domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
12m ago
where Tony Stark is guilted into supporting the Sokovia Accords
Also, Tony should have known better than to trust Accord oversight, considering the first thing they tried to do is nuke Metropolis [or wherever that was] to contain the Chitauri invasion. He ended up directly having to clean up that mess.
I get that Tony Stark very quickly became "Bay Area thought as a superhero", but that was not good judgment. Then again, because Tony really doesn't have good judgment, he'd naturally support the Accords, so maybe I'm more annoyed about it than I should be.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25m ago
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory.
But Russia also allows groups of its citizens, like this one, to cosplay as the Nazis. Of course one could argue that kolovrat is something else than a barely-plausible-deniality swastika (after all, it has barely plausible deniality!), but come on now.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
30m ago
outside of DEI inclusion
This is a huge parenthetical. They're definitely alienating people with the way they're doing this, consciously. And it's not just about the inclusion, it's about the very intense way in which they're doing that inclusion and how communicating the right message flows through everything that gets made.
I think there's a lot of paint-by-numbers going on, but I'd remind you that the most controversial movie of the past decade was almost certainly The Last Jedi, which famously had an auteur who deliberately made unexpected, confusing, and ✨subversive✨ choices that alienated people and damaged the brand. There's a lot of both going on; the only constant is DEI.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
37m ago
My problem with Civil War was that it wasn't a Captain America movie, it was an Avengers movie. I didn't even feel like Captain America was the main character, he just felt like one out of a cast of characters.
I'm sure this just comes from the comics, every time I speak up about my criticisms of the MCU I get told it's because they adapted something straight from the comics.
edmund-nelson
38m ago
I run into this issue with plot holes, where I can see them if the show/movie is "thinky" or is trying to make you think, but when the show is just trying to be fun you can easily ignore the plot holes because the show isn't trying to do this. Books are typically the domain where you can have stories that have thinking and work well. Stuff like to Kill a mockingbird works because it's in book form. The television show Attack on Titan was like this, the first few seasons were a pure spectacle, there was no real deep plot going on and no need for one, but once they started having a major plot in the last 26 episodes+2 1.25 hour long television specials, the holes in the story started to show.
I don't know what to call this it isn't "suspension of disbelief" it's more like "suspension of thinking rationally about the plot". Like the issue is that these stories have 1 writer only and you have to write both a plot and the characters. Most people actually care more about #2 than the plot and most plots kinda blow. The spectacle of most shows is more important than the actual story for good reasons, (Books typically are a much better medium for pure storytelling, but a lot of the best books tend to fall in the "books you read in high school" category, which if you really pay attention the grand narrative of them is mostly trash). The only exception was this tiny weird niche space opera called Legend of the Galatic heroes which I swear is like if star wars was written by a Neoreactionary.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
46m ago
Does anyone feel that the motte is becoming more soapboxy?
Scrolling the CW thread, I feel like the #parent:#child ratio is much lower than it used to be. During the reddit times, there were threads that that had 50+ responses. That seems to be a relic of the past.
It feels off now. I scroll through the main thread, see yet another >1000 word post with barely any engagement, scroll past it, same thing again, and again.
I think the lurker and casual poster counts are decreasing, we are left with more and more soap boxers who do feel the need to produce endless walls of text, but not engage with other peoples walls of texts..
quiet_NaN
47m ago
A war is fought not only on the battlefield, but also in the realm of propaganda.
As you point out, the size of Azov is trivial compared to the size of the army, and wearing swastikas does not actually grant combat superpowers.
But this should also mean that the possible battlefield gains from arming them with US weapons would be small.
On the propaganda front, it does not matter that they are only a small group. The USSR fought one big war, in which some 13% of its citizens were killed. In the end, they won, and it is a victory celebrated to this day in Russia. Their enemies in that war were flying the swastika.
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory. One would be better off supporting a brigade of child rapists and cannibals.
