johnfabian
1mo ago
Would there be? Does NATO risk nuclear war for the sake of Estonia?
What if it's just a border incursion? The Russians penetrate some 20 or 30 km and then stop. What if it's just shelling or a few bombs dropped on military bases?
I don't think this is something particularly likely, but the Russians might think it valuable to test the waters on how united NATO really is, especially if Trump is elected again.
johnfabian
3mo 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
5mo ago
A couple months ago I took this screenshot of the-then top posts for that day in /r/canada. Was an effective summary of the malaise we're in
johnfabian
6mo ago
I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.
Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression
johnfabian
3mo ago
At the start of the 20th century, if you were forced to pick a country that you think would carry out a Holocaust-level atrocity in the next fifty years, everyone would have picked Russia. (Not necessarily with Jews as the target, they were just the most obvious target). No other state in Christian Europe was nearly so repressive.
johnfabian
6mo 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
7mo ago
I think this will be bad for Bibi. It's one thing to have occasional rockets slip through the Iron Dome and kill a civilian or two per year. It's another thing to have this happen on his watch. The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel. When the dust settles opinion might turn on him; I think this might happen regardless of whether there will be a general political shift.
I think the decision to slowroll settler expansion in the West Bank in exchange for petty violence from Palestinians was a very deliberate one, but this level of violence will probably force some kind of shift in Israeli strategy, one way or the other.
It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction.
The result would not have been Québec leaving Canada, but there probably would have been a marked increase in French/English antagonization, as well as presumably French/indigenous strife. The 1995 referendum question was much too vague; while the PQ fully intended that a 50+1 Yes vote would allow them to proceed with a negotiated or unilateral secession, how it would have played out in reality is doubtful. Subsequently the Supreme Court adjudged that provinces do have the right to secede, but it requires "a clear question and a clear answer" (neither of which the 1995 vote had), and that would oblige the federal government to negotiate an exit for whichever party was seceding.
But one could certainly imagine a lot more social strife and culture war if the vote totals had been reversed. For reference here is the referendum question:
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
I imagine that for many it was very much less than clear what this entailed. This was of course, by design.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.
"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you're underestimating how much one can do with makeup. Among my siblings, me and my younger sister have brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexions, and at least with my sister I've seen her very convincingly go "mock Indian" with the right makeup/style/accessories (we're like around 5% Métis or whatever; multiple full-blood indigenous relatives from the early 19th century, by all accounts more than Ms Ste-Marie).
My older sisters are both fair, blonde, blue-eyed and would not pass muster as indigenous even though we all have the same parents and otherwise resemble each other strongly. Similarly Ste-Marie looks very much like her (fairer) brother
johnfabian
5mo ago
The Trudeau government has been particularly bad (or deliberately bad?) at anticipating second-order effects.
johnfabian
3mo ago
You actually support Diocletian's reforms? umm, yikes.
johnfabian
2mo ago
The sites died out because their format of pouring incandescent hot rage into your eyes has moved to youtube, tiktok, twitter, etc. Those offer either condensed format or visual augmentation, whereas for as bad as those former sites were for humanity they at least forced you to READ a bit.
The comments on youtube/tiktok/whatever are still largely unmoderated even if the more text-based social media sites are.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
johnfabian
11mo ago
If not for knowing how the subject brings out resident contrarians, I would be half inclined to think this is another rdrama experiment. I'm willing to indulge a bit then.
Only, I cannot fathom how anyone sees this when they look at Hitler. Here was a man who sincerely held the best interests of his People in his heart. He came of age in a time when his nation was — historical aggression notwithstanding — brutally, horrifically, oppressed. Countless of his countrymen, women and children, starved to death needlessly under spiteful, vindictive post-war Allied blockades. The economy was so saddled with reparation debt that rebuilding would take generations if it were ever possible at all. The people had no hope. Men and women who wanted families faced down a seemingly-insurmountable challenge in doing so. The risk of watching their babies die of starvation was all too real. And what chance had those children of decent lives even if they did survive to adulthood? They would end up de facto slaves, servants to the sneering foreigners who now controlled everything.
I think you're getting something here. I think you're a bit confused about some of the details - post-war Allied blockades starving Germans? But I think you're broadly correct that the hunger Germans experienced in the last year of the war was a very impactful historical trauma. I know how a similar hunger in '44-45 shaped the worldview of my grandfather. All questions of morality become mooted when you have a tangible sense of genuine food insecurity that most westerners can't even dream of. There have been a number of books written on exploring food insecurity as the driving cause of the mass violence in Eastern Europe from 1918-1945, (Black Earth by Timothy Snyder is one I've read), and I think it's a useful lens.
