The work is exploratory, not mission critical. The needs of academia are almost the opposite of ISS or even an average business/web setup. An occasional crash is not a big deal in academia. Getting a new algorithm that someone recently published to work is. Many systems in academia are sloppily managed and that's fine. People aren't doing IT here. These are researchers doing science, not sys admins. IT is an after-thought. Its just-enough IT. People look to Ubuntu or Fedora because help is easy to find in a forum and packages are plenty. Of course, academia is not monolithic and there are various technical cultures within it.
Seriously, how is this better than simply disconnecting or throttling down to say, 256 kbps (with perhaps intermittent redirects to pay-your-bill reminder pages) until the bill is paid? It shows more respect to customers. Is there a law in Canada that disallows this by classification as an essential service?
I doubt that Julia is going to surpass R in a decade as you say. I use R because statisticians like it and contribute every obscure technique into it. Statisticians (for most part) don't seem to care about performance or elegance of the language from an engineering standpoint. R toolbox, for whatever reason, makes sense to them. For most people, R is used more as a statistical shell, rather than a programming language. Do I care whether BASH scripting is elegant or fast? No... just that everything is quickly available from it.
Julia will no doubt be valuable for a subset of statistical techniques where performance matters. I think Julia will become a good extension language for vectorized code. It will perhaps be the next NumPy/Cython, a general-purpose high-level, high-performance language/libraries that everyone can plug into, not just the Python community.
The one problem I had was that it still had a nasty startup time when I last evaluated it an year ago. Gadfly took way too long to import... something like a minute. Its not a problem for interactive use, but painful for scripts. It can be worked around of course. I hope the grant helps.
Sensible gun laws that everyone else has is "let the government do it for you" "nonsense", but "a much better public health system for the poor and disadvantaged" and "provide a reasonable option for their mental health treatment" isn't? Nice logic.
I don't want to know about cleaning, locking and maintaining guns. I just don't want to be shot by them:-). Perhaps, we should make OECD gun violence stats, *one of the first required classes* in high school - your logic, not mine. At least with stats, they'll learn something.
> I suspect Finland has neither a melting pot of people that the US has
Are there any statistics to show that still-melting people or refusing-to-melt people are responsible for most of these shootings?
> and that it has a much better public health system for the poor and disadvantaged than the US does. > The United States doesn't lock up its crazy people and doesn't provide a reasonable option for their mental health treatment.
US public health system may be an embarrassment compared to other OECD countries. But there are many third world countries that have much worse health care, poverty and undiagnosed mental health cases that don't have mass shootings, because they recognize the reality that their societies, don't have the maturity to handle guns safely. Australia decided to give up guns when it realized that. Unlike in US, gun-ownership isn't an entire ideology in Australia, so their hands were not tied.
You can combine them. Android can be used with a mouse (mostly) just fine. Touch UIs work OK with the mouse, but the reverse isn't as easy for the reasons you state. One of the main reasons is that the mouse is much more precise than touch. So we have small UI elements on desktop apps that are just hard to hit with touch, but somewhat manageable with a stylus. iOS team took advantage of the coarse aspects of touch and incorporated gestures to great effect.
As we are moving towards high DPI displays on mobile, but not so much on the desktop, perhaps the differences will become less different in the future and mobile interfaces will look acceptable for mouse use. Tooling (Appmethod) is making it easy for apps to simply present two different interfaces for the same functionality. In the end, it will all converge. Windows appears to be on the right track for long term evolution.
I just saw John Oliver's video. It mostly gets things right. The main miss is that people outside of India often just mention the casualties of one side. This ends up painting the violence in the tone of a pogram - Indian law tries very hard to maintain communal harmony and has laws that supersede free speech, when the question is communal harmony (the partition was very painful). It was an unanticipated communal clash, granted, 3-4x more died from one group in the final tally and that should indeed be noted, but it was a conflict nonetheless.
