mildly_benis
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User ID: 1305
mildly_benis
10d ago
By contrast, the power of Borris Johnson to coerce, compel, bewitch, or otherwise overturn the true desires of the Ukrainian political establishment was...?
You frame this as if it were absurd to think US had any way of influencing Ukrainians. I do find the focus on Johnson silly. The idea that at that pivotal moment US helped Ukrainians decide to commit themselves to the meatgrinder, not so much. Obviously Johnson himself would be little more than a mouthpiece.
My impression is that you never give an inch.
mildly_benis
10d ago
enough to trigger something that wouldn't be out of place at a Klan rally
Where is that something, do you just mean the responses under the the tweet in your link? The pinned tweet on that account, while recent, makes me suspect the shitposting crowd was antagonized before already.
mildly_benis
10d ago
This is so bizarre to me.
If you're male, I find it very hard to believe you don't see his point. You can discard it as a primitive, outdated consideration if you so choose, but don't call it bizarre - it decidedly is not.
Myself, I can't overstate just how much this scenario makes me recoil. If such mercenary behavior is straightforwardly permissible, then the idea of fighting for a nation falls apart, and you're just meat to be sacrificed to further elite interests. You don't exactly get to loot your way into leaving a war better off these days. War in Ukraine is utter hell, demanding solidarity on homefront is perfectly normal.
mildly_benis
1mo ago
I mean that something like Foxhole but with Factorio-complex factory gameplay and combat that's more like say, war thunder or Squad (but with lots of AI grunts) would be far more fun.
I see, I'd like to see a game like that too. Don't know about it being more fun though - it does not exist.
There's no commander's map view where he can assign objectives to units
No, it's total anarchy unless you talk people into something, and there are no such in-game tools to coordinate even just your own squad. Randoms, you must wrangle them via text/voice chat. But you can imagine, against such backdrop of chaos, a coordinated group can be insanely effective.
So 'effortless coordination' in comparison to that, and experimentation, since the base assumption is that it must be purely voluntary.
I lost my taste for that kind of game cca 1997.
I think it would surprise you. It's light on individual aim skill, heavy on positioning, flanking, correct tool usage. Digging a key trench or placing tripod MGs correctly can turn a battle. Admittedly short engagement ranges make it all somewhat arcadey, but I'd say most of the time this is not detrimental.
mildly_benis
1mo ago
Maybe, no idea what sort of changes you're thinking of. But as it is, it's both good gameplay, and nicely unique. Imo the wasted potential is in the lack of serious experimentation with tools that would enable effortless coordination at all scales while maintaining anarchy.
mildly_benis
1mo ago
IRL Russia chose Religious and Aristocratic and ended up technologically backward
MEIOU3 is a total overhaul, possibly more feature rich than EU5 will ever be - it adds pops, simulated economy, and a lengthy, painful process of reform from feudal to modern bureaucratic state. A small but modernized, urbanized country with rich and educated plebs will demolish a country like Poland - strong early, but held back by the powerful nobility, naturally falling behind as game progresses.
The mod is still rough, held back horribly by the UI limitations, has a steep learning curve and demands patience, but I 100% recommend it for all EU4 players.
the whole thing with game being 3d yet having weird-ass 2d combat is not good either
Did you try it? Foxhole infantry combat is great, and if you're lucky to join an interesting battle, it is downright fantastic. Vehicle gameplay is cool too, though tank line meta is meh and there is a lot of waiting around involved. I thoroughly recommend it for everything except facility building.
mildly_benis
2mo ago
One perspective on Navalny death is that it was meant as a signal for Europeans: "Current regime feels itself strong enough to drop the act that a reset is at all feasible. Russia is winning in Ukraine and will dictate when and how the conflict ends. Putin is the only person Europe can negotiate with".
Ukraine would be interested in Europe not treating this signal seriously, saying it was just a clot helps. It's quite a stretch though.
mildly_benis
4mo ago
If you haven't experienced the loss
Only men cut well out of childhood do. But I would not cede the exclusive right to judge the matter to them anyhow. I only meant I consider being and not being all natural as far back as you can remember equal standing here.
but the object-level facts can't support the weight "mutilation" is trying to load here.
I don't agree. Yes, it's a strong word, it is sufficiently central here. I would say such parents are perpetuating mutilation, just not the worst imaginable exact kind.
mildly_benis
4mo ago
most people who get conspicuously upset about it are [...] MRA’s going on screeds
Maybe, either way, I think being very upset over it is permissible.
mildly_benis
4mo ago
We've experienced it, and do not consider it worthy of the term "mutilation"
It's vanishingly rare here, I think experiencing the alternative gives you just as much standing to judge it. I'm not sure if I quite understand what you have in mind when you say "the experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well". Here, practically any adult man would consider it an unambiguous mutilation if proposed without absolute necessity.
The exact extent of the loss of function is of little interest to me, it's a technicality dwarfed by the default of no wanton destruction of body parts that I know to be perfectly good as they are. I could probably live with the tip of each finger, say 0.5cm, removed. You could prove it's only 8% loss in general performance, I don't care - it has to be a significant, unambiguous improvement before it deserves even a conversation.
