Ironically enough, my source for this idea was Walter Wink's "Powers" series, which is about taking a close look at the Bible and what it has to say about power (hence the name) and social institutions, and how these can be regarded as living things in their own right. And even more ironically, that idea meshes quite well with Dawkin's ideas about cultural memes being analogous to genetics.

War has been avoided many times.

So it has. Humans are, after all, also living creatures with their own agendas, such as survival. But every time war is avoided, how is that treated? Like we had won a terrible fight against a great enemy?

Or simply read what you wrote. Yes, war has ben avoided. You could replace "war" with "the Great Cthulhu" or "Slenderman" in that sentence and it would make just as much sense. War is not just an unfortunate failure of diplomacy. It's more, a pattern of behaviours inherited from our ancestors that are always there, suggesting a particular response to any perceived situation. And that pattern has been activated once again, and is guiding people's responses towards WWIII.

I you start at 4:3 moving over whatever the hell 1280x1024 was, then back to 4:3 a too short flirt with 3:2 then settling on 16:10 before dumping it for 16:9, and now trying to argue 32:9 is what everybody (should) want. Sounds like the desktop screens are getting wider and wider to me.

You could combine it with the CSS 'content' property if supported, or just pretend the background is the foreground, which it tends to be unless you put something in front of it.

Seriously. This would be better solved by going back to trying to standardize CSS 'content' that way IMG could be implemented using CSS.

It won't be the end of humanity... There's no chance that this will ever develop to that scale.

War is an archetypal situation. Once the possibility of one starting develops, it has "suction": people react to the archetype, and that threatens to overwhem rational thought. The archetype was worshipped as a divinity in many cultures precisely because war behaves as if it was a living thing seeking to devour people - or, in this case, the entire world.

So yes, there's every chance this will develop into World War III: Last Dance.

In Socialist Germany, market corners YOU!

In Europe trying to refute an action by calling it socialist doesn't work.

A good cyberwarfare department could easily post lots of fake satellite imagery to google from multiple sources.

A good cyberwarfare department does what it's told. Gaining foreign hostility is likely one of Putin's goals in all this, because he can use the resulting siege mentality to concentrate more power in his hands. For that matter, economic sanctions work in his favour too, since they get Russians used to lower standard of living which gets blamed on West, thus allowing Putin to move economic resources to military.

I may have. I typically post on slashdot before going to bed, or during insomniac period. At that point, I have in the past confused different posters. If so, I apologise.

Regardless, Sarkeesian, and a couple of others are know to be scam artists preying on gullible people. If you are looking for a debunking of a specific claim in a specific video of this particular scam artist, you can search youtube for a dosen. There are quite a few people, men and women alike who spent a significant amount of time debunking her arguments through use of logic and research.

I will readily admit that I simply don't want to bother to do the same just to participate in the discussion. I apologise if that feels like a cop-out on my part - it probably is. But making arguments that others already made for me does sound like a waste of time.

BTW, here's why I think the official results are closer to reality than this guy's estimates.

First of all, there are UN polls (which I trust more than any Russian or Ukrainian polls, given how politicized this matter has always been between the two countries). Before the election of Yanukovich as president, in 2009, these shown 70% in favor of joining Russia, and only 15% against it. These figures gradually decreased to 65% under Yanuk. After he was ousted and maidan took over in Kiev, I'd expect this number to shoot back to 70%, at the very least, and likely grow even further because of heavy Russian propaganda pitching maidan as "fascists" and "banderovtsy" (and most people in Crimea were getting their news mainly from Russian TV channels, not Ukrainian ones). With 16% undecided in the original polls, I can totally see support at 75% or so.

