johnfabian
1yr ago
Where can actual men engage in unrestricted intellectual discussion in a truly properly masculine fashion without effeminate finger-wagging jannies from California all too frequently interfering to whine about "antagonism"
I'm just a manly man looking for a super-masculine place to do the highest-T activity possible: whinging about what people are saying on twitter
johnfabian
1yr ago
The German war plans offered limited flexibility - not NO flexibility as the General Staff pretended - but once the decision was made to go in against France, Belgium was done for regardless. As units on the Belgian frontier were activated they were already moving across the border to secure the way for those coming behind them. The German deployment schedules which were so rigorously developed in the pre-war period required either a conquered Belgium or a pliant one. There were no alternatives.
johnfabian
1yr ago
The whole "oh the Germans just didn't have any plans for all the prisoners they were going take" is something I might believe from someone who knows literally nothing about WWII, but if you have any sort of passing interest you know about things like the Commissar Order, the Einsatzgruppen, the Barbarossa Decree, Generalplan Ost etc. If you have slightly more interest you would know about army- or unit-specific examples like the Severity Order.
The Germans absolutely had a plan for the millions of captives they were going to take. That plan was death.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I'm going to abandon this one because the topic is genuinely infuriating to me for whatever reason. I find it hard to not be insulting and that's just not great.
It takes great patience and forbearance in trying to be a pro-cycling activist because my natural urge is to call everyone who opposes me fat. In my experience of real-life community meetings about bike lanes it is almost always the case that the concerned party is some flavour of overweight if not obese.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Just as a related thought, not tied exactly to your point, but I also subjectively feel like since the advent of smartphones, the quality of driving has dropped sharply; and I wonder if this is supported by evidence. I don't know if there's anyone tracking the frequency of, for example, someone failing to turn left when they get the left-turn arrow, because they're watching their phone instead of the light; and how many quality life-minutes that's costing society.
At least in Toronto the number of hit and runs had doubled in the five years leading up the pandemic. The speculation is that these are mostly distracted drivers on their phones or other screens. The incident cited in the article where someone was hit sequentially by two vehicles both of whom fled is awful.
I can't imagine things have improved since then.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Cyclist culture wars: reporting from the front lines
It's been a bad year for cyclists in Toronto. Five people have died so far this year, and a few dozen injured. Vibes in general are bad. There is a general feeling that drivers are getting more aggressive - construction has been very bad this summer and congestion is worse than ever. To add to that spaces meant for cyclists are now increasingly taken up by international students doing food deliver on e-bikes with very limited fidelity to traffic rules; very frequent to see e-bikes ridden on sidewalks or the wrong way down cycle lanes. Our new progressive mayor has been significantly less active on the cycling front then people had hoped - there was actually great progress made during the previous conservative mayor John Tory, especially during COVID - but only 100 km of new lanes are being added by 2027. And these are generally not the kind of physically-separated infrastructure cyclists prefer, but "painted" lanes that can still be quite dangerous.
Last month a woman was killed while cycling in one of these lanes when she was forced to merge out of it because a construction company had illegally put a dumpster in the middle of it; this sparked a widespread fury among Toronto cyclists. I remember the day after the accident biking to a friend's party and during the 20 minute ride overhearing three different groups of cyclists talking about it. It also launched a kind of guerrilla campaign reporting illegal blockages of bike lanes (example here). There is a sense of frustration that we are putting our lives at risk every time we go out. Personally I have become much more cautious and will take more time in order to keep to routes with better infrastructure. As the late Rob Ford said we are "swimming with the sharks" when we're out there and there is very low trust in the capabilities of drivers.
I'm writing this post now because last night NHL star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother were killed by a drunk driver while cycling in New Jersey. They were supposed to be groomsmen in their sister's wedding today. Johnny left behind two babies and a widowed wife. There's a lot of shock and anger in response, and frustration that many news agencies have characterized this as a "biking accident"; it appears the drunk driver attempted to pass them on the shoulder and instead rear-ended them, killing both instantly.
