johnfabian
5mo 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
4mo ago
A brief retrospective on the Battlestar Galactica reboot:
So I saw the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. This interested me for a few reasons: firstly, I'm getting old. This was the first TV show I was actively a "fan" of, and as a young teenaged boy it was everything I could have wanted. Timing-wise, it aired in the last heyday of the network TV drama: before the writer's strike of 2007-08 that would see the bifurcation of television into cheap reality shows and "prestige" (but relatively little-watched) cable dramas. As such the show ever tries to balance itself between the seriousness of its concept and demands for mass appeal with 20+ episode seasons. But it also served as a sort of test case for the rebooted franchise, a phenomenon you may have observed has become more common in recent years. It is also not dissimilar to the slew of comic book movies in that it took a somewhat childish and cheesy media property aimed at children and "updated" it for adults. So in many respects it's interesting to see it again as a portent of the shape of things to come.
So I sat down and watched the miniseries, and then a bunch of episodes from season 1. It's still great, and although it collapsed into nonsense later in its four season run it's still very much worth a watch. Don't worry about spoilers here, I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you're interested then don't google anything. The characters are rich, the plotlines imaginative, the music might be the best ever composed for the small screen, and the special effects look great (especially for a constrained budget). And when the show fails, it does so trying to swing for the fences... or in an attempt to please network execs.
It's an interesting look back in time from a culture war standpoint, because it is a show very much of its time. It mines pretty heavily the feelings of post-9/11 America (though like almost all low-budget sci-fi, is staffed almost entirely by Canadians). There's an alternating sense of paranoia and simultaneous togetherness that runs through everything. The show muses repeatedly about the nature of overlapping civilian and military governance, and the appropriateness of how either might extend their power given the situation. The Iraq War of course provided inspiration no science fiction show could pass up, but the show generally opted for much more interesting parallels, and ones that you might not expect.
You might not also expect how little the ripped-from-the-headlines controversies resemble the culture wars of today. Take for instance the sex-swap of fan favourite, hotshot pilot "Starbuck", who was now a woman in the rebooted series. This is the sort of thing that has become a rote controversy in current media adaptations; inevitable long youtube rants about "wokeness" and trillion-dollar companies playing the victim ensues. There was a minor, albeit passionate outcry at the time, but was pretty solidly squashed by how well the show pulled it off, in part because the show makes no attempt to treat it as significant or lecture the audience. In fact there's almost no gender-war elements at play in the series, and the only one of note I can remember again does not play out how you might expect. (A bunch of characters were also "race-swapped"; some light googling suggests no one even cared at the time, nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly).
But there also exist parallels that didn't exist at the time: it's pretty impossible to watch it today and not think about it as an exploration of the dangers of AI. Of course, rebelling robots was a hackneyed concept even by the time the original series aired in the 1970s, but the reboot does a good job of imagining the ways superhuman intelligence might rapidly evolve out of our ability to contain or comprehend it.
So do you like sci-fi? Do you like drama? Do you like shows that respect your intelligence and don't treat you like a child, morally or intellectually? Do you like depictions of a military that is not totally incompetent and treats discipline as actually essential? Then hey, give it a shot. Though I understand it can be tricky finding it to stream legally; Amazon or torrents or 123moviestv dot net would be better options, especially because you want to start with the miniseries before season 1, episode 1.
johnfabian
2mo ago
This is actually a debate space to make progressives better at debunking alt-right trolls. TheMotte plays a critical part in deprogramming radicals.
(this isn't even necessarily untrue)
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
1mo ago
A short post about Metrolinx, Ontario's incompetent transit authority
I enjoy talking about public transit. Not just because I advocate for it to be better, but also because I think it sits at the nexus of a number of problems in the Anglosphere: crushing regulatory barriers, unwieldy bureaucracy, land use and housing, GHG emissions, and the declining state capacity to envision and build projects that better the lives of its citizens. As has been discussed much before, the Anglosphere has a problem separate from other western countries with respect to its construction costs, and this is particularly egregious for transit. Similar projects to those accomplished in Spain or Norway or Italy are - when attempted in Canada, the UK, or the US - considerably more expensive (often 10x more, per km), take longer to build, and when finished have inferior performance. If you live in the Anglosphere and are barely aware of local issues you can probably think of a few local examples off the top of your head.
