domain:betonit.substack.com
thejdizzler
1d ago
Just finished my fourth annual reread of Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, which is perhaps the best one volume history book about the civil war ever written. Some random thoughts from my reread below.
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It seemed like the war was coming long before 1860. At least the South seemed ready to leave the union in the 1850s. So why was there no preparation for this war in terms of stockpiling weapons, encouraging military training/enlistment in the US army? Maybe these things would have been too obvious, but at least pro-secessionist leaders could have encouraged things like the strategic localization of ammunition factories, diversification of agriculture away from cotton, and investment in railroads. Nope, instead we have cope about how feminine mechanized labor is, and how the only real work is overseeing a plantation. This society deserved to lose.
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I think Lee is overrated. He managed to win a ton of really impressive tactical victories, but never seemed to effectively follow these up to destroy the enemy army, which is what all the tactics is supposed to be in service of. In fact, Lee's tactics ended up shredding his army much more than his opponents, and he arguably only won because of northern inability to deal with taking casualties, especially under General McClellan.
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It's interesting how much the rich man's war, poor man's fight theme seems not to be true, in contrast to most modern wars I can think of. It seems like a general on one side or the other dies in almost every engagement (Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James McPherson, to name a few off the top of my head). In fact, generals were something like 50% more likely to die than privates, which is a wild statistic.
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Struck by the respectful treatment of Army of Northern Virginia by Grant/Chamberlein upon Lee's surrender. Yes, the South fought for a horrible cause, but still can respect the valor, leadership, and conduct of people you really strongly disagree with. Perhaps an argument against tearing down confederate monuments/renaming forts. You don't beat a man when he's down. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two from this.
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Insane levels of delusion by Southern leadership in Late 1864/1865. How did Hood think that assaulting breastworks head-on was going to work in Franklin/Nashville? How did Davis think the government was going to continue the war after the fall of Richmond?
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Cool to see how much of the technology of this war would presage WW1. Importance of rail lines and logistics to Northern victory. Also shift to destruction of ability to wage war/armies rather than necessarily capturing territory. Arguably this started with Napoleon too.
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I'm getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
No Hydro, I'm hearing you, but it's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about Ms. Zito. You can't really choose to live in 1890 in 2025, especially when you're in your mid twenties and your family is liberal and lives in another state. There is no realistic pressure that her family can exert on her erstwhile suitor, nor is she herself obedient to her parents' wishes regarding her dating life to begin with.
In 1890 there was an entire familial, legal, social infrastructure around the shotgun wedding. And all of that is required to produce the shotgun wedding. To start, it requires that your dad and male relatives want that for you and want to threaten force to get it done. It requires that society will look the other way when such violence occurs, and that society will look down on the cad who hits "betray" in such a way that he will have trouble finding life opportunities at all if he doesn't marry her.
Ms. Zito can't just magic all that into existence by wishing it were so. If she gets knocked up her New Jersey parents aren't going to threaten to beat the dude up if he doesn't marry her, and if they did the guy wouldn't take them seriously, and if they tried to beat him up he would call the cops and the cops would take his side, and if everyone at work knew what happened it would impact him minimally in his profession that he "stuck his dick in crazy" and "her parents stalked him" or something like that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Great advice for a man, doesn't make "being crazy" a dominant female strategy.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Is there a new cheating epidemic?
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Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree
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High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, I think so. At the very least, if the school is bringing the kids on ski trips, that presupposes the parents can pay for the ski trips. If they can't, and the ski trips are treated as part of the curriculum about learning something, then the low-income kids are going to lose out on that 'learning experience'. The ordinary school day is structured to mesh at least some way with the parental work days, if the Alpha school means parents can't drop them off early/pick them up late, or other reasons, that's not going to work out in the long term.
Schools are expected to do a ton more than simply teaching, and the home environments of the kids also has a heavy influence on how well they do. Alpha and the other suggested fixes work best for those who are "I hated school, I was too smart and was held back" and who now have smart kids and plenty of money to burn on "send them to a programme that will accelerate their learning".
What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.
What do you do with the extra four years? Go into a job? Start your own business? Maybe some of the genius fourteen year olds will do that. Do your college learning at home? The example of "paying the kids to learn" with the tokens as per the review doesn't reassure me about that, because it seems the kids didn't want to explore their own learning during summer holidays and free time, they wanted to do it in school time to earn the tokens.
Smart kids from well-off families is where the 'fixes' work and if the parents demand them, then there will always be an educational entrepreneur revolutionary with the latest fix, but it's never going to scale for the average kids from low income backgrounds.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
Homeowners of The Motte -- what would you differently if you could do it all over again?
I plan on building a house in the next 12 months on a lot about an hour away from the Gulf of Mexico America. It's going to be a two-story 5BR house with porches on the front and the back, built in a traditional Southern style.
I'm a bit overwhelmed as I don't even know what I don't know about building, and I want to avoid making costly mistakes that I'll have to pay to renovate later (or worse, be unable to fix at all). Happy to hear both from people who built and people who bought.
Corvos
1d ago
I would say Pratchett did so well because his books are almost unique in his genre for clearly not being slop. Agree with him or disagree, but he has a very particular perspective that he’s coming from and you’re going to end up grappling with his philosophy one way or another.
Corvos
1d ago
All bugman references aside, I think the point is that Asian societies are more conformist, so everyone sends their children to the same (public) schools and then quietly to cram school out of sight.