It was interesting to see Zakaria also make the comparison to southern politicians - that was along the lines of what I was driving at. Some local leaders certainly had these failings and they deserve to be locked away. Modi was examined by the court towards whether he exercised his tools in time and he managed to furnish the records. The civil society in India had 12 years to debate that before his election.
Fair enough. As I said, I don't disagree that BJP does have some extremist elements in it (along the lines of my insistence of comparing similarly developed societies, it is perhaps more like the the Democratic Party, soon after the US civil war, until the Southern Strategy). I just argue that it isn't defined by it.
I don't disagree with the point about courts either. Indian lower courts aren't good. Higher courts are good, for a country of its development. I have no illusions about the perfection of process. Like you say, India's supreme court judges are good, but the process can potentially be tampered here and there... *if* it can be done without arousing Judges' suspicion. If we look back into US history, circa civil war, we find outright racist supreme court judges. By those standards, India compares fine. As for Kodnani's conviction, it shows that the process was followed. BTW, BJP is not unique for being host to such elements (cf: Indira Gandhi assassination riots).
My main point is that the quality of institutions reflects human development of societies, which in turn is dependent on economic development. I am not blind to India's (or any other developing countries, ones with colonial legacies) flaws. I just want them to be seen in a proper context. My point is not so much of defending Modi, as it is a civilizational defense. The criticism implicitly turns into a judgement of the entire country (as we have seen with the Delhi rape case - rather than see the main story of vibrant middle class activism, it used the crime of a drunk, steroid-pumped thug, with a violent history... and his gang, and turned it to paint the entire country of 1.2 billion people, as one of rapists, with no statistics to back up the claim, just a bunch of anecdotes, easy to find in a country of India's size), and a question on its capacity to wield democratic choice, as well as a question on its mandate.
I haven't rationalized anything and you haven't provided any counter arguments.
What I did was I called to look at things in historical and developmental context. I feel there is a general tendency for people living in relatively advanced countries (not just the West) to lecture people who don't, while completely forgetting where they were before they got to where they are now... just like how a rich person likes to lecture the poor about hard work and discipline. This lecturing isn't much about doing good, as it is about schadenfreude - Haha, look at those savages. It is a universal trait. US might like to lecture India. India might like to lecture Pakistan etc. Reality is more complicated.
> torching of the train cars in which Hindu extremists were traveling
Why do you say that the Godhra victims were "Hindu extremists"? So that you can cast them as sub-humans and casually explain away their massacre? What extremist activities did they perform? What activities did their attackers perform?
> who said that "killing of Muslims is a natural reaction to their killing of Hindus
Quoting Wikipedia: The train was attacked by a mob of around 2,000 people. After some stone-pelting, four coaches of the train were set alight, trapping many people inside. 59 people including 27 women and 10 children were burnt to death, and 48 others were injured. According to J Mahapatra, additional director general of the Gujarat police, "miscreants had kept the petrol-soaked rags ready for use much before the train had arrived at the Godhra". A study conducted by the Gujarat Forensic Science Laboratory report states that 60 liters of inflammable liquid had been poured into coach S-6 of the train using a wide mouthed container. It had been poured by standing on the passage between the northern side-door of the eastern side of the coach, which had been set on fire immediately thereafter. The report also concluded that there had been heavy stone pelting on the train.
If this event happens in ANY country *of India's per capita income*, between ANY religious groups - you can expect people to go berzerk & bloody riots to follow... and the most well-intentioned state will have a hard time bringing the situation under control.
The hindu extremists were those who attacked muslims who had nothing to do with the train attack for retribution, not the ones who died in the train.
> Different countries (or more precisely, different societies) at different levels of development need to be measured by different yard sticks. That is my key argument. US and Europe should be held to a higher standard, as they had more time (after industrialization) to get it right. China hard-pressed to think of a nationalism movement that did not, ultimately, turn out to be a bad deal for a great many people
It looks like my thoughtless use of angle brackets ate some text.