The Eglinton Crosstown is a classic example. Originally intended to open in time for Toronto's hosting of the 2015 Pan Am games, this light rail line was subsequently cancelled, revived, and redesigned before construction eventually began, with a greatly inflated budget. The project's completion date had previously been announced as 2020, then '21, then '22... in September 2023 a news conference was called by Metrolinx to announce they had no update for when it might be operational. Ostensibly it will be this year, but no one would bet on it. There is presumably some fault with the construction (informed speculation points to leakage and erosion in some of the stations near the intersection with the Yonge-University subway line) that is not being publicly announced due to legal wranglings with the P3 contractor. All in all it's a gross failure, and a pathetic one.
Which made it all the more unbelievable that Metrolinx decided to launch a PR campaign mocking those who complained about delays. Sometimes you get a glimpse of someone's personality by some action they take that seems to reveal in a moment all you need to know about them, and I get the feeling based on the public reaction this substantially hardened people's opinions. Now I know some people who have worked in or with Metrolinx, and I was aware of their general incompetence, their paralyzing bureaucratic approach, their malaise of indecision. I was not aware they were so contemptuous of the public. This 30 second advertisement and its accompanying campaign cost $2.25 million and was immediately pulled due to the response (all told, one of their more on-target projects).
But the real reason I wrote this is so I can share the amazing parody of the Metrolinx ad campaign that perfectly captures the passive-aggressive sanctimony.
Canada's most famous indigenous woman: not indigenous, not even Canadian
Buffy Ste-Marie is a musician. She has a deep discography of folk music that incorporates her indigenous identity and activism. She has lived a long and productive life as arguably the most famous Canadian indigenous woman. For Americans she's probably better known as the first woman to breastfeed on television, an interesting milestone in its own right. It's also good that this proves she's a woman, as it's the only element of her public identity that is still standing. In news that should shock exactly zero people who are tangentially aware of the notion of "Pretendians" in Canadian high society, the CBC has rather convincing evidence that Buffy Ste-Marie's version of her life's history is fraudulent.
The details have changed over the years - a sign in itself, if anyone would have risked official censure to point it out - but in general Ste-Marie has claimed herself to have been born to a Piapot Cree woman, and then subsequently removed from her birth mother (either because of her death, or forcibly as part of the "Sixties Scoop", which should have itself been a red flag considering she was born in 1941). She claimed to have been adopted by an American family, and later reconnected with and adopted by her birth people in Canada. Well, the documentary evidence seems fairly irrefutable: her "adoptive" parents were her birth parents. Her siblings are her full-siblings. She was born Beverly Santamaria in Massachusetts, and has no ancestral connection to Canada at all. Her father was Italian, her mother English.
She appears to have begun claiming Indian ancestry in her early 20s, first claiming to be Mi'kmaq, a perhaps more believable white lie having grown up in New England. Alternatively, she said she was Algonqiun. A few years later she claimed she was Cree, which prompted her paternal uncle to correct a local newspaper on that fact in 1964. In the next few decades as her career began to take off, coinciding with a general surge of interest in Native American arts and culture, she increasingly resorted to legal threats to silence her family members from contradicting her self-constructed origin story, including threatening her brother that she would tell the world that he had sexually abused her.
I've been watching the trickle of responses over the past day on reddit as news this piece was coming out spread. This thread on /r/indiancountry is generally defensive, arguing that irrespective of the exact circumstances of her birth that she is legitimately indigenous via ceremonial adoption in her 20s. I think these kind of arguments will melt away now that the CBC investigation has been published. It seems clear to me that Ste-Marie's story was not borne of confusion or innocent mistake, but was rather a deliberately and cynically constructed narrative that was upheld through threats and intimidation. The investigation was much more thorough and dug into a lot more nasty stuff than I expected. Ste-Marie was a Canadian legend, and had been endlessly fêted by the CBC (and other Canadian media) prior to this. I would point out that although the CBC has generally gone mushy progressive, its investigative journalism programs, namely Marketplace and The Fifth Estate (who undertook this project) have remained excellent and provide very good value for taxpayer money.