Also, the threat model is not that Azov declares its own state and sets out to conquer Ukraine by force of arms -- which is indeed silly given the power balance. There is a huge difference between having two thousand guys with military gear outside your borders and having them freely move within your country. It takes a lot more than 2000 men with guns to defend against 2000 determined terrorists.
One of the scarier phrases from Weimar Germany is "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- uttered when the German army refused to engage paramilitary putschists because they recognized them as comrades in arms. Every army seems to have some fraction of crypto-fascists, and the Ukraine army is likely no exception.
At the moment, Azov are suffering the Jewish president Zelenskyy to live because his interests and their interests align -- both want to stop Russian aggression by military means. I find it highly likely that Ukrainian mainstream -- and their president -- will tire of this war before Asov does. From the situation on the ground, it looks like any peace deal would involve some concessions to Russia, Crimea if nothing else. At that point, Azov could turn against Zelenskyy.
JulianRota
1hr ago
On the one hand, it could be seen as a knee-jerk over-reaction based on the cultural prominence of this overall viewpoint.
On the other, the thread OP did say "scares the shit out of me" about it, and did not elaborate on exactly what was so scary about a thousand-ish men being given some weapons in the middle of a huge war involving many hundreds of thousands on both sides.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
It is the biggest possible nothingburger or the smallest possible real world impacting event. Nothing will change drastically, but it is a sign that the US ability to control the whole world is slipping further. The real world consequences will be meh.
johnfabian
1hr ago
Party Down is an all-time great comedy show that very few people have seen. Strongly strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot
haroldbkny
1hr ago
The dumbest thing for me about Civil War started in the beginning: where Tony Stark is guilted into supporting the Sokovia Accords because the mother of someone killed in the battle blames him. The Avengers were literally saving the world from a genocidal robot, and unfortunately, there were civilian casualties.
I don't think that's dumb. If there's anyone to blame, it's Stark. It was his idea to build the robot. I do think it's stupid for the rest of the avengers to feel guilty, but Stark should totally feel guilty.
ajuuiomml
1hr ago
Set up automated contributions into the s&p 500. This is the greatest return on 10 minutes of effort you will ever have in your life.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
III. The North Shore: When Planners Draw the Map
To old-timers like my father, there is no North Shore. For the past 30 years, every time the neighborhood is mentioned on the news, I hear “When did it become the North Shore? It’s the North Side. There is no shore.” He’s right about it not having a shore. The Allegheny usually sits at lest 6 feet below the riverwalk, and in warmer months there are plenty of boats tied off. As to when it became the North Shore, the earliest reference I’ve seen is from 1974, but I haven’t exactly looked very hard. Nonetheless, for reasons that will soon become apparent, I share my father’s disdain for what feels like a neighborhood that was designed more by city planners than by natural processes. But this time the planners won, and to everyone who isn’t my father, it’s the North Shore.
The North Shore begins roughly at the West End Bridge and runs between the river and the highway for about 2 ½ miles before the last occupied land peters out as you approach the line with the independent borough of Millvale. There are roughly three sections. The first section comprises the area around the stadiums, ending around Federal St. This area was historically known as “The Ward”, the first ward of old Allegheny City, and was similar to the Strip in that it was a rough, mixed-use area near a river with small-scale industry and rowhouses for working-class residents. By the ‘30s the residential areas were being cleared out for warehouses, by the ‘50s the area was run down, by the ‘70s there wasn’t much left. When Three Rivers Stadium was built in the late 1960s, the land it sat on was formerly occupied by a scrap yard. The Carnegie Science Center opened in 1992, but other than that this area was basically a no-man’s land for 30 years, a stadium in a sea of parking lots.
In the ‘90s is when the “North Shore” really took off as a buzzword. The Pirates were demanding a new stadium. The Steelers weren’t exactly demanding one, but they figured that if the Pirates got one then they deserved one too. The Pirates threatened to leave; the Steelers didn’t exactly threaten, but there were mysterious rumors of a stadium being built at a racetrack in a neighboring county. To make a long story short, the teams got their stadiums. I could focus this section on the pros and cons of public stadium financing, but that argument has been done to death. What’s more interesting is the other bullshit that went along with this.
