ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I was similarly confused by the media coverage of this execution, but what seemed likely to me was that a couple of outlets whose reporters are already trained to see swastikas in every shadow pattern-matched "asphyxiation by nitrogen" with "gas chambers," told all their friends that "Alabama is doing a Nazi thing," and then they all ran with it.
Regarding humane forms of execution, seeing as two things the US has in excess are fentanyl and guns, I always figured we should dope them up and then shoot them in the head, but that would run afoul of the unwritten rule that execution must be as clean and sanitized as possible so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the executioners. To which I say if we as a society can't stomach the sight of someone's brains splattered against a wall then we may as well abolish the death penalty because we clearly can't handle the weight of the responsibility.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I'll probably make a Japanese-style chicken curry. The store-bought seasoning mix makes it quite easy, though I try to make each batch unique by adding some additional spices and things like grated fruit, cocoa powder, different vegetables, etc.
I went from being a subpar cook to a decent one during the covid lockdown when I had nothing better to do at home, mostly by messing around in the kitchen trying to recreate things I had eaten and liked in the past. I'd say most people around me are worse cooks than their parents' generation, though this is more pronounced in the children of immigrants, where you typically go from someone with a deep knowledge of their ancestral foodways to someone with a shallow knowledge of a half dozen cuisines with a limited ability to recreate any of them.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Most of my physical books were bought used and may already be damaged or contain writing, but I generally don't do anything to make their condition worse. Growing up I mostly read library books, so my habit has always been not to write in, fold, or tear them. Generally I find things like highlighting and taking notes on the margin a waste of time and unnecessary for my own comprehension.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?
From what I've seen, the Chinese are quite likely to assimilate into the white population as soon as the flow of new immigrants is cut off by the motherland's catastrophically falling birthrates, and tend to be quite politically apathetic relative to their population size outside of issues like college admissions. Even in the event of a war with China I wouldn't expect any sort of large-scale treachery, although if the government tries the whole internment camp thing again and rounds up some Koreans by mistake there will be federal casualties.
Indians on the other hand are both more politically astute (compare Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy to Andrew Yang as presidential candidates) and have multiple overlapping factors holding back complete assimilation i.e. stronger religious traditions (especially for Muslims that demand conversion upon marriage), a tradition of arranged marriages that seems to be making a resurgence among sexually frustrated zoomers, and a larger population reservoir to draw new immigrants from. In that sense Indians are much more like Jews and will likely persist as a distinct and politically salient population for far longer than any East Asian group.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
This was my impression of the entire series. Herbert left all the most interesting aspects of his world tantalizingly out of reach, as though he pointed a camera at a beautiful landscape and it focused on a fly buzzing in the foreground instead of the natural wonder behind.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Among people I know or observe regularly, mostly in college towns and other liberal strongholds, I have definitely seen many adopting this habit of wearing facemasks when they are ill or when it is very cold outside (works better than a scarf in my experience), rather than masking indoors all the time out of some lingering covid paranoia.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Seeing how El Salvador went from being a crime-ridden hellhole to being safer than almost anywhere in America in the span of a few years would seem to invalidate the notion that such measures are impossible. Maybe blue tribe liberals won't be the ones to do it, but their hold on power is not eternal, and they are doing their best to empower nonwhite immigrant groups that have fewer qualms about the methods necessary to clean the place up.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner. Maybe not even then, unless they released a chemical analysis report along with it.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Chechens are a Muslim hill tribe with a culture and language alien to that of Orthodox Russians, not fellow East Slavs and members of the triune All-Russian nation. There is no room in that conception for a Ukrainian nation whose destiny is different from that of Russia and there never has been. If Putin got his wish they could keep their folk songs (except the ones about fighting Russians, perhaps) and quaint clothing and go on speaking their peasant dialect regional language at home if they so desired, but that would be the extent of their autonomy.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
What makes you think Putin would accept a ceasefire proposal along the current line of control? All I have seen indicates to me that he is fully prepared to fight a years-long war of attrition until Ukraine runs out of either artillery shells or people, because he thinks at that point they will collapse like the Germans in 1918 and he can have the glorious march to Kiev he was denied at the start of the war. I don't see any incentive for him to stop halfway besides saving the lives of Russian soldiers dying in the trenches, and after all what's a few million dead compared to reuniting the motherland?
