I did think of Nestle as well, and another one, Tata. They’re infamous for stealing land belonging to indigenous people in India. In 2006, the state police of the Orissa government shot 12 people, including a child, in a crowd protesting state-sponsored land grabbing. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/asa200012007en.pdf

The most iron-rich part of India, Bastar, is also the poorest, and with the most number of Maoist militias. This is no coincidence. Tribal people make up only 9% of the country’s population, but more than 40% of the land used to build ‘development’ projects belonged originally to them. The most mineral rich areas in India, and the world, are some of the poorest because the industries are not publicly owned.

To be honest, I can think of much, much worse. Union Carbide, Adani, Aveo, which was funding a drug epidemic in Nigeria, they’re all bad. There’s no good capitalist.

👍

Nice guess, but no.

Edit: जर्मन आणि मराठी? मी कर्नाटका पासून आहे, त्यामुळे म्हाला मराठी (मातृभाषा) आणि कन्नडा येते. जर्मनी मध्ये फॅमिली आहे का? NRI?

Mongolian is similar to Sanskrit, and other Indo-Aryan languages: ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ १०

Esperanto is still a thing? I’m surprised.

Now that you mention it, sure, I think counting in Sanskrit would be somewhat amusing. It’s such a serious, proper language. I don’t ever use it in conversation, except for some fun proverbs.

Four. English, Hindi, Marathi (native) and Kannada. Sanskrit as well, but it’s a dead language, and I can’t speak Sanskrit because the grammar is extremely complicated. Had it in school for 3 years. So 5, if you’re counting Sanskrit.

I generally count in English, unless I am using another language with my friends (excluding Sanskrit).

Apart from some political communities I like, Science Memes is nice. !science_memes@mander.xyz.

I would have liked !physics@mander.xyz if it was more active :(, I hope it gains traction later.

entoptic blue field phenomenon

Thank you. You’ve solved a mystery that bugged me since forever lol. Yay, I am not crazy. I legit thought there was something wrong with my eyesight all these years, or that they were just weird floaters. Thank you so much, friend. Relate hard to the sound stuff as well, it’s nice to know it happens to other people al well.

Understandable. .world is generally Eurocentric or US-centric. I stay away from most political comms there for my own sanity.

Lucky you. I live in southern Sanghiland, Karnataka.

Dude, I know. I am an Indian too, and a socialist. Getty and Thurston definitely aren’t cold war propagandists. It is Robert Conquest, Anne Applebaum and more recently, Timothy Snyder who portray the famine as an intentional genocide done by evil Soviets. Getty and Thurston, especially Thurston was actually notorious for taking a more pro-Soviet stance. Wheatcroft and Davies did important work showing that the famine was caused by a combination of bad harvest and poor planning. As far as I am aware, the popular genocide/deliberate starvation line is not the historical consensus and has not been for some time after the opening of Soviet archives. Even liberal historians like Fitzpatrick and Krotkin debunk the many capitalist lies about the famine. People discussing it online generally have a very strange assortment of sources - from Snyder’s terrible book ‘Bloodlands’ to obsolete books like Tottle’s ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism’ which was written before the opening of Soviet archives. r/AskHistorians is a good source for finding both Marxist and liberal sources, and it generally avoids neoconservatives like Conquest.

I am from the South too but am Marathi.

Yep.

.world really isn’t very tolerant of certain views. They are very quick to dismiss people as Russian shills/bots for instance. I disagree with this instance’s views of China and the Russo-Ukraine war, and am not an ML (though I do kind of lean Leninist) and haven’t seen much bad faith name calling. It certainly is prevalent in leftist spaces (CIA bot, NAFO shill, etc) but this place is surprisingly decent.

Thurston and J Arch Getty have good books on Stalin. They’re both pretty well respected historians, so you can read stuff about the famine from their books. It’s not a pretty picture. Also, which part of India, if you don’t mind?

Narcissus poeticus, or poet’s daffodils are called ‘nargis’ (nuh-ruh-giiis) in a a number of languages. The root word is Persian. It is often used in poetry as a metaphor for a person’s eyes (generally your girlfriend) as it is supposed to be ‘eye shaped’. There is, of course, the Greek myth which is often alluded to in English literature. It’s also a pretty flower.