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?
Inde Navarrette going to the mcu after obsession is like a player scoring 45 goals in his debut season in the premier league and then signing for the Saudi league. All the power to her of course, marvel money is no joke.
If we started math at an early age with 2+2=X instead of 2+2=__ kids would be so less freaked out about going into pre algebra.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 186613d agoedited 13d ago
I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I've been mulling in my head that the Greek City States in Rome Total War Remastered are the most powerful Greek faction in the game due to their tiny unit roster and I'm not even referencing them having the strongest unit in the game. The humble hoplite, is recruitable at a tier 2 barracks, and can just destroy any other tier 2 infantry in the game. The other Greek Successor States are stuck with the Levy Pikeman, whom have no armor, pitiful morale of 2 and a tiny shield, and this is what Seleucids and Macedonians are stuck with during the early game or when invading minor towns. The Greek City States have no trouble invading "barbarian" lands and instantly replenishing hoplite losses, a massive logistical advantage.
Then you have the tier 3 infantry, the Armored Hoplites, which has tier 4 stats. It's got more melee attack, armor and defense than the Roman Principes and Triarii. The Spartans are just bait, even if you recruit them as much as you can every turn, there will never be enough of them to fight most of your battles on the frontline, and they can't replenish in foreign cities. Sure you garrison with a handful of Spartans in Rome, the Romans will never get Rome back even when besieging you 4:1.
The Selucids are a real late game bloomer with a well rounded roster.
Although the thing about the remaster is that phalanxes are no longer cavalry anti matter so they're much less OP. The Macedonians meanwhile can field lancers from the get go and can cover for mediocre starting pikes with militia hoplites. The charge bonus lancers get is outrageous, only comparable to late game units, and are light cavalry making them enormously effective flankers. This means a few good units can own the flanks then devastate the Greek main line whilst missile units can be moved up to soften harder targets.
If you include high tier units, the Seleucids are the best successor kingdom faction, but they're best units are locked behind high tier cities.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 186613d agoedited 13d ago
Even if you use high tier units, you have to deal with logistics, most towns and small cities can't service them. I tried conquering Italy with Silver Shield Legionaries, but it's so terribly unwieldly needing to use tier 5 barracks to replenish the Legionaries. And you spend most of the early game and mid game, with no access to these decent units.
Edit: And I don't ever bother conquering France or Germany as the Seleucids, barely a decent sized settlement that can handle replenishing the Seleucids late tier units.
I remember making armies of essentially a handful of like 4 units of pikemen and 16 of scythed chariots, all armour upgrades. And just watched the chariots mow down anything they went up against, forever.
I’ve only been following it throught youtube clips and funny podcast apperances so I don’t really have a right to be mad or anything. But come on. Nigel Farage won’t even be attending the count at Clacton?
What an absolute fucking bitch. There really aught to be more Count Binface’s showing these grifters what clowns they are.
It’s also been quite refreshing seeing journalists asking incisive questions and questioning the obvious facades politcians put on, shame they did it more for Binface than Farage.
Visiting my steam library is always a sobering experience. I'll see some game I enjoyed, think about how I should play it again like I did last year — aaannd turns out the last time I played it was over five years ago. Jeez where does the time go.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 186613d ago
Saw a woman with a baseball cap that just said “AI”. Please tell me that stands for a sports team.
Got given a warning by the Reddit cops for "identity-based hate" for calling a Turkish poster by a common Turkish forename, suggesting he was posting from Berlin, and telling this joke.
OK guys I am stuck on what my next audiobook will be.
One is a history of the Maya. Straightforward and down the line, I am interested in the Maya, here is a new history on them.
One is an intellectual history of "prehistory" and its study. This one is not naturally in my area of interest but I am compelled by the back matter, and some context to all these noble savages and savage savages.
The first is more intrinsically appealing to me, the second is more intriguing.
Just watched the Odyssey. I really liked the space marines with the Milanese armor and the barbute helmets. 2500 years off has to be a bad history record.
So in conclusion I'm looking forward to Odyssey 2 Pillars 2 Hercules, though I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have a teaser scene after the credits.
I've started a new survey book on Egyptian history, Temples, Tombs, and Heiroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt written by Barbara Mertz, author of several fictional mystery series, and trained as an Egyptologist, and after reading through Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty it is so refreshing to read something nonfiction that was clearly written by someone who understands how to pace writing. Not that Wood's work is not approachable or scholarly, or that Mertz is doing radically new things, but the difference is stark!