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still. I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
I can only speak for myself, but I still support sending aid to Ukraine and I never thought that reconquering Crimea or the breakaway Donbass republics was feasible, only status quo ante bellum at most. As long as Ukrainians are willing to fight and there are no American boots on the ground (the odd volunteer excepted) though, I don't see any reason to deny their requests for assistance; we can stop the day Ukrainian public opinion turns against the war.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
It seems to me that for an ethnicity to exist in practice, you need a critical mass of people to identify with it to the exclusion of other identities, and that is what "Americans"/Amerikaners/white Americans of colonial British heritage/[insert your preferred neologism here] lack. Ukrainians are fighting a war not to get lumped in with the Russian ethnicity and Palestinians have fiercely resisted decades of attempts to group them with Jordanians or Egyptians, but I doubt even a lizardman's constant of your founding stock American ethnicity conceive of it in the same terms you do or would lift a finger to assist any political mobilization on their behalf (unless it were disguised as garden variety civic nationalism, which is what liberals have been paranoid about for decades despite it almost never happening).
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I think there was some element of genetic pacification in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations as well, since the unmixed indigenous populations there are generally more peaceful than their mestizo and white neighbors, while up north (and possibly down south in Patagonia too, but I haven't checked) the trend is the opposite.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I suspect western animators have simply conceded the 2D space to Asian studios that do it better. Kids in China for instance are said to "live a 2D life" due to the ubiquity of Japanese-style animation there. While the popularity of anime and manga is increasing over here as well, I think the works aimed at younger audiences (<10 years old, say) haven't made the jump as well either for financial or cultural reasons (or gatekeeping by local networks). Older kids on the other hand can navigate the internet well enough to find what they're looking for if they have an interest.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
We certainly hear a lot more about the USS Liberty than we do about that time the British bombed the French fleet after their surrender to Germany, killing over a thousand sailors, or the many times commercial airliners have been shot down, among other such incidents. What sort of conversation do you think we should be having? Should we break our alliance with Israel because they killed 34 of our sailors? We're allies with Germany and Japan after all, and they've killed about 10,000 times more Americans than that.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Dover's dual-language books are a good way to start reading short passages from classic works and if you like Game of Thrones you could check out Les Rois maudits, the (completed!) historical novel series that inspired it.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
I mean, all I can say is that the works that really make you (as an individual) think might not do anything for anyone else and vice versa. The impression I received from nearly everyone I talked to last year was that watching the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once would trigger some mixture of existential crisis and spiritual awakening in me and I just came away from it disappointed wondering "did you people not all think through and resolve these particular issues when you were in elementary school like I did?"
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
The way any nationality or ethnicity's intellectual powers are directed is in large part culturally mediated and orthogonal to their measured intelligence. Imagine all the collective brainpower that has been spent (or wasted, you might argue) by Ashkenazi Jews in debating the finer points of Talmudical hermeneutics or by Indian Brahmins in memorizing and reciting the Vedas for thousands of years. However high IQ those populations were or are, there isn't much there for you to read if you aren't into esoteric religious literature or have some personal connection to that culture. If your interest is as specific as modern science fiction novels for example, then you're probably going to get more out of a random western or western-adjacent country like Poland or Finland than anywhere in Asia simply for contingent historical reasons.
As far as the Japanese go, I'd say from my limited experience that their technical expertise in many areas of manufacturing seems indisputable, that they have made major advances in science above and beyond their neighbors in East Asia, and are pretty much the number 2 country in the world after the United States in terms of unique cultural exports (anime, manga, video games, movies, etc. that don't simply ape American forms like European or even Korean producers often do). The fact that they developed a vernacular literature and achieved nearly complete literacy before even most western nations also ranks them pretty highly in my book.
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
I also don't have too many complaints about my education, but to be fair I spent the last few years of it at a magnet school with a lot more freedom and higher quality students than is the norm. Being familiar with some East Asian school systems also colors my perceptions, and while I have always been somewhat bemused by Libertarians in the US raging about how schools are prisons for children, their arguments are perfectly valid in places like China or Korea.
