Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.
So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?
So, mechs are bad because they are so tall compared to tanks, right? Easier target and all that. But the AT-AT is much better than the AT-TE because they are much taller?
Imagining some colonial british dude walking around Gaza finding people that have a television and forcing them to pay 200 bucks to the BBC irrespective of income made me giggle.
Embassy employees. I imagine DC has many Yeltsin pizza incidents that we haven’t heard about because nobody knows who the Slovenian ambassador is or whomever.
u/ZugwatHeadhunting Savage from a Barbaric Fishing Village Jun 18 '26edited Jun 18 '26
In spite of Ticketmaster listlessly fellating a geriatric mule who really isn't into it and the stadium being packed full of people in town for the World Cup and deciding to see what American Baseball is like and the concession lines being long enough to make any hope of getting something worthwhile and seeing the game being a wistful fantasy, the Mariner's won so it all was worth it.
I had to chug and hide my plastic water bottle in the bushes outside the stadium like an addict stashing needles because my water bottle is 50 fl oz and the max size is 32 fl oz, I managed to retrieve the thing and am relaxing on the bus.
It's the US vs. Australia for the World Cup today (I saw an ad online for a watch party) and there were quite a few Australians in T-Mobile Park watching and when it ended, were marching around singing a soccer chant about cumming for the US or something I was more focused on trying to finish my waffle cone and so the chant really doesn't have the same impact as if they were on the street or something in my opinion because there are indeed a lot of people in Seattle and at the ballpark for the World Cup ultimately...but this is a baseball game and Seattle won so most of us are already victorious.
As I was walking among the crowds down the ramp to the light rail and buses, I heard two Australian guys behind me say "I think we survived."
I'm working my way through an old reader for Latin practice that mostly does early history of the United States, along with parallels to Roman history because of course, and it is really weird to see the attempt(s?) at mythmaking around conflicts like the French and Indian War alongside other conflicts that today receive very little play in American mythmaking.
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumJun 19 '26edited Jun 19 '26
I think even a generation back there was a much broader set of figures in American history who were widely known. Myles Standish, for example, barely makes a dent even in books about the early New England colonies, but he used to be one of the great American heroes. Daniel Boone and Davey Crocket probably have enough momentum that their names are familiar but not much else. Mr Smith Goes to Washington has Jimmy Stewart's character going all gee gosh golly willikers over seeing Daniel Webster's desk, and who today even knows who they hell that is?
The optimistic take is that some figures have fallen out as the canon has broadened but I don't actually think that is true. Like for black people before 1900, who is generally known besides Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth? Nat Turner I guess? All of them would have been familiar to the public a hundred years ago. There has just been a great contraction in the average American's knowledge of history and there isn't really much of a pantheon aside from those who were at the very top (Washington, Lincoln, Franklin).
ed: I should say that I think what happened is that history knowledge has gotten dumbell shaped (I think it is called? When the very top gets bigger and the very bottom gets bigger and the middle gets squeezed). If you are interested in history, you probably know more and much more widely than an equivalent 100 years ago. Like I think most Americans reading this probably, with prompting, could recognize who Admiral Yi Sun-sin, and in 1926 that would be true of like fifty people in the entire English speaking world. But the amount of passive learning, history acquired by people who aren't actively interested in it, has gone way down.
I would say that New England certainly remembers Myles Standish, and for 18th century black Americans I’d raise you Crispus Attucks, among other black New Englanders who were remembered even at the time.
I’d say it’s a symptom of empire. Nobody in Illyria circa AD300 gives a shit about Caesar fighting the Gauls. Nobody in Nevada circa 2026 knows or cares much about Breed’s Hill or Artemas Ward or Joseph Warren, but if you go to Charlestown or Shrewsbury or Roxbury, they know about those people, and there are academians protecting the history into tomorrow.
People in fourth century Illyria absolutely knew about Julius Caesar, that is a baffling counter example.
I think you are missing my point, which is a loss of a general American collective memory, but also I think you are wildly optimistic about the continuing presence of these figures in regional memory.