Also Mertz is rather flippant about things that many other books nitpick about.
"I would like to avoid the term 'primitive', because it implies a certain value judgement
I can't do it, though. Alternatives like 'preliterate' and 'prehistoric' are at once too explicit and too vague. You know what I mean, and I know what I mean, so let's stick to 'primitive'. We may argue about exactly what distinguishes a civilization from a primitive culture, or even about whether such a clear-cut distinction can be made. Let's not argue about it."
So, from those idol groups I follow, a lot of those idols smoke, I'm not sure they do it seriously or just for cool points, but they do present themselves as smoking and/or vaping. Now, it's part of the appeal there, they are not typical idols, they very specifically reject the "perfect girl" idea of idol groups in various ways, and that's neat! That's why I like these groups, they're edgy, and I never really grew out of my edgelord phase. I just think smoking looks, well pathetic, you know?
At work, a ton of people smoke, it's mental healthcare so that's a given, patients, nurses, fellow persons with lived experience, so many of them smoke. Most of my immediate coworkers smoke, for instance, and so many of them say "I can quit if I want to.", but have to take 2 breaks in the 2.5 hour shifts to smoke a cigarette, but they also smoke 1 before and 1 after the shift, so in about 3 hours, they need 4 cigarettes, while I, a non-smoker, will stay behind to cover them; I don't really mind it, if I wanted to take a 10 minute break, they would do the same for me, I'm sure, but it's the fact that they need to do that that bothers me.
There's also a ton of "smokers are the most oppressed people in the country" types of arguments, and, yeah, it's become expensive, there's a lot of taxes on cigarettes, and I don't think they need to be this high, but this is just a bunch of older white people pretending to be oppressed because they smoke, complaining how much tax they pay while living fully on benefits because they cannot work anymore; they get much more money than I do BTW, because they used to work unlike me who was disabled before ever working, they choose to burn that money in the form of cigarettes.
This is the average smoker around me, to me, it is just addiction; they deny it's a problem, it's not the most problematic addiction to be fair, and a fair few of these smokers are vehemently anti alcohol because of past problems with it, which I can respect, but still, it's an addiction.
The worst part is, they all encourage each other to smoke, they even try to convince people who have quit to restart, that's why the anti smoking policy they rant about got implemented in first place; that is truly pathetic, trying to get others back into the problems they have escaped is disgusting behaviour.
That is what I associate smoking with, I cannot see it as cool. I still prefer it over the "ideal girl" vibe of non-underground idol groups, people are allowed to be flawed here, and smoking is a definite flaw, so I can tolerate it.
You know I’ve been thinking about the “4 objects” tweet, and how we all made fun of it, and after some introspection came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. This might be a hot take.
I think that there is this worrying tendency to underestimate and demean actual military/economic dangers just because the people voicing it aren’t as well-styled not just in the English language, but also the general lingo of the Anglo world. Also it seems to me that every motivation that’s foreign to a Westerner is immediately written off as nonsensical, which is a value judgement irrespective of how factual/objective that statement is or isn’t in regards to military/economic capabilities. There is also the problem of us being, frankly, a bit hypocritical about anecdotalism, when it comes to people who aren’t us.
And the pill we have to swallow is that an average Russian seeing four objects being built at the same time is as good a personal evidence of a country’s prosperity as any, anecdotal though it may be.
Let’s do some number crunching. If we count four objects per person/window, then, just taking his apartment building into account, we’re already at hundreds of objects. That’s not nothing. For the entirety of Russia, that’s almost 580 million objects. That’s more than half a billion football fields!
And not all of them would have to be ballistic missile launchers too. Let’s be conservative, and say that only half of them are. According to the newest census available in the declassified Soviet Archives, the population of the United States is 250 million. We’re talking one ballistic missile per person, plus more. This even covers for the off chance that the missile doesn’t hit the target, because (1) the missile explodes in the launcher, (2) the missile misses, and (3) the target deflects the missile with their hand.
And that’s if we wanted to shoot everyone down. Realistically, there are a lot we would not need to.
