problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails. You're basically dooming yourself and your people (and many other countries) either way, with a not-insignificant chance of your own death; at the levels of destruction we're talking about here, it's kind of moot. Seriously, I doubt anybody is evaluating this with the geopolitical logic of "Well, 85% of my country is dead and large swaths of it will not be able to be livable for a good long while and there's possibly a nuclear winter going on, but 99.9% of your population is dead! Checkmate."
Even if China fired none of its nukes, which isn't likely, launching 3,700 nukes in their totality to totally decimate the country blows back on the US immediately and in a big way.
That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
Again, the sheer number of nukes does not actually allow you more freedom of action. It's basically threatening an intense no-win scenario where outcomes on every side are so horrific it's unlikely any country would want to escalate to it.
The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD; being not only capable of longer range but higher altitudes and a superior radar system. And Pakistan has announced plans to acquire the HQ-19, so I guess we'll see how it fares in an in-practice scenario. Suffice to say I don't think THAAD is a particularly convincing or central point for your argument about US overwhelming military dominance.
problem_redditor
21hr ago
Or so they say, yes. Even so, in its presence or absence I doubt any major power would be retarded enough to start firing these things all over the place. MAD is a powerful deterrent.
The idea that the sheer number of nukes a country holds is the most important factor in an engagement is just silly; maintenance is costly and Russia and the US have so many nuclear bombs partially because of Cold War-era posturing. Strategically speaking, you don't actually need 2000+ nukes to do the job properly, it's not about saturation as much as it is having the capacity to hit enough targets to deter attacks. If you have even a nominal amount of nukes and a proper delivery system, that is more than enough. MAD doesn't need to be even close to total, if you wipe out the largest cities in the US the vast majority of its economy is gone in a handful of hours (and note, you'll not only kill people directly but also through the collateral damage such as complete collapse of infrastructure and radiation percolation into the water system).
Note that China has 600+ nukes, which would certainly be capable of levelling large swaths of the US; striking first is incredibly stupid. Theoretically you could remove their second strike capability by attempting an attack on their silos, but realistically you aren't going to be able to identify the locations of every Chinese silo and submarine and target them before China mounts its offence. Even if just 20 of China's most antiquated ICBMs hit the US, that's 50 million dead according to some possible ballpark estimates, how would you feel about 300? China certainly has enough for credible deterrence against the US, and that's largely what its nuclear arsenal appears to be designed for - out of the major nuclear powers, it's the only one that actually maintains an unconditional no-first-strike policy. Even so, of the nuclear powers it's the one scaling up production fastest.
And speaking of missile defence systems, China has the Hongqi-19, which has a reportedly superior maximum operational range (up to 500-600 km) compared to THAAD (200 km). Claiming "overwhelming nuclear dominance" such that it would allow the US to steamroll any country it feels like is premature, to say the least.
It really feels like the usual parade of cope and trope about China that has been circulating in the public discourse ever since it bootstrapped its way up from worse than sub-Saharan poverty to a world power in 45 years, all the while singlehandedly orchestrating the largest urban migration in human history and aggressively A/B testing their entire economy to see what worked and what didn't.
People really want this to be a Soviet Union situation where the regime is barely hanging on by a thread, only bolstering their public image via international propaganda, and where the dominance of the ever-so-enlightened USA will be assured in the end in some kind of teleological Francis Fukuyama-esque end-of-history sense "but tofu construction, but ghost cities, but CCP is going to collapse, but everything in China is fake". Their military technology at the moment lags slightly behind the US (though they're making huge strides in closing that gap), but their production pipelines and logistics are more streamlined and scalable, and yeah their population is massive.
Of course nobody can say for sure who would win in a scuff-up between the two, but I would not underestimate China.
At least in the circles I've run in, the idea of "cultured intellectualism" that sticks today has a lot to do with knowing prominent but countercultural figures, movements and pieces of art that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. New Hollywood and independent films (such as knowing the oeuvres of Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and John Cassavetes), the Manchester and London punk and post-punk scene (listening to and appreciating the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, The Fall, Joy Division, etc) and other such things. Knowing critical modernist and abstract-expressionist artists and designers such as people involved in the Bauhaus movement and de Stijl, as well as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and so on is also a big part of it.
