domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4m ago
What? Who believes that? It's my understanding that a strong majority people across all political sides think [European] WWII was preventable, it's just that the reasons vary. I think there are, broadly speaking, about three camps that conveniently tend to align with modern political positions:
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The people of Germany should have been better at fighting back and denouncing Nazism when it was rising and/or after Hitler took control (Left)
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The other nations around Germany should have been better at drawing firm lines in the sand for what was allowed and what was not, it was appeasement that let Hitler get out of control (Right)
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The winners of WWI shouldn't have imposed such an overly strict and emasculating treaty of Versailles which led to German resentment and decline creating an environment of radicalism and lawlessness (Center)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
12m ago
"Scapegoating" itself as a word comes from Jewish tradition where the sins of the entire nation would be laid on a single literal goat who was then released into the wilderness (practically, pushed off a cliff outside town), while another 'innocent' goat would be sacrificed on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Jesus literally and symbolically took the role of both being innocent and being sacrificed, and it's quite literal in Christianity that he took on him the sins of the world there, which sins would otherwise prevent us individually from reaching heaven. Reasons for why exactly he was capable of doing this differ across sects but usually are some variant of him being innocent or of godly nature.
In modern discourse being scapegoated is seen as a bad thing (i.e. avoiding responsibility) but Christians would agree that you need some action yourself to obtain this absolution, though it's "free" in a more general sense. Here is the key point where the various sects differ greatly, what action? Some believe that you need to follow some kind of true regret/restitution/prayer process, others that you need to confess to a priest, others that you actually don't have to do anything other than once in your whole life ask for forgiveness and that's it.
aldomilyar
15m ago
I just felt like it should have been brought into the vampire climax somehow and felt like it just kinda weirdly floated above the rest of the movie just to tick the 'racial oppression themes' mentioned box moreso than really contributing to the plot perse. Also like the only two real white person interactions of the movie are 'The Local Klan is ready to go on 24 hours notice for the grave crime of selling an old barn' and 'Old drunkard's friend is mass lynched for the crime of having $20' which is a pretty insane setup.
If it had tied into the vampire plot with say the Vampiric mulatto woman going to the local town and making up a rape or something to galvanize the Klan into action to get the vampires into the barn I'd buy that, or if it somehow tied into the source of the Chicago money with organized crime contacts using the Klan to try and get revenge. Otherwise it's just a child's understanding of the South where mass lynchings were a daily occurence in every locality.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23m ago
It depends on what parts of the Bible. Some, absolutely. My very-atheist hometown of Portland, OR (suburbs but still) had a "Bible as Literature" English elective class in high school! No, I didn't take it, sadly.
Not all chapters are equal, and it also depends on the translation. KJV has a pretty famous poetic style, though the NRSV keeps a good bit of the charm while updating the language somewhat. Read some famous passages in the ESV though and you might feel like a toddler, it's pretty bad. There's some of the Psalms, of course, parts of Isaiah with nice imagery, the start of Genesis is a bit of a classic. In the New Testament, it's a little more parceled out into particular chapters, though John and Luke are definitely more literary than the other Gospels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
33m ago
It's definitely true that most Spanish-only-speakers have developed coping strategies already, or are bilingual to an acceptable extent, so the returns aren't as starkly defined as with other languages. However, it does expand your ability to vacation in most all of the hemisphere, allows you to be a better "neighbor", and furthermore allows you to communicate somewhat acceptably with those who speak Italian or Portuguese (French to a more limited extent), so there's that extra marginal effect too. I just yesterday had a whole conversation with someone from Brazil, cross-language with him in Portuguese and me in Spanish, and it was pretty effective. So you kind of get 1 + 2 * (1/2) languages for the price of one. On top of that, since the linguistic roots are so similar, learning Spanish also has the effect of boosting English vocabulary (and vice-versa)! It's extremely common for regular-use Spanish words to have less-used English equivalents. As a trivial example, the word for "to chew" in Spanish is "masticar", which you might recognize as related to the more archaic English word "masticate" with an identical meaning. By contrast, Chinese offers practically zero cross-over knowledge in vocabulary, the script itself, and some intonation.
Again Chinese is definitely #2 on that list of most-useful languages, though. It's just hard to argue with the numbers. Most people rarely leave the country, and even if your Spanish is functionally decorative with 80% of all Spanish-speakers, there's still twice as many Spanish-speakers where it would be useful as there are Chinese speakers domestically (for which similar arguments could be made anyways). Sure, there are still 2-3 times as many global speakers of Chinese, but IMO you really need to weight that heavily by exposure chance. An unused language is still vaguely helpful developmentally as I mentioned above, or as a hobby, and might get you some attention from women, but overall it would still be a poor investment to learn a language never used.
Status-wise, there's no doubt Spanish has a lower socioeconomic association, so if you're trying to raise your kid to me a major climber, Chinese might be better if that's your primary goal. However, Spanish is the kinder and more practical option. So it might come down to values/priorities in some sense.
