It's good that people outside any big system continue efforts to preserve suppressed history and memories, in hope of re-integration later.
I add only that the message could gain strength from comparisons with other cultural groups and periods of history.
Regarding the worst man-made disasters, the two world wars usually top such a list, sometimes followed by the Taiping 'rebellion', which is too-often forgotten in the west but still spooks chinese leaders. Although on a slightly smaller scale, disasters led by the previous regime such as the 1938 yellow-river floods were pretty bad too. Looking further west, and a couple of decades earlier than the "Great Leap", Holodomor followed a rather similar pattern. And before we conclude the pattern depends on a certain type of government, people in Congo, Bengal, Ireland, Native Americans, plenty of other examples, might have something to say about extreme-capitalist alternatives. Also if we start to analyse potential 'failed-to-be-born' numbers on a global multi-century scale, we'd have some interesting results, and the alternative scenarios might not be so attractive either.
Yes, we need to resist propaganda from big powers, but currently those also include big-tech in the usa, pushing some other strange ideas about which majorities should dominate which minorities. Indeed as human nature evolves less than technology, so we must learn from history. So I'm not trying to deny any tragic situation by 'whataboutism', only to take a long-term global perspective.
Returning to central asia, there is great potential for a better future, but life there does depend strongly on irrigation from diminishing snow and icecaps on the mountains. Response to such externally-driven factors may need big engineering as well as traditional cultural wisdom, so change is inevitable, although it's wrong that technocrats impose it by coercion. I remember in better times, at a railway station in the desert, watching chinese characters alternating with arabic script, they can flow together. Maybe the surprisingly rapid and apparently cooperative changes in Syria suggest hope for that region.
benjhm
Indeed trade links relevant, so navigable rivers played a big role - before railways, our main transport was either boats or horses (or camels). Horses needed a lot of grass, which thrives in drier mid-continental climates where trees don't survive wildfires. For example the Mongol empire was good at trade and connecting cultures, covered a huge area, but not (for long) near coasts, and still demanded intense tribal loyalty (elements of such culture was absorbed by the next empire which gradually pushed it back...).
It's now decades too late to choose between climate mitigation and adaptation, we have to do both. This includes that more people will inevitably migrate to more 'climate-safe' regions. The challenge is to help that process be more gradual and equitable, which includes some issues you raise. For example development of new homes creates opportunities, including jobs, but older landowners may benefit disproportionally.
This is a global issue, not specific to USA, but given that context, while I also have little sympathy for billionaires with seaside palaces in Florida, such people are few, and it's also hard to feel sympathy for populations in the midwest who collectively voted for decades for climate-denying politicians who blocked effective policies, even influentially on a global scale.
At the end I read: "I found my ideal social network ... with the functionalities of Friendica, the UX/UI of Sharkey and the stability and reliability of Mastodon ..." - so - please forgive me if I missed something, what does this combination, do we have to make it ?
That's interesting, but there are different personality types, maybe some could benefit more from a fresh start?
We are not all so tribal. I emigrated at a moment when I felt I had nothing (except a web-model), this was a a good move, at least for the first few years.
This is difficult. Yes we should discourage further mis-investment in unsustainable locations. Including whole cities, which may still be liveable for a few more decades, but not centuries. On the other hand, by pushing down market sale prices, this penalises people whose ancestors moved there, long before we knew much about climate change. So maybe they should get some compensation or help to move, although on such timescales there are plenty of other 'bad-luck' factors that society doesn't compensate.
Can anybody here tell us more about India, e.g. is the government promoting this, which are their favourite distros - are there local variants we don't know about in europe, what other foss is thriving best there (and if so, why not fediverse ?) ?
Maybe add some major tributaries - eg the Inn, Sava, Tisza ... ? Sometimes, depending rain on the mountains, these have greater water flow.
I think if you plotted political inclination as a function of distance from coast, globally, you might find quite a good correlation. Various plausible explanations. For example, in tougher mid-continental climates you need to store and protect stuff to survive the winter / dry-season, so people there evolved (including self-filtering migration) to have more tribal loyalty.
Like the colourful rooftops (the diversity somehow blends with the patchy colours of the mountainside), is it a trend in that region?
Yet here in Belgium I'm walking around in a puffy winter coat hat and gloves, whereas preceding winters would wear less. The point is, isolated observations don't tell us much about climate. In winter, warm and cold anomalies travel in waves (Rossby waves) around the pole, and mostly offset each other in the hemisphere average. Problem is that human population distribution evolved, over centuries, such that most people live in places with comfortable climates - and when we change the typical wave patterns, such distribution may no longer be a good adaptation to the new climate.
As a now-distant observer, can somebody local explain why glaswegians elected such a type in the first place, and is there hope for the left to rise above its factions, to offer more hope than such populism ?