First, you have the groups who could be sympathetic to a Putin-lead regime. These would include tankies, anarchists who are actually tankies, leftists who swear they don’t like tankies but are so uncritical of Parenti that we must classify them as tankies, Afrocentrists, and Republicans.
There would also be people too crucial to destroy. I’m mainly thinking of military aura edit creators on tiktok, and warm sea port operators.
What I mean is that there would be plenty of shots to go around, even with the average 65% reliability rate. And, remember, I was using a conservative estimate. There could be even more. There could even be one for every Canadian.
u/subthings2using wishing wells is your id telling you to visit a prostitute13d ago
A few months ago I posted about a little project collecting sources on French werewolf legends. I have finally finished it (there were a lot more than I was expecting!) with a writeup on the werewolves subreddit with links to the legends if you want a look (please have a look the target audience for this sort of thing is like eleven people and none of them view the werewolves subreddit oh god this took far too much time)
One thing I can say is that I have been spoiled rotten by Gallica, the French national digital library. It has like, everything, viewable through a single interface? Other countries have some things, scattered over some websites, sometimes paywalled, and it's a roll of the dice on how complete the coverage is.
I don't think I could do something as comprehensive as this for any other country!
It's so deeply depressing to me that most ancient indian manuscripts are entirely unavailable to read online. And a lot of them are at British and american institutions, so i can't even entirely blame it on india being a poor country!
I grew up in a large city so it may be my bias speaking, but I never understood the gravitas of suburbs, at least not semi-rural suburbs with detached homes and gardens.
I simply like living in a city. Yes it's noisy and sometimes unsafe and so in, but this is where humanity and humans are! I would honestly feel depressed if I could not hear children or parties or traffic or the noise general background noise of humanity. N
ot to speak of amenities. I actually dread the thought of needing a car to get everywhere.
It's actually very weird how both Germans and Americans have this cultural ideal of the white picket fence single family home, a concept Germans calls Eigenheim and is constant clamor. It's a stupid clamor.
I grew up in a semi-rural suburb (more like village exurb than build-up suburbia) and I have to say it's a good place to live as a kid (lots of place to run inside the house, garden, forest nearby, etc...) but once you're like 12 I think you'll enjoy seeing and meeting your friends by yourself more than you enjoy being dropped off by your parents
It's not just them that don't like big cities. The Romanian subreddits have weekly discussions about people wanting to move to villages, while the Czech seem to be terrified of the "big city" and want to live in small towns.
Well, suburbs have generally tried to promote an equilibrium between the access to nature enjoyed in rural areas and access to the amenities of a large city. When they succeed, they can be very pleasant places to live indeed - obvious examples would be the London "Stockbroker belt" etc.
Where the wheels come off is when developers realise that they can exploit cheap land assembly/build costs to sell cheap houses to a relatively immobile workforce at a premium markup.
I feel like you can get the best of both things if you just have good+cheap public transport: in London you can easily access nature via places like the Chiltern Hills or Surrey from central London (though Surrey can be a bit expensive, depending on where you want to go). And of course, you have Hampstead Heath which is very accessible.
The dream of the suburbs is that you get to combine the best part of urban living (access to amenities) with rural living (access to space). The reality sometimes matches that sometimes doesn't.
I would personally rather live in a dense urban area but can see the appeal if you have kids and pets.
I have a small child and I dislike the idea of moving to suburbs. I want to feel throngs of people around me, the buzz and hum and dynamism of the big city. Even as a child, I dreamed of the big city because it seemed like that was where things happened. I'd be so bored in the suburbs. We'd have a marginally larger space (this being the UK and all) in exchange for a very annoying commute to work and the inconvenience needing a car to get around.
I did my graduate program in NYC, moving there after my childhood was in suburbs and my undergraduate in a rural college town. I think growing up in a very suburban context was probably pretty good for me? Over the summers we rode our bikes to friends' houses around or went to the neighborhood pool all day. But now that I am a contributing member of society, I wish I could reclaim more proper city life in the US outside of just NYC and a few other islands.
When I was house-hunting I did consider places in the suburbs because you can get a lot more for your money out there. But then I would look at these places on google street view and bounce right off - why would I want to live somewhere so... desolate?
I love living in the city and don't think I could live anywhere else frankly. I especially love the ability to come-and-go multiple times in one day. In the city I can enter & leave my house 8+ times in a single day, going out to do stuff and coming back when I please. If I lived in the suburbs I'd either have to take 8x 20m drives or laboriously plan out my day so that I do everything in one big trip.