In general, the art that we venerate and consider intellectual says a lot about the aspirations, beliefs and general zeitgeist of our society, and it certainly applies here. Any such aristocratic Victorian ideals that persisted in the early half of the twentieth century were all but swept away by the counterculture of the post-war period, and by the time the third millennium began it had largely been replaced with an... entirely different set of ideals and hierarchies. All of the stuff that is considered intellectual today was explicitly about "breaking from tradition", breaking from conventional notions of beauty, prioritising the individual artist and their subjectivity over the consumer, accepting the strange and absurd and even the outright ugly. That goes along with a zeitgeist that's typified by a blank-slatist idea of the human mind wherein all aesthetics, beliefs and social structures are fully enculturated, it embraces absurdism and subjectivity to the point that it claims that truth is unattainable and morality is merely a construct (used primarily as a rhetorical device to undermine and expose the previous system as fake, all while the ideology contradictorily makes its own sweeping claims about truth and morality and imposes its own social stratifications that are elevated to the level of dogma), and it's so beholden to its roots and needs something to be in opposition to so badly that it's unable to stop LARPing as subversive and countercultural even after it has ossified into every institution and become the hegemony. I find it very funny that progressive media and art now finds itself in the strange position of having become an institution with its own stringent and limiting criteria for deemed excellence.
I think there is a nascent counter-counterculture forming at the moment in certain very online dissident right and dirtbag left spaces with their own distinct mannerisms and aesthetics, but it's going to be a good long while before they take the world by storm in the same way that the 1960s and 1970s saw.
I would add a more specific question for whether there are parts of town that are particularly interesting on the street level, in the sense of having local colour rather than being all globalised slop. (I'm quite open to shantytowns and the like too.)
That does exist in places (I look for these kinds of neighbourhoods as well; I truly hate the International Style). You'll find a lot of lovely colourful Straits-style shophouses in and around Chinatown, which also happens to house the two traditional Hokkien temples I spoke about earlier. In addition, Little India should provide you much of that local vernacular style, there are many shophouses there that primarily cater to the Indian diaspora. Koon Seng Road also features a bunch of Peranakan dwellings that have been painted very colourfully, though there isn't that much else to do in the area.
Also, anything touching on the military history of the place? The British colonial era, prisons/bunkers/batteries that changed hands during WWII or were otherwise connected to it being overrun, etc.?
There are a good number of colonial-era WW2 forts and bunkers: the most prominent are Fort Siloso, Labrador ATMB Battery, and the Battlebox on Fort Canning Hill (the Battlebox, in particular, is where the decision to surrender Singapore to the Japanese was made). Fort Canning also has some earlier fortifications going back to the 1800s, though only the gate and two cannons remain of this early fort. There's also the Changi Chapel and Museum, which features exhibits on a strange part of WW2 history: it was a place where Allied POWs were interned during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and during this period prisoners converted buildings into churches and built makeshift altars out of scrap.
By the way don't forget to try the Singapore chilli crab. Criminal thing to miss out on, in my opinion.
A one- or two-day excursion to Malaysia is probably conceivable; how is the transport situation to go to Malacca or beyond? Are there good trains, or is it sensible to rent a car and drive?
There's no direct train from Singapore to Malacca, and it's a three-hour drive between the two cities if you're using a rental. I believe there are also buses directly connecting the two cities, that's a four hour trip.
In other words, it's doable if you're willing to spend a bit of time on the road. Ideally I would spend two full days just to soak in the vibe, though I'm not sure how realistic that is for you depending on your schedule. Malacca is small and sleepy but very charming, it has all the local feel you would want from a Southeast Asian city (it's so colourful and vibrant it looks like a Wes Anderson film sometimes), and has the historical credentials to boot, having been founded around 1400 as the capital of a sultanate. Lots of pretty little temples, heritage houses, churches, mosques and fortresses. It also has the most consistently amazing food I've tasted in the whole country, and I do not say this lightly; I grew up in Malaysia and am very particular about my Malaysian food.
If you end up deciding that you want to do Malacca just let me know. I can offer up some very detailed recommendations.
EDIT: Note that NUS Baba House seems to be closed for renovations, for something similar to that there's also the Singapore Peranakan Mansion Museum.
I do have to second @pbmonster and ask why you're spending two weeks in Singapore. Perhaps I like to travel fast, but I spent far less time in Beijing, Seoul or Xi'an, all much older and more historically rich cities than Singapore. I honestly say three or four days maximum in Singapore, four if you're really dead from all the walking in the horrific tropical heat; you'll need to rest a lot in order not to pass out from heat exhaustion.
