domain:experimental-history.com
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I don't think the Holocaust is exceptional as far as genocides go. All genocides are horrific. But the Holocaust happened and it was a genocide, and genocides aren't the same as other war displacements (even if leftists today like to call everything a genocide).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I thought criticism of Israel wasn't the same as criticism of Jews. It's interesting how they're distinct or the same group depending on the convenience for your current line of attack.
Gaashk
1d ago
I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum.
It's not a great sign that it's been 8 hours and you haven't been arguing with any of the responses.
Of course there are vanishingly few self made men, everyone gets almost everything from their family, nation, ancestors, etc. That's proper, right, and necessary.
I don't believe very strongly in meritocracy. Reports of the striver rat race to get into the best colleges, of South Korean grind culture, and of elite overproduction suggest failure points. I would be alright with a world where people mostly followed their parents' professions (assuming they're competent enough for the position -- the child of a brain surgeon might be a more generalist doctor, or if they don't want to do the work, some other PMC for, for instance), aside from the obvious issues with underclass kids with no profession to look to (sure, intermittent work in a warehouse or fast food restaurant is not a good life plan), and technological obsolescence. Trying to get everyone to go to college because blue collar is just so terrible was a bad idea. America should focus more on making things like working in all aspects of chicken farming/processing less terrible, not on importing desperate Guatemalans who will work until their fingernails rot off.
Individualism is fine to the extent that it's possible to interact with people as individuals. If there were some wise judge who was actually wise reviewing all potential immigrants as individuals, and they really had the best interests of the nation in mind, over multiple generations, then sure, fine. But that's not going to happen, just like the communism of a monastery isn't going to scale to a whole country, or even city. States often can't operate at that level (cue Nikolai Rostov "they're actually trying to kill me! Me, whom everybody loves!")
Anyway, yes of course most Americans are citizens because their parents were. Just like everywhere else. There's no frontier that could absorb large numbers of stateless people who failed to earn their citizenship. I guess if the Starship Troopers plan were on the table, where people had to earn the right to vote through national service (but still retained the right to live and work through birth), that would be fine. I dislike the custom of anchor babies, but doubt that anything much will change in that respect.
What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? ... But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work... when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone.
Did Scott miss the plot here? CS Lewis has remarkably little to say about God as punisher. That's one of his signature traits as an apologist. In one brief section in The Problem of Pain, he concedes it as part of a thought experiment to defend the goodness of eternal hell in its most repugnant aspect. But everywhere else, he describe sin as self-torture, and hell as something you do to yourself.
Here lies the primary genius of Lewis as a Christian essayist. Reading him, you really feel, intuitively, that Sin, Hell, and Death are the same thing, rather than the last two being something God arbitrarily imposes on those who do the first. It's the explicit theme of his novella The Great Divorce, where God tries to draw everyone into heaven, but they flee into outer darkness because they prefer their bitter and envious ways. More theoretically, in Mere Christianity, he spends his chapters on the capital vices showing how they make you miserable even at a natural level — in my opinion, this chapter on Pride is one of the greatest ever written, and even a fourth grader can understand it.
Here is a poem in his first work of apologetics, Pilgrim's Regress, sung by an (implied) angel when seeing doomed souls on the fringes of hell:
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
That misery might be stayed,
God in His mercy made
Eternal bounds and bade
Its waves no further swell.
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
This is, on its own, counterintuitive to accept, and IMO the through line of Lewis's oeuvre after Pilgrim's Regress is showing how it's true. CS Lewis's God is a big softie.
The point was that an actual market share would encourage actual importing.
Due to the way the import market works for alcohol, there's almost no grey market. So if the corporation doesn't want to specifically send the real stuff to you, you're not going to get it any way you go about it. I don't believe it's possible for a private citizen in the US to legally get a can of Japanese made Asahi even if he had a blank check.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the “completely different” clause is expected to fly.
So you take Peroni beer. Something with a hundreds of years old recipe, from even before Italy existed, made with Italian ingredients, in an Italian factory, just like Mussolini liked it. Then you slap on the label "Asahi" and some Japanese looking characters and bam you have "Asahi." Should be an open and shut case honestly. Maybe there are other cases that are more borderline, and maybe the court can err in the favor of the company in those cases, but really there are tons of cases that are very black and white.
