johnfabian
2yr ago
I think small family farms are an entire world of difference from industrial meat processing. I feel people who actually kill/process the animals the eat basically have no moral burden. They are willing and able to do the task themselves. I've killed animals before and have found myself able to have done so without self-disgust, so that somewhat mitigates the qualms I have about my meat-eating. As for the rest of it I try to only eat meat once or twice per week.
I've kicked around in my head the hypothetical of requiring people over the age of 14 or 16 to get a "meat-eater's license", i.e. having to kill/dress a larger mammal by themselves in order to qualify to eat meat. I wonder what percentage of the larger population would disqualify themselves from eating meat if they were forced to jump through that hoop. I do feel that if you cannot steel yourself to take the life of an intelligent, social animal like a pig or a deer or a cow, then you should not eat meat.
I don't identify as an effective altruist (but I generally shirk from labels, and I dislike that label for much the same reason I dislike "rationalist").
johnfabian
2yr ago
Are you looking for a discussion of historiography, or specifically a focus on primary sources?
johnfabian
6mo ago
Currently reading Prit Buttar's two-part history of the siege of Leningrad. I now have many tragic anecdotes about people starving to death. Also have several very funny anecdotes about people starving to death.
johnfabian
6mo ago
Following in the footsteps of the other famous American driven to be an outlaw by healthcare costs.
johnfabian
1yr ago
He's really fat. Easily obese.
johnfabian
1yr ago
he says "puck". It's an old saying about why Wayne Gretzky was so good.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Eh, I think that's underselling Paul's position. Her chief-of-staff was saying that all Green MPs have to be Zionists, and she was backing him.
johnfabian
2yr ago
The most fun/silly culture war argument in a while: STOVES!
Hey, did you hear the Democrats are coming for your gas stoves? Variations on that were the instigation of a bizarre culture war spat last week. Apparently some government official speculated about banning gas stoves because of health concerns, and that started the now-predictable cycle of "No, you're wrong!" bouncing around social media. I saw various reactions to this in different spaces and they were interesting in the way they were filtered through the various political lenses. In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here. On the other hand saw lots of bourgeois PMC foodies declaring that you would only take their gas stoves from charred, dead hands.
I'm a hobbyist cook. I love trying new foods, experimenting with new recipes, and making food for friends and family. I'm the one who gets chained to the stove all through Christmas time (I like it though). So I found this a refreshingly fun (amid the inherent stupidity) culture war. My short opinion, having cooked with both gas and electric (rare to have gas in Canada); average gas stoves are better than average electrics, but among better ranges it depends what you want to do. I have a nice electric stove right now and I reckon I prefer it to gas because it is a lot more powerful which helps for high-temperature cooking (good for meat, Chinese food), and also is more constant at low temperatures (I make a lot of soft-scrambled eggs). But gas generally has much finer temperature control which is very practical for restaurant applications and to a certain extent rewards higher skill in a cook.
Gas does have real health/environmental implications. Yes, good ventilation goes a long way to preventing serious health risks, but it's not nothing. And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale). How much these considerations weigh against the legitimate reasons people have for preferring gas for cooking depends on the individual. But certainly people resent a top-down government intervention to force them to change their preference, and are skeptical of the reasoning presented.
But you know what this really reminds me of? The hot culture war debate of 20 years ago: incandescent lightbulbs vs. fluorescents. I've mentioned this a few times before here, but it's one of those culture wars that just disappeared, and I think many people would be genuinely forgetful or surprised if you brought it up to them now. It was a big thing at the time: as a kid I would remember reading the op-ed section of the newspaper and see endless letters to the editor about how using incandescent bulbs were our God-given right or you were a heartless rapist of the earth if you didn't immediately switch to fluorescents. The breakdown of that culture war was pretty simply liberal/conservative (should be obvious which side was which), whereas this one doesn't align people so neatly. But what the real comparison to the present is what ended the previous culture war: a new technology came along that made both previous ones (and their partisans) obsolete. LEDs ended up just being simply superior to both in every way. Progress ended the culture war.
Enter: induction cooking. It's electric. No particulate emissions. It's extremely powerful. It has fantastic temperature control. It's getting cheaper. You can have a traditional range, or just a hotplate: it's flexible and scalable. It's much safer, both for risk of burns and for starting fires. The only downside is that some existing cookware isn't compatible with it (you need ferrous metals in your vessel for it to work).
My prediction is that by the end of the decade induction replaces all gas stoves and most electrics. And twenty years later people will be bemused and embarrassed that we had such a silly argument over this.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.
A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.
And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.