Anyway, I like history, so in my recommendations I'll focus on that alone. Firstly, there are some pretty nice Hokkien temples in the city centre. Thian Hock Keng Temple and Yueh Hai Ching Temple are two relatively old ones (hailing from 1800s) with colourful porcelain detailing and woodcarvings, personally I think you can't go wrong with Hokkien temples; most of them are quite beautifully decorated. Bunch of Indian temples downtown too: Sri Mariamman Temple, Sri Krishnan Temple, Sri Thendayuthapani Temple and so on are some old ones.
Secondly, there are also some historical houses I know of that you can mooch around. The House of Tan Yeok Nee is one of the only two remaining traditional large Chinese mansions left in Singapore, and it's built in Teochew style with a lot of tiling and decoration. And the Former House of Tan Teng Niah is a uniquely colourful Chinese heritage villa. The NUS Baba House on the other hand is a Peranakan/Straits Chinese villa; they're an ethnic group that has both Chinese and Malay descent and hybridises cultural influences from both groups. Worth seeing that when you're in the Straits, because that's an architectural trend you probably won't be able to find anywhere else.
Finally, if you really want a very weird and hyperspecific attraction, the Har Paw Villa is a strange bit of history. It was built by two Burmese-Chinese brothers who developed the analgesic heat rub known as "Tiger Balm" (if you're Chinese, you have definitely had this applied if you have had joint pain or even when you got sick as a kid). They built gigantic theme parks in Singapore, Hong Kong and Fujian showcasing dioramas of Chinese folklore and religion (the one in Singapore features over a thousand of them), which became a popular recreational destination in Singapore. In its heyday during the 1950s and 60s, the park hosted about 1 million visitors yearly, though visitor numbers have significantly decreased now.
Anyway, I'd also recommend making trips to Malaysia, and would point to Malacca and Georgetown as particularly interesting and historical places. I was there just this January, so if you want more info on them I'm happy to provide it.
I took them to a few places that were unique enough but also interesting (spending the night at Koyasan temple, for example) that many tourists still don't know about.
If it's not too much to ask, I would actually be interested to hear what Japan recommendations you have for someone who is basically allergic to large crowds. In spite of my reservations about the tourism I'm not averse to the idea of a future trip to some lesser known destinations in the country, though I'd want to stay away from Kyoto, Fujikawaguchiko, Osaka and Tokyo entirely.
As such I've been scoping out the area for interesting places, and have been considering Koyasan, Nikko, Sado Island, Matsue/Izumo, Iya Valley and Hiraizumi; Miyajima looks nice too, but Itsukushima-jinja seems crowded on the best of days. It's a bit of a shame because Kyoto/Nara is so obviously the cultural centre of Japan with by far the highest concentration of history, and attractions seem to be rather far apart outside of there with a couple exceptions, but I can't justify travelling there considering the sheer amount of tourism the city receives. It's far beyond the actual capacity that it can realistically accommodate.
problem_redditor
8d ago
This is really good! Surprised this has been blowing up for two weeks and I missed it; this is the kind of thing that I could see myself having on regular rotation for a while.
Hainan's beaches don't really compare with Southeast Asian beaches though, its geography isn't very dramatic, and it also has a lack of heavyweight historical sights that could compare with an Angkor Wat or Borobudur Temple, being largely on the fringes of the Chinese state ever since it was incorporated into the empire. It was literally used as a strategic naval outpost and a prison island for exiled officials for much of Chinese history.
Most of the best Chinese historical sights are located deep in the north of the country, in provinces like Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu and so on, and while they are really spectacular to the point that I would say they're the best I've seen, the climate up there is indeed aggressively unforgiving. I visited in winter and it was cold, dusty and desolate to the point it felt practically Siberic; at one city I was in the temperature dropped below -18 degrees Celsius. I'm willing to endure these climates if it means I get to see all the historical sights by myself - even Chinese domestic tourists fuck off when everything is that cold - but your average tourist probably won't want to travel in these conditions, and probably would prefer to travel someplace with more English uptake, less spitting on the ground, international-standard tourist amenities, a better climate, and higher cultural status/clout within their social milieu.
I would say they're missing out on absolute peak, but people travel for significantly different reasons than I do I guess.
This is the kind of thing that has stopped me from travelling to Japan thus far, in spite of travelling through the rest of the East Asian sphere. There's nothing I can't stand more than being crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with other tourists when travelling, and it degrades the experience so heavily I would rather not go. I have also heard from other family members who have travelled there that the tourist numbers are unbearable, which doesn't give me confidence. Everybody and their mother wants to travel there and seems to view it as the premier East Asian destination; travel is at least part-fashion, and Japan seems to be in vogue at the moment.