Maybe I'm just living in fantasy land, but trademarks are too important to trade for consumers as well as producers to simply be treated as chattel that can simply be bought and sold like buildings or cars.
I don't believe Asahi owns any breweries in the US. This whole Peroni thing seems to be part of their push to capture more value through vertical integration, as when licensing the mark the licensee gets to keep a big cut. The peroni factory was almost certainly chosen because it's probably the cheapest out of any macrobrew in their global holdings.
For Europe, I'd imagine that Italy is considered domestic for all intents and purposes. Maybe things will change after Brexit but as long as there's no tariffs I don't see it changing anytime soon.
If they acquire any factories in North America, I'm sure they'll start using those for that region's production.
phosphorus2
1d ago
"despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".
I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms
Ok so the motte has anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic views, to the extent you would prefer the woke to have power. But the woke are notoriously and unambiguously anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. One would think that if those were your reasons you would prefer the motte, no?
A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
J.D. Vance does not actually say that. If your quoted paragraph was the entirety of his words on the matter then I think that your reading would be a fair one. However in literally the next paragraph, w/ emphasis mine:
So I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century. I think we’ve got to do a better job at articulating exactly what that means. And I won’t pretend that I have a comprehensive answer for you, because I don’t. But there are a few things I’d suggest off the top of my head. And given that you guys are all brilliant intellectuals, I see Michael Anton back there. He’s the most brilliant. Given that you guys are all brilliant intellectuals, I think this is one of the main things that we need to run with over the next few years in our country. What does it mean to be an American in 2025?
Vance goes on to list what he thinks citizenship means. They are: Sovereignty, Building, Obligations to Fellow Americans / Gratitude. Noticeably absent is ancestry.
When Vance explicitly addresses what he thinks citizenship means and you ignore it in favor of an implicit reading it comes across as dishonest.
P-Necromancer
1d ago
Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.
Hmm, OK. I read 'indiscriminately opening fire' as 'making no distinction between combatants and civilians,' and since they surely do fire on enemy combatants, they must also fire on civilians at similar rates. Which is obviously untrue, or no aid would be distributed. Is it your position that they don't discriminate on that basis at all (that is, they're just as likely to return fire at enemy combatants as to fire at random civilians), or that they do, but without sufficient care? (Which would be an opinion, not a fact, but whatever.)
Maybe that's my misread.
M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.
He explicitly says the rifles are OK. .22 LR is a different caliber which those rifles can't shoot. So far as I know, there is no widely used 5.56 munition that's less deadly than M855. (Well, there's less reliable/accurate ammo; this makes civilian casualties more likely, not less.) There are rounds which have less penetration, sure: hollow points, the use of which would actually be a war crime. If he wanted to argue 5.56 rifles were inappropriate, he could have done so. Instead he fixated on the bog-standard ammo, emphasizing its spectacular lethality, and, bizarrely, claiming its issue (not even its use!) is a war crime.
I mention NATO because as a rule it can be assumed that using the standard-issue munition of the world's premier military alliance -- the whole thing, not just America, who hasn't signed on to every treaty -- is not a war crime. It's additionally abundant and, due to economies of scale, pretty cheap for its quality. I'm only harping on this because he chose to harp on it.
Who said the rifles are intended exclusively for crowd control? He says repeatedly there's active fighting in these areas -- there's active fighting in all of Gaza, as he acknowledges elsewhere, but he claims these areas are especially bad. If there's serious risk of these sites coming under fire from enemy combatants, these rifles are suitable for engaging them. If there's not, then it sounds like it's actually not an active combat zone.
It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.
Well, the one I'm talking about was physically impossible. I recall there were a number of 'experts' who swore by it, thereby proving that either they're not experts or they're willing to flagrantly lie to propagandize against Israel. It's perfectly possible some members of the IDF have shot children for sport -- I certainly can't prove otherwise, and there might well be other, real proof -- but they weren't the ones in those pictures.
Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?
