Happy (or sad) Monday guys!
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?
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Perhaps the only thing that tonight’s speech clarified is that this is what Trump sees every time he goes to sleep.
Been replaying OSRS as an onna-musha, or at least I was until I decided to go Hardcore Ironman and lock myself out of a katana. I've slayed the great dragon in Dragon Slayer I, and have almost finished the F2P content, but I have yet to afford a Runeplate body.
I'm finding it kind of charming how basic the stories are. Slaying the Dragon, the great burnatator, was just a classic experience. And being Ironman, the game has actual balance. I hadn't realized I had become such a servant to the Grand Exchange in my original account, everything you did was about amassing gp. Not being beholden to the market, is more in line with the Musha shugyō.
With a great amount of metaphorical weight off my shoulders and the ability to get some genuine rest on a pleasant mattress, I've gotten back into video games.
I downloaded and have been trying out a couple of the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Series because I have fond memories of Rainbow Six Vegas 2, and wanted to see what these ones were like. Namely Wildlands (Eh, the voice acting in it's really taking me out of the immersion) and Breakpoint (Eh but more playable a few hours in).
I've gotten quite a few hours into Breakpoint, something like 18 hours or so, and the reason for that is that like a lot of Ubisoft games, it's wide and expansive...but doesn't have that much there all things considered. Outside of story missions, the main things to do are kill mercenaries, massive drones who are an equally massive pain in the ass to destroy, and explore...wherein it's killing more mercenaries and looking for loot.
That aside, what comes off as super questionable for Breakpoint is the setting and its ambiguity.
It's supposed to take place on the fictional South Sea archipelago called "Auroa", and is ~2000km from Auckland, NZ based on what this one character says to the PC.
The gist is that this archipelago was supposed to be the site of this project by a tech company called Skell Tech and they're trying to build this place where science can be fostered and other things I personally just cannot be bothered to care about. At some point Skell Tech has a PMC called Sentinel come in and provide security for them, and so far it's been Sentinel has gone rogue and has taken over the island.
Across the map, there's old ruins of what look like Māori/Polynesian villages, but the only people that are called locals are all non-Polynesian and definitely American "Homesteaders".
I kept wondering what the deal was there because there felt like very little exposition on who these people even were, when I finally found something akin to some explanations from sections on the Objectives Board, which says on the Aurora Archipelago entry:
And then for section on the Homesteaders:
What really struck me here is how the US government totally ethnically cleansed (or "evacuated") the region of its Indigenous populace and it's just filler for the background, and 43 years after they committed what sure seems like a crime against humanity, random Americans wanting to raise their families "off the grid" have come and just squatted on what should be whoever the hell originally lived there's land especially since that act of ethnic cleansing took place well within living memory and then they complain about a tech company and PMC barging in and taking over like they didn't just do the same goddamn thing.
I later heard some NPC Homesteader dialogue about "the Ancients", which is apparently what they call the Indigenous folks of Auroa.
Coincidentally while these Homesteaders were in an abandoned village that was occupied by the PMC that I just cleared out. I cleared out another village and even found Homesteaders literally occupying houses while having this same conversation and repeating it after a minute or two, so it's clear this is supposed to be the position of the Homesteaders and their understanding of events.
Homesteader 1 – "I was passing by one of the ancient villages the other day, the all thing (sic, the voice actor says "whole") was cleared out. Vines growing through roofs and all that."
Homesteader 2 –"Goddamn shame. There is so much history there."
Homesteader 1 – "Those Ancients really cared about the environment. They didn't cause anybody trouble. Now, Sentinel is rounding up their descendants. It's horrible."
Homesteader 2 – "Sentinel cares about nothing but profit and control."
Homesteader 1 – "It's disgusting."
