johnfabian
4d ago
b. There are evil people colluding to drive up the prices of essential goods
This does sometimes happen, though. Grocery price-fixing occurs from time-to-time even though ostensibly it should be one of the more difficult sectors to do that in. More commonly it also occurs at the supplier level, especially now that there has been considerable market consolidation in key sectors.
I saw lots of people mocking those who thought something was afoot with the price of eggs in 2025: as if those evil companies were just conspiring to raise prices, instead of being it just the natural result of a supply crunch! What, do you think prices are just based on greed? Well...
johnfabian
8d ago
Yeah, the scope of the project is a store each in four of the five boroughs, if I remember correctly.
johnfabian
8d ago
Is this not fairly standard for a large enough (and sensitive) deal?
johnfabian
9d ago
Also, one might wonder how a country would become more Christian while deporting or otherwise doing away with a substantial portion of the populace.
I don't think the proposals that would result in this outcome would be very Christ-like.
johnfabian
20d ago
It's very much different from the other novels. The Player of Games is often considered the better way to start
johnfabian
20d ago
Finished reading Bagration 1944: The Great Soviet Offensive by Prit Buttar. I've read through most of his Eastern Front histories now because they feature lots of primary sources. Knew most of the subject matter already but an interesting element that this book brought which many others do not was an expanded emphasis on partisan infighting, especially the conflict between Polish, Jewish, and Soviet (and Soviet-aligned) groups and how the various governments interacted with them. Buttar is also generally much more skeptical about received wisdom and is quick to point out possible inconsistencies/misleading elements in testimony.
Started reading Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. I don't know exactly where this one falls in his authorial timeline but the prose is noticeably more purple in this one than in others I've read of him.
johnfabian
27d ago
Ah, I see your point. I think there's a bit of cherry picking: you can point to lots of white players who peaked at 18 or 19 and lots of African players who rounded into form later. I think I'd be inclined to agree that there might be a general trend where sub-Saharan African players might generally trend that way, but there's also issues in a lot of those countries with players faking their birth years (such that players that look to be excellent 16 or 17 year olds are really OK 20 year olds).
johnfabian
28d ago
Because they weren't slow to develop, and had already established themselves as superstars by the time they exited their teens.
johnfabian
28d ago
Compared with European players with 'potential' like CR7, Messi or Rooney that had 'potential' as teens and then hit their stride in their mid 20's.
I think these are all bad examples; they were all teenage wunderkinds who made their pro debuts at 15
johnfabian
28d ago
You mean from the perspective of the French, or the Algerians?
It's water under the bridge except for the most bitter nationalists at this point. It's definitely sore for the pieds-noirs but they're dying off. For most French people their issues with Algerians living in France would be much more pointedly about crime or Islam or terrorism, not a conflict barely anyone can remember anymore.
Likewise Algerians are quite happy to come to a more prosperous, stable country; nevermind that once they conquered and tried to colonize you. It's not like contemporary Vietnamese have much gripes with the French either; in fact quite the opposite.
johnfabian
29d ago
I guess I'd be interested in hearing a real French perspective on this, if someone is willing to volunteer one.
I'm not French but I lived in France for four years. Speak the language, regularly read French news/social media, so I would probably have as good an insight here as anyone.
Historically France had a much more "expansionist" sense of nationalism. France at the time of the revolution was not a deeply cohesive nation-state, with probably just some 20-25% of the population speaking what we would register as French with a variety of minority languages and cultures proliferating. French nationalists saw the French project as one defined by culture that inferior peoples could (and would) integrate into. You can see that by 1812 France had directly annexed Catalonia, the Low Countries, a strip of northern Germany, the left bank of the Rhine, much of Italy, as well as modern Croatia and Slovenia; these were all deemed to be peoples who, if not French now, could be French in the future. As late as 1919 French nationalists were still arguing that all the people on the left side of the Rhine were more French than German. France, unlike most other European countries, have integrated some colonies directly into the structure of the metropole: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion are not separate overseas territories or dependencies but rather integral regions of France.
The big changes to this mentality came after the 1960s. France lost the war in Algeria, and with it the Algerian provinces that had been annexed into France. Over a million pied-noirs (white settlers) and Algerian Jews left Algeria for France. Around the same time, France turned to the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa for low-income labour. The state also increased offers of education in France for those areas of Africa in the French cultural/colonial sphere (where France still wields considerable influence). Over time the non-European population of France has increased significantly.
So people are basically of three minds. Many right-wingers (and perhaps less openly, people aligned in the center and left) think French identity is primarily racial. You have to have a majority, if not pure (for the more extreme), ethnic connection to the French nation. There's a certain hypocrisy here as people would not say this of the various other waves of European immigrants to France (particularly there has always been a historical connection with Poland), and a not-insignificant number of the most hardline of these are somewhat lacking on this count (like Éric Zemmour, who is a Sephardic Jew). Also from my experience this rhetoric is oriented rather squarely at sub-Saharan Africans, somewhat lesser at Maghrebis, and almost not at all against southeast Asians.
There are other people, probably still the plurality, that consider Frenchness a matter of culture and that anyone can become French. This still involves a lot of snootiness about what that means (French culture of course being manifestly superior in all ways), despite proclamations of laïcité an intense (and not undeserved) skepticism of Islam, and again some extent of double standards with respect to who is "French enough." (No one ever questions whether someone named Nowak or Kowalski is French).
The third group of people are the smallest and mostly left-aligned, particularly with the political party La France Insoumise (communists, basically) who believe the French identity to be completely flexible and not worth all that much to begin with.
johnfabian
29d ago
The situation is different, but my point was that people who would've otherwise claimed to see nothing at all strange or odd about France's team being 90% African were quick to point out how "Italian" the Italy team was.
Yeah, I may have a somewhat skewed perception, but a lot of the women around me have distinctly old-fashioned tastes. My 15 year-old niece is rampaging through all the 19th century classics. I have multiple friends whose interests in sewing and crochet root their tastes in art and culture centuries past. Obviously this doesn't apply to all the women I know, but there's certainly a cohort of them for whom the past is alive.
More options
Context Copy link