siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1884180.html




0.

The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

    Somebody, oh, Johnny! Somebody, oh!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

– Sea shanty, presumed Guyanese

Let us appreciate that the only reason – the only reason – I know about what I am about to share with you is because of that whole music history thing of mine. It's not even my history. My main beat is 16th century dance music (± half a century). But dance music is working music, and as such I consider all the forms of work music to be its counsin, and so I have, of an occasion, wandered into the New England Folk Festival's sea-shanty sing. Many people go through life understanding the world around them through the perspective of a philosophical stance, a religious conviction, a grand explanatory theory, fitting the things they encounter into these frameworks; I do not know if I should be embarrased or not, but for me, so often it's just song cues.

So when I saw the word "Essequibo" go by in the web-equivalent of page six of the international news, I was all like, "Oh! I know that word!" recognizing a song cue when I see one. "It's a river. I wonder where it is?"

And I clicked the link.

That was twenty-one months ago.

Ever since, I have been on a different and ever-increasingly diverging timeline from the one just about everyone else is on.

In December of 2023, Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, tried to kick off World War Three.

He hasn't stopped trying. He's had to take breaks to steal elections and deal with some climate catastrophe and things like that. But mostly ever since – arguably since September of 2023 – Maduro has been escalating.

You wouldn't know it from recent media coverage of what the US is doing off the coast of Venezuela. At no point has any news coverage of the US military deployment to that part of the world mentioned anything about the explosive geopolitical context there. A geopolitical context, that when it has been reported on is referred to in term like "a pressure cooker" and "spiraling".

The US government itself has said nothing that alludes to it in any way. The US government has its story and it's sticking to it: this is about drugs.

As you may be aware, the US government is claiming to have sunk three Venezuelan boats using the US military. The first of these sinkings was on September 1st.

To hear the media tell it, the US just up and decided to start summarily executing people on boats in the Caribbean that it feels were drug-runners on Sep 1st.

No mention is made of what happened on Aug 31st.

On August 31, the day before the first US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel, at around 14:00 local time, somebody opened fire on election officials delivering ballot and ballot boxes in the country Venezuela is threatening to invade.

And they did it from the Venezuelan side of the river that is the border between the two countries.

That country is an American ally. And extremely close American ally. An ally that is of enormous importance to the US.

And which is a thirtieth the size of Venezuela by population, and which has an army less than one twentieth as large.

You would be forgiven for not knowing that Venezuela has been threatening to and apparently also materially preparing to invade another country, because while it's a fact that gets reported in the news, it is never reported in the same news as American actions involving or mentioning Venezuela.

Venezuela, which is a close ally of Russia.

You may have heard about how twenty-one months ago, in December of 2023, there was an election in Venezuela which Maduro claimed was a landslide win for him. There was a lot of coverage in English-speaking news about that election and how it was an obvious fraud, and the candidate who won the opposition party's primary wasn't on the ballot, and so on and so forth.

You probably didn't hear that in that very same election, there was a referendum. If you did hear it reported, you might have encountered it being dismissed in the media as a kind of political stunt of Maduro's, to get people to show up to the polls or to energize his base. It couldn't possibly be (the reasoning went) that he meant it. Surely it was just political theater.

The referendum questions put, on Dec 3, 2023, to the voters of Venezuela were about whether or not they supported establishing a new Venezuelan state.

Inside the borders of the country of Guyana.

2023 Dec 4: The Guardian: "Venezuela referendum result: voters back bid to claim sovereignty over large swath of Guyana".

Why?

Eleven billion gallons of light, sweet crude: the highest quality of oil that commands the highest price.

(I can hear all of Gen X breathe, "Oh of course.")

It is under the floor of the Caribbean in an area known as the Stabroek Block.

The Stabroek Block is off the coast of an area known as the Essequibo.

It takes its name from the Essequibo River, which borders it on one side, and it constitutes approximately two-thirds of the land area of the country of Guyana.

Whoever owns the Essequibo owns the Stabroek Block and whoever owns the Stabroek owns those 11B gallons of easily-accessed, high-value oil.


Image from BBC, originally in "Essequibo: Venezuela moves to claim Guyana-controlled region", 2023 Dec 6


As far as almost everyone outside of Venezuela has been concerned, for the last hundred years Guyana has owned the Essequibo.

Venezuela disagrees. Read more [5,760 words] )

This post brought to you by the 219 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

Shooting for 100

Sep. 30th, 2025 07:33 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
But he didn't make it.

I heard today that my stepfather passed away yesterday at age 97. So there's no more need for angst about not being able to see him. There is just lingering sadness that I did not get to see him.

I've sort of already been grieving all this past year so it's not really making me upset that he has now actually passed.

My stepsister was actually pretty decent on the phone about it. She doesn't have funeral arrangements yet, and I'm crossing my fingers that she will in fact let me know what they are in time to buy plane tickets. Maybe I can figure out what funeral home they are using and find out that way.
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Hey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.

Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 114

What country do you currently live in?

What is your age?

12-19
1 (0.9%)

20-29
5 (4.4%)

30-39
18 (15.9%)

40-49
29 (25.7%)

50-59
39 (34.5%)

60-69
14 (12.4%)

70-79
7 (6.2%)

80+
0 (0.0%)

To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?

jducoeur: (Default)
[personal profile] jducoeur

Table of Contents

  • Part 0: Introduction (you're reading it)
  • Lots more to come!

