TIL: Today I Learned

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned that a bunch of April Wine fans in Halifax, N.S. trashed a ferry.

The following year April Wine returned to Halifax.

This time, guitarist Myles Goodwyn sent the fans home with an order that bounced off the Metro Centre roof and echoed all the way down to where an army of policemen waited at the foot of George Street: “Don’t wreck the ferries!”

 

[Takhisis]

I'd say this is super-villain stuff, but villains usually have grander ambitions than "steal tourist dollars from Egypt".

Don't you remember the plot in the Josie and the Pussycats' show to get away with adolescents' ‘wads of cash’?

also tourists in Egypt have in excess of ONE MILLION dollars *takes pinky finger to mouth and laughs*

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL that meanwhile one third of the municipalities in Poland are officially LGBT-free zones.

Polish municipalities across an area greater than the size of Hungary have adopted resolutions that critics say discriminate against LGBT people and make intolerance official.
Local municipalities across a third of Poland have adopted resolutions “against LGBT propaganda” or “pro-family”, creating what rights groups describe as hostile spaces for anyone who is not heterosexual or committed to the so-called “natural family”.
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/02/25/a-third-of-poland-declared-lgbt-free-zone/

A protest in Warszawa against "gay terror":

The resolutions have formally no law value... but they legitimise the informal surpression
and effectively undermine the formal rule of law

It gives me the creeps that this process is now so widespread

 

[Berzerker]

a difference between viewers of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity

Hannity's viewers were more likely to get the virus and die than Carlson's

Why?

Because while Hannity was downplaying the danger Carlson was warning his viewers about it

thats according to some study Krystal Ball saw

 

[r16]

the Saudi location , if you are believe in those who believe in Qatar , is meant for the devil , and also secures the actual place where Moses and Exodus bunch crossed the Red Sea . Extra location for lsrael to be captured and denies the location to Muslims at the end of the world when Gog Mog dogs show up . Yes heard on TV . Saudis on the other hand prove they are so modern that you can see breasts and stuff on their streets , though it is mostly a construction project of the kind that made Dubai , a city that actually has no other reason to prosper and stuff except it has flashy condos where Arabian oil sheiks can be served the whole delights , down to European escorts , without the stigma and stuff of being known to have travelled to sinful cities around the globe . Will also help the coffers of building companies , Usame was one of the home team , right ?

 

[Ferocitus]

TIL a lot of new collective nouns...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_collective_nouns_by_collective_term

A glaring omission:
A covfefe of covidiots.

 

[The_J]

I learned today to be rightfully careful about some wiki articles.
I read the wiki article about the Portugese dictatorship, and thought “ah, that actually doesn't sound too bad“. No mentioning of government crimes, terror, torture, secret internment, killings, etc. Also not in the Wiki article about the Portugese secret police.
I checked with a Portugese friend, and she said it should definitely have been there. She had a look at the wiki article and it was surprisingly mild in her opinion.

Afterwards I had a look at the article from Francoist Spain, and same there. At least articles about government terror and concentration camps are linked.

I find this worrysome, given that these will be the first information points for the vast majority of all people.und

I would not have expected this either.

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL about the "Scorpion Kick"

Football: England-Colombia 1995: Rene Higuita

Amazing

 

[Imaus]

I learned today to be rightfully careful about some wiki articles.
I read the wiki article about the Portugese dictatorship, and thought “ah, that actually doesn't sound too bad“. No mentioning of government crimes, terror, torture, secret internment, killings, etc. Also not in the Wiki article about the Portugese secret police.
I checked with a Portugese friend, and she said it should definitely have been there. She had a look at the wiki article and it was surprisingly mild in her opinion.

Afterwards I had a look at the article from Francoist Spain, and same there. At least articles about government terror and concentration camps are linked.

I find this worrysome, given that these will be the first information points for the vast majority of all people.und

I would not have expected this either.

Check the history and 'talk'. Might be an edit war. Wikipedia is not free from the bias of its editors, and omission is a way to do that.

 

[The_J]

I wanted to avoid that...
But considering that the whole thing ended ~45 years ago, the last real supporters must now be 65+, so this is not exactly a generation which will start a wiki edit war.
So I wonder about the reason, but don't want to touch this with a 10 foot long pole.

 

[r16]

troll farms are paid large salaries and if they don't have anything else to do they go and fix wikipedias and the like . And removing bad stuff from public view helps to reintroduce them , step by step .