Corrected: Different countries (or more precisely, different societies) at different levels of development need to be measured by different yard sticks. That is my key argument. US and Europe should be held to a higher standard, as they had more time (after industrialization) to get it right. China, India and Africa are in that order. Each seems to be 20 to 30 years behind the other, on modern timescales of development.
> hard-pressed to think of a nationalism movement that did not, ultimately, turn out to be a bad deal for a great many people
I don't disagree. I am not supporting nationalistic fervor. But one also needs to understand why nationalism emerges. It is easy to say Germans in pre-WWII should not have been so nationalistic. More reasonably, it is impossible to imagine them as not turning out as nationalists given their circumstances. No one chooses these things. Humanity has not mastered its mass psychology yet.
This discussion should ideally be neither about christians nor about hindus. The conflation of hindu fundamentalists with hindu nationalists is however the same as the christian analogue. Like I said, the person who coined the term Hindutva and first promoted it, is a hindu atheist (hindu being a cultural identity, rather than a religious identity), rather than a religious fundamentalist.
Because they exist in different contexts across the countries. Many Indians in US are equivalents of WASPs, when in India (legal immigration by airplane selects a different class of people than does illegal border crossing). So they may support a right-wing party in India. When they come to US, they become minorities, privileged minorities, but still minorities nonetheless, and experience this strange angst of being a minority that they never did before. A party that leans left caters to that insecurity.
> and no one gets a pass because they're "at a very different stage of development".
Its not a question of getting a pass. We all agree in the ideal of the modern liberal societies. But it is pure schadenfreude to mock and criticize agrarian communities for not have the values of post-industrial societies. If they economically develop, but remain socially backward, criticism and even mocking would make sense. A good question to ask: how were my ancestors behaving when they had the same level of development as these people. Modern liberal behavior does not emerge out of thin air or due to cultural superiority, as people would like to believe. There are pre-requisites.
> India is a modern nation
Parts of India are modern and have enlightened views. Parts of it are still at sub-saharan levels. Everything seems to correlate well with economic development and education. But happily, the most backward parts are registering rapid improvements in development indices.
> just as the USA or Europe or China does not.
Different countries (or more precisely, different societies) at different levels of development need to be measured by different yard sticks. That is my key argument. US and Europe should be held to a higher standard, as they had more time (after industrialization) to get it right. China hard-pressed to think of a nationalism movement that did not, ultimately, turn out to be a bad deal for a great many people
I don't disagree. I am not supporting nationalistic fervor. But one also needs to understand why nationalism emerges. It is easy to say Germans in pre-WWII should not have been so nationalistic. More reasonably, it is impossible to imagine them as not turning out as nationalists given their circumstances. No one chooses these things. Humanity has not mastered its mass psychology yet.
> The modern KKK may be odious, but they don't go around beheading people.
The KKK is only better than ISIS in that they never had total control of territory like ISIS. If you take note of the carnage of christian fundamentalism in the not-too-distant colonial era, ISIS isn't even that brutal - blowing people off cannons, slitting throats of fellow christians for being of a different sect, plenty of slave rape etc etc. Yes, that was all in the past. And no, it is not proper to compare the maturity of people from an advanced & prosperous country, with those at a very different stage of development.
> The BJP is aggressively forcing Hindu traditions onto non-Hindus.
The national government isn't. A few local governments are... mostly for reasons of populism (a milder equivalent in US is Ten Commandments everywhere). Strictly speaking, there are plenty of instances and even recommendations to eat beef in Hindu scriptures and the case is being made. India isn't like Ireland denying life-saving abortions to non-christians, because it is a "catholic country".
> When muslims object, they are told to "go to Pakistan".
The statements of a few colorful demagogues do not constitute official policy. No one is forcing muslims to leave the country. India is the only country in the neighborhood where the population of its minorities as a %, actually increased. In all the rest, it declined. India has special laws that give additional support to minorities. But no, you prefer to miss the big picture and insist on focusing on non-representative and colorful press reports because it suits your prejudices. You probably also think India has a special rape problem.