johnfabian
9mo ago
Big week for nuclear power in Ontario
After France, I believe Ontario is the king of nuclear power generation: roughly 60% of the province's electricity is generated from its nuclear power plants. However there were growing issues: cost overruns and increased political opposition in the 1980s had prevented development of new reactors for decades, and the legal battles over just the initial environmental assessments of an attempt to build new reactors at the Darlington site beginning in 2006 meant the project ended up stillborn (the provincial government abandoned it in 2011, and the court scuffles went on for another five years past that). After that successive Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments were plenty happy to kick the can down the road: after all, getting new hydro or nuclear generation going is never something that's going to come online in time for next election, so it just all disappears beyond the political event horizon. Never mind the various projections anticipating a large and growing gap between generation and demand, a gap probably understated if electrification of heating/transport accelerates.
Then all of a sudden it becomes an issue because one of the major nuclear plants (Pickering) is all of a sudden due for retirement before the next election, and there's a mad scramble to fix things. But at least the positive is that it appears to have finally shaken decision-makers out of their reverie: 4,800 MW of new reactors at Bruce Power will see it reclaim its former status as the world's largest nuclear plant, and three new small modular reactors will add 1,200 MW more. The scale is considerable: just the three new SMRs will generate more electricity than Canada's ten largest windfarms combined.
And so far the response has been positive! Looking at Reddit comments might not necessarily be instructive of the general reaction but it's been nothing but relief so far. I've been scanning left-leaning legacy media (there isn't much left in Canada) and what criticism there has been so far has been mainly tepid concerns about cost (which are valid, controlling cost overruns are pretty important here).
It'll be interesting to see the federal response here. The current Minister of Environment, Steven Guilbeault, is a former Greenpeace guy and has been vocally anti-nuclear in the past. The regulatory hurdles these projects will have to mount are mainly federal and there is the potential for some kind of obstruction. On the other hand the current Trudeau government has been cautiously open, at least rhetorically, to new nuclear development and has been helping fund SMR development. We shall see how it pans out. In general public sentiment isn't an issue: the large majority of Ontario's population already lives close to a nuclear power plant and public support is high. The concern is how interest groups or specific influential individuals might use the legal system or regulatory requirements to kill by a thousand cuts.
I'm going to take this chance to indulge in just a little bit of optimism!
johnfabian
5mo ago
I finally caved and watched it. I had seen Malarchuk, I had seen Zednik (much less worse), wasn't particularly interested in seeing this one until I became aware there was a debate over whether it was intentional or not.
Do I think Petgrave deliberately kicked him in the throat? No. Do I think he deliberately raised his leg? That's harder to say. I play hockey and I flatter myself into thinking I have a generally decent understanding of this sort of thing. It's really, really difficult to try and parse intent by slowing down a video frame-by-frame. Hockey is a very fast sport and these sorts of collisions occur in fractions of a second. It is extremely tempting to read into these sort of things more than is actually there.
A little bit of background: about 15 years ago pro hockey started cracking down on hits to the head. There were a rash of bad concussions to high-profile players like Sidney Crosby and the general rumblings about the concerns of CTE, so the NHL, fans, and the general public were supportive of further restricting what was legal. (Before you could more or less hit people in the head without getting penalized, provided you did not commit another penalty in the process - this resulted in hits like this being entirely legal and generally celebrated). Before players were generally held to be responsible for themselves - don't want to get hit in the head? Don't skate through the neutral zone with your head down. Now the onus was reversed; it was the responsibility of the player hitting not to target their opponent's head.
This created two general trends: first, since the ban players have been generally less "heads up" in their play. It used to be keeping your head up was important for not getting concussed by the meathead on the other team; now you can more safely watch the puck while you're stickhandling. Part of the reason Johnson gets caught in the neck here is that he's looking down as he comes across the blueline (previously a very risky move), and so he's both unaware of the player coming at him and more crouched over.
