Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
16hr ago
Oh, heat dissipation, ventilation, etc. is definitely a concern at 50m too, it's just more of an issue at 800m (note that mineshafts are generally cooler than outside air at the start, then heat up as you go down). More stuff to get blown up on the surface, more difficulty repairing it after a strike. If 100m protects you from US bunker busters, no need to keep digging.
I'm seeing claims that Israel "destroyed" the underground structures at Natanz, but from the pictures going around it looks more like the kind of surface strike you describe - smash up the aboveground buildings and tunnel entrances to set things back and make the site a pain to clean up, ideally contaminate the site with the radioactive materials already there.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I don't know exactly why the IAEA claims that Iran has facilities 800m down, but as far as I'm aware reliable estimates place the new Natanz underground complex at 40-50m down, with the old underground complex much shallower but with about 7.5m of concrete shielding. The new complex is still under development, which is one reason Israel may have decided to strike it now. Fordow is 80-100m down and that provides protection from even US bunker busters - by the time you get to 800m you're reaching mineshaft-level conditions which require serious ventilation and cooling facilities on the surface to do anything resembling nuclear manufacturing (to put it another way, you could cripple the site just by blowing up the aircon). There's just no reason for Iran to go that deep, but it seems to me that they claim far deeper facilities because a bigger number is more impressive in the third-worldist mind, and international inspections bodies are pretty gullible.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I have heard credible testimony to the contrary from a guy who definitely knows one and claims to know the other, but no hard proof of the negative. They are, as you'd expect, pretty similar people.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Bars/pubs with an older clientele tend to be regulars who mostly all know each other, instead of small groups of young people there to talk with their friends. Same thing in the US, at least in terms of being welcoming. I once dipped into Chicago neighbourhood dive to charge my phone, and an old lady came over with a shot and said "now, son, we don't like to see people sitting alone here, less they want to." Spent two hours yukking it up with the old-timers telling me about the good old union welding days.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
trans women in women's sports, endorsing childhood intervention or nearly any other culture war hot point
Yep that's the bailey. I'm not trying to speak for the other poster, and it's not my position, but it seems reasonable to me that people who believe the motte but not the bailey can still pick their side based on whether they think it's more important to avoid being caught out in the bailey, or whether defending the motte from people who are 100% anti-trans is still worth it.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
If I recall correctly, Mearsheimer's realist thesis is that Israel's influence over the US is long-term bad for Israel because it makes them structurally dependent and less rational as a state - relying on US support rather than doing whatever realist stuff they need to survive on their own. But Mearsheimer's an interesting writer, in that he will overstate his theses if he thinks that's a direction that policy discourse should be dragged in (in order to counterbalance the weight of "mainstream" discourse).
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I think it's fair to say that any movement will have people who sincerely believe in the motte and do not believe in the bailey.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
From my limited reading on the Wars of the Roses, this was also a factor there - Henry IV's usurpation of the throne meant that all the various cadet branches of the Plantagenets felt they had some kind of a claim.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
every time the King of Castille dies there's a civil war for succession in this period.
It's kind of crazy how unstable the house of Trastamara was compared to the Jimenez and Ivrea dynasties. The previous dynasties had plenty of minor succession struggles and an unfortunate tendency to keep breaking apart and reuniting the kingdoms, but rarely anything that broke down the kingdom's ability to resist external threats. My theory is that Reconquista/Crusader kingdoms generally had far more flexible customs of succession (note how much more often you had queens ruling in Iberia/Jerusalem than in the older Western kingdoms) - a necessary adaptation to frontier rule, where you needed a monarch to fight off Muslim threats, but one that became very troublesome once you either ~finished the Reconquista and no longer had that threat compelling unity, or when things started to go badly in the frontier struggle as they did for Jerusalem.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
This is so easy a dunk as to not be worth posting, but do you honestly think people on the left believe that Darwinian evolution applies to the human brain? I'm not seeing any major political faction which meaningfully believes in evolution.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
iirc during the Africa/America section the narrator is also losing the plot somewhat
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I'm at my most attractive when I feel full of will and energy.