Having grown up in Asia, this kind of feels a bit like being a Canadian and seeing everyone suddenly wanting to go to Calgary for some reason. In my opinion, there are other places in the continent that are equally as beautiful and cultural without being swarmed with tourists, that in fact are undertouristed, and that actually need the income to assist with preservation; I would rather visit these instead of an already-overtouristed country that is so aggressively swamped with people that the tourism is probably contributing to xenophobia in Japan at this point. It's to the point that I would feel complicit in a sort of vandalism.
I'm pretty skeptical of actual Chinese cultural exports leaking into the West, even as somebody who watched more Chinese-language films last year in Cinema than English ones. Bit of a disconnect with what's acceptable, plus the Chinese culture seems a lot more insularly-focused than like Korea actively trying to engender more widespread appreciation and adoption.
There's also the obvious geopolitical aspect behind this, with the international viewpoint of Mainland China being quite obviously contaminated by the fact that it's a major world power that straight-up does not want to be a part of the American international order and often shows off hostility towards it (and vice versa). Your average layman's knowledge of China gets mediated through all of these incentive structures and as a result it's still pretty much a summary of the worst that could be found, often taken out of context. China is often perceived as a Stalinist state with little to no cultural value, and stuff that comes out of there gets viewed with a sort of default suspicion.
This isn't limited to artistic exports, either. People seem capable of perceiving China only through the lens of its government. It's still very common for people to suggest that any kind of indigenously Chinese culture has been all but destroyed on the mainland because of the Cultural Revolution, that religion and culture is all but impossible under the totalising purview of the CCP, and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia. Yet I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of traditional religion and culture at least on par with what I saw in Southeast Asia; if it's anywhere close to dead in Mainland China then clearly my lying eyes deceive me. (There's also a clear absurdity with the idea that "Chinese culture" is this unified phenomenon that can be preserved via one tiny regionalised portion of emigrants primarily representing urban, coastal parts of Fujian and Guangdong which then hybridised significantly with foreign elements, but that's another thing entirely.)
So I would agree that China's public perception isn't close to being anywhere near positive yet; this is changing, but the international perception of China has a long ways to go before people stop seeing it as a scary authoritarian enemy-state.
I've just filled out the survey and left a pretty long comment with a bunch of pointers.
I would agree with this definition, and would also note that “conservative” is a trait that manifests in context dependent ways and increasingly maps less and less into the political right at all nowadays. As the left becomes more entrenched in institutions, the party differences in openness to experience has shrunk considerably, such that the relationship has now become very small. Progressivism becomes “conservative” once sufficiently mainstream; these terms were forged in a cultural context that no longer applies today, and were always to some extent incoherent groupings.
Increasingly you’re finding people whose constellations of beliefs mostly fit onto the US political right, and yet would also be the type to try out the Chinese bull penis hangover soup (I would). A huge portion of political conservatives today would actually be attitudinally liberal and have more in common with 1970s radicals than they would like to admit, whereas the opposite is true for progressives, some of whom would likely be part of the Moral Majority had they been born in the right time period. Anecdotally, in my family and all my friend groups, I’m most likely to swing highly right on issues, but am also most likely to go “this is different, how exciting” when encountering new experiences or ideas, to an extent that most people around me seem to find a bit intimidating, and am fairly certain that this general tendency towards taking nonstandard ideas seriously informs my political takes a lot.
problem_redditor
13d ago
Thanks for letting me know. Just made everything in the album public (instead of link sharing), should hopefully work now.
I’ve continued updating the photos in my China photo album. The rate of completion has slowed rather significantly because I’ve been busy and the amount of perfectionist pixel-picking I do has begun to tire me out very badly.
18 pictures are complete now, instead of just seven (I like to frame this as me nearing 20% of my target of 100 pics). Several photos have been removed and put under the chopping block for reediting, while some new ones have been added.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/204084770@N07/albums/72177720331609421/
I’m up for giving feedback on about as long a passage as you want (within reason).
As someone who’s tried to write sci-fi multiple times but got busy and bogged down in work (and also story-planning considerations), you’re doing better than 90% of us by having a completed manuscript. I have a good number of half-finished stories and plans for such collecting dust.
I'm kind of halfway on this. I'm not against the usage of LLMs as a brainstorming tool that helps one come up with alternative wordings for passages already written (in fact I have done this myself at times for specific awkward sentences I've written that frustrate me, though with massive renovations to the wording and structure of the passage to make it fit within the overall style of writing I'm prone to), writer's block is a very big problem and sometimes usage of LLMs to brainstorm various different grammatical structures can get the creative juices flowing again. There's a legitimate use for LLMs in writing and I don't inherently object to the usage of it in posts on TheMotte. It’s utilising LLM as a tool and not as a wholesale replacement for effort.