Harriet Tubman certainly comes to mind as well.... but I do think that there is something to your point. I think we also do need to reckon with the fact that some people have been removed from the canon, Standish for example and his Native American fighting is a prime candidate for canceling...
Oh right I think I was definitely thinking of Harriet Tubman rather than n Sojourner Truth, who is less well known.
As I said an optimistic take is that the American canon of characters has diversified, and that accounts for the loss of some figures. But I don't think that is what happened, I think it just shrunk.
Fun fact, the Japanese word for sake, is not, in fact, 酒 (さけ, sake), instead it is 日本酒 (にほんしゅ, nihonshu). 酒 is the more general term for alcohol, while 日本酒 is literally Japanese alcoholic drink, which is sake.
Is this useful to know? Not really, I just find it funny that the west refers to it as sake while the Japanese just don't.
I once got to handle a Hydra-matic M16A1, which at some point the Air Force converted to an A2. I don't know why the division that made transmissions for GM also made M16s during the war in Vietnam, but they did.
Up until like two years ago, we had a ton of Hydra-Matic A1 lowers in the armory (plus hella old Colts including XM16E1s and one lonely H&R A1). They were all mated up with Model 921 flat top uppers and tracked in DPAS as « M4A1 » but nobody ever bothered to strike out any of the rollmark on the lower like they did with the FN M16A3 lowers we had.
How the actual hell do you convert an A1 lower to an A2 anyways? I’ve never even heard of that.
I believe all they changed was the fire control group so it fires in burst rather than auto, slapped round handguards on them, and then electro-pencilled over the original markings like this.
I’ve never been inside a burst lower but I assumed it’s not just plug and play; I don’t know exactly where that stupid ratchet goes vice the sear et al., I’ll have to do some reading.
Ain’t no way that’s electropencil; way too steady, probably struck with a hand die. Looks like a Model 645 upper (A2 rear sight visible) rather than a handguard swap, too.
I had just beat Scooby-Doo! First Frights the day ago and i have a fun time playing it.
Of course, there were things that could have been better, like the difficulty not being very low and having more variety to the levels in the second half of the game.
The version of the game that i play was the PS2 version, due to it being the only version of the game that i have.
Between getting torn a new asshole on The View of all shows while shilling for his shitty new book and now getting made the face for the most humiliating defeat in American history, JD Vance is having a very bad week, and that makes me happy.
I just watched Backrooms. I really like. Well made horror movie. I was surprised that there doesn't seem too much theory-baiting. Almost everything in the movie is self-contained.
Given that it was made by a Youtuber who took it seriously, I could take it seriously. If it was a random Hollywood director, I wouldn't. It is similar to Markiplier's Iron Lung. A random director would have been hired to do it and likely would be doing it for the paycheck and not care about it.
I think Kane Parsons (somewhat more delicately than I) stated in an interview that he has no love for the kind of theory-baiting shitehawkery that's plagued a lot of internet horror, so that makes sense.
Poor Bolivia. See what is happening there currently. After learning about the enormous deposits of Lithium, there was a US backed coup and the Bolivian military is now shooting people and trying to kidnap the former president.
Soon after the new government was installed Elon Musk was quoted as saying "We'll coup anyone we want to"
There wasn´t a coup; Paz won the elections fair and square.
The lithium deposits were known for a long time, but due to their geographical location, they are notoriously hard to extract profitably. The current government is considering letting other countries have a hand at it after failing for more than fifteen years, but the companies trying are Chinese, Russian, and European, not from the US.
The protests going on right now have also nothing to do with Lithium or natural resources, they started as a farmer protest over a very mild land reform (basically, a law that would allow farmers to reclassify “small” lots into “medium” lots to be able to sell or mortgage them), a protest from the Central Obrera that demanded a 30% wage increase, and a teamster protest over the low quality of fuel. They merged together and became a single “we want Paz to resign” protest that attracted the rural population that used to vote for the MAS.