Secondly, it has created a professional and hobbyist enthusiasm for watching slo-mo videos. In order to determine whether a hit merits a suspension, the league would look over video repeatedly from different angles and with different speeds trying to parse intent, and when they would announce the results of an inquiry they'd produce a handy film, JFK style (example). Similarly every time there's a big hit in the NHL you will see on social media fans poring over every frame trying to prove or disprove intent to injure. Very frequently you will see very absurd manipulations by fans to try and conjure up something that isn't there. A favourite tactic is to slow down the video before impact, and then speed it up at impact; this gives the impression of more deliberation by the hitter and a more violent impact.
So for Petgrave's hit: no I can't say for sure either way. It looks somewhat suspicious; he may well have been trying to stick a leg out to sort of block or hamstring Johnson. He might have lost his balance. He might have been trying to stick a leg out and then lost his balance. I think it would be fair to rule out any deliberate intent to hit Johnson so high, but whether the play itself was dirty I feel like I could be convinced either way.
What this incident reminds me of is a play about a decade ago where Matt Cooke, notorious head-hunter, severed the Achilles' of superstar Erik Karlsson. This was another incident where a notoriously dirty player injured a star, and there was an intense debate over the time whether it was deliberate or accidental. The discussion on it was inevitably coloured by the reputations of the two players.
johnfabian
3mo 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
6mo ago
Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, and the limits of what you can imagine
A couple times on this forum Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR, for short) has come up. He's an American science fiction writer who plies mainly in hard(er) science fiction, and especially likes to play with themes that explore the interactions between technology, culture, and economics. He takes some limitation of humans and imagines: what if it were not so? How would we change, what could we do, what new things would we discover about ourselves? He's a bit of a granola-eating utopian socialist so I'm sure some here would have certain ideological objections to his writing. But it's nice sometimes to read work from someone who has a fundamental sort of optimism for humanity, that we might one day be able to put aside our differences and Figure It All Out.
His "Mars trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) might be his masterpiece, and extends his inquisitive nature. A depiction of the colonization of Mars over centuries, there is an endless series of problems for the characters to solve; some scientific in nature, but more than that organizational and cultural. The colonization of a virgin world yields all kinds of conflicts where there can be no true compromise between people with differing fundamental values. Alongside the geoengineering of Mars proceeds the genetic engineering of the human race, as scientists begin to unlock the ability to greatly extend the lifespan of humans. This might just have originated as a conceit by KSR to keep most of the characters across the centuries required for the geological drama to play out, but he dives fully into imaging all the upheaval such an advance would yield.
There are Luddites, reactionaries, those who wish to monopolize longevity for themselves, a great and deep anger from the masses at the prospect that immortality might be denied to them. There are myriad complications and problems; certain limits prove tricky to overcome. But technological progress is an unyielding wave, and by the end of the series humans dabble in every kind of imaginable self-customization, from the crucial to the trivial: yes, all sorts of environmental adaptations to Mars' ecosystems are quickly developed, but so are custom mixes of psychoactive drugs. People create physical backups of themselves so they can do dangerous sports. All sorts of modifications can be sought to fill the spiritual and emotional void. People delay their physical decrepitude indefinitely. Women put off having children into their 300s.
But what people don't do is change their sex. The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child. There is no mention of purely cosmetic alterations to simply imitate the opposite sex, or become some even more complex sexual entity now that technology enables them to do so. No character ever feels any deep or emergent desire to push past this one final barrier, when all the others have already been crossed. And it's not like KSR is some prude or philosophically opposed to it; his more recent novels feature trans and non-binary characters, and in those that feature similar types of possibility with respect to genetic engineering people freely experiment with switching sexes even if they do not have some form of dysphoria. The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.
Most of the original hundred colonists are either American or Russian; one might speculate that if the books had been started five years earlier, the latter would have been Soviet, and if they had been started five years later, perhaps Chinese. To some extent this is the problem of all science fiction that deals in the near future (the the trilogy begins in the far-off future of 2026); it is far enough away to be unable to predict with certainty but close enough that mistakes seem obvious in hindsight. But I think this is also somewhat of a humbling notion that we just might not be as good at predicting societal changes as we might flatter ourselves to be. I used to feel that they were more strongly tied to material/economic forces; in recent years I've become less sure. When it comes to predicting the grand arc of human civilization it is a lot easier to look a fool than a wise man. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to ignore that and take a stab.
