Notices by Ramin Honary (ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org)

@Infoseepage you’re right, and had they done that, we would be seeing very different events unfolding right now I think.

But on the other hand, it does show Iran to be the more honest actor here. It doesn’t matter to English-speaking countries if Iran is honest or not, but it matters to countries like Pakistan, China, Russia, and even Japan. Iran has proved to them, their allies, to be a trustworthy partner, and in a longer game, that was probably a wise move.

Pakistani journalist F.M. Shakil has written an excellent article published at The Cradle on recent developments between Iran and it’s neighbor Pakistan. This gives me some hope that what appears to be the opening to World War 3 may not actually devolve into such a world-wide conflagration. If Iran is not standing alone, and is backed by nuclear-armed powers in the region, it could deter the US from foolishly trying to escalate the conflict.

From my point of view, after Trump reneging on the US diplomatic agreement JCPOA (“Iran Nuclear Deal”) that was organized by Obama, and otherwise behaving extremely erratically in the first 4 months of his second term in office, would any rational actor in the role of state leadership ever trust any diplomatic negotiation with the US ever again?

Furthermore, after hearing many grand Biblical proclamations from various Neo-Conservative and Christian Zionists of the Trump regime, such as Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, is it crazy for the leadership of a majority-Muslim nation to see this attack on Iran as motivated not only by purely cynical greed for control over more crude oil, but also by a zealous and completely irrational White Supremacist ideology? Are the Iranian regime the only regressive religious zealot players in this game?

Back to F.M. Shakil’s article, if my point of view was not obvious to you, it might seem surprising that Pakistan would choose to back Iran in this conflict, especially after the two countries were recently engaged in drone warfare skirmishes. Quoting the article:

“It was only early last year that Iran launched missile and drone strikes into Pakistan’s Balochistan region on 16 January, targeting extremist militant group Jaish al-Adl positions. Pakistan retaliated two days later on 18 January, conducting air and missile strikes into Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province in an operation dubbed Marg Bar Sarmachar. The tit-for-tat was remarkably friendly in the final analysis, and appears to have settled some critical border cooperation issues between the two states.

“The fact that these former adversaries – who had just engaged in direct military exchanges – have now adopted “resolute solidarity” is nothing short of breathtaking.”

But then Shakil presents the hard evidence — the US and Israel have already tipped their hands here:

“Tel Aviv’s recent strikes on Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure mark a new phase in a decades-long western strategy aimed at dismantling Muslim powers resistant to colonial domination. Iraq, Syria, Libya – all were destabilized under similar pretexts. The 2001 plot, conceived by the US, its European allies, and Israel, has entered its second phase, targeting Iran initially and Pakistan subsequently. In a 2011 interview with Channel 2, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid bare the logic: Iran and Pakistan are the primary targets of this containment strategy, he stated blankly. “These radical regimes … pose a significant threat,” he said, stressing the need to prevent them from acquiring nuclear capability.”

In short, it is no secret: after Iran is done, Pakistan is next.

Though Pakistan has indicated they are still open to negotiation with the US, it would be crazy for them not to back Iran in this conflict. Then we will see how a nuclear-capable power supporting Iran changes the balance of power in the region. I hope it prevents open war between Iran and the US.

One thing we have seen repeatedly over the past 50 years is that the US has been reluctant to act with belligerence toward any nuclear-capable nation, hence why North Korea is hell-bent on perfecting their ICBM program. Conversely, Libya unwisely agreed to disarm in 2004, a mere seven years later the Gaddafi government was deposed in 2011 by a NATO-backed rebellion (and Hillary Clinton mocked the Libyans for it during her 2015 presidential campaign). And if you do not have nukes (like Iran), the US will claim you do anyway and and use that as justification to start a war against your country. Once again, insane US foreign policy has but one thing to teach leaders of the world’s various nations: if you want to protect yourself from US settler-colonial conquest, acquire nuclear weapons.

#Politics #IranIsrael #War #WorldWar3 #US #Israel #Iran #Pakistan #Diplomacy #Libya #Syria #Iraq #NorthKorea #JCPOA #NuclearWeapons #NuclearDeal #Trump #Netanyahu #SettlerColonialism #WhiteSupremacy #Zionism

A few different journalists I have been reading have now mentioned a 2009 report from the Brookings Institute called Which Path to Persia. People who have read it note that there are strategies discussed in the report for getting the US/European public to support a war with Iran. One of the possible “paths” include starting a war between Iran and Israel and then reluctantly coming to Israel’s assistance. So far, the strategy laid out in this report seems to have been followed quite closely, assuming this is in fact the strategy that the US is pursuing.