> How is that different from the KKK saying that black Americans should "go back to Africa"?
Different by not sustaining a campaign of physical intimidation like KKK did?
> Saying that non-Hindus are not "real" Indians is no better than saying non-whites are not "real" Americans.
Actually, even the proponents of Hindutva say that non-Hindus are sons of the soil, as long as they acknowledge their ancestral roots and a common civilization. Hindutva is about nationalism, more than religion. The angst comes from the partition and the colonial experience, not religious fundamentalism. India had a tradition of such harmony where muslims wrote epic poems on hindu mythical figures and hindus went/and still go to muslim mystics and shrines. After the painful partition, the balance of trust was damaged between the communities.
> Actions, and inactions, by political leaders, that lead to those riots are moral issues.
As the saying goes: "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence".
In a country with 1.5K per capita, you can expect only so much swiftness in response. If all the wealth, organization and technology of US could not save it from the botched response to Katrina, why would you expect prompt response to *anything* in India? If you compare the response of India to responses of countries at a similar stage of economic development, you would find that it does quite well.
> Also, the post-riot response by political leaders is a moral issue.
That is a more sound argument... particularly the rehabilitation efforts towards riot victims. Same causes though.
I am not approving or disapproving. I am cautioning against hyperbole.
I mean that the Modi legacy will likely be that of Regan, in both positive and negative ways. The one major modifying factor is that India is at a very different stage of development than US was when Reagan was in office. So pro-business policies in India mean industrializing it. In US, they meant de-industrializing it. Their policies had/will of course have environment and social justice consequences that will shape their legacy. In point, for the KKK bit, I am saying that his promotion of Hindutva is no more than Reagan's promotion of a Christian Nation. I approve neither. But neither is KKK nor ISIS.
> we should just ignore the fact that he was complicit in the violent deaths of thousands of people
India had a history of riots, clashes between the Hindu and Muslim communities in certain regions that come with a society with still weak institutions (government was always weak in India's history). Note that these were riots and clashes, not pogroms from the top. Both communities indulged in violence, although expectedly, the majority community ends up inflicting more damage in the end. India seems to have gotten the riot problem under control since the Gujarat riots.
India's supreme court is a trusted institution. It examined the case for several years and had not found Mr. Modi complicit in the matter. Finding him complicit is akin to finding US presidents *personally* complicit in LA riots, Abu Gharib, Iraq death toll etc.
> heads a hate mongering political party that is the moral equivalent of the KKK
Consider that the person who coined the term Hindutva (the party's alleged ideology) was an atheist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and that the party's spokesperson is a muslim intellectual... and that this "KKK" celebrates the recently passed muslim president as the people's president and one of its own... and honored him as no president before him. Indian politics should not be seen through such extreme and simplistic lenses.
BJP is more like the republican party. There may be a few KKK elements here and there, but it is not defined by it. Mr. Modi is like Reagan, in terms of his politics and his popularity.
> 3. It's not user friendly. > A very well supported statement.
I for one would like all my Desktop apps to have an Eclipse style UI. Its very flexible to layout, as you see fit. I first tried Eclipse in 2002. I picked it up instantly and had no confusion about anything (had used several other Java IDEs before).
> 4. It doesn't run on other operating systems well because it wasn't pure swing. > 'Other' operating systems? > AFAIK, it generally runs fine on Linux (barring high-DPI KDE environments) and OSX.
Indeed. I prefer Eclipse on Linux in part because it is NOT "pure swing". Swing fonts on Linux are not nice. I wish that no IDEs are Swing-based.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, he is not on ISS. Why does he need to care?
The work is exploratory, not mission critical. The needs of academia are almost the opposite of ISS or even an average business/web setup. An occasional crash is not a big deal in academia. Getting a new algorithm that someone recently published to work is. Many systems in academia are sloppily managed and that's fine. People aren't doing IT here. These are researchers doing science, not sys admins. IT is an after-thought. Its just-enough IT. People look to Ubuntu or Fedora because help is easy to find in a forum and packages are plenty. Of course, academia is not monolithic and there are various technical cultures within it.
https://xkcd.com/865/
Seriously, how is this better than simply disconnecting or throttling down to say, 256 kbps (with perhaps intermittent redirects to pay-your-bill reminder pages) until the bill is paid? It shows more respect to customers. Is there a law in Canada that disallows this by classification as an essential service?
