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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3762 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Are people using "milktoast" [sic] in an ironic way or do people genuinely not know that it's wrong? I've been seeing it more and more lately on places like reddit.

Also, this might just be Baader-Meinhof, but I have a subjective feeling that mistakes of this kind have become more prevalent recently. Use of "should of", or "i.e." instead of "e.g", etc. Anyone able to sanity check me on if this is real (i.e., do people just care less about proper language use nowadays) or imagined?

I'm guessing a lot of people are getting words audibly and then repeating them in print phonetically. It's common enough to become a thing. I'm guessing people just read a lot less books/newspapers/magazines where they'd have learned the correct phrasing of things. I remember having the opposite problem where I'd read a lot as a kid and knew words and phrases but not how they actually sounded out loud so when I'd try to say it I sounded dumb but people who learned it from hearing it would know how to say it right but maybe not how to write it.

At least they're probably using the word to mean what it actually means and they just don't know how to spell it. It doesn't bother me but I see so many people use the word nonplussed to mean not impressed (which arguably makes sense) even though it means confused. One thing I see a lot of even really smart people do is say "with regards to" instead of "with regard to" and I have to stop myself from commenting about it at this point.

I think using the wrong words or phrases or spelling them incorrectly isn't that bad of a thing but I hate the new trend of everyone just deciding that being grammatically incorrect is correct if enough people are wrong and doing it enough. Mostly because it feels like people trying to write history rather than letting it happen.

Yes. But I'm also the kind of person who gets mildly annoyed at people on here who use hyphens instead of en dashes or em dashes (as the case may be); i.e. I'm an insufferable pedant.

To be fair, there's no easy way to type the dashes on a standard keyboard. So people just use hyphens instead, cause that's easier than bringing up charmap or whatever. And to be honest I have no idea (even as a frequent pedant) what the difference in usage between em dash and en dash is supposed to be.

there's no easy way to type the dashes on a standard keyboard

In Markdown, at least, you can use HTML named character references. "& ndash;" without the space after the ampersand → "–", and "& mdash;" without the space after the ampersand → "—".

I have no idea what the difference in usage between em dash and en dash is supposed to be

Wikipedia's Manual of Style includes a handy guide—though, of course, Wikipedia is not necessarily trustworthy.

At the risk of being insufferably pedantic and because you seem to care, there should be a comma after “i.e.” (or “e.g.”, for that matter).

I'm glad I could lure you into the ninth circle of pedantry. A comma after "i.e." is preferable but not required; it's a matter of style, not grammar. But if we're talking style, the bigger blunder here is that I used "i.e" in text where I could have just as easily written "in other words". "i.e." and "e.g." are best confined to lists, parentheticals, and other situations where economy of space trumps flow and readability.

I love this place so much.

I get unreasonably upset at people using risky for risque.

Also, this might just be Baader-Meinhof, but I have a subjective feeling that mistakes of this kind have become more prevalent recently. Use of "should of", or "i.e." instead of "e.g", etc.

It's something I've been noticing for at least 7 years. I think it's mostly kids/teenagers. Apparently it's rude to correct people online on their spelling these days as well, so I guess the answer to "do people just care less about proper language use nowadays?" is yes.

Is it possible for the site like reddit to cache our responses so if we accidentally click somewhere else our comment is saved? I just lost a whole 5 paragraphs and I'm very sad :(

On old.reddit you can just click the reply button again and your text will still be there.

In theory, yes and there are lots of websites that do that. If particular stubborn site doesn't, you might use a userscript to do it.

Custom CSS question: How do I change the colour of the vote arrows after they're clicked?

This is what I use.

.active.arrow-up::before {
    color: #bd2130;
}

.active.arrow-down::before {
    color: #0062cc;
}

It's not perfect when I'm using the Motte on my phone (need to tap somewhere else for the color to update) but works fine on my desktop browser.

Works a treat. Thanks!

Obviously I get all my news from the most reliable sources, The Motte. So imagine my surprise when I randomly heard a news clip today and someone said MAGA, pronouncing the MA, like from the word maw, instead of mad. Before I embarrass myself in conversation, the reporter was a weirdo right, everyone says MAGA with the MA sound from mad, right?

Neither, it's may-guh. The same vowel sound as in "make".

In the early days of Trump's campaign I was confused at why so many conservative Americans were celebrating the drunken debauchery of Magaluf.

Maw? Mad? I've always thought it was the PALM vowel, like in "saga" or "mama".

Wait it's not Mage-ah?

You say Mah-GA, and I say May-GA.

Mah-GA, May-GA, Mah-GA, May-GA, let's call the whole thing off!

I intended to post Ella and Louie, but then I found this version.

Now that you mention it, I can't recall ever hearing anyone saying that in real life.

When I say it in my head, it sounds like the maga in magazine. In my head, MA like in mall sounds vaguely British, but I have nothing to back this up.

