johnfabian
4mo ago
The book I'm reading is the second volume of a 2018 translation of his gulag stories.
johnfabian
5mo ago
The development of the fire bombing campaign against Japan was a very late shift in the war; it started in February 1945 but really only got truly going in May. There were a number of unique circumstances that essentially only then made very low-level night bombing attacks viable, with B-29s literally stripped of all their defenses crammed to the gills with incendiaries.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Not sure what innocent French civilians have to do with this.
johnfabian
5mo ago
There were similar discussions to the hypothetical I mentioned before D-Day as well. Churchill was probably the most outspoken advocate for French civilians, and constantly fretted about their lives, even though he also ordered the infamous (but in my mind, eminently justified) raid on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir.
There are plenty of counterexamples, though. Many golfers don't peak until their late 30s or 40s. Some classic examples would include Phil Mickelson (who won his six majors between the ages of 34 and 51), Steve Stricker (who didn't peak until ~45), or right now Lucas Glover who has won the last two PGA events at age 43 and has resurrected his career after a decade and a half of being one of the randoms to win a major.
edit: forgot another great example. The only other player to have a "Tiger-esque" season in the last few decades was Vijay Singh who was 41 at the time (2004). The large majority of his wins came after he turned 40
johnfabian
8mo ago
you haven't even gotten into all the weird sex stuff yet!
johnfabian
11d ago
This is just the substack equivalent of the more deranged branches of critical theory. They posit that because they are against the people who claim all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society and YOU need to pick a side, that in fact all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society (but different). I'm fond of reading tea leaves but I think one loses the point (and fun) of it when you start smashing your head into your cup.
I was reflecting upon this earlier today when I saw on Reddit that the children's show Bluey had uploaded to youtube an episode that had been "banned" in the US. It wasn't actually banned, but Disney decided not to include it in the show's episodes for American subscribers. You can watch it here and take a guess as to why that might be. If you haven't heard of Bluey, it was the second-most watched television show (in total minutes) in America last year in spite of its short format. It's a charming show and is much more tolerable to adults than much of contemporary children's programming, most of which seems like the virtual equivalent of crack cocaine. It's been in the news recently because it may or may not have ended (?) despite being massively successful and profitable. I took a gander at some of the culture warring over it and it's invariably idiotic. The lunatic left see its messages of friendship and inclusion as proof it is secretly Marxist; the retarded right see a wholesome nuclear family with nary a Pride flag in sight and think it's hiding its power level. This kind of reading-into-things seems to me little different than the kind in the linked article.
Any time I see stuff like this my eyes protectively glaze over and my curiosity is ended. All of this kind of culture war obsession just strikes me as so incredibly infantile.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I often think of liberalism as a bell jar: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is essentially no competing world view that people in the west are exposed to. Everyone they meet are some kind of liberal. Liberals call each other "liberals" as an insult. The "communists" are really liberals, the "alt-right" are really liberals, when you scratch beneath whatever surface label they've applied to themselves all you find is a liberal. On the one hand this is a reflection of the blinding success of liberalism but also has resulted in a significant weakening of liberalism as an effective mode of governance.
To treat liberalism as an inevitable endpoint, or a universal truth, or some manifestation of the underlying laws of the universe; it undermines what made liberalism triumphant and successful.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Tai-Pan is also imo quite inferior compared to its "sequel", Noble House
johnfabian
5mo ago
It's usually framed using words like "resilience and strength" or "vibrant". The leading newspapers regularly feature columns from or interviewing people with incentives to encourage immigration with little critical analysis applied. Here's an example. Great emphasis is placed on the importance of housing prices continuing to rise in perpetuity.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Certainly the western allies saw very little distinction to be drawn between German civilians and combatants. There was sometimes an employment of various euphemisms to skirt around the brutal logic of this worldview (the proponents of strategic bombing liked to talk about "damaging enemy morale" or "targeting worker housing"), but generally the perspective was that the ultimate good was forcing unconditional surrender as soon as possible, by any means possible.
johnfabian
8mo ago
- Extroversion: 70
- Emotional stability: 66
- Agreeableness: 51
- Conscientiousness: 18
- Intellect/Imagination: 96
Not sure what this means exactly.
johnfabian
10mo ago
Of course, it's an older show...
New season coming out in a month
johnfabian
1mo ago
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
Even this analogy is somewhat inapt; it would require for OJ Simpson to have been unrepentantly open about killing them, with the defence team meanwhile trying and failing to construct alternative scenarios regardless.