I especially dislike how meaningless the practice is in the US, and as such, a reminder that men are disposable. If it were a genuine ritual you go through when coming of age or whatever, I'd be far less disgusted, even though it would hardly be any more of a choice.
I'm not demanding each 'victim' to be mad about it, of course, perspective @self_made_human describes is reasonable.
mildly_benis
4mo ago
But getting mad about having been circumcised reeks of mommy issues
I find this willingness to apply 'deranged' label to resentment over getting mutilated unsettling. Can't help but see it as a defense mechanism first.
mildly_benis
6mo ago
That's fair, I'm hoping that after some tweaks it can be made to map there.
mildly_benis
6mo ago
amplifying Israeli rhetoric about savage barbarians etc would be far more likely to turn European populations against mass immigration
I think that only enables the media to shift the blame for the 'savage barbarians' rhetoric from Israelis to the right, a very convenient framing. Showing yourself capable of seeing past ethnicity/religion, and comfortably lampooning double standards seem beneficial enough to warrant the sympathy signal boost, especially if the angle is 'natives mistreated'.
mildly_benis
6mo ago
I am primarily referring to 'brutal combat footage or savage treatment of POWs', yes. If the question is the emotional, subjective impact (what I meant by 'wince') of an individual video, I think it does not matter who the victim is, it all comes down to either extreme cruelty in full display or detail. There is a well known trench combat video when one of the surprised soldiers gets shot, you begin to hear him scream in fear and agony, and barely a second later his is shot again and silent - I mean this sort of detail. Meanwhile photos from Bucha mentioned below did nothing of the sort for me, as bad as murder is.
mildly_benis
6mo ago
The Palestinian terror attacks were a type of brutality I don't think anybody in the modern western world has ever seen before.
Baffling statement as far as I am concerned. Nothing I've seen so far made we wince the way some videos from Ukraine do. Then there are cartel videos, and minor events like, for example, that tourist woman getting beheaded in Morocco (?). This is of course just the tip of the brutality iceberg that's easy to access.
I've seen some videos of Israelis getting shot, some dead women, some captive scared women. Stuff that, to me, does not feel out of place in Israel, considering the unresolved conflict. Is there any actually gruesome stuff out there?
mildly_benis
6mo ago
It's not 'technically not fully nude', just normal not nude, complete with something on her back that looks like a strap of a top. From what I've seen it's not really clear she was stripped of anything at all.
I don't know what you think I'm trying to convince you of, seeing falsehoods repeated irks me, that's my angle here.
mildly_benis
6mo ago
parades their naked bodies through the streets
Is there a video or picture of this? This claim is repeated everywhere I look, but if you mean the short video of the corpse of that German-Israeli woman, she's not naked.
mildly_benis
6mo ago
Does that short clip of a female corpse in underwear in a truck with Palestinian soldiers sitting over it make such a huge difference to you? Or are you referring to some other video?
mildly_benis
9mo ago
It reminds me of 4th of July LARPing in Eastern Europe. Yes, it's actually a thing
On a quick glance all I found points back to some people setting up a theme park for people to roleplay in. Expansive tickets, fewer than 100 people, a lot of photos. I assume this is not really your threshold for something being 'a thing', and at least in my experience, 4th of July does not register for people in Poland beyond the mentions of it in the news.
mildly_benis
9mo ago
I did not say America was short on them, I implied the opposite - by 'if anyone' I meant, if you're going to list any individual to represent the forces that were of foremost importance in US success in the two wars.
mildly_benis
9mo ago
grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case
Seeing this repeated is too much for me. If 'Teutonic war machine' lost to anything American, it was the 1/3rd+ of global industrial output and a continent worth of resources supporting the Europeans - and it was these Europeans that Germans lost out to. List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.
I was surprised that no asked asked what, concretely, is so harmful about Holocaust education
I am surprised you feel this was absent from the thread below.
If by holocaust education you mean dedicating a single high school history lesson to the topic - nothing particularly harmful.
If you mean Holocaust education as it exists, and as SS suggests it might evolve, it is a ploy to secure and solidify power by a group I don't belong to. Concretely and currently, it helps enable Jewish organizations to use USA as a bludgeon to further their goals. Among them, the attempt to extract rents my country - Poland - with the flimsy excuse of claiming the property of Polish citizens of Jewish ethnicity who were murdered during the war and did not leave any descendants.
mildly_benis
1yr ago
Not out of place when discussing court cases, mind you, but when I see these rather strictly legalistic arguments used in the context of unprecedented, transformative tools, they seem lacking. Surely the circumstances call for more than pointing to such and such paragraph? From my shallow understanding of how society handled previous such changes, it's a vain hope, losers will simply have to cope.
We already have a substantial minority of Russian speaking people.
My hunch is that a policy of open arms for all (ethnic) Russian immigrants would help with the Polish reputation of being rabidly russophobic, and make it a tiny bit harder for German politicians to explain away a local conflict as something Poland pushed for and maybe even deserved, actually. And anyway, not many Russians would come, I imagine.
I suppose the potential for sabotage is a concern.
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