It wasn’t enough that the teams got new stadiums; the North Shore had to be an entertainment district. And in typical municipal fashion the city awarded the exclusive development rights to Continental in a no-bid contract. Development has been consistently behind schedule, though there are rumors that the Steelers are quietly trying to prevent construction on the surface lots because they don’t want to lose tailgating space. The existing footprint is smaller than originally envisioned and a large apartment complex has been delayed for about 15 or 20 years at this point. There’s an okay but rather uninspiring stretch of North Shore Drive that’s occupied by several small office buildings and the kind of bars that sell well drinks by the gallon in a plastic cup after 9 pm, actively recruit bachelorette parties, and reference the “hit” TV show Nashville filming there as a reason to show up. I guess this is what politicians must picture when they envision “nightlife”. In the same vein, when the Port Authority (now PRT) decided to expand the light rail network in the mid-2000s with a tunnel under the Allegheny they decided to make it run west along the Ohio so it could have one stop between the stadiums and a terminus near the casino. This routing pretty much foreclosed the possibility of any network expansion into the more populated parts of the North Side or surrounding suburbs in favor of slightly better access for the occasional southern suburban tourist.
The second section is a small area between Federal St. and Anderson St. that has the most urban feel of the neighborhood. It’s a dense collection of midrises including one attraction, the Warhol Museum (that is, if you don’t include my old office). There may have been residential here at one point, but it’s long gone.
The final section is the most obscure. The remainder of the neighborhood is what used to be Schweitzer Loch, or Swiss Hole. There are a few scattered commercial and industrial concerns along River Ave., and it’s bounded by apartment complexes on either end, including lofts in the old Heinz plant, but it’s mostly empty these days. It’s commonly said that the neighborhood was destroyed when the highways were built between the 60s and the 80s, but that’s not exactly the case. George Warhola, Andy Warhol’s nephew, owns a scrapyard in the area, and he explained the real story to a newspaper a few years back. There were plenty of rowhouses there as late as the 90s, and there are a few remnants of the old neighborhood remaining today. What really happened is that Buncher, the developer largely responsible for the Strip, spent several decades buying up property and demolishing the buildings as soon as the deals closed. The idea was that once the last of their Strip real estate is built out they’ll have acquired the entire area and will be able to build their own model New Urbanist community as a sort of extension of the Heinz Lofts. Warhola basically told them to fuck off innumerable times no matter how much he’s been offered. I say good for him. If some developer wants to tear down a real urban neighborhood so they can build a fake urban neighborhood, they deserve to have a scrap yard in the middle of it. People like Warhola aside, Buncher ended up running into a more formidable foe, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN).
Combined sewage outflows have been a problem in Pittsburgh for quite some time. In the old days, all the sewage, whether from stormwater runoff or domestic water use, went straight into the rivers. In the 1950s ALCOSAN built a treatment plant that was intended to end this practice. The problem is that treatment plants are only built for a certain capacity. While they can handle the actual sewage without a problem, since sanitary lines and storm drains are all tied into the same system, they become overloaded any time there is significant rain (which is pretty often in Pittsburgh). To prevent sewers from backing up into people’s homes, there are several combined sewer outflow points along the rivers and their tributaries. The upshot is that anytime we get more than a tenth of an inch of rain, a certain amount of untreated sewage is being directly discharged into area streams. This isn’t a problem unique to Pittsburgh, but it’s worse here than in any other city in the country.