In addition to this other stuff, looking at the game's lore entries for information implying stuff about the population prior to the 99 year lease:
First, Captain Cook had discovered the island in 1773, ignoring warnings that the island's residents had angered the gods and in the process discovered an abandoned Spanish fort that is completely missing from all records ("Captain Cook"). In 1786, European migration began to the island to hunt the island's plentiful seal population ("Traders and Adventurers"). In 1788, another actual historical explorer, Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, lost two frigates at the island during a hurricane ("The Lapérouse Expedition"). In 1803, whaling began on the island, bringing yet more European immigrants to the island and the remains of that whaling infrastructure can be found in Maunga Nui, Whalers' Bay, and the Windy Islands before the waters became thoroughly depopulated of whales, ending the industry in the late 19th century ("The Whalers"). In 1837, the Auroa Company was established to populate the island further with European immigrants to staff these industries, most of whom were Scottish, hence the Scottish place names such as New Argyll and New Stirling ("Auroa Company"). In 1860, gold was discovered, causing a gold rush that brought in thousands of immigrants from New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and California, whose mines can be found in Silent Mountain, Restricted Area 01, and Good Hope Mountain ("The Gold Rush"). By 1921, the mines started drying up and by 1930 the last gold mine closed down and miners started leaving the island ("Depleted Veins"). In World War II, the US took over responsibilities of defending the island, building bases in Fen Bog, Channel, and Seal Islands, and here we get hard numbers about the islands' populations as it cites 21,000 military personnel and 16,000 civilians being on the island in 1945, though the military dwindled to a few hundred in the immediate aftermath of the war ("World War II"). By 1948 when the US and British governments begin negotiations, the population had fallen to 10,000 on account of the collapse of all industries other than agriculture ("The Cold War"). By the 1953-1954 exodus of civilians for purposes of operational secrecy, the population had dropped again to 9,000 and the US was obligated by the 99 year lease to purchase the civilians' lands at high prices and compensate for travel and relocation costs ("Residents Exode"), and then the entry reveals that apparently the last of Darkwood Island's residents were "captured and expelled".
It feels kinda weird getting to that last detail. Up to this point, it feels like they are doing everything to establish that the population the lease would be displacing a bunch of people of European descent who came there for economic opportunity, likely absorbed the remaining native population, and whose leaving is also an economic opportunity getting off an island with by now massively diminished prospects but they got a pretty penny out of it so eh? Then, "Oh, also there still were some in-determinant number of natives around who had to be forced to leave, a likely infinitesimal population by this point but still it happened." It feels like a weird left turn since the whole premise of the island's history feels like it was building up to avoiding that detail that people might not like, then, "also, here's the detail that people might not like."
Given much of the game's writing was trying to pull back from the previous game and have the game's writing and story be inoffensive, I feel like the devs must have gone through this whole process of setting up a situation where the displacement of the civilian population was about as unproblematic as such a process could be, and then at some point, some dev went, "Wouldn't it be more potentially offensive to imply there were no indigenous residents on the island at all by the time of the lease or that they were of the same sentiments as Auroa's non-indigenous residents?" but this thought occurred too late in the process to actually add any concrete details that could go along with that to make it less weird, such as the Homesteaders having among their numbers returned descendants of the Kings of the Forest represented by something like one of the side story quest givers and some incidental Homesteader dialogue.
One of the great difficulties of enjoying foreign instrumental music is it's so goddamn hard to find something you remember liking but not the title for. There's a piece for a something like 18 part woodwind/flute ensemble by a Chinese composer who IIRC was the head of a well regarded university music program there for a while. No idea who it was, no idea what university, no idea what the title was. It's been driving me crazy every time I try to find it again for the last couple weeks.
Humming it into Google works 50% of the time.
so....... Trump finally gonna announce war against Venezuela, right? or at least air bombing like first part of desert storm?
look at clips & internet comment
.... I don't understand what's the point of the speech, why does it needs to be a speech? this could've been an email
Whatever happened to that "Tedshire Rifles" (or whatever the fuck it was called) volunteer regiment that u/TheBatz_ mentioned a few months back? He announced that he had taken up a position as the regimental Advocate General, and then he seemed to have transferred into the same position at the Yorkshire Rangers or remnants thereof before getting yayorted into the Tedshire Pit of Doom.
I think the Tedshire Rifles is a front for some insane drug ops.
Trump has apparently put plaques underneath the presidential portraits in the White House, giving brief synopses on their terms and opinions on them from his perspective. Personally I think he should do more of this, even for non-American heads of state. I would enjoy if Trump were to opine on the reigns of, say, Louis XIV or Atahualpa. What historical rulers do you want Trump to make a plaque for?
I want to see what he wrote about Benjamin Harrison
I’ve been trying to find a picture with Harrison’s plaque but the one below is the closest I could find. As with the other ones I’ve seen of presidents Trump’s never heard of it was probably written by some Heritage Foundation intern.
https://preview.redd.it/0xttdp26pv7g1.png?width=3072&format=png&auto=webp&s=231fa40c459753c8107e618639eb1d6bfb108171
Caesar (Julius or Augustus)
So probably Little.
George III
The Qianlong Emperor
Pope Formosus (of cadaver synod fame)
Peter III of Russia
I love the Montenegrin Peter III: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0%C4%87epan_Mali
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I love Peter Justin Wrangel
Give him a cognitive test, see what he'll say about a portrait of Hitler. If he can't ace the easiest test in the world, we'll know.