The mainstream media also is publishing headlines that appear to be carefully crafted according to the strategy of the “Which Path to Persia” report: using the passive voice such as “America may be pulled in to conflict”, never mentioning that Iran’s attacks on Israel are retaliatory, calling Israel’s strikes “pre-emptive” (which is an outright lie), and so on.

One person reporting on this is Thomas Karat, who published this 8.5 minute video explaining clearly why he thinks the US is not “being pulled in,” but driving this war as part of a much larger, decades-long strategy that began after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks to control all oil resources in the middle east. He makes a good point, it is worth considering.

• Karat’s blog: https://karat.substack.com/about

#politics #MiddleEast #Iran #Israel #war #WorldWar3 #IranIsrael #Trump #Netanyahu #Hamas #FreePalestine #NoKings

@Infoseepage they may just re-institute the draft.

@hellomiakoda so many of these war games like “Call of Duty” are specifically designed for training kids to be soldiers. A game like yours would be great to counteract those war games, and train kids to be anarchists instead.

@macesari resolution to stop the genocide right now, requires unanimous decision. All in favor: everyone else. All opposed: United States. Resolution defeated.

The US votes in favor of genocide every single time. Our “great” nation is morally worse than Nazi Germany.

#politics #uspol #gaza #genocide #palestine

@hellomiakoda yeah, I had some nice Bose headphones that I paid over $100 for, and the pads of the earmuffs started getting flaky after a few years, and came completely unglued after a few years after that. I know they are supposed to be expendable and easily replaced, but still, it is a pain in the ass to have to order new ones and replace them every 2-3 years, I won’t do it.

This took me three months (a month longer than I had hoped), but I finally have merged it into the main branch!

This patch rewrites the Emacs Lisp lexer and parser in Scheme using Scheme code that is 100% compliant with the #R7RS standard, so it should now work across all compliant Scheme implementations. Previously the old parser relied on #Guile -specific regular expressions.

This patch also implements a new feature where a stack trace is printed when an error occurs. This of course makes debugging much, much easier. Previously the old parser did not keep track of where code evaluation was happening, it simply produced lists without source location information. The new parser constructs an abstract syntax tree (AST) and source locations are attached to the branches of the tree which can be used in error reporting and stack traces.

Next I will make whatever minor tweaks might be necessary to get my Emacs Lisp interpreter run on other Scheme implementations, in particular MIT Scheme, Gambit, Stklos, and Gauche. I would also like to try to get it running on Chicken and Chez, although these are going to be a bit more tricky.

Then I will continue with the task of implementing a new declarative GUI library.

#tech #software #FOSS #FunctionalProgramming #Lisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #EmacsLisp #Emacs #Schemacs #GuileScheme

@aral thanks for the explanation!

“A web server and framework [to] make web sites and apps” makes perfect sense to me. I humbly recommend you include those words toward the top of the home page.

By the way, I am enjoying the humor in the FAQs!

@screwtape

I didn’t even realise Kitten was fundamentally an expert system. https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#install

@screwtape I have read “Reference” document of the kitten project and am still not really sure what it is — something to do web sites, it seems.

It has a parser and a command to “build” things, so I guess it is sort of like PHP or Django? Or maybe sort-of like Wordpress or Drupal?

@aral

@hellomiakoda take one every six hours and hope for the best?

Regardless of PewDiePie’s personal #politics (which clearly, at the very least are problematic), it is fairly well known by anyone who has been following him for any number of years that the vast majority of his fan base are enthusiastic fascists.

Now #PewDiePie , who’s content centers around PC gaming and Windows, has decided to switch to #Linux and published a video encouraging his followers to do the same. This means a very large number of his #fascist fan base is going to be switching to Linux.

Now many Linux communities are going to be forced to more explicitly choose their politics. Like the parable of the Nazi bar, if the community remains politically neutral, it will become fascist in short order.

A few things to be wary of:

• People asking you not to be “too political” or to “focus on the technology, not the politics” is a classic and highly effective fascist ruse to get moderators to lighten up on fascist elements posting in their community.
• People complaining about free speech rights. The #Internet and the #Fediverse is already a domain where people can speak freely about their politics by running their own server and building their own community with few to no government constraints. You don’t need to compromise on whether fascists have the right to free speech in your community.
• Arguments over your code of conduct (CC) and “safe spaces.” Keep them up-to-date. Research other people’s CCs, learn about the history of why these CCs came to be, learn about what the function of each clause of the code is included and phrased the way it is. These were usually designed to make explicit the fact that a community wants to be a safe space where underprivileged people can feel comfortable expressing themselves, and it is very easy to make people afraid to express themselves. Fascists understand these CCs and the concept of “safe spaces” were explicitly designed to exclude them, and often attack these ideas.