I note you didn't address the claim that issuing M855 is a war crime. Here's what he said:
Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition... That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
Can you please point me towards the treaty, the case law, anything at all, that makes carrying M855 a war crime in and of itself?
aqouta
1d ago
Heavily endorse this. It's frustrating to have positions put into my mouth that I do not hold. I think many people feel a knee jerk need to defend positions attributed to them and that only reinforces the implied consensus.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
Regarding fuddlore and similar, there's a certain type of person who loves to repeat these sorts of shibboleths regardless of whether they're true. They're a cheap way to signal that you're part of the ingroup and get credibility. Reddit seems to attract these sorts of people since all you have to do is mindlessly paste the fuddlore (bonus points if you add some passive aggression or irony) and you'll be showered in karma.
I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.
Israel says it doesn’t limit the truckloads of aid coming into Gaza and that assessments of roads in Gaza are conducted weekly where it looks for the best ways to provide access for the international community.
Col. Abdullah Halaby, a top official in COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to the territory, said there are several crossings open.
“We encourage our friends and our colleagues from the international community to do the collection, and to distribute the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” he said.
An Israeli security official who was not allowed to be named in line with military procedures told reporters this week that the U.N. wanted to use roads that were not approved.
He said the army offered to escort the aid groups but they refused.
The U.N. says being escorted by Israel’s army could bring harm to civilians, citing shootings and killings by Israeli troops surrounding aid operations.
MSN:
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy ultimately accused the UN of “unforgivable negligence” in its actions preventing food from reaching Gaza.
“The failure of the UN aid mechanism in Gaza is truly catastrophic. 600 trucks’ worth of food the IDF is urging the UN to pick up. I saw mountains of pasta, lentils, hummus, cooking oil, sugar, and flour,” he wrote on X, accompanying a video of him walking among aid supplies.
For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said trucks traversing Gaza have to contend with traveling through an active war zone, along with hoards of desperate people rushing to get the supplies, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Criminal gangs have also previously attempted to ransack the vehicles as they enter the Strip.
“Taken together, these factors have put people and humanitarian staff at grave risk and forced aid agencies on many occasions to pause the collection of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities,” OCHA said in a statement last week.
Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.
TheLoser
1d ago
How are images of the facts on the ground curated propaganda? Is reality propaganda at this point?
It seems like “romantasy” has become the default genre for young women, it's pretty startling. I also have met people who seem to be basing their conception of what romance should be like on these sorts of books. I know a young lady who's desperate for a man who also reads romantasy, which is particulary bizarre because these are books written with female protagonists from the perspective of women. I'm not sure what she expects her dream man to be getting out of these books.
Maybe that kind of thing has been around for a long time. But I know older women who like romance books, and they were never like that. My mother is an avid reader of romance, and a shipper before shipping was cool (there were, in fact, fan forums that shipped Anakin Skywalker with Padme Amidala, and yes, my mom is still sad he turned into Darth Vader).
But my father is certainly no romance novel protagonist, yet my mom talks about how funny he was when she met him, and how all the girls thought he was cute, and talks lovingly about going on drives in the country with him and listening to music, and says that even when there was tension in the relationship, it didn’t matter — “I loved him.” They’ve been married for 40 years. That’s my parents.
My mom is just a sweet lady, she likes love stories because she loves people, and romance novels are about people connecting with each other and sharing vulnerability.
I worry that maybe the market for romance stories has shifted from, “sweet story about people overcoming adversity for true love” to “escapist experience where you get to imagine yourself being seduced by one of Snow White’s magical creatures.” Also, please do not look up "scenting."
I get the feeling that older generations viewed these stories as an enjoyable narrative with an inspiring message about the sacrifices that lead to love, which could be tempered by the actual lived experience of seeing your mother and father, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, go through the reality of marriage and as such understand that the reality isn’t like books — and yet still worthy.
Air Force Command Pauses Use of M18 Handguns After Security Airman's Death
An Air Force command is temporarily barring the use of issued Sig Sauer sidearms amid an investigation into the death of an airman at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming over the weekend.
For those of you who do not pay attention to small arms development or small arms procurement, the story of the M18 is an interesting one.
Several years ago, the US military published a request for a new sidearm for all of its branches, called the modular handgun system (MHS). They asked for several highly specific features, including the ability to replace grips and change slide lengths at the armorer level.
