hymnoptera

त्वम् ! त्वम्?

[Gavin Shoebridge @KiwiEV]

Just found out I need to take the Leaflet to Auckland for a work trip. It's a 200 km drive which means stopping for a pie and a charge. Trips like this mean I've put 10,000 km on this old girl in just over four months! Anyway, let's see where we end up. 🤔

[jimmah @jamesdouma]

Robotaxi is going to save a lot of lives. It's going to save a lot of money, and avoid a lot of waste. It's going to make the air noticeably cleaner. And it's going to improve freedom of movement for millions of people.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The Tesla that Jessica just bought cost $48k and has a range of about 350 miles. The one she bought in 2015 cost $135k, adjusted for inflation, and had a range of 270 miles. People who think they dislike capitalism don't know how good they have it.

[hymnoptera @hymnoptera]

@Traveler2000AD @flo He is finnish by nationality but swede by language.

[گمنام @nzb_05]

No mainstream media is talking about the shit that happened in Hangu.
Asim Munir’s way of fighting terrorism is that it shouldn’t be aired on any news channel.
No media coverage —> no terrorism. 🤩

[Praveen Swami @praveenswami]

We should indeed carefully listen to Kashmiris—and everyone else—especially when we disagree with them. But when an article by a credentialed academic comes with as many errors of fact as this, it makes you wonder if people who say we shouldn’t listen to them might have a point.

[Rangilo Rajasthan @InfraholicR]

These two brothers have done more coverage of BJP state government projects than the actual BJP it cell Amit Malviya.

show your support to both guys

Aman Singh Naruka
Dev Chauhan (brothers Enfield)

[hymnoptera @hymnoptera]

@Harv7n @ocelotl88_ बहवो जानन्ति बहवश्च वदन्ति बहवोऽवगच्छन्ति संस्कृतं देवानां गिरम्।

[Amul Sanskrit @amulsanskrit]

वृथा दानं समर्थस्य वृथा दीपो दिवापि च ॥
Charity to one who is already capable, and a lamp lit in daylight, are both in vain.

[Markandey Katju @mkatju]

I have often criticized the Cockroach Janta Party & its movement. But I have always done that politely giving my reasons.
In return most CJP members&supporters responded to my criticism by hurling filthy abuses, vilification, & invectives at me ( like abuse of mother&sister ), on the social media, which I had to delete.
I dont mind polite criticism. I have an open mind & can change my views if someone coolly&politely points out my error.
But most of today's youth ( like the cockroaches at Jantar Mantar ) believe that to win an argument one must hurl filthy abuses, profanity & vituperation, instead of presenting cool, rational arguments.
And like the children who followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin & were drowned, they are so gullible that they can be taken for a ride by any charlatan, fraud, or deceiver, who may take them to their doom.

[Vikas Saraswat @VikasSaraswat]

The 21 figure is a figure quoted by CJP. The only credible newspaper report on numbers is by Hindustan Times which puts the number of suicides in the intermittent period at 11. However a perusal of these 11 cases shows there are multiple reasons for these suicides. In few cases it was XII Std results. In 2 cases repeated failure to qualify and in most cases the notes left clearly point towards parental pressure. And no education minister makes money from paper leaks. It's downright stupid to imagine that a Minister will fall for such pittance of an amount. In the NEET case, it was Govt itself which took cognizance of paper leak within a week. No political party had taken up the matter till then. A re-exam was quickly ordered and results were declared very much in time. Demand answers for the overall corrosion in education from Pradhan but NEET is more of a political outrage. Protesters themselves know it and that is why they are raking up a lot of unrelated issues.

[Rahul Roushan @rahulroushan]

State has to remind that in a democracy, the monopoly on violence lies with itself. So it now, before this disease spreads far

[Rahul Roushan @rahulroushan]

An ass exploiting other kids, wishing that they die from police bullets so that he can live his wet dreams of revolution, is accusing others of exploiting one kid.

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

Mesopotamia was never the cradle of civilisation. India was.

I spent forty years in international shipping, not academia. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I had no orthodoxy to defend. I followed the evidence, and it kept arriving in the same place: the Indian subcontinent.

Nineteenth century archaeologists dug in Mesopotamia because the climate preserved artefacts, the biblical sources pointed them there, and the Ottomans allowed the excavations. That is the entire basis for the myth of Mesopotamia as "the cradle of civilisation."

Nobody applied the same rigour to India. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. By then the narrative had already hardened.

What was actually there was the largest civilisation of the ancient world. Three hundred cities. Fifty thousand people in each, by 2600 BC. Two thirds of them stood on the banks of the Sarasvati, the central and greatest of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda, flowing down from the Himalayas before the river vanished entirely by 1900 BC. The Vedic kings claimed territory stretching "sea to sea," from Afghanistan to Maharashtra, some 1.5 million square miles, against Egypt's 13,000. A dock at Lothal built to handle thirty ships of sixty tons, unmatched in Europe for four thousand years. When it was first excavated, it was recorded as a bathing pool.

When the scale became impossible to dismiss, the theory was not corrected. It was replaced with a story of pale-skinned nomads from the steppe who supposedly arrived around 1500 BC and brought civilisation with them. There is no evidence. The chronology doesn't work. The Vedas describe no invasion.