In my head, MA like in mall sounds vaguely British, but I have nothing to back this up.

I mean, it is how the Brits would pronounce that word, because the first letter of the British English alphabet is "aw" and not "a" (just like how they pronounce the letter "o" as "oi" under certain conditions, like in the word "no").

I hear both pronunciations equally often.

Obviously.

Not sure if this is the right place, but...

I know for a fact that the allegations of election fraud in 2020 on both sides have been discussed thoroughly both on the reddit and here. Is there anyone who can point me to a good thread for both Biden and Trump alleged fraud?

I've been made aware of a vile and slanderous conspiracy against me, and need some advice.
A group of people are trying to get me to accept a vacant position on a municipal corporation board, and aren't taking "haha thanks for your confidence I'll think about it and get back to you don't call me I'll call you" as an answer.

What's the tactful way to say "this public service would get in the way of my valuable gardening time and also I would probably end up arrested for assault at every meeting"?
I'm sure a lot of people here have turned down "offers" of job responsibilities, management crap, admin duties, etc. It's a totally new experience to me, because my bosses have usually been good judges of character and potential.

The word you’re looking for is ‘no’.

Against the grain of the advice you are looking for ... but maybe take the position? How bad could it be? And could you term limit yourself?

Communities are made better when people step up and do volunteer work. It won't really feel like you are helping a whole bunch, but maybe you doing this annoying but necessary tasks frees someone else up to do less annoying and less necessary but more beneficial tasks.

I was the secretary for the parent teacher organization at my daughter's small pre-school. I was mostly helping put emails together. It sucked and it was boring. But it wasn't a ton of work. And me doing it meant that the other parents in the organization got more done organizing fun events for the kids.

I'd totally do it if it was a position like yours. Jokes aside I'd really like to volunteer more, but with something that's either already functional or that I've got the power to fix.

The story behind this one is that they got absolutely played by a big new contractor, the board members responsible have been bailing as the consequences become apparent, and nobody has any idea how to solve the situation.
A few of them decided to rope me in because I'd privately warned against it in the first place. But what am I supposed to do to help when my warning was literally "if this doesnt work out, you won't have an exit plan"?
I know they're not deliberately setting me up as a fall guy, but that's how it would work out.

You're right though, it's time to find some volunteer work, maybe through the local church.

"No thank you, I'm not interested". It really is as simple as that.

If you wanted to make a foldable keyboard which merely stored keystrokes (the text you type) and nothing more, with no screen attached, in other words genuinely just a foldable keyboard, how thin could you make this? Could you make it so thin that it folds in your pocket?

As thin as a decent mechanical design allows you to. The electronics won’t take essentially any space and a small molded lithium battery won’t take much either. You could even make it wireless for dual use as a regular keyboard and for transferring any stored data out.

Yes. Variants that plug into small computer have been around for a while: early generation Palm Pilots rather famously had a pretty slick full-size TLK keyboard in the late 90s early 00s, and they're clever enough people make adapters for them today. No onboard storage without the Palm Pilot, though.

In terms of the smallest possible device that only had storage and operated without interacting with anything else, you're mostly going to be limited by your mechanicals and the software. If you're willing to deal with momentary switches, you don't even have to make it a folding device, though in turn it will absolute suck to use.

If you want conventional switches and keycaps, you're pretty much stuck with a pretty specific layout given your target number of keys, and mechanical switches are very hard to find slimmer than a half-inch (meaning you get one fold at most before it looks like you're smuggling the world's most awkward hardon). Scissor-style switches exist that about half that, but gfl finding 'em. For conventional cherry-MX and a 70% layout, expect a minimum size of 4" by 6" by 2" -- probably more cargo pant-pocket sized. The scissor-style switches can drop that down to less than an inch thick -- still bigger than a cell phone, but not as bad.

In the middle is... well, the membrane and lever approach from the Palm Keyboard, or membrane-and-contact. This only really saves vertical height, but it can be pretty huge in that dimension: membrane-and-contact keyboards can be literally a couple millimeters thick, or even rollable. Downside is that they're expensive and difficult in small sizes to get from major builders; DIY variants are usually based on flexPCBs that can be janky to work with or assemble.

The headless part is pretty trivial from a hardware perspective. You can get cheap tiny SOCs for a headless nix setup at sub 5 USD per chip at unit 1, and microcontrollers in the sub-1 USD range. The former will be easier to work with if you're trying to store data forever (who wants to write their own file system!), while the latter will be more energy-efficient.

Batteries are trivial, these days.

Super informative!

Can you come up with a healthy food menu for a day that includes 160g of protein and a little over 2000kcal for 4$? If you can't do it in 4$, go as low as possible.

