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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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No, but I love the throwback, you or anyone else want to fire that back up sometime for nostalgias sake?

I think the Bolsheviks very openly and actively wanted to unite the workers of the world which would have certainly included going to the Atlantic if someone hadn't stopped them

In real life, the Soviets only reached even as far as Berlin because of copious American and British assistance. Without that, they might have at best fought the Germans back to Barbarossa start-lines. On their own, they barely beat Finland. The Red Army marching all the way to the Atlantic is ridiculous. "If it wasn't for us, the communists would have taken over!" was a useful bugbear for everybody from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco but Bolshevik conquest of Europe was always a fantasy.

Okay I'm open to it - let's say you're right - doesn't that make US the bad guys?

doesn't that make US the bad guys?

Wrong question. Ask: Were US good or bad players of the great game?

Look at the game board. At the beginning of session, there were seven players. At the end, only two were left.

The Red player who held one sixth of the board at the start, succesfully defended himself and was able to snatch few more squares.

While the Blue player beat and outmaneuevered all others and owned or controlled everything else.

Some people who are never satisfied might bitch that Blue victory should be even more lopsided, that if Blue optimized his play to perfection he might prevent the Red from taking the few squares he gained.

Or team color one could've teamed up with other color and the communists could have not won and their cities could've been firebombed into ashes instead.

On Earth 2 we're not surrounded by soul-sucking Brutalist architecture that seemingly popped out of nowhere and DEi tribunals that no one can remember voting for

I see what you were going for, but no, at the end of the war everyone like me had their both-metaphorical-and-often-much-more-literal dicks smashed into the dirt by the communists and their allies

On Earth 2 we're not surrounded by soul-sucking Brutalist architecture that seemingly popped out of nowhere

...you think that Nazi architecture was any less brutalist?

Speaking plainly, this mockup does not make me despair in the same way modern drop down florescent lights and cheap thin plywood does. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1986-029-02%2C_%22Germania%22%2C_Modell_%22Gro%C3%9Fe_Halle%22.jpg

But I live in a nice house on a hill with some land where I don't have to deal with any of that day-to-day. Maybe I would feel differently if I did? (This sentence was facetious - meant to be playful - was not speaking plainly)

Thin plywood and fluorescent lights aren’t products of brutalism though; the former long predates it and the latter are popular because they’re much cheaper to operate than the previous incandescent bulbs.

Yeah, most of the stuff that people deride "brutalism" for is less a conscious choice of some boutique architechtural style and more just wanting to do stuff for cheap, something many countries particularly did in the 60s-70s when urbanization was in the full swing and housing needed to be created fast for millions of rural workers moving to the cities.

A lot of people want "prettier housing" but it's much rarer to actually want to pay the cost - one can see it in how often such desires are phrases like "they should have built that like this [decades ago]..."