 

[Cutlass]

I wanted to avoid that...
But considering that the whole thing ended ~45 years ago, the last real supporters must now be 65+, so this is not exactly a generation which will start a wiki edit war.
So I wonder about the reason, but don't want to touch this with a 10 foot long pole.

That doesn't necessarily track. There are always young apologists for old autocrats. The far right today, for example, will often pound away at all the people "socialism" killed, but never mention any people killed by fascism.

 

[Takhisis]

But considering that the whole thing ended ~45 years ago, the last real supporters must now be 65+, so this is not exactly a generation which will start a wiki edit war.

And yet Breitbart exists. Hey, even the Daughter of the Confederacy thing still very much exists.

 

[Imaus]

I wanted to avoid that...
But considering that the whole thing ended ~45 years ago, the last real supporters must now be 65+, so this is not exactly a generation which will start a wiki edit war.
So I wonder about the reason, but don't want to touch this with a 10 foot long pole.

Just because the revolution ended the Estado 'peacefully' doesn't mean its supporters went away. It's the same in Spain. A peaceful transition of power ends up with a paternalistic, condensing, and strong right-wing in the corner. They feel proud of themselves, or, rather, after temporarily abandoning the regime publicly due to a downturn, turn back to reminiscence about it privately or publicly when the successor state doesn't automatically make things better and/or enters a rut. And they're still spreading their support of the regime to their children, impressional youth, and the like.

However as well you don't have to start an edit war. It's enough to suspect a bias. Everything has a bias, I guess, but if you can smell one from a bit away, that's a good indicator of your own critical thinking skills.

I might be arsed to call into question the bias by the bias tag-thing, but eh.

 

[Zkribbler]

Corvid-19 is the leading cause of death in LA County.

 

[Traitorfish]

That doesn't necessarily track. There are always young apologists for old autocrats. The far right today, for example, will often pound away at all the people "socialism" killed, but never mention any people killed by fascism.

Unless to insist that estimates of the numbers of people killed by fascism should be revised downwards, of course.

You might say that modern reactionaries are not prepared to talk about how many people were killed by fascism, but are quite prepared to talk about how few.

see another thread on this forum, for instance

 

[Hrothbern]

You will not find it back on Wiki Belgium:

Practical anti-fascism in WW2 and their fate after WW2 up to today's politics in Belgium with the Flemish Nationalists:

The Belgian people who collaborated with the Germans are somehow seen (by the Belgian elite and rightwing people) in the decades since WW2 as the victims !
The people of the resistance were marginalised and pushed out of the history.
In most other European countries the resistance people were "embraced" by the establishment and nudged into an ornamental support role. How to say no to a romantic glorifying ? Yet many Dutch resistance people migrated away because of that.
After all... too many collaborators and wrong people (fascist movement member or sympathies before WW2) ended up high in the national and international establishment (or were Royalty).


Here a story on the Belgian resistance and the collaborators from a comprehensive series of articles this year on WW2 in general in most of the Dutch media to remember the end of WW2 75 years ago.
That cycle started earlier this year with a 5-day 24 hour marathon stream session where all the 102,000 names were read out of the Dutch victims of the Holocaust.
(this article from Trouw, founded during WW2 in the Netherlands as resistance newspaper, most of all to keep spirits high among the population during the occupation, and now a solid Christian-Progressive quality newspaper with relatively little hyped news and ample in-depth & background)

For a long time, people in Flanders thought negatively about Belgian resistance fighters during World War II: they were half criminals or adventurers. That image has only recently tilted.
Armed with one pistol, a storm lamp and a sheet of red paper, three Belgian men forced a long train to stop at the Flemish Boortmeerbeek on 19 April 1943. The twentieth train convoy left the Dossin barracks in Mechelen and en route to Auschwitz. On board 1631 Jewish prisoners. The three men manage to break open a car and rescue at least seventeen people.

It is the only place in occupied Europe where during the Second World War a Jewish transport was stopped and people were liberated, says historian Koen Aerts. However, few Flemish people know that. Or know their names: Youra Livchitz, Robert Maistriau and Jean Franklemon. Let alone that a street is named after them. ” The same fate befell Marcel Louette. This liberal teacher from Antwerp founded De Witte Brigade in 1940, a resistance organization that was involved in the sabotage of railways and the spread of anti-German propaganda. The group also helped people go into hiding and smuggled Allied pilots back to England. "After the war, he was briefly overtaken as a hero, but he quickly disappeared into the annals of history."

