Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading. Megathread for the Israel-Palestine conflict is here though if you want to talk about it in this thread as well feel free.
To offset the more serious post, I thought I'd throw in something a bit more narrative and fun. These stories are true, but composite. It didn't all happen the same day, not with all the people mentioned, and not in the same units and places. That said:
It's midnight on a Tuesday. I'm pleasantly drunk in a VFW, arguing politics with Doc and Malo. They're the only people in the unit who would rather do that than chase girls and fight the locals. Doc short, confident, prematurely bald and ugly as a gnome. Hilarious dude, a Napoleon of dick jokes. Malo black and huge, his big dumb face concealing a keen intellect and a first rate education. He speaks the Queen's English with a slight african accent and an aristocratic tone. Me rail-skinny, argumentative and mean. We're a strange looking group, but our military IDs buy us a quiet corner where we close it down, then start collecting our other guys. Pasco and Healy have struck out at the bars, and Po is hiding behind a gas station near the highway. He got in a fight and the cops are looking for him. We pick him up on our way out of Victorville. It's almost two hours back to base, and morning formation is at 0430. Our team leaders will kill us if we're not there by 0415, so we have barely enough time to get back.
I get about an hour of sleep on the ride. Malo drives, he's a bad muslim but doesn't drink. The gate guard wakes me up with his flashlight, checking the long line of cars snaking into the base in the dark early morning. We awkwardly change into our PT uniforms, lots of butts in faces if you want to imagine six drunk dudes getting changed in a moving Chevy Tahoe. Lots of commentary and propositioning. Ahh, the infantry. Gayest pack of straight dudes in the world.
Parked, we stagger out into the company area where the NCOs are already forming us up. We jog to our spot in the formation, our little group splitting. Doc to Headquarters, Malo to first squad, Pasco and Healy to Second and Po and I to Third. New guy, B team, Third squad, Third platoon (Dirty Third!). I'm at the end of the line, farthest from the NCOs. Po is one slot from the squad leader. I look down the line, and I see we weren't the only ones out on the town. The whole squad is swaying forward and back, everyone trying hard not to look as hammered as they are. The First Sergeant is walking out, but I can hear Sgt. Mac's vicious hiss: “I can smell you motherfuckers”.
We're all technically drunk on duty, a court martial offense. We're relying on the informal rule, which is that if we can gut out the morning PT, they won't breathalyze us. There's a thought to sharpen your mind on a cold desert morning. Fall out, and you'll be in the brig by lunch. And first Sar is looking pissed. He's not going to make it easy for us. Yup, he's leading PT personally, and we're running. Fuck my life.
At least I'm a strong runner. No weight to slow me down. I can run this company into the ground drunk or sober. If I'm in the brig, I won't be alone. I wonder if that would warm the guys up to me?
Three miles outside of base, I have a new problem. Somehow, I've hit the perfect level of intoxication, and am feeling no pain on this run. I do need to shit though, and that greasy bar food is not going to wait for this run to end. I spot my chance as we pass over a large culvert where the road crosses a wadi. I dive off the side, slide down the embankment. I can hear my team leader's startled yell behind me, but I'm already down to the culvert. It's dark, I crawl in and paint the walls brown.
No TP, no vegetation, and with this run, I'll probably need my socks. I rip the bottom off my PT shirt to wipe myself with, leaving me with a very fetching crop-top. The unit is hundreds of yards ahead now. I start making up the time, closing the distance. I come upon Healy who has fallen out and is struggling. He looks at me in surprise, “I thought you fell out?”. I grin as I come along side him, pointing to my midriff. “Needed a shit”. He laughs and quickens his pace a bit. We catch up the unit just before it's light enough for people to see us. Hernandez, my TL, is relieved, but I'll still probably catch some smoke later. There's much giggling, whistling and shit talk about my new fashion statement. For now, we're five miles from base, and we still have to run back. Six miles. Seven. Jesus, is first Sar gonna run us twenty miles? At seven and a half we turn back. Fifteen miles and I am flying. A third of the unit drops out, but they're all the family guys who weren't at the bars last night. The rest of us have to finish.
We form back up on the company area. First sergeant stares us down for a long minute before he releases us. I don't know if that's good or bad. From there, it's a sprint back to the barracks, quick shower, uniform of the day, then off to the chow hall, packed this time of the morning. I wolf down two quite good omelets, four very bad biscuits, and something they passed off as sausage gravy. Got fifty bucks says no pigs were harmed in the making of that product.