HereAndGone
39m ago
Because he made it into a brand that elevated it from "seedy porn" to something daring, sexy, naughty but in keeping with the spirit of the times, when Sexual Liberation was all the rage. Now women too could explore their sexuality openly! Being a Playboy bunny may seem ridiculous today, and it wasn't without criticism back then, but a lot of jobs for young women advertised an image of glamour and sexiness, e.g. airline attendants or trolly dollies, because air travel still had the air of being something luxurious and not commonplace.
These kinds of careers were presented as something more than the conventional "be a secretary or teacher and then get married and settle down to being a housewife" path for attractive young women. They did rely on sex appeal but there was a crucial distinction established between that and being the pole dancer or stripper or prostitute or porn actress: no expectation of having to have sex with the customers. The fantasy on both sides was: you are a hot young woman who, through working this job, may meet a desirable well-off man/you are a young man in a white collar job who can meet a glamourous girl not like the girls-next-door for mutual fun.
HereAndGone
47m ago
t's a moral, emotional, and physical cripple incapable of basic human functioning.
See, here is where our opinions sharply diverge. I don't want to fucky-fucky like a rabbit in spring? Well gosh, then I'm not a real human! Asexuality does not mean incapacity to have emotional and relational bonds with others, it just means 'no sex'. It doesn't even mean 'no romantic love', that's aromanticism!
Taking a look at the news pages about the people who do experience sexual arousal and so are not 'moral, emotional and physical cripples incapable of basic human functioning', what do I see about these paragons who have the fullness of erotic desire?
Serial killer couple from decades past. They were in love and sexually functional, you know!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39x1ggj3e3o
Man murders his daughter by deliberately running over her. If he had a wife and family, he had normal sexual and romantic human relationships, unlike those soulless asexuals!
Female prison officer attempted to get pregnant by convict. They're so in love, your honour! Okay, the guy is a convicted rapist, but that just means he is so overflowing with normal human attraction to potential sexual partners that he shares the love vigorously!
I can find a lot of stories of that type, if we want to argue about moral cripples.
HereAndGone
58m ago
Yeah, the money-making empire was the brand but the magazine was what brought it to mainstream attention. Maybe you'd never be that guy going to a Playboy club or casino, but the magazine allowed you to participate in the dream. That's what porn is about - selling fantasy in a way that tries to persuade the consumer 'this is attainable for you'.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
it sounds bonkers that they planned a project like this, and when it came to "how do we pay for it?", their answer was the equivalent of "uh, look down the back of the sofa for some spare change".
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. That's only about a hundred and forty years or so, but they're still working on it.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Yes, blue on black.
I suppose if you factor in everything possible (disruption to supply, closing off streets, getting all the legal stuff around planning permission etc.) that it does make sense they could only do under a mile of power lines per year, but the proposed timeline does seem.... excessive.
Since I don't have anything useful to contribute, here's a classic song that is applicable. At least the linemen of Pasadena will have job security!
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
I'm not seeing the mischaracterization. He can call himself a classical liberal neoconservative and suck as many dicks as he wants, he is still haggling against progressive morality.
Why else would a gay cosmopolitan man care so much about the legacy of Winston Churchill? It's because it's a part of his foundation for why the west deserves to survive. A moral narrative of redemption. He doesn't leverage how many amazing gay bars there used to be in London.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere
It is not out of nowhere. It's the analogy you selected. It's literally a law of the universe. It's fundamentally just conservation of momentum. It's not some "utterly deranged" statement like your current examples, which are untethered from any mathematical reality of scaling. It's the actual fundamental law of how scaling works for the analogy you selected. In your analogy, they might not have realized where they were on the exponential at the time that they were making great gains; they might not have quite realized how far along they would be able to go before running into this fundamentally exponential scaling curve. But that was the underlying reality of the world.
I mean, how do you think this is supposed to go? "Let's use the analogy of flight, but it's absolutely forbidden to notice that there is a scaling law there, because that would be 'out of nowhere'"?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Bloomberg has posted the list of Russian demands from the Istanbul talks:
- Permanent neutral status for Ukraine (like Austria)
- No reparations
- No calls for the return of Crimea and the four mainland regions
- No ceasefire until Ukraine withdraws from the four mainland regions
- International recognition of the new border
An anonymous X user clashreport has posted a similar list, but with "adoption of EU standards for minority rights and ending nationalist propaganda" inserted as item 3.
The ordering of the items shows what Russia is willing to negotiate on:
- military neutrality of Ukraine is important
- where the new border will be isn't, as long as Russia doesn't have to cede any land and Ukraine drops all claims beyond symbolic ones
- the other part of the original war goal, "denazification", is an interesting case.
I think Bloomberg's source consciously omitted it from the list to make Russia look like a straightforward warmonger in pursuit of moar clay. It's also the most dangerous to Ukraine in the long run, a poison pill.