In 2019 a Harvard-led genetic study revived the claim, and the press reported it as confirmation. It was not. The same study found the builders of these cities were indigenous. The Sarasvati river that the Rig Veda described had already dried up before these newcomers arrived. What the study also found is that a small group of men, arriving after the Sarasvati had already dried up, interbred with the existing population and left a genetic signature. That is all.

So, where they chose to dig was mostly an accident of climate and access. The Aryan invasion theory was constructed because an Indian civilisation that owed nothing to Caucasians was a fact the late nineteenth century could not accommodate.

Link to full Substack essay with sources in the comments below.

[Amit Schandillia @Schandillia]

[HERO]
1/18
Since much is being talked about heroes these days, especially Greek, thought I’d do a quick, quick primer on the topic. For starters, we say Greek hero simply because the concept is quite literally Greek. Just not in the way we now think.

[Vikas Saraswat @VikasSaraswat]

Uttarakhand has seen the second highest decadal shift in its demographics in the first decade of this century, second only to Assam. Sorry to say there isn’t much entrepreneurial spirit on display in the state apart from opening of Home-stays, Trekking services and other Tourism related activities. The state suffers high intensity distress migration. Around 4000 villages have become Bhootia Gaon or Ghost villages. Around 10% of the population of Pauri, Tehri and Almora has out migrated. There is a virtual exodus happening from the hills. So whatever development comes helps the economy in the only entrepreneurship state knows. It keeps the revenue inflow in whatever little way it can. It keeps at least some people in the hills somehow. And yet there is a crowd which shrieks its lungs out “We do not want development.”, “Modi is destroying the hills”. There is so much of slow but steady encroachment by private players all through the state but nobody says a word. The only trees which bother their conscience are the ones which have to be cut for developmental work.

[taslima nasreen @taslimanasreen]

I have been invited to Kolkata by an organisation called Secular Mission. The organisation is headed by a progressive Muslim, Osman Gani Mallik.

Is the BJP taking me to Kolkata? No.

Is the West Bengal government taking me there? No.

The elected government of West Bengal is only arranging my security. Whenever I visit any state, whichever political party is in power there arranges my security. This is a normal administrative responsibility.

Yet some Left leaders in West Bengal are blaming me for going to Kolkata. They were the ones who drove me out of West Bengal; now, according to them, merely setting foot in the state means that I am a Hindutva supporter, that I belong to the BJP and the RSS.

I have visited Kerala many times at the invitation of the CPI(M) government. The Left leaders there welcomed me, honoured me and arranged Z-plus security for me. Did these Left leaders in Kolkata then abuse me by calling me a “Leftist,” or did they shower me with kisses of approval? They conveniently kept their eyes shut then. Do their eyes ever truly open when it comes to me?

Why are they spreading these lies about my visit to Kolkata? I am returning after 18 years, 8 months and 10 days, and only for two days—yet even that is enough to make them burn with resentment.

The Left Front government drove me out of Kolkata. The Trinamool government that followed did not allow me to enter West Bengal either. Not only that, it stopped the television broadcast of a long-running serial written by me and cancelled my book launch. Did Bengal’s so-called progressives utter a single word in defence of freedom of expression then? No, they did not.

The truth is that many Left leaders cannot tolerate those of us who want to bring Muslim society out of darkness and into the light; who want Muslims to be educated and scientifically minded; who want to free them from religious fanaticism, ignorance and barbarism; who demand equal rights for women and human rights for all; and who want discriminatory Islamic laws to be replaced by modern laws based on equality.

They want Muslim society to remain trapped in the misogynistic, fanatical and intolerant world of fourteen hundred years ago. They regard those who seek reform within Muslim society as enemies. And we all know that they have no hesitation in appeasing Islamic fundamentalists.

That is why my return to West Bengal has provoked so much anger, resentment and false propaganda from them.

Will these Leftists ever learn to be human? How much longer will they hide behind the mask of progressivism while speaking the language of jihadists?

I also see some self-styled Left intellectuals spewing venom against me. Echoing Bangladeshi jihadists, they claim that I do not know how to write literature and that my books are third-rate. By any means possible, they must find something—anything—to hold against me.

Let us assume that they are right: I am not a good writer, and all my books are third-rate. Does that justify putting a price on my head? Does it justify driving me out of my country and banishing me from Bengal altogether? The literary merit of a writer’s work will be judged by readers and by time. But whether the writing is excellent or poor, threatening to kill the writer or forcing the writer into exile can never be acceptable in any civilised society.

Free thought, open-mindedness and tolerance—these self-styled Left intellectuals do not allow any of them to come anywhere near them. My only real fault is this: they believe Islam is a religion of peace; I do not. They cannot accept that the right to criticise Islam is part of freedom of expression. All their liberalism ends at the gates of Islam.

[Rahul Raj @x_rahulraj]

Love it or hate it, one major reason many tech entrepreneurs are willing to take bold risks today is the impetus provided by the Modi government. Even today, a large section of Indian businesses operates with a trading mindset. Many large business houses invest in R&D more for optics than for genuine innovation.

In such a scenario, the greatest hope lies in technocrats, college graduates, engineers building and leading businesses. That has become more feasible because the Modi government shifted some of the underlying incentives and policy gears.