And Zimbra Desktop - cross-platform and feature rich, although heavier.
I doubt that Julia is going to surpass R in a decade as you say. I use R because statisticians like it and contribute every obscure technique into it. Statisticians (for most part) don't seem to care about performance or elegance of the language from an engineering standpoint. R toolbox, for whatever reason, makes sense to them. For most people, R is used more as a statistical shell, rather than a programming language. Do I care whether BASH scripting is elegant or fast? No... just that everything is quickly available from it.
Julia will no doubt be valuable for a subset of statistical techniques where performance matters. I think Julia will become a good extension language for vectorized code. It will perhaps be the next NumPy/Cython, a general-purpose high-level, high-performance language/libraries that everyone can plug into, not just the Python community.
The one problem I had was that it still had a nasty startup time when I last evaluated it an year ago. Gadfly took way too long to import... something like a minute. Its not a problem for interactive use, but painful for scripts. It can be worked around of course. I hope the grant helps.
Sensible gun laws that everyone else has is "let the government do it for you" "nonsense", but "a much better public health system for the poor and disadvantaged" and "provide a reasonable option for their mental health treatment" isn't? Nice logic.
I don't want to know about cleaning, locking and maintaining guns. I just don't want to be shot by them :-).
Perhaps, we should make OECD gun violence stats, *one of the first required classes* in high school - your logic, not mine.
At least with stats, they'll learn something.
> Why not just make safe gun use and storage one of the first required classes?
The mass shooting are not happening from accidental discharges and stolen guns.
You kinda made OP's case.
> I suspect Finland has neither a melting pot of people that the US has
Are there any statistics to show that still-melting people or refusing-to-melt people are responsible for most of these shootings?
> and that it has a much better public health system for the poor and disadvantaged than the US does.
> The United States doesn't lock up its crazy people and doesn't provide a reasonable option for their mental health treatment.
US public health system may be an embarrassment compared to other OECD countries. But there are many third world countries that have much worse health care, poverty and undiagnosed mental health cases that don't have mass shootings, because they recognize the reality that their societies, don't have the maturity to handle guns safely. Australia decided to give up guns when it realized that. Unlike in US, gun-ownership isn't an entire ideology in Australia, so their hands were not tied.
You can combine them. Android can be used with a mouse (mostly) just fine. Touch UIs work OK with the mouse, but the reverse isn't as easy for the reasons you state. One of the main reasons is that the mouse is much more precise than touch. So we have small UI elements on desktop apps that are just hard to hit with touch, but somewhat manageable with a stylus. iOS team took advantage of the coarse aspects of touch and incorporated gestures to great effect.
As we are moving towards high DPI displays on mobile, but not so much on the desktop, perhaps the differences will become less different in the future and mobile interfaces will look acceptable for mouse use. Tooling (Appmethod) is making it easy for apps to simply present two different interfaces for the same functionality. In the end, it will all converge. Windows appears to be on the right track for long term evolution.
contd...
I just saw John Oliver's video. It mostly gets things right. The main miss is that people outside of India often just mention the casualties of one side. This ends up painting the violence in the tone of a pogram - Indian law tries very hard to maintain communal harmony and has laws that supersede free speech, when the question is communal harmony (the partition was very painful). It was an unanticipated communal clash, granted, 3-4x more died from one group in the final tally and that should indeed be noted, but it was a conflict nonetheless.
It was interesting to see Zakaria also make the comparison to southern politicians - that was along the lines of what I was driving at. Some local leaders certainly had these failings and they deserve to be locked away. Modi was examined by the court towards whether he exercised his tools in time and he managed to furnish the records. The civil society in India had 12 years to debate that before his election.
