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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3779 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 16, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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There’s a recent German-Slovakian historical drama entitled Führer und Verführer (“Leader and Misleader”) about the life of the infamous Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels. I imagine it only had a rather limited release in the US and the UK (it surely has no Wikipedia page in English). I thought the movie is well-made altogether but nothing new really – also the cast pretty much looks generally scarcely like the figures they are supposed to portray – with the glaring exception that Hitler’s character not once behaves like a raging lunatic and does not even raise his voice at all. (I remember that the movie Valkyrie was the same in this regard, but it also only showed Hitler on screen for no more than a few minutes.) I never imagined that I’d ever see a German movie like that. Can definitely recommend.

Do any of you fish? I'm not sure if anyone can answer this question since it's probably niche even for fishermen. I live about an hour away from the Illinois River and I am sympathetic to the plight of the Illinois River's Asian carp problem. I am also very curious about what the bastards taste like and I won't accept the colloquial answer of "they taste bad, don't bother". I participated in a Redneck Fishing tournament one year where people sign up to get on motorboats that stir up the water and catch them with nets when they jump, which was quite thrilling. I'd guess thousands of pounds result from that every year, but I didn't ask if I could take any home; I think they were sent to a meat plant to get turned into dog food.

As far as I know, they're filter feeders. I possess no fishing equipment and I have only fished once in my life in some relatives' pond when I was 10 or so, and we tossed the fish back in that case. What's the cheapest way for me to fish Asian carp? A motorboat is out of the question, but a fishing kayak might not be, though I don't know how smart that would be on a big river like the Illinois River. These are big fish we're talking about, and capsizing is within the realm of imagination of a bunch of them smacked you on a small boat. Ideally I would be on the banks, anyway.

Fish love me, women have mixed opinions.

Last time I fished in the family pond was about a decade and change ago. I hate the taste of fish, which takes all the fun out of it.

I don't think we have this kind of carp where I'm at, but there are lots of smaller ones around -- we fished for them as kids. (and were encouraged to bonk them on the head and throw them in the compost, so I guess they are also considered invasive?)

I don't recall them being bait sensitive in the least -- from what I recall the technique would be "chunk of hotdog on a treble hook, dangled just above bottom near some hiding place (usually a dock that we were standing on, but hey)".

The "hiding place" and "dangled just above bottom" bits might be trickier in a river -- I'd be surprised if casting a bobber set to whatever you figure the depth might be near/behind rocks/overhanging trees/snags didn't catch the odd fish though.

Oh, that's tolstolobik, isn't it? It's a pretty common fish here. Like all carps, it has lots of bones and smells faintly of muck, but you can make gefilte fish or just keep only the largest specimens, like 7lb+.

You can fish from the bank, you just need a rocky shore, this fish doesn't like grass. Do not fish during algal blooms, the fish will not be hungry enough. Midnight is the best time. We use "technoplankton" to catch it, but all English-language links are machine translations of Russian sources. It's a dense block of finely ground bait that slowly dissolves in the water, forming a cloud of food around the hooks. You need a tackle that looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/Fishing-Feeder-Inline-Coarse-Terminal/dp/B09244F54V

They are filter feeders, so all other bait or tackle will be much less effective.

Yes, I think it is that fish. Asian carp or silver carp is what it's called here. The Illinois River is absolutely full of them and the authorities have been troubled by this fact for years. That's great advice on how to catch them, makes perfect sense. That's probably going to end up a lot cheaper than a kayak.

I've certainly never heard of "technoplankton" and none of the fishing threads I looked at on reddit seemed to have any inkling of anything like "technoplankton". Perhaps Americans don't catch this fish much and don't know how to catch them? Do you make technoplankton yourself or do you buy it? What do Russians think of the fish? The people here (rural Midwest) think it's a trash fish. Man, glad I made the original post, how fascinating.

YouTube autogenerated subtitles are fine if you want to watch some actual fishing guides. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qe69lsqX3u0 or just paste "ловля толстолобика" into the search box.

It's native in the Far East, but it's been introduced across the whole former USSR. It's considered better than most other forms of carp because it grows big enough there's enough meat between the bones.

You can buy technoplankton, but some fishermen make it themselves, especially when they are short on money. For some of them fishing is not a hobby, but a source of protein. It's basically a mixture of various flour, some sort of binder (like sugar or powdered milk) and optionally a source of strong delicious smell (I've seen ready-made ones that smell like strawberry, honey, baked milk, aniseed, garlic and... fleas). You mix all this into a barely wet dough and press into a dense block (about 2 ounces) that fits onto the tackle (or inside it, if it has a cage like the one from Amazon). It slowly dissolves in the water and forms a tasty cloud that the silver carp will try to slurp.

Asian carp were endemic in a lake near where I grew up. People mostly used bows but it was possible to catch them with conventional spinning reels using bread as bait. It's my understanding that they're very bony. I think my folks tried before being one of only two money saving hacks I know of them giving up on in the attempted processing.

I unfortunately do not own a bow. I do own a shotgun, though. Can you use shotguns on the river, I wonder? I wonder what kind of ammo you'd use for it. Birdshot would be my guess, since it probably wouldn't take so much of the fish if it was far enough away, but I don't know if it's illegal. Where did they use the bow? On the banks or were they in a boat of some kind? If boat, what kind of boat?

We should bring back dynamiting as a legitimate means of fishing. I'm far from a fisherman, but I'd get behind throwing explosives into water bodies.

Much as I'd love to join you, and I theoretically could, shotgun fishing in Pritzker country sounds a little risky...

Bullets lose way too much energy in a short distance of water. I don't think they'd work. Easiest way I know of is a cheap rod and some bread on a hook.

People say they taste pretty good.

I see mixed things about them outside of that thread. In real life, the sentiment is quite negative. There's some movement to rebrand them "Copi", but there was a stand at the state fair selling them and they did things like mix them heavily with potato stuff or crab rangoon mixture and then breaded them so you don't even know what they taste like. What a waste of money, and it wasn't even good, just greasy and salty with no winning flavor to save it. Really put a damper on the whole visit. I am just really interested in dirt cheap protein that the State wants gone. I am interested in hogs for the same reason, but I don't live in hog country, unfortunately.

WDYM you don't live in hog country. They live literally everywhere. You just need to be patient.

with no winning flavor to save it.

Sounds like most fish to me tbh. We commonly eat carp in eastern Europe and it too doesn't have that much flavor either.

It's not bad but the breading does a lot of lifting.

tfw hog country is everywhere

Well no, you're wrong! Look!

Still bizarre they are not everywhere.

I thought you were going to link this.

I'm back home, in India. Either the Pakistani SAM sites didn't want to fuck with a Middle Eastern airline, or the conflict has truly died down.

I'm also, in somewhat related news, single again. It's been a while. All the excuse I needed to overcome my innate laziness and hit the gym. My brother was convinced to drag my sorry ass along to his very upscale gym, and beat me into back workouts till failure. Well, I suppose that the body does remember previous experience (it's hardly the first time I've hit the gym, it's just been a while), as the DOMS hasn't been nearly as bad as some episodes I remember. I'm going to get ripped or die trying, the first thing I'm going to do when I'm back in Scotland is get a gym membership. In the meantime, I'll get warmed up here.

I was wrong. There's a reason it's delayed onset muscle soreness.

Good luck. Generally the more delayed the more soreness onsets.

I spent half the night sleepless from how fucking badly my shoulders ached. It's better now, but not back to full ROM. Well, I've been off the pony for more than 2 years at this point, time to get jacked again.

In the meantime, I'll get warmed up here.

My wife commented just today that it was intolerably hot outside at the playground. It was 22c (in the shade).

My wife loves to go outside when it's 65 (that's 18.5 or so for all you countries that haven't been to the moon), strip off most of her layers, lounge about in the shade, etc. If it's the same temperature inside the house she's all bundled up and harassing me into turning the heat on. Go figure.

https://x.com/TheSun/status/1289163901376974851

Funniest shit I've seen today.

Samsung's OneUI 7.0 seems to have increased the battery drain on my phone significantly. Is this part of planned obsolescence or am I being too cynical? :P

Planned obsolescence implies it's part of a plan that they have meetings on. It's more that they don't care about you once you've ceased to provide them revenue.

It did just the opposite on my phone. Could be that it's something that was tweaked for one CPU type at the expense of others?

Sitting in the airport lounge at Dubai, on my way home. I can confirm that Google blocks Gemini Flash image gen in the UK, but allows it in the UAE of all places. Dafuq.

Probably has something to do with UK laws. Maybe some Google lawyers are scared somebody would sue them if some image casting somebody powerful in bad light is generated. UK is not a good place to be sued for defamation. While Google is probably not scared that somebody in UAE sues them. May be related to that.

Existing AI image generation hasn't had any issues there, beyond the usual noise about deepfake porn. It's certainly not blanket illegal. Besides, ChatGPT offers their LLM-based image generation there, which makes it all the more perplexing why Google are being cowardly.

Do lemme know if you visit Rajasthan, safe journey!

I'm halfway to convincing myself to travel somewhere now that I'm home and bored, if it's that direction I'll hit you up dawg 🤞

Huh? Why is it blocked anywhere?