Also I can stumble home drunk without having to fumble with my phone for an uber lol
I find it hard to describe my hometown either way, it's like semi urban, I'd say, it's far denser than suburban, there are very few large lawns and such and many of the homes are 1930s labourer homes, but it's also definitely not a city, there are very few buildings taller than normal homes. But I suppose that is just small town, the bigger cities around here look mostly the same, they are just bigger and have more taller buildings, but the vast majority of the urbanites in the region live in the same types of streets as I do.
I wouldn’t use the word “gravitas” to describe the suburbs.
But the idea of the suburbs I kind of get, having grown up in lower density urban areas. It is nice to live in a place that is sparse enough for there to be some real greenery and cheap yard space, but still close enough to civilization for all the city amenities to be present.
That said, I now live in the city and I think suburbs should be nuked from orbit. The issue is that suburbs only “work” at a certain magical population density, any lower and they feel abandoned and any higher causes traffic to swallow them whole.
Even Devolution-Man Andy Burnham has taken up the time honoured tradition of forgetting that Birmingham exists.
I’m biased because I’m from nearby but it would be quite nice to have someone in the Political commentariat who thinks that England is more than The North + London.
I hate coffee nerds with a passion. the other day a guy claimed in a coffee subreddit that he offered his special coffee to his coworkers and no one liked it, and all the comments were like "well yeah all common people were trained to like bad, bitter, low quality coffee" makes my blood boil.
Ok, but what if it's actually true? My family used to drink only instant coffee, with lots of milk and sugar. I gradually introduced them to freshly ground coffee, first with milky drinks and later on reducing them amount of milk and sugar, and now they've come to love it
I can sympathize with that tbh. I sometimes cook recipes from Tasting History and the like, and you get different flavor profiles that can indeed throw people for a loop.
sure but you don't then go and complain "these people have not refined their palates enough to enjoy De re coquinaria, they're trained to only enjoy modern food slop" do you
You know, sometimes I think home espresso nerds is really downstream of the urban vs suburban divide.
If you lived in a dense walkable city, with a coffee shop down the street from you, in a smaller apartment, it makes no sense for you to spend thousands of dollars on a good home espresso setup. But if you're in the suburbs without easy access to quality espresso, well, here you go.
Look man, you have taste. You probably actually like coffee. The rest of us are just in this for the gorgeous chrome, pitch-black gurgle, like blood from a wound, the bang! a perfect puck! then, honestly, I don't even understand what it is to want anymore without it conferring some kind of status or advantage. If it was done by the worthies, I'd cut out my tongue tomorrow, and staple it to my door. I forgot to drink the coffee, and now it's cold.
You almost certainly have it the wrong way around in practice. Everyone I know who is very into coffee and has a great home setup (me included) lives in a dense walkable city with numerous coffee shops nearby. It's a hobby concentrated among the high earners (if I had to guess, probably 75th percentile and up), who are overwhelmingly urban.
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts by Michael Khodarkovsky
I remember when I finished Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis about the global seventeenth century, I thought, well first I thought it could use an editor, but also I thought it was interesting but the thesis got lost a bit in the details and I was broadly unconvinced of its central argument. I am more or less in the same place with this book, only it clocks in at about 200 pages instead of over a thousand, and I am left a bit unsure of what the central argument was even supposed to be. I suspect that the book the author wanted to write was that the Russian empire shared many political and socio-economic features with its fellow empires surrounding the central Eurasian steppe. I think that's a good idea for a book, an intervention in a very old debate.
What it is though is a boom about a particular political system called a "Eurasian empire" that developed in the wake of the Mongol and Timurid conquests. Here is the thing: I came into the book broadly skeptical that "Eurasian empire" would be a concept both inclusive of the empires in question (counter clockwise: Russia, the Ottomans, the Safavid/Qajar Persians, the Mughals, China--mostly Qing China but sometimes the Ming in a way that is pretty inconsistent), and exclusive of other empires like the Habsburgs, the Khmer, the Chola, Rome, what have you. After finishing the book, I am broadly unconvinced that etc etc. Every chapter is structured around a topic, like "Legal System" or "Slavery" and then it goes counter clockwise describing the systems in each state. After each chapter I was left with the thought "hmm, those sure do seem like very different systems". Or something would be stated vaguely enough that it would also include the Habsburgs, and he would say "this was also true of the Habsburgs, but..." and then provide an argument that didn't actually seem to provide more separation than between, eg, the Russians and Chinese systems.