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.
Happy 4th of July to our American friends! I've come to share a little bit of history that struck me, then and now, as one of the more compelling paeans of American greatness: the opinion of Germans of American soldiers in 1917-18.
When the USA fell into WWI mostly-unprepared, it had to rapidly acquaint itself with the realities of modern warfare and gamely struggled with it. Once the fighting ended the Army was very interested in sourcing the enemy's opinions of its performance so as to be better prepared for next time. What actually happened was the USA retreated again into isolationism and it had to relearn all the same lessons in 1941-42 again at great cost. But it did produce this great document: Candid Comment on the American Soldier of 1917-18 (and Kindred Topics) by The Germans.
While much of it is devoted to German opinions of American combat performance (the general conclusion was brave, but foolhardy), the more interesting elements to me are the German impressions of Americans as individuals. Many of the American soldiers were ethnically German themself, and the whole situation lended itself to German introspection on how their American cousins had diverged in between the great German national failures of 1848 and 1918. This was after all a great clash of the ideals of the former versus the structure of the latter (which was drawn into sharper contrast by the further civil conflict within Germany; there are repeated instances of praise for American rule versus that of the "Spartacists").
You can see some selected quotes on various topics here, but what I find particularly interesting are the various comments about American class distinctions, given the shock Germans had in comparing their Prussian norms with American freedoms. Some choice quotes:
He comments on the fact that the Americans were what might be called bad prisoners. A group of 14 were brought in one day and when asked about their units refused to talk. They refused to work and talked back to the [German] officers, much to the annoyance of the officers and the concealed delight of the men.
Braun has served in the German army as an enlisted man and keenly alive to conditions in the army. He makes an interesting comparison in the German and American systems of training officers and states that the German system was the direct downfall of the army. At the beginning of the war Germany was well supplied with experienced officers who were respected and looked up to by the men in spite of the harsh disciplinary measures. The casualties, however, among officers during the first year of the war were enormous and they at once started training new officers... The candidates were selected from among the sons of the most influential families, given a short training and then put in charge of Companies. They tried to impose the same rigid discipline that the regular officers had, but the enlisted men resented this to the extent of open rebellion and fought with their officers until there was no discipline left in the army... He said that the American training schools although modelled after the Germans turned out successful officers because the best fitted men were picked from the ranks.
He spoke of the great difference between the American and German armies and was very much surprised to learn that one could become a noncommissioned officer after spending six or eight months in the service. In peace time in the German army a soldier was given a Sergeantcy only after he had spent 10 or 12 years in service then if he continued faithful he was given a place near his home as a Postman or railroad employee.
The American army seems to me as fine a collection of individual physical specimen as I have ever seen. But from the standpoint of military discipline it is a mob, pure and simple. The men appear slouchy; the officers do not stand out from the men in appearance as they do in any European army. All seem to allow themselves to be victimized in prices by the tradespeople of this, I am most unhappy to admit, vanquished country. They seem to have no conception of the fact that we are their enemies, and deep down in our hearts we hate each and every one of them!
Hahn states that all the people in the town are admiring the clean-cut American soldiers. He states that the impression the American soldier is leaving, with the people of Germany, is the impression that Germany will have of America in years to come. He notices the contrast between the American and German armies in their forms of discipline, stating that if the German army had been as free with their men as the American Army is, they would not have had the success that was theirs at the beginning of the war.
The attitude of the American officer towards enlisted men is very different than in our army in which officers have always treated their men as cattle.
While on duty the relations between men and officers are very strict, but on the other hand, when off duty, they are without constraint. The officers sit in the same cafe rooms with their men. When one sees the supplies, the material, etc., one is obliged to laugh at the imagination of our marine heads who praised the U-boats as a victor over the Entente. Every man has his cloth coat and his waterproof coat, his leather shoes and rubber shoes, etc.