Context: I did a deep-dive into recommended nutrition and apparently the current numbers are 2g of protein per kg of weight. My monthly budget for food is 100$, which comes out to about 3-4$ per day. I asked some LLMs the same question and they mostly couldn't do it.

I think soy protein is the cheapest, but soy flour is somewhat difficult to find

Yes. Greens, beef suet, and flour take you a long way, even if it’s not the most appetizing diet.

I think you're in eastern europe, and at least some of the US options are very unlikely to generalize over there (and the numbers are low for the US: 4 USD/day is about SNAP levels, and those are intended to supplement food budgets, not replace them entirely). If you're asking for US-side given the dollar unit:

The standard in the United States for hard-protein diets has traditionally been chicken breast, at about 130 grams protein and 700 calories per pound. Exact prices will vary depending on location, but expect around 2-3 USD per pound boneless skinless chicken breast in store brand bulk, generally on the lower end if you look at places like Sam's Club/CostCo. Bone-in used to consistently be less than 2 USD per pound, but it can vary a lot right now.

Canned tuna is kinda second-best: it's a little more expensive (~3ish USD per pound) and fewer calories, but it's shelf stable and prices are very stable. Depending on location, expect to need to check places like Gordon Food Services to buy in bulk. On the downside, large quantities start raising serious questions about heavy metal toxicity, and eating just canned tuna in water can risk rabbit starvation. Most people can't eat too much of it straight or solely spiced, as well.

Dried beans are more cost-effective in terms of dollar/calorie, but they can take obnoxious amounts of time to prepare, and they're pretty high in fat and carbs for the protein you get. Exact variety matters, but expect around 1-2 USD/pound dry weight, 100-120 grams protein and 1300 calories per pound. Even good in terms of dietary fiber! Downside is that it's a lot of beans, to the point I'm not sure I could eat that much in a day. Can be good to supplement or for variety, though.

Whey protein can sometimes be a reasonable choice, but it's very dependent on where and who you buy from. Some of the bulk purchases (eg Costco) can get as low as 3 USD/day to hit your protein requirements, while others will be as high as 30 USD/day.

Ground beef and turkey are usually (much) less dollar-efficient, but they can be used as supplements for flavor variation in ways that most of the above can't. Same for eggs. Unlike eggs, ground beef and turkey do (often!) go on sale, either for holidays or as it gets close to expiration date, often to compare or beat 'normal' chicken prices. Milk is very cheap, but it doesn't work well after the first gallon a day, and it doesn't work at all if you're lactose intolerant. (and I'd expect it's cheap in the US because of US-specific government policy stuff. Same for cheese.)

For filling the remainder of your diet, your big options are either breads or rice or noodles for carbohydrates, with the fixings (butter, fattier beans, heavy soups like cream of mushroom) for fats. You can get 1000 calories per 0.75 USD, here, without struggling too much; going with big bulk purchases can drop below that (eg 50 lbs of enriched white rice from CostCo runs around 25 USD, and each pound is 1500 calories and about 30 grams protein).

You can and should add some leafy greens for fiber and for macronutrients, but it tends to be what you do with the rest of your food budget, rather than a starting point.

These numbers are a little out of date, especially with current food inflation, but they'll point in a right-ish direction.

Dried beans are more cost-effective in terms of dollar/calorie, but they can take obnoxious amounts of time to prepare,

A tip for dealing with this is to prepare a large batch (like 5-10 lbs) at once and then freeze in portion sized bags. If you want to use them in a salad or just on their own you probably want to freeze them on a baking sheet before putting them into bags so they don't stick together too much.

Beans and chickpeas freeze pretty well and if you're using them for a stew or as filling in a burrito or something you absolute won't notice.

Are you in the US, and if so what region? I recall there was a blog in the early 2010's where there was a guy that did $2 a day, but I don't think he hit 2g/kg bw protein. That probably leaves some extra headroom, even with inflation, for a few extra grams of protein. I recall he had a bunch of open face penutbutter and banana sandwiches. It did require a bunch of annoying couponing to hit his budget as well.

Along those lines, the "Big On A Budget" Series from Animal is a bit of a cult classic. The ones with Evan Centopani are probably closest to what most people would consider a healthyish diet. The budget was $50 a week, early 2010's $s, and they didn't include the supplements they are selling. Offsetting that most people are probably not trying to feed a bulking 100kg+ body builder. You generally see a bunch of oats, rice, eggs, broccoli (if they include vegetables), and chicken breast. I am a fan of using broccoli slaw to save prep-time, as popularized by Chad Wesley Smith, but it's probably not worth it if your budget is that low.

Realistically $100/month is a very small food budget if you are in the US, especially for those protein goals. The USDA Thrifty Food Plan currently puts the budget for a 20-50 Male at $303.90/month. If you are US based and really only have a $100/month budget for food you likely qualify for SNAP benefits, and should also consider food banks.