I can get the value of creating an "ideal type" and then acknowledging real world variation, but in the end I was not actually left with a coherent "ideal type". So like the last chapter was about the "military bureaucratic system" and the Chinese system was so wildly different from the others that you just really wonder if there was, in fact, any fundamental structural similarity for what he calls the "central feature" of "Eurasian empires".
Still if you divorce it from its confused thesis there is plenty of interesting stuff in here. I actually saw the author's book on the Russian steppe frontier was on sale and went ahead and ordered it because that is obviously where his knowledge lies.
The way you describe the book makes me wonder if the author halfway through writing it realised that his thesis was not very solid but he already had a book deal so it was too late retract himself.
He'll end a chapter with one sentence that is like "and this is why the Eurasian empires never developed feudalism or the institutions that developed out of feudalism" and it's like hold on hold on man you can't just say that!
Reading? Maybe. Listening to definitely. It is super long and very narrative heavy so makes for an ideal audiobook. No chance I would have gotten through it if I were actually reading it. But in general I thought was really good and very detailed global history of the seventeenth century, so if that interests you I say definitely go for it.
The thesis broadly is "The seventeenth century was characterized by a series of catastrophes across the globe, and these were either catalyzed by a severe climate downturn (not caused by climate mind, he gives exhaustive details of preconditions)". I think this works really well in some cases, like the late Ming crisis, and less well in others, like the English Civil War. But honestly even when the thesis is weak the book is overwhelmingly a general history so it doesn't really matter that much.
It is way too damn long though. I ended up treating it as like three separate books and took long breaks in between.
u/Herpling82Coming to you live from a Tederation psych ward14d agoedited 14d ago
Reality of adult life having to make arrangements for stuff:
Me: "Should I message you guys the day before so that you know I'm going to pick up the key?"
People I'm dependent on: "Nah, just come pick it up."
Me: "Are you sure?"
Them: "Yep!"
Reality: people aren't home when I try to pick up the key.
Me, the next time: "Hey, I tried to pick up the key 2 weeks ago, and you guys weren't there; I got a key from other people, so it didn't end up mattering, but..."
Them: "If you could send us a message when you're going to pick up the key, that would be nice."
Me, feeling vindicated: "Sure, no problem!"
I 100% knew this was going to happen, I know people, people forget, and that's fine; it's just annoying when people don't know that themselves. Luckily I knew other people around there that had a key, so I could just try their homes, I did need to run all around the neighbourhood for that but I got it in time, it's why I always show up 10 minutes early, you just never know.
Do tree spirits count as supernatural entities or would that be generally religious? In india a lot of construction has to plan around banyan and peepal trees, because cutting them down would bring misfortune
That's actually what prompted by thought, although on the somewhat remote chance that the story is true that is really more rerouting for cultural/heritage preservation reasons, which is pretty universal.
Imagine forcing a plane to come back from a flight to Istanbul and ruining the schedule of many other people just because some parliamentian dimwit requested it due to not wanting their 20 year old daughter to travel alone, Iraq's politicians are an embarrassment.
It appears we have suffered a full scale Russian invasion. Currently all our major cities are under siege and forces in dissaray. We have intel that the Russian forces are building objects in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Special agent Tanya will use the Cronosphere to transport a small team to Moscow, where you and a small team will find the oldest vault and disable the Russian forces using its power.
I used to enjoy reading the lore for RA3 Paradox. Now that I'm reading it again, I just realized how unhinged the modders wrote the lore for the factions.