Back to formation, where we are sent to “PMCS the vehicles”, standard infantry code for “we don't have shit for you to do today, so check the oil on the lieutenant's vehicle for the eighth time this month”. But there are benefits. A pair of boots sticking out from under a vehicle won't raise suspicion, so I get a nice nap on the cool concrete as the outside temperature spikes. Supposed to hit a hundred and ten today, but it's barely hundred in the shade! Fuck Fort Irwin.
Hernandez kicks me awake, and gives me a perfunctory smoke session for dropping out of formation and damaging government property (my PT shirt). His heart's not in it, he doesn't care, but he has to be able to tell Mac that he did it so Mac can tell his boss, and so I do ten minutes of pushups. If that's all the worse I come out of this, it will be a fucking miracle. “Good job on the run” he says “go to lunch”. He can't come down on me too hard for drinking, I buy him beer. He's still only twenty.
For lunch I go back to my room and catch another nap. My roommate isn't there, but I can see the ants crawling under his bedroom door. Filthy fucker. How does he keep getting away with it? I get my room inspected weekly, Lacava has never been inspected. And he's supposedly in a strict company. I've put in for a different barracks room three times already, but they say nothing is available. This motherfucker has pizza stuck to the ceiling, rotting food and dirty clothes everywhere, his room stinks. You can smell it from the sidewalk. I should probably just kick his ass until he puts in for a transfer, but he's the only guy around smaller than me. Not a good look. And I'm new, no leverage, no real friends, no idea of the lay of the land. Might have to ruminate on that one.
Back to the motor pool. We're a light unit, so our platoon only has one vehicle. The PMCS took fifteen minutes back in the morning, but if we go back to the company, they'll find something even dumber for us to do. There's fifteen guys laying around, playing spades, napping, bullshitting. It's a great afternoon. The glories of the previous night are dissected in detail, lies are told, bullshit is called. I come in for a good bit of comedy about my shit-shirt that morning. I play it off, call them fags for getting all excited at a man's belly button. My timing is off, the jokes are flat. But soon enough it's someone else, Pasco getting grilled about that totally hot chick who supposedly blew him in the bathroom that no one else can remember seeing.
1600 the other units are leaving the motor pool, but Hernandez keeps us there. Our formation will be late today, he says, and he wants to see if we can steal some gear from other units' trucks. We find an unlocked victor two lines behind ours from some other unit and strip it bare. Seat cushions, pioneer gear, a donkey dick (long funnel) etc. We'll outfit our PL's vehicle and trade the surplus to other trucks, maybe even the guys we stole it all from. There's only one thief in the Army, the rest of us are just getting our shit back the saying goes....
Formation finally happens around seven, after several more hours of sitting around not doing shit. Infantry in garrison rarely have much to do. Our general work cycle is two weeks in the field doing training, then two short weeks in garrison punctuated by a three-day and a four-day weekend. Then back out to the field, ranges, gunnery etc. Once we get out of the field and get all our gear cleaned and turned in, it's bullshit details and “PMCS” to try to keep all those joes busy. For our part, we learn to stretch every job out as long as possible, because they're only going to find something else when you're done. The stories about hand-painting the gravel are true. When everything conceivable has been cleaned, mopped, polished and checked it's time to get creative.
The infantryman considers garrison to be basically one big weekend, which is why we've been drinking every night. This is not our job, this is the bullshit period before our job. There's nothing important to do, so we try to stay out of the way and enjoy ourselves as much as possible. We'll be sleeping in the dirt again soon enough. There will be no bars, no girls, not even the indifferent but at least hot chow hall slop. I'm gonna miss those omelets.
I get pulled aside at formation, everyone else goes home. Hernandez, Mac and I have to report to the First Sergeant. Just for scale, I'm a boot PFC, Hernandez is my team leader, my daily boss. His boss is Mac, the squad leader. Mac is the Hand of God, and the First Sergeant is his bosses' boss. Literally the Almighty Himself. I do not want to be here, this will not be good. I'm worried about jail, but it turns out someone has finally complained about my roommate. Which means they complained about me. Mac and Hernandez get interrogated about how often they inspect my room. Because Lacava isn't their soldier, they can't touch him, so they say nothing about that part. They do hedge a bit because I've built a recording studio in my closet. I checked the regs and it's technically legal, but first Sar needs a reason to be angry and that's it. He's getting complaints that his soldiers have dirty rooms, so someone is gonna suffer and that someone is apparently me.
