thejdizzler
4d ago
I am really enjoying What Hath so far. I'm only a few chapters in, but I like how he is framing the whole period in terms of a transportation/communication revolution. Also enjoying his take on Jackson as a bully. McPherson is awesome, as you've surely seen me post about before. The only other two I've tried are The Republic for Which it Stands and The Glorious Cause. I found the first 5-6 chapters of the first one really really good (dealing with Western expansion/Reconstruction), but have been getting bogged down in the social history that follows those chapters. The second book is overwritten, at least in the first few chapters. I'd like to revisit them both quite soon though. Soft goal for this year is to read all of Oxford US history books that have come out so far.
thejdizzler
4d ago
What hath God Wrought: history of the US from 1815-1848. Also still slogging through Way of Kings.
thejdizzler
6d ago
I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.
thejdizzler
8d ago
Flame of Frenzy in Elden Ring.
Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of us do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).
thejdizzler
8d ago
I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?
thejdizzler
9d ago
They have about as much sense perception as a tree: their single sensory nerve is to open and close the valve that allows them to filter feed. Nutritionally they fill a gap in my diet (Taurine, Iron, Omega-3s, B12), and I live in Maryland so they're cheap and tasty
thejdizzler
9d ago
As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).
I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I have quite a few Joe Abercrombie books to read still.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I will probably do most of the trail (planning a ten mile run). Just have hill repeats in my plan and thought it would be cool to understand a little more what Pickett's charge is like.
thejdizzler
9d ago
Goals for last month went okay. Did my chore spreadsheet successfully, read about 3k pages, saved over 50% (due to an unexpected bonus) and swam and ran what I was supposed to. Did not stay fap free or meditate at all. This month I want to focus more on processes/habits and less on deliverables.
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Figure out triggers of masturbation/porn use and try and cut the problem off at its root. Masturbation may not be all that bad, but I think my perception of women/the ability to relate to the opposite sex has been messed up, and despite ~5 years of trying, I've never kicked this bad habit.
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Be more social. Have social activities planned on at least 3/4 weeknights and one weekend night
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Do one thing at a time. Multitasking is an illusion that hurts both productivity and causes anxiety.
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Replace the default bored or stressed activity of scrolling with either doing nothing (preferred), or reading an easy fiction/pop sci book.
thejdizzler
11d ago
This July 4 thinking of renting a car and driving up to Gettysburg to do a run on the battlefield. Hopefully if I go early enough won't run into too many re-enacters. Hoping to do some hill repeats up cemetery ridge and little roundtop.
thejdizzler
11d ago
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Right, hindsight is 20/20. Much of the upper south didn't even secede until after Sumter, so it was by no means a sure thing. I'm thinking of a lot of the rhetoric of the firebrands from states like South Carolina who seemed to want to secede in the 1850s even when things were going well. But these people were ideologies who can't be expected to seriously plan things. The actual talent in the confederacy (Davis, Stephens, Lee, etc.) all seemed to have been caught a little off guard by secession. And like others point out, this is also making assumptions about what kind of war we know that the civil war was, rather than the war that people thought it was going to be. Although there had been examples of total war (end of the Napoleonic wars, and the Crimean War) in the recent past, the mindset of the ruling class was very much that of limited war, which the south could have won.
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Totally agreed. Jackson's legendary performance in the valley and at second Manassas is offset by his terrible performance during the seven days, and the extremely high casualty rate of his division. Longstreet is a general I'd like to learn more about: I know he was vital during second Manassas, and seemed to see a lot of the problems with Lee's plan at Gettysburg, but I don't know much about his performance at Chattanooga, or about his time in the Republican Party after the war.
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It's not only the casualty rates, but the enlistment rates largely don't reflect the rich man's war, poor man's fight either. I don't have the statistics on the top of my head, but MacPherson states that the only group that was actually underrepresented in the army was unskilled labor (and also immigrants interestingly enough in the North). The South did have some weird exceptions to this (the overseer exemption from the draft for example), but even in the South, the planter class was at least proportionally represented in the army. Some planters, like Wade Hampton, spent significant amounts of their own money furnishing entire brigades for the army.