Edit: I managed to dig up the couponing thing. It was $1 A Day, and it did involve annoying coupon shenanigans that are probably less common now. I think this site is also one I had thought of from the same era. There is a free PDF of a $4/day cookbook. I could have sworn there was another n$/day cookbook from that era that involved a bunch of baking, but apparently I never archived it.

I live in Eastern Europe. For reference, minimum wage here is about 500$/month and I make about 150% that.

Food prices here are about the same as those in the US/Western Europe. Bread is a little bit cheaper, meat is a little bit more expensive. But mostly the same.

5% tvorog is 2.5$ for 400g. That's 64g of protein, but still too expensive.

I think you'll have to stick to 1g/kg. It's not the end of the world, Central Asian construction workers have great muscle definition on a diet of kefir and white bread.

That makes way more sense than a US based person with that budget.

I think federal minimum wage at full time employment in the US is about $1,200/month right now. Seems consistent with PPP, which is about 2.1 for the Balkans.

For eating on a budget you probably have the slight advantage of things like kasha being more readily available in economy pricing, whereas (excluding oats for some reason) groats seem to be considered some sort of specialty health food in the US. Can't say I know anything beyond that though.

The traditional solution is a very legume heavy diet. My experience with beans in the Balkans is that they tend to be terrible and hard to eat much of, and recommend looking at Mexican recipes. I remember hearing something about rice and beans together making the protein better somehow, but don’t remember the specifics. And North African recipes for lentils. Second the eggs recommendation.

Rice + beans provide all essential amino acids, but in "you won't die or get sick" amounts, not "you'll get swole" amounts.

Does anyone have any recommendations for sci-fi works involving population decline? I ask because most late 20th century — and even early 21st century — works I'm familiar with assume continual population growth, and frequently an overpopulation crisis. (Even the grimiest dystopian cyberpunk seems to take for granted that people will somehow keep popping out kids, enough to more than replace all the people getting gunned down by megacorp hit squads or torn apart by psychotic cyborgs.)

The only exceptions I can think of are works involving sudden plagues of infertility (Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men) or are Japanese (Yokohama Shopping Log). Anything else out there?

Edit: I'm talking less the "post-apocalyptic" genre, where the collapse has already occurred and the focus is rebuilding, but during the decline — particularly a slower one like Yokohama Shopping Log.

A lot of wildbow's works (Worm, Pact, Twig...) hit similar themes; though the decline is usually violent, he has a recurring pattern of stories starting from a place of relative stability and affluence and gradually cranking up the bleakness/hopelessness/lack of resources available both to individual characters and to society at large.

On the Japanese media side, Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou (English title might be something like Girls' Last Tour) is a worthy spiritual successor to YKK, perhaps slightly more on the bleak and eventful side. It's a sort of cute slice of life series about two girls traversing a ruined world in the wake of WW4 in search of a something/anything, as the last remnants of human activity around them flicker out. The author's narration and Twitter feed pattern-match against the worst cases of inadequately medicated clinical depression I have encountered. Both the manga and the anime adaptation are pretty great.

Classic example is planet Solaria in Asimov's universe.

This planet was underpopulated and declining not because some catastrophe, but unlimited affluence.

Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. The population was kept stable through strict birth and immigration controls. In the era of Robots and Empire, no more than five thousand Solarians were known to remain. Twenty thousand years later, the population was twelve hundred, with just one human per estate. Solarians hated physical contact with others and only communicated with each other via holograms.

I appreciate any mention in the wild of Yokohama Shopping Log, but alas that I cannot recommend anything like it.

It's more in the background but The Lord of the Rings has some of this.

The population decline in Middle Earth in Third Age is explicitly due to apocalyptic conditions - constant war, orc and other monster infestation and plagues spread by Sauron (the Shire is one of few places exempt from this general shithole state).

Not what OP intended.

Perhaps for most peoples, but the elves seem to be leaving/declining more because they just aren't feeling the vibe anymore.

The later books of the Three Body Problem series have natural population decline. One of the secondary ideas is that advancing technology makes manly vigour somewhat superfluous, resulting in an epidemic of androgynous soyboys who are not exactly top-tier in a crisis.

Fallen Angels maybe?

Children of Men

Interstellar?

A Canticle for Leibowitz?

I'd class that more in the "post-apocalyptic" genre — more "mass death" than "population decline."

These episodes from The Outer Limits (1995 - 2002) series: Dark Rain, Patient Zero, Rite of Passage, The Vaccine, Lithia, The Camp, and Promised Land.

The Luck of the Draw episode from Sliders - "in this Earth where San Francisco, populated by only 100,000 people in a world of half a billion".

These episodes from The Outer Limits (1995 - 2002) series

I had to remind myself of those episodes, because it's been awhile since I watched the show — not since back when it first aired.

