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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3326 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

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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So, what are you reading?

I'm starting Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer, after a re-watch of the LoTR films. It's an "other side" story from Mordor's perspective mentioned occasionally on /r/rational. Hopefully it doesn't accomplish this by ruining the "good guys" entirely, but I suppose we'll see.

I've been reading The Foreigner Group by Carolus Löfroos. It's evidently somewhat infamous as being written by a Swedish man who volunteered for the allegedly Nazi-aligned Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine during 2014-2015, well before the time of the 2022 Russian invasion.

It was initially set to be published by Ian McCollum's Headstamp Publishing. Ian is a fairly mainstream source of firearms trivia, and his imprint mostly publishes books about various intricacies of firearms manufacturing and history. Apparently they for some reason agreed to publish this book, then a bunch of people flipped out (I've never seen it specified exactly who flipped out or what specifically they did) and they cancelled it. It's now being published by the considerably more heterodox Antelope Hill. I'll refrain from taking a position on them, you're welcome to take a look at what other things they publish if you want to.

Anyways, I'm about 2/3 of the way through it. For all of the furor, I haven't seen anything all that remarkable yet. It's a moderately interesting tale of a man who volunteered to fight in a somewhat poorly-equipped informal formation in a mostly low-intensity and undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. The author seems to have suffered some reputational issues in Sweden due to his volunteering. I haven't yet seen the book express any opinions about racial issues, Jews, or pretty much any political issue aside from opposing Russian expansionism and imperialism. The author does liberally refer to thinks he doesn't like as "gay", but it seems to me to be more of a 90s-style meme than actual hostility to homosexuals. I don't really see anything here worth cancelling over.

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