Notices by simsa02 (simsa02@mastodon.social), page 6

My "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" has one huge advantage: it's EMP-proofed. While under natural or military EMP your online encyclopaedias will (probably) go dark -- and stay that way as nobody has thought about EMP resistent backups of Wikipedia et al. -- my "Museum" will stay alive & afloat. :-)

The "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" got a new "exhibit" :-)) -- the German "Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe" ("historical basic notions"), one of the major German encyclopaedias in the history of concepts & ideas. I was looking for it for quite some time, in thrift shops & online, but haven't been lucky. Now the family pooled resources & gave me the student edition as a present. Wonderful.

The "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopedias" got a new acquisition :-) : The famous German language Fischer World History (1965-1983, 36 vols), in a licensed edition by a different publisher from the year 2000. The 36 vols edition indeed covers most of the world areas, except Oceania, Australia, New Zealand. Nice! And a real bargain too.

Yay! Got all 23 vols of a famous German art history in a second-hand bookshop. Not directly an exhibit in my "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" proper -- it's not a dictionary or encyclopaedia in the strict sense -- but a treasure nonetheless.

The "Museum of Outdated & Negelcted Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" got another new "exhibit":

W. Marciszewski (ed.), Dictionary of Logic as Applied in the Study of Language: Concepts, Methods, Theories (1981)

In 68 articles & a magnificient index it covers the field in not-too-technical entries. I'm happy to be ablte to finally include it in the collection of reference works. (It's usually very expensive, even in thrift shops, but I found an offer that was pretty affordable.)

Another new exhibit in the "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias":

Rev. F. Kittel, A Kannada-English Dictionary (1894, 12th repr. 2006)

I found it in a public book shelf. :-)

Hurray! The new exhibit of the "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" has arrived: "McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology" (11th ed., 2012, 20 vols). (I had been looking for it for quite some time, got it second-hand)

As my flat gets too small to house the "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" I started putting book shelves on transport rolls so that I can push them aside when needed.

It took me a while, but now ... The Encyclopaedia Britannica (32 vols, 2005) made it as latest acquisiton of the "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictioanries & Encyclopaedias". Near perfect condition! The price has been ridiculously low, which is sad and great at once.

Today the "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" received its latest purchase: The "Dictionary of the Middle Ages" (10 vols., 1980-1999, in German), a splendid encyclopaedia on the Christian, Byzantine, Jewish, Arabic, Irish and Scandinavian Middle Ages. Yay!!

A few weeks back the "Museum of Outdated & Neglected Dictionaries & Encyclopaedias" welcomed its newest arrival, the "Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie" (4 vols, 1980-1996, in German). It's an encyclopaedia that treats its topics from a constructivist point of view. A wonderful set of books, I'm happy to finally have it here.

@es0mhi @simsa04
It's improbable that another "anchor for identification" can be found quickly to open a path for change. Cf. this recent thread of mine: https://gnusocial.net/conversation/6475754#notice-11007325

Sorry for all the barrage of stuff :-)
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@es0mhi @simsa04
PS: Your claim "Built on an absurd narrative it was still very robust and resistant. But in the end it crashed through economic difficulties" seems to me to miss the point I was up to:

The Soviet Union wasn't built on a *narrative* but on the *sacrifices* thereof. It's the sacrifices, the mutual violence, & that things couldn't have been in vain after all what had been endured that made the "narrative" & clinging to the state (psychologically) so compulsory & effective.
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@es0mhi @simsa04
while blaming the West for its misery and waiting for the day of payback. Appeasement in this situation may take off some pressure and consolidate the situation for the moment – which can be useful –, but in the long run invites this further aggression the nation bred in its cocoon of timeless hopelessness. Either way, we'll have to brace for major economic devastations and military confrontations in the whole of Eastern Europe.
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@es0mhi @simsa04
But the price for Russia, the Ukraine, and Europe at large is high. We can only hope and pray that no scuffles occur between Russian and NATO troops. Declining states, in their way down, esp. with a large military force, prove to be the most dangerous ones, in the most dangerous moments of their history. And that's when states like Russia may freeze in a kind of coccon and endure aggressively deprivation, militarism, and the mutual lateral violence of its citizens, all >
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@es0mhi @simsa04
Soviet Union who's collapse seemingly took decades more than its dissolution in 1991, with years of seeiming stabilisation (after Yeltsin), and a fruther slide into oblivion after its attack on Ukraine. That Putin even invaded Ukraine at all is to me a sign that not his grip on Russia but Russia itself is at a point in which it senses forebodingly the writing on the wall and turns to suicidal methods which may, for a short period of time, yield some of the desired results.
6/8

@es0mhi @simsa04
Stay in Ukraine and risk continued guerllia warfare; or leave Ukraine and the Ukrainians taking back their government and their institutions. In the end, I think, Russia can keep a thumb on Ukraine only if it can come up with some means of lasting pressure. Which I don't see yet.

I kind of share your opinion that in the long run we're seeing a cracking Russia and that this, in a sense, is the "beginning of the end" – or rather, to me, the "final breakdown" of the former >
5/8

@es0mhi @simsa04
I was a bit suprised that the Ukrainians put up a such a strong resistance. I feared that the build-up of 190,000 troops and heavy equipment around Ukraine's borders would have a similiar effect as the U.S.'s military concentration in Iraq in 2003. I thought that this massive troop deployment was to "shock and awe" Ukrainian soldiers into a sense of hopelessness and to surrender. This has not been the case (yet). And right now I cannot imagine a proper Russian strategy:
4/8

@es0mhi @simsa04
walls of the Kremlin. Germany in particular faces a shock in realising that most of its recent "Ostpolitik" with its reliance on economic entanglement has come to ashes. But that doesn't mean that politicians will change course, not the Social Democrats (in the end it's their "Ostpolitik" of Willy Brandt), not the Greens (it's their "success" in exiting nuclear energy) not the other, liberal and conservative parties who cherish the markets in the east.
3/8

@es0mhi @simsa04
puts the effectiveness of any major sanctions like SWIFT-decoupling squarely out of reach. It's primarily Germany that undermines any meaningful western sanctions regime. And when the German government repeatedly refused to send weaponry to Ukraine, even forbids countries like Estonia to send weaponry that once have been produced in Germany (while at the same time being the 4rth-largest exporter of weapons in the world), then nothing but laughter echoes from the >
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