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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 19, 2024, 05:59:30 PM »

I would agree we have historically been fairly oppressive to other countries which we ruled - as we've established many have had to go to war or rebel to get rid of us. But in general the government has let us get on with our lives without undue interference.

There is no difference between those two things in the case of Ireland. The Irish were part of "us" because Ireland was a part of the UK. You cannot simultaneously agree to the Irish having been oppressed and say that the citizens of the UK were never oppressed.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 18, 2024, 08:55:24 PM »

I don't think how we behaved as a nation a century ago is that relevant to how we behave today.

I'm not arguing that it is. This is a response to your claim that:

Neither the US or UK has ever had a particularly oppressive government

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 18, 2024, 07:19:30 PM »

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Exactly what is considered a country is not well defined.

It's perfectly well defined when you are talking about the borders of the UK, which included the entire island of Ireland between 1801 and 1922. We are not in the midst of a philosophical debate about what it means to be a country. If you want to deny that Ireland was part of the UK before 1922, then you must also argue that Northern Ireland is not currently part of the UK, since at no point in history did Northern Ireland join the UK separately from the rest of Ireland.

I don’t think that’s quite the same issue as the day to day freedoms British citizens enjoy though.

We are literally talking about literal British citizens living in the literal UK who started a literal war to escape. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make it.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 18, 2024, 01:25:51 PM »

Right. Not entirely sure how that’s connected to what I’m saying. We have behaved poorly historically towards other countries, no dispute there.

Ireland was not another country until after the Irish War of Independence. That's what "Independence" in "War of Independence" means.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 18, 2024, 12:48:32 PM »

Which war are you referring to?

The Irish War of Independence.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 18, 2024, 12:38:47 PM »

Neither the US or UK has ever had a particularly oppressive government

Are you aware that a large part of the UK fought a war of independence against their oppressors barely a century ago?

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 17, 2024, 01:59:58 AM »

This thread began with a fundamentally correct premise, which its own proponents then proceeded to systematically demolish by basing their argument on a comparison with an even worse country. This is a remarkable state of affairs because now all sides of the argument are equally inane. To get back to the topic: the UK is not okay.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Wiki Spam

« on: March 24, 2024, 03:16:00 PM »

Makes sense. If both Tom and I ended up in a similar scenario (noticed vandalism, made edits, and those edits turned into more vandalism), it almost makes me wonder if someone made changes to our MediaWiki code. I'll poke around a little this evening.

I didn't see any obviously suspicious changes when I diffed a vanilla MediaWiki with our current code, but that didn't cover all the extensions we've added, so there's a chance there's something somewhere in there.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Wiki Spam

« on: March 24, 2024, 02:20:15 PM »

I tried upgrading MediaWiki to 1.41.0, and after manually cleaning up a bunch of duplicate database records and upgrading some extensions, I found our theme calls deprecated functions and I don't know to what extent it's been customised. I've already given up half my afternoon that I was supposed to spend studying and I'm unlikely to have any more time to waste on this until sometime in mid-April. For now it's back on the old version with edits still disabled.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Wiki Spam

« on: March 24, 2024, 01:24:05 PM »

Are you certain about that? I manually reverted the vandalism, but I saw no evidence of my account making any malicious edits.

When I looked at the change your account made, the diff just changed the vandalism to different vandalism. It's now gone, of course, since I restored an old backup.

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that just reverting the database is likely not to be very effective on MediaWiki. It seems more likely to me that some of the vandalism persisted in its cache, and that making an edit restored it.

The Southern Hemisphere page wasn't listed in Tom's original list of vandalised pages, so it's not at all clear whether there was any original vandalism to persist in the cache. To be on the safe side, I've restarted memcached (I already restarted php when I restored the database before), so now there is no cache from before the database restore.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Wiki Spam

« on: March 24, 2024, 01:13:33 AM »

Something funny seems to still be going on.

Agreed. I suspect a vulnerability in MediaWiki allowing someone to impersonate users, since the page you linked was defiled by your and Pete's accounts. I don't have time to investigate properly right now, so I've disabled POST requests in the web server configuration and restored the same backup again. This means that nobody will be able to log in or edit pages until this is properly dealt with, which will probably involve upgrading to the latest version of MediaWiki.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Wiki Spam

« on: March 20, 2024, 03:12:07 PM »

Thanks, I've restored a database backup from before these pages were created and deleted the user account that created them. Other recent changes since 3 March will also be gone, if there are any, but we can restore those as needed.

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: 8values

« on: March 12, 2024, 02:31:30 AM »

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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Political compass

« on: March 12, 2024, 02:21:44 AM »

I've changed a bit.

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Status Notices / Re: Scheduled maintenance, 2023-07-08

« on: July 08, 2023, 10:28:20 AM »

Maintenance complete (somewhat later than expected). There are some remaining issues to be addressed, but I will schedule a separate maintenance window for those.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Why was my thread in Angry Ranting locked?

« on: July 06, 2023, 12:41:09 PM »

The title did not make clear that I was looking for how FEers answered that question but the post did so.  I thought it was a pretty ordinary question.

Yet you posted it in Angry Ranting, a forum dedicated to not getting answers to questions, for which reason the rules are relaxed. Circumventing the rules by inappropriately posting in forums where there are fewer of them is not okay.

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Status Notices / Scheduled maintenance, 2023-07-08

« on: July 05, 2023, 12:08:45 AM »

The homepage, forum and wiki will be going offline for up to 2 hours on 2023-07-08 between 08:00 and 10:00 UTC.

In your local time (if you are logged in and have your time offset correctly configured), this is
July 08, 2023, 08:00:00 AM to July 08, 2023, 10:00:00 AM.


The server will be upgraded to a new stable release of its operating system. This introduces the risk that problems will arise afterwards. If you notice any, please create a thread in Suggestions & Concerns so that we can deal with it. Thank you.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Can't report PM

« on: May 29, 2023, 01:25:49 AM »

You might want to consider adding a reporting function in PMs.

Fair point, but in the meantime, you can add users to your ignore list if you don't want to receive PMs from them. I understand that this doesn't solve the core problem.

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Arts & Entertainment / Re: Eurovision

« on: May 23, 2023, 04:43:02 PM »

Exactly. I'm glad we agree

That was my point all along. I wanted to understand why you had made a claim about which you had no information that was irrelevant in the first place.

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Arts & Entertainment / Re: Eurovision

« on: May 23, 2023, 04:35:34 PM »

He neglects to mention his ability to speak Finnish in his profile.

That is fine, since I didn't claim that he was interpreting from Finnish. I only claimed that you do not know if he was interpreting from English (which is still the case, since he lists several other languages that he could have been interpreting from).