There’s the post-collapse genre exemplified by Foundation. It shifts back to focusing on recovery pretty fast, but the idea of planning for population decay and instability is there. Dune flirts with the subject for similar reasons. I haven’t read past God-Emperor, but I hear the last couple Frank novels are weirdly desolate.

For more modern stories which play around in the post-apocalypse, maybe Revelation Space? Or influenced works like the sandbox space game Starsector. These are settings where humanity has not coped well with the collapse of major technologies. You really get a sense that humanity is limping along even when there are insane accomplishments in the setting.

You might appreciate an explicit (if minor) theme in A Fire Upon the Deep. The sympathetic alien leader of Woodcarvers is specifically struggling with the eugenics required to keep continuity of consciousness in an organism made of multiple separate brains. Shit’s wild. The whole book is great, and straddles the line between bleak and triumphant. I suspect the sequel, featuring a few humans marooned on a primitive planet, would hit similar themes.

On the fantasy side, Prince of Nothing. It’s also post-apocalyptic, and it’s very clear that the squabbling institutions of men are losing ground. The first apocalypse was triggered by summoning an entity which prevented live births so long as it remained in the world, and the group which summoned it is still around. Great series. Absolutely horrible.

So yeah, good question.

Prince of Nothing

Well, the Sranc certainly aren’t suffering from depopulation…

The Nonmen are a race explicitly suffering from depopulation as all their women were killed by the Womb Plague iirc, so you have a society of immortal individuals slowly dying off from war and madness. I think it’s The Unholy Consult that has the section exploring the last of their extant Mansions. Haunting and beautiful stuff, Bakker is easily one of the best fantasy authors living.

I second the Starsector recommendation, although do note that the game is still in development and the main storyline is currently only half-finished.

A Fire Upon the Deep

I suspect the sequel, featuring a few humans marooned on a primitive planet, would hit similar themes.

I will highly recommend the sequel, A Deepness in the Sky. That primitive planet? It circles a star that dies out then flashes on. The natives? Spider-aliens. The deepness? Their word for where they hibernate during the sun's darkness, and the place that protects them from the explosion of light. Thus, the Deepness in the Sky is their place of safety, off their bipolar world, somewhere outside of the constraints their world has imposed upon them.

And I haven't even mentioned the humans, yet.

Shit's wild.

It's pretty wild, but it suffers from the fact that the aliens are just humans who happen to look like spiders. Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.

I think this is by choice since the author seems to believe in a kind of Whig view of history that liberalism is the only real way to advance and anything else is doomed to slow death or stagnation.

The Three-Body Problem did a better job of showcasing actually bizarre aliens, instead of people who look bizarre.

Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.

Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.

Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.

Yes and no. The spider society really does have nuclear families, a class system, constitutional monarchies and a World War and Cold War that mirror that of 20th century Britain. The physical descriptions and names are made to more mirror human culture by the autists, but fundamentally the spiders' history and social structure is like 20th century Britain in reality, that part isn't made up.

Also, although, the humans are weirded out, the spiders find humans extremely cute; because, spider children can only look in one direction like humans and spiders find the way humans stare at them while speaking, adorable.

Yeah I loved their 'house of congress' analog turning out to just be a giant pit full of spiders.

Dying Earth, Book of the New Sun? That's the closest I can think of, but those are not decline so much as post-collapse.

For that matter, the Barsoom novels occur on a Mars which was previously much more inhabited.

I’m wondering to what extent the German Wehrmacht is, or at least was present in British and American cultural memory as a worthy enemy in battle, unlike the Japanese and the Italians, in a similar way how, I suppose, Confederates were seen as worthy enemies in the Northern US after the Civil War, unlike the various Indian tribes. It’d largely explain why the so-called myths of the clean Wehrmacht and the Lost Cause of the South came to be.

Obviously as a Brit I'm consuming the fictionalised version of the American frontier from a long distance, but in the Cowboys and Indians mythos I grew up with Indians were always Worthy Opponents in the TVTropes sense. I assume this idea dates back to the golden age of the Western as a movie genre because that is where the tropes come from.

if we're dealing with mythos, this scene might be a worthwhile corrective.

Yeah, there was a brief "lone ranger and Tonto" period where the mythology was sanitized, which was used to launder support for AIM and other Indian terrorist groups in the 60s-80s.

Didn't the warriors of various Indian tribes routinely take hostages/captives and kill/torture them?

On the east coast colonial period, yes. Horrible drawn out tortures. Being seared to death with hot coals. Skinned alive one small strip at time. Fingers broken and twisted the wrong way. Completely senseless. And not even always during warfare. They'd take hostages and get to work on one as an example to the others.