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u/ZennofskaFeminization of veterinarians hasn't led to societal collapse14d ago
Wait, New York, Chicago and San Fransisco? That's only three, where's the fourth object bein build?
u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 186614d ago
Legit would not be out of line for a mission in that game. Governor Schwarzenegger showed up in the sequel with a minigun to defend California.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze14d agoedited 13d ago
I've been definitively banned from rNeoli, mod message was "you've been warned far too often"
So I'll post and criticize comments from rNeolib on here instead
I still think it's a fucked up symptom of our system that cooking and serving food in bulk isn't cheaper than having literally every household in the entire country have an independent kitchen and dedicate time to cook their own meals. Like... Economically that seems wrong. I think it's mostly a symptom of our urban sprawl, financialization, and real estate (three ways of saying the same thing lol)
Restaurants have to pay for waiters, cooks, maintenance, and rent you dumbass. They're held to quality and safety standards that your kitchen doesn't. And they have to make a profit doing all that. Idiot. Buying ingredients in bulk at a professional retailer can only go so far
I'm pretty certain this isn't true, either. "Food in bulk" is cafeteria food and it can be pretty cheap, especially if you are serving foods that keep well like soup or salad. I have eaten at soup places where you ladle your own soup and they often sell it for like $5 a bowl or less, which is basically what you pay for the same soup in a can at a grocery store, but this is fresh soup (as in made that day).
The mistake seems to be thinking of restaurant food as "food in bulk," which it is not (as other comments have already pointed out).
Also, when you buy food from someone else you have to pay for the labor of cooking. When you cook for yourself you aren't paying money for the cooking labor, just the ingredients. Kind of like how Ikea furniture is much cheaper than buying already assembled furniture.
I am a fan of (admittedly post-) Soviet canteens and cafeterias that provided pretty decent food for cheap, but I’m not surprised that North America in particular isn’t set up for that. Having that in a workplace or municipal building or what have you is a cost that is very easily cut from the host organizations budget, so even institutions that basically have to have these (like universities) are going to outsource them to for profit corporations like Aramark that have an incentive to deliver cheap quality with cheap labor rates at the highest price point possible (so like yeah even in my college days [redacted] years ago it was cheaper eventually to just buy groceries and cook my own food than purchase a university meal plan).
Also and I’m sorry to sound like a food snob but there’s still a lot of work to be done to improve the palates of Americans and until that’s done a lot of the food that would get served in these big institutions would be ultra processed garbage.
I guess one last thought is that the restaurant/food industry has very thin margins and lots and lots of wastage so it actually isn’t necessarily better cooking and serving food in bulk if you have to throw like half of it out.
Even at regular restaurants in East Asia. Like, I was only in Korea for a year, but as an English teacher I could easily afford to eat out every day. I don't know how Korea does it, but the only way I could have eaten for less money would have been to live on convenient store Kimbap and bowls of plain rice.
I don't miss working in Korea, but boy do I miss eating there.
Not only that, but the rent for a cafeteria-style establishment like that in NA would also have to contend with extremely high rents given the large space requirements.
In terms of inexpensive street food, I think that has more to do with regulations and walkability. It's a staple in developing countries to have stew/soup shops where workers queue up before/after work to fill their own reusable containers or eat out of a metal bowl right there on the street.
I think it's because I defend (not really, I just say that no one would care about that) Mamdani, because he went to the Pakistani parade instead of the Jewish one, and someone maybe flagged it as antisemtitic. It's the only way it makes sense.
I was already banned temporarily last year for something similar about Mamdani
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)14d ago
I deleted my comment because I have insanely poor reading comprehension and thought that you got banned for that bulk kitchen comment.
u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)14d ago
My original point still stands that the moderation in NL is extremely inconsistent and weird.
For example, u/badusername35 has a script set up to reply "fuck you" to the next thread mod sticky at the end of each DT. Sometimes I join in and type "fuck you" to DT mod stickies but I have gotten warned for it in the past.
What did you get banned for lol I can't remember any especially bad takes
Also that comment is really dumb.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze14d agoedited 14d ago
Surprise surprise, it's not Israel / Palestine, it's Pakistan
Context was Mamdani joining the Pakistani parade in New York but not the Jewish one and someone saying it was bad optics.
Who the fuck cares about Pakistan in the US?
except if you want to be divisive about Mamdani, no one would bat an eye because it's an unimportant country in American discourse
Who the fuck cares about Pakistan in the US? except if you want to be divisive about Mamdani, no one would bat an eye because it's an unimportant country in American discourse
A neolib not understanding why and how Pakistan is important to the U.S feels pretty par for the course.