Multiple companies tendered submissions, including Glock, Beretta, HK, SIG, and a few other smaller players. After years of examination and multiple lawsuits (that are worth examination on their own), the department of defense settled on the SIG P320, which they labeled the M17 and M18, depending on the barrel and grip length.
As a result of the contract, multiple law enforcement agencies across the US standardized on the P320 as a service weapon.
Unfortunately for SIG, users discovered that the P320 was not drop safe. If dropped from several feet onto a concrete surface at the correct angle, the mass of the trigger shoe could cause the trigger to pull itself due to inertia.
While SIG did not issue a recall, it did offer a "voluntary upgrade" program that replaced the heavy trigger shoe with a lighter polymer model, which was the one used on the M17 and M18. This variant did not have enough mass to pull itself when dropped from a height onto a hard surface at a specific angle.
However, the pistol now had a reputation. It was The Gun That Goes Off For No Reason. SIG rapidly found itself playing defense against a torrent of lawsuits where individuals claimed that the pistol discharged with absolutely no user intervention. Claimants argued that since the gun was once, in specific circumstances, able to fire without human intervention, that it was fundamentally and inherently unsafe. Even though no one could ever describe a mechanism for uncommanded discharge, SIG lost two of those cases because they shipped a trigger shoe that did not have a Glock-style trigger safety, which would have hypothetically prevented an uncommanded discharge that occurred due to an undescribed mechanism.
Fast forward to now. A US Airman has died, allegedly because the service pistol fired a round while it was sitting in a holster on his desk.
A YouTuber and a redditor have both claimed to be able to repeatedly create an uncommanded discharge. The "gun community" has taken this as permission to Hate SIG, and has begun to do so with gusto.
Here's the thing: both the YouTuber and the redditor manipulate the trigger in their reproduction steps. The YouTuber shove a screw into the trigger assembly, and the redditor literally pulls the trigger with his finger.
To my knowledge, no one has figured out how to make the gun fire without touching the trigger.
I feel like this series of events has culture war implications.
The first reason is because it seems like a lot of culture war activity seems similar to a concept in the gun world called "fuddlore". "Fuddlore", to those who haven't heard about it, is received wisdom that has only a tenuous connection to reality at best, but is nonetheless extremely sticky in the mind of a certain class of person. An example would be someone saying something like "I'd never use an AR-15 because it shits where it eats and constantly jams". You could show them dozens of long duration tests across multiple environments and duty schedules, from multiple sources with different biases, that all prove the modern AR-15 is a solid, dependable rifle that will keep firing in even the most vile conditions. They'll nod their head, then a week later say "I'd never use an AR-15 because it shits where it eats and constantly jams". In the case of the M18, it's the Gun That Goes Off For No reason now, and it's firmly embedded in the fuddlore even though nobody can figure out how to do it.
You might recognize that same mindset from stories here. I've seen people mention it around politics, romantic relationships, COVID, and Lord only knows what else.
The second parallel to the culture war is that a lot of people hate SIG for a few different reasons. Some are fanboys of other brands. Some think they're cheating on the federal contracts. Others just think they're Too Jewish (don't ask me. I don't get it). The end result is that they're using motivated reasoning to make a point of believing the stories. It feels similar to Scott's old arguments as soldiers story.
I don't if I have anywhere else to go with this, but it's wild to see concepts discussed here show up in a different subculture.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Are you an insanely charismatic man in excellent shape, who's impeccably dressed and whose every word and gesture are a near world-class work of performance art? No? Plenty of people have happy relationships - or non-catastrophic relationships - with women with BMIs of 30, 40, 50, even 60.
Huh, this feels like the conclusion of a narrative arc. Never thought we'd hear this message from you, brother. And you're not wrong.
Did you ever find a girlfriend?
YE_GUILTY
1d ago
Thank you for this.
One piece of context, as near as I can tell, is that Lewis came to Christianity by way of Platonism. As such, a lot of his metaphysics (particularly anti-materialism) come from that perspective.