The other, more indirect indicator is language. This is more reliable than ethnicity, because Ukraine has a very blurry line between the two, with plenty of people self-identifying as Ukrainian on the basis of their family name or their parents' self-identification, but culturally and linguistically behaving as Russians in all other aspects. For example, in Crimea, less than 60% self-identified as Russians, but 77% listed Russian as their native language of communication (and 90% in Sevastopol) - whereas only 10% listed Ukrainian as such. It's even more skewed if you ask people which language they primarily use at home with family (since some would consider native language tied to ethnicity) - in this case you're looking at something like 95% in Crimea. Crimea also had extremely low levels of bilingualism, with only 30% of the population proficient in Ukrainian at all - a stark contrast with the rest of the country, where bilingualism is the norm, except for Western Ukraine where Ukrainian dominates with a similar proportion.

Now if you look at these language figures and consider them a proxy for political affiliation (an oversimplification, but not an unreasonable one), they also match pretty closely to what the official claim was: 80% turnout, 97% in favor of the union. What this looks like to me is that most everyone who was against the union did not vote at all, considering the referendum illegal (Crimean Tatars, in particular, had an open boycott); and most of those who wanted the union came and voted. The real numbers are probably closer to 70% for turnout and 90% in favor or thereabouts, but still a clear supermajority.

I would consider it such, if it were based on some solid data (i.e. polls or such) - but this is just one guy's opinion, and I don't know where he stands politically in general. The Russian "human rights council" is basically an umbrella organization to keep pet opposition under control - and "pet" here means that they don't do anything that is actually dangerous to the regime, but they still occasionally flaunt their not-quite-agreeable status in harmless ways.

Regarding the division, I assume that the text - being written by a Russian official after the annexation - uses the political division that Russia has adopted. In it, Sevastopol is a "city of federal importance", which means that it is its own separate federal subject with its own government etc; and the rest of the peninsula is the Republic of Crimea. The only other places in Russia that have a similar arrangement are Moscow and St Petersburg, which are also distinct from their surrounding oblasts.

The referendum itself was also split along the same lines, because the arrangement was also similar in Ukraine - Sevastopol was a "city with special status" with its own administration, and distinct from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. So the Sevastopol city administration held one referendum within its limits, and Crimean administration (in Simferopol) held it in the rest of the peninsula - and, technically speaking, those two had separate results. So when discussing them, it's common to address each part separately, especially as the results in Sevastopol were significantly skewed by letting Russian soldiers legally stationed in the city (on the naval base) to vote.

It's not Putin's people, though. It's one guy from the "President's Council for Human Rights", from a field report on his trip - not official data.

The numbers you quote are also not what's written there. He says "In Sevastopol, the vast majority voted for union, with a turnout of 50-80%. In Crimea [i.e. the rest of peninsula - not Sevastopol], according to varying sources, about 50-60% voted for the union, with a turnout of 30-50%".

Which, yes, is still different from the official figures. And the official figures are likely higher than reality, but reality is still that there's a clear majority supporting the union in Crimea. Which is not news to anyone who studied the topic before, since Crimea (and especially Sevastopol) was always a hotbed of Russian separatism in Ukraine.

Basically, it's kinda like presidential elections in Russia. They're falsified to show 70%+ approval, but Putin would still win them with a considerable margin even if they weren't.

I can assure you that Soviet soldiers (and Soviet citizens in general, for whom it was fashionable at the time to want to volunteer to fight in Vietnam - kids would occasionally run away with such an idea in mind) knew full well that it was American soldiers fighting on the other side in Vietnam - it was prominent on "anti-Vietnam-war" posters etc that were in abundance everywhere. Here is one example - the text on the left says "Vietnam will win", the text on the right is "Aggressor out of Vietnam!'.

American involvement was a major staple of Soviet propaganda at the time. Indeed, it was a major staple of Soviet propaganda after WW2 in general - everything bad that happened in the world, happened because of American occupation thereof.

For shame, really, because its attached historical lessons are desperately needed these days.

Don't worry, we're about to get re-educated on the matter. And this time there isn't any "free world" left to come to the rescue, just Stalin - er, Putin.

Whatever. It doesn't work in Greek, either.