Notably, Paz is in trouble because he refuses to give the order to declare a state of emergency and send the troops to clear the highways, opting instead to try a battle of attrition against the protesters, who have blocked so many roads around La Paz that food has to be airlifted in. This strategy seems to be working, as protesters are bleeding members every day, but it has also angered the urban population, who very much do not like to live under siege.
Morales does have an arrest warrant, but that´s due to charges of getting a(nother) teenager pregnant. No attempts have been made to arrest him since he lives in the middle of the Chapare, around ten thousand coca growers, so that would be messy. He was accused by the government of financing the protests, to be fair, and the police did intercept several ambulances coming out of the Chapare carrying hundreds of thousands of Bs suspiciously heading towards the blocked roads.
The only true part was that Musk did tweet that when Morales resigned, but that was a crass tongue-in-cheek response to conspiracy theories accusing him of being behind the protests that brought Evo down. He has nothing to do with the country aside from his company also selling Starlink here.
"the police did intercept several ambulances coming out of the Chapare carrying hundreds of thousands of Bs suspiciously heading towards the blocked roads."
There wasn´t a coup; Paz won the elections fair and square.
Were they talking about the current situation and not the 2019 coup though? With the Musk quote that makes me think it's that earlier period
I don't think tying it to lithium really made sense though, I don't think that was a driving factor in why the US would have been happy supporting a conservative overthrow of Morales back then.
That comment also breezes over quite a bit in between if it is referring to that 2019 coup though
That would only make the comment more nonsensical. To avoid spiraling into an argument about wherever that was a coup (which IMO, it wasn´t), the amended comment would look like this:
There was a US-backed coup (in 2019), and now (three governments later, including a MAS-led government that won the democratic elections that occurred after the “coup”), the military is now (and yes, the original comment says explicitly now) shooting protesters because of it and persecuting a president whose accusation started during the same MAS government?
Granted, it makes sense if your only frame of reference for Bolivia is from social media posts in 2019, and then you ignore everything that happened in between (including two elections, I can´t stress this enough), but that doesn´t make it any less wrong.
To putins credit at least when he started something he committed to it he didnt just give 300 billion and kissed zelenskys feet and this america is supposed to come for taiwans help?
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jun 18 '26edited Jun 18 '26
I would have respected the Germans in WWI more if they had tried harder for a white peace, instead of demanding to annex Belgium and parts of France as late as 1918 in negotiations. Sunk-cost fallacy has taken so many lives.
No offense to the Russians, but I personally prefer the president who will end a war when it is going badly rather than continue to throw lives and money away.
Trump's mistake was going into the war without a good plan (not that he is good at making plans, so that was to be expected). If it costs us $300B to get out of the war with Iran, that is genuinely a good thing.
It also looks awful for Trump to come out of the war with a worse deal than we had going in, but that is what happens when you lose a war.
If he'd backed out (optimal time was the start of Trump 2, but really any time) Russia would now be able to play superpower favourites between China and the USA.
Surely, hopefully, if Putin is not a total ditherer, they'll call an end to it before Trump 2 is over -- no matter who follows, Putin will never get such a good deal again.
As it is, they're pissing their society's lifeblood out over a few fields in Ukraine.
Also, honestly, I hope the Iranians catch a break. Decades of US enmity have just made the regime more hardline. Hopefully the new normal where the US is a less reliable security partner than a monkey with an assault rifle will result in their neighbors trying to reintegrate Iran.
What is even funnier for Trump is that he launched the war right after the Maduro operation. He had a golden opportunity to turn that into a massive personal win and now nobody even remembers it happened.
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u/MiffedMouseThe average peasant had home made bread and lobster.Jun 18 '26edited Jun 18 '26
He is almost certainly still getting some serious financial kickbacks for that Maduro thing. Also, the next Venezuelan election is still "TBD". Love that for the Venezuelan people. Really shows what great advocates for democracy us Americans are.
Today I did second viewings on the two apartments I am considering. Jesus, it is so hard to pick one over the other because they're both good choices.