The most straightforward solution to this problem is to redirect sewage into dedicated lines. The problem is that there is a high cost for the authority to build the dedicated lines, and a high cost for homes to tie into them. The terms of an EPA consent decree meant that houses along the new lines were virtually unsaleable for a while (and accordingly sat vacant), because the cost of redoing the sewerage made buying them financially unfeasible. Decades later, split systems have hardly made a dent in the problem. ALCOSAN’s solution, then, is to build a series of tunnels that will hold the excess stormwater so that it can be treated during dry periods. Construction of the system is expected to take years, but it will reduce combined outflows by 70%. Construction, however, requires a a large amount of land to use as an access point for the boring equipment, and there’s no better place for an access point that a large vacant area along the river. So ALCOSAN bought all of this land off of Buncher earlier this year and will soon tear it all up to build their tunnels. What will happen to the land after this is anyone’s guess (I didn’t read anything about any permanent facilities there), but Buncher is out of the game for the moment. My guess is that once the project is complete Buncher will see what the property looks like and maybe buy it back off of ALCOSAN for less than they sold it for, just in time for them to build their dream community. And since the remaining individual landowners will see their property condemned through eminent domain, Buncher won’t have to deal with the George Warholas of the world. But that’s off the table for now.
What does the future of the North Shore look like? Probably not too dissimilar to the present. The area is still pockmarked with a number of large surface lots that are unlikely to go away unless the Steelers abandon their current stadium for one built elsewhere and this seems unlikely to happen, because the Steelers aren’t the kind of team that’s going to start screaming for a new stadium. I’m convinced they’d still be playing at Three Rivers (which was a very good football stadium but a terrible baseball stadium) if there hadn’t been such a push to build a new home for the Pirates. Heinz Field is already about as old as Three Rivers was when calls for its demolition began, and the lease on Heinz is set to run out in 2031, but the Steelers have already indicated that they intend to renew the lease and at the very least haven’t given any indication they want a new venue. While I promised I wouldn’t get into stadium politics here, I personally find it pretty wasteful that NFL teams can’t share stadiums like they used to. When I worked on the North Side, I’d occasionally take walks along the river and would see Heinz Field invariably standing vacant, a monolithic white elephant. You’re talking about a facility that cost hundreds of millions of dollars that’s used 8 times a year for regular season games plus a couple preseason games and maybe 1 or 2 playoff games if you’re lucky. The situation in Pittsburgh is actually better than in most NFL cities, because Pitt also plays here 6 or 7 times a year. Add on a couple concerts and the occasional miscellaneous large event and you’re talking maybe 20 out of 365 days that you actually need a large stadium. And these events are almost always on weekends, which is great for parking but bad for integrating it into the urban fabric. I don’t find the baseball stadium nearly as distasteful, because they at least use it 81 times a year, and the environment surrounding a weekday or weeknight Pirates game adds a festive air to a normally mundane workday, as opposed to a Steelers game, or even a Pitt game, which is like “dropping a circus” on an area that’s not really used to it.
But, as I mentioned earlier, the Steelers unfortunately seem to be driving the North Shore’s development, which means that the surface lots adjacent to the stadium on the eastern side are unlikely to ever be developed. They actually build a parking garage on one of them at an od angle, the seeming intention being to make the remaining space unusable for anything but surface parking. There was some recent development next to PNC Park, and there’s some planned development on the western side of the stadium, but nothing to suggest that this will ever develop into a real neighborhood. ALCOSAN’s acquisition of the entire Schweitzer Loch area takes that off the table for at least the next half decade, though it seems unlikely that anything would have happened over there in that timeframe anyway. Buncher certainly didn’t seem to have any problem selling it after spending 30 years acquiring it, and if they have to wait another 10 to buy it back it then it’s no great loss. Given that the entire area is being controlled by developers who don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to do anything, or are at the very least facing strong disincentives (hey, we gave you that sweetheart deal, so you’d better play by our rules), buzzwords like gentrification don’t really apply. I don’t see the area becoming anything more than it already is, at least within my lifetime, but I don’t see it becoming anything less either, so I guess that’s a good thing.