Supilupiluma II
How do you fix the US median voter's perception of the economy without deflation?
I'm not sure the median voter's perception of the economy is broken to begin with. Trump says we're living in a Golden Age and that "affordability" is a hoax word invented by Democrats. The median voter isn't buying it.
I see Vegas and Cruises catering more to richer cliental, to the exclusion of the middle class, that tells me the economic tide isn't lifting all boats.
I mean, most median voters will say the economy is 'fixed' if we get to 2019 prices. That obviously won't happen.
Yes, the economy isn't good right now, but what is a good metric that someone can run on that the median voter can understand?
I mean, better faster cheaper would say, you can get back to 2019, you just have to seek efficiency. Meat was comparatively much much more expensive in the past, then it got vastly cheaper.
So it's weird to get it in your head that prices can't go down.
Ignore them and build sickass railroads everywhere.
Raise the national minimum wage.
It wouldn’t even do that much these days, since most districts with a large labor force already have local minimum wages that exceed the national minimum, some times by a factor of 2x or close to 3x. The only areas that would really be impacted are rural counties.
I'm always fascinated by 19th/early 20th century media, basically before radio and TV, when there was such a thing as mass-entertainment but it was still (almost) entirely in person. Plays, revues, shows, circuses, music, etc. all had to be performed. (and if you couldn't afford to see the big stars you'd set up your own production...) it's a fascinating thing.
If Red Dead Redemption 2 is anything to go by, set in 1899, you still had the cinema and magic lantern shows.
Is there some kind of tea flavoured/derived liquer out there? Someone I know said they tried some kind of tea-related alcohol that's apparently from Romania or Slovakia or somewhere like that. Does that ring any bells with you guys? I can't remember what the name was or where it was from, but I want to get some.
Tatratea?
Ah, that looks like it might be it. Thanks
Having tried tatratea i have to say I don't think the "tea" part in the name has much merit. Certainly didn't think while drinking it "this is like tea". Tastes like many other herbal alcohols, which is bad. Also, if my memory serves me right, the main gimmick was that it had a very big alchohol content
Riverposting has escaped containment.
Why is the river Thames in the image?
Rule Britannia
I was looking for a version played shittily on a recorder but then I remembered that this exists.
Everyone who was mad at me for my ranking should check this out.
(nb it wasn't actually "my" ranking but rather the conclusion of pure science)
Maybe someone who knows a bit about economics can explain this to me. If not I'll post it on askeconomics or something.
Why do people (including economists) not seem to care if economic growth is highly concentrated in one area? I keep seeing people reference an economy's growth as relying on one sector as if that's unproblematic. For example, I've seen people say that almost all of the US's GDP growth is in datacenters and other AI-adjacent stuff, so we should also focus on that.
The reason I find this surprising is because it sounds unhelpful for increasing most people's quality of life if most industries that they actually work in or consume goods/services from are stagnating. I suppose the government gets more tax revenue from the growing sector, but it doesn't seem like it'd be that much.
Well there are three answers.
The first is that economists do care. The term for an economy where one sector booms at the expense of other sectors is Dutch Disease and is a relatively well-known phenomenon but is also a very specific phenomenon and AI doesn't seem to be causing this problem for the US.
The second is that this data is happening over a short timespan. So in 1868 you might be able to say that X% of US gdp growth is in railroads and say that's a bad thing but then over the course of a decade, you'll see growth is more balanced. AI is a new(ish) technology coming alive rapidly so it makes sense that tons of AI investment will happen upfront before the secondary effects spread.
The third is the Baumol effect. This effect means that when one sector experiences productivity growth, it generates wage growth across all sectors. This can make unbalanced growth feel a lot less unbalanced to people living in those societies. Yes the capitalists of only one sector are seeing huge growth but the workers across the entire economy are seeing benefits (of course the dark side of Baumol is that this rise in wages can cause contraction in industries where demand doesn't keep up, ex: symphony orchestras)
You invest in the stock market in the breakout hits of the 90's, Microsoft and Apple and in this newfangled "inter-net", your quality of life would improve dramatically (at least until the dot com bust).
It would be unhelpful to try and lift a dying economic sector instead like the US manufacturing sector, which is somewhat doomed unless you put it on heavy duty life support back in the 90s. In stocks, you sell the losers, buy the winners to maximize profit and growth. You don't sell the winners and hold onto the losers.