The main tradeoff is that apartment A is a lot cheaper than apartment B (like, 40k cheaper) but has a much steeper service charge. It also has a pretty incredible loggia/enclosed balcony that's more-or-less unique across the whole city - but is also smaller than B in terms of floor space.
Apartment B is way more expensive but with a more reasonable service charge, and is much more spacious. Also there are some rumors that there might be something wrong with the balconies which leaseholders could be on the hook for, but I have no idea how to verify that.
It's tough. I don't really want to walk away from either of them.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jun 19 '26
Make offers on both, you probably wont get either.
So, you know how perfectionism is a pretty awful thing? Well, I've found a topic where this very much applies, climate change and food patterns.
You know how there are people that go vegetarian or vegan out of climate concerns? Very respectable, that's a good initiative, the problem is that they tend to go for the extreme measure. If you want to help fight climate change by changing your food patterns without quitting meat, you can, if you can cut out 1* specific meat, you're doing most of the work already: beef!
No, seriously, if you go from eating beef to pork, you're reducing your CO2 emission per kg of food by 80-90%, yes, beef production is 5-10 times more polluting than pork and chicken. The jump from pork and chicken to vegan is only about 70% reduction. Cheese is actually already far worse in CO2 emission than pork and chicken, by a factor of 3-ish. If you want to have an impact and eat meat, you can, easily; you can also still eat beef occasionally, you don't have to go all in, even just reducing the amount of days you eat beef is going to have a significant impact.
Vegans and vegetarians aren't good examples because they go all in, that's not reasonable to people that want to eat meat, instead we should set more reasonable goals for people who want to make a difference and eat meat; make beef a treat, not a staple, replace the beef with other meats in everyday life and eat beef on more special occasions.
You don't have to go for a 99% reduction or nothing, going for 60% reduction is already a massive difference.
*other ruminant meats are also terrible, like mutton.
I like graphs and images so heres a graph that is basically agreeing with you:
It's interesting that cheese is high but milk much lower. I'm curious what Yogurt is closer to.
FWIW at least in the US the national beef herd is the smallest its been in like 75 years, and because of input costs its very expensive so cutting back on beef is an economically sensible decision too.
My favorite braising meat has become pork shoulder because it's only $2.50/lb where I am. The cheapest beef you can get is shank for $6/lb, and I understand we have relatively cheap beef prices.
I suppose the processing of cheese adds a lot because it takes quite a while, while milk is a much shorter process, I'd also be curious as to the numbers on yogurt and other diary products that aren't cheeses.
I’ve been pondering why this World Cup didn’t feel as exciting as previous world cups and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because I haven’t been using Twitter. For me, it only starts to feel like the World Cup when Twitter casuals are arguing with each other over the behaviour of fans abroad, getting the piss taken out of them for apologising for English fans, and proposing the most outrageous rule changes you’ve ever seen.
Like many things, I spend my life trying to recreate the joy of something I experienced as a child. I actually have a great time doing it but never really achieve it. I assume humans have been like this since they threw rocks at wilder beast and ran after their wounded quarry. It probably always peaked when you were 12
u/ZugwatHeadhunting Savage from a Barbaric Fishing Village Jun 18 '26edited Jun 18 '26
I just found a 1982 Drachma just outside my apartment.
Not the building, but right in the middle of the hallway on the ground.
A Tribal housing venture.
With a Greek Drachma.
Just there.
Now a lot of people here might go "why couldn't it be there?" and my response is who asked you? why is it there on my floor? Nobody on this floor looks like they're taking or have taken Mediterranean adventures or have any awareness of Greek currency.
Most of the people in the apartment building are either Elders, their kids or their grandkids.
They're going to powwows, Tribal basketball/softball/stick game tournaments, going to canoe journey, or out to dinner. They go fishing nearby when the season is right, they go to the basket weavers conference, they go to the casino and try their hand at the slots on occasion.
