Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
Imagine a lithium-ion battery fire...the size of Pittsburgh!
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter?
Civilly, quite possibly! (Caveat, I'm not a Michigan lawyer so this isn't legal advice, but my Westlaw subscription includes Michigan cases and I'm bored). Michigan recognizes the tort of negligent entrustment, and there are several cases in which parents are found liable for permitting incompetent minors to drive. Dortman v. Lester (1968) 380 Mich. 80; Zokas v. Friend (1984) 134 Mich.App. 437
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?
Yes.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning.
There are also incentives for various players in government to fudge census figures for purposes of representational allotment, project funding, public relations, etc. Not saying it happened in any particular instance, but we can't just point to an incentive here; census accounts have to be researched and justified like any other historical record/document.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Many thanks!
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
I would be interested in what mistakes those are - I read and enjoyed "Stalin's War" but have very little outside knowledge of Finnish history.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
I mean, the narrative I was taught in school was that there were a lot of different ways that Nazis killed jews - rounded up and shot in the wake of Wehrmacht conquests, beaten/burned to death in pogroms, worked/starved to death in slave labor camps, and yes, gassed in extermination camps. All of which was tied together by the Nazi's fairly-consistent rhetoric that Jews were the ethnic enemy of Germans and should be killed. The idea that it's "6 million gassed" or complete denial/revision seems like a really bad strawman to me.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
I apologize, I think I was not clear. What I meant was that the OIF comment @Ben___Garrison cited itself does not provide convincing examples of the proposition that a partisan war can be handled without reprisal against civilians, because the methods described both explicitly involved significant intracommunal violence up to and including actual ethnic cleansing.
Personally, I think physical relocation and/or separation can be, but isn't always, a solution to intracommunal violence. More important, to my mind, is that a situation be reached whereby all parties agree that one side has conclusively triumphed, the other has conclusively lost, and that further conflict is futile to change this result. That's the only way that both parties will settle down and start funneling resources into building their own prosperity rather than attempting to destroy/displace the other.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
I'm not sure this post proves what you want it to re: the utility/necessity of reprisals. As I read it, it claims that the insurgencies in Iraq were broken by:
(1) coopting moderate factions inside the (Sunni) insurgencies and relying on them to do the dirty work themselves (does anyone want to bet that those Sunni militias didn't target civilian supporters of the radical factions as well as combatants under arms?), or (2) allowing the (Shiite) insurgencies to more-or-less achieve their objectives, which included withdrawal of US troops and ethnic cleansing of enemy civilians from insurgent-controlled areas.
Neither of those are particularly happy outcomes, and neither would be acceptable in the Israeli/Palestinian context.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Ursula's not just a villain - she was (allegedly) inspired by a drag queen, she has a special relationship as an unabashedly proud and powerful fat woman, and on and on. You can't just have her say actually bad things, because the people who care way too much about the movie she's in (aka the target audience of the movie) can't and don't see her as evil, and are ideologically committed to reclaiming her.
One thing that you're missing is that the old life-script involved people doing a lot of things themselves that today we assume have to be done by others. That phrase "If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife" covered a lot of tasks that took a lot more time than they would today: making and repairing clothes from scratch; managing household expenses in an era where everyone was objectively a lot poorer; cooking when the vast majority of all meals were home affairs, including making such basic staples as bread from scratch; cleaning without the use of labor-saving devices like washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners; and other types of home production.
Similarly, the male role involved doing things like building one's own house, as well as general mechanical and skilled labor competency. And for the things you didn't do yourself, you were expected to have sufficient ties to the local community that others could come and assist you (mutual aid societies, fraternal organizations, etc.). Having these sorts of skills and making/repairing almost all of your consumable goods drastically lowers the cost of living (at the expense of requiring a lot of effort).
Of course, mechanization got rid of most of these tasks from ordinary daily life. It's a truism that domestic appliances, drive thrus, and the supermarket, by trivializing the important household tasks that women had historically provided, did a lot to bring about second-wave feminist unrest. As for the rest of us, we also have been substituting capital goods and machinery for skilled labor as fast as we can. This simultaneously makes it more expensive to "grow up" and make your own life, and makes the average individual less skilled and thus less capable of handling the various problems they're likely to encounter in the world.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Either way, I think states’ rights are a dead issue.