Listen at: https://archives.anonradio.net/202504020000_screwtape.mp3

This week we will talk about the Unix Philosophy and how it compares and contrasts with whatever one might call the “Emacs Philosophy.”

The impetus for the discussion is a series of blog posts by @ramin_hal9001 called “Emacs fulfills the UNIX Philosophy”:

• The original introductory blog post
• The show notes

…as well as a fascinating discussion that took place over this past week on ActivityPub on the topic of the Unix philosophy and history of Lisp on Unix in which some very knowledgeable people have contributed anecdotes and facts.

#technology #programming #SoftwareEngineering #RetroComputing #lisp #r7rs #SchemeLang #UnixPhilosophy

#senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems

@screwtape I wish there was a port of CLIM for Scheme that I could use for my Emacs clone, but I don’t know if any of the Scheme implementations of the Meta Object Protocol (MOP) are comprehensive enough to support CLIM. The same is true of the Emacs MOP, which is some combination of cl-lib and EIEIO, I don’t think you could implement CLIM with just that.

Also, every Scheme MOP is platform-specific. GOOPS is only for Guile, COOPS is only for Chicken, SOS Is only for MIT Scheme.

The Racket GUI library is quite good, but it relies too heavily on Racket’s macro system to make it very portable to other Schemes.

For myself, I was thinking of rewriting a lightweight JavaScript React-like framework called Van.js to Scheme and use it to implement a higher-level interface around an existing GUI framework like Gtk. The nice thing about Gtk is that the FFI bindings are automated throught GObject Introspection, and it has been ported to all major operating systems.

But I think a better long-term solution for my Emacs clone would just be to implement the full MOP and then CLIM in Scheme.

@slgr

I’m planning to put scheme as an optional runtime in ecl

@jackdaniel implementing Scheme in Common Lisp sounds like a really cool idea! Will it comply with the R7RS standard? If it does, then I can easily port my Emacs clone to ECL Scheme.

One goal of my project is portability across multiple Scheme implementations. The problem with the GUI is that I need a high-level interface written in Scheme that makes calls to lower-level platform-specific GUI library calls. If I had a MOP implementation that was written in fully-standards-compilant R7RS Scheme and CLIM implemented on top of that, it would work on other platforms that did not provide a MOP or CLIM. When porting it to ECL, I could just leave-out these high-level libraries and allow programmers to use the underlying ECL CLIM libraries directly.

@screwtape @slgr

early Lisp on UNIX: Franz Lisp (80s).

@symbolics I suspected that Franz may have been ported to Unix eraly-on, but I had a hard time finding evidence of it, so thanks for confirming that!

Most people consider Stallman’s Emacs to be the origin of Emacs back in 1976-ish based on the TECO editor, even though the Emacs of that era would probably be unrecognizable to us nowadays. Greenberg wrote Emacs in MacLisp in 1978, and so I think that was the first Emacs Lisp, but this was running on ITS, not Unix.

I understand that Emacs already had quite a following by the time Gosling Emacs was officially released in 1984, and Stallman’s GNU Emacs v15 released in 1985 saw wide-spread distribution as a result.

• https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory

So I guess Franz was indeed probably the first Lisp to run on Unix.

@AmenZwa @masso @screwtape @sacha

@amszmidt well, I believe the story. Zenie said, she was working on a Xerox Alto System 9, which was a machine that would be placed in the office, not a data center, and could connect several Wyse terminals to it, each one at an individual’s desk.

@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha

We always made fun of emacs because you could often hear the disks swapping.

@Zenie I guess “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swaping” was not just an idle slander, so it really did have to do lots of swapping.

And yes, if you really believe in the “each tool does one thing and does it well” ethos, then why not have all of your tools written in Lisp and work together nicely in a consistent environment?

Thanks for telling us your story!

@amszmidt @bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha

Besides, I don’t want my Emacs to do “one thing” (even if it did that one thing very, very well), because I don’t want to do just one thing

@sacha yes indeed. My article is critical of the UNIX Philosophy, not supportive of it. I prefer not tools that “do one thing and do it well,” I prefer tools that are simple, orthogonal, and composable, i.e. “functions” in a functional programming environment. So any environment (such as Emacs) that allows me to compose these tools together easily is a computing environment I would prefer to use.

@bshankar @amoroso @screwtape

@firebreathingduck @sacha it is funny to me that we have Emacs “distros” like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs that give you Vim bindings, but not really anything yet for VS Code bindings. That would lower the barrier to entry.