Remarkably, until recently Flanders had a handful of Cyriel Verschaeve streets and avenues. Verschaeve was a collaborating priest and poet who fought for Flemish emancipation. Aerts: "But a real Nazi during the Second World War." Someone who tried to reconcile his faith with Nazism and had conversations about it with Heinrich Himmler. He was already aware of the gassing of the mentally ill in 1941. ” Nevertheless, Verschaeve was appreciated. Not as a collaborator, but as a Flemish nationalist, someone who fought for the Flemish cause.

Struggle for the memory:
It is typical of the Flemish approach to the memory of the Second World War, says Aerts. “The losers of the war have made history. And the winners of the war have lost the battle for memory. ”

Aerts is a university lecturer and researcher at Ghent University and the Belgian center of expertise for the history of the conflicts of the twentieth century (Cegesoma). He received his doctorate for an investigation into the prosecution of Belgian collaborators after World War II. Because in Flanders, contrary to the resistance, much more scientific research has been done. That's partly a resource issue, Aerts says. “Much more material has been preserved about the collaboration. Of course, the resistance did not take minutes or issue membership cards during the war. The standard work on the resistance has yet to be written. ”

This is not only due to a lack of resources. In post-war Flanders, not only the stories of resistance fighters, but of the 100,000 punished collaborators dominated in the memory of the war. Many Flemish nationalists still criticize "repression" to this day, the harsh manner in which the Belgian state had supposedly dealt with those who collaborated with the Germans.

Perception problem:
The actions of the estimated 160,000 Belgians active in the resistance soon "disappeared into the folds of history," Aerts said. In fact, they soon faced a huge perception problem. Many Flemish people looked with suspicion at the people who suddenly came out as members of the resistance after the Liberation. “They had the impression that they sprouted like mushrooms. But it is logical that they only made themselves known publicly. "

The first images of the resistance that circulated after the Liberation did not help either: it shows resistance people who take action against collaborators, who were locked up in the Antwerp zoo, for example. “In those photos, the resistance is visible as the perpetrator and the collaborators as victims. This reversal of history eventually becomes dominant and creates a specific Flemish memory culture. ”

Actually, the negative image was created before, during the war, says Aerts. “The resistance worked underground. Locals sometimes paid the bill for acts of resistance: armed attacks against Nazis, often followed by retaliation. A well-known example is the murder of a collaborator by members of the resistance in Meensel-Kiezegem, after which dozens of villagers were picked up and taken away during a raid. Through such actions, the resistance suffered image damage. ”

Unlike in the Netherlands, the resistance in Flanders is unable to promote itself after the war. An important reason for this is the complex political relations in Belgium, even then. Where the resistance in the Netherlands acquires an almost mythical status and unites to play an active role in the reconstruction, the Belgian resistance falls apart like loose sand. “The Belgian resistance consisted of separate groups of all conceivable political colors, from the extreme left to the extreme right. There were also far-right resistance groups, even a small fraction of fascist in character, who turned against the Germans, ”says Aerts. "The resistance against the Germans was the cornstarch that kept those groups together, but when it fell away during the liberation it fragmented further."

Collaborators in Flanders seek each other out and close the ranks. Moreover, they often share a common Flemish nationalist ideology and appear to be an interesting electoral audience for the Christian People's Party. "Angling them in required a gentle approach to collaboration," said Bruno De Wever, professor of national history.

Own memory culture:
Collaborators therefore soon receive a reduced sentence and a role in the reconstruction of society. A number of resistance groups demonstrate against this and force a minister of justice to resign twice in the 1940s and 1950s, but they soon lose their moral right in the image. The Belgian state itself does not pursue an active nationalist or patriotic remembrance policy, which in Flanders creates space for the former collaborators to manipulate the image and to create their own remembrance culture.

Among other things, they set up the Flemish nationalist magazine 't Pallieterke, which highlights the victimization of the collaborators. "Resistance fighters are also portrayed as people who murdered collaborators during the war, shot at the wrong people and caused the population to suffer more because they provoked repressions against the Germans with their actions," says De Wever, who himself comes from a Flemish nationalist nest. - his younger brother Bart is chairman of the New Flemish Alliance, the largest Flemish political party - and with whom 't Pallieterke fell on the mat at home.