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This is true.
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Agreed that Hood had to do something, but his tactics in these battles were sorely lacking. That whole army might have been much more useful opposing Sherman's March to the Sea or something. Also good point about the Trans-Mississippi: most of Texas was completely unconquered, and after the disaster of the Red River campaign, most of Western Louisiana was safe too.
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I'll have to check this out! I'm currently going through Bruce Catton's trilogy, and a book about the battle of Fredericksburg in particular.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Just finished my fourth annual reread of Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, which is perhaps the best one volume history book about the civil war ever written. Some random thoughts from my reread below.
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It seemed like the war was coming long before 1860. At least the South seemed ready to leave the union in the 1850s. So why was there no preparation for this war in terms of stockpiling weapons, encouraging military training/enlistment in the US army? Maybe these things would have been too obvious, but at least pro-secessionist leaders could have encouraged things like the strategic localization of ammunition factories, diversification of agriculture away from cotton, and investment in railroads. Nope, instead we have cope about how feminine mechanized labor is, and how the only real work is overseeing a plantation. This society deserved to lose.
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I think Lee is overrated. He managed to win a ton of really impressive tactical victories, but never seemed to effectively follow these up to destroy the enemy army, which is what all the tactics is supposed to be in service of. In fact, Lee's tactics ended up shredding his army much more than his opponents, and he arguably only won because of northern inability to deal with taking casualties, especially under General McClellan.
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It's interesting how much the rich man's war, poor man's fight theme seems not to be true, in contrast to most modern wars I can think of. It seems like a general on one side or the other dies in almost every engagement (Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James McPherson, to name a few off the top of my head). In fact, generals were something like 50% more likely to die than privates, which is a wild statistic.
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Struck by the respectful treatment of Army of Northern Virginia by Grant/Chamberlein upon Lee's surrender. Yes, the South fought for a horrible cause, but still can respect the valor, leadership, and conduct of people you really strongly disagree with. Perhaps an argument against tearing down confederate monuments/renaming forts. You don't beat a man when he's down. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two from this.
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Insane levels of delusion by Southern leadership in Late 1864/1865. How did Hood think that assaulting breastworks head-on was going to work in Franklin/Nashville? How did Davis think the government was going to continue the war after the fall of Richmond?
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Cool to see how much of the technology of this war would presage WW1. Importance of rail lines and logistics to Northern victory. Also shift to destruction of ability to wage war/armies rather than necessarily capturing territory. Arguably this started with Napoleon too.
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I'm getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective.
thejdizzler
13d ago
I'm immediately skeptical of this whole thing because they are using DUOLINGO of all things for language learning. You're much better off doing something like dreaming Spanish + Anki and/or paying a talented SL teacher to do comprehensible input for younger kids then add in YouTube/Graded readers. Duolingo is okay I guess for the really basic stages of language learning, but it quickly veers off into territory that is IMO not useful (way too many reps of vocabulary that undermines the spaced repetition, forced translation, early output). I've learned far more Spanish (and even Italian) through reading+Anki then I ever learned doing Dutch Duolingo.
thejdizzler
15d ago
I'm an apple chud unfortunately. I have cold turkey on my computer which works great, but phone is another issue. I seem to always be able to get around the controls.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Probably the wrong place to ask this, as this is an Internet forum, but have any of you implemented any kind of Cal Newport style Digital Minimalism? I just reread his book and am finding it frustratingly vague.
thejdizzler
15d ago
I'm hoping I have the same change in attitude as you. I know that there's a correlation between time and effort put in and performance. If I run more (and recover) I perform better. If I read more my focus improves and I grow in knowledge. If I regularly show up to the same social events I'll make friends. If I do more experiments, I will get more data. If I spend more time on my blog I will get more readers. Yet the actions that I take somehow don't reflect this. I'm always looking for the hack supplement that will improve my athletic performance, the one blog post that will turn my opinion of the world on its head, the one connection on social media that will become my best friend or romantic partner, the one big experiment that I can do that will get me my PhD. I know this is al la bunch of bullshit. The way to improve is to consistently show up and do what the best in the world did to get where they are, which is on paper pretty straightforward for the things I care about.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I wonder if we'll get a democratic collapse along the lines of the 1850s Whig party. I don't see any particularly salient issue that could divide the party like that. Instead, it seems like lots of really small fractures, which paradoxically keeps the party together. Which is unfortunate, because we need a collapse like that of the Whig party: the Democrats don't stand for basically anything other than grifting anymore.
