fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I think one of the worst recent developments is the extent to which we’ve made our personal lives hostage to our political beliefs. Who cares, just call him they. This isn’t lying or submitting to an evil authority, it’s a minuscule, inconsequential compromise to get along, after you’ve made your position clear. Save your spine for someone you don't care about.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Are you arguing that ruthlessness and effective rule are correlated, or merely that effective rule is not necessarily nice?
Ruthlessness isn’t a proxy for ruling well. His lopping-off slaves’s heads character trait is at best orthogonal to his ruling quality. Pol Pot and the Kims are ruthless, most of the failed states are ruled by psychos. Look at africa, Moulay’s roots, and bask in the good times these hard men have brought.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Don’t know about music, but mountains of literature, definitely not.
In 1991: 102,000 new books published in North America; 6,500 in the Arab world.
In 2022, Israel published 6971 books, so about as much as the entire arab world.
Reports and studies have shown significantly low reading levels in the Arab world. The average reading time for an Arab child is six minutes a year compared with 12,000 minutes in the West, according to the Arab Thought Foundation’s Arab Report for Cultural Development. The reading rate of an Arab individual is a quarter of a page a year compared with 11 books in the US and seven books in the UK, according to a study conducted by the Supreme Council of Culture in Egypt.
In the 1980s, number of books translated per million people, per five years: Arab world 4.4, Hungary 519, Spain 920 .
In terms of quantity, and notwithstanding the increase in the number of translated books from 175 per year during 1970-1975 to 330, the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the number translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the Al-Ma’moon era to the present day amounts to 10,000 books - equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year (Shawki Galal, in Arabic, 1999, 87)
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
This is just explaining the fuckup, not justifying it. Mitscher perhaps thought it was a good idea, but it was still stupid - or as the article says, unwise.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Before the battle the issue is not to get fuel into your planes, but how to get it out of your hangars before it burns down the ship.
You're overcomplicating the hornet issue, like there's some 8D chess reason for a simple, yet major, fuckup.
Has anyone beside you ever thought it was a good idea, well-justified ?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Launching everything is both defensively and offensively superior - best way to keep your carriers intact.
Anyway, back to Hornet's flight, mitscher knew he fucked up, the insubordinate flight leader certainly thought it was stupid.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Ah yes I forgot fletcher also held down yorktown in reserve at first. Again, total waste of an hour. They were so afraid of making a mistake when the worst mistake was inaction - Copenhagen ethics strategy. What if the japanese showed up in that hour. An extremely explodey carrier and no strike. Those admirals all sucked, except maybe spruance.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Really, you're going to defend the flight to nowhere?
Even if the carriers are not all at the confirmed original sighting (say, 50% chance (because, in reality, as we know they were at the sighting), you still have to have the luck to find them (maybe 20% chance) .
So basically you incapacitated an airgroup for a 10% chance to sink 2 extra carriers, assuming they are good.
While if you send them to the sighting, you have a 50% chance to sink 2 extra carriers, plus the increase in chance of sinking the confirmed carriers, who might have been missed by the original strike.
If Nagumo had CarDiv 5, this might have been alleviated.
Having more forces is not a strategy. Anyone can win with more.
Are you just arguing to argue( it's fine if you are), or do you really believe yamamoto's reserve order, and Hornet's void search were correct decisions?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I think after Coral Sea, both navies’ admirals were paralyzed by the thought of launching against the wrong target, and appearing stupid. The reserves they kept for discovering ‘true’ targets were a liability. The defeat can be traced to the original decision to keep half in reserve. Nagumo should have launched everything against midway, first thing. That could have shut down the base, and there wouldn’t have been ordnance or fueled planes lying around, greatly increasing the survivability of his fleet.
Same thing with fletcher’s reluctance to launch everything at eastern solomons (which he ended up doing anyway). Hornet’s decision to head west to keep looking for more carriers falls into the same kind of completely faulty decision-making, when they were at least two perfect targets. They went looking for a bird in the bush when they had two, and perhaps all, in hand. It’s baffling, I can’t explain it other than their egos getting the better of them, wanting to be the trailblazing hero instead of just doing their job.
This perfectionist mentality is what doomed the japanese : ‘first we’ll find all the carriers, then we’ll launch a perfect, coordinated strike’ – when they should have launched what they had, and sunk what was available – more in the spirit of the disjointed american attacks.