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
I think his willingness to be ruthlessly realistic about limits to America's commitments to Taiwan is a breath of fresh air.
While he's honest about wanting to defend Taiwan only because of semiconductors, his claim that domestic manufacturing will supplant TSMC by 2028 seems patently absurd to me.
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
When dealing with a sample size closer to Dunbar's number than to population-level statistics, I don't think there's much difference in health outcomes, personality traits, or other factors based on maternal age. For what it's worth, my mother was older than you when she had me and I turned out normal, or at least as normal as any of us who post here are.
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs.
There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.
My understanding is that a family home is explicitly not a third place, because a third place is by definition a neutral public meeting ground with a semi-rotating cast of characters who have no obligation to be there. It might be possible to make one's house a third place by hosting enough open and regular events and parties, but that would be quite unusual, and would be made unnecessary if more typical meeting spaces e.g. coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, dance clubs, etc. were common enough to meet people's need for socializing.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Do you imagine President Ocasio-Cortez sending the best US troops into the harm's way to defend places with names like Szypliszki and Stańczyki, which no CNN commentator could even pronounce - especially if it comes with the risk of global nuclear war? I think a lot of people would object to that.
I think for the millions of Americans with Polish ancestry those aren't just unpronounceable names, but places they would be more than willing to fight and die to protect, whether as part of an official intervention or as part of volunteer brigades. That's not to mention the fact that the Polish army is better equipped and better trained than the Ukrainians were at the start of the invasion last year, they would be facing a thoroughly depleted and less motivated Russian military, and there are already thousands of US soldiers present in the country who would probably get hit in the crossfire at the start of an attack and trigger demands for retaliation.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I'm not sure what the difference between Aryan Invasion Theory and Aryan Migration Theory is supposed to be. The genetic evidence matches pretty closely what we see in historical events that are universally considered invasions e.g. the Spanish conquest of the New World, which in terms of demographic impact took nearly 400 years to conclude during a time with much more advanced military technology and social organization than possessed by Bronze Age tribal peoples.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
I don't mean a politics that organically develops around a preexisting ethnic identity; I mean a politics that recognizes the weakness of an identity and believes that the use of government action to solidify that identity can solve real problems.
This supposes that the development of ethnic identities in the first place was an organic process, when in most cases it was a top-down government policy that forcibly assimilated minority groups through a combination of public schooling, historical revisionism, and state propaganda. Forming separate national identities is not the inevitable result of linguistic, religious, or cultural differences, otherwise the Middle East, China, and India would have ended up looking exactly like Europe. The relative youth of these identities is why there aren't many examples of shoring them up yet.
As to whether ethnogenesis has had good outcomes in the past, the question is good for whom? I would say the Turks have done well for themselves, successfully transitioning from being the head of a pan-Islamic empire into a nation-state with a strong identity and relatively good economic development relative to its neighbors, but that success came at the cost of millions of dead Armenians and Greeks. If places like India and Nigeria succeed in melding their disparate inhabitants into united ethnicities, that would in the long run eliminate most of the sectarian tensions that hold countries like them back, but would in the short run actively inflame them.
Because to Asians raised in famine-stricken societies, it the responsibility of a host to ensure that their guests are well-fed. This explains the Asian obsession with food relative to westerners who are many generations removed from true poverty, a decent fraction of whom seem to eat almost entirely for sustenance and not pleasure. In many Asian languages the traditional greeting is "have you eaten yet?" and you can't walk ten feet in a rural area without someone offering you dinner.
I'm not sure what there really is to complain about here though. I love taking home enough leftovers from a Chinese restaurant to cook my next three meals; it's the customers who are leaving money sitting on the table if they let the restaurant throw it all away. The only things I don't usually take back with me are excess hotpot broth and dipping sauces. By contrast, whenever I go to a European restaurant and am presented with half a sandwich and a cup of soup I feel cheated because I could have gotten 3x as much of better-tasting food for the same price at an Asian or Middle Eastern place.
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