Fair enough. As I said, I don't disagree that BJP does have some extremist elements in it (along the lines of my insistence of comparing similarly developed societies, it is perhaps more like the the Democratic Party, soon after the US civil war, until the Southern Strategy). I just argue that it isn't defined by it.
I don't disagree with the point about courts either. Indian lower courts aren't good. Higher courts are good, for a country of its development. I have no illusions about the perfection of process. Like you say, India's supreme court judges are good, but the process can potentially be tampered here and there... *if* it can be done without arousing Judges' suspicion. If we look back into US history, circa civil war, we find outright racist supreme court judges. By those standards, India compares fine. As for Kodnani's conviction, it shows that the process was followed. BTW, BJP is not unique for being host to such elements (cf: Indira Gandhi assassination riots).
My main point is that the quality of institutions reflects human development of societies, which in turn is dependent on economic development. I am not blind to India's (or any other developing countries, ones with colonial legacies) flaws. I just want them to be seen in a proper context. My point is not so much of defending Modi, as it is a civilizational defense. The criticism implicitly turns into a judgement of the entire country (as we have seen with the Delhi rape case - rather than see the main story of vibrant middle class activism, it used the crime of a drunk, steroid-pumped thug, with a violent history... and his gang, and turned it to paint the entire country of 1.2 billion people, as one of rapists, with no statistics to back up the claim, just a bunch of anecdotes, easy to find in a country of India's size), and a question on its capacity to wield democratic choice, as well as a question on its mandate.
I haven't rationalized anything and you haven't provided any counter arguments.
What I did was I called to look at things in historical and developmental context. I feel there is a general tendency for people living in relatively advanced countries (not just the West) to lecture people who don't, while completely forgetting where they were before they got to where they are now... just like how a rich person likes to lecture the poor about hard work and discipline. This lecturing isn't much about doing good, as it is about schadenfreude - Haha, look at those savages. It is a universal trait. US might like to lecture India. India might like to lecture Pakistan etc. Reality is more complicated.
> torching of the train cars in which Hindu extremists were traveling
Why do you say that the Godhra victims were "Hindu extremists"? So that you can cast them as sub-humans and casually explain away their massacre? What extremist activities did they perform? What activities did their attackers perform?
> who said that "killing of Muslims is a natural reaction to their killing of Hindus
Quoting Wikipedia:
The train was attacked by a mob of around 2,000 people. After some stone-pelting, four coaches of the train were set alight, trapping many people inside. 59 people including 27 women and 10 children were burnt to death, and 48 others were injured. According to J Mahapatra, additional director general of the Gujarat police, "miscreants had kept the petrol-soaked rags ready for use much before the train had arrived at the Godhra".
A study conducted by the Gujarat Forensic Science Laboratory report states that 60 liters of inflammable liquid had been poured into coach S-6 of the train using a wide mouthed container. It had been poured by standing on the passage between the northern side-door of the eastern side of the coach, which had been set on fire immediately thereafter. The report also concluded that there had been heavy stone pelting on the train.
If this event happens in ANY country *of India's per capita income*, between ANY religious groups - you can expect people to go berzerk & bloody riots to follow... and the most well-intentioned state will have a hard time bringing the situation under control.
The hindu extremists were those who attacked muslims who had nothing to do with the train attack for retribution, not the ones who died in the train.
> Different countries (or more precisely, different societies) at different levels of development need to be measured by different yard sticks. That is my key argument. US and Europe should be held to a higher standard, as they had more time (after industrialization) to get it right. China hard-pressed to think of a nationalism movement that did not, ultimately, turn out to be a bad deal for a great many people
It looks like my thoughtless use of angle brackets ate some text.
Corrected: Different countries (or more precisely, different societies) at different levels of development need to be measured by different yard sticks. That is my key argument. US and Europe should be held to a higher standard, as they had more time (after industrialization) to get it right. China, India and Africa are in that order. Each seems to be 20 to 30 years behind the other, on modern timescales of development.