Depends on the period, roughly speaking. During WWII Germany was of course villainized in propaganda and amongst western Allied soldiers; massacres of surrendering German soldiers were not regular but also not uncommon. SS troops were frequently shot out of hand due to several high-profile incidents. In the mass surrenders at the end of the war surrendering Germans were not classified as POWs but rather as "disarmed enemy soldiers" who were not entitled to the levels of treatment outlined by the Geneva Conventions. The claims surrounding the "Rhine death camps" are overblown but there was genuine systemic mistreatment of surrendering Wehrmacht personnel during and immediately after the war.

The dive in relations with the Soviet Union led to the quick realization that Europe and the United States might need to fight the Reds and there were a bunch of people with lots of experience killing Russkies. This is what initiated the rehabilitation of ex-Wehrmacht senior officers and the start of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth in the west. I'm short on time but I might come back to this later because there are some interesting dynamics at play here.

After the end of the Cold War the changing political realities and the opening of Soviet archives doomed the reputation of the Wehrmacht. There was no way to deny their involvement in horrendous war crimes or the depth of their entwinement with Nazi rule.

A simple way to look at the arc of it all is to look at how officers convicted of war crimes to Allied forces were treated. Take Kurt Meyer for example: sentenced to death, reduced to life in prison, transferred to Germany, released permanently all within ten years.

During WWII Germany was of course villainized in propaganda and amongst western Allied soldiers; massacres of surrendering German soldiers were not regular but also not uncommon.

I think it's important to point out here that the massacred soldiers in question were almost(?) all Waffen-SS, not Wehrmacht.

For larger massacres, generally. But lots of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers had their surrenders not-so-politely declined; this was sort of glossed over in the post-war official histories but appear frequently in AARs. Also as Ioper notes due to the influx of draftees and soldiers from other branches into the Waffen-SS (whose units were almost always subordinated or OKH or OKW) just because someone was in the SS doesn't mean they were SS.

At the point of the Allied invasion of continental Europe that distinction isn't super clear due to the massive expansion and forced conscription of both large numbers of Germans (often Wehrmacht) and foreigners, doubling in size many times over. It wasn't remotely the same org as before or at the start of the war.

Do most Americans not regard the Japanese as a worthy enemy? Maybe I listen to too much Dan Carlin or something, but my memory of Imperial Japan includes extreme bravery and substantial competence.

No, they don't, the dominant view of the WWII Japanese is that they were batshit crazy and directed by Nazi-tier evil leadership.

I think that this has changed over time. I am old enough to have known many WWII vets and they almost universally hated the Japs and did not really admire them even in the most begrudging fashion. the common adjectives describing Japanese soldiers would have been more like fanatical, honor bound, or suicidal. More like a death cult than an army. I think over the period of the Cold War, when Japan became more and more of an economic and strategic ally, and as the WWII generation died out, that shifted. In the popular worldview, movies like TORA TORA TORA and later films like Letters from Iwo Jima contributed as well.

The Japanese didn't adhere to Western codes of chivalry, they routinely tortured and executed their captives and generally fought without either decency or mercy. Such an enemy isn't seen as worthy and earns no respect; I think American attitudes towards them during the war reflect that.

A somewhat less subjective (but by no means esoteric) view might be that many of the Japanese conscripts were themselves basically brainwashed thugs drunk on pie-in-the sky notions of honor and loyalty to the emperor (they weren't all thugs, of course). They had their own codes, albeit not ones really accessible to non-Japanese, and this made them seem (particularly at the time) impenetrably barbaric. Their martial views of any enemy who would so dishonor themselves as to surrender contributed to the objectively horrific treatment they afforded any captives.

In the actual fighting (e.g. the jungles of Burma) they made formidable and resilient, if despised enemies. To say they were without decency or mercy may feel good but is a contextual judgment that overlooks the considerable cultural influences involved.

Somewhat related to Trump assasination attempt: does it occur that sometimes doctor beforehand plan for possible surgeries for people in dangerous professions? Documenting body's unusual features like abnormal positions of blood vessels or organs, keeping a pool of compatible blood, etc.

I remember reading that the Secret Service travels with donor blood ready to go for the President in case he needs a rapid transfusion.

Specifically mentioned in the film In the Line of Fire, which is just as gripping now as it was thirty years ago.

When I worked close to the white house, the Vice President's motorcade for the commute home had an ambulance as part of the standard vehicles. The most memorable though was the SUV with the doors removed and a SAW mounted in the door's place.

After their showing this week, not sure I'd be comfortable with the SS doing that. Imagine they're pumping it into you and one of them goes "huh, the package says it should have been refrigerated! How about that"

Why arent my posts showing up in real time? It appears a mod has to approve each post of mine? Why is that?

Because you're a new user, and the inherited code requires new users with no upvote history to have their posts manually approved. The mods try to approve stuff from the filter as frequently as possible, and hopefully you'll get enough upvotes in short order for the filter to leave you alone.

Before you ask, no, apparently we can't fix this.