Investment dollars are placed in the areas of the highest growth. Investing in personal computing and the internet was a way for the US to get ahead of competing nations. Spreading the money around instead to invest in coal mining, logging, manufacturing, naval infrastructure, aerospace engineering and the defense sector despite the Cold War ending, would have been a comparable waste. While aerospace and defense have a future unlike coal, with the Cold War ending it was entirely logically to draw back funding, not double down on it.
Norman Podhoretz huh. Nil nisi bonum, so there isn't much to say at all.
ed: This comes as hard news for all the left wing writers who like to find conservatives who they can pretend are intellectual and sophisticated in order that they themselves can pretend to be intellectual and sophisticated by writing about them. My thought are with them.
Who?
Some prick.
I watched 12 Years a Slave on television on a Russian channel, which reminds me that weird Russian censorship laws, by which I mean how it is illegal to portray tobacco products and nudity.
So you'll have literally the most horrible fucking thing happening on screen, like an underage slave girl getting tortured, but her breast is blurred.
Something about society I guess.
Shocked to hear that, smoking is much more common in Russia than in the West, yet they ban it in broadcasting?
Oh dear god HES SMOKING.
If you do a 90s Jim Carrey bit in Russia they send you straight to the Donbas
My examination commission when I showed up in my double breasted pin striped suit.
Real live photo of TheBatz
Double breasted?
Woah mama
I am reading 'War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster'. Interesting book. A lot of insights into the politicians and bureaucrats come from their letters to their wives. It is very cute.
Any mention of Fisher demanding to be promoted to Lord High Admiral?
Churchill keeps going on about Mrs Churchill's soft underbelly.
I want to write a post called "KAGANOVICH PRESS 'MECHANIZED AGRICULTURE' PRODUCTION METHOD BUTTON NOW!"
I have no idea how I would write it but I find the idea of Stalin standing over Kaganovich's shoulder screaming about how he's not pausing Victoria 3 to change the RGO to be really funny.
I think studying Stalin and the actual industrialization of the Soviet Union (than you R. W. Davies, my king) would save Victoria 3.
Stalin was the closest thing we have to a Vicy 3 player to exist (although as Kotkin always notes his power wasn't always absolute) and the war for the Industrialization of Russia could form a basis for making Victoria 3 more than a cookie clicker where "line goes up".
It's crazy that the hardest thing to do in real life, making industries change their production methods, is actually the easiest thing to do in game. It's one button press. There's no rebels, no industrialist is upset "Oh my god this will wreck my business!", no Communist party Apparatchik goes "What the fuck this will make my grift no longer work!?" No workers get angry other than for the 30 seconds when they're unemployed.
But in real life it was hard. It was a continuous war that Stalin would gain ground on, then cede ground, and then come back with a new counteroffensive that would flank the right wing of Ivan Kabakov soldiers and then make them switch X factory to a new production method. It was as close to a war as possible. And that's how Victoria 3 should feel. An actual fight , a continuous struggle where line goes down because the industraliasts are engaged in work stoppages and they're refusing to change their production method until they're given XYZ. If they don't want to do actual war, give us economic war a war to bring the country from shitty backwater to modern industry. And I just think studying Stalin's war for industrilization will give us a lot of event packs and problems and systems that can be implemented in the game.
Big shoutout to the Frederick, Maryland Thermo Fisher team for wasting 5k of product because they're too cheap to overnight us a package with dry ice.
Macron doesn't give names but it was either Ouattara or Biya
Watch out for African countries taking laws against AI in the coming weeks to find who's the secret boomer
LMAO it's like they are recreating scenes from Yes, Minister in real time
who wants EU propaganda?
There are loads of EU propaganda billboards in my city. Makes me feel faintly sick, to be honest.
I think I'd be ok with EU propaganda if it included building a Statue Of Liberty in Athens, stopping drowning kids in the Med, and celebrating the EU's new role as 1920's America.
I don't think it is really true that Paris, Milan, Vienna, etc has atrocious propaganda.
In the Victoria III mod Hail, Columbia!, a flavor pack for the United States, I encountered this event:
https://preview.redd.it/ybfepgnjws7g1.png?width=1186&format=png&auto=webp&s=01b9d89d992e33bcc8e112e74cb4a00fd3bdb52c
The building's production method is "Hioppopotamus Hunting" which comes with an unscaled modifier of +30.0% Mortality of Laborers because of course it does. Of course it'd have to be Louisiana because where else are you going to find a sufficient population of people crazy enough to hunt hippos and make them into something appetizing?
Anyway, I just randomly stumbled upon the historical inspiration for this event today while listening to the SPYCRAFT 101 podcast. Turns out this was something cooked-up by a man who deliberately shrouded himself in tall tales (some of which have been verified to have been false and, bizarrely, some of which have been verified true), the South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and spy Fritz Duquesne while he was in exile in New York City.