Only later on in the war did they catch on and at philippine sea they immediately launched when they saw an incoming strike, they told them to circle, attack land targets whatever, anything but keep planes on the ship ‘as a (flammable) reserve’. More Yamamoto’s fault really, but since nagumo was willing to ignore the order to keep the reserve, he shouldn’t have half-assed it.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
What do you call a very small fraction? Seems to me large parts of the military were involved in it, or otherwise 'pacifying' to allow the einsatzgruppen to do their work. All of this wouldn't even be necessary if they just played the kind liberators against soviet oppression.
But that's not even the worst waste: Without the antisemitic obsession , jews would be the usual highly productive workforce, like in WWI, and perhaps they could build an atomic bomb for germany, or find another Haber-Bosch, or Fischer-Tropf process. Slave labor benefits, or the value of their gold teeth, are a joke by comparison.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Aside from the utilitarian benefit of his staying, which i would dispute on second-order effects, fruits of a poisonous tree or something, it just bothers me that this weasel got away with it while his underlings went to the gallows/seppuku'd.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Obvious solution to maintain the institution while holding the man responsible is suicide. Beyond the man, I woud question why such an institution who failed and was largely responsible for the militaristic and anti-democratic turn of japan should have been maintained in the first place. They made liars of “unconditional surrender’ to maintain this joke of an institution. I’m sure a continuation of the nazi party in germany would have done wonders at stability and limiting riots and such, but hey, they’re the ones who made a mess of it all in the first place, and so did he.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I'd gladly witness your culling by a militarily superior race in its quest for Lebensraum, so long as it's explicitly justified with this inane correlational logic.
Already happened. And my nazi grandfathers had to witness the full extent of their moral, racial, military and epistemologic inferiority. They fought till destruction because they really believed in the correlation, far more than I do. In a way it vindicated the theory while it destroyed them and their particular beliefs.
When you’re living in your bombed-out capital, your conscience sullied, your army destroyed, your reputation infamous, the universe is trying to tell you something. You can immediately exclude the hypothesis of having done anything right, and of your own superiority.
I don't think realpolitik will triumph if the west falls - people have always resisted the athenians, even when it was hopeless - witness the realists anger at Ukraine. If china dominates, they'll just make their own rules russia and the others will have to obey, and the russians will still be grumbling about 'universalism' .
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Evil is usually a bad tactic. The holocaust really slowed down the german war effort. I wish they'd understood how bad genocide is tactically. They could have achieved more objectives for less blood.
Anyway, who's mask off? rafa is always for culling the young male population anywhere, anytime.
I don't recognize the claims of the indians or palestinians , and I don't even need to call them savages, - all they have are earlier claims of conquest that have been nullified by more recent ones.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
After the bombs his answer to the question ‘what if they refuse to keep you as emperor, will we fight on? ‘ was ‘of course’. I always have to think of this ridiculous man when people talk of the mythical ‘noblesse oblige’. Here was a man considered a god, whose subjects were killing themselves and others by the millions for him, who could not even take one ounce of responsibility – think of others for one second. Had he never heard of suicide?
It’s human I guess – if you tell a man he is noble, he is godly, he will believe it – and question his actions even less than he would have otherwise. His instinct will never be to turn towards the ragged masses and ‘give back’ (As far as he knows, he did not receive anything from them, so he couldn’t anyway) or sacrifice anything. These strictly hierarchical relationships are purely one-way.
Ever notice that, as, you rise through a company , both your salary and the respect you’re getting increase simultaneously ? It’s not like your superiors help you more when you take out the trash because noblesse oblige. It’s not complicated, the lower on the layer cake you are, the more shit you take. And Mr. Hito was never taking and always giving.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
First of all, the US being a juggernaut of any sort is 20-20 hindsight.
How ? In WWI they were the decisive factor. In the washington naval treaties they commanded first rank (nominally equal to britain, but everyone knew, industrially far superior) . Major european power france accepted a 1,75 to 5 ratio to the US fleet, it's a huge disparity, making any serious contest impossible. And they couldn't even build that much. No one was treating the US as a lightweight.