thejdizzler
18d ago
The Jewish immigration to Israel began long before the British mandate. The first Allayah occurred when the area was still an Ottoman province. The British gave some support to the Jews, but the mandate administration was openly actually quite hostile to the idea of Jewish state. They were the only security council member not to recognize Israeli statehood before the War of Independence (or the Nabka as the sore losers like to call it), and cracked down pretty hard on immigration and weapons imports before 1948.
thejdizzler
18d ago
Well the Israeli government tried to do something about it in the 1970s/1980s. But turns out it's mighty unpopular at the ballot box to bulldoze the homes of your own people after you just won a war.
thejdizzler
19d ago
This is a huge W for Israel. And frankly a necessary W for the country. If my generation continues to hold the politics that they hold now as they age, Israel is stuffed in about 20 years. They need to win these wars now, and make peace with the people that they are able to now, or they won't survive when the blue-hairs start being elected to the senate.
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine. I get being against what is happening in Gaza, but so many people seem to be completely ignorant of the history of conflict, perhaps willfully so. I used to enjoy going on /r/stupidpol, but that place has become as cesspit of pro-Hamas propaganda. Even if you think the state of Israeli was a Western colonialist project (debatable at best), the fact is there are 9 million Jews living there now. If Hamas/other Arab nations get their way, those 9 million Jews will either be all dead or displaced. How is that any better than what they think is happening in Gaza and the West Bank? Part of me hopes that most of my generation isn't really thinking about things that way, but based on reactions in my graduate department to 10/7 (immediate pro-Palestine protests despite the fact that ISRAEL was attacked), make me think that a lot of my generation actually just wants Israel gone. Which makes me pretty sad.
I lived in Israel in 2019, and as far as I could see, it was a country that would be worth preserving. The public infrastructure was functional, vast amounts of food are grown on relatively small amounts of land, and best of all the people there actually seemed to believe in something greater than themselves. I spent a bit of time in the north where most of the 1 million Arab citizens live (and also more time in Jerusalem where non-citizen Arabs are), and while they had complaints about their economic situation/racism from Ashkenazi Jews, it seemed like their lives were far far better than their relatives in the West Bank or even in other Arab countries. Heck in Jerusalem there were Israeli soldiers guarding the entrance to the upper temple complex to make sure I didn't go up there as a non-muslim. Would a Palestinian government grant the same kind of protection to a disenfranchised Jewish minority? For some reason, I doubt it.
I'm definitely much more liberal than a lot of people here, but this is one thing I just cannot stomach from my own tribe. It would be one thing if we just disagreed in the abstract, but most organizations on the left seemed to be obsessed with tying support for Palestine for everything. My grad union for example wants to send union dues to Palestine and to bargain to try and get Hopkins to divest from Israeli companies. I didn't fucking sign up for this shit when I signed my union card.
thejdizzler
23d ago
I guess I'm curious if I even can change it. The reason why I even would take it seriously is because subjectively since starting grad school it does seem that I've been quite stressed and not really operating at 100%.
thejdizzler
23d ago
I don't think this is the reason. I only started checking the score within the past few weeks, but it's been tracking for nearly 3 years. Daytime stress has pretty much always been high, unless I am relaxing at my parent's house.
I think I'm putting dating on pause at least for a few months but probably until I finish my PhD. I'm finding I'd much rather train or spend time with friends (or making new friends) than go on a date with a stranger that probably won't go anywhere. Of course at some point I do need to focus on dating: I think finding someone to spend the rest of my life with is important. But I think things will go easier when I earn more money, have clearer work/life boundaries, and in an era of my life where I don't want to train as much.
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