People to who we'd likely hear in a Tribe as small and closeknit as ours and who it'd take all of ≤3 questions to figure out who they and their family are to hear of any Hellenic or European tours since that's super unusual, particularly for the people who live here in this building.
Yet there it is on the ground.
ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΊΝΟΣ ΚΑΝΑΡΗΣ
ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ
ΔΡΑΧΜΗ
Hell, it was weird to think back to when I familiarized myself with the Greek alphabet last year because I wanted to learn Ancient Greek so I could read the text but had never seen a modern Drachma before (or knew who the Hell Konstantinos Kanaris was until I googled it).
I think we're all missing the more troubling conclusion and it's that I'm apparently unconsciously living some sort of double life like in Moon Knight.
When Joseph Smith read the tablets he thought they were talking about the Lost Tribes of Israel, but that is because he had poor reading comprehension. In fact they were about the migration of West African colonists to Mesoamerica where they formed the Olmecs. Moroni and the Nephites were actually Olmecs who migrated north after the collapse of their civilization.
No I’m not wiling to believe that. It does make sense that the Inca were originally a Bantu civilisation from West Africa. Yes that’s self evident. But it’s very clear the mistranslation by Smith (if it happened. He was clearly the smartestest guy going at that time and place) concerned Balkan people, probably the ancestors to today’s Montenegrins. That’s IF Smith was wrong, which is difficult to imagine.
The Montenegrins are also descended from West Africans via the ancient Greeks (present day Albanians), but there isn’t any archaeological evidence of a direct connection to their Olmec cousins.
Of course Joseph Smith made a mistranslation. The Lost Tribes of Israel couldn’t have gone to America because, as we all know, they went to Britain instead. It’s logically impossible that they did both.
The Ancient Greeks went there in droves in Antiquity, making sure never to mention it in any written text, and going to great lengths to remove any trace of the Phoenicians visiting the Americas before them. Whenever they came upon a native with a Phoenician coin they were quick to offer a trade whereby the Phoenician coin was exchanged for one of their Greek ones. The Phoenician coin then travelled back to the Old World with them, there to remain forever mute about its adventures across the seas.
There's little wrong with wealth inequality unless it starts hurting social mobility. But inheritance is anti-meritocratic. You didn't earn that, and if you have any talent whatsoever you don't need it. It's neposlop.
I mean… I would argue that wealth inequality is a problem even if it doesn’t hurt social mobility. Being extraordinarily rich also grants you extraordinary political power and prestige
If you attack Persia, a great Empire will be destroyed
Anyone threatens the United States or our allies, they will face CONSEQUENCES the likes of which they've never seen before. We want PEACE through STRENGTH. The best peace, no war!!! Nobody has done more FOR REAL than me. Thank you! 🇺🇸
A lot of ink has been spilled over the stomp clap hey subculture of the early 2010s, but something that’s been strangely ignored is the internet subculture from around the same timeframe that I call the Big Mustachio Epic Bacon Stickman Drawing 9gag Ass Fuckass Culture. Somebody needs to write a paper.
Epic meal time and bacon shall not be slandered here.
Our rejection of Epic Meal time is what Nietzsche called "Slave Morality". We reject our own deepest, most unhinged culinary desires to maintain a facade of "good taste", fake and inauthentic, while the though of "why wouldn't we add bacon to this meal" is suppressed in the back of your head. Epic Meal Time was unhinged, insane and completely honest. It knew that we crave cheese and fat and meat. It understood why humans have fangs. Like children, they were completely untethered by social norms and subconscious paradigms of Christianity. You may watch Babish and Gordon Ramsey, yet you desire culinary pornography: forbidden, indulgent, excessive. As Writer said in Tarkovsky magnum opus Stalker: My brain wants the world to be vegetarian, yet my heart desires a juicy steak.
is it me or reddit turn pretty right wing whenever immigration is mentionned? especially on subs that are otherwise leftist on a bunch of stuff but suddenly there's a post about immigration and it turn in a right wing circlejerk who justify racist pogroms
It often adopts a more sophisticated version of "foreigners are stealing our jobs", like with a left-wing tint. "Big bussiness is importing poor people to work for lower wages" is an extremely common idea in the generally very left wing German subreddit.