"They completely reversed the narrative," says Aerts. Resistance fighters were depicted as executioners and perpetrators, complete with Nazi caricatures. They diverted attention from their own debt question and found a stick to beat the Belgian state: it tried to break Flanders. ”

That image of the resistance still continues - decades later -, he says. “During lectures I always show a photo of Cyriel Verschaeve and one of a local resistance man or woman who has been arrested and executed by the Germans. There are always those who know Verschaeve, but not once has the resistance fighter been recognized by anyone in the audience. And that, of course, is about people from their own village, who have given the highest good for their ideal, in the fight against the Nazi occupier. However, that image is not anchored to a wide audience. ”

The last minute resistance people:
Many Flemings still think that the real resistance fighters died in the camps, the rest consisted of amateurs, adventurers, half criminals and "September resistance fighters" [people who wanted to take credit last minute, MdV.]. "That does absolutely no justice to the sacrifices made by the Belgian resistance," says Aerts. In reality, a quarter of the approximately 160,000 resistance fighters were arrested, 15,000 did not survive the war.

The Belgian resistance did not consist of mere amateurs, Aerts emphasizes. “Very solid operations were set up to free prisoners, there were networks to hide people, the passing on of military information to the Allies. That saved thousands of people. ”

Where in recent years there has been more distance from collaboration in Flemish nationalist circles, the revaluation for the resistance still lags behind. Only recently seems to receive more recognition for their sacrifices. "We first needed to correct the collaboration," says Bruno De Wever. Why was it so long overdue in Flemish nationalist circles? “A question of the advancing time, a generation that is disappearing. That makes it easier to speak clearly about that time. ”

The documentary series about children of collaborators of the Flemish public channel Canvas in 2017 also provided more insight and interest in the war past. Last fall, "Children of the Resistance" followed, in which De Wever and Aerts also participated. In it, children talk about their parents' resistance histories, who helped people in hiding, smuggled weapons, cut telephone lines or sabotaged electricity poles. It is even more about the price paid by their parents and the impact it had on their children's lives. How the Gestapo stood at the door one day, after which they never saw their parents again. Or how parents came out of the war severely traumatized and how that past and the lack of recognition dominated family life.

The attention for both the Flemish collaboration past and the resistance led, among other things, that one municipality after another is now renaming its Cyriel Verschaevestraat - only in his birth municipality there is no discussion about this for the time being.

Anne Frankstraat
The disappearance of Verschaeve from the street does not mean, however, that resistance fighters are now automatically honored. The Verschaevestraat in Lanaken, which was the first to leave the field in 2017, was renamed Anne Frankstraat. In Kortrijk, it was suggested to name the street after a resistance fighter from the First World War and now the name of Hugo Claus (the author of "The sorrow of Belgium") is on the table. The Delwaide dock in Antwerp - named after the Antwerp war mayor who turned out to be active in the persecution of the Jews - became the Liberation Dock last year. "A safe choice, but it says nothing twice," says Aerts. “Why not a Marcel Louette dock? People often don't dare to take a position. ”
Female resistance fighters
An exception to this is the city of Ghent. Last year - on the recommendation of Aerts and his colleague Jan Naert - he decided to dedicate street names in a new residential area to female resistance fighters. But only after extensive research. Aerts: “They wanted to make sure that those people were still of good repute after the war. I thought that was good, but also a bit ironic considering that there are still Verschaevestraten, who was a Nazi sentenced to death. ”

De Wever is more nuanced. “Who to commemorate on street signs is a fair question. The resistance deserves a more central place in public memory, but it was not merely heroic. They are hero stories with ifs and buts. ”

Aerts agrees. “We should not fall into the Dutch pitfall, where the resistance has been romanticized for a long time. You shouldn't turn people into a cardboard category: villain or hero. Then we don't learn anything about history. The Dutch example should teach us to be wary of glorification. The image in Flanders should tilt, not overturn. ”

https://www.trouw.nl/verdieping/het...ven-vechten-om-erkenning-nog-steeds~b48facd4/

 

[Chukchi Husky]

That doesn't necessarily track. There are always young apologists for old autocrats. The far right today, for example, will often pound away at all the people "socialism" killed, but never mention any people killed by fascism.

I've heard something like that before, how absolute monarchy is better than republican governments because monarchy never had the Reign of Terror.

 

[Cutlass]

I've heard something like that before, how absolute monarchy is better than republican governments because monarchy never had the Reign of Terror.

Right, the tyranny was ever-present, rather than coming in a mass.

 

[Old Hippy]

That doesn't necessarily track. There are always young apologists for old autocrats. The far right today, for example, will often pound away at all the people "socialism" killed, but never mention any people killed by fascism.

you miss the obvious point that these arguments/conversations/start when the progresive tolerent left call people who disagree with them facists and Nazis
TIL that it can not be taken for granted that facism / hiltler and nazis are bad you must first make this point that this is so and try to convince people of the obvious before a debate can proceed