A minor accident had forced me down in the Rio de Oro region, in Spanish Africa. Landing on one of those table-lands of the Sahara which fall away steeply at the sides, I found myself on the flat top of the frustum of a cone, an isolated vestige of a plateau that had crumbled round the edges. In this part of the Sahara such truncated cones are visible from the air every hundred miles or so, their smooth surfaces always at about the same altitude above the desert and their geologic substance always identical. The surface sand is composed of minute and distinct shells; but progressively as you dig along a vertical section, the shells become more fragmentary, tend to cohere, and at the base of the cone form a pure calcareous deposit.
Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this . . . this iceberg: its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region.
I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.
But suddenly my musings on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man's fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably.
And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of this celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them.
Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.
Well that is some spectacular prose, I am truly transported to a place where spirituality and science meet at a single point of grand mystery and realization that I have felt a few times in real life, alone in nature at surprising places and odd hours, but Saint-Exupéry has taken this all one further level up the rung.
To a level that my father actually lived, as an airplane pilot in Baja California back when the peninsula didn't have a paved road, an isolated, remote place as yet mostly untouched by man.
One minor caveat, however:
a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust
While I understand such a thoughtful writer was going for a feeling, surely with his talent he could have found a way to include windstorms, all the dust and sands they can sweep horizontally across the lands and over hills. The Rio De Oro region is in northern Morocco, surely it often gets blasted by powerful Saharan winds.
A sheet spread beneath the Moroccan sky most often receives desert-dust.
I really don't understand, my definition of Liberal has always been "Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded" which is something I subscribe to. Before I came to lemmy I never even heard of people refer to liberals as anything other than that.
Now if you were to say "Liberal Party of NY" or "Liberal Party of Canada" etc then I can see how more specific political beliefs across their ranks could be made points out of, but if you just say all Liberals then you sound like a frother to me.
Liberals tend to say that the system just needs a few tweaks here and there while the reality is that the entire thing is rotten to the core and the stuff they enjoy now in their "developed" countries was built upon centuries of exploitation of other people, which is still ongoing stronger than ever.
When confronted with these facts, some liberals act defensively and instead of learning and growing in their understanding, they start aligning with right wing thinking. That's why the saying goes "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds".
Basically all i kno about haiti is:
only country to successfully throw off colonizers (they beat the french).
then they got superwomped by foreign nations flooding their markets with oversubsidized goods and draining wealth out of haiti to where the people got thrown in extreme poverty.
with what little i kno of haiti, i would assume the power figures in haiti government are just as corrupt as those everywhere else and that removing their corrupt hold wouldn't be a bad thing... except that there needs to be some support for countries that do that instead of just 'crushed and controlled by foreign corporate and government interests' afterward. Maybe oldendays cuba and tito woulda helped support him afterward?
i literally armchair philosophizing with basically no info.
with what little i kno of haiti, i would assume the power figures in haiti government are just as corrupt as those everywhere else and that removing their corrupt hold wouldn’t be a bad thing
The guy is a former member of a govt kill squad who got expelled for excessive violence and brutality. That should tell you something about him. There are worse things than corruption in govt.
Basically all i kno about haiti is: only country to successfully throw off colonizers
Not exactly. Other countries have done that (the US for example). What sets Haiti apart is that they are the first and only successful slave revolt. Slaves gained their freedom through revolt, which terrified every nations that used slaves (basically every Western powers and their colonies at the time).
You know this article pissed me off with the self-immolation bit.
Self Immolation in protest couldn't be from preexisting mental illness. He clearly was emotionally impacted by his experience in the environment enough that his rational brain thought that by assuming such agonizing pain and stating the protest, the message would get heard a squeak louder.
Suicidal people don't think rationally. They want the pain to end. Or they become wildly careless. They don't sit there and go "how do I accomplish some good and end my suffering " while selecting the second worst way to die.
I still question the intentions of the media and how a lot of outlets immediate ran to claim his actions as mental health related.
Like sure, I can see where that's coming from in a sense since self-immolation is inherently self-harm and you have to question a person's mental health for doing so, but at the same time, I don't know of anybody off-hand who says the same about the Buddhist monks who did the same in Vietnam.
Maybe times have changed and people don't see that action the same way as they used to back then, but if they are going to call this a result of mental health, I really hope they keep consistency with that from here on forward.
No, it's more like how we used to refer to all professions as being different kinds of men. Mailmen, firemen, policemen, etc. because men were the only ones with those jobs. I'm sure it's not intentionally gendered language, but it definitely is and we can change it if we want.
People dying because of border fuckery again, dude set himself on fire and we here unironically talking about the correct way to name a profession. Time and a place, person. this aint it.
I'm not the one that started this cringe reddit-style correction thread, as far as I'm concerned all soldiers are the same, but I'm sure as fuck not going to let shit like "airman is already the gender neutral term" go unchallenged because it very obviously isn't.
This is a comments section. None of this matters. This is exactly the time and place to talk about this. 🙄
Except the US Airforce uses it as a gender neutral title, which is extremely relevant when the subtext is you're talking about whether you're misgendering an almost certainly closeted trans person by calling them "airman".
I should have said "as a title used by the airforce" but I figured that was implied.
I don't think I care what the US Air Force calls people. The meaning of words is socially constructed, just like gender, and our society constructs "-man" as a gendered suffix. Male-as-default should be fought wherever it arises, even when the official government policy says otherwise.
Maybe especially when the government says otherwise, and Bushnell being trans (the evidence is certainly compelling) just makes this more important.
Nobody denies that women can do professions, short of the furthest right extremists, nobody disagrees with that. And nobody takes those guys seriously.
You know what the moderate right does take seriously? The idea that the left wants to make everything "woke" with things that negatively affect them and forces them to use "political speak", which is precisely what pushes people into the right wing dumpsterfire.
Like it was a cute idea 10 years ago, it backfired, please stop.
Hamas has repeatedly rejected any kind of temporary ceasefire. I can't see why this would be any different.
Was Hamas even involved in the drafting of this deal or did the US and Israel just throw this together to paint Hamas as unreasonable when they reject it again? None of the articles I've read have made any effort to clarify who drew this up beyond vaguely gesturing at Israel, US, and Egypt.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I don't know what the terms of this one are, but past cease fires have basically required Hamas to surrender. Giving up their only leverage, hostages, and allowing IDF to strictly control everyone and everything going in and out of Gaza, free to shut off power and water as they feel, and block aid.
As you say, they have very little leverage. What they can offer is returning the hostages and a guarantee of safety for Israel and in exchange, they can get peace and relative freedom. At this point they should probably negotiate for whatever they can get, because the alternative is complete destruction. Belligerence hasn't worked out well for them, perhaps they should try something else.
I wouldn't expect any trust and goodwill considering their stated goal is to genocide Jews and destroy Israel.
Israel didn't like the terms and they have most of the leverage, Anthony Blinken said there were a lot of "non-starters" in the offer. What exactly those were I don't think has been made public.
The reason there's a massive security apparatus around Palestine is not to oppress Palestinians or impose racial hierarchy, it is because they have been trying to murder Jews for the last 70+ years.
The violence against Israel is the reason for this. Hamas is a cause of the violence. They create the very situation they say they want to end.
If they want the walls to come down and the blockade to end, they need to show a commitment to peace, rather than a commitment to genocide.
Being real, that depends on if Hamas and Israel want it. Seeing as Hamas literally has Israel's destruction in their charter, any ceasefire is only temporary
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