As such I do find there's an admittedly ill-defined threshold where something becomes too LLM for me to ignore and the sort of overly sanitised prose that LLMs are prone to shows through to the extent that the writing loses all personality and originality; it's the feeling that someone has just taken huge chunks of text from an LLM without giving any thought to tone or style. This post certainly exceeds that threshold for me.
Well I checked and that seems in line with some, limited, statistics: https://www.newsweek.com/campus-rapists-and-semantics-297463
That study is awful, please read this article explaining its bad methodology. They used a 5 point scale that indicated likelihood to engage in any given activity. The question that's usually focused in on as the source of this claim was like question 35 on a long quiz asking if you would force a woman to do something sexual, where a question about whether you would rape a woman had just been asked in the same quiz, creating the implication that this question was something different that wasn't rape and obviously making people want to give rape the lowest likelihood.
As to how that five-point measure got made into the 1-in-3 statistic? Anything that wasn't recorded as a 1 was taken as a "yes". This is frankly a ridiculous method of coding that data and inflates the percentage by a crazy amount. The answers provided on that scale were basically "No, Yes, Yes, Yes, or Yes." Also "the men in Edwards et al (2014) were in between two to seven times less likely to say they would rape a woman than kill someone if they could, depending on how one interprets their answers. That's a tremendous difference; one that might even suggest that rape is viewed as a less desirable activity than murder." I suppose we live in a murder culture too, then.
In other words, it's an incredibly sketchy study with such awful methodology that I can't help but regard it as being intentionally bad just to inflate the percentage.
It seems like we get these kinds of "men are sexual degenerates" posts semi-regularly, I've never found them particularly convincing, and this one's no exception. The major problem with your analysis is that it is, ultimately, an example of the Chinese robber fallacy, in spite of the atypical circumstances of this case. It is always possible to find examples of regional cabals of people who have helped to perpetrate or cover up a crime, but that does not make it an illustration or indication of larger society (I would also note that 50km around Mazan is a massive radius that features the city of Avignon, home to 487,000 people in its larger metropolitan area, and the arrondissement of Carpentras is itself home to 220,000 people; it is not particularly surprising to me that someone could find 72 criminals there over a period of nine years if they really tried). But here is an example of what one can write that follows the broad strokes of your comment, if so motivated:
This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Thai penile-amputation epidemic has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the curious case of a rather hyperspecific form of crime that became oddly common in Thailand in the decade after 1970, where angry wives severed the penises of philandering husbands. I could not find a single mention of it on this site. You could claim this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that this is cherrypicking isolated cases and not reflective of an attitude that women have towards men generally. But series of interviews carried out with prominent Thai women revealed that they almost unanimously endorsed this method of retribution. It was to the extent that expertise in managing penile amputations has developed in Thailand, and that “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat,” is a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society.
This article notes about it: "In 2008, the Journal of Urology carried a retrospective by Drs Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes of the Washington University in St Louis, called The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s. Ferguson and Brandes conclude that: "Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic. The vast majority of worldwide reports of penile replantation, to this day, are a result of what became a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value."" It was endorsed by female society at large, publicly, occasionally in a televised way (which suggests they expected no blowback for these viewpoints), and thus resulted in a rise in prevalence in Thailand.
In the West, such light-hearted endorsements have occasionally become apparent as well, and for far less than infidelities. The Catherine Kieu Becker case is only one example of that. On July 15, 2011, a popular CBS daytime television show titled The Talk discussed the news story of Becker who was charged with drugging her husband, tying him to the bed, and waiting until he awoke to sever the man's penis off with a knife. She then proceeded to throw the appendage into the garbage disposal before calling 911 and reporting the crime herself. The audience members along with the other hosts immediately after hearing the details and the supposed reasoning for the mutilation (the husband had asked for a divorce) responded surprisingly by laughing. One woman in the audience was heard saying, "That'll teach him" and the host found it amusing enough to repeat it so it could be broadcast. Sharon Osbourne, one of the hosts of the show, offered her opinion that she felt the crime was "quite fabulous" only after making a gesture with her hands mimicking what the severed body part would have looked like while being destroyed in the garbage disposal. In spite of the talk of how men find it hard to relate to women, men do not collectively laugh on TV about women being raped; I find it quite interesting that women are capable of making light and even excusing when this kind of mutilation occurs to men.