The three of them march me over to the barracks and wait outside while I pull every scrap out of my room and lay it out on the sidewalk. Bed, cabinet, clothes, everything. It takes hours. I have to disassemble the bed and cabinet, reassemble them outside, clean the room. The boys are headed back out, they're clowning me, asking if I want to pop down to San Bernardino for a quick one. I give them both fingers and keep working. The cleaning is easy because my room was already clean. My only consolation is Lacava doing the same thing a few yards away. His NCOs ain't saying shit. Now that we're all here, it's pretty obvious who has the problem, and who is just a weirdo. I re-disassemble the furniture, and move back into my own barracks room. It's midnight by the time I finish, twenty-four hours in the life of an infantryman.
Mac and Hernandez have had to sit there and watch me all night. They didn't get to go home, have dinner, see their families. They'll be pissed about that, but hopefully they understand.
In the morning, I'm going to kick Lacava's ass.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
We live in a country of 350 million people. At any given time, around 1.2 million people serve in the military, or about a third of a percent of the general population. Of that third of a percent, the "tooth to tail" ratio is 8:1 (150k), but "tooth" is combat arms which includes artillery, tankers, cav, engineers etc. Even within the Infantry there are mortarmen, mechanized, anti-tank squads etc. It's hard to say for certain, but the number of dudes in the military whose job it is to kick the doors and shoot the faces is likely no more than 50k at a given time. Of that, only a minority will deploy and a minority of those see combat. In the twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has awarded right about 77k CIBs and 47k Purple Hearts out of 2-3 million total deployed over that time. Obviously, there is some overlap between those awards.
For the uninitiated, the Combat Infantryman Badge is intended to identify those members of the infantry who have actually "close(d) with and destroy the enemy with direct fires.", and the PH is known colloquially as the Enemy Marksmanship Badge. But there are some caveats. For reasons I will explain, the numbers we pull from awards like this are likely a high-end estimate, rather than a minimum, but counting the Marine 0300s and whoever all else could push the numbers up a bit.
The CIB is awarded at the company level, and only in the Army. This means if one dude in an infantry company (~100 men) gets in a firefight, the whole company gets their CIB. Much of the fighting these days is very small unit engagements, so it is quite common for only a few squads or teams in a CIB company to have actually seen the combat. OTOH, more people than infantry get into shooting scrapes, I know a couple cooks with multiple engagements just because they used to volunteer to fill out patrols that were short on people. Given the nature of the conflict, a lot of people who weren't infantry, or even combat arms have seen combat. However, if they do, it's usually because of bad luck or the military ran out of infantry to do that job. It's impossible to say definitively given the data available to me at the moment, but I very much doubt the total number exceeds the number of infantrymen with CIBs. Lots of cav guys saw action as route security, lots of random MOS people got blown up en route or pressed into some role they weren't trained for. But the guys who do the job day in and day out of locating, fixing and killing the enemy is a rather select group.
So too the Purple Heart has gone to a lot of people who don't do that sort of job. Mortars dropped into a FOB can hit anyone, and roadside IEDs don't care if you're on the road to take water to an outpost or heading out on a raid. But they are more common among the people who are in the most dangerous situations more regularly.
Let's bring it all those numbers and assumptions together for a moment, because I'm describing a group of people who are very, very abnormal, and very far out on the distribution tail of the violence bell curve. Let's round up to make the math easy and account for POGs and Marines and call it a hundred thousand men over twenty years (and yes, to the closest approximation, it is all men). It's three ten thousandths of one percent of the general population. That's the high estimate, the real number could be significantly lower still. And the number who deploy multiple times is much, much lower.
When American foreign policy decides some poor dirt farmers on the other side of the globe need some freedom in their lives, maybe one ten thousandth of one percent of the population is who gets sent to do the actual violence of empire. I am one of those men. I have a CIB and a purple heart. Within the rarified community of professional actual soldiers, I am a small fish in a tiny pond. I was not special forces (or, technically I was briefly, but not really). I was a reasonably high-speed infantryman with a penchant for guns who worked himself into a sniper platoon in a fairly trash unit. I made sergeant, ate an IED and got med-boarded out of the military. A short, somewhat spicy but relatively unremarkable military career for an infantryman.