Weird tech nerds are more likely to brag about sending their children to an experimental school, whereas in Japan this is kind of like saying ‘I’m an enemy of society and I don’t want my children to be brought up in the normal way’. There are special schools for diplomats’ children etc. but not enough to matter at scale.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
I tried the dark theme at one point, but it's not as good as TheMotte theme with DarkReader, so I just use that.
win98 is pretty cool though.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Absolutely, and while overt delusional beliefs are what pop to non-medical people seeing or hearing about these patients, the real problem is the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (often manifesting as a total inability to care for oneself in a functional way). That is much less exciting but more important for commitment purposes a good chunk of the time.
I think a lot of the doubters here would be way more comfortable if they had a chance to stay in a city crisis center for five minutes.
Throwaway05
1d ago
That sounds like a plan. That sounds like you want this to be adjudicated in court instead. Explore that! Examine the consequences! Thank about it! Is it better? Worse?
I haven't seen good faith engagement from you in ages in this conversation. You clearly imply that some infringements on the right to bear arms is reasonable but you don't want to admit what that is then you later try and imply that you don't. Those are incompatible and you must pick.
Blueberry
1d ago
Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism
I can’t parse this sentence. Asian culture is more conforming, so their children go to public instead of private schools? Weird tech-nerds are more non-conforming? I don’t know what bugmen are.
zataomm
1d ago
I felt kind of annoyed by the claim that "most" Supreme Court cases go 6-3 along ideological lines, although I guess the more defensible version would be that the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines. Be that as it may, I created a website this morning to help understand data from the most recent term. Spent more time than I intended on this so I'm hoping someone else finds it interesting: https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=dashboard
aldomilyar
1d ago
These are the standards for a husband, but they're applied after a bunch of attractiveness filter to get to boyfriend/hookup status so it's 'an 8/10 who's good at dating and also has all of the above'
aldomilyar
1d ago
"He thinks we're just having fun, I'm hoping to have his baby and force him to get serious."
Don't put your dick in anything you wouldn't be able to deal with getting pregnant.
aldomilyar
1d ago
One of my friends is a porn producer and has been in the game for a couple decades. One time I was talking to him and the whole step-thing came up, and in his opinion it's simply popular since it injects taboo into a scene without requiring anybody to do anything actually physically excessive beyond a standard pornshoot.
We're beyond saturation point for normal PIV, so just doing a quick find-and-replace in your normal script to slip in 'stepwhatever' gets you equivalent taboo value as having to recruit people to do stuff that's actually physically onerous. Also the relative paucity of large families plus the increased rate of step-relationships adds fuel to the fire.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I liked his books too, but let's face it, it's slop. The most valuable skills you learn in school is grinding and discipline, and reading slop is inherently not suited for that.
AvocadoPanic
1d ago
Once your in these stores in the shitty area of town they ask to see your ID because offering pornography to minors is a crime.
Creative sex toys, generally dildos designed or themed around fantasy monsters. Some front page examples now include Kragg the Rock Dragon and Reggie the Mothman, along with the more typical werewolf or saytr or minotaur.
Bad Dragon itself is a specific company that pioneered in the field (and has kinda become the Kleenex of sex toys, double entendre not intended) and runs heavily on the furry theme, but there’s a small industry out there. Because of some worker disputes and BD focusing more on male customers, I’d expect most female novelty-seekers to work with a variety of other companies (or chase the zillions of Etsy shops focusing on the field) as well. See The Wandering Bard, or PhoenixFlame Creations, Primal Hardwere, Weredog,co,uk, or Paladin Pleasure for other examples in the business.
Uh, somewhere private, and only if you don’t mind getting blasted with every imaginable fantasy dick (and a handful of vulvas/tongues/butts). All of these are hugely NSFW.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1d ago
I'd say I learned quite a lot from my readings of Pratchett. Perhaps not things that would improve my test scores, but in terms of real life relevance almost certainly more important than anything "Distilled Science Schoolbook vol 4" ever taught me.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1d ago
Agreed. Alpha et. al. need to come out and own their model as not being suitable for the average kid. Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder and damn the consequences...
Clementine
1d ago
We already have plenty of evidence that no, people are not aware of the difference between reality and fantasy.
My sources here are going to be limited because googling these topics is a distasteful experience.
In July researchers from Melbourne and Queensland universities published a study on the prevalence of sexual strangulation among 18- to 35-year-olds in Australia and found that over half of the more than 4,700 surveyed had choked or been choked by a sexual partner. Among young people, sexual choking has become mainstream.
The prevalence study found that the main way young people were introduced to choking was through pornography (34.8%). The next most commonly reported first exposure to choking was conversations with friends (11.5%), while 9.2% had learned of the practice through discussing it with a sexual partner. One in 10 were unsure how they came across the idea and only 3.9% had never heard of it.
A majority of those surveyed (61.3%) had seen choking depicted in porn, although this included more men (71.4%) than women (51.5%).
Similarly anal:
National Survey of Sexual Attitudes research undertaken in Britain has found that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse has risen from 12.5% to 28.5% over recent decades. Similarly, in the US 30% to 45% of both sexes have experienced it.
I don't have statistics on an increase in incest irl as a result of incest in porn (and I'm not interested in doing much googling it) but it's enough of a concern that people who work in organizations dedicated to fighting child sexual assault mention is as an additional risk of the legally produces videos, aside from the cover and camouflage those videos provide for the millions of videos of actually illegal rape
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.
The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.
The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.
You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1d ago
things are just simpler when you're inherently on the same page
I'll note that this doesn't seem to be symmetrical; there's no real male counterpart to the tomboy archetype. AFAICT, women don't fantasize about doing their nails and gossiping with their BF(F)s, or at least there's not nearly as many of them as guys who fantasize about playing videogames and shittalking with their GFs.
The chauvinistic side of me wants to say that it's because girl stuff is just objectively lame, or at least less cool than guy stuff. I think that's half-right, but I feel there's still something missing.
Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.
Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.
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