> hard-pressed to think of a nationalism movement that did not, ultimately, turn out to be a bad deal for a great many people
I don't disagree. I am not supporting nationalistic fervor. But one also needs to understand why nationalism emerges. It is easy to say Germans in pre-WWII should not have been so nationalistic. More reasonably, it is impossible to imagine them as not turning out as nationalists given their circumstances. No one chooses these things. Humanity has not mastered its mass psychology yet.
> not sure on sexual assault statistics
There's your problem.
> but India, like most of the world (unfortunately), absolutely has a problem with respect for women.
No more than other similar countries in the region with similar levels of development. It is NOT a special case as the press would have you believe.
This discussion should ideally be neither about christians nor about hindus. The conflation of hindu fundamentalists with hindu nationalists is however the same as the christian analogue. Like I said, the person who coined the term Hindutva and first promoted it, is a hindu atheist (hindu being a cultural identity, rather than a religious identity), rather than a religious fundamentalist.
Because they exist in different contexts across the countries. Many Indians in US are equivalents of WASPs, when in India (legal immigration by airplane selects a different class of people than does illegal border crossing). So they may support a right-wing party in India. When they come to US, they become minorities, privileged minorities, but still minorities nonetheless, and experience this strange angst of being a minority that they never did before. A party that leans left caters to that insecurity.
> wrong is wrong
Of course.
> and no one gets a pass because they're "at a very different stage of development".
Its not a question of getting a pass. We all agree in the ideal of the modern liberal societies. But it is pure schadenfreude to mock and criticize agrarian communities for not have the values of post-industrial societies. If they economically develop, but remain socially backward, criticism and even mocking would make sense. A good question to ask: how were my ancestors behaving when they had the same level of development as these people. Modern liberal behavior does not emerge out of thin air or due to cultural superiority, as people would like to believe. There are pre-requisites.
> India is a modern nation
Parts of India are modern and have enlightened views. Parts of it are still at sub-saharan levels. Everything seems to correlate well with economic development and education. But happily, the most backward parts are registering rapid improvements in development indices.
> just as the USA or Europe or China does not.
Different countries (or more precisely, different societies) at different levels of development need to be measured by different yard sticks. That is my key argument. US and Europe should be held to a higher standard, as they had more time (after industrialization) to get it right. China hard-pressed to think of a nationalism movement that did not, ultimately, turn out to be a bad deal for a great many people
I don't disagree. I am not supporting nationalistic fervor. But one also needs to understand why nationalism emerges. It is easy to say Germans in pre-WWII should not have been so nationalistic. More reasonably, it is impossible to imagine them as not turning out as nationalists given their circumstances. No one chooses these things. Humanity has not mastered its mass psychology yet.
> The modern KKK may be odious, but they don't go around beheading people.
The KKK is only better than ISIS in that they never had total control of territory like ISIS. If you take note of the carnage of christian fundamentalism in the not-too-distant colonial era, ISIS isn't even that brutal - blowing people off cannons, slitting throats of fellow christians for being of a different sect, plenty of slave rape etc etc. Yes, that was all in the past. And no, it is not proper to compare the maturity of people from an advanced & prosperous country, with those at a very different stage of development.
> The BJP is aggressively forcing Hindu traditions onto non-Hindus.
The national government isn't. A few local governments are... mostly for reasons of populism (a milder equivalent in US is Ten Commandments everywhere). Strictly speaking, there are plenty of instances and even recommendations to eat beef in Hindu scriptures and the case is being made. India isn't like Ireland denying life-saving abortions to non-christians, because it is a "catholic country".
> When muslims object, they are told to "go to Pakistan".
The statements of a few colorful demagogues do not constitute official policy. No one is forcing muslims to leave the country. India is the only country in the neighborhood where the population of its minorities as a %, actually increased. In all the rest, it declined. India has special laws that give additional support to minorities. But no, you prefer to miss the big picture and insist on focusing on non-representative and colorful press reports because it suits your prejudices. You probably also think India has a special rape problem.
