farss

The "rules-based international order" was a fiction popularized by US policy makers who wanted to quietly substitute it for international law, so they could violate said laws, while still vaguely gesturing at moral authority.

I'm not sure that per capita is a very useful rubric to measure over time. Like I'm not saying there's no relation to population size, if you compare a tiny country to a large one, but it's not clear to me that there's a strong relationship - why a government would be expected to lock up 5% more journalists if the population grew by 5%. Or why if a country of 30 million jailed 100 journalists it should be necessarily be considered less repressive than if a country of 40 million jailed 100.

Some benefited handsomely. Most others, not so much.

The military jet was just a stunt, to reinforce the false pretext that there was a bomb aboard. There was no reported military aggression against the plane, and IIRC, the RyanAir pilot said he didn't see it as a threat, but as a form of routine emergency assistance. The plane may have already started to turn toward Minsk simply because ATC asked them to.

And keep in mind, the U.S. believed Morales may have granted Snowden asylum at that time, and was absolutely willing to flout international law and norms on asylum, on top of the norm for safe unimpeded transit for sovereign leaders. And all that based on mere rumor.

You can say in clarity of retrospect that Morales was free to return to Moscow, but that is a bit of a long flight back, and they had no idea what was happening at the time, or if other countries would also mysteriously deny them transit.

None of this is to take away from an absolutely outrageous incident, but I don't see how the two are so categorically different. Both are shocking abuses of international law and norms to shut down dissent and free and adversarial press. It's important to condemn Belarus without letting Western/American governments play so innocent.

I haven't seen evidence that it was merely a stunt. But in any case, the sovereign head of state was effectively detained for 12 hours, based on lies and coercion. That itself is outrageous. Belarus used a fighter jet pilot to deliver the lie about a bomb threat and convince the pilot to land, while U.S. lied to Western European governments through diplomatic channels about who was on the Bolivian plane. Both cases are a serious breach of international norms and rules in order to conduct rendition of a political criminal.

The methods used are somewhat apples to oranges, but they're comparable in that both the United States and Belarus used pretty brazen measures to go after the political crime of unwanted journalism. Faking a bomb threat and intercepting a civilian plane is more serious in a way; blocking off a sovereign leader's path en route & then boarding his plane is arguably more serious in another.

The Morales incident wasn't simply one country choosing to deny airspace. It was a hegemonic superpower using it's leverage to create a wall of un-passable countries, and then having the plane boarded and searched before it was allowed to take off again. Belarus's version is a weapon of the weak to the same or very similar end.

Trouser cuffs do have a function. The extra weight helps the cloth drape better.

All I really want is Fireworks. Never found a true replacement for it.

True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.

I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.

I believe they might go after the publisher in this case, and that Snowden already got a good advance they presumably can't get to while he's in Russia.

> "(and safe)"

Want to make sure this part of the comment is also highlighted because big homeless shelters can be really difficult, scary, and even dangerous places, even when there are beds available, and so unhoused people have to wrestle with whether it's safer/more desirable to sleep outside rather than deal with all that. And that's not to mention all the cumbersome rules and religious proselytizing they might have to deal with in shelters. Warehousing people is not a good option.