Plato does loom large over a lot of Lewis's writing: The Silver Chair's climax is the Allegory of the Cave, and The Last Battle portrays the Kingdom of God as being the Realm of the Forms. The latter especially is not exactly orthodox (small-o) Christianity: the influence of Plato is something controversial in Christianity ("What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?") especially as Platonism wants absolute primacy of the immaterial over the material, which reacts with Christianity to get very Gnostic.
But it does provide the map he uses here.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
This is the usual way I read the motte.
You do have to be careful, though -- sometimes you can end up with a perfect comment responding to what you thought a discussion was based on a reply to a reply to a reply, and then you realize you spent all that time reverse-engineering what was already stated or dismissed in the discussion.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
If a thousand more Israelis died on 10/7, Gaza would be a smoking, burning crater.
It's not hyperbole to say that Israel has no strategic depth. The distance an American drives to say, Walmart (10 miles) is further than Israel is at its narrowest width. Even a scrappy band of jihadis with no air cover can hold such a small band for a few days. With hostages? Indefinitely.
Israel doesn't get a chance to make a mistake, while its enemies only have to get lucky once to do significant damage.
oats_son
1d ago
Wow, you've described my job to a T. Very little seems to be expected of me and I am increasingly finding it difficult to actually force myself to work on anything, but nobody seems to have noticed or care, and getting on with my coworker/boss is more important. We both do a lot of screwing around. It's decent pay for a single man, but I feel some crazy pressure on me to improve my skills and move on, which feels like it's going to be more difficult the longer I stay, and even though I have a decent amount of free time, my commute and my laziness make it feel like a lot less if I want to actually do stuff, which I usually don't.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
We don’t have to imagine fake Canadian history, we can imagine real American history. Let’s say tomorrow the Navajo decide they’re done being the white man’s bitch and attack the Grand Canyon with smuggled Iranian weaponry. They kill about a thousand people and take a few hundred tourists hostage. The entire white population of the Navajo reservation is evacuated. Twitter is overflowing with clips of Navajo warriors doing the ghost dance over the dead bodies of raped American girls. Big Chief Leaping Antelope declares no surrender until the entire Colorado basin is free of American influence. Bands of raiders take potshots at towns across the Southwest. Dozens of American troops are killed or wounded every week during the attempted occupation by ununiformed partisans blending in with the population.
You know exactly what would happen next, the same thing that happened to all the other tribes who refused to accept American sovereignty.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
indiscriminate
Indiscriminate means “not marked by careful distinction : deficient in discrimination and discernment”. What definition were you looking at? It does not mean that they fire on everyone they see.
ammo
M855 ammo passes through soft tissue more readily, meaning in a large crowd there will be more casualties per shot; his point is that this is a terrible choice for crowd control. Police doing crowd control use rubber bullets etc. In fact the IDF specifically uses .22 LR in Ruger 10/22 rifles for riots in the West Bank. You weren’t aware of this? NATO is not supplying these munitions so I don’t know why you’ve mentioned NATO.
Taking rubber bullets into a situation where you might well get shot at with real bullets is incredibly dumb
It’s an unarmed civilian population receiving food. Rubber bullets are a smart way to do crowd control.
Would that be the thread with several x-ray images of full power rifle rounds, with no deformation whatsoever, in the middle of children's heads?
It was the one confirmed by numerous third party experts who dealt with gunshot wounds. I’m not sure how Israeli pundits responded to it but they may have called them forgeries.
obvious errors
Hm, I don’t see a single error in his testimony. Which error did you have in mind?
aqouta
1d ago
Even in a chiller workplace like the VA Attending psychiatrists start out at around $250k, Which is a little north of what newly minted Bank VP can expect. Bank VPs definitely have some more variability.
DradisPing
1d ago
Still working on my Minecraft API with MCP for AI integration. I got Dockerization working so I can theoretically deploy it somewhere easily. It's not really ready for that as I haven't bothered adding any security to the API yet.
Previous comments here taught me that I can use different LLMs from VSCode, so I've been having some fun with that.
Going forward I really want to let the AI do building construction, so I've been planning out a component system where it can pass component names, options, and bounding boxes and subcomponents will handle the internal details.
I want it to be similar enough to React that it'll be able to transfer over some of that training. Curious to see if I'll run into limits with the context side.
The post was filtered pending mod approval. I believe it's been more like 2 to 3 hours.
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