If I win the lotto, I won't tell anyone, but there will be signs
I could finally afford a Warhammer army.
Get that sucker on AirBnB.
絶望キネマ (Zetsubou Kinema), a new Idol group from Mad Ink, the same company behind Mazari. I'm not a fan of the random English profanity, but it's otherwise pretty good, so, I'll be watching their career with great interest.
Oh no. CA is streaming a super early version of Medieval III. I do not think this is a good idea. The Tinto Talks for EU5 were great and all, but it was just a guy making posts and discussions, not a livestream with people speaking to camera and the interacting with chat (in a moderated way). And apart from that, I don't think Total War fans are the patient and pensive type that can enjoy the process of development.
I'm also reminded of Matt Colville and how his company handled dev diaries for their recent TTRPG Draw Steel. Most of the week to week changes and playtests were exclusively on Patreon, and occasional big dev updates as videos on their channel. So the audience that wants to just enjoy the content can get hyped at the big updates without getting annoyed or disappointed at constant changes or unpolished weirdness, while the game design weirdo audience can get into the nitty gritty by literally buying into it first.
I honestly love this type of content since I'm a game design weirdo, but this is probably a mistake that will mess up their marketing later on.
I still feel burned by the false preview footage from Rome 2.
I'm actually behind this idea. The twenty minutes of the stream that I watched this morning give me much more hope that the game will be good. There were lots of bad ideas and negativity floating around the chat, but that's going to come with anything that CA does because their community is so carcinogenic.
I particularly love that external settlements are coming back. TW is general is too weak on campaigning and my armies often just march from city to city without fighting much in the field. I hope they also add more interesting terrain to battlefields like villages and hedges so they aren't all just open fields and the occasional hill.
I really liked the castle building thing. Just adding a block to enemy movement anywhere on the map. Reminded me of a thing in Nobunaga’s Ambition.
I really like the content of the stream too, to be clear. It’s just that this sort of super early and prominent communication often does not go well for game devs, especially when the community is this ‘carcinogenic’ as you say.
Their goal should be to get people like you and me to notice this info and not people like in the chat. This is why my mind went to the Tinto Talks.
There's this poster on X called 'Roman Helmet Guy' who's basically been getting a lot of tracition after claiming that people shouldn't read history written by marxist historians and instead read "Primary Sources" to learn history. Another crowd of right-wingers have been cheering him on for apparently owning the woke historical establishment because of his ability to cite "primary sources". Though of course the definition of primary source is actually simply just a source that olds rather than the traditional meaning of the term.
The guy is an obviously right-wing clown with negligible insight, and his screed against academia is total gibberish but part of the reason he's been able to make so much headway is by attacking bad narratives that have been spun up about Rome to push progressive stances. I think generally more caution needs to be taken before using history from 2 millennia ago to make political arguments.
Had a quick glimpse at some of this primary source bro's recent posts, I'm already getting a lot of brain damage.
I've taken a look at the of bibliography of Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425 by Hugh Elton, whom I guess this guy would consider one of the evil woke Marxist wokeist wokerati that took over history departments for arguing against the Barbarisation of the Roman Army thesis. There are over 120 primary sources listed, which if I'm going to be extremely generous, is probably 20 times the amount of late Roman sources read by Mr. "I've read nearly every important source the Romans ever wrote about their own decline".
Of course hes a chud.
Tweeting at Elon Musk is not something a sane person does.
Also he uses AI and lots of terrible summaries of history beyond Rome. He has done pirate history.
Maybe I'll mock him one day.
Sorry this is a no vague accusation zone. As one of the woke progressive cultural Bolsheviks who studies Rome to push my politics, I would like you to cite examples of him doing this.
I'm not really talking about his attacks on academia, more him scraping the bottom of barrel pop bad history. Like in particularly attacking the idea that Septum's Severus was 'Black' by taking someone who thinks he's sub-saharan African based on our current understanding. Or his attacks on the 'wholesome multicultural romans'. Though on second thought there was also his fight with Elon Musk...which while definitely not a progressive was very funny for his sheer level of syncopathy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1oz0v85/the_nazis_are_fighting_over_who_knows_more_about/
Was just about to make a comment about this too. Very funny that for all his talk about primary sources he apparently doesn’t speak a word of any of the ancient languages that would be necessary to read them in the original text. This guys out here reading Penguin translations of Plutarch and calling himself an expert.
