disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
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User ID: 426
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
3mo ago
I do agree that story #2 was an achievement. The entire bit with
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
5mo ago
The problem is, we don’t have cures. We have drugs that at particular doses have positive risk/benefit ratios for a particular condition for most patients. If every bottle of Tylenol is priced to cover the liability for liver damage I’m not sure pharmacies continue to exist.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
Do you think there is only one bad guy in WWII? I’ve never said “true villain”, nor “race traitors” for what it’s worth. I’m saying Churchill sucks, not that Hitler or the Nazis are the good guys.
Given that Germany was already at war with Britain why would you expect anyone in the British leadership to want to make life easier for the German high command rather than harder?
Given that the Nazi regime thought it was at war with the Jewish cabal that controlled Europe, why should the Nazis want to make life easier on the Jews rather than harder? The answer is that killing civilians is wrong and doesn’t advance your war aims, but everybody but the US missed that memo. The same can be said for the treatment of POWs.
I can’t speak at all for DeGaulle, although the French colonies certainly aren’t where the war was won or lost.
I think the crux here is that you want the winning side to be treated as the good guys, and I want all players to be held to the same standards. War is bad! The Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were super evil! The British were their usual level of evil, with Churchill channeling their worst tendencies. The Americans were slightly more evil than WWI but still basically the most moral players in the war.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
Untargeted night bombing raids were effectively hitting only civilians, but the whole period has so much stuff going on that I don’t think we’ll change each others mind here.
I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.
This seems very silly? Stuff Churchill actually was responsible for, like Operation Wilfred or the Gallipoli campaign all seemed to end disastrously. Britain barely came out ahead in WWI, and in WWII the British contribution to the European theater was essentially their naval blockade, while the actual war was won by Russian soldiers and American industry.
Madagascar
Germany had beaten France and claimed their colonies. They were offering the transport of civilians out of a war zone, but that wouldn’t help British war aims, so it was denied. If you inhabit the frame of winning at any cost, then sure, Britain was playing to win, but so were the Germans, and what they did sure does seem evil. If Britain was losing the war, would you be surprised if they started killing the Germans they had put in concentration camps?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
The British sent bombers targeting Germany for IIRC 9 months before the Germans retaliated. I can’t speak to Germans bombing civilians in Poland, tho I would believe it.
On Churchill: yes. This is why Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do. He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war. Additional beef: Hitler’s offer to turn Madagascar into a Jewish-German colony was denied by Churchill because he wanted to maximize the number of mouths Germany had to feed on the continent. Decent odds Madagascar would have been turned into a charnel house anyway, but we won’t know thanks to Churchill.
Agree with Germany being dumb, but I think it was more that the Nazis thought that their struggles were due to a Jewish conspiracy that ran Europe, rather than perfidious Albion being perfidious. German theory-of-mind takes the L once again.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
Culpability isn’t a very useful metric when this stuff seems pretty overdetermined. Germany and France will try to unify Europe under their control, UK will try to stop said unification, Russia will try to expand the empire, Americans will sell stuff. The stuff I’d like to argue about is whether to treat a particular player as behaving in a respectable way or not. WWI, with all its slaughter, had its deaths concentrated among men explicitly waging the war, with some exceptions for starvation in Germany near the end. We don’t revile Germany for its behavior in that war today, because their conduct was within the relatively wide bounds of honorable conduct for that conflict. WWII on the other hand has widespread and unrelenting barbarity by nearly all players, excepting the US and France. The Germans are rightly reviled not because of their blitzkreig through Belgium but because they liked to kill civilian Jews for bad reasons. We too should revile the British approach of sending planes to scatter bombs indiscriminately amongst civilian German populations for different but still bad reasons.
Very few people care about the alliance between Poland and the UK because the alliance was explicitly built as a last-second deterrent for German expansion, not because the Polish and British governments had a long and close relationship of mutual protection. Local players had their own reasons for disliking said expansion, but from the American perspective there really wasn’t any reason why we should care.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
How does the development of tools for mass murder in the world wars fit into the paradigm of ‘following the rules’? After the fact, the indiscriminate killings of civilian populations via bombings or starvation by the UK, US, USSR, and to a large degree Nazi Germany are treated ambivalently by contemporary recountings, while the discriminate killings were immortalized by the Nuremberg trials and have been written into the foundation of contemporary morality. ‘Don’t kill civilians’ is perhaps an unworkably high standard, but I’d much prefer if that was held to a bit more strongly than tripwire alliances designed to further geopolitical goals. The US was actually pretty good about not doing evil shit aside from a handful of bombings later into the war, and I’d like that to be that standard, which the indiscriminate and pointless night bombings of the British very much fall short of.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
7mo ago
Back in the periods of major European immigration to the USA a large number would return back to their home country, usually because they failed to make their fortune and America was rough if you were poor.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
8mo ago
I recently took STEP2, the immense medical school exam that dictates my likelihood to match. 8 hours, ~310+ q’s, the sum output of 6ish months of my free time. I’d project I ended up somewhere in the 230s, below average but still within the reach of my desired residency, although I’ve got a bit before I actually get the results. I still have a handful of minor hurdles, but most of the stress has now officially passed.
My next project will be getting back into climbing. I was able to clear v5 and 5.11s with some consistency but I’ve grown old and fat. With some afternoons free I’m hoping to at least clear the local v4s in the next month or so.
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
8mo ago
How did you meet? How have your expectations for a partner changed over the years and across relationships? Do you have any regrets that you learned from or might be generalizable?
disposablehead
Hipster eugenicist
9mo ago
Don’t conflate wicked with impotent. That’s a long list of political accomplishments, even if you think they’re malevolent!
Ne Zha 2 is currently the best selling movie you’ve never heard of. It’s a sequel to an animated film from 2019 which was… fine? Impressive for a first-time director with a small budget but nothing to write home about.
But Ne Zha 2 is worth writing about. To get the CW part out of the way, it was animated entirely using Chinese firms, allegedly after the director felt exploited and ignored by other international animation groups. Maybe (probably?) AI was involved and some other animators don’t like this. It still looks better than any other effects work I can think of.
But the movie is just broadly excellent. The dialogue and characterization are sharp, the plot is tight (except for an indulgent act 3), and again, it’s visually astounding. Worth seeing in theaters!
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