This man has been a proprietor of a cafe for eight years. He speaks very highly of the American soldier and thinks that it was luck for the people that Americans were chosen for this district. He thinks it is strange that the Americans, having spent so short a time in the army, can adapt themselves to any condition that presents itself. He remarked that on the day the soldiers came to this town all were surprised at the orderly way the Americans conducted themselves. He said that he had never known a regiment of German soldiers to come here and behave themselves in such an orderly manner. German soldiers were always brutal to servants and destroyed a great deal of property.
A few American prisoners were brought here in June 1918 and were not mistreated. The Americans were the Chief complainers when the food was bad which was always. The Americans occasionally received packages containing hard tack and other luxuries but their packages were usually rifled. After the entrance of the Americans several Italians desired to return to Italy and France and demanded their pay from the German contractor. This was refused. They appealed to the Americans. Three "doughboys" with fixed bayonets accompanied the Italians and prompt payment was made. He states that miners are now being treated well and receive thirteen marks a day.
In the town of RITTERSDORF the subject of separation of Church and State was very strongly advocated at a meeting of the German Democratic Party: an opportunity to defend the position of the Church in this question was seized by two Catholic priests in the audience, who contended that the ideals of good government and the ideal of the Church were identical. In reply, the speaker of the German Democratic Party stated there could be no better example of the results of a divided Church and State than the American soldiers billeted in the German homes; he asked the audience to compare the conduct, appearance and enlightenment of the American soldiers with the aspect of the German soldiers. The reply met with the approval of the audience and the priests were "hissed" out of the meeting.
This lady says that a good many of the inhabitants of Rengsdorf and the surrounding town have made up their minds to emigrate to America if they will be permitted to do so. She explains that this is due to the good impression made by the American soldiers who are occupying this region and also the fact that most of the middle class and lower class are much afraid of the impending war debt and indemnity.
I have had soldiers in quarter all winter. At first I had Germans. Later Americans came. To become acquainted with these "our enemies" as house companions is among other things so very instructive. I have changed in a good many of my opinions, and would like to go to America for a half year or so because it is certain that these people possess a secret method which raises the most common fellows into an individual who stands up boldly and moves about freely and unconcerned. I think we can learn some things there which later could be used to advantage here. I do not mean this personally, but as a better education nationally.
johnfabian
12d ago
It might depend on what level of salami slicing is attempted. Estonia is a very soft target; there doesn't need to be some massive build-up of force to seize most or all of it. So let's say you have a normal force distribution at standard readiness in the Leningrad Military District. All of a sudden the wire comes in - ethnic Russians have been killed by the government of Estonia, and the rest need immediate protection to prevent the same! It's only a 200 km drive to Tallinn from the border. There are negligible forces in your way. How much preparation is actually needed at this point?
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.
johnfabian
11d 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
14d ago
This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.
Experimentally proving the greenhouse effect is a common science class task for sixth graders. The author of this could probably do it with materials that exist in his house. This is a rather extreme self-imposed ignorance.
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
Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.
Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.
johnfabian
1mo ago
I've been binging Only Connect, a game show people here might enjoy very much. The appeal of it is that it's a sort of hybrid of trivia and lateral thinking, which often forces contestants to combine different sorts of thought processes to find answers. It's delightful in that it is simultaneously unpretentious in its presentation and incredibly pretentious in its subject matter, is played for no money, and as far as I know in the English-language world it is the most difficult game show. If nothing else it will improve your knowledge of British geography. The (almost) full archives of it are on youtube allowing you a near-infinite back catalogue. If you want a taste here is the most recent series finale.
johnfabian
5mo 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
2d ago
Absolutely not. Don't even bother thinking about it again. They were out to scam you and you just got them first.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Jokes are not a problem, pranks aren't a problem and you even noted yourself that the misogyny and homophobia is light hearted, which in a sane world would be another way of saying "not a problem". And then we get the kicker - repressed homoeroticism. No action involved is an issue, but there are problematic thoughts involved.
Yeah I don't think a lot of it is a problem. I'm not one to start an Inquisition over some "problematic" jokes or whatever. But when you're say, having all the veterans take turns pissing on cookies that you then force the rookies to eat, or you have all the veterans take turns teabagging the rookies, or you force the rookies to run a gauntlet of towel-whipping while nude... there's a point where this crosses a line into both homoeroticism and cruelty
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
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.
