johnfabian
2yr ago
Yes, baseball is very much a "hang-out" sport. I love playing baseball, love going to a game, hate to watch it on TV.
johnfabian
2yr ago
To further your baseball analogy, old-fashioned sign stealing is an "acceptable" form of cheating, that everyone does to some extent and is accepted in the culture of the game. What the Houston Astros did was egregious cheating outside of the accepted culture that was universally condemned (except by the MLB, unfortunately).
Any cheating in chess effectively follows example #2 because of how strong chess engines are.
johnfabian
2yr ago
It's important to remember that the Hugo Awards are not awarded by a panel; they're pure popular vote by those who attend Worldcon (or, alternatively, purchasing a "supporting membership" for voting rights for ~$50).
So naturally they tend to reflect the type of person who cares enough a. to attend Worldcon, b. to vote, and c. to make their vote reflective of their politics.
The results speak for themselves. But I do not think they represent some co-ordinated, deliberate attempt to pander.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Based on the news coming out of the UK, it looks like this might be the end for Queen Elizabeth II.
I think it's easy to underrate how important she has been as a figure of calm and stability after WWII. The Empire fell apart rapidly, and the Commonwealth and the UK itself might have as well if not for a universally respected figure to rally around. We'll see how things go after the initial period after her death but I would expect there to be greater support for Scottish independence and Irish reunification in the aftermath, and a growing republican movement in Commonwealth countries. Some anticipate that Charles will not become King (at the very least he probably wouldn't rule as Charles, given his namesakes) and instead abdicate for his much more popular son.
It's hard not to feel a keen sense of decline that over the course of her life the UK has gone from the likes of Churchill and Attlee to that of Bojo and Truss. Western nations have a tendency to devour each other in the culture wars and one of the few stalwart defences against that was a unifying public figure like Elizabeth II. I don't see any good coming of this.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The general principle was that once you seized a resistance line, dig your own foxholes and prepare for immediate counter-attacks. Using German trenches/fortifications was risky because they were usually pre-sighted for artillery and booby-trapped. This might seem like an obvious concept but in the exhilaration of battle when the enemy has seemingly broken it was not second nature to soldiers, and the tendency to get caught out by German mortar/artillery fire was common among replacements. What could really blunt the effectiveness of German counterattacks was having forward artillery observers; the firepower that American or Commonwealth troops could call on at the company and platoon level was in another universe entirely from what the Germans had on offer (German soldiers often grumbled that fighting the western Allies was a "rich man's war"), and the western allies had already mapped out range tables for the whole of France before landing in Normandy. This had been recognized as important in late WWI due to the similar need for breaking up German counterattacks.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I was reading a thing (probably from one of the pro-Russian sources, so salt to taste) that both sides have discovered a winning tactic that works well in this war along the lines of "temporarily occupy small village that you don't care about with an unsustainably small force -- when the enemy 'retakes' the village, quickly withdraw and level the village (plus enemy troops) to the ground with artillery".
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon - it was first employed by the Germans in WWI when they abandoned trench warfare in the west in favour of a strongpoint system in late 1916. The idea would be you have a lightly held outpost line that you pre-sight for artillery fire. Troops holding this line offer minimal resistance and then withdraw in the face of an enemy attack. Then you can counterattack an over-extended and disorganized enemy with very accurate artillery and fresh troops. This tactic was also used extensively in WWII and was something the Allies would specifically train against because it was so common.
johnfabian
2yr ago
johnfabian
2yr ago
I think your framing as Napoleon as "absolutist" is wildly incorrect. Napoleon is the central figure of liberalism's history. He more than anyone else is why liberalism won out. France unburdened by the extractive institutions of feudalism was able to fight the whole of Europe and (nearly) win. Massive armies of patriotic men led by officers who gained their positions by merit, backed by an economy not hamstrung by the Church, nobility, and state monopolies forced the rest of Europe's monarchies to make popular reforms, or perish. Even when Napoleon was ultimately defeated he had made 1848 inevitable.
Logically, shouldn't we expect powerful absolutist/totalitarian states to dominate, ceteris paribus?
Market economies tend to very badly outcompete state-directed ones. And that means that in a war, it's the market economies that are vastly more efficient and producing all you need to win one. In WWII the western allies absolutely clowned Germany, Japan, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union with respect to production of materiel.
I'm reading The Road to Dien Bien Phu, essentially a chronicle of the First Indochinese War from the perspective of Vietnamese state-building. Essentially the thesis is that Vietnam differed heavily from other post-colonial wars in that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam tried to build a centralized state with the capacity to wage conventional war (what the author refers to as "war communism") rather than relying on a non-centralized guerilla resistance.
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