I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of women do not view sexually violent retribution against men as particularly heinous, and are very capable of endorsing these acts, committing it while justifying it to themselves as a method of revenge for perceived slights. This is the nature of women. The vast majority of women know just how vengeful women can be, and I have the sense that while women can empathise with other women, most of them simply struggle to empathise with harms to men. The women in question here had issues with their husbands, their husbands weren't satisfying their needs in one way or another, and as such they're capable of viewing it as a trivial matter when they do the deed.
Is this sentiment unhinged? Maybe it is, but it's where this kind of reasoning is capable of getting you. When looking at 8 billion people interacting over the course of decades, it will always be possible to find case studies that sound like prima facie convincing evidence for most any position. But that never stops people pointing at them as soldiers for whatever viewpoint they want to support and going "See? This proves [sweeping statement] about [significant proportion of the population]".
It's not irrelevant to the discussion, I just thought the vibe of the comment was funny and is the kind of unnecessarily-detailed comment about relatively mundane matters I like finding in TheMotte.
I don't cut my apples either, FWIW, since apples oxidise stupidly quickly (even just leaving them for 2-5 minutes causes light browning) and biting into a full apple is just satisfying in the way the slices aren't.
I virtually always prefer oranges. If I can cast my net wide here and include mandarin oranges in that definition, the best ones I've had were the tangerine cultivars in Jeju Island (hallabongs, cheonhyehyangs, etc), which were just sinfully sweet and almost honey-like, I haven't ever eaten an apple that can compare with that.
Also I have never seen someone talk about eating an apple in such an autistic way as this comment of yours.
Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.
Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.
The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.
1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.
2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.
Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.
Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.
Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?
In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.
I really want to address this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument (I'll move on to other parts of your comment after this has been addressed, because it's by far the bit I take most issue with). I agree that there is, as your article states, an art of "making the best use of the limited area of freedom of action left us by the deterrent effect of the existence of nuclear weapons". But the idea that deterrence can only be achieved by amassing as large an arsenal as possible is not sound, and was the very second-strike capacity which I think I addressed in my previous comments. The following Cold War argument in the article is as such: "Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them."
This logic only holds assuming perfect information is present, but it rarely is. In practice, it is virtually impossible to detect and destroy literally every silo and submarine in a fairly large geographical area, and second-strikes are pretty much all but guaranteed for a country with any sizeable nuclear arsenal. Once your opponent is able to diversify their holdings via the nuclear triad in any significant capacity it would not be very easy to actually eliminate your opponent's second strike capability wholesale. After your nuclear arsenal grows to a certain level, you do not in practice have to engage in this extremely costly contest in which a greater and greater proportion of public funding goes towards maintaining a nuclear arsenal of gradually increasing size.
It's partially for this very reason that there were several reforms to the planning process that came with a realisation that a bloated stockpile was not necessarily an effective deterrent (and came with steep fiscal costs) that led to the decline in such massive additions, and gradual disarmament. Hell, even McNamara himself noted the diminishing returns inherent in keeping a huge stockpile of reserves. "The point to be noted from this table is that 400 one megaton warheads delivered on Soviet cities, so as to maximize fatalities, would destroy 40 percent of the urban population and nearly 30 percent of the population of the entire nation... If the number of delivered warheads were doubled, to 800, the proportion of the total population destroyed would be increased by only about ten percentage points, and the industrial capacity destroyed by only three percentage points... This is so because we would have to bring under attack smaller and smaller cities, each requiring one delivered warhead. In fact, when we go beyond about 850 delivered warheads, we are attacking cities of less than 20,000 population."
McNamara argued that deterrence was achieved when 25% of the Soviet population could be threatened by their nuclear arsenal. According to that threshold, this study estimates that 51 warheads would deter Russia, 368 would deter China, 300 would deter all of the NATO member countries, 124 the US, and 11 Canada. Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War the US held like 30,000 warheads. Cold War decision-making isn't something to emulate; it was excessive and inefficient by any reasonable standard, including their own.
Except: "This article tests a core argument of the nuclear competition school regarding the effect of the nuclear balance on the initiation of nuclear crises. With original data on strategic nuclear balance, my statistical analysis shows that having a superior nuclear arsenal than another nuclear-armed opponent does not lead to a reduced likelihood of nuclear crisis initiated by the opponent. These core findings hold after conducting a series of robustness tests with various measures of the balance of nuclear forces."
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