Certainly the japanese understood they were screwed in case of a long attritional war against the US.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
I agree with rafa. I keep telling you Might Morality and Truth are correlated. As are Weakness, Ignorance and Evil. Parent to child, elder to younger sibling, civilised to barbarian, the stronger is often the wiser.
It’s a strange equivalence op is trying to draw. The more obvious one is that with israeli capabilities , hamas would have killed far more jews in a day than jews ever killed palestinians. palestinians owe their lives to jewish clemency, yet are incapable of it. They are ignorant of their own weakness, and morally childish, which is to say, incompetent and cruel .
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Regulars get less charity than newbies and private accounts of unknown provenance. This isn’t me flaunting the rules or refusing to recognize your autoritah, we’re talking about effectively banning me for stuff new accounts would barely get warned for , slowly but indelibly added up over years of participation like a kafkaian nightmare.
Imo over that timescale the good washes out the bad. (if there is any. Basically, to answer your question, I’m an innocent man, victim of circumstance, accused by appearance)
For example here, rafa’s the most resilient person on the motte, completely unfazed by antagonism, if what I said even counts. The way I see it, you’re defending people who don’t need defending, enforcing borderline rules for the hell of it.
Anyway, I got your meaning, I should write that QC so I’ll get the benefits, implicitly.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
If - big if - I write a AAQC, will you stop increasing the bans and go back to warnings?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Inexorably, the bans get longer and longer. Shouldn’t I get a reset somewhere, I’ve paid my debts to mottiety.
The gradual automatic escalation is stupid, site's getting unusable for me now. Will the garden improve after I leave, weed-puller?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Why do you call the japanese scouting efforts 'fucking stupid'(area of sweden etc) when you later note that they perfectly localized the enemy that day.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
Not much of a signal, assassination is a pretty egalitarian weapon. The main difference is not the power differential imo, it’s that putin’s enemies don’t wan’t him dead as much as he wants them dead. I’m sure Prig could have organized something, but he chose to rely on the warm-heartedness of putin instead.
Prig, you, hillbilly and me, we all first have to recognize that the dictator might kill us easily, and it will help him – is that worship, or respect, of power?
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
With no IC engines, no electricity, no pesticides, no modern crops and techniques and a general iron-age toolset at best, we would in fact most likely all be starving if we didn't work the land. That's my understanding, at least. Is yours different?
We'd also be starving if we worked the land. Not starving is not about working the land, it's about all those things produced by people who don't work the land.
What evidence is this statement based on? What tools then existing and proven would make up for, say, a 30% reduction in agricultural labor?
Take trade, for example. No need to work the land if you can trade clothes or swords for more polish or egyptian grain than you could ever have produced. And the mere presence of that transport capacity makes famine less likely.
Do you think the highly urbanized low countries were the ones starving when famine struck ? This would be what your theory straightforwardly predicts.
If these people moved to the cities and generated wealth as you allege, wouldn't that make the bosses' positions better? Why wouldn't they want that to happen? Why wouldn't they think that would happen?
The difference is the benefit doesn’t accrue to them, it accrues to society. 5000 dollars in my pocket has quite a bit more weight than a million for the state.
As always, they were stupid and self-interested. If they honestly believed they were altruistically trying to stave off starvation, they could simply have agreed to the raises. But they wanted to maximize their own surplus at the cost of the peasants, and took away their leverage by force.
fuckduck9000
2yr ago
According to that simple math, we should all be starving because we don’t work the land. If the salaries were higher in the cities, so was productivity. In simple terms, they more than made up for the loss of their farming work by producing tools, trading for better crops etc, which allowed the farmers to support them, and enriched society in the process.
Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks.
They didn’t do it to be dicks, but because it was in their interest, like a boss who refuses a raise. The difference being, that boss wouldn’t take ‘fuck you, then. I’m off’ for a legal answer.
What are you talking about? What does this have to do with anything? Are you counting soviet civilians as subjects of germany, and german soldiers as tragic passive victims 'being killed' through no fault of their own? It sounds like those germans were having a real hard time in this war that came out of nowhere, and then decided a bit of jew-killing would help.
Germans had rationing, but they were not starving during the holocaust, every other population they controlled was. I think there was a Hitler quote about that - apparently traumatized by the WWI blockade, he swore that every european would starve before a single german, or something to that effect. Plus the more intentional starving of 'zig millionen' slavs in the hungerplan.
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