Neighborhood Grade: Non-residential. There are only 3 residential complexes in the neighborhood at present, with a fourth one on the horizon, but they’re pretty well spaced from one another, and Heinz Lofts isn’t even in the official neighborhood boundaries (it’s officially in Troy Hill, but that’s crazy talk). There’s practically nothing in the way of functional businesses here, which is to say that there may be some but I’m not aware of any. When I worked down here there were plenty of casual bar and grill type places I could go to for a greasy lunch, but not much in the way of casual grab and go spots with the exception of a cafeteria-type place in an office complex lobby that was obviously geared towards office workers.
Having reached the conclusion of this section, I want to say that my father’s hatred of the term “North Shore” is symbolic of the type of boneheaded planning the whole area represents. I have no idea what my father’s opinions are on urban development are, if he even has any (and considering my parents moved beyond the suburbs when they were still in their 20s to avoid having neighbors it’s a pretty good bet that he doesn’t), but the whole enterprise seems like one of these misguided efforts to generate a tourist area from scratch. “North Side” sounds too urban and gritty, “North Shore” sounds pleasant and inviting. And I will admit, the riverfront is very well done. I enjoy tailgating as much as the next guy, but why leave what should be prime real estate an empty lot most of the year so that the diminishing percentage of people who can afford to go to Steelers games can drink outside for a few hours beforehand? The worst part of this is that there is plenty of space under elevated highways that’s really only suited for parking, so filling in the remaining holes doesn’t diminish the total amount of tailgate space as much as an aerial photo would suggest. Why redirect your light rail system toward serving a nonresidential area? Why give development rights to one company that can be manipulated rather than selling the parcels individually?
The answer to these questions is fairly simple — there seems to be an obsession among city planners towards catering to suburbanites who may visit a few times a year rather than creating a neighborhood where people might want to live every day of the year. The Tilted Kilt was not the kind of bar one was inclined to go to every day after work. By their own convoluted metrics, the North Shore has been a roaring success. Even the slow pace of development contributes to this illusion. Instead of a quick wave of construction that nobody can keep up with and that comes to an end they get an endless cycle of project announcements, groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings, etc. Rinse and repeat for every 5 acre parcel. Get the mayor’s name in the paper (though to his credit the current mayor hasn’t seemed as involved with this nonsense). The fact that what we end up with is an incongruous mishmash of parking lots, legitimate destinations, and tourist tat is completely lost on the so-called City Fathers.
I assure you I’m not as salty about this as I may seem. The riverfront is a legitimate asset, Stage AE gave us the mid-size concert venue we’d needed since Syria Mosque was torn down, and the bars have their market. It’s certainly a lot better than it was during the Three Rivers Stadium days. It’s just frustrating to realize that certain pressures never go away. History, largely correctly, regards these kinds of large-scale renewal efforts as failures, and one would think that our elected officials and hired planners would be hip to this. But there’s still a tendency to abide by these old principles, even if under another name. If the presence of sports stadiums drives the kind of economic development that politicians promise when they want to spend money on them, then the land they own in the vicinity should sell for top dollar. They shouldn’t need to give one developer rights to the entire area because even if the developer can list 500 reasons why it needs all the land to achieve the city’s vision it will still be more economical to sell the parcels individually at market rates. But the risk there is that things might not turn out as the politicians envision. Instead of a nightclub and Southern Tier Brewing you could end up with anything. A lot of black people live on the North Side; what if the land doesn’t sell for as much as you hoped and the commercial strip in front of the stadium is filled with check cashing places and pawn shops? What if it looks like Forbes Ave. did in the ‘90s? What if it just sits vacant? There’s a push/pull dynamic of city planners seeing an undeveloped area and developing a vision for it, and then trying to make sure that vision is achieved, irrespective of whether there’s a market for that vision or not. Developers show glossy renderings of shiny new buildings surrounded by lush landscaping on sunny days inhabited by happy pedestrians, and everyone — politicians, the media, normal people, etc. — thinks “that would be nice”, and the politicians want to make it happen come hell or high water. So then begins the long fight of trying to realize that vision, to turn renderite into reality. But then come all the external pressures and arguments about traffic, parking, affordable housing, architectural design, and, above all, cost, and the whole thing gets slow-walked and built in a piecemeal fashion, and since this was the vision of politicians and not the market, there’s no guarantee that it will fill any real demand.