Anatomy of a slow-moving scandal: Canada's 2018 WJ hockey team
The "World Juniors", the under-20 international hockey championship, is probably the third-biggest sporting event for Canadians after the NHL playoffs and the Olympics. Played immediately after Christmas each year, it gets massive TV ratings as people are home for the holidays. It helps that Canada wins more often than not, though its hold on being the undisputed champion of ice hockey becomes more precarious year-by-year. The brightest stars of junior hockey in Canada are often already household names before they go onto their professional careers, and people look back at certain years with specific fondness for their wealth of talent, in particular the 2005 team.
Well no one is going to look back at the 2018 team with much fondness: five of its members have been ordered to surrender to police to face charges for the gang rape of a woman after a celebratory gala in June 2018 to commemorate their victory. The move towards criminal prosecution has been somewhat glacial; an investigation was briefly opened in February 2019, but was closed and the story never reached the press. In 2022 the victim sued Hockey Canada; they settled with her out of court, and it was this settlement that sparked media attention as news of the incident had never reached the public. The settlement ignited a real public scrutiny on Hockey Canada, which was revealed to have a special unmarked fund for compensating victims of sexual assault by its players, and using government funds to do so. The criminal case into the affair was re-opened, and the problem of sexual assault within Hockey Canada and hockey culture in general became a national debate.
Hockey culture is kind of weird. I grew up somewhat alongside it; I was good enough to play rep hockey, but my parents were too busy for it so apart from a summer when I was 12 I never got too deep into it. But I knew the guys who played AAA or junior hockey and a few future NHLers, and I got enough taste of the locker-room culture to put me off it. It's really not too dissimilar, from my understanding, to the culture of similar macho, competitive sports like American football; a mix of jokes and pranks and lighthearted misogyny and homophobia (with an undercurrent of repressed homoeroticism). For the really competitive teams hazing was common and could get quite severe, bordering on sexual assault of new players. If you're a really good player (not necessarily a future NHLer, but maybe a pro in Europe or somewhere) you leave your family at 14 or 15 to go play junior hockey in the CHL. Education is very much a lesser priority, you probably don't go to university, and there's generally few people telling you you're anything but hot shit. If you make it to the Canadian WJ team you're practically a national celebrity if only for a brief period of time. I think all of these things add together in not necessarily the most wholesome of ways.
So that this kind of scandal would happen, or that it would be swept under the rug only to eventually reappear later, is not entirely shocking. "Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal a real shock to anyone who has never met a junior hockey player" says The Beaverton, the Canadian equivalent of The Onion, and yeah that pretty much sums it up.
Since the coming to light of the incident in 2022 there's been a flurry of speculation about who might have done it: my understanding was only two of the players (including superstar Cale Makar) had airtight alibis as far as internet sleuths could tell. Every time news came out about one of the 2018 WJC players there was speculation it was somehow linked: a player being traded, or not being re-signed by their team, or rumours about locker room problems, etc. My team (the Ottawa Senators) didn't re-sign a player, Alex Formenton, from the 2018 WJC who had had a good season the year before, and so speculation swirled that everyone behind the scenes knew what was up. There have apparently been a few hunches confirmed: in the past day and a bit five players have been announced by their teams to be taking "indefinite leaves of absence." All five were semi-regular NHLers (except for the aforementioned Formenton who was now playing in Italy). I wonder whether there will be pushback against the teams that employed them, presumably knowing this was coming for a while.
There's no statute of limitations in Canada (except for treason, bizarrely: 3 years!). Presumably the London Police feel they have a strong enough case here: besides the woman there were apparently three others who saw and did not take part. As of yet I've seen no sort of arguments that the alleged victim was lying or something, but there are some conflicting details and perhaps more that will emerge as prosecution moves further along. This is after all what the criminal justice system is for. So as of yet this case has sort-of ignited a culture war debate, without yet succumbing to culture war neuroses quite yet. The last big sexual assault case that got national attention in Canada was gigantic clusterfuck (Jian Ghomeshi, if you're interested) and pretty badly damaged the credibility of the media. We'll see where this goes.
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