Much of what the general public hears about combat, even "first hand accounts" is not from people who actually do this job. As I have hopefully established, this is a very small, very highly selected and very abnormal group of people. Most of what you read ore hear in war accounts is from the middle classes, which in the military means officers. Officers are not soldiers. They are managers of soldiers. During conscription, it was at least possible for a southern gentleman of letters like Eugene Sledge or a Junker scion like Junger to write an account of actual enlisted combat, if unlikely. In today's volunteer military, this is almost never the case. The venn diagram of actual front-line soldiers and people who can write competently in an educated manner for general consumption is essentially two separate circles. These are not generally guys with college degrees, because if they had one they'd be an officer. There are exceptions, but we'll perhaps get into that at another time.
This hopefully will go some way to explaining my arrogance in writing about the topic. IQ and violent tendencies tend to be negatively correlated, and I am way out on the right tail of of the distribution on both. If that seems self-aggrandizing, rest assured that neither has done me any good.
So who are these men? Who carries the torch of empire into the barbarian wastes of the Korangel? Who sits behind the machine gun of a HMMWV? Who donkey-kicks the doors off their hinges and plunges into the black interior following the blinding light of his Surefire? Who sits in a ditch for three days waiting to shoot a retarded teenager whose dad got paid $200 to have him drop an IED in a pothole?
In short, they're degens. Poor and working class kids, half of which aren't old enough to buy beer. Mostly rural whites and hispanics. Roughly a quarter are from Texas alone. The South more generally provides well over half, maybe two thirds of the total. Most of the rest are from the Midwest and West. They self select. These are guys who asked to be in the Infantry, and survived the training and indoc. Nobody winds up on the pointy end of the spear by accident. It's the worst job in the military, so the people who volunteer for it are driven by very different considerations to most. It's also the highest status within the violence hierarchy.
It's a weird group. There's a lot of immigrants, not all of them hispanic. A surprising number of professional soldiers from other countries come to the US just for the action. If you're just itching for a fight but are born somewhere too peaceful, coming to the US will greatly increase your likelihood of getting into the shit. I've met British Marines, African princes, a German seminarian who dropped out to join the US infantry. There's some tiny minority communities that are heavily overrepresented though still small in total numbers, like Native Americans, the Samoans, the Hmong and the Sikhs. East asians are rare, and black Americans, while overrepresented in the military generally, are underrepresented in this part but still common.
We are united by a few characteristics, most generally the privileging of suffering as a badge of honor, physical violence, and a death wish. One does not join the Infantry to live a quiet life to a ripe old age. Mostly, I think we want to fuck around and find out. Like the movie says, how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I had a lot of reasons for joining up, but I think the most basic was a desire to test myself and find out if I had what it took to face another man in mortal combat. To "see the elephant", or any of the other thousand euphemisms we use for fighting and killing our fellow men. To take the ultimate risk.
A recruit can get all the benefits of military service in a safer and more sustainable career. The infantry chews up men, minds and bodies, training alone eliminates hundreds of thousands. A twenty-five year old infantryman is probably middle management, a thirty-year old is probably out of the field as a platoon sergeant. The incessant road marching ruins feet, ankles and knees. The heavy packs wreck spines and shoulders. The heat, cold, wet and sleep deprivation cull the sensitive and the civilized. The social aggression removes the timid and the hazing removes the bitches.
There's an old glib saying that captures the esprit of the group. "The cowards never started and the weak quit along the way. That just leaves us.".
As a composite character, I give you the US infantryman. He is nineteen or twenty years old, grew up in a trailer park, has a kid or two with women he's not married to, is married to a woman with kids that are not his. He'll be divorced in a year. His family are construction workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail workers, garbage collectors, heavy machine operators, drug dealers, petty criminals, major criminals. He is dumber than average, hated school, has never read a book not assigned in class. He's been in jail multiple times, and probably will be again, mostly for low level stuff like underage drinking, vandalism and fighting. He binge drinks and smokes when in garrison, dips in the field. He gets in fistfights on a regular but extended basis with members of his own unit, in group conflict with other units, or with civilians on liberty. His politics, if he has any, are somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. He drives a pickup truck, a Mustang, or a heavily riced-out import and is dead broke most of the time. He is, in short, perilously close to the underclass of our society, and there's a lot of crossover. His life is boredom, fear, pain and the brotherhood of those who live in fear and pain. His values are foreign, rude and frightening to those not of his group.
He is the world elite of the violent class. The modern equivalent of a knight, loaded down with many years' wages' worth of technology, weapons and armor. Far better trained, supplied and equipped than his adversaries. The big stick that the world hegemon swings in the anarchic world of international politics. The very tip of the spear. The point of empire.