Introduction

I started outlining this series months ago, while I was on sabbatical, but never got around to starting the actual words. I've got a new job now (at OnePass, a refreshingly sensible company providing actually-useful services, which is sadly not the norm at the moment) -- work is extremely busy, but I do need to think about things other than that and politics sometimes, so let's get this going!

All year, I've been mulling the problem of Trust Architectures: how do we share information about "trust" online. As I'll discuss under Use Cases (next time), I think it's getting to be Steam Engine Time to take it seriously. Between the AI Slopocalypse spewing nonsense all over the Web, and the social networks succumbing to Advanced Enshittification, it's getting ever-harder to understand who to trust.

This isn't even remotely a new problem, mind -- it was a pretty old topic when we explored adding this sort of thing to Trenza way back in 2001. But it's rarely been taken really seriously, and most of the better attempts have wound up buried inside proprietary walled gardens that don't necessarily have the human user's best interests at heart.

There appears to be a lot of relatively recent literature on the topic, some of it possibly even good (I'm cautiously intrigued by the OpenRank project). But much of it is obsessively focused on Blockchain, which I'm rather skeptical about (I still consider it to be 90% a solution in search of problems), and most appears to have a lot of assumptions baked in.

So let's step back, and tease this apart. I'm going to intentionally go in a bit naively, so as not to be too biased by everyone else's assumptions, and explore the topic from first principles, winding up with a very high-level sketch of how things might work. Once I have straight what I think are the interesting use cases, requirements, and architectural parameters, we can take a properly critical look at what's already out there.

I expect this to take at least 6-7 installments, likely more like 10 before I'm done -- it's a big, chewy problem with a lot of facets. As I add parts, I'll add them to the Table of Contents at the top of the Dreamwidth version of this post. I'll likely edit some of these posts as we go and folks point out additional nuances; I'll try to be good about crediting folks who point stuff out, so call me on it if you feel like you haven't been acknowledged properly.

This is not fully-baked yet: I'm going to be thinking out loud. That's why this is "towards" -- I'm seeking to make progress here, and we'll see where it winds up. It's possible that we'll find that the One True Trust Architecture already exists, and we should be lobbying for everyone to adopt it. It's also entirely possible that we'll conclude that the problem is insoluble in principle, and give up. (Hopefully not.) The goal is to come to a better shared understanding of the topic, and ideally some actionable ideas about how to deal with the problem.

I hope you'll join in. While I'm going to do a lot of talking over the next couple of months, it's going to be a lot more productive if you chime in with your thoughts and ideas to add to that.

I'm intentionally posting this on Dreamwidth because despite (or maybe because of) its antiquity and old-fashioned UX, it's still the best place for posting and discussing complex, long-form topics, free from the AIs and enshittification consuming most other places.

So I'm planning to post primarily to Dreamwidth, mirror to Medium and LinkedIn since some of the technical crowd mainly knows me there, and link from Mastodon and Bluesky. (But not Facebook, which I've mostly given up on, or Xitter, which I've entirely abandoned.) On platforms that have tagging, I'll be using #TrustArch as the tag for this series.

Comments are welcome at all of those places -- I'm curious to see where I get good conversations -- but the authoritative copy of these posts will be Dreamwidth, and that's the copy that will get edited and updated as this evolves.

That said, a couple of ground rules. I don't want to see comments saying that if it's not 100% perfect, it's not worth trying. (I'm reasonably certain that it's impossible to make this perfect, but I'm moderately confident we could create something helpful.) And I'll be downright scornful of naive claims that we should just leave this for AI to deal with -- while I think it's likely to get quite powerful over the next decade, I'm not at all sanguine that it's going to be trustworthy to that degree any time in the foreseeable future.

But aside from that sort of thing, I'd love to get some serious conversation going. So come along, share your thoughts, and let's tease apart this important problem!

Two Q [writing, DW]

Sep. 26th, 2025 07:17 pm
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
1)

Is there a term for the part of a large non-fiction writing project that comes after the research – when you have a huge pile of sources and quotes and whatnot – and before the actual "writing" part, the part that involves making sure you have all the citations correct for the sources, maybe going over the sources to highlight what passages you will quote verbatim, organizing them (historically by putting things on 3x5 cards and moving them around on a surface), and generally wrangling all the materials you are going to use into shape to be used?

I think this is often just thought of as part of "research", but when I'm doing a resource-dense project, it's not at all negligible. It takes a huge amount of time, and is exceptionally hard on my body. I'd like, if nothing else, to complain about it, and not having a word for it makes that hard.

2)

I don't suppose there's some, perhaps undocumented, way to use Dreamwidth's post-via-email feature with manually set dates? So you email in a journal entry to a specific date in the past? This doesn't appear among the options for post headers in the docs.

I am working on a large geopolitics project where I am trying to construct a two-year long timeline, and it dawns on me one of the easiest ways to do that might be to set up a personal comm on DW and literally post each timeline-entry as a comm entry. But maybe not if I have to go through the web interface, because that would be kind of miserable; I work via email.

How not to be efficient

Sep. 21st, 2025 10:09 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Eat a snack consisting of pretzels and water from a water bottle. Neglect to finish chewing and swallowing before sucking down some water. Have your cheek pulled in between your teeth as you continue chewing the remaining pretzel and masticate your cheek.

Ouch.
Page generated Oct. 2nd, 2025 03:50 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios