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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   3039 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

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

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

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

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Ironic “Small-Scale Question Sunday” question:

What happened to Sundays? Maybe I just didn’t realize this stuff when I was a kid (90’s and early 2000’s), but Sunday used to be, well, sacred. Stuff didn’t happen in Sunday, mainly because of church. As I got older, (American) football also got added to that. Between those two things, nobody would dare schedule a practice or a game or a birthday party or anything.

Now, that’s gone. Kids have games on Sunday mornings. Kids have practices. My own kid was told, when we needed to call out of one Sunday morning practice for one special church service around the holidays, that missing practice that one time would result in them sitting. Not sitting one game. Sitting for the season unless someone else got hurt or bailed. Birthday parties during football. Football during church.

Was it like this when I was a kid and I just didn’t realize it?

I used to hate Sundays, for reasons similar to those enumerated in High Fidelity:

All my life I've hated Sundays, for the obvious British reasons (Songs of Praise, closed shops, congealing gravy that you don't want to go near but no one's going to let you escape from) and the obvious international reasons as well...

When we were very small my mum would make us go to Mass, which probably only lasted half an hour and yet seemed to go on for an eternity. Later my sister and I joined an orchestra, for which rehearsals were held every other Sunday morning, which I dreaded. Often when I returned from rehearsal, my mum would invite my granddad over for Sunday dinner, which invariably consisted of mashed potatoes, boiled peas and overcooked roast beef that you would have to spend five minutes gnawing through before you could swallow it (the aforementioned congealing gravy not acting as much of a lubricant), and my granddad wasn't much of a conversationalist even before he lost his hearing. And once he finally went home, I couldn't enjoy the rest of the day because I still had homework to do before the next morning.

Now, however, I like Sundays. I wake up around ten a.m., get a coffee and go for a walk with herself, buy some groceries and do some meal prep for the following week, go to the gym if I need to meet my weekly quota, and still plenty of time left over to unwind.

As a boy we did early church, had lunch at Red Lobster or a cafeteria, and/or visited my grandparent's places in the countryside. All very iced tea leisurely. My dad forbade even yardwork. You couldn't buy beer in stores.

How old are you? When I was a kid in the 90s our soccer games were all on Sunday, and plenty of birthday parties were on Sunday.

Youth sports on Sunday morning are considered a shocking and recent intrusion of degeneracy in my area- but Sunday afternoons were never as sacred.

Soccer = godless middle class PMC types in your area? I played soccer in the late '90s in rural michigan and we never played Sundays.

42 - like I said it’s very possible I just didn’t think of it at the time, didn’t realize it.

I think it’s the decline of two important things: expected church attendance and the single income family. Church was the dominant reason why things didn’t get scheduled on Sunday. But the two income family reduced the ability of families to participate in activities on other days — neither parent would be home before 5-6pm and by the time meals, homework and showers/baths happen, it’s time to go to bed.

Let's say you're redoing the Civil War and you get to play one of two characters: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis.

Would it actually be easy to win the war playing as Jefferson Davis?

Obviously, the South would never have been able to conquer the North. The North had immense economic, technological, naval, and manpower advantages. But they didn't need to. They just need to impose enough of a cost on the North that the North would come to a settlement. This doesn't appear that far-fetched. The re-election of Abraham Lincoln was no sure thing in 1864. Had the war not turned decisively in favor of the Union, its possible that McClellan could have won. In the end, he still captured 45% of the votes and won three states (NJ, DE, KY). If McClellan prosecuted the war as President like he did as a General, its likely the South could have held out for a long time. Situations like the starvation of Union prisoners in Andersonville, and the sheer awfulness of the conflict would have likely have proven intolerable without a sure path to victory.

So what could the South have done?

Fabian tactics. They should have simply refused to give battle whenever possible, and harassed Union communications. Johnston did just that as he retreated in the face of Sherman's army. But then he was replaced by the Confederate government because they preferred someone who wanted to fight. Then Sherman took Atlanta.

Lee's incursion into Pennsylvania was a fatal mistake that did more to weaken the Confederate cause than anything. He may have been a good tactician but this strategic blunder is unforgivable.

But the real weak point here is Jefferson Davis. He often involved himself in military decisions and wanted commanders who took an aggressive posture. While appropriate for a stronger force, this is entirely inappropriate for a weaker one. Confederate doctrine should have been preservation of precious manpower, avoiding giving battle, never fighting when not intrenched etc... That last part is also key since the Civil War showed some signs of a proto-WWI type environment.

In any case, in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South. Which character would you play: Lincoln or Davis?

I studied the American Civil War in graduate school, and the books I read (and my professor) did not think highly of the Fabian thesis. They pointed out that

  1. The material and morale cost imposed by having a hostile army rampaging all over your countryside was extremely high (this is part of the reason Lee invaded Pennsylvania, Virginia had been marched over by armies of both sides so many times).
  2. A standing army was a necessary symbol of the legitimacy of the South to its people (and also helpful to foreign sponsors) as a nation-state.
  3. Aggressively defending its territory was necessary as the South was a slaveholding state, and the North was freeing slaves in territories it entered. This is a pretty serious problem when you are at war, the men are off fighting it, and you need to make sure your armies are fed. Allowing retreating in the face of their superior armies meant that the Southern economic base would evaporate.

There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.

Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.

If I was going to try to win the Civil War for the South as a time-traveler, I would have used the tourniquet in Albert Sidney Johnston's pocket to save his life and do my best to make sure the Union troops were routed at Shiloh on the second day. Johnston was regarded by many as the best commander in the United States going into the war, and American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive. (Focusing on Gettysburg is arguably a bit of pro-Confederate myopia that glorifies the South's high-water mark in the East while overlooking their relatively poor generalship in the West, although you aren't wrong about the potential electoral consequences.) A victory over Grant there could have removed the North's most effective commander.

Of course, saving Johnston's life might not really matter in the long run – I like it because it's an interesting "what if," a small change of the sorts that spawn alternate-history books. There are lots of other things an effective time traveler could do, such as ensure Grant did not get the early sweep at Forts Henry and Donelson (possibly more important than saving Johnston), pick up Special Order 191 before it was recovered by Union forces, give advice on how to win/not lose at Gettysburg, kick the early trial plans to free slaves to act as soldiers into higher gear, or possibly even persuade South Carolina not to fire the first shot.

I also do think that the South could have used more effective defensive tactics without going purely Fabian. Lee (who had an early war nickname of "the King of Spades") imposed massive costs on the North via effective trenchworks and defensive tactics later in the war. But at the end of the day, particularly in premodern war, "eating the other guy's corn" versus "letting the other guy eat your corn" is a big difference.

There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.

The South did eventually wage a successful Fabian/guerilla campaign. The first attempt (the first Klan) was crushed, but the white South ultimately "won" (in the form of Redemption and Jim Crow) by maintaining the capacity for organised political violence while exhausting the Feds' willingness to keep enforcing Reconstruction. The South may not have been able to do that under the leadership of the planter class - the Redeemer leadership was much less aristocratic than the CSA officer corps or the first Klan leadership.

Ignoring "lose the war but win the peace", I agree with @Shrike that Shiloh was the easiest place to win the war for the South, in hindsight. If AS Johnston (or even Beauregard, who seems to have been a perfectly competent general) defeats Grant's and Buell's armies in detail (as it looked like they probably would on the eve of the battle) then they hold Corinth, which gives the Confederacy a working east-west railway line, and even at a purely tactical level delays the Vicksburg campaign by a year (or indefinitely if the political impact of being routed at Shiloh ends Grant's career). Delaying Vicksburg by a year means that the war is indecisive by polling day in 1864 and McClellan beats Lincoln. In the best case, a victorious Johnston supported by sufficiently talented political leadership is able to flip Kentucky and the war west of the Appalachians is over. Is the minimal intervention for a time traveller to flip the American Civil War simply warning Johnston about the strategic importance of the hornet's nest?

Ending reconstruction was not losing the peace for the Union. Their war goal was not racial equality in the south, or even really overturning the south's social system. The war goal was to end the southern planter class's veto power over the republic's politics- which they did quite effectively.

How about, after the shocking victory at First Manassas, just blasting north and rolling into an unprepared Washington DC? Having the White House surrounded by graycoats might have gotten Honest Abe to rethink a few things.

This is off the top of my head based on what I recall from coursework like a decade ago, but if memory serves:

  • Southern troops were exhausted from the battle and the maneuvering leading up to it and not in a condition to pursue
  • Washington, D.C. was likely fortified (I know it was later in the war)
  • Northern troops were falling back in that direction, would benefit from interior lines, and would have a numerical advantage on the defensive

I'd need to do more research to have a really solid opinion, but it strikes me a lot like the people saying Hannibal should have just thrown his army at Rome after Cannae, ignoring that the Romans had the superior numbers.

Aside from the high casualty rates, this would not have ended the Union’s ability to fight- the confederate army would probably have needed to reach, like, NYC.

Highly recommend Gallagher's Union War and Confederate War on this question.

Seconding this. Great books.

American literature over-indexes on the fighting in the East. The truth is that the Western campaign was arguably the most decisive.

I've always thought that Vicksburg was probably the most important fight of the war. What's your take?

I'm not sure. I did a course in it, not an entire degree, and to the extent I focused on anything it was actually the naval war, so I don't have a strong opinion on the single most important battle. But Vicksburg, if memory serves, was what really allowed the North to implement Scott's Anaconda strategy on the Southern interior.

Interesting. I knew that my post would bring out some people with deep Civil War knowledge. I'll fully admit that anything I can think many others have thought of before, more deeply.

When it comes to the slaves, I wonder if hundreds of thousands of freed slaves streaming North would ultimately have become a burden. Potential culture war issue: were regiments composed of freed slaves actually useful (I don't trust the academy to give me an honest answer here).

Definitely the south should have never fought outside of an intrenched position, but they did so regularly and at great cost, even when defending their own territory. But I can imagine why soldiers and commanders would prefer gallant charges over sitting inside fortifications for months making staged retreats.

The biggest difficulty I see for the south is that Union naval dominance was inevitable. Perhaps the Union could have fought its own defensive war and just starved the South out over time via naval blockade without taking a lot of casualties. I wonder if President McClellan might have gone for that.

were regiments composed of freed slaves actually useful (I don't trust the academy to give me an honest answer here).

I think the answer is "yes" in Union service, and it's unclear how they would have performed in Southern service, since their options were basically fighting for freedom or surrendering for freedom. (However I do think that freeing them was better than the slightly insane plan to conscript the slaves to fight as slaves.)

Even if one agrees for the sake of argument that freed slaves wouldn't perform as well on the battlefield (and setting aside any of the culture war reasons, at least in the South a lot of troops went into the war with a deep familiarity with firearms we would not expect most slaves to possess) being able to use them in logistics, screening, and garrison roles is useful.

Definitely the south should have never fought outside of an intrenched position

See Fort Henry and Fort Donelson for what happen when you adopt this tactic. Fortifications are force multipliers, not a replacement for maneuver.

Perhaps the Union could have fought its own defensive war and just starved the South out over time via naval blockade without taking a lot of casualties.

The South was an agrarian society. You could have made them poor this way, but not actually starve them out. Furthermore...although the Union blockade was successful, the Confederacy's commerce raiders punched above their weight and imposed real economic losses on the North. Northerners might not have seen a "sit and wait" strategy as politically acceptable while the South was tearing through their commerce and whaling. However see Winfield Scott's similar Anaconda Plan, which was ultimately essentially implemented because Scott was more correct than most other early war leadership about the length and cost of the war.

I'm not sure Northern naval dominance was quite as inevitable as one might imagine. Certainly they had the superior manufacturing, but the Confederacy's early war goals were to procure European ironclads and obliterate the Northern wooden-hulled fleet. However they were unable to procure a European ironclad until late in the war. I doubt buying a few ironclads would have prevented a resolute North from eventually beating them at sea with their greater manufacturing capabilities, but it might have set the blockade back at a crucial time.

Okay, you clearly know a lot more than I do. I'm slightly skeptical of the value of black troops in northern service only because of the culture war implications where obviously any modern historian is going to be forced to say they were incredible fighters and even contemporaneous accounts from northern leaders would not want to cast shade on their own troops. I wonder what southerners said about them.

In any case, what would you do if playing as Jefferson Davis to try to win the war?

Buffalo soldiers after the war performed well- the Indians seemed to generally regard them as extremely capable, the equal of white infantry.

I mean, probably the same thing he did in real life. It's very hard to fight a war against a larger enemy without an offsetting advantage. The only offsetting advantage that the South had was that their troop quality was superior.

Since troop quality tends to equalize over the course of a war (very noticeable change, for instance, in the capabilities of Southern cavalry relative to their Northern peers over the course of the war) fighting an aggressive campaign to rack up as many victories as possible and break the enemy will to fight early on is pretty smart.

I am sure that in hindsight there is a lot of things Davis could have done differently, but my study of the war didn't focus very specifically on him and thus I am likely ignorant of many of them.

I think Lee can perhaps be criticized for being willing to win costly victories early in the war, but ultimately the South was never going to win a war of attrition, and Lincoln basically needed to cycle through commanders until he found one (Grant) that understood this and was willing to throw his own men into the meatgrinder, so fighting to optimize for casualties probably doesn't help you win the war if it means you are losing more often - this was basically McClellan's strategy (McClellan as far as I can tell was actually very good at training and loved his men - if anything, this was a problem, he wasn't willing to let them die) and he was pretty evidently ill-suited for actually winning the war.

But it seems to me that there wasn't much Davis could do differently in most cases. What is he supposed to do about Johnston or Jackson, tell them "don't die"? Or tell Lee "good job, try to get fewer people killed"? He could have put Lee in charge sooner, or perhaps put him in charge in the West, but Lee wasn't ultimately capable of beating Grant. Maybe he could have tried to have Grant assassinated after Shiloh, or something similarly off-the-wall.

The one thing I know I would push for if I woke up tomorrow as Jefferson Davis, newly elected President of the Confederacy, is push to free slaves to fight sooner. But a lot of that is because I think such an effort would be better for the postwar South (regardless of who won) rather than thinking that it would win the war. There's also a real problem here in terms of timing - something like this became more politically viable late in the war, but arguably too late to matter. If Davis had been able to free the slaves on Day One, it might have made a difference in terms of Northern political will, and garnered additional support from England. But obviously that was politically impossible. The best he could likely have done would have been to launch pilot programs earlier in the war. Maybe that would have worked well, or maybe not.

Most historical accounts suggest that the segregated Colored Troops performed bravely and reasonably well, given their limited battlefield experience. Their high casualty rates seem to stem from how they were employed during battles, and a general take no quarter and ask none attitude between them and Confederate troops.

in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South.

That's pretty much the opposite to the opinion I've come to. In my view, the South bet a slightly better prepared soldiery (in 1860) and wish-and-a-prayer magic-thinking diplomacy against.........everything else. Confederate diplomats made a mess of things, their greatest triumph was getting arrested off a British boat, thereby creating an incident. Britain was heavily anti-slavery and had already turned the Royal Navy against the slave trade. They weren't going to finance a pack of slavers, and in fact might have invaded/blockaded if the Union failed to defeat the Confederacy. Nobody else in Europe was going to piss off the Royal Navy for Jeff Davis.

Lincoln meddled as much as Davis did, but he could afford to fuck up several times, and Davis couldn't. Could a perfect storm of events and unstinting genius on the part of 100% of the confederate officials and generals have hypothetically given them a result that could be called victory? Yes. Was it ever likely? Not even for a nanosecond. The confederacy lost the minute they seceded. It just took the Union a bit of fumbling and a quarter million casualties to make it happen.

I think you're basically correct (hence the repeatedly desperate combination of pleading, cajoling, and threats from Confederate leadership to get England involved) but there was a genuine streak of pro-Confederate sentiment in Europe, particularly in England, which is why the Confederates were able to keep buying warships there while the British pretended that ships fitted for cannons could be used for practically anything. Charles Francis Adams was a very busy man!

The #1 most plausible scenario for a confederate victory is not a Fabian strategy- union logistics were too good. A Fabian strategy works by interrupting the opposing army’s logistical chain until they can no longer sustain an army large enough to win against the opposing force- which for the confederacy would have required major offensives to destroy union depots, rail facilities, etc. The U.S. army was designed to crush steppe nomads at the beginning of the war, so it was unusually good at logistics. Without that it’s just an insurgency, and insurgencies typically fail. The South’s economic basis- large, highly visible farms with an unwilling labor force that would run away if given protection for doing so- is uniquely unsuited for a guerrilla campaign.

No, the south was stuck with the strategy they adopted- attempt to win a war-ending victory in their northeastern front. They failed at this, obviously. They could have succeeded, it’s a lot more plausible than them conducting offensives into Union territory at will. But their deadline was pretty harsh- early enough in 1864 for news to reach the country’s voting population. The alternative for the Confederacy was to capture enough Union territory to force a surrender, which they likely couldn’t do- it would probably entail something like occupying all of Pennsylvania and laying siege to New York City.

Lincoln probably could’ve done a bit better, he could’ve maybe sacked McClellan earlier, but he is rightfully considered a great wartime leader. There were also political constraints; he couldn’t start off hard war/total war immediately without destabilizing the north and possibly scaring the hoes/border states. There isn’t much more he could’ve done better, and a lot he could’ve done worse.

If John C Fremont was president, you probably would’ve had a souther victory through sheer extremism and heavy handedness and arrogance. I think a replacement level northern republican leader would’ve won. They likely would’ve gotten a worse deal though. Maybe a Brazil style gradual emancipation and/or unchallenged Black Codes in the South.

The Southern case is interesting, though. The North materially can beat them; the only way the South gets independence is if the North decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. If they can keep the war reasonably competitive by November of 1864 such that there is years more combat in front of the north, I think they got a shot at a very desfavorable for them peace. It would involve things like the union controlling the Mississippi River and key Southern forts, but they would still get legal independence.

Of course with the cotton crash of the 1870s, there goes their economy. Welp. They are probably reabsorbed by the 1880s, with most Southerners considering it a terrible failure.

IMO the war was never winnable for the South. Yes, they had favorable terrain in the east and the Army of Northern Virginia did a respectable job of operating in that theater, but the western theater was a wide open disaster and it's hard to think up a counterfactual in which Grant and Sherman wouldn't be able to break it open sooner or later with superior manpower and materiel, not to mention near total naval supremacy.

More to the point, even if the South were to "win" in some fashion, what's to stop the north from licking their wounds and gearing up for another invasion in a few years? The US was never going to tolerate a competing power on the continent if it didn't have to and I seriously doubt a European power would've been willing to spend the resources required to credibly defend the Confederacy given their other global commitments.

The British would have loved to have a competing power effectively encircling the United States, particularly one that was mostly interested in exporting raw materials and importing finished goods. This could have worked for the Confederacy... if Britain wasn't the most fanatically abolitionist of all the Great Powers.

I agree that the CSA would have fallen into the British sphere of influence. I assume that some alternative legal structure for unfree plantation labour could have been worked out that wasn't technically chattel slavery and therefore was acceptable to the British* - something similar was done with unfree sugar plantation labour in various British colonies which never had chattel slavery, although not in the Caribbean. I don't know if the CSA leadership would be savvy enough to do that.

* The UK didn't abolish criminal penalties for breach of employment contracts until 1875, and employment contracts which would constitute indentured servitude according to the modern definition were common.

I'm not sure Fabian tactics would have worked. The Union's advantages in manpower and materiel were staggering. The combined northern military was roughly twice the size of the Confederate forces, and the Union hadn't dipped nearly as deeply into its conscription pool as the Confederates did.

Given the limited industrial base of the Southern states, Union generals could force engagements simply by targeting vital infrastructure and strategic cities, like they did during the historical war. At that point, Confederate generals would be forced to choose between engaging in a battle against a numerically superior and better equipped force, or lose more of their ability to make war with every passing day.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to step into the time machine, my personal attempt to salvage the situation would probably depend on the date.

Starting the war 10-20 years earlier would negate a lot of the Union's advantages in manpower, industry, and logistics. It might not be enough, but it would be something. It would also offer enough time to stage a proper PR campaign against Northern insurgents like John Brown.

If I had to start on exactly the same date as Davis, I'd likely turn to guerilla actions as soon as possible. Border states like Maryland were already powder kegs. If the Northern war machine couldn't trust the civilian population from Harrisburg to Annapolis (either through organic discontent or agents provocateur), it would seriously limit their ability to move supplies and soldiers through one of the most important corridors of the fighting.

What a fabian strategy actually is is to deny the enemy the ability to field war-winning armies over large portions of the theater by interrupting their logistics- Fabius did this by defeating Hannibal's foraging parties so that he was unable to move his army away from allies, giving Rome a free hand to campaign wherever Hannibal was not.

This... isn't something the south could do. For one thing, the US and Russian armies had far better logistics than most victorian armies did; they were set up to pursue steppe nomads from friendly bases. Due to railroads, depot networks, and conestoga wagons, the union simply had a far longer logistical leash than ancient armies- more than long enough to take war-winning amounts of territory without foraging or advancing their logistical infrastructure into confederate controlled territory. Secondly, the confederacy did try a fabian strategy against general Sherman- it didn't work, he had the manpower to simply eat the casualties, and rice plantations in the tidewater functioned as large supply concentrations enabling more effective foraging. Plantation agriculture is simply not well suited to sustaining guerrilla warfare compared to smallholding.

Yeah, I'm reading Grant's memoirs right now and he mentions often how his troops were able to eat on the land from abundant food resources during his campaigns in the west.

I recently read 1776 and there was a similar theme of armies finding abundant food as well, even to the astonishment of British troops unaccustomed to such agricultural wealth.

America really is the land of plenty.

I don't disagree with any of that.

The point I'm trying to make is that even if the Confederates were to try and disrupt Union supply lines, they'd be trying to interrupt those supply lines while Union troops were merrily burning down entire cities. They simply couldn't be in both places at once, and like you said, the Union could ignore the pain longer than any Confederate force could maintain the pressure. Sherman was not shy about pillaging the countryside, so supply chain interruptions would have been even less effective.

As for the guerilla warfare aspect, you're probably correct in the tidewater, but the battle of the Wilderness and... basically everything that happened in Kansas makes me think that a more ruthless Confederate approach probably would have had legs further inland. The Confederacy could have potentially maintained a rump government for several years.

A rump government which couldn’t secure the interests of slaveholders wouldn’t have stayed together long.

Agreed - the Appalachian mountain men are the folk heroes of Red Tribe orneriness now, but in the Civil War era they were the least reliable part of the Red coalition, to the point where West Virginia and Kentucky defected from the rest of the south, and the Appalachian bits of Tennessee were not reliable either.

Yeah, it's hard to successfully carry out the Fabian strategy when you are Carthage by analogy.

One weakness, if you could call it that, that the North had is that they were unwilling to really go after the civilian population. I am not sure they'd have been willing to do the necessary to root out civilians who were harboring rebels. I'm sure people could point out counterexamples, but in general I don't think northern soldiers would be willing to commit atrocities against southern whites in order to win the war.

The South probably couldn't have stopped the North from taking cities, but I doubt the North could have fully suppressed the countryside. But maybe the South would have had its own motivation problems if Richmond, Atlanta, and New Orleans all fell without big battles.

I think the more interesting question is: the North won the war and you play as Andrew Johnson. What do you do so that 130 years later people no longer identify with the cause of the South?

Do people really identify with the cause of the South now? The Confederacy fought for a very specific slave based political economy. That economy was destroyed by the war and never came back. All political fights in the US are within the political-economic universe created by the victorious Union.

I consider modern people who use Confederate imagery as similar to Ukrainians who dress up like the Nazis; they are appropriating the dress and iconography of a previous movement despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement.

I've met at least one guy younger than me who was like "yea I'd fight for the Confederacy." It wasn't a pro-slavery stance, it was essentially regional patriotism.

You've got to understand that a lot of the people who fought for the South didn't fight for slavery in the sense that they did not stand to benefit by it and had little or zero economic investment in it. Like, plenty of poor people who basically did not benefit from slavery at all still fought for the South because they were invaded by a hostile foreign power. And by 1860, the culture war over slavery had grown beyond slavery in the sense that it had become about whether slavery was right or wrong or should be legal or illegal, but about a clash of cultures and ways of living. (You can see this in today's culture war as well, arguments as soldiers and all of that.)

And in the South, moreso than most other parts of the United States, those people didn't go anywhere, they had kids and grandkids and those great-grandkids still live there and still have an emotional attachment to their ancestors (who fought bravely despite very long odds and were defeated) and their land (which was economically devastated by the war) and their culture (which has been mocked in popular culture ever since). So (despite your assertion about political fights in the US today) the differences in the cultures and ways of living never really went away. Many, perhaps most people in the South, are still regionalized patriots. I think (particularly in the past) people were likely to display a Confederate flag similar to how someone in Texas might display the Texas flag instead of the United States flag. (Not that I would suggest there was zero correlation between wearing the Confederate flag and certain beliefs about race...!)

Perhaps the best way I might explain this to someone who is either too close or too far from the question to understand it might be: imagine a patriotic Englishman who strongly supported the Saxons at Hastings (I suspect a pretty common position) despite modern England being fundamentally a Norman invention.

This is not Confederate apologia, by the by, I'm just trying to explain something to you. Happy to elaborate to the best of my ability.

One thing I don't understand is that, at some point not too long ago, Confederate apologia was relatively common in the North. I mean, for Pete's sake, a Canadian band wrote a sympathetic song about the South, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Now the common take is that the south was evil, no good, they sucked in every way, etc... The Dixie Chicks are just the Chicks. Lady Antebellum is Lady A.

What changed?

Its not what we would normally expect. In the 1920s I would expect the antebellum South to be the outgroup. In the 2020s, they are the fargroup. You would typically expect hatred to lessen as the conflict becomes a distant memory. Instead, it has increased.

Regardless, I thank God for the defiant oppostionalism of the Borderers. They guard my right flank. Without them, the leftist hate mob would be after me.

What changed?

A cynical and short answer is that American politics did (the South stopped voting for Democrats).

There's always going to be a sort of romance and pathos in defeat that I think is attractive, and I think that US culture went from elevating rebels to viewing them as an insidious threat. In fact, I think it's super interesting the degree to which US establishment culture grew extremely censorious while still pretending to be the old rebellious culture, but of course the easy answer is that they are the same culture, just all growed up.

The south became roughly as republican as the national average in the late seventies and was more republican by the nineties. Your timelines don't match up.

Cultural shifts don't happen on a dime, and oftentimes are the product of generational replacement - so a shift taking place in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, being put on hold for a bit to allow Bill Clinton to enjoy his Presidency, and being kicked into high gear during W. and then manifesting about the time 90s kids started using social media sounds about right to me.

I freely admit this is at best a answer, and at best a simplistic one - very open to alternative explanations.

The civil war wasn’t really about slavery- I mean sûre, slavery is how I’d explain it to children, it was the proximal issue, so it’s not totally unfair to call it that. The civil war was about whether southern elites should have a veto over US policy on the whole. This is, in the minds of liberals(and perhaps nowhere else), a live issue again. You should just read liberal propaganda and connect the threads.

Reconciliation between the North and the memory of Dixie was a symbol of reconciliation between the two halves of the country, so naturally it ratchets back up with the culture war (the 1920s culture war was along different lines, like prohibition, that didn't match to North/South, but nowadays the South, as well as anywhere up North that would fly the flag, is Deplorable country).

I think it was Dylan Roof shooting up a black church while wearing Confederate and Rhodesian flag patches. It was pretty soon after that, that Amazon and such stopped selling Confederate flag merchandise, and streets and schools started getting renamed.

Literally who?

I don't doubt the chronology, but the stage has to be set ideologically. The spark didn't really cause the fire, it was inevitable with enough dry timber. If Dylan Roof, who I honestly don't remember, had never existed do you think that the schools wouldn't have been renamed? Of course they would have. And if a Dylan Roof didn't exist it would have been necessary to invent him. Like we have now with the lynching hoaxes.

I think all of your arguments are true, and it tracks my experiences with Southern family and living in the South, and I think we may have a bit of a terminology dispute. When I read, “the cause of the South”, I interpreted it as specifically “the Confederate cause” rather than “fighting for Southern wellbeing in general.” While people fought for both the Union and Confederacy for tons of individual reasons, the Confederate leadership was pretty unified that the purpose of secession was the maintenance of the slave system and planter dominance in the South.

Tons of later Southerners viewed themselves as having kinship to the Confederacy, but almost none of them wanted the socio-political-economic system that was the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. Even the Redeemers after the Civil War had a very different class and social basis than the pre-war Planter class. They may use Confederate iconography or argue for the nobility of certain Confederates or even the cause as a whole, but I don’t consider that really supporting the Confederate cause.

Your average guy who has a Confederate flag is either a Southern regional patriot or Red Tribe person who dislikes Blue Tribe and/or people who don’t like the South. I view it as similar to a Ukrainian who uses Nazi/Banderite iconography today; they don’t support Nazi Germany or probably even the politics of Stephan Bandera. They are just using the symbols of a previous fight for their use in a current fight without endorsing the politics of the previous fight.

There are two versions of the "cause of the South" that were live issues in living memory and which Yankee elites would have preferred to suppress for good reasons.

The notorious one is race-based citizenship rights. Jim Crow was a live issue for a century after Appomattox, and the last unrepentant segregationist in active politics was Trent Lott as late as 2007. The strand of MAGA thought that talks a lot about "heritage Americans" is being deliberately ambiguous about where ADOS blacks (and feather Indians) fit into their ideal America. The Confederate Battle Flag and the veneration of Confederate veterans was, in fact, used as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights and an attempt to link Southern regional pride to the political project of opposing Civil Rights, which is why the symbols are as controversial as they are.

The more serious one in the 21st century is the idea of the United States government as a foreign invader. PJ O'Rourke writes in the introduction to the British edition of Parliament of Whores that the genius of the Anglosphere is that we see bad government as more like a broken toaster than a hostile god. Seeing the government as a foreign invader (either in general, or only when it does something you don't like) isn't that. My (limited by youth and distance) understanding of the symbolism when I was growing up was that the Confederate Battle Flag was used as a symbol of this kind of anti-government sentiment (in much the same way that the Gasden flag is used now) in the 1980's and 1990's before it became a red rag to anti-racists.

Do people really identify with the cause of the South now?

If by "cause of the South" you mean "very specific slave-based political economy", maybe.

But if by "cause of the South" you mean "anti-do-what-anyone-else-tells-you, accepting that you go your way and I go mine, and [to a lesser extent] that fighting if neither of us can do that is good and necessary, even if we die on our feet rather than living on our knees"? That's the reason the General Lee has the Stars and Bars on it (and why it's the symbol of the Dukes of Hazzard in the first place), and is also why even in other nations people reach for this symbol (for they have no native culture of their own) to evoke that particular kind of childish American-style liberty.

That's kind of what "States' Rights (to [insert your favorite moral opprobrium here])" misses- the entire point of that is so that you may do in your area what you and your people have decided to do (i.e. good faith is assumed, per liberalism). One notes that "States' Rights" also includes "to murder your children and get away with it so long as you are a woman", but most don't actually realize that because they're focused on Muh Slavery.

despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement

I mean, yeah, the Nazis would have put all of Ukraine in concentration camps if they could. The Ukrainian Nazis are generally fighting the Russians (re: Azov) so obviously they don't advocate for that goal; so does the "never ask a white supremacist the race of his girlfriend" thing.

I think there's a lot of emphasis on words and not really on actions, but you have to be paying attention to said actions to know that.

I don't know for sure. Until 2015 the creed of the "Children of the Confederacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy" stated that the war was not fought to sustain slavery, which means you can identify with the CSA without advocating for slavery.

I think it’s important to disambiguate the cause of the CSA from the Redeemer and post war conservative Southern causes. The core telos of the CSA was the maintenance of slavery and planter dominance. All of its leadership agreed on that. Post war Southern conservatives from the Redeemers onward desired different things. There is overlap, such as both wanting to limit Yankee power more or less and support for white supremacy until the 60s, but they are different political projects.

Groups like Daughters of the Confederacy use the history of the CSA for their own purposes, but they don’t share the same ends. The CSA response to the question of “Was the US Civil War about slavery?” Is “YesChad. Slavery needs to protected.”

The confederacy fought because they believed the planter class was owed a veto right over federal policy, and they had pre-abolitionist dust ups over this regularly. They seceded after losing control of the senate and then the presidency in quick succession, not in response to any specific policies.

In the 1860’s, this was specifically manifested as slavery. But they’d previously gotten into it with pro-slavery presidents. The non-slavery parts of the CSA constitution are also revealing- all about Plutocracy and the natural rights of large landholders to govern.

I’d use a test along the lines of “would believers in the original cause endorse my goals?” Or maybe “would I care about endorsement from the original cause?” So neo-Nazi groups might count even if they don’t have a specific opinion about Versailles. But they’d have to deploy that iconography in service of a Nazi-approved goal like, say, purging ethnic Russians from a region. Merely defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity wouldn’t count.

By this standard, there are definitely people who still identify with the Lost Cause. They’re not expecting to bring back plantation economics but they do still want to maintain a black underclass. Or they have strong opinions on federal authority: courts, banking, interstate commerce. It’s a different world but I think you can still show continuity, especially when it comes to civil rights.

That is a more interesting one.

The Republican Reconstruction agenda which Johnson opposed mostly made it into law anyway. He stirred up a lot more resentment against it, but I can’t say if it would have been more or less enduring if he had rubber-stamped everything. I suspect that ship had sailed after his first year, by which point several Southern states had reconstituted their old governments and sent their war heroes to Congress.

Maybe you could preempt the Lost Cause by refusing amnesty to Confederate personnel? But then you’ve still got the remnants of the aristocracy trying to hold on to their plantations, putting up statues and moaning about the good ol’ days. Can you avoid that without going full damnatio memoriae?

Also, preventing ex-Confederates from getting into state or national government probably reduces support for black suffrage. That would give voting southerners license to, well, recreate their whole underclass again. That’s an injustice and probably still reinforces the aristocratic myths.

I agree with most of what @Shrike and @birb_cromble have to say about a Fabian strategy not working. But I want to put a finer point on it. Your thought experiment is in a pretty common vein among history buffs, and while these can be fun, as intellectual exercises they are often lacking. The reason for this is that the participants too often presume to second-guess the actions of the real-world participants with the benefit of knowing how everything ends. It's illustrative that you bring up Joe Johnston's actions in the Atlanta campaign and point to them as wise and prudent, in contrast to the recklessness of John Bell Hood. This is a pretty common take among Civil War buffs. Almost no one, however, says the same thing about Johnston's actions during the Peninsula Campaign two years earlier, or equates Lee's actions in the Seven Days to Hood's in Atlanta. It's because we know now that Lee's actions spooked McClellan enough that the Union ended up withdrawing from the Peninsula entirely. If you're going to take the position that Davis should have undertaken a Fabian strategy you don't get to apply it only to the situations where, with hindsight, that would have worked. You can't just tell Lee to not invade Pennsylvania; you also have to tell him to fall back to Richmond during the Seven Days, and to be prepared to abandon it if the situation became untenable. No stupid shit like dividing his army to attack a larger force. Of course, had the South actually pursued this strategy, the war would have been lost in 1862, even with an idiot like McClellan in charge of Union forces.

In 1862, Johnston had strategically retreated against a less aggressive general while he was more evenly matched in terms of manpower. By July 1864, he had spent the previous two months strategically withdrawing in good terrain for defensive battle. By the time he reached Atlanta, the situation had worsened. If I'm Jeff Davis, by that point I'm waiting for a telegram saying that he doesn't like the looks of Sherman's position and the only prudent thing to do is abandon the city before Sherman outflanks him, cuts the rail lines, and lays the city under siege. Remember that you aren't fighting some idealized war with the benefit of hindsight; you're taking a position on what Davis should have done given what he knew at the time, using the people who were actually involved. Whatever ideas you have about what Johnston should have done had he stayed in command, he probably wouldn't have done them. If he had any intention of fighting a decisive defensive battle for Atlanta, the time to do it was weeks earlier when he had a terrain advantage. Part of the reason he got canned in the first place was because he chose to retreat to a less defensible position.

And even if he had, so what? People act like he could have just hung out in Atlanta indefinitely, and that the North would have grown restless and elected McClellan to end the war. First, he couldn't have stayed in Atlanta that long. When Hood attacked Sherman, it was to prevent Sherman from positions that were disadvantageous to the Confederacy. What you're suggesting is that Hood should have just let the Union take these positions unopposed. From this perspective, Hood's attacks, while costly in terms of manpower, allowed him to stay in Atlanta about a month longer than he otherwise could have. If the Union had taken the Macon railroad on their first shot at the end of July, they Confederates would have given up Atlanta a month earlier than they did in the historical timeline, not later. And even in the unlikely event that Johnston could have held Atlanta until November, and McClellan won the election, you still need to keep in mind that Lincoln was in office for another four months. There was no way that Atlanta was surviving the winter intact with that much of a Union advantage, and developments elsewhere, particularly Virginia, would have meant that by the time McClellan took office on March 4, the war would have been over anyway.

I say all this as someone who thinks that the Confederacy could have won the war, and who thinks that Jeff Davis and others made a lot of bad decisions. I don't think that Union victory was inevitable. But I'm reluctant to point to any specific tactic or strategy that the Confederates could have used to win the war.

Yeah, the confederacy would have been better served by a more aggressive strategy, because they were going to lose a war of attrition and needed a decisive victory early.

Other commenters have given good reasons why winning the war was more or less out of JD’s hands. You’re relying on foreign recognition and the addition of more border states to even force a stalemate.

Lincoln, on the other hand, has a few opportunities to avoid Union disasters. Several of them involve McClellan.

Am I allowed to abolish slavery as the CSA?

You're allowed to play as Jefferson Davis which means exercising a lot of dictatorial powers, but not unlimited power. You could try to abolish slavery. But if you did, you'd probably get deposed or killed which would end the game in a loss.

My idea would be to avoid the Civil War altogether by transforming slavery into technically not-slavery: emanicpate the slaves, but make them owe enough money to the former masters that it would take them 25 years of effectively zero disposable income to repay it. Let Northern abolitionists purchase this debt if they want to prove their virtue.

The civil war was fought over the political power of the planter class, which expected a veto over the republic's policies before the war. 'Slavery' is a reasonable enough term for that, but that kind of emancipation wouldn't address the real cause.

This would almost certainly not have avoided the war, as Lincoln was determined to keep the nation together. It might have taken the wind out of the sails of some of the Radical Republicans and made the CSA more popular in Europe, but Lincoln had a plenty good casus belli already.

Oh, I meant avoiding the war by avoiding the secession.

Ah gotcha.

One of the saddest things of Denuvo becoming a joke is that I figured out that the vast majority of the games protected by it were just not worth playing to begin with. Also it looks like indeed AI has had a hand in the recent proper cracks.

For those of you still sailing the high sees - do you even bother to check some of the old releases?

I don't pirate video games, but when a company cares little enough about customers to use Denuvo long-term, they generally also compromise on other important aspects of the experience. If you're into super-big-name Japanese properties like Monster Hunter or Hatsune Miku, maybe one of those is worth it, but otherwise I'd just skip any game that uses it.

Holy shit Denuvo got cooked? I kind of fell out of game piracy around 2020 as my gaming calcified into 2010s strategy games with active modding scenes (EU4, CiV) and zero functional DRM, or $CURRENT_SHOOTER with my friends, which cannot be pirated.

But every time I checked in on the gang, it seemed like Denuvo was winning more and more, and the only solution, Empress, was much more focused writing insane manifestos and shilling for donations than cracking games.

Happy to hear the gang is so back, it was never over

https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/

UNCRACKED/UNBYPASSED DENUVO GAMES There are no uncracked/unbypassed SP Offline denuvo exclusive games as of April 26th, 2026. Well done to all the crackers and bypass developers. Denuvo VR Games have all been cracked/bypassed on May 5th, 2026.

So, what are you reading?

I finished Nasr Abu Zayd's Rethinking the Qur'an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics. It's a short essay, but very valuable.

It is not only a question of contextualization, which is pivotal in discourse analysis, but more than that it is what the discourse tells about the context and how. Now, the question is which is historical and which is universal, a question that keeps all the modern liberal Muslim scholars of the Qur'an busy. Being confined to the Qur'an as 'text' alone, the conservatives win at the end of the day. When the liberals, for example, emphasize 'togetherness' as the universal eliminating the 'hostility' limiting its meaning to the negative past the conservatives will apply the principle of 'abrogation' to historicize 'togetherness' as abrogated and will universalize 'hostility', as the abrogat [sic]. In the present context of unsolved Palestinian-Israeli trauma, whose hermeneutics or meaning is valid? The winner is sure to be the meaning of ghetto, separation and isolation, the meaning of Mr. Sharon's wall.

Zayd's hope is to fight against that outcome in Middle East/Western relations, which 'hostility' he sees as being supported by the adapting of Islam to resistance.

I just finished the Silmarillion. I've had the book for decades, and had read most of the stories out-of-order at one point or another (with the rest being filled in by wikipedia dives and the occasional lore video on youtube), but this was the first time I actually committed to reading the whole thing front to back. This is also the first time I've read any of it since reading George RR Martin's Fire and Blood, the only other book I'm aware of in this particular genre of "not quite a fantasy novel, not quite a history book." It's a fascinating contrast, and a handy reminder that Tolkein is still the undisputed king.

The central conceipt of Fire and Blood is that it's an in-universe history book drawing from multiple unreliable sources, with the fun coming from noticing the various biases and trying to piece together "what really happened." Something I didn't realize until now, however, is that the Silmarillion is doing basically the same thing, but never tells you. You may notice as you read that some stories are told as detailed accounts inlcuding dialogue and a more-or-less full recounting of events, while other important events and even entire centuries get glossed over in a single paragraph. If you read particularly closely, you'll notice a pattern where the stories involving Gondolin and Doriath are told in longform with lots of details, and the more removed from these kingdoms you get, the more sparse the prose becomes. The sons of Fëanor and their realms, for example, recieve almost zero attention in the text. This is because the "author/editor" of the Silmarillion was clearly a refugee from Gondolin who moved to the mouths of Sirion where their people mingled with refugees from Doriath (this is confirmed by Tolkein in the Unfinished Tales, yough nowhere made explicit in the Silmarillion itself). We have no stories from Himring or Thargelion or Ossiriand because those people never had the opportunity to share them with Tolkien's source.

Now, we know that the real reason for this is that the Fall of Gondolin, the Children of Hurin, and the tale of Beren and Luthien are the three main First Age stories Tolkein wanted to tell (and the only ones he'd get even somewhat close to completing), and his son had to cobble together the Silmarillion from a bunch of unorganized and contradictory notes after Tolkein died. But this almost makes it better? Unlike Fire and Blood, with its manufactured inconsistencies and clear authorial intent, the Silmarillion really is a lost book of fragmented histories requiring careful historigraphical analysis to fully understand. Just like with his languages and other aspects of worldbuilding, Tolkein presents the real thing where other fantasy authors only present a facsimile. I get the same joy of discovery reading the Silmarillion as I get reading Le Morte d'Arthur.

The Silmarillion is my favorite book, bar none. I think there are a couple of reasons why. One is that when I was a teenager reading LOTR, I picked up on all the references Tolkien made to the wider history of the world (as he intended, of course). I was super curious to learn more about who Fëanor was, who was Elbereth, what was "the West that is forgotten", and so on. So when I finally did read the Silmarillion, it scratched an itch that I had for quite a while and was very satisfying.

The second reason I like it so much is because of the way it's written. Honestly, that's surprising to me, because normally I care nothing for prose and view the words as simply a vehicle to communicate the story to me. But something about the way Tolkien writes the Silmarillion (and also LOTR, though not as much) really moves me. I suspect it's because he was intentionally modeling his work on the real life epics he knew so well, but either way it gets my blood pumping. One of my favorite passages:

Then Fingolfin beheld the utter ruin of the Noldor, and the defeat beyond redress of all their houses; and filled with wrath and despair he mounted upon Rochallor his great horse and rode forth alone, and none might restrain him. He passed over Dor-nu-Fauglith like a wind amid the dust, and all that beheld his onset fled in amaze, thinking that Oromë himself was come: for a great madness of rage was upon him, so that his eyes shone like the eyes of the Valar. Thus he came alone to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat.

And Morgoth came.

It's so majestic (the whole passage, not just the bit I quoted). It really does elevate the story beyond what it would otherwise be, and make it something special.

Yes! It’s a beautiful, unique work. Not even imitated all that often.

Despite being killed off remarkably fast, Fëanor is one of the characters of all time.

My copy has this crazy painting of an exploding castle on the cover. I was able to trace it back to “The Fall of Numenor” from this calendar. No; I have no idea why that rated the cover. If you haven’t seen those, enjoy.

I'm almost positive we have the same old paperback. I remember looking at the cover as a little kid, long before I was mature enough ti actually read it, and being entranced. I spent hours just sitting there wondering what happened to Atlantis-looking city and why.

Finished reading The Salt Fix. It did do a pretty good job of making the case that the FDA's current RDAs for salt are bunk and the claims that even lower salt limits as being supposedly "heart healthy" due to blood pressure control are basically made-up. It seemed a little vague about what to actually do, though, besides saying it's basically fine to "salt to taste", or eat as much as you think tastes good, and talk to your doctor.

So I guess it made me feel more comfortable with consuming significantly more salt, which I have been thinking about doing for a weird medical issue I have. I suppose I ought to explain that a bit better, but I think I'll hold it for a Wellness Wednesday thread, to save filling up the book thread with my weird medical issues.

If you are mainly eating food you cook yourself from whole or minimally-processed foods, salt is basically a non-concern. Salt to taste.

High-sodium diets in the western world are almost universally diets high in ultra-processed or fast food.

I agree with the diagnosis of this book. Especially if you any significant amount of exercise, salt is such a non-issue.

I've been rereading The Lord Of The Rings. I grabbed the first volume when I went on a trip, just to have something to read, and it has been nice. It's been several years (maybe a decade?) since I last read it, so I've been enjoying reading it again. Stuff always hits you differently when you reread books. This time, I've noticed (for the first time) just how much elvish devotion to Elbereth seems inspired by Marian devotion among Catholics, and also just how old some of the characters are. Frodo is 50! I know it was right there in the text, but it never stood out to me before, and it's interesting given how young many fantasy heroes tend to be nowadays.

50 ain't old! Cirdan is pushing 11,000!

Incidentally, this is the source of most of my nerd rage toward Amazon's Rings of Power. It bugs me that Galadriel is written as a petulant teenager when she is literally older than the sun

True, but what I meant is that Frodo is somewhat old by our reckoning (as hobbits seem to live not much longer than humans do), at least relative to the ages one sees in fantasy protagonists. There are of course creatures much older than Frodo (Gandalf, Sauron and Sarumam being probably the oldest, since they were around before the world itself was created).

and also just how old some of the characters are. Frodo is 50!

The time between Frodo finding the Ring and the quest beginning is another thing where Jackson's view of it dominates in my mind. Intellectually I know it, but the movie seems so much smoother that that's what sticks in my head.

I'm currently reading LOTR (after having read The Hobbit) for the first time.

It's hard to give it an objective view because a) I saw the films first, and so I know the major parts of the story, b) I'm long past the age where reading it might make a big impression, and c) I've never been into fantasy.

Interestingly in the films it was Legolas I couldn't stand while in the books it's Gimli. It also feels like a lot of scenes are weirdly underworked for such a long story. Like when they release Theoden from Wormtongue's influence after what feels like five minutes of just pointing at him and going "Mate, his name is Wormtongue. Worm Tongue! Mate, come on!" and Theoden is all like "Yes, you make a persuasive argument. Wormtongue, you have been revealed as an enemy agent and a traitor to our kingdom, and for that there can only be one punishment: Sending to Coventry".

It’s not about revealing Wormtongue (which is a nickname anyway), it’s about giving Theoden the courage to do what he already knows needs to be done. Wormtongue is providing a plausible excuse to do nothing, that’s all.

Sure, it's just an example of how lightly what would seem to be important events are handled by both the writer and his characters. Meanwhile lesser events are dwelt on at length.

I find myself going back to older books. A lot of Golden Age detective stories, which can be an acquired taste. Most recent is a collection of short stories from 1925 about a forensic surgeon for Scotland Yard called Reggie Fortune. The tone is very much of the time, and it could be grating in large doses, but for example I found this exchange very funny (of course the big cheese at Scotland Yard is a minor sprig of the gentry, of course the style of badinage is very of its day, of course it is about the well-off upper classes, of course it is very much Entre Deux Guerres and before the Great Depression and economic crash):

In a day or two Reggie made a call on the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. He was received with a cry of joy. The Hon. Sidney Lomas pranced round the table holding out his arms.

“Reginald! My innocent child! Embrace me! I thank Heaven for your deliverance. Not a stain upon your character, they tell me. Wonderful!”

“You know all about it, do you?” said Mr. Fortune morosely.

“These little things will get about,” Lomas chuckled. “I wish I’d seen you at the police station. The fair young hero, falsely accused, defying calumny. ‘Where are my emeralds?’ says the villain hoarsely. ‘Search me,’ the noble youth cried, ‘search me, varlet!’ And his innocence was proved in the fair light of Heaven.”

“Yes. I wasn’t taking any risks,” said Mr. Fortune. “You see, I’d had the beastly things in my pocket.”

The face of Lomas changed like an actor’s from mirth to gravity. “The devil you had! And what have you been up to, Fortune?”

“I wish I knew. I was stuck in that show behind a woman who was having a spasm of the heart. When we moved on I thought I felt something at my coat-tails. I found that emerald pendant in my pocket. I dropped the beastly thing under the table and looked about for anybody suspicious. All very ordinary people. And then Mr. John Good, of the International Detective Service, was arresting me. Queer sensation, Lomas. Ever tried it?”

“Nobody has arrested me yet,” said the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department modestly.

What's interesting is that this is in the approved style where murder is treated more or less as a lark for the quirky investigator to have fun solving, but the stories are not like that. They're often about serious effects of the crimes on the people involved, and Fortune is more concerned with justice (so far as he can manage it) than the requirements of the law. He's also fully aware of the results of his investigations: if he catches the bad guy/proves his guilt, he gets that person hanged. It's not all fun and games.

The language and behaviour of the characters may be that of the "silly ass" from Wodehouse's Drones Club, but they are in fact intelligent and capable people. Though nowadays describing a male character as "prancing", "conspicuously jaunty", or "sitting in front of his dressing-table perfecting that work of art, the wave in his hair" we would have a very different impression of his, er, personal life.

Maybe the same applied in the 1920s!

I tried a couple Poirot short stories recently. Not super impressed. Sherlock Holmes if he only had 10 pages to work it out. Not that there aren’t some redeeming qualities, but it didn’t wow me at all.

My wife and I are continuing our tradition of reading aloud before bed. We started with Wodehouse but the current novel is Chandler’s The Big Sleep. My God, this is incredible. Marlowe just sort of stands around until people get uncomfortable and either leave the evidence or try to kill him. And there are so many hilarious phrases.

Least expected feature: Los Angeles. I always assumed noir was a New England thing.

Chandler is a very good writer. Less cynical in a way than Dashiell Hammett, but the amount of corruption in the police he describes (and which seems to be pretty historically accurate) is breath-taking. You can tell an honest cop because his clothes are shabby and he looks poor. But that's how business is done in LA!

He has a way with language, I think my favourite bit is "crazy as two waltzing mice" but there are plums in all the books.

She had lovely legs. I would say that for her. They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father.

I can’t say why this one hit me so hard. It’s so stupid. I love it. Material for the Lyttle Lytton contest.

But the best scene so far has been the four-way confrontation in some jerk’s apartment.

I hit Agnes on the head with less delicacy than before, kicked her off my feet, and stood up. Brody flicked his eyes at me. I showed him the automatic. He stopped trying to get his hand into his pocket.
"Christ!" he whined. "Don't let her kill me!"
I began to laugh. I laughed like an idiot, without control. Blonde Agnes was sitting up on the floor with her hands flat on the carpet and her mouth wide open and a wick of metallic blond hair down over her right eye. Carmen was crawling on her hands and knees, still hissing. The metal of her little revolver glistened against the baseboard over in the corner. She crawled towards it relentlessly.
I waved my share of the guns at Brody and said: "Stay put. You're all right."
I stepped past the crawling girl and picked the gun up. She looked up at me and began to giggle. I put her gun in my pocket and patted her on the back. "Get up, angel. You look like a Pekinese."
I went over to Brody and put the automatic against his midriff and reached his Colt out of his side pocket. I now had all the guns that had been exposed to view. I stuffed them into my pockets and held my hand out to him.

Carmen is one of the genuinely disturbing characters in any of the novels. She has no morals at all, is a pure sociopath, and despite all her sister's desperate attempts to protect her, help her, and failing that just put her someplace she can't hurt others or herself, the outlook is pretty bleak.

The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick.

...I looked away. Then I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman's eyes.

..."All right," I went on heavily. "Will you take her away? Somewhere far off from here where they can handle her type, where they will keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her? Hell, she might even get herself cured, you know. It's been done."

Also Lord Peter Wimsey, who always heavily salts his conversations with quotes from some poem or other that nobody (who hasn't specifically majored in fin-de-siecle English poetry) has ever heard of. It gets annoying for the reader sometimes!

Reggie is definitely a forerunner to Lord Peter. He writes a telegram in Latin to tease the CID boss, and another story has his knowledge of Ancient Greek be a plot point.

But so far, I'm amused. Though in the first story he's thirty-five years old, which everyone treats him as being "just a boy". And we think extended adolescence is a modern phenomenon!

Currently reading Post Captain, the second Aubrey-Maturin novel by Patrick O'Brian.

I enjoyed the first one and then forgot about the series, until recently I saw on X that it was described as "Jane Austen for boys." That made me pick it up again.

I just read that one!

Not nearly as self-contained as M&C, but it’s fun and badass and absolutely hilarious.

I'm finally done with Mother of Learning. I guess there's something inherently alluring in progression fantasy, because I shouldn't have spent so much time on a single book.

I liked the story taking a few rapid twists and turns during and after the escape from the time loop. Some of the setups and payoffs in the final act were good, but some were asspulls. Zach didn't get an end to his character arc at all.

I'll give it a zero on my usual scale.

I’m reading “The Protector’s War,” the second book in S.M Stirling’s Emberverse series. I previously read his Nantucket trilogy, which I loved. I thought the first book in the Emberverse, “Dies the Fire” was good, but in general I like this series less than the Nantucket trilogy. I don’t know why, exactly, but two things sort of standout:

  1. The speed with which people adapt. They’re two weeks into this world shattering event and there is literally an organized kingdom.

  2. I wouldn’t say it’s blatantly anti-Christian or anti-traditional religion, but the focus on a witch coven as this beacon of civilization (at one point facing off against a nasty preacher) just sort of rubs me the wrong way. Of course if this was traditional fantasy I’d take no issue.

Overall, though, I’m enjoying the series.

Cold Days turned out way better than I expected.

Freedom’s Forge is a WW2 biopic about setting up military-scale production. There’s something aaqc-worthy there about the change in expectations over 80 years, but I’m not sure that I’m the right person to write it.

I appreciate the idea, but I don’t think you can take the corpus of Islam and remove the hostility simply because it’s central to the foundation of the religion. Muhammad was a warlord. He conquered a territory which he then governed. There are lots of references in the Quran and Hadith to wars, rules of war, and historical battles. This is unavoidable, much like it’s unavoidable to say that Moses and Joshua had wars of conquest in the Torah. What changed for Judaism was that it had later revelations that encouraged peace and getting along with other tribes. Unless you have a second Quran, you’re stuck with the book and traditions you have written.

I've seen at least a few reasons for doubting that perspective. For example, Quran 5:48:

...To each of you [Jews, Christians, Muslims] We have ordained a code of law and a way of life. If Allah had willed, He would have made you one community, but His Will is to test you with what He has given each of you. So compete with one another in doing good. To Allah you will all return, then He will inform you of the truth regarding your differences.

Of course, there are passages contradicting or seeming to contradict this. Zayd's perspective is an attempt to find a new means of interpretation which can tilt towards the 'togetherness', and I'm not convinced that such efforts will bear no fruit.

But for me the question is less what Allah intended, as I'm not a Muslim, but what practical effect Islam has had on the world, and what it might still contribute. For example, Islam probably had a large hand in Guru Nanak's "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim" in Sikhism, as it is one possible interpretation of the unity of God and the importance of intention over outward appearance.

Speculatively, I recall an old passage in Abramelin, one of the grimoires of my youth:

For it is an indubitable and evident thing that he who is born Christian, Jew, Pagan, Turk, Infidel, or whatever religion it may be, can arrive at the perfection of this Work or Art and become a Master, but he who hath abandoned his natural Law, and embraced another religion opposed to his own, can never arrive at the summit of this Sacred Science.

I am beginning to wonder if this way of thinking is actually in part Islamic in origin. Though I will admit that these are at present vague and poorly supported thoughts.

I was away on holidays this week and read about 150 pages of The Best Minds on the second leg of my outgoing flight, bringing me up to about the 70% mark. Haven't touched it since, aiming to finish it next week.

A more serious question: have you noticed any negative behavior changes in people you know who have started taking GLP1 drugs?

2 people I've known for 20 years have gone on such drugs, and both have started displaying far more materialistic behavior than ever before. It might just be midlife freakouts, but then I realized that besides their ages, they also had GLP1 in common.

Not GLP1 but a friend of mine on HRT has turned, in his fifties, into a horndog and is leaving/divorcing his wife to presumably chase tail with abandon, as well as becoming a gym rat. His kids are grown(ish). I cannot say with certainty that the testosterone is causing this but I have my suspicions that it isn't not causing it. I don't think realistically the 50s is still 'midlife' but it could have to do with the not untypical older guy collapse.

There's a joke in bodybuilding that if you're not worried your wife is cheating on you, while you're cheating on your wife, you aren't taking enough Tren.

I don't know if that's a common story from a 50something guy doing HRT, but it's not an uncommon story.

Is he trans? Sounds like the "second puberty" thing I read about on social media.

Ha. No he isn't. I'm not sure how that would even work given my description of older male now chasing girls the way an 18 year old would. Part of me wants to read your comment as trolling but to respond sincerely no, he isn't trans.

I presume you meant to say TRT? HRT is to fix female problems.

Men that want to be more womanly go on HRT, e.g. trans.

Men that want to be more manly go on TRT.

Testosterone is a hormone. Even Wikipedia files non-transgender applications under the main "hormone replacement therapy" page, and relegates transgender applications to a separate "gender-affirming hormone therapy" page.

I was using the term as Hormone Replacement Therapy, where the hormone involved is testosterone. I wasn't aware the terms were so distinct.

They aren't.

Thank you for your diligence

One thing people complain about on the drugs is anhedonia. Less desire for food, drugs, sex, caffeine, etc. I could see this turn into a spree of purchasing better and better things trying to chase their old high.

Well, they probably had to buy new clothes, and put a bunch of thought into their new look/wardrobe, because now vanity has more potential payout.

Playing up how spiritual and non-materialistic you are is either cope for not having anything (materially and figuratively) or a flex you do while also having everything (materially and figuratively).

See my reply below. It's way more than new clothing.

Do you have any reason to believe it’s not stereotypical midlife crises?

FWIW my dad doesn’t appear to have changed behavior at all. He’s gotten more interested in whiskey, I guess.

No reason at all. I noticed the behavior changes and noticed 2 things in common. Given people talk about the positive behavior changes from GLP1 drugs, I thought it was worth tossing out a question on possible negative effects.

I feel like there's gonna be a certain correlation between people losing weight and then doing more stuff to spend on their appearance. Last time I got into really great shape (Not GLP-related) I also started dating a ton and massively improved my wardrobe, but that was all kind of a recursive loop. Now I'm married with children I'm not a blob but I also can't really see the point of meaningfully investing in my wardrobe.

I'm much more interested in living it up lately but I think it's better explained by my P(doom) being at 0.1 than going on a GLP-1

I’ve been trying to live it up for the same reason but failing, mostly due to having young kids. Any suggestions on how to turn money into happiness would be much appreciated.

Buying a bigger and better house in a nicer neighborhood, replacing anything that works okay but isn't perfect, paying for delivery instead of picking it up even when it's just 5 minutes of extra errand, furniture that matches, throwing away anything I haven't touched in a year.

The most audacious thing I did was having a matcha latte delivered to me by DoorDash when I was watching my kids at a playground.

It's still pretty hard. Money doesn't buy that much happiness.

Haven't noticed anything for my parents who have been on them for about half a year. Though my mother is complaining about it making eating out far less fun.

I do in fact have a friend who got pretty erratic and impulsive after losing a bunch of weight on GLP-1. We always joke that GLP-1 made her crazy in a "ha-ha but no seriously" sort of way.

What do you mean by materialistic behaviour? Like spending a lot of money on cars and jewelry?

Yes, spending money on luxury cars, buying a ruinously expensive house in an exclusive neighborhood, taking expensive vacations, etc.

The most I'd attribute to GLP1s is the ego-boost from feeling sexier making someone scramble to similarly upgrade their lifestyle, but that would really only account for the expensive vacations and maybe the car. They don't to my knowledge make someone manic, but the hotness boost could send someone with that problem into a manic episode.

If anything, I find they make me "want" things less.

Not a question, but a recommendation.

We recently had a discussion about rare earths re: Greenland. I think this guy's video on rare earths is good and that his channel is good in general. Entertaining, informative, non-cucked. I watch it while on the treadmill.

What's your preferred type of Millennial beer (non-alcoholic barely-flavored carbonated water)? I'm partial to the lacroix limoncello and sunshine flavors, but it's not like any type/brand is much more than tv static + a hint of flavor.

Coors light

Hey, I'll eat a lot of shit for my peers, but millenials are the triple IPA artisinal 15% beer and ironic PBR generation. Blame the zoomers for your flavorless alcoholic seltzers.

millenials are the triple IPA artisinal 15% beer and ironic PBR generation.

"Are" should perhaps be "were." As a bunch of us cruise solidly into our 40s, I've noticed the move from 18% imperial stouts to non-alcoholic fizzy waters.

Traitors!, Jezebels! Heretics! You move from 18% Imperial Stouts to nice 12% Barrel Aged Tripels and Quadruples!! Maybe a sleepy 4% Honey Kolsch or Helles Lager depending on the situation

Hear, Hear! Millennials are the Craft Beer generation. We popularized it.

"turned it into a bitter hopfest", I think you mean?

Please, Millennials brought the resurgence of German Beers, Meads, Trappist, Darks, and Sours back into style. Just because hop ODing is easier does not define our grain-juice palette.

German beers and various dark types were a mainstay of first-wave craft brewers in the late 80s -- they were occasionally too malty (especially the dark ones) but some persist to this day!

IDK where you are going that meads are in style, and in any case the ones I've had are very much not beer -- that leaves Trappist and Sour which (assuming you mean sparkling-monk-style due to EU regulations) are pretty far from mainstream IME?

Whereas whenever I go to a restaurant since the dawn of the millenial, I typically have twenty disgusting IPAs with colourful labels to choose from, and can maybe find one each of decent lager/ale/stout. Sometimes the brewers are even sneaking extra hops into those though, so ordering something you've never heard of is not safe.

I assume somebody is buying this stuff, and my money is on the dudes (still) wearing the ironic facial hair.

DK where you are going that meads are in style

Idk places around me, there are 3-4 meaderies in my local area. I consider them beer adjacent because it's really only craft beer drinkers that tend to get them. Wine drinkers just get wine. Yeah Trappists as in Doubels, Tripels, and Quads, as the beer type. From the sparkling-ale region of my local breweries. And Sours, Farmhouse Ales, Goses, etc have absolutely flooded my local beer stores that it's almost gotten to the point that if I see a barrel-aged bottle of expensive beer, its a 50/50 flip between an Imp Stout and a Sour.

Whereas whenever I go to a restaurant since the dawn of the millenial, I typically have twenty disgusting IPAs with colourful labels

Depends on how hip honestly. We have local beer stores and local breweries that have wide varieties. When I was in Chicago I frequented Beermiscous and Beer Temple a lot. Restaurants around here often have locals which are fairly wide in variety, my current favorite is a nice ESB that is spreading, but yes boomer establishments where the average age of the clientele are 50+ stock mostly disgusting domestic/Macrobrew IPAs

Don't get me started on the Boomers...

We've reached a generation where ppl don't drink beer. I should probably die soon.

Nein.

Spindrift tastes noticeably better than its competitors to me.

Agreed, spindrift actually tastes good, not merely “more interesting than water.” It’s a little expensive but also head-and-shoulders above any competitor I’ve seen. Both of those are probably because they rely on diluted juice instead of extracts or flavors, afaik.

I typically abhor any kind of seltzer water, but I've found I have a very specific taste for Topo Chico's Lime and Mint. Very refreshing, no sugar/sweetener, zero calories.

My parents were telling me to drink grape juice diluted with seltzer water before it was cool.

Traubenschorle!

Very interesting.

Is the carbonated grape juice in the US typically bought as something other than a non-alcoholic alternative to a wine-drinking event? The white variety I've seen before at weddings and parties and such for kids when the adults are drinking sparkling wine (champagne, or other types). Not that anyone would object to an adult choosing it too (pregnant, alcoholic, religious objections, just a non-drinker).

I'd bet you can charge more for something people are already buying with much more expensive sparkling wine.

I'm used to apple cider being the default there and plenty of parents just letting their kid have a small quantity of wine or champagne, with sparkling grape juice being used as a punch, served out of a bowl?

Sparkling apple juice is available as well.

I don't think it would make sense to put a carbonated drink in a punch bowl.

Is the carbonated grape juice in the US typically bought as something other than a non-alcoholic alternative to a wine-drinking event?

It does always seem to be dressed up in a fancy glass bottle with foil on top, so I guess not.

I've gotten a lot of utility out of my sodastream. Running the numbers it might not be particularly cheaper than buying cases of seltzer, but I appreciate the ease of flavoring (I'm partial to just pouring in some lemon juice) and the ease of re-carbonating a bottle if it goes flat before I finish drinking it.

Lacroix key lime is also kino.

