crisis.

---

[Another] major element [in Cutler's scholarship] [...] is an exploration of the complex politics of policing French Algeria’s eastern border with Tunisia, in the era before French colonial rule began in the latter polity in 1881. [...] [T]his border, officially demarcated in 1846, was only integrated into local ecosystem relations over the course of subsequent decades. Repeated performance of sovereignty through patrols and taxation of pastoral communities that lived and worked in the frontier commons instantiated the border, but the border region remained resistant to the forms of modern statecraft, such as standardization, bureaucratization, and written transactions, that French authorities preferred. [...] [Cutler] draws on intentionally “mundane” examples to show how they were critical to the steady reproduction of a modern imperial border (p. 47). [...] [A specific] episode of transborder [dispute] [...] in 1869 [...] became a referndum within the settler community on the virtues of military rule and a reminder for that [European] community of [supposed] indigenous incompatability with modernity. [...]

[T]he various divisions illuminated by the story - between modern and not, between inside and outside, and between European and Algerian - were performances staged at various times and places, not eternal features of the society or landscape. The repetition of “divisionary logics,” in the author’s telling, were at the heart of French colonial modernity (p. 149). [...]

---

[T]horough reading of the French colonial archive, from official sources as well as memoirs, newspapers, and periodicals [...], [t]he first two narrative threads, on bread and disaster, demonstrate the significance of moments of crisis [...] in actually changing the course of history [...] [and] longer-term [...] ecological transformations. The other thread, however, examines how the mundane performance of modern sovereign power and its divisionary logics, over time, made real or even naturalized the new imperial frontier between Algeria and Tunisia. Both [...] society-wide crises or the steady performance of the mundane logics of power [...].

---

All text above by: Jackson Perry. "Review of Cutler, Brock. Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria". H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. April 2024. Published online at: h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59842. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[clandestinegardenias]

Will I ever ever in my ENTIRE LIFE come to peace with the fact that I am not and never will be a great historic polar explorer making scientific discoveries in leaps and bounds, beloved by my men and leading them forward through thick and thin, overcoming catastrophe with my grit and strong but kind leadership?

Survey says…probably not! Fun!