Can't you change the threshold where this happens? Set it to like -1 and then it'll never bother anyone.

We've asked. No dice.

How about whenever a new account is created they automatically make shadow posts which get upvoted by enough "new account upvoter" bots to overcome this threshold immediately?

Manually, we could make a weekly/monthly circlejerk thread where everybody upvotes every post that's made and new users can introduce themselves and everyone congratulates them and each other with infinite upvotes.

…or holds a grudge. Still probably worth it, though.

I'd be for it.

I'm not a new user. I've had this account for months .

You haven't posted much and you haven't earned many upvotes. Until you participate regularly, you will be caught in the new user filter.

How many upvotes do I need to escape the filter?

I don't know. I don't know if it's a fixed number. Just participate regularly and eventually you won't be flagged as a new user.

I know @AhhhTheFrench's had trouble with being flagged because he gets downvoted a lot. Now, he's significantly less pleasant to deal with than @Doubletree2 here, but do you think the vote totals being involved might end up disproportionately hurting those whose views differ from the typical mottizen's?

Yes, it does have that effect. guesswho/darwin stayed in the new user filter despite being a regular poster because he was downvoted so heavily.

It is an inconvenience, but I'm not sure what alternatives Zorba might want to implement.

I dont know if anyone here knows the answer to this, but i was browsing x and saw this picture.

Is trump carrying? I assume the pistol on the left is a shoulder strap for the SS agent. But the one on the right looks clipped to his belt under his jacket.

https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1812570975726432656

No. From the picture, it's all armed Secret Service agents piled on top of Trump. If you look at the bottom left, you'll see his legs sticking out from the pile.

If you watch the video I think that's another agent dogpiling on Trump -- he doesn't need to carry, he's got people for that. (theoretically, maybe he needs to get his own people.)

Judging by the holes in his administration, I’m not sure he’d be able to fill the ranks with his own people…

The people who are willing to take orders and use guns are a pro Trump demographic.

So are the police staffing a Pennsylvania rally, yeah?

Pro Trump is not the same as Working For Trump is not the same as Capable Security.

It's not clear that Don Jr's hunting buddies would have done a strictly worse job -- but one would think that given Trump's connections in the world of hated billionaires he could be in touch with some private security heavies pretty easily?

I don't think the kind of security that is able to take over privately-owned buildings which provide rooftop overlooks of a rally site is something money can buy. Nor should it be.

So, what are you reading?

I’m still on Hülsmann’s Abundance, Generosity and the State. Also going through Ogburn Jr.’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, an Oxfordian tract. So far it has been a lot of interesting information well-presented, though occasionally I find his logic odd.

Still on a Lacan kick, now reading Jacques Lacan himself after finishing a primer on Freud and a clinical intro by Bruce Fink. I have some thoughts on my first forays into Lacan proper, as well as some on the Fink book (which Scott Alexander also read and reviewed).

Initially the recommendation was to absolutely avoid Ecrits, read supplementary material like Fink, and read Lacan's seminars starting at 11 and 7, then going back to 1. I tried 11 and it's a bit too hard to understand; too mired in previous work, I think. The recommendation stems from it being a turning point in his work, but I'd rather have the context to know what it is turning from.

I'm reading Lacan's first seminar now, which seems to ask more coherent questions. It is a direct offshoot from Freud and so far is commenting on Freud's writing directly, while throwing shade at other offshoots (ego psychology). The primary questions seem to be things like, what actually is the unconscious, what is the goal of analysis, what is the process of analysis, what is the position of the analyst, how should the analyst approach analysis...? These all seem to stem from the fact that Freud's actual methods are veiled and only communicated in a limited scope (i.e. what Freud actually wrote down). I'm still very early in the book, though.

I feel that I can actually grasp some of what Lacan is saying here, which is a nice change of pace. I'm sure that will change, but before this I wasn't sure there was a foundation to turn away from, so I'm feeling confident in my decision to divert from the suggested starting place and go chronologically.

A bit of commentary on the Fink book after finishing:

I feel like it was a good intro that avoided a lot of the roundabout references that permeate Lacanian commentary. At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, it was perhaps too grounded, in the sense that the examples, case studies, and commentary by Fink were the biggest issues. The gist I have picked up from other third parties is that Lacan is all about abstracting and structuring Freudian analysis, moving away from the particulars in the abstract sense so that the actual particulars of any given case can be dealt with. Some of Fink's comments seemed closer to symptomizing than structuralizing, more cause -> effect proselytizing than observational.

In general it provides an overview of key concepts, and is a good jumping off point for anyone who is curious about Lacan. Extremely readable and engrossing at points. Very different from Lacan's own work, which is probably a big plus for some.

I never got around to actually reading Lacan, but the IEP's entry on him was stellar reading.