I usually opt for whatever is cheapest. I guzzle the stuff because it scratches my carbonation itch and my need for hydration, so buying in bulk is important for me. If price was no object though, if you have a Wegmans nearby, they have some really interesting flavors. I'm partial to the Cherry Vanilla and especially the Ginger.

So is there something to be said about barber shops of all places? The Wikipedia article on the social phenomenon known as the third place has featured a photo of a barber shop in Brazil as one illustration for a long time as a reflection of the simple fact that barber shops are among the evident third places for men. These are a subject we have discussed here multiple times as there seems to be broad consensus (outside of this forum as well) that they (i.e. third places for [single] men) are mostly dead by now. Broadly speaking there appears to be two opposing narratives on this; one is that these places are dead because men (and adults in general) no longer want them and no longer think they need them, the other is that adults would actually prefer to visit them but they're dead anyway, and they died off because adults in the past bought into the illusion that these are no longer necessary and now it's impossible to resurrect them.

After visiting the Wikipedia page above I went on to ask myself multiple questions. Who goes to the barber shop anymore? As far as I can tell, barber shops are still around, but only in dense urban core areas. Do they exist in the suburbs and exurbs where walkable neighborhoods do not exist? I guess not. Is it that a growing proportion of men are single and many of them let themselves go to such an extent that they don't bother going to the barber? Are married men reluctant or unable to visit the existing barber shops?

The local barbershop culture is a casualty of the safety razor. It's a lot harder to build relationships when you go in 8 times a year for a 15 minute cut than when you're going in 3 times a week for a shave and touch up. There's just no opportunity to build comradery.

There's a reason the only barbershops that still retain that sort of community atmosphere are black barbershops. Black hair styles typically require substantially more professional maintenance than those popular with other ethnicities, so guys are back in the shop on a regular basis. Similarly with women's hair salons. If you're going to be there for 2+ hours at a time and have to keep a regular maintenance schedule, that's a lot more opportunity for banter and friendship formation. Meanwhile I tend to wait until the last second before some important event, then stop by whatever chain is most conveneient to my other obligations that day.

I'm reminded of Ring Lardner's story Haircut, which is a barber reminiscing to a new customer about a deceased regular, who the barber remembers as a salt-of-the-earth guy with a great sense of humor but who the reader comes to realize is a total garbage human being. Edit: included link to story

Yeah, I suspect this plays a big part in it.

In New Jersey, due to corruption, you need 900 hours of training / apprenticeship at a barber school to be able to cut men’s hair. This only really applies to Whites not in college and East Asians, as everyone else knows a guy who will just cut their hair under the table. So this is like a tax specifically on third places. I imagine there are also bizarre health code requirements that are not actually necessary on top of this. Of course there are still “third place” barbershops if you’re willing to spend more money, but I imagine the barbershop in Brazil doesn’t have the issue of retarded regulations making haircuts more expensive, so for the Brazilian it’s always worth the money. Also, when a chain takes over it does everything possible to increase customer turnover and you might be penalized for spending too long with a customer. The ambience is the brightest possible white light so that you aren’t sued if someone is cut, but this lighting is not conducive to bonding.

there is something to be said about barber shops of all places

The scents of the powders etc increase relaxation and it requires close personal touch and trust. Barbershops are probably unique among places for this.

these places are dead because men (and adults in general) no longer want them

This is another factor because men are fine making video games their third place

In New Jersey, you need 900 hours of training/apprenticeship at a barber school to be able to cut men’s hair.

Source: 1 2

Latin America is full of dumb regulations, rent seeking, and corruption. I wouldn't doubt that Brazil has the same thing, and just relies on income inequality to make up for it.

I go to a suburban barber shop. Never really thought about this. There are several in my area. I live in what could be called a "streetcar suburb" of a large Midwestern city, which is not Chicago; the barber shop is five minutes' walk from me, so I will probably always go there as long as they do a decent job.

My barber is, strangely, the most "based" dude I have ever met. Every time I see him, without fail, he ends up talking about how the Anglo-Saxon race deserves to survive, how Andrew Jackson was a hero, how the Jews control the media, and many other similar topics. He does this no matter who else is in the shop - of any age or race. He seems to do a thriving trade, and evidently has good relations with minority-owned businesses that occupy other suites in the building. In general a fascinating guy who I think about often.

I don't hang out at the barbershop, though. I have other things to do. Haircuts are something I just get done and move on. My third place is church, where apart from attending services I serve on committees, put on events, run Bible study, and much else.

Barbers are like that. Or they're altchicks. Have to be into heavy metal to do barbering.

Or an old Italian guy, but that might have gone by the wayside.

I walked into a barber shop in Pittsburgh once. I was the only non-black person. There was a group there just hanging out. They paused their conversation for like 3 minutes after I sat down and then got back to it.

The levels of shooting the shit they were doing was unmatched. I wish I could say more but I ... didn't even understand what they were talking about(??)

All of the other times I've been to a barber shop I only end up talking to the barber, they're usually pretty empty.

I tried wandering into the barber shop by my house and they asked me to make an appointment. Like what. An appointment for a place with a barber pole outside? Wack.

Afaik black hair cuts tend to require more maintenance so it wouldn't shock me if that's a contributor to the creation of a third place.

I go to the hairdresser two or three times a year. If I was trying to maintain a fade or an elaborate beard I'd be in once or twice a month, and also probably a certain social contagion effect where I'd be more likely to go with a friend if it were that frequent and be substantially pickier with my barber

It's like a gun shop, but for black dudes.

Fuck.

I tried wandering into the barber shop by my house and they asked me to make an appointment. Like what. An appointment for a place with a barber pole outside? Wack.

I've always made appointments. I'm in and out in 15 minutes. They don't want a long queue of people waiting to get a haircut. I wouldn't want to sit there and wait either, I usually have more chores to take care of. The place I go (which is just the nearest one to my house, I don't need anything fancy done) doesn't even have a waiting area.

Who goes to the barber shop anymore? [...] Is it that a growing proportion of men are single and many of them let themselves go to such an extent that they don't bother going to the barber? Are married men reluctant or unable to visit the existing barber shops?

For barber shops specifically, the answer is mostly that chain salons like Supercuts have taken over the market, no? They're cheap and convenient, and they have tons of locations in the suburbs, but they're not really social spaces. I treat it roughly the same way I'd treat a dentist's office.

I get the impression that the main people who go to traditional barber shops are old men who are used to going to traditional barber shops.

You're never going to build a community around a chore that takes 15 minutes to complete 8-10 times a year. A combination of looser grooming standards (my grandfather got a haircut every 3 weeks like clockwork to keep everything neat and tidy) and cheap/easy at-home shaving killed the barbershop culture. Even when I used to go to an old school barbershop, I didn't go often enough to even recognize the other customers, let alone form relationships with any of them.

I go to barber shops, went to one for a while enough to be quite familiar with the barber. The barber shop I'm going to now is italian, all the barbers and the clients seem to know one another except me, but dammit they're very cheap and they do a good job. The clients are, except me, pretty much all older men or younger immigrants, and they all seem to be there to hang out more than to get a haircut and a shave.

There’s tons of haircutting places in suburban strip malls. Single men go to them because their wife cant very well give them a hair cut(she, after all, doesn’t exist).

I see a decent few around. Sometimes, as has been said, in strip malls, sometimes just small shops on a corner or in a residential area. Can't say how well they function as third places as opposed to just "get in, get the job done quietly, get out" these days, though.

I'm pretty sure there's a ton of Barber shops (or male hairdressers) in Europe, at least in the places I've passed through, but mostly in places that have apartment buildings. Suburbs don't really have much of anything besides a restaurant or two.

But like malls or shopping areas tend to be surrounded by apartment buildings, which in turn are full of barber/hairdressers.

Otherwise I've never been to a barber, and usually go to a "female" hairdresser.

Looking to educate myself about AI and the various concepts, possibilities and probabilities surrounding it. I know very little about it other than what I see here (which is often over my technical level) and what hits the news, which I assume to be alarmist and often technically-illiterate. My preferred way of deep-diving something is an audiobook or a podcast since I can listen while doing chores/working out/etc. Anyone got anyone recommendations. On a not-unrelated note, is anyone aware of any apps which convert pdfs or epubs into audio files?

Andrej Karpathy is a cofounder of Open-Ai and he has a course named Neural Networks: Zero to Hero. It requires some coding knowledge, but by the end you will understand what a neural net is and a very basic version of GPT and how a tokenizer works. That should give you at least a generalist understand of what is going on with LLMs. I went over it as a software developer and found it enlightening.

I think it's important to have a basic overview of how neural networks (and transformers in particular) work. I did my last deep dive on the subject before all of the videos in this 3Blue1Brown playlist were made, so I can't vouch for all of them in particular, but I think he does a good job of explaining things in general.

Depends on how deep in the technical weeds you want to go.

  • Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Barton and Sutton.
  • Deep Learning, by Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville.

Probably good starting spots. I'd advise to stay away from AI Safety literature, it's definitely going to be more digestible but without an understanding of how AI actually works, its will be pretty hard to separate "what is true" from "what is a cargo-cultist belief based on science-fiction literature".

I recommend Robert Miles' videos. Start with Intro to AI Safety and Why Would AI Want to do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence. Most of his videos were created prior to the release of ChatGPT, but the concepts are all applicable to modern agentic AI. He also made a series of videos on the Computerphile channel that are a good watch (or listen).

For your second question, check out epub2tts or epub2tts-edge

Has anyone joined Blind with their company email address? I'm concerned this is the kind of thing that might get me in trouble with security flags since its clearly not work necessary and easy to search for.

I did but I did it after putting in my two weeks notice

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