Bicycle lanes are the lowest of the low hanging fruit for many cities. They are cheap, simple, ways to reduce traffic congestion, promote healthy and active living, and protect the lives of cyclists. It is so incredibly frustrating how much of an uphill battle it is to get them built. I think there's this enduring perception from people who exclusively drive that bike lanes are something for hobbyists rather than a way for people to get where they need to go. Every attempt to get new lanes built is met with a torrent of backlash. I try to do my part by showing up in support at community meetings and the level of vitriol always astonishes me. Yes there are bad cyclists, it cannot be denied. But they are not in charge of two-ton death machines. Bad drivers never are perceived as a systemic issue. Recently a pregnant mother with two young kids was killed by a driver near me; no one gave thought to redesigning the road, or restricting licenses for the elderly, or treating it as anything other than an unavoidable tragedy.
I tell my friends that the first priority as a cyclist is to survive. Every now and then you get people who yell at you for no reason, or throw bottles at you, or almost turn into you, or door you, or whatever. Don't engage because it's not worth it. It's like bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. You have to make your efforts at the political level.
johnfabian
1yr ago
have you seen Black Mirror? There are a few episodes which brush up against this
johnfabian
1yr ago
Germany: political center (Berlin), legal center (Karlsruhe, weirdly), financial center (Frankfurt), tech hub (Munich)
Some of these are debatable because Germany is extremely decentral
johnfabian
1yr ago
yeah it's nice to get a taste of it every now and then. On the rest of social media it's all degenerate lefties, I need to see some degenerate cons to keep me in balance
johnfabian
1yr ago
I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.
johnfabian
1yr ago
civ 5 still has a very active multiplayer community playing lekmod
johnfabian
1yr ago
That was just the style of the '90s nu-metal scene. Yes this was at the end of the '80s but Faith No More was basically proto-90s stylistically. White guys with dreads? That's just what skaters, bums, and layabouts looked like. You never heard of Korn?
See the music video for "Epic" from the first album with Patton. Same style.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I previously sang the praises of Only Connect, my favourite game show. It is now back for series 20, with a brave youtube user evading the BBC censors for us. The first episodes of each new series are generally easier with it ramping up in difficulty towards the end.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I would never claim that poverty has no effect on crime. I think besides being on some intuitive level obvious there are very broad relations one one can see, that go beyond simply that people who commit crimes tend to have the same kind of cognitive impairments that also keep one poor.
But this supposed iron law that crime is purely the product of poverty is something you see repeated everywhere where even the simplest of glances at the correlation can see how patently false that is.
There are people who still desperately cling onto the notion that crime is directly a result of poverty. It is very hard for them to explain how Baltimore (GDP per capita of ~$60k USD) has more murders annually than Italy ($35k).
Oh, Italy also has roughly a 100x larger population (60 million vs 600 thousand). But of course they are famously free of organized crime.
Maybe the real underlying cause is that murder rate is inversely proportional to pizza quality?
johnfabian
1yr ago
Something that had been consistently found in polls was the general perception that both Trump and Biden were weak candidates, and only by virtue of being pitted against each other via inertia were their flaws masked in the predicted election outcomes.
The Democrats were smart (or more accurately, lucky that Biden had such a disastrous performance at the debate) to force their unpopular candidate out first.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Finished the books I was reading about Augustus and the Peloponnesian War. Now I'm reading The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham (he co-wrote The Expanse). Finished the first part and was pleasantly surprised. Enjoying it quite a bit.
johnfabian
1yr ago
johnfabian
1yr ago
Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are only two novels because publishers forced it. They're essentially one rather than a book and its sequel. That being said I didn't like Fall nearly as much.
More numerous than any other individual combat arm? Generally, often yes. But in modern professional armies they don't tend to approach a majority. How things might actually play out for conscription-based armies which train most conscripts as light infantry remains to be seen though I suppose.