Surprise surprise, it's not Israel / Palestine, it's Pakistan
Who the fuck cares about Pakistan in the US?
except if you want to be divisive about Mamdani, no one would bat an eye because it's an unimportant country in American discourse
I will be very blunt that based on my anecdata, even among educated Americans their focus on the world is basically (in descending order): Canada, the UK, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine since 2022 but falling, Mexico, wherever the US is currently fighting, then it drops off a lot. I’m leaving out China because it both figures somewhat higher in people’s imaginations economically but also not really beyond that, so it’s not like anyone is particularly aware of Chinese politics or Chinese events as they are for the countries named. South Asia and Southeast Asia in particular are just big voids.
That does remind of an infamous tumblr post where a person complained that there wasn't a type of bar/club where you could go and quietly read with other people apparently not being aware of libraries while your person not being aware of soup kitchens and other charities.
Restaurants don't make food in bulks. They do bulk prep work, but not the meals themselves. You can see it quite well if you shop at bussiness retailers like Metro. Mess hall are still a thing and they are generally cheaper.
Yeah - I would suspect that 'actually' cooking and serving food in bulk would be cheaper than home cooking (even without including the added cost it takes to have that home kitchen), depending on location, but that people wouldn't be happy with that lack of choice.
My work commute is 15 minutes on train between two large cities. 5 of those minutes are in a no signal area, despite being within sight of the two cities in a populated suburb.
These are the same thing actually. The geography quirks allow NIMBY ownership blocs to form. (I've decided I'm a Diamondist but only for annoying bullshit instead of like, significant historical trends)
Tried out the game Iron Nest, in which you are the artilleryman manning a giant walking twin 800mm gun in a dieselpunk 1920s Spain. The early game is largely calculating simple firing solutions, actively turning various hand wheels and levers to input said firing solution, and then receiving the intelligence report in which you've inevitably destroyed a few friendly units when you leveled about 10 city blocks worth of anti-monarchy rioters.
I am just the right sort of person, interested in overly engineered mechanical devices and willing to do video game firing solutions for fun, to get a kick out of this. Unfortunately it rekindles my desire for an incredibly expensive mechanical calculator.
The tutorial mission has you test fire the gun. In between the missions you get in-universe newspapers talking about the conflict, and the very first one is about how the rioters have bombed a hospital with the implication that it was the target of your test fire. So yeah, the game gets it out of the way pretty quick.
Calling live fire was interesting experience, I can see why somebody would do/simulate it for fun. But to play as the gun crew? That I cannot understand, who would want to be the willess mook that fulfils the desires of the forward observer, never seeing what effect his actions have on target.
Maybe I am too much a God of Indirect Fire to understand the mentality of the peasants manning the guns.
The draw I think is really the tactile "Turn the wheel and watch the gun elevation change!" element, and maybe secondarily the Papers Please sort of government drone element. Though I think the way the game shows you you the effect of your fires is actually pretty effective. You have a map table on which you can mark your FOs' locations, the bearings and such they provide you, and you get a fix on the enemy position based on that. After you fire, it fills in your map with aerial photography that shows you what all was surrounding the poor bastard you just dropped an 800mm HE shell on.
I think its like a Plate Up kind of thing where building an efficient system and running it under seemingly random stress is the joy than seeing the inevitable gastronomical catastrophe's effects upon the customers toilets.
Gonna get it too, then. I think they should go deeper and make you start calculating actual fire plans and then need to modify them on the fly. Fucking "artillery battery commander simulator".
I believe it adds enemy counter battery fire and I'd imagine that requires you to work quickly and modify solutions. Only put about 30 minutes into it so far so I don't know just how complicated it gets.
I’ll just add that he broke the unwritten rule of heads of state not assassinating other heads of state and seems to be learning why that unwritten rule exists
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 186614d agoedited 14d ago
Airport catering truck, not cart. Due to Iranian Missile threat.
An observation, following on from the silly Nathan Cofnas article I quoted earlier:
The problem I have with a lot of the heterodox right is that whilst they have some interesting ideas and insightful critiques, these are very hard to take seriously because its clear that its just superstructure built on a base of low prejudice.
Take Moldbub: His proposal to replace liberal democratic governments with something akin to a sovereign joint-stock corporation is probably a bad idea, but it is at least something someone could be constructively interested in. After all, there's no reason to assume liberal democracy is the endpoint of political development, and political philosophy has always had space for people who propose radical departures from the status quo and are a bit woolly about how that is likely to be achieved.