So what we get is the North Shore we deserve. A place that’s good enough. Cromulence, if you will. But it’s nonetheless a place where one is forced to reckon with whether full potential was ever realized. A place that’s urban without the urbanity. It has pedestrians but no real street life. It’s an office park in the day, a bar neighborhood at night, and a festival ground on the right weekends, but it rarely manages to be all at the same time. It’s a place where a pleasant riverside stroll among rare beauty leads to a terminal vista of an empty parking lot. It’s frustrating. I’ve walked around here more than most other neighborhoods, and I still don’t know what to make of it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
I've seen people claiming Biden is old and senile for the last six years, when they weren't claiming he died and was replaced by a surgically altered body double. They have pointed to weird speech gaffes, reading teleprompter cues out loud, and Biden falling off his bike.
I have mostly ignored these examples.
Lately it actually seems like he's as senile as people have been trying to make it seem.
hanikrummihundursvin
2hr ago
The politics of Joe Rogan, more or less.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
2hr ago
Does it matter? All religions are made up. None of it is true, regardless of which harry potter novel is cannon for a particular sect. No one rose from the dead. No one ever has, and if they ever do it will be hard nosed scientific research that gets us there, not some fantasy novel.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
2hr ago
Yeah, the responses to this kind of issue are really one sided. Female attitudes around this issue (at a societal level) will not change in your lifetime, so all you can do is change how you react to it.
freemcflurry
2hr ago
I'm not familiar with him, what do you mean by counter-culture?
JulianRota
2hr ago
It does seem interesting. What remains to be seen is to what extent the Saudis will actually start pricing or selling at least some oil in currencies other than USD, and whether the US will be less committed to defending the current Saudi regime.
See the discussion here.
I disagree with your interpretation somewhat. He's talking about inventors and scientists, so the extreme end of intelligence. This is "tails of the bell curve coming apart" argument rather than intelligent black people not existing.
There's another sort of of-topic interesting point: I'm not really sure that "people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US" is significantly different from "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as".
It's fine and well if this is how you see it, but there are people who don't agree. If you treat these things as interchangeable you'll be slandering your targets in front of them.
The cardinal, anti-meritocratic sin of judging people by their descent instead of their own accomplishments appears just as strongly in in both cases.
I don't think everything should be meritocratic, though. I wouldn't let some random dude take the place of my cousin in my family, just because he's more competent, and/or more pleasant to be around, for example.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3hr ago
It's a threat insofar as SJ persecutes Nazis and thus a statement that non-haters of Nazis are Nazis is a threat to persecute anyone who doesn't join in the persecution.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3hr ago
I think they may also have internalized that there is a mental cost to flashy possessions. They attract attention, they send certain messages to people around them, and they can occupy your own thoughts as a focus of concern, where a boring used sedan simply disappears.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3hr ago
War tends to be good for the incumbent, historically speaking.
Is this true? WWI is tricky because the Democrats winning 1910-12 was out of the norm for that era, but the Democrats did nothing but lose in subsequent elections and by 1920 the GOP had the Presidency and a massive Congressional majority thanks to running against Wilson's internationalism. WWII also gets tricky because the FDR coalition was so insanely dominant, but winning the war didn't save the Democrats from getting crushed in 1946. The Korean War likewise resurrected the GOP from the dead, with them winning a trifecta in 1952 (They wouldn't win the House again until 1994.). The Vietnam War arguably scuttled LBJ's Presidency and even winning the Gulf War in spectacular fashion didn't save H.W. Bush in '92. The W. era GOP performed unusually well in '02 and '04, but were dead in the water by '06. IIRC Biden's approval nosediving had to do with the ugly optics of the withdraw from Afghanistan.
The female Ghostbusters was within the last decade.
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