johnfabian
21d ago
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
Your social media algorithms are almost certainly not feeding you opinions representative of "the left", just like "the left's" social media feeds are currently displaying the dumbest and most overwrought reactions from conservatives.
johnfabian
21d ago
I think there is certainly a case to be made that following these kind of style changes are more ideological than abstaining from their use because they are fundamentally prescriptive rather than descriptive. It was not the common use of English speech in America or anywhere else to refer to males as she/her should they wish to identify as such, and neither was it common use to capitalize Black. Calling a human male he or a person of predominantly African ethnicity black is not some conscious political choice. Choosing to do otherwise, and beyond that making it an institutional requirement to do so, is what is ideological (for better or worse).
Yes you can argue that choosing not to rebel against convention is just as political a choice as doing what everyone else does yada yada yada but I think this misses the point, besides being needless sophistry. When describe things as being "political", they mean that the action in question done was with deliberate intent to make some kind of rhetorical or political point. Failing to try to make a point, or not even conceiving of your speech as political at all, is obviously inherently less "political" in nature.
I like to say that even if you must insist that a chocolate chip cookie recipe is just as political as, say, Das Kapital, you must at least be able to recognize that they are political to vastly differing extents.
johnfabian
1mo ago
"migrant" in the UK context almost exclusively refers to illegal immigrants, and often specifically the small boat kind
johnfabian
1mo ago
You might have been thinking of Ukraine, whose GDP per capita is a third of Bulgaria's.
johnfabian
1mo ago
KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.
johnfabian
1mo ago
I about wrote some of my reflections on the trilogy here last year.
johnfabian
1mo ago
A much more frustrating element of SecureSignals' writing is that he will often make some passing mention of some supposed ironclad consensus that exists on this one niche topic, that requires no sourcing or validation (after all, it is the consensus!).
He will then of proceed to conspicuously deny universally agreed-upon facts.
johnfabian
1mo ago
I finished four books over my holiday, including Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire which I wrote a short review of on reddit
johnfabian
1mo ago
My initial thought after reading this post is that the future will have two types of capital C Conservatives: those who are excited by this kind of stuff, and those who think anyone enjoys this should be involuntarily sterilized.
johnfabian
1mo ago
Top 10%, but it feels like I got off easy, getting all relatively recognizeable phenotypes
johnfabian
1mo ago
All the attempts to claim other bands as progenitors/contemporaries in metal are laughable. Like people will bring up Deep Purple or Hendrix (or more rare bands like Lord Baltimore) but it's so obviously not metal when compared to Paranoid
there really wasn't another metal band until Judas Priest
johnfabian
2mo ago
It's possible - perhaps probable - that you were banned by an AI. Reddit is using LLMs to detect and automatically punish users for "violent" language. So you have to be careful quoting song lyrics, or politicians, or people you don't like, etc. In my experience they've just been warnings but if it was bad enough it might be a short ban.
johnfabian
2mo ago
This is a funny kind of idiocy, in the sense that not only is it objectively and very obviously false, but that it also obscures a more interesting controversial element. It would be like if someone's main criticism of Trump (being otherwise a generic liberal) was that he was not an American, but actually Burmese. (edit: on further reflection, what is actually quite similar is the claim I see pop up on reddit that the attempted assassination where Trump was grazed by a bullet was entirely faked, and he was not shot, or shot at, at all)
I only tangentially know who Owens is but I strongly suspect, like in many many other cases, this is another instance of social media-induced psychosis
johnfabian
2mo ago
Cheese is also a big one. There are lots of grocery items that are value-dense (is this a term?) Essentially give disproportionate payoff for the ease of taking and moving them. Bonus points if you only need limited effort to keep it in good condition.
And unlike other things where you basically already need to be a career criminal to get the ins to someone who will fence stolen property for you, stealing food products has another upside: there are a million struggling restaurants who will gladly buy your stolen product from you, no questions asked.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Canada of course famously has a strategic reserve of maple syrup (which a while ago was equally famously stolen).
johnfabian
4mo ago
Certainly there were lots of people who at the time of the Holocaust saw it as a uniquely terrible crime, even as it was ongoing. For example in July 1944, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden (concerning the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners’ camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Also the "right" is far from a unified front, as it is sort of awkwardly mashing together the progressive conservatives and Reform types.