In our modern peaceful society, that point has become very fine indeed.
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Happy 20 TTs guys.
I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.
So:
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.
But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.
Piece I wrote on the even now under-estimated impact of Grecco-Roman Culture, and how Modern Culture IS just classical culture with some odd conceits thrown in.
I Contrast Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and his thesis that most of what westerners consider "Human Nature" are actually just cultural artifacts of how our culture has adapted Shakespearean psychological ideas and self conceptions... Which would not hold across cultures unexposed to Shakespeare or Shakespeare inspired fiction and narratives...
And I contrast Ancient Greek Texts with biblical texts, with shocking results.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Submission statement: Adam Mastroianni examines why scientific discovery seemingly avoided low-hanging fruit for so long.
For example, why did the Ancient Egyptians know how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid 4,000 years ago, but medieval European thought that meat transformed into maggots until 1668? Why were ancient people able to make significant mathematical discoveries, while still demonstrating ignorance about basic real-life processes?
The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.
Who we have
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@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
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@Southkraut, @RenOS, @netstack - Interstellar Warfare Consultants
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Me - developer
I hope you don't mind I moved you to Consultants for now, @netstack. I'm always torn between keeping people in their originally declared roles as encouragement, and not wanting to harass them into contributing, when writing the contributor list. I'll be more than happy to re-add you as a dev if you're still on board.
Who we need
The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into
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developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
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artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
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writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
A small note if you want to contribute:
Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I might be able to help.
What we have
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An official Highspace Github Org and Repository
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An official Highspace Wiki
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Even more concept art for ships, curtesy of @FCfromSSC:
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A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.
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A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
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A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.
Updates
It was another slow month, but things are finally starting to move. Literally. I added a current time display (set to the very beginning of the universe for now), and time can be paused / started / fast-forwarded. I also added a side bar with some help text (I thought the controls were relatively obvious, only to realize that what seemed obvious depended on the game I was most recently playing). The planets are the only things that move on their own for now, but I should be able to extend that feature to ships pretty soon. I'm not sure if this idea will go anywhere, but I'm thinking of having ships be able to move through conventional and subspace drives, the former obviously only being useful for planet-moon type distances.
Other than that I spent a lot of time optimizing. Brute-forcing my way through "find me the ship under the mouse cursor" was fine for a proof-of-concept, but I was finding myself making more and more "get me the nearest X" queries, so it was time to shove everything into a spatial index. I'm quite happy with the result, but it's not really something you can show off visually (well, unless you really want to).
What's next
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Getting the ships to move along an orbit.
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Real-time ship movement (sub-space, and conventional)
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Obstacle mechanics for the planets
The gap
This gap between the average male and female life expectancy of given population group is alternately labeled as Life Expectancy Gender Gap (LEGG) or Gender Gap in Life Expectancy (GGLE). Going forward I will be using the LEGG acronym.
The expectancy
There are basically two types of life expectancy. In historical context, we usually refer to the Cohort Life Expectancy. We track a group of people born in a particular year, many decades ago, and observe the exact date in which each one of them died. Then we can calculate this cohort’s life expectancy by simply calculating the average of the ages of all members when they died.
It is of course not possible to know this metric before all members of the cohort have died. That is why when talking about the present and the future we use Period Life Expectancy. This is an estimate of the average length of life for a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed, from birth through death, to the mortality rates observed at one particular period – commonly the previous year. Estimates of life expectancy of the current generation, which are also used in the calculations of indexes like the Human Development Index or Gender Development Index, are of this Period Life Expectancy type.
There is a corollary: because we are judging the existing generation based on mortality rates of the previous year only, whatever happened to that generation before that year is not taken into account. So let's say. if there was a recent deadly pandemic that affected one gender disproportionally, and this pandemic ended and is not affecting the mortality rates of the previous year, there will be little evidence of said gender disproportionally in the current life expectancy estimates.
The lost years
The first important thing to know about the LEGG is that its impact is, without an exaggeration, enormous. Let's take for example the US, with a LEGG of 5.8 years at the average predicted age for men and women 73.5 and 79.3 years respectively. Do you see the enormity? You don't, do you.
Ok, let's put things into perspective - how do you measure an impact of early death? With Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL). This is an estimate of the average years a person would have lived if they had not died "prematurely". It is usually reported in years per 100,000 people and the reference, "mature" age should correspond roughly to the life expectancy of the population and is now usually given as 75 years.