Since doing my degree I’ve thought that ‘read the primary sources’ is the worst advice you could give someone trying to get into history, but it makes sense in the context of people LARPing about being historians. Stupidest part is his labelling of post-90s academia as Marxist when a bunch of pre-1990 secondary scholarship is still held in high esteem anyway and would be a lot easier to use than the primary literature.
Know this person's bent this is more likely older 19th C translations freely available online.
Also funny given that traditional Marxist historical materialism seems to be dying away in history departments, not flourishing. Someone keeps forgetting to feed the Mechanical Turk :/
If you can't read cuniform tablets get out
Also i agree jumping headlong into primary sources is a bad bad bad idea. Context, culture, and meaning is wildly different and you need a baseline of understanding.
This is in jest but we need to get primary sources off of the internet. Literally just 1984 all primary sources on the internet.
Force people to go to their library to get primary sources. That will make 99.99999% of people who pretend to care about history to ....not because even the most minimal friction will make them go "Oh I give up." SO their only option will be to read secondary scholarship (of people who can actually give context to the secondary sources) and maybe, just MAYBE, they'll actually learn something
Or they'll just scream about how the authors are all part of some Jewish conspiracy and hiding the truth within the library.
I think this is how Catholics used to talk about vernacular translations of the Bible
I agree. I see this all the time with people who "totally love the sagas" but don't know anything about how they look, and only talk about things modern blogs talk about.
Read them. They're free.
The trick is that he's reading neither.
Despite all the bluster about primary sources. I also genuinely don’t think he’d know what the word ‘epigraphy’ means
This basic guy is a dime a dozen. I saw someone once who was recommended to avoid I believe Mark C Elliott and instead read the dynastic histories directly if they wanted to learn about the Qing...
Ye Olde Qing were apolitical, unlike today’s combative politics, so the Qing obviously had no reason to lie.
/s
It is if anything worse than that - there isn't a canonical Qing dynastic history, because there was no dynasty after them to write it and for most of the 20th century any successor that might have written it was a little busy with other matters. The sources he was recommending to learn about the Qing end with the Ming.
There's been so much insane conspiracy stuff in mainstream reddit subs recently it's really pissing me off. There were a whole bunch of comments trying to connect the Rob Reiner murders to his recent film on Trump and Putin. Like Putin is really going to kill a guy over something that has been public for a decade...
Then there's this MIT professor who got shot and people are speculating that it could be a foreign hit. Ok, that is a thing that has happened, but it happened to stop a country from developing nukes and the US has had nukes for 80 years. Why kill someone now? People were then trying to connect it to the Brown shooting suspect when the only similarities are being loosely connected to New England universities. One was a mass shooting on campus that killed an economics professor and the other was an off-campus shooting of a single person that targeted a physics professor.
Whenever something happens, people rush to ridiculous explanations (sure, the UHC CEO was totally killed by a master assassin because Agent 47 is a real person who really exists...), but this time seems worse.
Two students in a review session for an economics class were killed at Brown. The session was led by a TA who survived, the professor was not there afaik. Disgusting to see conspiracy shit about that too, though, as one of the students was a member of College Republicans and people on Twitter are already trying to claim it was a political hit and harassing random pro-Palestine students over it. I hope they find the shooter. It’s awful not to know.
I swear the people who say this have never worked with another human being. What you think the average person is COMPETENT?
These people need to work retail for two weeks during a holiday.
I think something that contributes to it is how, if you read the local news a lot, the majority of criminals are really fucking bad.
Put a little bit of thought into your crime, and you are Agent 47 relative to the average murderer. I guess then anyone who displays any level of preparation or foresight is so out of the norm, it makes it seem like a grand conspiracy
The funny thing is that the anti-billionaire crowd should embrace the idea that you don't need someone like Jason Bourne to whack a billionaire. But these idiot commenters have built up this idea of plutocrats as people completely inaccessible to the common person. But then they might have to actually take action instead of whining about how change is impossible.
I mean the funny thing is that the UHC CEO wasn't a billionaire either, estimates I've seen has been a personal fortune of about $50 million, only 5% of the way to a billion.
I seem to remember seeing someone or other suggest Mangione's parents were likely personally wealthier than what's-his-face the CEO. I've stopped trying to verify or know about those things - I know too much personal bullshit about random semi-famous people already.
That is funny. There's a crazy about of misinformation about this case going around. One of my best friends is a vocally pro-Luigi person and I've been unsuccessfully trying to summon the will to pick a fight about it for a year. I don't have much sympathy for the professional vampire who died, but idolizing assassins is not a good practice (except for Jason Bourne, because he's awesome).