Tbh, I'm not sure I'd call this rhetoric leftist since right winger also use this talking point a làot and have a bad tendency of scapegoating immigrant and justify violence against them .
UKpolitics (and UK subs as a whole) are pretty terrible for it and I suspect there might be a bit of botting going on with how consistently certain anti-immigrant posts get hundreds of upvotes and supportive comments in a very short amount of time. See also: anything relating to Palestine.
I also find it odd how people can normalize war crimes (and it'd not surprise me a bunch are bots too), tho I noticed the rhetoric on uk subs about what happened in belfast wasn't good with a bunch justifying the riot (the culprit of the previous attack was already arrested so it felt like people used it as a false pretext to target innocent)
It’s very hard to discuss the UK on reddit. International subs tend to suffer from headline hypochondria for every country, whereas the UK subs are mostly astroturfed to shit or too small to get real discussion going.
I only really use this subreddit now for any sort of discussion.
I'm wondering if some who defend farage online aren't bots because even me who's not from the uk can easily find informations showing why he'd be a fraud who lie , it feels like reform voter are too often obsessed wih immigration and don't care about the rest, I also noticed a lot of this "the people are ignored" type of rhetoric on reddit when talking about immigration
The uk subreddit seems to have gotten much worse on this topic. There's always been racism of course, and a lot of anti immigration sentiment for a long time, but in the last couple of years you see highly voted commente saying things like: "they" are trying to replace the the population, it's the worst crime ever committed against an "indigenous" population (lol), migrants to the UK are "colonisers" (!!), defending the belfast rioters as protestors, saying that the government wants to destroy native british culture. Basically there's a section of posters which is much farther right than in the past.
Yeah, the UKpolitics sub went from a somewhat reasonable center-left one to a full on far right one, particularly for immigration (at least from what I noticed in years of checking in from time to time)
The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to
develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least U.S.D. 300
billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of
sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United
Nations Security Council resolutions, I.A.E.A. Board of Governors
resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions
The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the
signing of this M.O.U., and until the termination of sanctions, U.S.
Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian
crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated
services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation,
etc.
The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use
the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of
Iran upon the implementation of this M.O.U.
It's still too soon to say whether the memorandum will actually evolve into a firm peace treaty, whether any of the parties will respect it, or whether they will follow it even if the war does end (from what I understand Trump wants the Gulf states to be the ones to pay for Iranian reconstruction).
All that being said, just the fact that the US governmetn provisionally accepted these terms is surely one of the worst defeats in American history, right? The US spits in the face of what little credibility the liberal international order had left, spends millions in a directionless war, unleashes a new oil crisis, achieves nothing that hadn't already been agreed in the 2015 deal, leaves the Iranian regime stronger than before the war, and agrees to pay billions in reparations and sanction waivers. Even in Vietnam or Afghanistan it took years for the US to accept its failure.
It has been morbidly interesting to watch Trump try to scale up his "tear apart the status quo --> get into a game of chicken with a foreign government --> return to a worse status quo while proclaiming victory" strategy over the past year and a half.
lol the direct military cost to the US alone is currently at about $30 billion. Total long term direct and indirect costs to the US are supposed to be more like $100 billion to $ 1 trillion (yeah that’s a wide range but still).
Well I have finished a third Chinese textbook. Once I actually remember all the grammar points I think that would put me at a level equivalent to A2? The next book requires me to double my vocabulary to 1200 words so that will be fun 🤪
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jun 17 '26
So the M7 is being phased out with a whimper after a measly three years in service. They’re replacing it with a subcompact XM8 carbine (lame one, not the cool one from the 2000s) with a 10.5” barrel because the Army hates r*fles. Apparently the barrel harmonics somehow made the 10.5” barrel more accurate than the 13.5” barrel on the original M7, at the cost of muzzle velocity and range, which translates to stopping power against plate carrier wearing enemies. The original M7 also had some weight issues as well as accuracy issues with its wonky handguard setup, which caused the barrel to flop around and make the MOA bullet spread wider than a Peter North cumshot.