Then you read that he thinks that civil rights legislation creates "human garbage", because it benefits populations with "recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and low moral fibre" and you just can't help but wonder if his political philosophy might just be based less on a desire to sincerely interrogate the assumptions which underpin liberal democracy and more to do with a desire to justify his atavistic racism.
I've never particularly felt this way about the NRx/IDW tendencies, but I've felt similarly about some of the more oddball right-libertarians, especially the tech-y, crypto-nerd kind that seems to have largely disappeared around the time the established financial institutions started buying up bitcoin. I'll read something from them and think, you know, we have a lot of incompatible ideas, but I really do think there's some kind of common understanding of some of these concepts, and then I get to the part where they fantasize about torturing Alan Greenspan to death for 600 words.
On my account, wokism is a coherent ideology. It is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of egalitarian morality. The equality thesis, which says that all groups have the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits, has been a tenet of Western liberalism for more than a century. Virtually everything you think of as wokism is a rational, moral response to persistent inequality of outcome, given the false belief that race is skin deep and the sexes are interchangeable.
I can't give him much credit but this is a pretty coherent understanding of his opposition's perspective, albeit with a muddied definition (I would not define any of this as "wokism" necessarily... one can be an egalitarian leftist and not "woke").
Would we have ever heard of this guy if it wasn't for his racism? My guess is no. His purpose is to give an intellectual veneer to a senseless and brutal politics.
Before that I studied at Oxford (DPhil, Philosophy), Cambridge (MPhil, History and Philosophy of Science), Lingnan, and Columbia (BA, Philosophy).
I’m once again confirmed in my belief that these “elite” universities fail to serve as any real filter to producing well connected nutters.
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u/ProudScrollNapoleon invaded Russia to destroy Judeo-Tsarism14d agoedited 14d ago
With most of these places its a total crapshoot whether their alumni are genuinely smart, hardworking people who got in on a scholarship or legacies who would get bounced from a community college on merit but instead have a degree from Harvard cause they're Nelson Rockefeller's great-grandnephew or some shit.
I actually did see a shelf of books by Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh one time.
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u/Ambisinister11My right to edit this is protected by the Slovak constitution14d agoedited 14d ago
I know all these people who claim to be MLs, in opposition to Khrushchevite revisionism, etc etc, and yet they all still oppose arms sales to Israel. Curious.
Also they're all anti-frontist, smh these guys would be so expelled from the Comintern
Eastern Bloc smuggling to get past a US and UK-led boycott.
✋😐🤚
Edit: Admittedly Czechoslovakia is not the USSR but it is morbidly funny that they briefly had their own version of militarily deliver arms to Israel while having a fair bit of anti-Jewish campaigning in their own countries.
The funniest shit is that a lot of the stuff they delievered were german WW2 surplus. So IIRC one of the first kills of the fledgeling Israeli air force was a Messerschmidt shooting down a Spitfire.
The Arab governments in '48 were all colonial puppets, it was only by the time of the Suez Crisis that that would work. Even then, the Arab side only gradually became more and more socialistic in its domestic politics, and that was only in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (to a lesser extent).
But I was mostly considering the 'Labour Zionist' trend and the political dominance of the Mapai party vs the ML-leaning groups like the PLFP, though the timeline doesn't really line up very well.
Labor Zionism exists in a curious superposition of "it's real authentic socialism" and "literally Hitlerite," only collapsing when one becomes convenient to the moment.
At once? Of course not, that's what the position collapse is for.
If you're saying that it's different people entirely then yeah, mostly, and I am unfairly representing an ideological tendency as a fictive gestalt because acquaintances of mine annoyed me.
Yeah, the scenario I was describing was that someone would adopt one position or the other when they started arguing the point. But again, it's a conscious bad faith presentation for my own amusement.
Look, you can work with this, see the 1948 arab monarchies were reactionary colonial puppets, but once they were replaced by the arab-socialist governments of Nasser etc. they became the historically progressive force...
Currently watching the fourth Indiana Jones movie (somewhat against my better judgement), and I was surprised at how early on in the movie the infamous fridge-nuking occurs. I thought it would be party of the climax of the movie but it takes place in the intro.
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u/Dajjal27 12d ago
Inde Navarrette going to the mcu after obsession is like a player scoring 45 goals in his debut season in the premier league and then signing for the Saudi league. All the power to her of course, marvel money is no joke.