Now, men and women in the US lose some 8,265 and 4,862 potential years per of life per 100,000. Given the population as 332 millions, men lose some 5,648,980 more years of potential life than women. Do you see the enormity now? Not yet?
During the roughly 3.5 years of WW2 the US lost 407,300 military and 12,100 civilian lives. With an average life expectancy back then 68 years, and a guestimated age at the time of death 21 years, every killed American lost some 47 years and the US as a whole lost some 5,640,000 potential years of life every year of the war. Do you see the enormity of the LEGG now? I think you do.
The causes
The second important think to know about the LEGG is that nobody seem to care. Biologists, statisticians, politicians, Wikipedians - not even men's rights activists - nobody seems to be franticly looking for the causes or proposing policies to stop this haemorrhage of men's lives. Let me paraphrase what Wikipedia has to says about it:
It is the life style, men drink more and smoke more and eat crap. And it is also the biology, men lack the double X chromosome, we see this across all mammalian species, plus male babies and boys dies of diseases much more than girls.
Speaking of Wikipedia, it has dedicated pages for many things, including the Orgasm gender gap, but it does not have a dedicated page for the LEGG.
To my surprise I have not been able to find any further information, neither on biology forums, nor on Google Scholar. Studies usually focus on one cause or divide the mechanisms into social and biological but there our knowledge seem to end.
At this point I was so intrigued that I decided to do some "research" myself. My first observation was that there is a great variance between developed countries with similar GDP and life expectancy, suggesting that a large part of the gap is not biological. Example:
- 2021 Norway - LE: 83.16 years, LEGG: 3,0 years
- 2021 France - LE: 82.32 years, LEGG: 6,2 years
Next, I knew where to find Eurostat data on causes of death - unfortunately only from 2010 - and I filtered out everything mechanical: suicides, assaults, accidents and drug and alcohol overdoses. The LEGG shrunk significantly:
- 2010 Norway - all LEGG: 4.54 | non-mechanical LEGG: 3,51, decrease by 29.5%
- 2010 France - all LEGG: 7.14 | non-mechanical LEGG: 6.19, decrease by 15.3%
Then I was curious how much of the LEGG is caused by mortality differences of infants and children so I calculated non-mechanical LEGG at 20 years, as opposed to LEGG at birth. The difference is negligible:
- 2010 Norway - non-mechanical LEGG at birth: 3,51, non-mechanical LEGG at 20: 3.37, difference: 3.8%
- 2010 France - non-mechanical LEGG at birth: 6.19, non-mechanical LEGG at 20: 6.07, difference: 1.7%
Next, I did one more napkin calculation. Assuming that smoking reduces the life expectancy on average by 10 yers and smoking rate among French men and women are 0.349 and 0.319 and smoking rate among Norwegian men and women are 0.17 and 0.154, I reduced the LEGG further:
- 2010 Norway - all LEGG: 4.54 | non-mechanical, non-smoking LEGG: 3,35, decrease by 35.7%
- 2010 France - all LEGG: 7.14 | non-mechanical, non-smoking LEGG: 5.89, decrease by 21.2%
Of course this does not mean the reminder is caused by biological factors. There are drugs and alcohol, there is a meat consumption and overall life style. Man also do more paid work so there is work related stress and exposure. It should not be a rocket science to isolate these factors, actually, it would amount to a very cool paper with plenty of citations. So where is this paper?
Actually, I found one piece of information: Causes of Male Excess Mortality: Insights from Cloistered Populations, the abstract talks about 11,000 Bavarian monks and nuns living in "very nearly identical behavioral and environmental conditions" with nuns having only a "slight advantage" in life expectancy - whatever that means, I can't access the paper itself. This of course only applies to men and women who already survived into their teens or twenties, but as we saw above the contribution of different child mortality to LEGG is negligible.
The bad and the ugly
FYI, about 80% of suicide victims are men and suicide is the second leading cause of death in middle aged men only after car accidents. Also, 90% of workplace accidents are men - constructions, mining, trucking, heavy industry, you know - and even though the total numbers are too small to meaningfully influence the LEGG it does not cover exposure to chemicals, hard labour or health impact of night shifts.
Some social and biological mechanisms out there are causing men to lose life equivalent to WW2 every year. We should be creating policies to reduce this loss but we don't. Why? We know that men are far less likely than women to visit a doctor. Where are the public health campaigns and safe driving campaign targeted at men specifically?
