JulianRota
14d ago
I've considered writing something similar in the more general department of how fiction affects peoples' worldviews. I see it a lot in terms of discussions on criminal justice in particular.
My impression from the sources I've read that seem to accurately reflect the "average" case rather than cases or regions cherry-picked for some particular reason is that around 90% of all people charged with crimes in the United States are guilty as sin and busted dead to rights. Meanwhile, huge numbers of people seem to believe things like that most people are innocent or crazy serial killers are everywhere or something like that, because all their knowledge comes from fictional media optimized for drama, and documentaries that cherry-pick outrageous cases and exaggerate how outrageous they are.
JulianRota
20d ago
What I haven't seen much commentary on yet is, will Adams and/or Cuomo run against him as an independent? I figure, winning the Democrat nomination makes Mamdani a shoo-in by default in the general. To have a shot at defeating him would probably require a temporary alliance between a very substantial number of more centrist Democrats and pretty much all of the Republicans to all vote for one particular alternate Democrat running as independent. Having a shot at that actually working seems much less likely if both Adams and Cuomo run, especially if they start openly attacking each other.
JulianRota
16d ago
On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.
"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.
"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?
I don't know if you're particularly interested in the "foreign resistance fighter memoir" thing, but I did actually read that book. In my opinion, it was a moderately interesting memoir with very little in the way of actual political opinions at all, aside from an opposition to Russian expansionism. I don't see any reason at all to "cancel" it besides ridiculous hysteria about "nazis".
Which of course completely reversed overnight when Russia did actually invade Ukraine full-scale, at which point Azov battalion suddenly becomes glorious heroes, regardless of how much Nazi imagery and terminology they use, and the Canadian Parliament gives an award to an actual Ukrainian Waffen SS member for fighting against Russia in WWII.
More options
Context Copy link