johnfabian
5hr ago
My point is that the Truth and Reconciliation commission in South Africa cannot have been a kangaroo court in any definition because they convicted zero people. That was very fundamentally not their concept or purpose.
johnfabian
15hr ago
How many people were convicted by these "kangaroo courts"?
johnfabian
17hr 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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
11d 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
12d 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
16d 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
17d 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
17d 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
20d 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
24d 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
26d 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
29d 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.
I don't quite understand; why would traffic be rerouted from the Strait of Hormuz be going around the Horn of Africa? That's what you'd expect if they were trying to avoid pirates/Houthis in the Red Sea or if the Suez was closed. The Strait of Hormuz isn't a general global shipping lane, it's specifically for ships going to/from the countries with ports there. I'm questioning the premise of this.
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