For the UK (and the Commonwealth countries which largely followed their military organization during WWII) there were two very important deciding factors which relegated infantry to a lesser size than the artillery. Most importantly was the scale of losses during WWI: politically, demographically, economically, whatever lens you looked through they were so high they could not be repeated. That inevitably meant a focus on greater firepower and heavy weapons rather than having infantry carry the burden.
Less importantly aside from the brief fracas in France the initial major land fighting the Brits did was in North Africa when the Germans were roughly on par with the in the air and the desert allowed for fluid maneuvers. This meant more losses to rear-area personnel and so they carried more men and got a higher proportion of trained replacements. This ended up adversely affecting British and Canadian forces in Europe because the decline of German air power and operational maneuver greatly reduced the risk to non-infantry combat arms. There was a persistent shortage of infantrymen throughout 1944 and 1945.
It is important to note that this wasn't some crazy or ineffective idea: artillery was in WWII, like all other modern wars, the main killing power on the battlefield. Certainly if you read German memoirs they are constantly bitter about the total dominance of Western Allied artillery (and air power). In Normandy there was frequent complaining about it being a "rich man's war" because of how badly the Germans were being outshot. Allied artillery command and control was also significantly more sophisticated and was a huge advantage.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Or is there something about the nature of modern combat that means military supply chains require this sort of "socialist" central planning to be effective?
Yes. I'll try to keep this short because I'm meeting a friend in fifteen minutes so I've got to go fast. But with the advent of heavy artillery, planes, tracked vehicles, trucks, etc. the fighting strength of armies have switched rather decisively from individual armed men to the equipment they operate. Because this heavy equipment requires so much fuel, ammunition, maintenance, etc. to operate, this means that the center of gravity (in the Clausewitzian sense) of any army of the 20th or 21st century is in its administrative "rear" and the logistical operations they run. An army separated from its source of supply ceases to become an effective fighting force and has to devote most of its time to somehow surviving, if it can.
This is why the operational and strategic doctrines that emerged during WWII and after focused on creating ways for the mobile forces of your army to target these rear elements. The Soviet or German plan for any great offensive was to figure out the best way to achieve this: usually by creating some kind of breakthrough on a narrow front that your tank/mobile infantry divisions can exploit to get hundreds of kilometres into the enemy rear and target the really important things: railway junctions, bridges, communication nodes, ammo depots, repair yards, slaughterhouses, granaries, oil dumps, etc.
WWII is the period I'm most familiar with but usually armies operated even then with much more rear personnel than those at the front. The Western Allies had a ratio generally of 1:6 frontline infantry/armour:rest of personnel. The Commonwealth forces generally had more artillerymen in a corps than infantry. Germans and Soviets ran more infantry-heavy because they were less mechanized (especially the Germans).
You don't read many memoirs from cooks or artillerymen or tank repairmen because they didn't see much combat, at least among the western Allies. In the more wider-open Eastern Front things were more fluid and the Germans were particularly enthusiastic about pressing administrative personnel and other rear-area types into infantry roles because of desperate manpower shortages. In any case in the mass encirclements that characterized the big offensives in the East it didn't matter what your job was, your life was on the line and everyone had to fight.
johnfabian
1yr ago
How young would the girl have to be before the immorality of the age difference overwhelmed the immorality of the casual sex? You've established an adult man having sex with a 12 year old is morally superior to casual sex with another consenting adult woman. What about a 9 year old? A 6 year old?
johnfabian
1yr ago
why would you pick his sons over Ivanka? It's not like she's popular or anything but at least to me she appears much more mentally with it than either of his adult sons.
johnfabian
1yr ago
This felt less like a prediction and more like a lay-up. I couldn't see any other course of action for the Democrats.
It's good to be in London circa 1900 if you are wealthy. If you are poor you have to deal with all the effluent of all that progress. Terrible air quality, tenuous access to clean water, cramped, unsanitary living conditions, brutal work, endemic malnutrition. Persistent assaults on every facet of your health is your lot in life as an urban prole at the turn of the 20th century. (Though even 1900 is substantially better in these respects than say, 1860; or at least for London it is).
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