So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Germany's war on Poland provides no justification for England and France to ally with the Soviet Union in a catastrophic war aim of unconditional surrender on Germany.
This is the second time you've made this comment. I know you're not a complete fucking mongoloid, but obviously you think the rest of us are. So tell me again: how did the Soviet Union end up allying with the UK? Did Germany, say, do anything to the USSR that made them break their alliance?
johnfabian
8mo ago
It’s hard not to view this as just the latest in a long string of people lighting their credibility on fire for a tiny chance of stopping bad orange man. It seems to run contrary to every other piece of evidence: polls, registration, early voting, “vibes.”
A Trump blowout still seems like the most likely scenario to me. There is just too much going in Trump’s favor relative to the very close 2020 election.
We've only got a few days to wait so we'll see. But how willing are you to consider that rather than your ideological opponents willfully blinding themselves, it is perhaps you?
I've got no horse in this race; I suppose I would prefer Harris wins but it would certainly be funnier if Trump does. Seems like this pollster has a sterling track record. I'm not sure why your initial response would be blanket denial.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"
What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)
This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Boy, it sure would've been a big coup if somehow, someone had managed to get a hold of the guy who prepared those minutes and asked some questions about it. Maybe have a big trial or something, I'm just spitballing. Then we could really get to the bottom of this. Too bad it never happened.
I would like to note that this entire time Mr. SS has been using the exact "levering" tactic I wrote about in the comment that sparked this whole chain of discussion. Of course it's all disingenuous, and there's ultimately no end to it because the impetus isn't just a bullish sort of contrarianism but also (rather obviously) a hate for Jews. There's no way to win on logic or a sound argument because that's not what put him in his position.
Quoting the camp commandant, Franz Stangl:
Around the turn of the year 1942/1943, following instructions from higher up, the bodies started being burned. At first a burning grid was made out of the trolley rails still available. However, these could not bear the weight of the mountains of corpses. Thereupon a bigger grid was erected by the gas chamber building, which was made of railway rails placed on concrete foundations. At first there were difficulties also with this burning installation. As a specialist for such burnings an Unterführer by the name of Floss came to Treblinka, who after some experiments brought the grid into the right position. In a pit underneath the grid a wood fire was maintained. The corpses were now placed upon the grid in layers and burned.
Concrete blocks were installed as a base to lay the rails on. About 1000 bodies were burned at a time, with 5-7,000 per day.
Quoting SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Matthes, who was in charge of Camp III (the extermination section of Treblinka):
The cremation took place in such away that railway lines and concrete blocks were placed together. The corpses were piled on these rails. Brushwood was put under the rails. The wood was doused with petrol. In that way not only the newly accumulated corpses were cremated, but also those taken out from the graves.
Yechiel Reichmann, a Jew part of the "burning group" who was one of the several dozen who survived the mass breakout from Treblinka that ended its operation:
The SS "expert" on body burning ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer of the grill, face down. The second layer could consist of whatever was brought – men, women, or children – and so on, layer on top of layer… Then the "expert" ordered us to lay dry branches under the grill and to light them. Within a few minutes the fire would take so it was difficult toapproach the crematorium from as far as 50 meters away.
(The "expert" referred to was SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel.)
Once again, I would repeat that the biggest obstacle to Holocaust denialists is why exactly the Germans (as well as Ukrainian and Polish auxiliaries who testified about the cremation of corpses at the Aktion Reinhard camps) went into such imaginary and morbid detail about something that never happened. Why not just deny it all if they were innocent? Why come up with such ridiculous exaggerations and lies, and then why did the other witnesses also lie to corroborate them? Barely any Jewish victims survived the Reinhard camps to claim otherwise.
Quotes sourced from Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka : The Operation Reinhard Death Camps by Yitzkah Arad.
johnfabian
2yr ago
We have some records from the Persians, but they tend to be more archaeological rather than narrative histories (or plays, or essays, or other written works).
The long story short is that papyrus scrolls require careful handling, and even with that reproduction; i.e. the surviving Classical works from the Romans and Greeks were not the originals but copies of copies. Hellenistic scribes evidently were less interested in reproducing Persian texts than they were Greek ones. Presumably the Arab conquest and subsequent wars didn't help either, but even by the time of the Romans, written Persian sources were noticeably lacking.
Herodotus was evidently working with Persian sources when writing his histories, be they written or oral histories, as well as presumably interviewing Persians themselves. By contrast Plutarch's Parallel Lives (which is our first reasonably full accounting of the life of Alexander, despite being written about 400 years after Alexander), while drawing heavily from now-lost Greek sources that were written during or shortly after the time of Alexander, is near-completely silent about the Persian perspective.
johnfabian
1yr ago
The communists needed the liberals much more than the other way around. If the western allies had refused to help the Soviets at all and the Germans beat them, Berlin and Hamburg and Frankfurt are still piles of radioactive ash come September 1945.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Liberalism is only successful because its adherents truly believe in it and cannot imagine anything else. The second it's regarded as anything other than an inevitable endpoint, or universal truth, is when it is going to fail.