Could it be the case of "you grow what you measure"? UN's Gender Development Index that measures gender disparity in achievements between men and women very quietly removes 5 years from the LEGG in it's calculations, arguing that men living 5 years shorter is necessary biology. The Global Gender Gap Report published annually by the World Economic Forum does something similar, arguing that if women live at least 6% longer than men, parity is assumed - but if it is less than 6% it counts as a gender gap.
As a corollary, women is Norway living only 3 years longer than men is interpreted as oppression.
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Quality Contributions in the Main Motte
- "Nobody is offering me free benzos to keep me from going too far in defense of my own property."
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Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023
Contributions for the week of September 4, 2023
All Moderators Are Bastards
The Aliens Have Landed Gentry
Contributions for the week of September 11, 2023
- "I sometimes wonder if 'sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be."
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Will the Real America Please Stand Up?
Contributions for the week of September 18, 2023
The Best Offence is a Good Defense
Who's Cheating Whom?
Contributions for the week of September 25, 2023
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This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, the Canada-India beef, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Haiti
The Dominican Republic has closed its border with Haiti (tbh surprised this took so long) over the construction of a Haitian canal that:
Officials in the Dominican Republic say the project will divert water from the Massacre River, which runs in both countries, and violate the 1929 Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Arbitration.
Presumably the spillover of lawlessness was also a concern.
The details of a Kenyan led multinational intervention force for Haiti are finally being hammered out. Kenya will pledge 1000 troops; America will pledge $100 million to the operation, and has also now signed a defense agreement with Kenya to help them combat the Jihadi group Al Shabaab. This has taken a remarkably long time (it still hasn’t been finally approved by the UN) given that President Moïse was assassinated two years ago and the country has been in semi-anarchy since. It is definitely less than ideal to use a country whose soldiers don’t speak French and is currently dealing with charges of police brutality in the ICC, but it’s something I guess.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt held the second round of talks over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which would double Ethiopia’s electricity generation but Sudan and Egypt are both worried would imperil their water supply. Unfortunately the talks seemingly brought the countries no closer to an agreement. According to Ethiopian President Abiy, the dam is now fully ready to be brought into operation - hopefully they work something out soon! There is supposed to be one more round of talks, which so far all the parties are still willing to attend.
Fighting seems to have flared up again in the Amhara region, where the ethnic militia Fano has been in rebellion over Abiy’s attempt to integrate it into the national armed forces.
Poland
Poland will be holding elections on the 15th, along with a general referendum on migration on the same day. Don’t know much about it and would be interested to hear from others:
While in 2019 PiS won 43.6% of the vote, the party is now several percentage points below that level of success at 38% as of 9 September, according to the latest POLITICO poll. Trailing behind Pis is Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition party - Koalicja Obywatelska - with 30% of the vote and the far-right Confederation Freedom and Independence - Konfederacja Wolsność i Niepodległość - with 11% of the vote. The current polls suggest that PiS, which has been ruling Poland since 2015, might look for a coalition partner to form the next government as it fails to reach an overall majority, though it’s still unclear where it will find one.
Nagorno-Karabakh
Azerbaijan has fully reasserted control over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia has warned against harming Armenians, but the 2000 Russian peacekeepers who were put in place to end the 2020 conflict do not seem to have the capacity or interest in helping them (The Azeri President Aliyev apologized to Putin for killing some of them and it’s apparently chill). This is likely the culmination of the past three years - Russia didn’t do much to help Armenia in the 2020 conflict either, and since then Armenia withdrew from CSTO and have sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Recently the Armenian President said publicly that they cannot rely on Russia to defend them anymore and had begun conducting joint military drills with the US.
Iran has warned against “border changes,” which is interesting. Iran doesn’t want to derail the overland routes they've invested in to be built across Armenia, and has also historically been a weapons supplier for the country (in part because Azerbaijan receives weapons from Israel). But they have something of a delicate game to play when challenging Azerbaijan, due to their own ~16% Azeri minority on the border. Previous President Rouhani made it a major initiative to improve relations with Iranian Azeris (some of whom are very integrated and others of whom occasionally protest) by allowing Azeri to be taught in schools, recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijan territory, and staying out of the 2020 conflict. Still, however, Azerbaijan regularly accuses Iran of favoring Armenia and tensions have never really disappeared.
Meanwhile, a pretty big chunk of the population in Nagorno Karabakh seems to be reading the room and heading for Armenia now that the Lachlin corridor is open.