The Jivani interview (that's JD Vance's bff) last night coming right out and blaming Ford for the defeat flabbergasted the CBC panel. Quite funny to see
johnfabian
5mo ago
Personally I mentally separate the West and BC. When people talk about "the West" they are not talking about Coquitlam.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Any tips for dealing with DOMs in the legs?
I find nothing works better for me than just walking it off. Yes it hurts but it gets the blood flowing. Eat extra protein and you'll be fine.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Loved loved season 1. Season 2 was a mess. I'm willing to extend it some measure of grace because there was a long series of disruptions behind the scenes (writer's strike, actor's strike, power struggles). But if it continues in the way of season 2 I'm going to drop it quickly.
johnfabian
6mo ago
It's a pretty big gamble to think you can get all of them when even one can kill 50+ million Americans.
johnfabian
6mo ago
NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.
Historically the US has used NATO nuclear sharing to store "tactical" warheads in non-nuclear armed member countries that, in the case of war, would be released to those nations' armed forces. Ostensibly it was decentralize command-and-control in case of a hot war where a top-down strategy for using nukes might be impractical or impossible, but really it was a wink wink nudge nudge to the Soviets about not nuking Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, etc by extending the umbrella of nuclear deterrence to them with American weapons. It was not about the physical location of the warheads so much as that the control and delivery of them would be effectively released to those nations themselves in time of war.
The reason why the Baltic countries would want to be in on this is that they would hope it would provide extra deterrence to a Russian invasion. Poland has actually made some noise about it.
johnfabian
6mo ago
As I said somewhere a the descendant of this thread, I think Putin was expecting Ukraine to cave immediately and demonstrate why you should not gesture in the direction of NATO. This isn't going how they planned and all of their actions afterwards have been bad.
All the Russian moves seemed to have assumed a more-or-less immediate collapse of the Ukrainian government and its armed forces. Everything about the first two weeks of the war, and Russia's grand strategy in general, seems to have been predicated on that. It will be really interesting to see if we ever get a behind-the-scenes history of the decision making involved because I would bet a lot of crazy things were being said behind closed doors immediately before and after the start of the war.
johnfabian
6mo ago
His argument in brief is that populations should have control over the services that effect them: so suburban services for a given city should be controlled by the local government, even though his ideal model sees a national, public-owned company owning the rail infrastructure, the rolling stock, hiring the employees, running the trains etc. So ownership should be centralised: planning and operation devolved. He sees this going hand in hand with extensive public consultation: not just at the planning phase but before that, starting at the proposal phase. He thinks (rather axiomatically) that direct education and involvement of the public of the benefits of a given infrastructure project will naturally engender far-reaching support for that project. The only hurdle he thinks that should be removed is any pondering of fiscal sense:
'With emissions climbing, and all the other things that railways can resolve getting worse to boot, now is the time to invest and expand. With power sufficiently distributed and railways democratised, such investment can be rapidly deployed. Forget business cases — so long as there is appropriate environmental and social impact assessment, the worst-case scenario is that a railway remains underused. The likelihood of this greatly diminishes if it is part of a suitably well-developed plan.
We must invest to build the world we want, not dance around the edges of the world we see today, not least as cultures of low investment generally lead to systems that exclude the most vulnerable in society, such as where accessibility changes are deprioritised because the bean counters just don’t see it as “value for money”.'
I think there is some merit to the notion of decentralisation; I think a decent chunk of the cost problems associated with modern transit construction, particularly in the Anglosphere, is the imbalance of revenue generation between municipal and higher levels of government that result in transit projects largely being designed by cities but paid for by higher levels of government; it invites buffet-style planning on the one end and political interference on the other. But I think in general his approach is just naïve beyond belief; the combination of the assumption that local interests will only work in everyone's best interests and abandoning any pretense of fiscal restraint obviously invites endless waste and graft.
I think people try to create some objective sense of what is "good" worldbuilding and what is "bad." Sanderson's worldbuilding is sort-of slapdash and relies heavily on rule-of-cool, which I don't think is a bad thing - it just doesn't work when paired with torturously meandering and overstuffed writing. It needs sharp prose and quick action.
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