Like I've said many times everytime SS starts beating this drum, Holocaust deniers never seem to come up with a convincing way to get around the fact that the Nazis were quite happy to admit they had killed millions of Jews. At best they would feign that they had somehow been coerced, or threatened, or were just following orders.
johnfabian
9mo ago
To me the central problem of IQ meritocracy is that intelligence is one value among many. If you were in charge of staffing a business or a school or a government ministry, it's understandable why you would want to prioritize intelligence; but if you prioritize intelligence alone you might start to run into problems. There are plenty of intelligent people who are conniving schemers, who are sociopathic, who are selfish and vain, who hate themselves or their country, who value their own advancement much greater than others, or who even simply prefer others failing to themselves succeeding. In these cases selecting individuals solely for their intelligence makes their destructive flaws worse. An inveterate gambler is a bad person to hire in accounting. An inveterate gambler who is also intelligent is a million times worse, because not only will they do much more damage they also are much more likely to be able to conceal their faults (and subsequently, the wake of destruction).
Western academia seems to be filled with plenty of smart people who hate themselves and their country. I don't think it would be an unpopular observation here to point out that them being intelligent makes it worse and not better. Maybe if we weren't so hellbent on selecting for IQ we would not have found ourselves in this position for IQ to be so roundly dismissed.
johnfabian
3mo ago
If the Western Allies had refused to ally with the Soviet Union, there would have been no war between Germany and Western Europe.
I cannot fathom what you mean by this. Like I cannot tell if you are being deliberately dishonest or if you have a perplexing, gigantic gap of knowledge. Who was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed by? Who made a deal split Poland, and all Eastern Europe? Who was allied right up until the point tanks began crossing the border on June 22 1941? Because it sure as shit wasn't the western allies and the Soviets.
johnfabian
2d ago
In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European.
Has there been some recent fascination with the book? I looked it up in the Toronto library system and all 8 copies are signed out, with multiple holds past that. Unusual popularity for a book from the 1940s.
johnfabian
3mo ago
It's hard to say exactly how much has filtered through to him on social media - I always hope that people in the public eye don't look at this kind of stuff, but you have to expect they do. The team itself always treated him very differently from Formenton - they gave him the A, he played a big part of media/promotion, etc. They clearly tried to establish without saying directly that he wasn't at fault. I think that makes the "guilty before even accused" behaviour worse, really. But it was also from a pretty small wedge of the fanbase, I wouldn't say all or even most of the "prog side" jumped in on this
johnfabian
4mo ago
Finished Prit Buttar's Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany's Eastern Front, 1944-45. The endgame of the Eastern Front tends to get short shrift in popular history with the exception of the capture of Berlin, and this is a very interesting book about a very messy series of campaigns. A must-read for lovers of war crimes.
Currently reading a collection of dissident (leftist) Soviet author Varlam Sharlamov, called Sketches of the Criminal World. More grim stuff, but quite darkly humourous at times.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I think it was likely that political pressures in Israel meant that a primarily non-violent response would not have been acceptable. Yes, Israel could have used the rush of international sympathy as diplomatic capital, but Israelis want a lot of Palestinians to die for this, and would vote for whoever promised that.
johnfabian
5mo ago
So no correlation. If you really really want to squint, there's a slightly positive correlation (which I did not expect).
johnfabian
5mo ago
One of the combat experiences about WWI is that the effect of chemical weapons in the battlefield environment were awful, but not decisive. With both sides prepared for the possibility, it raised the upper bound on human suffering without making your chance of victory any more certain. Chemical weapons were always fickle allies; they were very sensitive to changes in weather, they did unpredictable things, and ultimately if you were trying to use them to achieve some breakthrough you were inundating the areas you hoped to yourself capture.
There were various uses of chemical weapons against populations who could not fight back by the Germans and Japanese (moreso the latter), which was in many respects their "ideal" use case. But given the ability of both sides to be able to both manufacture large amounts of chemical weapons and deploy them against enemy civilian populations, and their marginal battlefield use, ultimately neither side saw them as practical.
But contingency planning and a German air raid led to the accidental discovery of chemotherapy, so that was cool.
johnfabian
5mo ago
There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause.
While this idea was not pursued with respect to targeting French cities, it was employed in the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Learning from experiences from the Blitz and the early years of strategic bombing, it became to be understood that attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure were in some respects more effective than targeting enemy manufacturing. Mass civilian casualties, and both damaging transport infrastructure and then deluging it with fleeing/wounded civilians, had larger downstream effects on military capabilities than directly targeting military elements themselves. The apogee of this mentality was the firebombing of Dresden, which was deliberately designed to cause maximum chaos in the German rear to limit their ability to co-ordinate a response to concurrent Soviet offensives.
johnfabian
6mo ago
Really, if Lenin was as influential and powerful of a figure as he was claimed to be, then Russia would've gotten off much lighter at Brest-Litovsk; he was the one pushing for peace, and Trotsky ended up convincing the rest of the Bolsheviks to follow his harebrained "neither war nor peace" strategy instead.
All the SBNation sites went downhill when they got monetized. Geez, I haven't been on SilverSeven for like 5-6 years now at least and it used to be a daily internet stop of mine.
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