States' rights to what, exactly? Anticommandeering doctrine is alive and well. Wayfair expanded state ability to levy revenue extraterritorially, and gave the dormant commerce clause some whacks. States even won the power to judicially interfere with federal enforcement and regulatory policy in Massachusetts v. EPA
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
You are correct, thank you.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Being an "international city" sure worked out well for Danzig and Istanbul...
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Except your example also demonstrates that "let them do it on their own" is BS. The Azeris had Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli backing...the Armenians "fought on their own" and got stomped. Little countries will always cozy up to big countries, and whoever doesn't have a patron had best find one quick or risk domination by their mobbed-up neighbors.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
And yet there were approximately a million serfs in France when the Revolution kicked off in 1789.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
The black population of the Union states was negligible in the late 1800s, but it was there that the U.S.'s great agricultural and industrial innovations were born and took root. The "Great Migration" of southern agricultural black laborers north to the booming industrial cities occurred after the great gilded age of American lassiez-faire capitalism, and well into the urban progressive movement (which itself smoothly transitioned, after flirtations with fascism and communism, into the FDR welfarist coalition that dominated the mid-20th century, and whose institutional bones we're still building).
Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK
This is a very doubtful proposition. The U.S. is several times larger than the other major industrial powers in the world (Germany, UK, France, Japan), significantly more diversified in resources, and - these are the big doozy - didn't get bombed flat or invaded during WWII, and didn't lose an entire generation of elite young men in WWI. Instead, WWI put America in the position of having the allies mortgage their empires to us in exchange for food, war materiel, and ultimately intervention (WWI debts to the US weren't fully cleared in the UK until I think 2003?), and then the physical destruction of Eurasia in WWII put us in a massive comparative industrial advantage.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy...
We tried to. It led to the stagnation of the 70's and early 80's. We then elected Reagan (as the Brits elected Thatcher) to try and shake the system loose, to varying degrees of success.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
If the south kept resisting then a simple policy of "take the children of whites from them at age 6 and indoctrinate them in the memes of the north, only sending them back after the age of 18" would clear away the problem in a single generation
Ah yes, and this is why the implementation of the Residential Schools resulted in the complete erasure of Indian/First Nations groups, which today are mere memories with no relevance or political salience at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Most sharecroppers were white.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages
...for the small minority of women who lived in London and/or other major cities. By far the most common occupation for both men and women would have been "small-scale subsistence farmer"
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Meanwhile Hezbolah is Iranian backed and maybe directly controlled, and has done little in the current conflict.
They've forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north of the country, all without drawing the kind of polarizing international opprobrium that would give Israel a justification for the kind of Gaza-like heavy-handed operations which would be necessary to remove Hezbollah from within easy rocket range of the border.
If, as has been speculated by people like Haviv Rettig Gur, that one of the purposes of Hamas's 10/7 aggression is to ultimately make the feeling of security necessary to maintain a first world standard of living impossible in Israel and drive the Israelis into the sea through emigration/attrition, Hezbollah has achieved about as much as Hamas has done, without any of the downsides.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
De facto, it was.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.
Correct. If Germans don't think about the consequences of electing a radical party to control the Reichstag, and the Nazis get control of the country and start annexing and invading the neighbors, the result is that other countries declare war on the entire country of Germany and not just on the individuals controlling policy. This is because the basic assumption of the modern nation-state system is that the nation is the sovereign unit, and has the right, ability, and duty to ensure it is governed in the manner it prefers.
If the Palestinians can't even ensure their representatives to the rest of the world match their preferences, then it's hard to call them a "nation" in any meaningful sense.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
While the labour disruptions remain, a critical mass of unsettled women is unlikely to fuck shit up in the way that a critical mass of unsettled men are.
Not in the same way, but I'd bet you'd see a mass wave of prostitution (and related vices like narcotics) and negative impacts on family life and the social fabric.
Iran's strike from its own territory appears to be, in my admittedly imperfect knowledge, rather unprecedented in the history of tit-for-tat strikes between the two countries. Historically, the strikes on Israel have come from Iranian proxies, not Iran itself. Even with the telegraphed nature of the 4/13-4/14 strikes (allegedly Iran told the US exactly what flight-paths the drones/missiles would be on?!?!?) Israel wouldn't want to let the precedent stand that Iran can launch on targets in Israel proper without Israel having grounds to strike at Iranian targets inside Iran in retaliation.
More options
Context Copy link