I think you underestimate the strength of liberalism. In the darkest days of 1940-41 when it was Britain alone against Germany, many were happy to write it off as an annoyingly obstinate but ultimately dead ideology. Yet the liberal democracies ended up thrashing the autocracies; not only crushing them under the weight of the combined outputs of the arsenals of democracy but ultimately converting them as well.
Perhaps liberalism will wither and decay. Perhaps some other, superior, more evolutionarily fit ideology will take its place. But I'm not betting against it just yet.
johnfabian
1yr ago
That may be tolerable for someone who wasn't Netanyahu. Netanyahu built his image on being the Great Defender, while simultaneously burning his political capital with his corruption and mismanagement. Maybe another leader could've weathered the storm in trying to show restraint, but Netanyahu had to strike back disproportionately. Every Palestinian killed works towards rebuilding his position.
johnfabian
2yr ago
If you met me there is zero chance you'd describe me as anything other than white. I find myself extraordinarily doubtful whether you can visually identify who has "pure European heritage" out of a group of North Americans.
johnfabian
2yr ago
They're a race of fictional creatures that help with chores. I think people are trying way too hard about this.
Whenever I see someone on reddit go on this big rant about how awful it is that the characters in Harry Potter aren't constantly denouncing house elves I just roll my eyes. Boy, could you imagine how embarrassing it would be if we exploited animals in real life?
johnfabian
2yr ago
Certainly in terms of raw numbers more Soviets than Jews perished, but there was a differing zeal to which the Germans pursued and killed Jews. Somewhat ironically they were aided in this by Soviet censorship of near-any information concerning their chief ideological enemies: most Soviet Jews were not aware the Nazis were anti-semitic. For example when the decision was made to liquidate all the Jews of Kiev, the German authorities were shocked at the turnout when they demanded Jews present themselves for "relocation"; ~33,000, more than double what they expected. It took 3 days to murder them all, with help for Ukrainian militias.
Ukrainians themselves were of course of various minds with respect to the Soviet authorities; especially many of the older generation were welcoming of the Germans, at least initially. Currently I'm reading Retribution: The Soviet Reconquest of Central Ukraine, 1943-44, and so far it has featured a lot of anecdotes from German soldiers about helpful Ukrainians. This was of course partly merely survival tactics. The German logic was brutal: the book quotes Erich Koch (Reichskommissar of Ukraine) as saying:
If these people [the Ukrainians] work for ten hours a day, eight of those must be for us. All sentimental considerations must be put aside. These people must be ruled with iron force as this will help us to win the war. We have not liberated the Ukraine for their pleasure, but to secure the essential Lebensraum and food supply for Germany.
and further:
We did not come here to dispense Manna from heaven, we came here to create the preconditions of victory … We are the master race and must bear in mind that the most insignificant German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times as valuable as the local population.
The Nazis were at least as willing as the Soviets, if not more, to work Ukrainians to death for their utopia; and that of course would only be the beginning.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Musk acts like an eight year old and I don't care that he's poking people I don't like; it's just embarrassing to be so rich and still be a tantrum-prone child
johnfabian
2yr ago
It seems strange to use the word "tyrannizing" in the context of the government voiding constitutional rights, but having it apply to the ones whose rights are being violated
johnfabian
4mo ago
I've been reading Richard Gwyn's two-part biography of Sir John A recently and it's interesting to see how many direct parallels there are. Confederation was essentially premised on economic rationales in order for the British North American colonies to be able to compete against American tariffs, and much of the post-Confederation work of Macdonald was to try and cobble together a semblance of national identity and acquire the rest of British North America as a way to forestall American annexation. We've been in tough times before. The problem is I don't know if there's any politician of that caliber around today. The people who would be that kind of leader generally aren't in politics to begin with.
I don't think it's so easy to say. But the settlements are very obviously a sore spot for Palestinians, and more to the point seem to indicate that making deals with Israel is a fruitless gesture - any diplomatic agreement is not worth the paper they are written on if Israel will just move in settlers at gunpoint. And it isn't just Palestinians that Israel is double-crossing with respect to the settlements, they make these deals with their allies to limit them and go do them anyways. From the perspective of a secular Palestinian, why on earth would you trust a foe who willingly violates the trust of their friends, let alone their enemies?
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