Armed neutrality is easy: Ukraine can still buy whatever military hardware and training it needs from anyone, it just needs to do it in Przemyśl.
But "no persecution of the Russian language" is hard, because either Ukraine will have to crack down on its own most politically active citizens in a complete reversal of its current policy, or Russia will have a pretext for a resumption of hostilities at any moment.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2hr ago
Now we see a test of naked American authority in Trump's exploitative trade war, in “DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED” bullshit.
Ok, I think I have a bit more to say about this now. I dont think we can really call this "the full extent of american power" if Trump hasnt even floated military action. And even the actual military threats over Greenland, we have taken seriously but not literally. Its all quite a while off from the US really going "or else". The other thing is that IMO, much of the american influence over Europe comes not from direct threats but maintaining an ideologically aligned establishment. Trump has only limited use of that, because its aligned to atlanticism and in communion with the relevant academic/think tank circles, not to the government per se. Technically speaking, some right-populists have a platfrom on the Ukraine war closer to the current administration than that of the mainstream parties - but its the latter who are "loyal to America" in the relevant sense. Thats why Nordstream is a good indicator: Preventing it is at the core of what Id expect US influence to do, but local economic interest (and a feel-good story about the cold war being over) won out.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
or will drop out entirely rather than support the 'rigged contest.
The nasty part here is that a lot of the hazards you mention have ceiling effects that allow defectbots to ignore them at the margin. A career criminal can't have his income garnished because all his income is off the books, he can't have his career damaged more than it already is because he already fails background checks and criminals don't care, and he can't have his dating prospects damaged because they already consist solely of "women who don't realise, or don't care, that he's a career criminal" (with admittedly an exception for time he actually spends in jail if he's caught raping/beating his girlfriend).
This is a special case of the more general issue that if you grade on a strict pass/fail with stringent conditions for passing, then the middle road and low road lead to the same place, which is a big problem if you want people to pick the middle road over the low road (and for all values of "you" that are thinking consequentially from the standpoint of society, you do; you are not God making a judgement after the end of the universe, which means that simply exterminating everyone who didn't pull off the high road tends to end badly and even if somehow implemented is likely to kick you below replacement).
2rafa
3hr ago
They can apply for judicial review on the basis of legitimate expectation and will very likely win and there's even precedent for it:
In theory they could use a notwithstanding clause to eliminate the prospect of judicial review when passing a new immigration bill, but they are both incompetent and unserious, so they won’t. One of the good things about parliamentary sovereignty and no written constitution is that a simple majority can at least just pass a law that says “this ignores the ECHR, ignores any court judgment, and establishes no legal challenge to itself whatsoever” and it actually works.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
Yup. Blue text on a black background for me.
2rafa
3hr ago
I think this is a relatively substantial mischaracterization of Murray, who has mostly called himself a classical liberal, except when he decided to embark on the contrarian project of rehabilitating the by-then-already-discredited term ‘neoconservative’ in the late 2000s and early 2010s (largely since abandoned).
He’s a gay cosmopolitan man who essentially wants the cosmopolitan liberal society of the early 2000s to continue forever. He’s pretty open about that, and it is the main reason he is opposed to mass immigration from the Islamic world.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
3hr ago
Do the links show through the spoiler for others too?
RenOS
Technology giveth, Sociology taketh
3hr ago
Afaik aztek human sacrifice tradition also held many of the victims in high regard.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Estonia tried to detain vessel from Russia's shadow fleeet, did not succeed
Why is it that these very small and weak countries in the Baltic are so eager to go all in on 'we hate Russia' and make incidents? Estonia does not have any combat aircraft whatsoever. Their military is roughly equivalent to the Oklahomah national guard, who do actually have some aircraft. This is not really a good position to be trying to seize Russian ships. Seizing other people's ships is cringeworthy behaviour whether it's the Houthis, Estonia or America but Estonia's by far the weakest player.
'Scream hysterically and wave a tiny stick' doesn't seem like a great strategy, I suppose that it's popular domestically.
ChickenOverlord
4hr ago
I saw the image that Walsh replied to on 4chan several days ago. The swastika is much more noticeable in a 4chan thumbnail before you open the full size image.
HalloweenSnarry
4hr ago
Oh man, I think I saw the trailer for that, and it looked like the kind of crappy 80's cheese I love.
A few points:
If the argument is “it doesn’t matter SCOTUS will decide anyhow,” then (1) maybe not due to cert denial, (2) maybe yes but if SCOTUS sided with the 499/500, then an injustice occurred potentially for years, and (3) if trying to solve time then legal issues don’t get to evolve within multiple rulings to tease out the thorny issues.
DOJ discussed long standing precedent that the general rule is they respect the opinion and judgement but they reserve the right to respect only the judgement. Notably, this is a historic precedent something that the DOJ actually pursued while Kagan was solicitor genera. However, the DOJ stated they would respect both the opinion and judgement of SCOTUS.
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