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dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

Yo do write very well! Is not an empty compliment.

About your comments, I can point to some excerpts in the Inquisition wikipedia article:

> The Inquisition was established as a genocidal institution against the Jewish and Muslim populace of Iberia,

"The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism"

There was no genocidal intention, its a nuance but important. It wasn't established to "find every Muslim and put it on a stake".

> For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Censorship

"The censorship of books was actually very ineffective, and prohibited books circulated in Spain without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom than in other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries."

"Despite the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the development of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro", although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another."

> The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...

"evertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed" [...] "In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000)."

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

Fair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

> he Spanish Inquisition is often cited in popular literature and history as an example of religious intolerance and repression. Some historians have come to conclude that many of the charges levied against the Inquisition are exaggerated, and are a result of the Black Legend produced by political and religious enemies of Spain, especially England.

Please, feel free to point me to any unbiased source.

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

In order to have a healthy democracy we first need the rule of the law.

Constitutions are made to define the foundations of those laws and protect citizen minorities against majority abuses: what if 80% of the population of a region decides to expel the other 20% because of whatever reasons?

The fact that the state tries to preserve the integrity of the country is necessary to keep the rule of the law. For if it just renounces to a region, its power to enforce its law is lost in such region.

Now let's assume a particular region decides to secede. That region's people, industry and such is the product of a historical process: there has been some migration, investments in the region and outside the region, etc... Thus, in case of secession under what law its decided how that secession is done? Who has legitimacy to define the rules of the law?

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository

> People will say it's justified because the Catalan separatists are fascists, terrorists, pedophiles, or whatever. It's not justified. The rulers of al-Andalus were no angels either, but their abuses were nothing compared to the genocidal nightmares the Inquisition concealed with its censorship.

Genocidal nightmares? I get that you are attempting to be poetic but do inform yourself about the historicity of your claims:

> The Inquisition was originally welcomed to bring order to Europe because states saw an attack on the state’s faith as an attack on the state as well.

> The Inquisition technically had jurisdiction only over those professing to be Christians.

> The courts of the Inquisition were extremely fair compared to their secular counterparts at the time.

> The Inquisition was responsible for less than 100 witch-hunt deaths, and was the first judicial body to denounce the trials in Europe.

> Though torture was commonly used in all the courts of Europe at the time, the Inquisition used torture very infrequently.

> During the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, between 3,000-5,000 people were sentenced to death (about 1 per month).

> The Church executed no one.

https://strangenotions.com/spanish-inquisition/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revision_of_the_Inq...

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: How the Great Truth Dawned

I was really surprised that this article was written by a humanities professor. I understand he's trying to make a point, but the premises in the first paragraphs are indigestible.

> No Westerner would call such a work “literary"

Why? There are plenty of works such as this in western literature.

> Russians revere literature more than anyone else in the world.

Again, I feel this claim is a bit baseless. Let's see why he thinks that:

> When Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina was being serialized, Dostoevsky, in a review of its latest installment, opined that “at last the existence of the Russian people has been justified.” t is hard to imagine Frenchmen or Englishmen, let alone Americans, even supposing that their existence required justification; but if they did, they would surely not point to a novel.

Well, this is the opinion of Dostoevsky, a writer. I'm sure similar hyperbolic comments were made by the french naturalists (Zola about Flaubert... ) or German idealists (about Goethe...)

Then the author proceeds to engage in other baseless generalizations about Russians' attitude to literature compared with other cultures.

I appreciate his insights on Russian literature in general and Solzhenitsyn vision in particular. But I do not understand why he needs to precede his text by such myopic comments.

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Japan's Women Opt Out of Marriage

What I want to discuss is the underlying premise of these articles, that by woman being liberated from the burden of the family, they achieve a sort of independence that leads them to increased happiness. And furthermore, that this trend is nothing but the next step in societal evolution and previous models of organization are not only outdated, but a form of subjugation.

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Japan's Women Opt Out of Marriage

So, let's see if I understand correctly: women did not want to marry but did so out of economic necessity.

Men did not want to marry either, but did so out of societal pressure.

Both Man and Woman did not want to marry but did so nevertheless, due to the structure of the society.

dmaldona | 6 years ago | on: Japan's Women Opt Out of Marriage

These are other articles by the NYT:

* Japan’s Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help From Dads

* In Japan, More Women Fight to Use Their Own Surnames

* Japan Desperately Needs More Day Care Workers. New Mothers Need Not Apply.

* A Princess in a Cage

Seems like NYT has a mission to liberate woman in Japan...

I am really skeptical of this ideology that affirms work and a wage as some sort of spiritual liberation.

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