Google doesn't specify, it just mentions it in a small disclaimer, by the "beware of leopard" sign, if you dig through the API and AI Studio documentation for their models. It's probably ass-covering that isn't strictly required, as ChatGPT allows native image gen in pretty much every country including the UK.

The Eurovision Song Contest was held this evening, which I haven't watched in about twenty years. A friend of mine suggested that we watch it, but was unsure if she'd be able to host, as her flatmate was insistent on boycotting it in light of Israel being "allowed" to participate. In the end her flatmate was out of the house so we were able to watch it in her flat.

I'd assumed that, given the absence of her anti-Zionist flatmate, we'd be able to enjoy the Eurovision as the trashy, campy experience that was intended, without politics intruding. I was mistaken: my friend, her boyfriend and one of her friends insisted on turning off the stream during Israel's performance and made innumerable derisive comments about them during the night. I'm a coward who wants to keep the peace so I held my tongue for the most part.

Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)

I was rather dismayed with how quickly my friend retreated into semi-ironic conspiritorialism: saying that the Eurovision would have to investigate their voting procedures next year to ensure no ballot-stuffing was taking place, or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right". (The idea that foul play must have been involved seems to be a consensus opinion, if /r/Ireland is any indication.) The possibilities that a) normie Europeans legitimately liked Israel's performance on a musical level more than the other countries; or b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.

I am growing increasingly dismayed by the level of ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland, but it's comforting to be reminded that it's quite the outlier among European countries.

Things took an even weirder turn when Armenia performed and the conversation turned to the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. My friend's Turkish boyfriend, who'd been enthusiastically participating in the Israel-bashing, suddenly became rather defensive, explaining how it wasn't a genocide but merely ethnic cleansing, and anyway forced marches are completely different from genocide, and anyway how do you even establish intent to exterminate a particular ethnic group, and it's hypocritical of European nations to accuse the Turks of genocide when they've done things that were just as bad if not worse* (it was a real mask-off, vino veritas moment, and even my friend seemed to be a bit taken aback by how worked up he got). I felt like saying - it's a bit rich of you to accuse Israel of genocide on the basis of their having killed ~110,000 Palestinians in the span of 75 years, but dismiss the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in one year as "mere" ethnic cleansing. My girlfriend, who's nowhere near as sympathetic to the Israelis as I am, admitted that I had a point here. I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.

*On this point I agreed with him: the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo.

Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)

Australia and Estonia were robbed, man. Estonia should've won (okay, Tommy's live performance didn't live up to the music video, but the music video and the song itself were gold) and Australia should've qualified for the finals over any of the boring shit that got in over them, particularly Armenia and fucking Denmark. Holy shit were those two painfully boring.

Before seeing Germany and Latvia, Estonia was my personal favourite. Good clean silly fun.

or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right".

Wait, I thought "the right" are supposed to be all Nazis? So all the Nazis are voting for Israel now, against Austria, where literally Hitler was born? That's hilarious.

ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland

On a more serious note, a disappointment of a decade, tbh, how quickly and easily Ireland turned anti-Semitic (let's not be coy, that's what it is). What did the Jews ever done to them? I have always been a fan of Irish and wider Celtic culture, but this thing makes me sad.

Wait, I thought "the right" are supposed to be all Nazis? So all the Nazis are voting for Israel now, against Austria, where literally Hitler was born?

In the 2020s, the "far-right" are people who think it's bad to massacre Jews for the crime of being Jewish, and who think Jews are entitled to defend themselves against attempts to massacre them. Whereas the "anti-racist left" are the people making excuses for people who want to massacre Jews, insisting that the reasons they want to do so are perfectly legitimate and not at all related to blind ethnic hatred, suggesting that it's the Jews' own fault if people want to murder them, and saying that the Jews are in the wrong if they attempt to defend themselves against attempts to murder them.

I have no idea how we ended up in this place, but I hate it.

On a more serious note, a disappointment of a decade, tbh, how quickly and easily Ireland turned anti-Semitic (let's not be coy, that's what it is).

A year ago I would have disagreed with you, but at this point I'm struggling to think of alternative explanations which could explain this degree of ire. Conspiratorial ranting about how Mossad are buying up Irish SIMs en masse in order to manipulate Eurovision voting for hasbara purposes - I mean, come on. Don't tell me this has anything to do with "anti-colonialism".

I have no idea how we ended up in this place, but I hate it

I have been meaning to write an effort post on this. The reason is that the modern woke worldview is already 9/10s of the way to being an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It holds that a certain ethnic group (white people) is responsible for all the problems in both America and the world. The way this ethnic group did that is by displaying racist high in-group preference, conspiring that all high ranking positions in society are controlled by that ethnic group. That way they can control the flow of wealth in the entire world away from those who need it, and to themselves and themselves alone. The ethnic group has also enforced this racial dictatorship by developing a years long stranglehold of not just politics, but of media and culture as well. All you need to do to turn that into something out of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is drop in a single triple parenthesis so that instead of white people it’s (((white people))). This is not helped by the fact that Jews are often high achieving and end up in many high positions of power and cultural authority in the society that the woke despise so much. Karl Marx said that antisemitism is Communist class warfare for morons, and surprise surprise, when you try to Communize a bunch of college morons, you are going to turn a lot of them into antisemites.

I think there are some other factors too, but this is the main one.

That said, if it's Reddit we're talking about, it's kind of self-selected for the worst excesses of woke, so maybe overall picture is not that bad. No idea, I am still holding some stupid hope that they'd wake up one day and figure out this is all BS. Probably won't happen though.

Reddit is certainly crazier, but among my university educated friends it's not rare at all to claim that the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted and besides, it's exaggerated anyway. I usually don't prod further, but when I confronted a friend who is unusually tolerant of different opinions with well, imagine yourself to be an Israeli: What if you're wrong? What if you let them in, and the murderous hatred does not immediately vanish? He just retreated to the motte that Israels' behaviour is immoral either way. At least I could get him to agree that maybe a slower process that doesn't have catastrophical fail states is better.

the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted

That had already been proven wrong, it's not a theoretical question, Israel gave up all power in Gaza and actively tried to not intervene there as much as possible for 20 years. What we have now is the outcome of that policy. Israel has its own left, and it operated exactly based on that concept - in fact, it was the dominating concept over the majority of the establishment, however they color themselves on other issues - that the hate will recede once Israel administration is gone, and the residual hard core of haters is going to be easy to contain since it would be small and isolated. That went catastrophically wrong of course.

It's like somebody would say "if we only had a socialist country" ignoring the USSR ever existed. Which I guess what the left is routinely doing, so not much new here.

I agree - but to them, the situation in Gaza was sufficiently bad that it doesn't count. It's just a fairly simplistic moralistic view that doesn't really account for agency on the alleged victims side or pragmatic solutions.

Yes, and the /r/Ireland subreddit has unambiguously undergone a purity spiral in recent years.

Leftist screeching is never about moral clarity. No comparisons will cool people off who are programmed to dislike what they are told to dislike. Israel hasn't been the best but I doubt Palestine would let jews live if they were as strong.

NRx people got a lot of this stuff right.

I object to Israel being in the Eurovision contest on the extremely pedantic basis that Israel is not, in fact, in Europe.

Boy, have I ever got some bad news for you.

What's the reasoning behind this? Did they just decide that it's good business to keep expanding the contest year after year? Is it eventually going to turn into a worldwide contest?

Despite the name, the contest has nothing to do with the European Union. Any countries which are members of the European Broadcasting Union (itself, counter-intuitively, not limited only to European broadcasters) are eligible to enter. At various points, entries from China, Kazakhstan and Qatar have been considered.

Cool, thanks. That's the first time I've ever heard of the European Broadcasting Union.

Seems like the US is also a member!

Nah, Turkey's got that little bit to the NW of Istanbul that I think counts, so partial credit. I guess historically it's more a production of the "European Broadcasting Union" as a media co-op, but still, what sell-outs

Azerbaijan is also considered to be partially in Europe, due to the funky way Europe's usually defined (part of it is north of the Greater Caucasus, and Europe is defined with the boundary being Urals-Caspian Sea-Greater Caucasus-Black Sea).

@FtttG

Hot take: "Europe" is only a separate continent because geographers have a very eurocentric view in drawing the lines. Every other continent has a pretty clear separation from its neighbors by sea or at least small isthmus. "Eurasia" makes more sense from the map.

Not Eurocentric; Med-centric. This one goes back to Ancient Greece, and when you're a maritime civilisation in the Mediterranean there are three big lumps of land of relatively-similar coastline around it: Europe, Africa, and (West) Asia. From the Med's point of view, Europe and Asia are separate, because of the Turkish Straits; it's only if you know/care about the far shore of the Black Sea that they seem connected.

EDIT: It's dubious how much relevance this has to history, but it should be noted that there have been times within human habitation that the Caspian Sea has become connected to the Black Sea. There may be again, if we melt the Antarctic Ice Sheet. With the Caspian connected to the Black, and thus the Med, Europe starts looking considerably more like its own thing.

Tired: Europe is a continent

Wired: Europe is not a continent

Inspired: Europe is a continent, and so is India

Yeah, admittedly Turkey and Azerbaijan are edge cases as far as geography goes. Culturally, on the other hand...

Might as well add bangaldesh at this point.

I think a Bollywood dance number could really liven the thing up. Something like this would make for a nice change of pace from the monotony of sombre ballads, Eurodisco and reggaeton.

Is the melody that is played on the strings the same in many Indian songs? You know, how The Ink Spots started every song with the same tune or how Johnny Cash used the same two chords for like half of his songs?

Or is the timbre of this instrument so distinctive it overrides my perception of the melody?

It's probably different lol. Though people use the same sample in most pop music on various regional TV channels is different.

@FtttG do people in the west mostly see Indian pop music? Indian exports at one point were more classical in nature.

I guess this song is simply so memetic that I must have heard samples of it a gorillion times in various videos.

I think it was used in that movie The Dictator.

Honestly, I didn't even know Indian classical music was a thing before reading your comment.

I know extremely little about music from that part of the world so I can't comment. @self_made_human, @mrvanillasky, care to weigh in?

I'm far from an expert, but this is a quintessentially Punjabi melody/beat.

It's far more representative of India as perceived by non-Indian, but the former is the association that one of us who isn't irony poisoned would make. I think very similar beats are in vogue for mid 2000s Punjabi music, not so much so today.

Lol, my aunts a popular folk singer, the kind of dance we have is quite mellow, ghoomar since Rajasthan is hyper conservative.

Are there any performances that you really liked in any eurovisions?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w07N2nfB7KY

I haven't watched it for about twenty years. Of the performances last night my favourites were Germany and Latvia. I can actually see myself listening to the German entry for pleasure, which is unprecedented for me I think.

Ban them! BAN THEM ALL!

the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo

Could you elaborate on this? I've been seeing a lot of arguments lately to the effect that the Belgians weren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop. So far when I look such things up I first find that the official story is everywhere, but when digging deeper it falls apart. At this point I don't know what to believe.

On the other hand (jeez no pun intended) I can very easily believe that it's massively overblown for to cast colonialism in the worst possible light.

e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop.

That part isn’t actually considered to be controversial at all. Leopold ordered a local armed force (gendarmerie) to be set up, commanded by European mercenaries and recruited from locals, with arms and ammunition being shipped in at great expense from Europe. As the officials were worried that the recruits would use the ammunition to poach local wildlife, they forbid hunting and ordered the hands of any killed rebel/saboteur/bandit/deserter etc. to be severed, collected and presented to command as evidence. Instead of suppressing poaching, this resulted in a black market where soldiers bought up severed hands from local tribesmen. It’s a simple case of perverse incentives. Everybody in power knew well that cutting of the hands to plantation workers for whatever reason is counterproductive and thus not to be condoned.

The time during which the Congo was the personal property of King Leopold was so bad that the Belgian parliament took it away from him. The time of being a Belgian colony was not as bad.

It’s funny how practically every poster on the Motte suddenly turns into SecureSignals when any other tragic mass killing in human history is mentioned. “Only 200,000 Congans died at worst! Mostly from typhus!”

Hah I love how inside baseball this comment is.

The situation in the Belgian Congo was poorly documented and almost none of the survivors had their stories documented.

Colonial ethnic violence in general took many forms, some are closer to the Holodomor than the Holocaust, for example. It’s disingenuous to suggest that King Leopold wanted all the Congolese Bantus (primary victims; the pygmies were considered too small to work for the most part and had already been genocided by the Bantus during the great migration) dead or expelled. The transatlantic slave trade was brutal and cruel, but it likewise wasn’t a ‘genocide’.

That’s the exact same spiel that any good motivated tankie would use when talking about the Holodomor.

The mainstreamed Atlanticist narrative is that the Soviet famine of 1932-33 was a genocidal policy of mongolized Russian imperialists masquerading as Communists specifically intended to exterminate the proud and ancient Ukrainian nation. It should be pointed out that questioning any part of this claim openly will earn you condemnation for being a Russian agent.

IMO it wasn't really about ethnicities. Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one. Sure, there was a dimension to suppress the nationalist movement, but the main idea was to exterminate the class of independent farmers who were completely incompatible with the collectivist centralized agenda of the new power. Holodomor wasn't engineered to destroy Ukrainian nationalists (though by exterminating their base, it was a side benefit), it had been engineered to destroy Kulaks and the concept of independent self-sufficient agricultural production. I'm sure you can play with the definition of "genocide" to place it one way or another, but in my book a concerted social engineering effort to destroy a wide group of people is something that is horrible, and happens often enough that we need a term to call it. If you don't want to call it "genocide", you'd have to invent a new term with exactly the same semantic connotations, by which point there's not really any reason not to just use "genocide".

Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one.

True. But it weren't Americans who invented the ethnicist narrative that has been mainstreamed in the West, it was Ukrainian nationalist immigrant activists in America, Canada, the UK etc.

Well, if you target the cultural elites, the narrative "racists tried to ethnically cleanse my people" gets you lots of sympathy, but the narrative "commies murdered 5 millions of my people while trying to establish the worker's paradise" gets you shrugs and "well, you can't build worker's paradise without breaking some eggs...". So it's hard to fault them for playing with the deck they've been dealt.

Love how starvation and disease suddenly become acceptable excuses.

Yeah, how do you think most people died in concentration camps ? (Extermination camps != concentration camps)

Well, at this point I think it's an observable truth that the history of colonialism is generally presented in, to put it charitably, the least-charitable possible light.

That isnt my experience. Colonialism is frequently presented as one/all of.

  1. Yes it was extractive, but still more competent than the natives.

  2. Yeah, but we civilized them.

  3. They killed themselves in civil wars after we left anyway.

Worst of all, even in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.

France still lays claim to the 150 million in Haitian ransom. The British refuse to accept blame imposed on Churchill for the Bengal famine. The portugese inquistion was famous for grotesque torture in Goa. The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it. Not many apologies to go around.

Yes, they werent as effective as communists or nazis at killing. And they werent as comically cruel as imperial japan. But, these were still fairly fucked up periods for the colonized nations. IMO, Pretty close to slavery.

The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it.

[citation needed]

The first microscopes capable of seeing "animalcules" date back to 1674, and as late as ~1850 we still have people like John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis still fighting an uphill battle with their controversial theories of "cholera can spread in drinking water" and "doctors should wash their hands in between examining corpses and delivering babies".

Back in the 1500s understanding of disease was so bad that we still don't even know which diseases were responsible for the majority of New World deaths. The earliest massive plague was smallpox, but the dozen-odd plagues of "cocoliztli" are still named by that generic Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "pestilence" because nobody knows which of a half dozen candidate germs were the actual cause.

For that matter, some diseases spread so much faster than the conquerors who first transmitted them that we don't know how bad the death toll was! In hindsight we believe that a lot of European colonist reports of "gosh, look how beautiful this unspoiled wilderness is" in North America were from people describing recently-carefully-tended forests whose caretakers had just been devastated by epidemics.

This isn't to excuse any of the colonists' deliberate crimes, of course. After the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been killed by an epidemic, the proper way to treat Squanto should have been sympathy and charity, not abduction. Some of the colonized nations' treatment was "Pretty close to slavery", and some was literal "we'll take you to the slave market to sell now" slavery.

I don't know where you grew up, what media you consume, or who you're talking to, but this is not my experience whatsoever. The first time I encountered anything like an opinion that colonialism wasn't an unalloyed evil was in spaces like this one. In school we spent a lot of time hammering home the point that colonialism (and American slavery) are the worst things that have ever happened excepting the holocaust.

'Decolonization' is a popular buzzword all over the place.

If you don't mind me asking, about what time period were you in school? I only got the slavery part and some whispers of "Columbus was evil actually", around 2002-2008ish. I first heard the word decolonization somewhere mid-late in the 2010s. Just trying to pin down an approximate timeline here.

90s and in California. Granted 'decolonization' wasn't a thing at the time but now the local school has it painted on their walls.

Figures it was California, though I'm surprised that this was in the 90s. I guess I shouldn't be though, just because I wasn't old enough to be aware of it doesn't mean it wasn't there. New York metropolitan area for me.

Okay. Even granting all that, what now? Blame current-day Europeans for the sins of their forefathers? Spend all of eternity re-heating old grievances concerning harm done by dead people to other dead people? Try to conclusively settle that which is impossible to settle, so that the next generation can turn around and call a foul and claim that the settlement was in itself unjust, so our descendants can all have another go at the merry-go-round?

in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.

The colonial powers of yestercentury don't exist anymore. You can go and extract apologies from the current French, Spanish, British or Belgian governments and what the hell are those worth? The people in charge now and the people who live in those countries now aren't the same people who committed whatever crime happened in the colonial era. It's trivially easy for them to apologize; especially in the current environment of "colonialism bad, europeans bad, africans good" in which you can thus put yourself on the right side of history, no matter whether there is any substance to the subject matter of the apology.

And that's completely eliding the question of whether we need to also account for the good the colonial powers may have done if we already weigh up the bad. Let's say there was no good, for argument's sake.

What would you want us Germans to do? Kowtow even further to Israel? Bend over backwards a little more to accept our great German guilt?

Fuck. This is the Friday Fun Thread?

And even if you, for the sake of argument, assume Erbschuld is a thing, you're still a long way from actually establishing a connection to the current countries. As far as I know, my ancestry is entirely lowborn small-scale local farmers and workers, with a small admixture of lowborn inter-european wage immigrants. Let alone me, wtf do my ancestors have to do with what some aristocrats got up to? Why do we have to pay penance & higher taxes now to assuage your guilt?

Another fun aspect is - what about the former colonial powers the current countries of which have enjoyed significant immigration from their former colony countries? Have those immigrants now also assumed part of the guilt?

Lmao this is true. Reminds me of this.

I have a Belgian friend who told me he learned in school that the death toll was in the same ballpark as the Holocaust, but I haven't personally researched the topic.

Just reading the Wikipedia article leaves me with the naive impression that we know that it was a horror show of abuse and barbarism but that we have a very poor idea what happened on a demographic level (what percentage of the population died? How much of the decline was reduced briths as opposed to deaths? Was the decline 10% or 50%? Etc.) and to what degree the Belgians were directly responsible as opposed to criminally negligent.

There genuinely has been concerted, ideological voting for Israel in this and previous Eurovision, I don't know how one could deny this. At least last year, people were organizing "vote for Israel" campaigns in evangelical Facebook groups at least here with indications that many of those voting didn't even watch the contest. The primary motive isn't as much political as religious, ie. Christian Zionism, though of course politics and religion overlap here. This is helped by Eurovision allowing people to vote as many as 20 times for their favorite.

At least last year's Israel entry was quite good musically. This year's was the height of mediocrity.

This year Finnish media didn't even focus on Israel that much, as the main topic of interest was the fact that there were in practice two Finland entries as far as the media was concerned - Finland's own entry Erika Vikman and Sweden's entry KAJ, sung by a group of Finland-Swedish comedians from rural Ostrobothnia. This was actually a topic of a mini culture war, contrasting Erika Vikman's hypersexualized "feminine empowerment" style favored by liberals with KAJ's national-stereotype-oriented light rural comedy favored by more conservative/normie types, though the entrants themselves got along quite well at the contest.

I'm also pretty sure the jury votes were rigged to favor the Big Five funder nations. Nothing else can predict UK's absolutely dire entry getting so many jury votes. I also lost a bet on this exact topic.

There genuinely has been concerted, ideological voting for Israel in this and previous Eurovision

Even if that's the case, it doesn't prove that it's "the right" doing this. Normies, liberals and centrists can engage in concerted ideological voting just as well as anyone else.

Erika Vikman's performance was hilarious, probably the purest embodiment of the ethos of the Eurovision.

Again, I don't think it's as much "the right" as a political movement as it is evangelical religious communities, which are of course generally often related to "the right" but not the same thing.

Also, probably the most Eurovision thing at yesterday's contest, and in long time generally, was the Baby Lasagna / Käärijä interval show.

I'll add Eurovision to my list of awards requiring the 'correct' ideological adherence.

In fairness, Eurovision faced repeated demands for Israel to be banned from competing, but stuck to their guns, and there's no question that Israel would have been given the award without fuss if they'd gotten the most votes. Some people have drawn analogies with how Russia was banned after the invasion of Ukraine, which seems like a transparent false equivalence to me: Ukraine was invaded by Russia and Ukraine fought back, therefore we ban Russia from competing; Israel was invaded by Palestine and Israel fought back, therefore we ought to ban - Israel?* I mean Palestine aren't in the Eurovision so you can't ban them, but why should you ban Israel?

*I know, I know, Israel "really" invaded Palestine 75 years ago, but come on, surely no one really thinks they started the current war.

I know, Israel "really" invaded Palestine 75 years ago

Nah, around 1200 BCE actually. But that's not the reason not to acknowledge the unceded claim of Canaanites to the land, of course.

Russia was invaded by Ukraine and Ukraine fought back, therefore we ban Russia from competing; Israel was invaded by Palestine and Israel fought back, therefore we ought to ban - Israel?

As worded, this is almost perfectly symmetrical.

I could very easily write you up four different arguments for which country is equivalent to which, depending on the particular political axe you want to grind:

  1. Russia is Israel and Ukraine is Palestine (I hate Russia and Israel)— Two countries vastly more powerful than their smaller neighbor carry out a blood-thirsty invasion, then play the victim and pretend they are trying to fight terrorism. The only reason they have any problem with “terrorism” is because they were trying to steal the land in the first place. They loudly propagandize the threat the smaller neighbor poses as a cover for their own imperialist land grab. Both theatrically sob and moan about the terrible horrors they suffered during World War II as justification even though it has nothing to do with the present situation

  2. Russia is Israel and Ukraine is Palestine (I like Russia and Israel)— Two strong yet mostly peaceful countries are both antagonized by their smaller neighbor. These small neighbor states are so possessed with bloodthirsty ethnic hatred of their larger neighbor, to the point that they are willing to commit national and ethnic suicide just to spit in the face of the hated larger state. Both the small states commit horrific acts of terrorism, then play the victim when the larger state retaliates to protect its safety. The two smaller states both openly valorize the Nazis out of spite, because the Nazis murdered the hated ethnicities of the large states.

  3. Ukraine is Israel and Russia is Palestine (I like Ukraine and Israel)— Ethnic group has suffered terrible persecution in the past during the Holodomorocaust. Ethnic Group decides that the only way to prevent such deprivations in the future is to have a state of their own. They bravely set out to create an independent state. Their neighbor(s) seething with baseless genocidal hatred and justifying themselves with their own completely false historical claims to the land immediately try to snuff out this small base of safety for Ethnic Group. Ethnic Group State fights bravely and secures its existence and independence.

  4. Russia is Palestine and Ukraine is Israel (My brain has been melted by years of dank 4chan may mays)— Two based and trad-pilled peoples heroically fight against the evil (((them))). It’s an uphill battle for both of our heroic groups of Chads, because their degenerate enemies are both supported by the hated ZOG empire of America and NATO. For some reason, people keep telling me to “post hand”.

Fuck, thanks.

There is something rather reprehensible about picking up on certain events that happened 100+ years ago and then insisting on prefixing every mention of a nation with that event like a Homeric epithet. It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.

In 1915 something like a quarter of the Muslim population in Anatolia were recent refugees ethnically cleansed out of Caucasus and Balkans in very similar ways to Armenians. Country was fighting for its survival against the Entente that had explicit plans to further this ethnic cleansing from both western and eastern directions until Russia collapsed. Probably a majority of non-Kurdish population of Turkey today has near ancestry who were ethnically cleansed out of their homelands during the events of late 19th-20th century. Something like half the countries in yesterday’s Eurovision rooster holds some significant responsibility for these series of cleansings which included the 1915 Armenian one too. Somehow as long as they don’t challenge NATO consensus these countries never get to carry a genocide epithet.

It’s commonplace for Turks like your friend’s boyfriend to act opportunistically hypocritical but I am generally quite proud that our population at larger never succumbed to the propaganda regarding their own ancestors unique evilness.

Would you acknowledge the evilness of Armenian genocide if we agree to drop the "unique" part?

Yes of course.

I got a lot of pushback here, but I still think my standard of "anything over 50 years ago should be dropped" as a current-year topic still works pretty well, not ideologically obviously but as a more pragmatic principle that preserves at least some notion of evenhandedness. 50 years later, most everyone in power then is dead now, or dying, so it seems increasingly pointless to try and get reparations or impact current policy. For Israel, that means the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War both ought to be non-factors, but the Oslo Accords and first Lebanese conflict might still be fair game. For Ukraine, that would mean you can't hold Stalin against Russia, but you can look at some of the last decade of the USSR. For Turkey, that would mean a lot of the PKK conflicts are still relevant. Does that imply that an Armenian shouldn't feel ill-will towards Turkey still? No, that's understandable, I would more say that it implies that you can blame their upbringing or current education system for mis-educating people still, but that at the same time pursuing any kind of reparations would be a fool's errand.

More controversially, your reasoning would imply that the following are off the table:

  • Every former British colony griping about British colonialism (including the Great Famine of Ireland, the partition of India and Pakistan, and on and on)
  • Jews griping about the Holocaust
  • Black Americans demanding reparations for slavery, or even bringing up Jim Crow
  • Aboriginal Australians griping about the Stolen Generations
  • First Nations people griping about residential schools
  • Native Americans griping about the Trail of Tears

Interestingly, the Rwandan genocide and South African apartheid are still within the statute of limitations.

I'm actually ok with those being disallowed from the complaining zone. I get quite sick of being held to collective blame (as a white American) for things that happened before I was even born. Slavery and the Trail of Tears happened before my ancestors even came over to the country! It doesn't seem very fair to hold grudges against a group of people who couldn't possibly have committed the wrong to begin with.

I basically agree, though I'd prefer an exponential function with a half-life of 25. But I guess that will be too complicated.

I don’t think eternal guilt is viable, but Turks could behave a little more like - say - principled British Empire defenders and admit the atrocities but say by and large it was a proud history in their opinion.

All large scale population transfers (ie ethnic cleansing) involve great suffering and usually many civilian casualties. Nevertheless, in the case of the Armenians the death toll and much of the historic narrative suggests at least some genocidal behavior, many outright mass killings of civilians in huge numbers and so on, and the death toll speaks to that (because as a percentage of Armenians at that time, it was an order of magnitude if not more greater than the casualties of the Greek-Turkish population transfers for example).

Greek-Turkish population transfers were negotiated between Greek and Turkish states at peace time with no direct urgency or threat. It’s not a good comparison at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I also wish my countrymen could be more enlightened about their patriotism. But then I should ask, as I know many British people personally from various backgrounds and education levels, where are these principled defenders of the British Empire? I certainly haven’t encountered many. What sort of effect do they have on the national consciousness of the general public? Close to none. The country we are supposed to imitate according to you is so lethargic that it cannot even react to the organised race-based rape of digit percentages of its young girls. Fuck no thanks I will take jingoism over that.

It's one thing to refuse to allow your national identity to be defined by a horrendous crime committed generations ago. It's quite another to pretend it never happened at all, as modern-day Turkey quite explicitly does.

But in practice the first is much harder than the second. Telling someone, “Yes, my ancestors killed millions of people not very long ago, but I choose not to let it define me,” is very difficult, especially if your conversational partner is related to the people they murdered.

It’s much easier to say, “nah, that stuff’s all exaggerated,” or as e.g. the SNP do, “no, you don’t understand, all that British Empire stuff was the evil hateful ENGLISH really, they oppressed us too, please don’t look at any of the Mac names on the memorials…”

Of course it's easier. And I'm not singling out the Turks for criticism as uniquely evil: this whitewashing of history is reprehensible no matter who does it, whether it's the Americans, the Japanese, the Belgians, the Brits etc.

For sure. I’m just saying that I don’t think the first approach is actually viable and I can’t remember seeing any examples, except when the genocide is centuries old and long forgotten except by revisionist historians. Can you think of any examples?

Germany is the obvious one, to the point that a lot of people think they take it too far (e.g. deporting people who criticise Israel). Arguably Australia and Canada, although I don't really believe either of the latter two were really guilty of "genocide" as such, but certainly genocide-adjacent activities. I've heard that American high schools have gotten a lot better in recent years about teaching pupils about slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Vietnam etc. (even if I'm sure it likely often devolves into lists of atrocities those horrible Red Tribers committed, which we noble Blue Tribers opposed at every turn).

The interesting thing going on right now IMO in high school history classes is we're starting to see them teach topics like the 80's, which is that awkward frontier where it's like, definitely starting to be established history in an important sense, but it's also still very impactful on current politics, so you theoretically still have to tread carefully. It seems like history classes in high school typically roll up to like a 20 to 30-year lagging window or so. APUSH for example technically covers "1980 to present" as a whole category, but in practice it usually starts petering out around the mid-2000's, with the last official topic being the Obama presidency, so about 10 years ago. But most history classes won't push that frontier as much.

OP said

It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.

Those seem to me classic examples of OP’s first case. Modern Germany defines itself (negatively) in relation to the Nazis, while Australia and Canada are constantly weeping performative tears (and arson campaigns, cancellations, affirmative action etc.) on behalf of the ‘genocided’ peoples.

Yeah, I think that's a fair characterisation.

Israel has done very well with audience votes in the past few years for basically one reason, in Eurovision, you can't vote against a country.

If I'm a pro-Israel partisan, I can vote for Israel 20 times. If I'm an anti-Israel partisan, who should I vote for? Palestine isn't in the contest (lol) and there are 25 other entries to pick from. If I know who the favourite is I can vote for that country, but that can be hard to guess. Sweden was the favourite this year and didn't do particularly well from either the juries or the audience.

I wish Israel had won, for the ensuing political drama. But hey, I'm sure they're very happy with second place, even if their contestant had to perform with a booing crowd (kindly edited out by the producers).

I was also surprised at the dearth of Palestinian flags in the arena. They were allowed (I think I saw one) but people mostly waved the flags of their own countries. I didn't see any keffiyes either. Maybe people are just getting bored about Israel as a topic?

b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.

I don't know whether this is true or not but I think it's at least not unreasonable for people to get the impression that the support for Palestine is far more universal than it is, especially among people older than 25.

Its mostly the far left that is concerned enough about the topic to publicly talk about and organise protests about the issue, which can leave the impression of much more widespread support than actually exists. Furthermore, the far left is also pissing people off by being histrionic and obnoxious which can lead to people opposing Palestine out of spite rather than opinions on the conflict.

Just looking at my own friend group this is pretty much the case. The only one that brings up the topic is the far left guy, but at a poker night when he didn't show up and the topic came up, it turned out everyone else is either apathetic or quietly pro-israel/anti-Hamas, people just didn't want to get into a fight with the pro-palestine guy.

I think this a fairly frequent thing happening and especially with the left due to their ability to organise protests.

So frequent there's a term for it.

Kind of but it isn't necessarily a right/left thing and people don't necessarily falsify their opinions.

I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.

Nah, this is just the media and culture war riling people up, plus recency. You could argue that maybe media coverage is due to antisemitism.

It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women. The Austrian homosexual hapa won. Hazel had joke during one of the set changes about the prevalence of homosexuals at Eurovision.

Whose coverage did you watch? We watched on ARD. I miss Terry Wogan. Tried Graham Norton on the BBC after Wogan died, Eurovision is gay enough without the extra help.

My wife was surprised by the seeming overperformance of Isreal. In her experience the majority of European homosexuals are pro-Palistine.

My favorite were the Icelandic boys. I enjoyed seeing Baby Lasagna again, I still think he was robbed last year.

10 years ago we won with a drag queen, yesterday with a countertenor. Double gay, yes, but also in some sense balance restored.

I'd thought Conchita Wurst had been more recent, but it was 2014.

Somehow last year and this year were gayer than the year a literal drag queen won.

It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women

It's not for nothing that Eurovision is known as the gay olympics. But never forget Poland. The red-blooded man often makes his voice heard.

My favorite were the Icelandic boys

Same, it was classic Eurovision. The audience in the past few years seem to be going for technical proficiency over feel-good nonsense.

I was happy with the prevalence of violins and key changes this year.

Whose coverage did you watch? We watched on ARD. I miss Terry Wogan. Tried Graham Norton on the BBC after Wogan died, Eurovision is gay enough without the extra help.

Just a YouTube livestream, but one of my friend's friends was this bitchy gay guy who had us falling about the place laughing with his snarky comments. It was almost like having our own personal Norton.

Greek performer appears on camera with her huge glasses

Guy: "She looks like she's dressed for the wedding of someone she doesn't like very much."

(on the Swiss singer) "She's hot by the standards of women who work in accounts receivable."

Israeli journalist appears onscreen to announce the results of the Israeli jury vote

Guy: "Who's this IDF slag?"

I've reached the (an?) ending of Blue Prince, a roguelike escape-the-room game. The premise is that you have to reach the final room of the manor your uncle left you in order to inherit it... except the layout is shuffled every day. In each run, you have a limited number of "steps" (spent by going from room to room) and explore the manor anew, drafting new rooms from a selection of three at every doorway.

Overall, it's likely the most fun I've ever had playing an escape-the-room game. There are many puzzles and threads to chase, and I haven't even discovered all room types, let alone solved everything there is in the game. The puzzles for the most part lack the infamous "moon logic" of puzzle games and the way to solve them is pretty intuitive - it's figuring out the mechanics and finding the solution across multiple randomized runs that's going to be hard.

The most glaring flaw is the lack of saving mid-run - if you want to close the game, you have to end the current delve. Also, some object interactions are downright sluggish and it's very frustrating when there's something routine you want to do with a terminal in a particular room but it still takes a literal "60 seconds" minute.

I really enjoyed Blue Prince (Blueprints... get it? get it? aha). If anything I would love to see more games like this despite its flaws. It took 8 years to create the interlocking lore and puzzles. Unfortunately this means we're unlike to see a puzzle game of this quality any time soon.

The game has some frustrating quality of life problems and grind related to getting the right combination of elements through RNG. The later is terrible when you want to test obscure theories of interactions between rooms and items, or worse, a particular reading of a possible clue. While up until the first 'ending' (which is were they roll the credits and probably marks around 30% of the games content) this isn't a huge problem as there are multiple leads to investigate on any given day. If you don't get the RNG for a particular combination of elements you are likely to have another that will allow you to make progression. Later on in the game progression really slows down while you wait for the correct RNG combination which is very frustrating.

For all the above, the game was like crack to me, particularly in the early game up until the first ending. I'm glad to see someone talking about it as I think it would be a good fit for a lot of the gamers on here.

(which is were they roll the credits and probably marks around 30% of the games content)

For real? Or are you exaggerating here? I stopped playing after the first ending on the assumption that I had seen most of what it had to offer and the remaining puzzle threads that I had discovered but not yet solved seemed pedantic and annoyingly completionist and I didn't think I would have the patience to grind through them just to get a "true" ending.

But if there's literally more than half the game remaining (in terms of actual content, not merely playtime spent grinding runs hoping to get lucky) then I might pick it back up.

Not exaggerating. You're about 1/3rd through on the way to the final 'true' endings.

The 2nd 3rd is probably doable solo without being too frustrating. The final 3rd is incredibly pedantic (and was mostly crowdsolved on discord/steam forums). Some streamers like CohhCarnage ostensibly managed to complete the whole thing solo, but I suspect Cohh and those like him get fed hints behind the scenes to allow relatively smooth progression.

I pretty much fizzled out after getting 2/3rds of the way through as I'd gotten most of the lore by that point and was frustrated at the obscurity of some of the puzzles/solutions and increasingly narrower RNG windows for progression.

There's a reddit specifically for this kind of thing, but I will put it here anyway.

Also google and chatgpt are no good.

I am trying to find a story I heard long ago - it goes like this:

The son of the king won't speak.

The king goes round all these people who try to fix him. For example, he goes to a musical band, who perform the most grooviest dance you ever saw, it was so cool, everyone was dancing, like even the villagers, the king, the king's son. Next they sing the catchiest song you ever heard where everyone immediately joined in the singing. Except the king's son.

However no-one can fix him.

But then, the chicken comes around and is able to fix him. I can't tell you how he did it, because that would be a spoiler.

Could it possibly be a misremembered version (or local variant) of Temiya, the Mute Prince? The overall story arc is there for sure, where the son pretends to be mute despite many many attempts to shock or persuade him out of it (not singing though), all in order to get out of being made king so he can do Buddha things instead. He eventually speaks after the king orders his death and he tries to fake his own death, and he successfully sheds the responsibility.

The other candidate I have for your consideration, more of a long shot but still fits the general pattern and with a sudden twist involving a chicken, is The Decapitated Chicken. A woman has 4 mute, unresponsive, almost insensate sons, who are only entertained by loud noises and bright lights, eventually neglected, and then finally a normal daughter is born who gets all the attention. Later, the sons witness a chicken beheaded and get fixated on the blood, and re-enact it by suddenly murdering the daughter, horror-style. It's not clear if this is truly a "fix" though.

Both seem like decent bets, considering how memories can be altered, misremembered, or conflated if it's been a really really long time. Or, could it have been more of a joke than a story? A children's book of some type? Dunno if I would have found it if so.

Charles Vance Millar (June 28, 1854 – October 31, 1926) was a Canadian lawyer and financier. He was the president and part-owner of the Toronto brewery of O'Keefe Brewery. He also owned racehorses, including the 1915 King's Plate–winning horse Tartarean. However, he is now best known for his unusual will which touched off the Great Stork Derby.

Millar's final prank was his will, which says in part:

This Will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have no dependents or near relations and no duty rests upon me to leave any property at my death and what I do leave is proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime.

The will had several unusual bequests:

  • Three men who were known to despise each other (T. P. Galt, KC; J. D. Montgomery and James Haverson, KC) were granted joint lifetime tenancy in Millar's vacation home in Jamaica, on condition that they live in the property together.
  • To each practicing Protestant minister in Toronto, and every Orange Lodge in Toronto, a share of O'Keefe Brewery stock, a Catholic business, if they participated in its management and drew on its dividends.
  • Two anti-horse-racing advocates (Hon. William Raney, Reverend Samuel Chown) and a man who detested the Ontario Jockey Club (Abe Orpen) were to receive a share of Ontario Jockey Club stock, provided they are shareholders in three years. Raney's and Chown's share were eventually given to charity and Orpen accepted his share.
  • Each duly ordained Christian minister in Walkerville, Sandwich, and Windsor, "except Spracklin, who shot a hotelkeeper" was to receive a share of the Kenilworth Park Racetrack, located just outside Windsor, Ontario.

The tenth and final clause of his will was the largest. It required that the balance of Millar's estate was to be converted to cash ten years after his death and given to the Toronto woman who gave birth to the most children in that time. In the event of a tie, the bequest would be divided equally. The resulting contest became known as the Great Stork Derby.

Eleven families competed in the "baby race." Seven of them were disqualified, but eventually Judge William Edward Middleton ruled in favour of four mothers (Annie Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Maclean) who each received $110,000 for their nine children ($2.24 million in 2023 dollars). Three of the four had to pay back relief money given to them by the City of Toronto government. Two of the disqualified candidates, Lillian Kenny and Pauline Mae Clarke, each received $12,500 out of court in exchange for abandoning pending appeals.

I'm too lazy to dig deep so I'm gonna rely on the bigbrains here to ask: is it legal for such an open lottery system to have race clauses baked into it? Like, most babies born of 2 parents whose combined skin tone is or is below a certain reflectivity or some weird shit like that?

I ask because there have been similar legal challenges here in my neck of the woods to extremely patriarchal wills. A common issue used to be where an alleged deathbed conversion of the patriarch to islam (or a marriage cert found in Indonesia where underage prostitution is conducted under the guise of temporary marriages - 'convert' marry pump dump divorce in about 1 hour) invalidates previous wills which specifically state that no property can be disbursed to muslims. A new tactic gaining (weak) traction is that such wills are invalid because of their discriminatory nature against mixed marriages, but southeast asia doesn't really play that game. Does such stuff happen in the west?

The state should do more lottery-based rewards. A one-time 20K subvention per kid, that’s boring, and everyone knows it doesn’t pay for the child’s maintenance. But 20% chance of 100K, now you’re talking, people will keep pressing that button for the dopamine hit, then the gambler’s fallacy comes into play, they’ll be sure the 5th, 6th, 7th time’s the charm, and when you win it’s like getting a free kid, so you can get right on making the next one since you were already psychologically primed to pay for the previous baby.

This would be dysgenic though, for it would most influence the reproductive decisions of those who are poor and relatively high in negative risk aversion.

Something like a 20% of chance of 100K paid out linearly over 5 years in the form of non-refundable tax credits would work better. Thus, for one kid, you get a shot at getting a tax refund of 20K in a given year for five years, but only if in that given year you paid at least 20K in income taxes. Non-refundable, so if you only paid 15K in income taxes in a given year, you only get a refund of 15K that year; if you paid zero or less you get refunded zero. This would stack, so a pair of twins could get up to 40K knocked off your taxes a year for five years.

Having a lottery reward capped at annual income taxes paid would still preserve a lot of the fun and hype, but would be less dysgenic. The payout over five years has the added benefit of selecting for those with a modicum of future time orientation.

Or the hypothetical future time oriented person could get a 20k raise per year without having to have a kid.

Sub-1 TFR of 120 IQ children or 4+ TFR of 90 IQ children, which one is really more dysgenic?

Or the hypothetical future time oriented person could get a 20k raise per year without having to have a kid.

Or the person could have both, and the offspring-lottery tax bonus on top off it.

Sub-1 TFR of 120 IQ children or 4+ TFR of 90 IQ children, which one is really more dysgenic?

False dilemma. One can increase the birthrate of the smart while decreasing the birthrate of the dumb, it's merely lack of political will in the current status quo.

But indeed, 4+ TFR of those with <90 IQ is more dysgenic than sub-1 TFR of those with >120 IQ if your population has a mean IQ of 100 with baseline TFR of 2.

Or the person could have both, and the offspring-lottery tax bonus on top off it.

My point being, whoever feels like 20k of tax returns/year is big enough money to flip them towards having a kid is probably too risk averse to gamble, and whoever is rich enough that it's merely one of their calculated risks is going to have a kid or not based on other concerns.

One can increase the birthrate of the smart while decreasing the birthrate of the dumb, it's merely lack of political will in the current status quo.

Lack of political will sounds like cope. If one can do it and it is beneficial, there would be a will.

But indeed, 4+ TFR of those with <90 IQ is more dysgenic than sub-1 TFR of those with >120 IQ if your population has a mean IQ of 100 with baseline TFR of 2.

More dysgenic compared to having no -genic at all?

Lack of political will sounds like cope. If one can do it and it is beneficial, there would be a will.

I have to admit, this sounds completely wrong to me. The connection between capability, benefit and political will is tenuous at best. There is plenty of will for the impossible, or for the harmful.

Name a eugenic intervention. Face it- the poor and high time preference always are more willing to do stuff like that for cash.

Face it? My comment you're responding to basically said as such: hence the payout over time and varying amounts depending on income taxes paid. And I was just tweaking the original prompt to be—as explicitly stated—less dysgenic while still retaining a lot of the fun and hype, not necessarily eugenic (it might or might not be).

Speaking of cash and the poor and those with high time preference, an example of a eugenic intervention would be a flat cash amount (e.g., 10K or some other number) for tubal ligation for girls/women ages 14-32 or so. In the name of Equity and Inclusion, we could offer similarly aged men cash for vasectomies, too.

Name a eugenic intervention.

Maternity leave, lower taxes for filing as a couple, and accessible birth control (including abortion) seem to be eugenic interventions.

I’m not too worried about dysgenic effects at this juncture, we have so little children that I’d take even lower class stock. Besides ,such subventions already exist in a similar form with dysgenic effect, in germany we have ‘children’s money’, which is at 255 euros/month/kid for the poorest (297 if you work), then you get the same in tax credit as you go up in income.

Of course, most of those subventions are officially justified on the grounds that every child should have a “minimum” to live on, which some courts and left-wingers keep increasing like they do every other minimum. And when the right’s at the helm, they increase it for more natalist and family values reasons.

So it’s hard to get a big part of that into a randomized payout, but it kind of ruins the bonus psychological effect of gambling if it’s just tax credits over years.

What I want to do is psychologically trick people (the ultimate decision lies with women) into having kids. Not pay them the full cost, and even less enormous sums in tax credits so that rich women in banking and medicine who understand opportunity costs have children, just cheaply manipulate them for cents on the dollar.

(I’m trying to keep this fun for the thread’s sake, but I can’t help veering into the culture war, broadly defined.)

Side-note:

those who are poor and relatively high in negative risk aversion.

You could say the lower class are true risk-takers, mavericks and entrepreneurs, not scared bean counters like the middle class who insure everything and buy bonds despite having a stable job.

And yet, usually less risk aversion is correlated with higher economic status:

Numerous studies have found that individuals with less income are more risk averse than individuals with more income

Although I’ve also read that it’s U-shaped, with the middle class most risk averse, like the cliché above. In that perspective, it’s likely that a randomized bonus has a stronger positive effect than a fixed sum, ie more bang for your buck, also and especially for the rich.

I was discussing the, imo, incoherent, common view of risk a few days ago. I don’t think you can call the risk averse “those with a modicum of future time orientation” – The main distinction between losers and winners in this game is: how much are they willing to pay for their risk aversion, or for their risk taking? Buying insurance or a lottery ticket both make you a sucker, of opposite risk aversions.

I’m not too worried about dysgenic effects at this juncture, we have so little children that I’d take even lower class stock. Besides ,such subventions already exist in a similar form with dysgenic effect, in germany we have...

No thanks, I wouldn't wish this on any country, including Germany. If you're already in a hole, stop digging.

I don’t think you can call the risk averse “those with a modicum of future time orientation”

I'm not. Hence my wording of "The payout over five years has the added benefit of selecting for those with a modicum of future time orientation" to separate future time orientation from risk aversion.

I explicitly was discussing relative negative risk aversion (i.e., positive risk-seeking) and not just merely low or high risk aversion. Although come to think of it (even assuming no positive risk-seeking), I'd prefer the society I live in to have high rather than low risk aversion, for all else equal it would increase the expected returns of my portfolio into which I'm still contributing.

As a side note, the Frontiers family of journals has a reputation for being pay-to-play and shady, even by the standards or "standards" of the field of psychology. Possibly there are diamonds in the rough when it comes to any individual paper, but in general when submitting to Frontiers, academics have to weigh the costs/benefits of adding a publication (and any citations that may result) to their CV versus the Scarlet Letter of having a (or an additional) Frontiers publication.

Germany's problems are not dysgenic fertility. They are: low fertility, and terrible immigration policy. Why does the alt right conflate everything together? It does not matter that the lower class is reproducing more than the higher class if both are not at replacement level. Dysgenic fertility is a first world problem, so to speak – our problems are far more serious than dysgenic fertility. It’s like worrying about disproportionate drowning in the desert.

Why would all else be equal in high risk aversion world? It’d be a wasteland. People would almost never change jobs, or create companies. Capital would be far less productive, it’d be all tied up in swiss bonds. It’s true as the one-eyed in the land of the blind you would personally do very well. Hell, you could even become the world’s richest man by exploiting all the riskophobes, ie selling insurance (buffett reference).

I've been mooching around Sydney as of late trying to find some lesser-known historic heritage sites in the city that are nonetheless impressive. So, nothing obvious like the Queen Victoria Building, St. Mary's Cathedral and so on. Two of the historic buildings I visited recently surprised me.

1: Yiu Ming Temple. This is a traditional village temple in Alexandria built by settlers from Guangdong circa 1908. It's rather surprising to me that this even exists in Sydney; what makes it even more surreal is that the temple's hidden behind a large brick wall and a row of shops. So it's isolated in a small cranny blocked off from the rest of the city, and stepping past the gate into that weird little back street feels like entering a little pocket of Asia. It even smells exactly like Asia (probably due to all the incense being burned). Highly trippy visit, actually. I've heard there's an even older one that dates back to the 19th century in Glebe, I may pay that temple a visit sometime.

2: The Cathedral of the Annunciation of Our Lady. I visited this one today. It was initially built from 1848-1855 in Redfern as an Anglican place of worship, but was later sold to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and reconsecrated as a Greek Orthodox church. It's really unassuming on the outside and seems like your typical brick church, but the interior is jaw-dropping. Rows of chandeliers hang from the ceiling, the altar is adorned with an insane amount of golden finery and the ceiling is covered in frescoes. It doesn't seem to be well known - it was completely empty when I visited, yet it's probably one of my favourite historic sites I've visited in Sydney and in my estimation it's even comparable to many churches in Europe in its architectural beauty.

Here are photos of each of the sites (I know the resolution isn't always fantastic, my phone is a potato, deal with it).

https://imgur.com/a/1w6WLLz

I’ve been to a few touristy locations with quiet, unassuming, empty, but gorgeous Orthodox churches. I’ve wondered for a while whether the placement of those beautiful churches was deliberate.

Not sure how well known this is - but if I ever get to Sydney I want to check out the HMAS Sydney / SMS Emden memorial. I think it’s just an old (but intact) WWI war trophy in Hyde Park somewhere, but it’s great tale, especially for military history aficionados.

I beat the Mechwarrior 5 Clans Ghost Bear DLC. It was short and sweat, with only 12 missions. I can't definitively say it was worth the $20 for everyone, but I'm happy with my purchase. I enjoyed the story, and the whole culture, of Clan Ghost Bear a lot more than the "We're gonna commit awesome war crimes but then try to make you feel bad about it" approach the Smoke Jaguar campaign took. Smoke Jaguar is synonymous with remorseless war crimes god damnit! If you have to lampshade what's coming to them, don't have a bunch of novice warriors questioning how genocide makes them feel bad. Have them mocking the doubters with "What is the inner sphere gonna do? A trial of annihilation?" And then have them belly laugh like you just suggested they start freebirthing too.

Anyways, that's the base game. The DLC was awesome, nothing annoyed me beyond the ubiquity of having all the authority figures be boss bitches. Because current year I guess. Like I know female khans, sakhans, star commanders etc were common in the clans. But their representation in MW5:Clans and it's expansion is like 70-80% of authority figures, and 90% of the "good" ones. Ah well.

Smoke Jaguar

They were the opponents in MW3, right? I'm still waiting for any sort of modern platform re-release of that one... by which I mean the ability to purchase and play the OG on a modern Windows machine.

Yeah, I don't think Mechwarrior 1-4 are ever getting released again. For a time Mechwarrior 4: Mercs got a free re-release, but the "free license" for that has been withdrawn, and it's no longer distributed officially. MW3 is actually the only one I haven't replayed to completion in recent memory. Perhaps I should make that my next retro project.

Monumentally stupid lawsuit:

  • November 2022: A homeowner in a homeowners' association seeks to build a four-foot fence in his backyard, four inches from the property line. He receives approval from both the municipal government and the HOA. Accordingly, the fence is constructed.

  • February 2023: The HOA claims that the fence is in violation of the HOA's rules. The homeowner replies that the fence was built in perfect accordance with the plans that were approved three months ago.

  • March 2023: The HOA seeks to amend its rules in order to impose a minimum setback of ten feet on fences. The amendment fails to garner the required two-thirds vote of all members.

  • September 2023: The HOA sues the homeowner under the theory that the minimum setback of thirty feet prescribed in its rules applies, not just to buildings, but also to fences, overriding the minimum of four inches that is prescribed for fences in the municipal zoning code. The trial judge rejects this argument as utterly ridiculous in April 2024, and the appeals panel affirms in May 2025.

Bonus: Trial transcript

I don't know the size of the lots over there, but, unless you've got a couple of acres, 30 feet back off your property line is a pretty significant distance. Frankly, it wouldn't be very aesthetically pleasing if you look at it that way, which is what these HOA rules are meant to provide. They want to keep the community a certain way, and a 30-foot setback requirement for a fence is just unheard of. I've never seen it anywhere. I've never heard of any association's having a 30-foot setback requirement from a property line for a fence. Drive around South Jersey. A lot of the fences, they're often at the property line, but you've got to get them off your neighbor's line unless you get his permission.

So I don't find that there is any material fact here. I think fences are specifically addressed under 8.1(c). If they wanted a setback requirement to be required, 8.1(c) should have had a setback requirement contained within that area. Otherwise, it should have been all under 8.1(dd), and it should have mentioned fences as well, but it did not. They separated them and there's a reason for that. Fences in one and the structures in another, the accessory buildings and shacks. I think it's pretty clear. And, if there is any ambiguity, you resolve that against the drafter. I think the defendants in this matter, they followed exactly what they were supposed to do under 8.1(c). The fence can stay.

Serious question; how are HOAs legal / constitutional?

The way I understand them, they are, generally, private non-profits. Yet, moving into an area "governed" by compels you to join them. There is no option not to.

How could such a thing be legal? The whole point of local-state-federal government is that they are the only "organization" one is compelled to be subject to. I can't square the existence of HOAs with the necessity of a government (even at the local level) maintaining full sovereign over its geographic jurisdiction

I'm president of the board of my local HOA. It seems typical for many in the area that it was put in place by the developer when the area was built out and that it exists at all is completely down to the city (that entirely surrounds the development) being unwilling to pay for anything. The dues of around $200/mo cover maintaining the roads/streetlights/signange, bridge over a 50ft ravine (it's hilly), landscaping along the roads and various maintenance activities with the 1/2 of the overall land that is 'dedicated open space' by demand of the city (the developer wanted to put in significantly more housing, that they were able to put in any was only after much negotiating from what I understand) which we are not allowed to say chop down dead trees in but also must keep from burning down all the houses and neighboring properties (a lot of weed whacking and brush clearing is involved). It would probably be dissolved if the city would take over the relevant maintenance (which it won't), it's all single family homes.

Our general challenge is getting enough volunteer board members (3), I don't think we've ever had a contested election in the entire history, and getting to quorum of votes (50%+1) in any election (last time was maybe 6 years ago?). The only somewhat contentious things we've had to deal with are parking disputes (no street parking allowed, we apparently can be forced pay to maintain the roads but the city gets final say on how they are used) so guest parking is limited. Technically, the by-laws give us the power to require (and enforce with inspections) that garages be cleared out enough to park two cars and the two cars are parked in the garage before parking in the driveways or guest parking, though we haven't yet reached the point of enforcing that. We have some other powers, but I suspect the only thing we'd enforce them around is planting large trees [eg. redwoods etc.], changing the exterior colors of houses, and hogging common areas [parking especially]. In general, the city does still get a quite significant amount of control over things, pre-me they tried to install a gate near the entrance of the community (it's like 15 acres or so, so plenty of room) and the city absolutely forbid it as in 'out-of-character' for the city and stated their policy is to allow only in the grandfathered places. So our power over this 'private' sub-city is limited.

Presumably because of demand. As I figure, the HOA is basically a way of forcibly excluding people who can’t “fit in” with the community or follow the rules. Reading in between the lines, that was what was going on in this case, as in, classic bullying. Probably the people trying to force defendant to fit in were a real mess of busybodies, obviously, as they brought a dumb case to court, but this is the function here.

In a more sympathetic case, imagine a family moved in who left rusting cars on the lawn and other obnoxious but not quite illegal things that nobody of your class or background would do. How do you make them stop? I know a lot of the people here are libertarians, principled or otherwise, but the average Joe ain’t and would rather keep those families out, or else coloring within the lines. Personally I don’t empathize and enjoy my freedom more, but I get that’s a rarity overall.

And apparently HOAs are overall popular. People like em. Or at least, they aren’t the kind of radioactive that would stop people buying these properties, even with the very obvious downsides, and encourage developers to not enforce them. I know revealed preferences is a meme, but it seems to apply here.

Relating this out. I’ve seen a lot of people on this forum arguing pretty directly for a shared US culture. Well, the HOA feels exactly like what’s being asked for here - an association that punishes deviance with process, and upholds normalcy. Japan is a pretty culturally centralized place, and from what I hear from my friends there, pretty much every little village and neighborhood has its own little HOA (micro-local government). They organize things like who goes to sweep out the graveyard, sure, but also make certain nobody gets too far out of line, in that distinctive passive-aggressive but unmistakably Japanese way. And I think of that, and of the fuck-you American spirit, and it makes me laugh a little. Conformists are allowed their little liberties here, but why think they’re remotely popular? An American will only subject himself to banding together once he’s exhausted the alternatives for keeping the undesirables out.

(This is ignoring the little associations that are just about funding shared resources, like an HOA that pays for the community pool. Those have a straightforward reason to be.)

From a legal perspective, requirements to join HOAs are usually set up as contractual requirements on the land, as well as a requirement to pass that onto any further sales of the land. Some created themselves in extant neighborhoods by getting the then-current homeowners to buy in, but these days most are set up by the original land developer and transmit from the first sale on. Courts have invalidated this type of thing in very specific circumstances, but outside of that one context they generally don't like to break real property contract requirements.

That process is, imo, one of the stronger arguments that they can be whitewashed state action: in addition to the dependency on mode of enforcement that Shelley highlighted, land developers can get anything from nod-and-wink permitting favoritism to outright direct grants for setting up HOAs with policies that match whatever the local government wants done.

I'm Not A Fan of them -- there are some reasonable HOAs and some reasonable cause for them like shared facilities maintenance or setting explicit standards of behavior, and there are a tiny portion of actually-voluntary HOAs that don't have such contract requirements. But even the good ones can be pretty easily corrupted by a single neurotic, and a lot were never good to start with. In theory, frustrated homeowners could take over an HOA (or even dissolve it), but in practice the bylaws are set up to make this an incredibly difficult and ponderous thing.

but these days most are set up by the original land developer and transmit from the first sale on.

Aren't they limited by the rule against perpetuities?

I'd expect that it's like a conservation easement. The rights are transferred to the HOA before the first sale, so you never have the full title to the land.

I look forward to an eventual SCOTUS case that crushes them.

I know, it being real estate - and residential real estate at that - there's whole multibillion dollar lobby and industry behind it. Still, I think once home ownership becomes an actual impossibility for 85%+ of Americans, the worm will turn.

This won’t happen. America is HUGE. Not being able to afford a home in top metros won’t stop most Americans from home ownership because lots of Americans will move to Indianapolis for a more affordable lifestyle- far more than 15% of them.

Yes, there are bubbles- and some of those bubbles are disproportionately influential- which view living in a second tier city(or having black neighbors) as a fate worse than death. But most Americans aren’t part of them. Standard of living trumps all, it’ll shake itself out. This isn’t an Asian country where conformism lets such tendencies run rampant.

They're a replacement of the city layer of government in parts of the US where people live at suburban density outside cities.

True rural life has rules that assume each owner had many acres and most activities don't meaningfully affect their neighbors enjoyment of their landm. This sucks when houses get built at suburban densities (less than half an acre per home) so HOAs let communities build shared infastructure (roads and sewers mostly) and set community standards like cities do. They don't use laws which apply to new homeowners rather they use deed covenants.

They're a replacement of the city layer of government in parts of the US where people live at suburban density outside cities.

This is not even true, or at least not the whole picture. HOAs are common (and even make some sense) in condo communities with shared walls/floors, which are denser than suburbs and usually not built on unincorporated county land.

But you can also easily find detached houses within city limits with HOAs.

Does every HOA start imploding on harassing people over trivialities after they achieve their primary mission of keeping human garbage out of the neighborhood?

Not at all, in fact it's fantastically rare. I think it's just another example of the thing where only ridiculous and outrageous stories of misbehavior get written, upvoted, and shared. The vast majority of them work perfectly fine basically all the time, but nobody tells stories about that.

I live in a decently nice condo building with a board that does maintenance, upkeep, and upgrade of common areas. They all seem perfectly reasonable and competent, and nothing dramatic has ever happened as far as I know. They're all up for re-election every year, but board meeting attendance is fairly low and virtually nobody ever runs to challenge any of the existing officeholders. They seem more barely able to muster enough man-hours to take care of all the things that they ought to than to have a ton of extra time to hassle people over random stupid stuff.

It's been my experience in real life that nobody I've ever met in person had this sort of thing happen to them. Basically everybody in real life will look at you like you're crazy if you express an opinion that it's likely enough to happen to take precautions against. I think that's a much more reliable measure about how much of a risk something actually is than how often you see stories about things on the internet or in the news.

This is the popular conception of HOA's, but everyone I've been involved with has predominately existed to maintain shared infrastructure (in the single family home case often infrastructure that probably should be the city's responsibility, but the city is uninterested; they still get tax revenue but don't have to pay for it). It's a failure mode of HOA's but how common is it really?

Nah. Ours did a bit last year, and we just voted in 3 people to the board who ran on 'roll back the due hike and stop bothering people about clover in their lawn'. We got exactly that. It's like any other form of democratic government, you get what you vote for.

No. We have an HOA. I have zero complaints about them being too strict. I wish they were slightly stricter. E.g. a neighbor has a giant LED american flag just inside a garage window. This is technically not HOA violating because it isn't outdoor lighting.

No, but you don't hear about the ones that just manage the neighborhood to the satisfaction of the residents.

Sure seems too. I had a buddy who lived in a shitty townhome community in a bad part of town, and the HOA rode his ass about the color of his front door (which was picked directly from the HOA's list of approved colors), but didn't seem to care one wit about the broken down vehicles scattered about the guest parking spaces, the litter scattered about by scumbag kids, or any of the other daily inconveniences caused by living among low trust, high time preference demographics.

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