Just finished Nothing to Envy, about life in North Korea as told by defectors. It's remarkable how the Kim dynasty managed to keep things going despite such drastic mismanagement. The craziest example, I think, when it became necessary to use human feces as farm fertilizer - you're probably assuming they just had the sewage treatment plants compost it, or had feces composted wherever it was being collected previously, or something else sane and reasonable, but no! That is not the North Korean way! Instead, citizens were commanded to bring feces in themselves, with not only a quota to fill but an unreasonably high quota at that, such that feces-theft became an actual thing.

Just finished reading the Raven's Mark Trilogy. It was pretty good fantasy.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the last years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson. This all started because I recently met a California girl (woman) who looked to me very much like Sharon Tate. I told her this, which went over about as well as you'd expect. In any case I then did a deep dive and ended up with this book, which is not directly about Tate, but is quite well written and paints an interesting picture of the late 60s early 70s Hollywood. I also rewatched Chinatown, which is in my view a nearly perfect film, if such terms can be used.

I just finished the 4th Culture novel, "The State of the Art".

Easily the worst entry so far, and it's not close. It started with a couple of vignettes that shifted both tone and setting from the previous novels, and then the back half was back to a more typical entry.

It just wasn't interesting. Basically, yet another screed about how communism would work if it wasn't for those capitalist dirty tricks. How awful the earth would seem to an advanced, egalitarian race in a post-scarcity economy. Ian Bank's superiority complex barely shrouded through fiction. The only connection to other books was a one-character cameo.

Despite its shortness compared to the other entries, I'm frustrated because it seems like it was a waste of time. So far, the fifth book is starting off much better.

That’s my next one. Use of Weapons was great, as was Player, unsurprisingly. Phlebas didn’t do it for me. I still read Look to Windward out of order, though, and it was perhaps my favorite. So there’s hope.

I was actually planning to skip Excession after hearing the Mind-Mind interactions were better offscreen than as chatrooms. But I understand mileage may vary.

Question though - after UoW and Player, did Phlebas grow on you a little?

In particular, I think having the main character be an avowed enemy of the "main character" of the rest of the series is just such an excellent expository vantage point. The world was built around The Culture before you started seeing things from its point of view. It was a multi-hundred-page prologue.

I'm not going to read the spoiler because I'm 10% into Excession but... now I'm nervous. Damnit.

Don’t worry, it’s not a serious concern. More of an aesthetic preference.

I read Phlebas second, having heard Player was a better starting point. So the comparison was always going to be biased. But I’d say my problems with the book were more about structure than vantage.

It’s a series of set pieces. Some of them were pretty neat, but they really don’t go anywhere until the finale. In hindsight, it sort of reminds me of The Last Jedi, adding destinations more for visuals than for advancing the plot or characters. The characters live on top of the setting rather than in it. In contrast, the other novels have a better linkage between place and purpose.

I was stuck at the mall with my wife, so in between pulling out my credit card, I went on LibGen and downloaded the NYT #1 book of the twentyfirst century Elena Ferrante My Brilliant Friend.

While I disagreed with a lot of the list choices, very political and very effeminate, this one is literary gold. I see why it won.

Getting back into Kissinger's Diplomacy after taking a break from it to read Goethe’s Faust.

Kissinger is fairly critical of the containment policy of the Cold War. Committing to fight the expansion of the communist states everywhere meant that the ball was in the Soviets’ court to pick the most inconvenient places possible to start crises which America would be morally obligated to intervene in. The book is just about to start on the Vietnam war and what’s interesting is that the Soviets have not yet purposefully exploited this supposed weak point (he has given hints that Khrushchev was very good at creating difficult situations for the Americans but equally bad at finishing them, there’s an echo to an earlier chapter about Napoleon III here).

Kissinger repeatedly says that the Soviets are simply confused by America’s universal moral declarations and they refuse to take anything other than realpolitik seriously. Stalin gives lukewarm support to the Korean War not because it’s an inconvenient place for the US to defend but because he thinks it just won’t be a big deal. The Americans have said as much when discussing core strategic areas, yet when the war breaks out it becomes a place worth fighting for purely because America is bound by the implications of its stated moral principles.

The core investigation of the book seems to be about how Wilson caused Western leaders to question the old balance of power model in favour of a model based on universal declarations of rights, personal goodwill between leaders, collective security organisations and alliances concerned just as much with agreeable domestic institutions as military advantage. Despite the initial failures of the League of Nations and the misplaced trust in Stalin the Wilsonian style of diplomacy never really went away, and the next decades show Britain being won over by this vision (with Churchill being a solidly old-school exception), America learning hard lessons which temper its idealism and the Soviets being terribly confused at what America is actually willing to start a war over. Kissinger is very critical of the Wilsonian vision but he does give it one piece of high praise: to sustain the kind of long term commitment that fighting the Cold War required the American public needed an ideal which could motivate them.