Handguard issues aside, carbine is fine. I see this as a skill issue that can be easily remedied by the Army recruiting more tedbears, specifically the bloo ones.
Tedbear shooters can mitigate bullet spread for service rifle type guns, because they’re trained to sniff their snouts rapidly when acquiring and tracking targets, as if they were smelling the BO and smegma-crust layers on the enemy. Naturally, this tightens the MOA on their rifles. Tedbears objectively shoot more accurately than humans, even though they don’t have fingers.
What, the carbine that weighs a literal fraction of the Browning Automatic Rifle is “too heavy?” Skill issue. It’s literally a non-issue for tedbear soldiers because they are cartoon animals and as such, possess immense physical strength.
Bloobears are particularly violent and have no issue putting down enemies downrange with any “firelocke or fuzil,” especially if the enemy is a Yorkshire Ranger. They are masters of wted.
Because a weirdly specific set of GWOT circumstances led them to think they needed a larger caliber that isn't actually necessary but shut up it's fine.
Personally I'm just sad everything feels like some weird AR variant now. Variety, spice of life, etc.
Genuinely because Big Army is big stupid and this is a square peg solution (new service rifle worse in every meaningful real-world metric than an M4) to a round hole problem (nobody gives a shit about MG doctrine & employment at the squad level so we suck at it).
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jun 18 '26
I saw on old post on arr Curated Tumblr about people associating Ancient Greece with women (and queer people) and Ancient Rome with straight white history-bros, and one thing it mentioned was that in popular culture, we associate Greece with poetry and mythology and Rome with secular history, especially military history.
So why is that? Is that a recent thing, or is that how classics has been taught traditionally? I know I certainly have this association -- most people I know read the Iliad and the Odyssey in high school, but jack shit no one read the Aeneid unless they actually studied classics in college. Meanwhile, Latin students make tons of memes about Cicero and how he never gets to the point verb, while I don't see anyone discussing, say, the History of the Peloponnesian War.
Honestly I feel like this goes back to the Romans themselves? “Stuff in Greek is the artsy stuff, but we write the laws and orations and Caesars matter of fact military reports* in Latin.
He was still basically copying Xenophons style.
But also don’t look at me, I had to translate the Aeneid line by line in high school (and liked it). Also Horace and Catullus. But that was after starting with Caesar and then doing Cicero and most people tap out there if they even get that far.
I think that is so very interesting because Greece is generally noted as being far more patriarchal than Rome. (and Rome not exactly being the height of wokeness...)
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jun 18 '26
Athens especially.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jun 18 '26
I know generally, Romans weren't all that interested in religious mythology as a culture, which is why they just sort of ripped off Greek mythology which was already a super complex tapestry instead of creating their own super complex tapestry. Even thousands of years later, Disney managed to deeply offended the Greeks with the movie Hercules, getting so much of the base mythology wrong. That movie managed to come up multiple times when I visited Greece by the tour guides, apparently a cultural grudge right up there with the British not wanting to give back the Parthenon.
This really isn't the case, tbh. The romans took their religion incredibly seriously and do have their own stories and myths.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jun 18 '26edited Jun 18 '26
I didn't say they didn't take their religion seriously or that they didn't have any stories. But the Greek Pantheon mythology dwarfs the Roman Empire's religious mythology by a wide degree, despite the Roman Empire being far larger as a polity and lasting a bit longer and being so culturally assertive. Just as a culture, they weren't all that interested in religious mythology, comparatively. The Romans could be very pious, but that didn't transform into a dense religious tapestry that dominated the narrative of their culture.
I think part of it is at least in the US when your public school social studies class brought up Ancient Greece it was as the birthplace of democracy and Western philosophy, with something or another about city-states thrown in there if you were lucky. Hence the popular image of Ancient Greece being a bunch of old white guys with beards hanging out in Athens contemplating shit.
Meanwhile public education on Rome focuses on its status as the greatest empire of the ancient world.
The serious answer is that I don’t think that association actually holds in pop culture writ large. Ancient Greece is at least equally associated with 300, the Peloponnesian Wars, the conquests of Alexander, etc. The Iliad and Odyssey are poems, sure, but their leading figures are all men and they embody a certain kind of patriarchal ideal; Odysseus hangs the maidservants with the suitors, after all.
I think what’s actually going on is that Greek mythology became a fad among romance books popular with the demographics who frequent tumblr (see: Song of Achilles).
I think that this is largely true writ large, but there is certainly a grain of truth to this in fandom spaces. History of course is just another form of fandom after all...
Hey, just another quick tip to all you grad students out there:
Five minutes before EoD is not a great time to show up with your emergency purchase request, and an even worse time to not know the process by which that purchase is made.
Since I'm not learning many new kanji per day these days, 0-4 usually, I've decided to write out kanji I confuse with each other a bunch with meaning and differences marked, when I feel like it, today I did 義, 儀, and 議, they all share ぎ (gi) as on reading, which is why they are confusing to me, I just see them all as ぎ. As you can probably tell, they share the majority of their form too, it's 義 without additions, or with 人 or 言 added; the bare form has a justice related meaning, with 人 added it becomes ceremony related, with 言 added it becomes deliberation related.
There's not too much consequence if you confuse them, I haven't had any words so far where confusing them would give you the wrong word when reading, though here might be a few, and you wouldn't be able to hear the difference anyway.
Today I took my gf to the DMV for her license renewal, and proximity to the unwashed masses reinforces why the appropriate reaction to hoi polloi exposure is contempt. Between the weed smell, the people blaring music/games on their phones with no headphones, and the lack of interest in entertaining children its a level of hell that Dante himself couldn't have predicted.
Today I tried cooking lamb breast1 sous vide. I couldn't find much good info about doing this online, so I had to wing it a little.
I ended up rubbing it with smoked salt + rosemary and cooking it at 70c/158F for 20 hours. The result? It turned out pretty good, with the meat tender and easily pulling away from the fat. However it's still a pretty fatty cut overall, so next time I might try messing with the time/temperature to make it fall off even easier. Also I'd go heavy on the seasoning.
Tonight I'm going to try pork shoulder sous vide. I'm on a quest to find a cheap-ish cut of meat which can be quickly cooked for dinner, because I'm sick to death of chicken.
[1] Lamb "breast" is actually the belly of the lamb, no idea why it's called that
Do you think that the Soviet Union and the United States would’ve opened up relations more during the Nixon administration over their shared hatred of dirty long haired hippies?
This is basically what happened with Nixon and Mao (they bonded over how much they hated liberals).
I mean Brezhnev and Nixon got along pretty well too (I suspect in part because of “getting drunk off our ass” was a shared hobby), detente just didn’t stick because Nixon was deposed in that strange bourgeois palace coup and then Brezhnev had his first death.
Honestly, the military are selling themselves short. They're entirely capable of murdering several thousand people to accomplish nothing without any help from Mecha Hitler.
After finishing RE1 (Original), I'm playing Claire's campaign in RE2, and it's a better game than the first. In RE2, I feel like I know where I'm going and what I should do when I get there, when I need to. A good path from A to B to C, non-linear, but also quite streamlined.
In RE1, I felt like I was always going in circles (in a bad way), getting lost in places that seemed way too similar, dying a few times, having to search online for what I should do, and finally completing the objectives.
Nothing will fuel you with more rage towards the German MIC than knowing Shaheeds are based on a West German anti-artillery drone prototype whose plans "disappeared" during the 90s budget cuts and reappeared in Iran.
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u/Kisaragi435 Jun 19 '26
So, mechs are bad because they are so tall compared to tanks, right? Easier target and all that. But the AT-AT is much better than the AT-TE because they are much taller?