Some 28,000 people — about 23% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh — have fled to Armenia since Azerbaijan’s swift military operation to reclaim the region after three decades of separatist rule. The mass exodus caused huge traffic jams. The 100-kilometer (60-mile) drive took as long as 20 hours.
Edit: Reports are saying it's up to almost 75% of the population that have now fled.
Kosovo
Speaking of breakaway republics and peacekeeping operations, a group of Serbians opened fire on Albanian policemen, who then returned the favor. The shootout left at least four dead and has further inflamed an increasingly tense situation:
Kurti accused the Serbian government on Sunday of logistically supporting “the terrorist, criminal, professional unit” that fired on Kosovo Police officers. Vucic denied the allegations, saying the gunmen were local Kosovo Serbs “who no longer want to withstand Kurti’s terror.”
President Vučić has demanded the UN deploy a peacekeeping force to take over the nation’s security. There is already a pretty large UN contingent in Kosovo, so I guess mainly he’s asking for a change in their scope of operations. The two countries are supposedly in the process of normalizing relations but it sure doesn’t look too likely at the moment.
Bolivia
Do you remember the coup in Bolivia? Long time socialist President Evo Morales was forced out of office after big protests against voting irregularities. A wacky lady named Jeanine Áñez took power in the wake and started promptly committing massacres. Áñez held off elections as long as possible until they ultimately resulted in Morales’ Movement for Socialism party re-winning the Presidency under his protege Luis Arce.
A lot of people at the time claimed it was a coup; further analysis of the voting records seems to indicate maybe they weren’t actually irregular, and there were suspicions that the west wasn’t wild about Bolivia closely guarding its nationalized lithium ion deposits - suspicions notable lithium-ion fan Elon Musk didn’t help by responding, for some reason, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!” Ironically, Acre has just announced that he will open up Bolivia for lithium extraction from foreign companies.
Either way, things may be coming full circle with Morales returning to the palace after all - he just announced that he will be running in the 2025 election. Acre hasn’t actually formally announced that he himself will be running again, but it’s unlikely that he’ll step aside just because Morales wants him to - the two have experienced a rift over the past few years, with Morales accusing Acre of hounding him with bonus corruption charges. Acre’s justice department will certainly be challenging Morales’ candidacy, but probably deservedly so - he’s already exceeded the constitutional limits on the number of terms you can serve.
Egypt
And speaking of leaders exceeding term limits, Egypt has announced new elections this December. Current President Abel Fattah Al-Sisi will be running again following amending the constitution to abolish term limits and increase terms to six years up from four. He won his last two elections with nearly 100% of the vote and jailed the last guy who was a serious challenge to him, so most likely he will win this one as well and govern till at least 2030.
The economy overall has been trending downwards. To make up for a lack of financing Egypt has been trying to coax a deal out of the IMF, who wants them to devalue their currency. They’ve now devalued three times in the past year but really the IMF wants them to switch to a floating rate regime that would accurately reflect their currency’s value.
Adding to economic bad news, to many Egyptians’ surprise they have now become embroiled in America’s latest political scandal around Senator Robert Menendez taking Egyptian bribes. This has led to increasing calls to withhold more aid from Egypt, which couldn’t really come at a worse time.
Uganda
Uganda has been resuming its own role of staying real active in its neighbors’ affairs. Recently they conducted a series of airstrikes against the Islamic State in the DRC (killing approximately “a lot” of fighters). This is part of a multiple decades old conflict - the Allied Democratic Forces is a 90s era Islamist rebel group from Uganda that was eventually driven out into North Kivu and has been attacking Uganda from a distance ever since, allegedly with the support of previous president Joseph Kabila. Recently the AFD joined the broader ISIS umbrella of jihadis and the DRC and Uganda agreed in 2021 to jointly crack down upon them. Since the conflict resumed Uganda has claimed to have killed over 600 jihadis already and has asserted the movement is on its last legs.
President Mosevini also recently offered to help mediate unification talks with Somalia and Somaliland; Somaliland promptly told them to kick rocks.
Spain
The vote to see whether conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo could become Prime Minister was held Wednesday, and he failed to cross the threshold of 176 votes. This means socialist PM Pedro Sanchez most likely now gets his chance to form a government, but with the Catalan independence party making strict demands of amnesty Sanchez doesn’t honestly seem much closer to winning either. The most likely result right now seems like another election getting held.
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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.
Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]
Links:
About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)
Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)
Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)
The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)
Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)
Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)
Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)
Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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