You ever had a situation where you overal like a person, but discover one personality trait about them that makes your opinion of them do a 180? I just had that at work. It's a sort of cowoker, I thought he was an alright guy before, but the conversation drifted to one person saying he was learning Korean, which I thought was cool; I mentioned I was learning Japanese, then the guy in question responded "Why bother with that? Everyone in Japan speaks English anyway."
First off, rude, he wasn't even part of the conversation, he just joined in to mock me.
Second off, wtf? Japanese people are infamously bad at English! That's very common knowledge, I have genuinely no idea where he gets the idea that Japanese people are good at English. But, naturally, he dismissed my protest on that point.
Third off, why shouldn't I? Even if Japanese people all spoke English, I still consume a lot of Japanese media, besides, learning a language is, in and of itself, a valuable thing to do. Hell, I don't care what it is, learning is good for you!
Like, I'm no fan of Japanese politeness culture, and I like the fact that in the Netherlands you're generally free to speak your mind, but sometimes some people should just shut their fucking mouth. But I decided to shut up about it instead, if the conversation continued, I would just get angrier. It's also just disappointing, I genuinely expected better from him.
I did have a potential friendship wither and die within about 5 minutes when I asked this dude if he knew my brother (but I said his name and not my relation to him) and the first thing he said was "I don't really care for him", then he realized I knew him and asked how I did.
It sucks, he was someone I felt was rather comforting to have in classes because it's always nice to have other local Natives around in a primarily non-Native setting.
But while I might be alright hanging around with people my family might not like, the reverse isn't true.
yeah dude is incorrect. although English is in school curricula, most Japanese people never use it beyond their school days. I have found English is spoken much more widely in Korea, meanwhile.
He probably thinks that because the Japanese love to use English words and the latin alphabet for stuff (for example Dragon Ball).
the correct response is to swear at him in your new language and continue the conversation "see? I already got some word pronunciation practice down"
I should have done that! Except that I'm on shift, surrounded by psychiatric patients, some severe, yeah, no, it wouldn't be appreciated. I'm supposed to give the right example there, swearing at a coworker wouldn't be that. Not that he gave a good example, rude behavious is something we specifically try to stamp out, because it can genuinely lead to fights. Let's just say that people have been killed on the premises before, nothing to do with our department, but still.
Yes, I have. It was that one time u/WuhanWTF called my childhood icon a “disgusting pants wearing degenerate”. I’ve been praying for that blue motherfucker’s downfall ever since.
Where's the lie though?
After finishing Mexico: A 500 Year History by Paul Gillingham (brand spanking new!) I have to say it is a real open question as to whether Mexico benefited from or was harmed by more by its proximity to the US. On the one hand, access to markets and investments, remittances, developmental aid (one stat was that for a time something like half of all US aid to Latin America went to eradicated cattle disease in Mexico). On the other hand, crime (particularly gun importation), periodic invasions, and a rather baleful level of political interest and interference.
One interesting note he brings up is that the discovery of the California gold fields was only a couple years after the Mexican-American War, with some easy to image shifting of the historical tables that windfall could have benefited Mexico, rather than the United States.
Overall great book, I do have some quibbles, like at times it works a little too hard to push back against common narratives (like when trying to push back against the idea that Mexico is characteristically violent he says there was nothing like the assassination of progressive leaders in the US with MLK, RFK, JFK, etc, and like maybe but there was also literal guerilla warfare going on when Harvey Milk was shot). I also think at times the heavily thematic organization of chapters can make it a little hard to follow the historical narrative, like sometimes he would mention something that would make me realize we were a couple decades earlier than I thought we were because he was covering a different topic. But these are both quibbles, overall this is a big fat recommendation from me.
Actually I think my one real criticism is that it does very little to place Mexico in the context of Latin America, focusing instead purely on North America (ie, much on its northern border, nothing in its southern). And I get why more space was given to Mexico's relationship to the US than, eg, Brazil, like it has been invaded by one of those two a couple times, but still I would have been interested in some discussion.
That said the book is already 700 pages long.
Was bullied into going Christas shopping and trying out a shirt from an Armani outlet which actually looked pretty good on me despite being as soft as damp tissue paper. Briefly considered buying it before glancing at the price tag of $900.
That's gotta be blasphemy if ever I saw it.
Battlefield 6 is… kinda not doing great. There are some issues I was willing to overlook early on that are really starting to bug me and DICE just punched my favorite game mode in the dick for no apparent reason (breakthrough matches now consist of the defenders lying down in a big line and getting run over by tanks). May have to find a new dumb game to activate the same parts of my brain, unfortunately.