You already know the most important thing. And the second most important, which is to learn how to be gregarious. The third most important thing is to dial in your dating logistics. Think like Napoleon - logistics enables everything else. For a classic drinks date, find a spot you like, ideally classy-ish but chill and quiet (I like wine bars), with tables/bar where you can sit close to her, somewhere nice you can walk to nearby to sit and talk in the dark. That's first date and first kiss sorted, and if you're within walking distance to your place often more. For coffee dates, find a place with a park nearby you can walk in with your coffee. Concerts most of your logistics are sorted for you but try to get a drink beforehand so you can have some time but not too much time to talk. Etc. etc., but the main failing I see for guys once they can get dates is that they sit down for 'job interview' first dates and never build up a real rapport because they're not comfortable in their surroundings.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
Glasses on men are like short hair on women - if they're hot, they make you hotter, if you're busted, they make you look worse. If you wear glasses that's a good reason to get your haircut and any beard grooming dialed in, and wear clothes that work with the glasses.
Bartender_Venator
14d ago
I actually find it much more of an issue in small-town restaurants, the kind you'd go to on a roadtrip stop if you wanted to avoid a chain. Recall once stopping off at a BBQ joint in the Central Valley (not necessarily a mistake, there are good ones) and my sandwich was like eating a salt shaker. Same with a fried chicken place in the coastal South that all the locals raved over. Though I did recently eat a bag of store-bought popcorn and it was so salty I had to put chapstick on for the next two days to heal my lips.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
I also feel the same way about salt in a lot of US food, although there are definitely times the body just wants MOAR SALT.
Bartender_Venator
18d ago
Karlin
Bartender_Venator
20d ago
Two ex-wignats, one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg, and a former holocaust revisionist who changed his mind after seeing a gas chamber (apparently he just... hadn't thought about that?) are not exactly the cast of the Level Headed Good Judgement Hall of Fame. A casual browse of David Cole's spittle-flecked twitter feed may help to confirm that impression.
Bartender_Venator
21d ago
Cole, like many disillusioned members of the right-wing commentariat, is really telling on himself here. If all you can do is churn out Takes on this week's story to an undifferentiated mass of readers, you will eventually come to see them as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity, and caricature accordingly. I assume this explains most of the phenomenon - I wouldn't want to make a guess at how much is internalized self-loathing for one's writing career terminating in what is essentially slop (that is to say, Takes).
This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.
Unz has been like that for a decade at least. This is more likely connected to Sailer's newfound career opportunities with Passage et al.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Storm of Steel is certainly the classic place to start, but worth remembering that Junger published it at 25 and lived to be 102. Most people only know him for WWI, and so they miss the incredibly rich development of his work afterwards. I'd urge you not to be satisfied without reading either On The Marble Cliffs (fiction) or The Forest Passage (philosophy) to get a taste of the later Junger, both of which are very short books. If you had to pick just one Junger, given your intense reading schedule, I would recommend On The Marble Cliffs (in the newish NYRB translation), which will hopefully give you the taste for more.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Happy to give any recs based on what you're looking for, I happen know a thing or two about Junger. Have one book and a half left before I've finished his entire (translated) bibliography (and "Bartender Venator" is chosen after the protagonist of his novel Eumeswil).
Celine is excellent, and he had a big impact on the young Sartre, although of course after the war they hated each other. There's a darkly amusing anecdote in Ernst Junger's war diaries where Celine manages to horrify a party full of Nazi officers with his antisemitic bloodthirst. Still, at least Celine was an honest misanthrope, whereas Sartre buries it under layers of bloated theorizing and projected dishonesty.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
"Why in Lenin's name is the General Secretary suddenly running the Politburo?!"
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
If by non-sweet tea you mean the pre-made Southern kind, yeah I enjoy it as a Southern thing but it's low-quality, industrially processed tea and it's not going to be good on its own. If you'd like a neat little hobby, try getting into brewing your own iced tea with high-quality ingredients - tons of variety as well as better taste.
Bartender_Venator
1mo ago
Pajeet was an Indian name that happened to be used in a 4chan meme about "designated shitting streets" (itself a variation of a comic making fun of Turkish claims to steppe nomad heritage), and the name just stuck.
For what it's worth, back when I had a car it was a kitted-out, new-model Mercedes-Benz GLC. Some of the bells and whistles were nice, like the heated seats, and it had some serious zip in sport mode, but apart from that my main memory of it is what an incredible pain in the ass the computer was. You had to navigate with a cumbersome wheel instead of a touch screen or buttons, and it put up serious resistance to letting you use anything but the onboard GPS (even if you used google maps through the bluetooth, it would cut out for multiple seconds before or after each direction announcement, making podcasts unlistenable). Some of the greatest hits of this GPS involve instructing me to turn into an exit leading to an NSA building (getting me briefly detained), directing me to drive in circles around the Pentagon, and refusing to update streets being closed to cars for years after they were. Of course, given the examples, it could just be ze Germans playing the long game for the next war...
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