johnfabian
4mo 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
5mo ago
I mean it is a direct analogy to a current geopolitical crisis to bring this up now.
I was merely inspired by a discussion with a friend. No point on sitting on the prompt for a few months hoping Israel/Palestine clears up.
johnfabian
15d 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
24d ago
he says "puck". It's an old saying about why Wayne Gretzky was so good.
johnfabian
1mo ago
There's a UK "quiz culture" and corresponding infrastructure; local leagues, regional leagues, prestigious competitions, popular club at universities, etc. It's just a much more popular pasttime from what I can tell.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
johnfabian
5mo ago
I suppose at its heart it's a more complex trolley problem with a historical context. It's an interesting moral dilemma to tease out.
johnfabian
11mo ago
The September massacres were spontaneous and the French government had no part in planning it (though the Parisian government did). It fit more in the pattern of this kind of spontaneous violence that the élites would then affirm as "regrettably necessary."
johnfabian
11mo ago
Emotions were always "high" among the larger mass of people; the poster below referenced the "Great Fear" which was a mass paranoia following the storming of the Bastille as an example. This kind of paranoia around "ordinary" property crime was very common around that time; France had experienced a series of bad harvests, inflation, and general privation leading up to and during the early years of the Revolution. There was a persistent economic desperation among the peasantry and urban poor that helped fuel more radical elements.
Among the revolutionary élites who were generally of the well-off middle class, Tackett argues it was the completely unexpected success and then rapid reforms of the Revolution that caused this sudden emotional heightening. It's hard to imagine for myself what it would've been like to live through if you had been born into a world that seemed fixed and unchangeable, and all of a sudden in a matter of months you had been able to mold it to your (very recently arrived at) worldview. There are quotes from various figures in that period of 89-90 (that Tackett constantly references as the "spirit of '89") of this general sense of euphoria and utopianism.
johnfabian
1mo 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
3mo ago
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.
johnfabian
3mo ago
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.
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
11mo ago
The triple crises of 1793 seemed to be the tipping point - the simultaneous worsening of the wars against external enemies, the counter-revolutionary insurrection in the Vendée, and the federalist revolts in the provinces. These all put great pressure on the Revolution and at the same time confirmed all the deepest paranoias of the revolutionary élite: there was a grand conspiracy of royalists, priests, and double-faced revolutionaries. Up until that point all the invective thrown around between various political factions had more or less come to nothing: the great surge of denunciations in 1791 and 1792 and resulted in effectively almost no arrests or serious consequences for those accused except a general sense of fear and intimidation. When the Girondins and Jacobins would casually accuse each other of treason this did not manifest in any attempt to hold them to account; even during the September Massacres when various elements of the Paris Commune issued warrants of arrest for Girondin leaders they were not carried out. It was ultimately the mob that stormed the legislature on June 2 1793 and forced the first factional arrests, and even then the detained Girondin leaders were treated very well by their captors (who supposedly considered them arch-traitors). It was only after the further worsening of the various crises as well as assassinations of several prominent Montagnards (particularly Jean-Paul Marat's killing by a Girondin woman, the circumstances of which again suggested a vast conspiracy) that really kicked off the state-led internal violence. August and September 1793 were the key periods of escalation there as the State mobilized the entire population for the war effort, a phase of Total War directed both internally and externally.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Tai-Pan is also imo quite inferior compared to its "sequel", Noble House
johnfabian
4mo 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
6mo ago
Your post about Aurora was the inciting incident for this post. Is all you've read of KSR Aurora? Because I'm sure the context would be rather lost on someone new to him given it's essentially KSR meta-critiquing himself by reversing all his usual tendencies. It's not really his best work, especially given that it is so inward-focused.
I've read about half the Culture books (whenever I come across one in the library), and I really should start hunting down the rest.
johnfabian
7mo ago
- Extroversion: 70
- Emotional stability: 66
- Agreeableness: 51
- Conscientiousness: 18
- Intellect/Imagination: 96
Not sure what this means exactly.
it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"
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