> How is that different from the KKK saying that black Americans should "go back to Africa"?
Different by not sustaining a campaign of physical intimidation like KKK did?
> Saying that non-Hindus are not "real" Indians is no better than saying non-whites are not "real" Americans.
Actually, even the proponents of Hindutva say that non-Hindus are sons of the soil, as long as they acknowledge their ancestral roots and a common civilization. Hindutva is about nationalism, more than religion. The angst comes from the partition and the colonial experience, not religious fundamentalism. India had a tradition of such harmony where muslims wrote epic poems on hindu mythical figures and hindus went/and still go to muslim mystics and shrines. After the painful partition, the balance of trust was damaged between the communities.
> Actions, and inactions, by political leaders, that lead to those riots are moral issues.
As the saying goes: "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence".
In a country with 1.5K per capita, you can expect only so much swiftness in response. If all the wealth, organization and technology of US could not save it from the botched response to Katrina, why would you expect prompt response to *anything* in India? If you compare the response of India to responses of countries at a similar stage of economic development, you would find that it does quite well.
> Also, the post-riot response by political leaders is a moral issue.
That is a more sound argument... particularly the rehabilitation efforts towards riot victims. Same causes though.
I am not approving or disapproving. I am cautioning against hyperbole.
I mean that the Modi legacy will likely be that of Regan, in both positive and negative ways. The one major modifying factor is that India is at a very different stage of development than US was when Reagan was in office. So pro-business policies in India mean industrializing it. In US, they meant de-industrializing it. Their policies had/will of course have environment and social justice consequences that will shape their legacy. In point, for the KKK bit, I am saying that his promotion of Hindutva is no more than Reagan's promotion of a Christian Nation. I approve neither. But neither is KKK nor ISIS.
Riots, unless pre-planned, are not moral issues. They are episodes of collective madness in the absence of adequate policing infrastructure.
> India has a loooong way to go to catch up
Sure, it still has to distribute cholera blankets, needs its own trail of tears etc etc.
> Pushing for them to advance is a good thing.
Of course. How will the East learn morals without the West?
> we should just ignore the fact that he was complicit in the violent deaths of thousands of people
India had a history of riots, clashes between the Hindu and Muslim communities in certain regions that come with a society with still weak institutions (government was always weak in India's history). Note that these were riots and clashes, not pogroms from the top. Both communities indulged in violence, although expectedly, the majority community ends up inflicting more damage in the end. India seems to have gotten the riot problem under control since the Gujarat riots.
India's supreme court is a trusted institution. It examined the case for several years and had not found Mr. Modi complicit in the matter. Finding him complicit is akin to finding US presidents *personally* complicit in LA riots, Abu Gharib, Iraq death toll etc.
> heads a hate mongering political party that is the moral equivalent of the KKK
Consider that the person who coined the term Hindutva (the party's alleged ideology) was an atheist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and that the party's spokesperson is a muslim intellectual... and that this "KKK" celebrates the recently passed muslim president as the people's president and one of its own... and honored him as no president before him. Indian politics should not be seen through such extreme and simplistic lenses.
BJP is more like the republican party. There may be a few KKK elements here and there, but it is not defined by it. Mr. Modi is like Reagan, in terms of his politics and his popularity.
> 3. It's not user friendly.
> A very well supported statement.
I for one would like all my Desktop apps to have an Eclipse style UI. Its very flexible to layout, as you see fit. I first tried Eclipse in 2002. I picked it up instantly and had no confusion about anything (had used several other Java IDEs before).
> 4. It doesn't run on other operating systems well because it wasn't pure swing.
> 'Other' operating systems?
> AFAIK, it generally runs fine on Linux (barring high-DPI KDE environments) and OSX.
Indeed. I prefer Eclipse on Linux in part because it is NOT "pure swing". Swing fonts on Linux are not nice. I wish that no IDEs are Swing-based.