I would disagree that Hitler "held the best interests" of Germans at heart. He had a sort of egomaniacal view of Germans; they were great when they were bringing his visions to loftier heights, but when they proved unable to win the wars he started he was quite spiteful. He of course privately disparaged Christianity and various other traditional elements of German culture in private, but really I don't see how you can reconcile some unselfish love for the German people with his behaviour in 1944-45. He would've gladly condemned every last man, woman and child to oblivion for the failure to see through his designs.
(Also for the record the Soviets did not kill more people than the Nazis, let alone "so many more.")
Hitler seems to me, at heart, a very good father. If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate. The notorious Fourteen Words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — make the connection so explicit and unassailable that the Left dares not to look upon it.
Hitler was willing to send endless Germans to die in Russia for him. He was willing to very literally to throw the lives of young boys away so that he might live a few days more. He set Germany against the world in a crusade for his own vanity. You interpret his actions as being meant to save Germany, but no one more than him worked to bring about its destruction. It was his actions that literally split Germany in two. Hell, if not for the threat of the Soviets you hold as the real evil who knows how far the retribution might have gone; the Morgenthau Plan gives you an inkling of to what extremes the United States might have gone to to prevent the rise of another like him.
The grand irony is that you are projecting all these kindly, fatherly attributes on to Hitler as a contrast to your "degenerate" enemies in the present. Yes, those debased products of modernity whose faults you neatly list: childless, infertile, more caring to dogs than humans, emotionally unsuitable to raise a family, and not even respectful of borders! It was here especially that I was wondering whether this was one big prank, but because you didn't add that they were all short-tempered drug addicts convinced of their own intellectual superiority I figured you must be genuine.
johnfabian
7mo ago
KSR is a sort of utopian Marxist, and so he very much thinks that technological advancement is married inextricably with social and cultural change (similar to another sci-fi great, Iain Banks). This makes for some very interesting science fiction because his future societies are not merely the 21st century, but in spaaaaaaace. He's an interesting author to read through the decades because the futures he writes about shift as the technology and culture of his own time shifts. I might write a short thing in the culture war thread about one specific element of this
johnfabian
7mo ago
I don't think the compact was the same. Psychologically-speaking, the United States had lived through decades of peace. An attack by an outside enemy on the homeland was practically unthinkable. It was not the covenant of the government of the day to prevent something that was unimagineable and unpredictable (at least to the average citizen). This was why in part the American bloodlust after 9/11 was so extreme.
By contrast Israel has been under a siege mentality their entire existence, and after 1973 the threat shifted from outside state actors and their conventional armies to terrorism. The threat of the Second Intifada in particular was that violent death could visit any Israeli at any time. The border wall, the Iron Dome, the hostage trades; the government of Israel (under various parties) has undertaken immense cost and effort to save the lives of handfuls of citizens. I'm not sure there's been another government so willing to spend money to save the life of the individual at the margin (at least at the hands of their enemies).
johnfabian
5mo ago
Another detail: maybe the biggest obstacle to securing a murder conviction is if you don't have the weapon. If you shoot someone in broad daylight, there's a logic to doing it with a cheap weapon you then immediately throw into the deepest, darkest hole you can find.
From what I remember from summer 2021 mostly the former. They were typically churches on or near rural reserves, and in general indigenous Canadians are more church-going than your average Canadian of European descent. One of the amusing results of this was that indigenous elders tended to be much more outspoken against the church burnings (some links: 1, 2, 3), while you practically had to drag condemnations out of Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh (leaders of the major center and center-left parties, respectively).
There were a few exceptions, like an Egyptian Coptic church that was targeted, or a Vietnamese church..
johnfabian
7mo ago
Israel has gotten a lot of egg on its face, but I do not think it has in any way been meaningfully "weakened" by the Hamas attack. If anything it is more likely it has been strengthened through greater public unity
johnfabian
5mo ago
a joke that didn't land then but does now, is that after this scene the PFJ internally schisms over whether a man can identify as a woman
johnfabian
6mo ago
This is outside the bounds of the hypothetical. Dwight Eisenhower is not relinquishing command of the Allied Expeditionary Force to you, nor are you personally replacing the Allied heads of state as chief coordinators of war strategy. The only role you have is to advise Eisenhower to what degree French civilian casualties are acceptable.
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
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.
Yes, but the different colonies aren't separated by skin colour/race; as far as I can remember they all run the gamut. In that respect it maps better on to debates surrounding free trade and western "exploitation" of developing nations rather than racial identity politics within western countries, especially with the talk of Zarek and his ilk as "freedom fighters" vs. terrorists
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