johnfabian
2d ago
Is it this, or that there hasn't been much demand for capital production of mass munitions in decades? The last war that used them in bulk was what, Vietnam? Every Western war since has been dominated my high-complexity munitions that often seem designed to separate the explosives from the fiddly bits. You can presumably build JDAM kits on any electronic assembly line.
I suppose one could quibble about what "in bulk" means, but there was plenty of use of artillery by western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was the operational point of establishing firebases, outposts, and forward operating bases out in the hot areas: that's where you site your artillery, and then everything within a 30 km ring of that can be shelled within minutes.
johnfabian
6d ago
This is a sort of pet interest of mine. I remember reading a book on the French revolution where the preface had a similar sort of comment: that every history of the French Revolution was really itself more a commentary on contemporary politics. It's an interesting way to go about looking at past media.
One I watched earlier in the year was Minority Report. For those unaware, it's a Spielberg film from 2002 starring Tom Cruise. In the near future bla bla bla, Washington DC comes up with a way to see murders before they happen, and arrest the perpetrators before they kill anyone. The suspects get sort of put into a coma and incarcerated forever. Then of course Tom Cruise gets framed for a murder he hasn't yet committed, and etc etc the program gets shut down.
This is of course was obviously pointed at US criminal justice, and particularly the debate over the death penalty which was a popular cause célèbre at that point. The problem is the film sets up the moral dilemmas very poorly. For one it turns out the "precogs" (who see the future) are never wrong; the film teases you with the notion that they're regularly making mistakes and imprisoning innocent people frequently but it turns out that the grand sum of their errors was literally just two times where the head of the program tricked them. The film tries to play around with this question of "fate"; can you really punish a man for a crime he hasn't committed yet? But because the program has been so successful at extirpating premeditated homicides most of the time they're stopping people who are literally in the act of killing someone in a crime of passion (in the opening sequence, they grab a guy just as he is swinging down to stab his wife for adultery).
So they try to make it out like this whole program is some clear moral wrong when they've actually succeeded in pretty much eliminating murder, and entirely without false positives. It's some real turn of the millennium optimism that the problem with the American justice system is that it is too effective at stopping crime. Easy to imagine this film being much different if it was adapted again today.
johnfabian
7d ago
They imply murder, not very justified self-defence.
What I expected from the title was actually vehicular manslaughter.
johnfabian
23d ago
It sort of comes from a period of time (1860s and 1870s) where the immediate success of the theory of evolution in providing an overarching material explanation for diversity of life on Earth engendered great enthusiasm in discovering similar sorts of grand theories that explained fully other disciplines. And while we eventually got some for certain of the "harder" scientific fields, obviously the softer sciences have resisted such attempts. Marx attempted to provide a grand theory of politics; it has clearly been about as successful as grand theories for history, criminality, economics, poverty, etc.
johnfabian
25d ago
I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
Quite the opposite, really. Churchill of course wanted those involved in the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes tried and executed, but he was very hostile to any sort of indiscriminate mass revenge against senior German officers and officials.
In fact there was an episode during the Tehran Conference in November 1943 where Stalin made a "joke" about how they could just kill 50-100,000 of the most senior German leaders to prevent another war, and FDR responded (in a more humourous tone) that maybe 49,000 would be enough. Churchill, knowing of the Katyn massacre and much more cynical towards Stalin than the somewhat naïve FDR, stormed out and had to be convinced to come back and resume the conference.
johnfabian
1mo ago
This type of "hypocrisy gotcha" you see as a go-to defence mechanism is very frustrating to me. "OH, so YOU EXPECT ME to be BETTER than [my political outgroup]? Why don't you hold them to the same standard?!?!?!"
Well firstly, often people are. Not everyone is locked into a rigidly partisan mindset. Secondly if you proclaim you are better, loudly and repeatedly at all times, you have to walk the walk.
johnfabian
1mo ago
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this.
Be honest and admit that these kind of "just joking" comments come from all sides. I don't like it, I think it's probably more insidious than people think, and at its core is corrosive to an open society. But if you think this is solely a "left-wing" or "Democrat" phenomenon and one couldn't trivially produce examples of Republicans doing the exact same thing, you're lying to yourself. Hell, it's not uncommon to see this kind of sentiment on this forum, albeit typically worded more fancily.
johnfabian
1mo ago
Suppose Hornblower is the obvious next suggestion, but the question is whether you want something in the same niche or something in the same spirit. The former is easy to find, the latter is hard.
johnfabian
1mo ago
Edit: FWIW I think Sanderson's world building in the Stormlight Archives is actually pretty good, it just gets dragged down by the plodding story.
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.
johnfabian
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo ago
"migrant" in the UK context almost exclusively refers to illegal immigrants, and often specifically the small boat kind
johnfabian
2mo ago
You might have been thinking of Ukraine, whose GDP per capita is a third of Bulgaria's.
johnfabian
2mo 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
2mo ago
I about wrote some of my reflections on the trilogy here last year.
johnfabian
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
Top 10%, but it feels like I got off easy, getting all relatively recognizeable phenotypes
johnfabian
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
Canada of course famously has a strategic reserve of maple syrup (which a while ago was equally famously stolen).
I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I'm vaguely aware that Mamdani is a sort of DSA-type, so I think it's fairly safe to bet policy-wise he's a bit out there, but also won't accomplish much. But it's hard not to root for him a little given the kind of frothing, incoherent rage he was generating.
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