johnfabian
2hr ago
And they apparently name their capital ships after racial justice courts!
I'm not surprised that someone who is Jew-obsessed sees Jews in every piece of media, but I'm really curious as to what you think "truth and reconciliation" means.
johnfabian
2d ago
As an anecdote, I was talking to my sister the other day about some work her friend is doing. She (the friend) is studying the effects of education on social mobility among women in India, and apparently because of the increasing gender gaps in India in terms of educational attainment, it's becoming increasingly common to see new strange reverse-dowry arrangements. Because girls are so routinely outperforming boys in school, parents will for the purpose of an arranged marriage of their failson to someone else's smart daughter, pay for the foreign education of that girl in the hopes that the boy will be able to emigrate with her and work in a higher-earning (ideally western) countrey.
johnfabian
3d ago
There are limited insights into how the US military performed because they're being unusually taciturn, but at the very least you can identify that a point of criticism is that they were not adequately prepared for Iranian counterstrikes.
johnfabian
3d ago
I think ostensibly they can (are supposed to?) but certainly in my hop across the border from Canada last month I didn't get flagged for anything.
johnfabian
10d ago
Postmodernism doesn't entail that it be byzantine and unapproachable. It's just often the nature of texts that see deconstruction as their main task.
johnfabian
11d ago
I think when the neocons wanted war with Iran, it certainly wasn't this kind of war.
johnfabian
14d ago
98th percentile, weakest on aesthetics (as I expect many of us are).
johnfabian
15d ago
Also, rather importantly, the Nakba was (for the most part, albeit this is controversial) Palestinians fleeing their homes willingly because of the war, and then later being refused right of return after Israel's victory.
It is a lot messier to force people out of their homes when they do not wish to leave of their own volition.
johnfabian
16d ago
Even for the Americans the submarine arm was the deadliest branch of the armed forces - around 25% of American submarine crewmen in WWII died.
johnfabian
16d ago
The other half of those survivors weren't of those crews that were sunk, it was of those that returned home safely. So 70% of Uboat crewmen died, another 15% were captured, and only the other 15% made it home safely.
johnfabian
19d ago
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was a pretty unambiguous American defeat.
johnfabian
22d ago
They also fined Morocco for some of their infringements, like, uh, having their ball boys steal towels and water bottles from the Senegalese goalkeeper.
This is incorrect: they actually lifted/reduced some of the fines that had previously been imposed on Morocco for their conduct.
It really is an incredibly outward display of corruption.
johnfabian
23d ago
According to the author's bio he is the creator of an AI wingman "dating assistant." I'm sure he views himself as not part of the problem, but...
johnfabian
25d ago
My classic strat for economic advantage in RTII was to build up my railway to a profitable network. Then when I had enough capital I would invest in the really killer advantage: "tunnels" you could build by using the lay track feature to change elevation of terrain. In this way you could cut through mountain passes to lay flat track that would in time be massively profitable, but in the short term cost your company millions in losses. If you sold all your stock before doing this, the effect on the stock price of your company seeing losses in the millions in a given year would instantly crater it to $1, at which point you could easily rebuy all the shares. Then going forward your company would be even more profitable than before because the one-time loss incurred in "tunneling" through the mountains would be repaid by the much faster and flatter route.
Once I had dominant control of my own company I would then pause and create subsidiary companies with my excess personal funds (every two years was the minimum) to create AI-ran companies which would just run low-profit goods to my stations and use the AI bonuses to make money. Then I would without unpausing be re-elected chair of my main company.
johnfabian
27d ago
2, I think. Though I know some people say OpenTTD is now the best version of a railroad builder
johnfabian
28d ago
I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.
Japan goes even further - they call their aircraft carriers destroyers!
EDIT: Though apparently they've been upgraded to cruisers.
johnfabian
28d ago
At the same time, American tolerance for causalities is super low. In the first island hopping campaign in the Marshalls, Toll makes a big deal about Americans losing ~2k dead taking Tarawa. Casualties are similarly low for much of the rest of the action of the book, including on Saipan and Guam. Even on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had only about 12k dead each. Compared to the Eastern Front, WW1, or even the Civil War, these are pathetic numbers that the media made a storm about. I don't mean to take these deaths lightly, but proportionally this is nothing. This attitude has only gotten worse (Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, current Iran war), and I think it makes it increasingly difficult to accomplish our geopolitical goals.
These casualties aren't really low, they are just lower compared to the totalitarian regimes the western Allies were pitted against (and allied with). Looking only at the dead is misleading too, especially when comparing with fighting elsewhere, as both non-combat and psychiatric casualties among American forces were much higher in the Pacific than elsewhere.
The other factor is that America had entered the war with a deliberate strategy to center its industrial might rather than its population wealth. They chose the 90 division army rather than the 200 division army. The American economy that was able to produce endless amounts of Liberty ships, aircraft carriers, tanks, munitions, fuel, food, etc. was made conscious with a deliberate decision to run as close to the wire as possible with the manpower put into the field. With Europe being the primary focus almost right until the war's conclusion there, the Pacific theater commanders did not have an endless supply of bodies to throw into operations against the Japanese.
johnfabian
30d ago
I'm not some bleeding heart. I know that war means dead kids, that's just the nature of things. It's why war is bad and you try to avoid it, but it also means that sometimes some civilians will die in order to end a war quicker.
But surely you can see that the sentiment being expressed here is beyond that of just "it is silly to expect perfection from the US."
johnfabian
30d ago
US bases are basically towns in their own right. In every aspect it would be more difficult to school kids off-base, plus it would create new security risks.
johnfabian
30d ago
There definitely are issues with the legal deportation process in Canada, no doubt. But it is also significantly harder to live illegally in Canada than it is the United States. There are no doubt hundreds of thousands of visa overstays, maybe even a million - but we don't have to nearly the same extent the same kind of underground economy.
johnfabian
30d ago
The Liberals are competitive in Alberta again. That Trudeau-era dynamic has been washed away, at least for now.
johnfabian
30d ago
There seems to be a big campaign right now from the left to get the Conservatives to dump Pierre. That's not what you'd expect if he was truly weak.
Poilievre is simply very, very, unpopular with the broader public. There's no way to get around that.
johnfabian
30d ago
It's "woke" to not want to kill children?
johnfabian
1mo ago
Immigration has been another interesting change with Carney in power; most of the pathways that were vulnerable to fraud have been (quietly) shut down. It's been a strange phenomenon where you end up seeing the article about how x or y immigration scheme has been closed from an Indian newspaper, because the Canadian government has not commented on it all. Since Carney has taken over, Canada's population has started to shrink for the first time in a long time (not including COVID years). The vast bulk of this is due to expiring visas of temporary residents.
Obviously it won't be enough for a lot of people, but the people who were claiming that Carney was going to press down the accelerator and flood the country were obviously wrong. I think more importantly for Canadians the more obviously fraudulent elements are being restricted, namely the international student streams, while popular capital I immigration (that is to say, permanent residency offered to non-Canadian residents) stays the same.
The other really troublesome issue is the stream of asylum seekers which exploded again at the end of Trudeau's reign; Canada got some 170k in 2024 and another 110k in 2025. The Carney government is cutting a bunch of funding to refugees and asylum seekers (again, quietly), and there's been more recent debate in Parliament about going further.
I think the Liberals have managed to somewhat skillfully defuse immigration as the bomb around their neck, at least for the present, by simultaneously addressing the most negative elements of the system they had set up (while also not telling anyone they are doing so, as to avoid blame).
How many people were convicted by these "kangaroo courts"?
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