Extremely weird to me that Christmas is only a week away. I don’t know why but every year I constantly think “man it’s way too early for Christmas music and shit to be everywhere” and then it just… happens, very suddenly, and I realize it’s actually perfectly timely. This likely would not be an issue if we moved Thanksgiving back like a month but we can’t do that because everyone other than me is a coward.
I've been hoping they'll change breakthrough, but in the sense that they'd make it less unbalanced not in the sense of tipping the scales in favour of attackers or defenders. My issue with breakthrough is that 90% of games I play are steamrolls where either the attackers never make it out of spawn or where the defenders get pushed over effortlessly.
BF6 is weird in general. They did well for the basic gameplay, but all the little accoutrements like map design, vehicle and weapon balancing, etc. are kind of off.
I've been playing Battlefield 6 breakthrough, but it doesn't feel nearly as good as Battlefield 1 operations. The balance in Battlefield 6 is asinine.
But TBF, Battlefield 1 operations had the defenders winning 90% of the time.
Totally, in retrospect BF1 was kind of a high-point.
Despite being a weird setting for a big-name FPS, and despite being pretty goofy (everyone in 1917 has automatic weapons, steel armor makes you a Space Marine, etc.), it’s just such a good damn game. Probably the most atmospheric multiplayer shooter I’ve played.
I was there when people said BF1 was too casual and weak and the worst of the series.
I knew even then it won't get better.
Oh how tragically true it was. Damn what a game.
This is why Canada has the superior thanksgiving
I think the new games have a lot of trouble making vehicles work in general, but it's wild how DICE keeps getting Breakthrough wrong
Yeah, it’s definitely a weakness. There were a couple of maps that were definitely balanced poorly but it was just map design more than anything. I guess they saw “the defenders are winning 53% of the time” and decided to spawn every tank that has ever been manufactured.
Also, I’ve always been admittedly awful as a pilot but the jets don’t feel very useful in general.
I know I sound like a broken record, but I think the shift to four classes had a lot of knock-on effects. If one out of every four players (including tank drivers) is carrying a rocket launcher, then that affects how vehicles need to be balanced, which affects how they interact with infantry who don't have rocket launchers.
Rarer, stronger, and less accurate is what I think would work with vehicles for the series going forward. That and a dedicated "vehicle crew" class and no third-person for armored vehicles.
As an early christmas present Arriva decided to change the bus timetable, it now perfectly matches the trains! It is, in fact, so perfect that the bus leaves the moment the train arrives and the bus arrives the moment the train leaves. Wait a minute, don't I need to walk from the train to the bus and vice versa? Yes, I do. Which means that I now need to leave 30 minutes earlier and will get back home 30 minutes later... Yep, an extra hour of travel time because they shifted the bus timetable by 4 minutes.
This feels like a giant "fuck you" to me specifically, who the fuck made this damn timetable?
Same where I live. For several years now, the bus which goes by the train station (it's the terminus of the line) leaves at about the same minute the train reaches the platform. Sigh. Wait half an hour or walk home are the options. Your choice is meaningless because whatever you pick you will be home at about the same time.
Another wonderful case can also be found here: one of the local buses shares half its stops with another bus before going north while the other goes in a loop back to where it started. This used to be great for us who got off at any of the shared stops because if you missed one bus you could take the other and didn't have to wait a full half hour. However, some genius got into a position to decide the timetables and the buses now leaves one minute apart, meaning if you narrowly missed the first one you're in a good position to see the second bus as it leaves its stop some 50 metres away (the two buses start from a bus terminal, hence the distance, although they usually end up together for the rest of the shared stops because the first bus takes more passangers and the second therefore catches up in no time).
Hot take: Ottoman Empire should have sold off Libya post 1850-ish. Italian invasion of Libya precipitated the Balkan Wars. And it is not like it brought much income.
Sell Cyrenica to the British in India and Tripolitania to the French in Tunisia.
EDIT: Or sell Cyrenica to the French, and Tripolitania to the British to potentially induce a fight.
Did it not bring in much income? And I’m not sure the people living there would have been that hot on British or French control. They might not even have been that hot with Ottoman control, but it looks like based on a brief survey that piracy was common in that region- so independence was possibly worse than being under Ottoman control for the Ottomans.
Would selling off too much of your territory to rivals been okay to your prestige among your citizens or even among your rivals?
I mean Napoleon basically sold off a land claim(Louisiana) that was bigger than Western Europe, and it didn't affect France's prestige.
But that was a far off colony with few people that France just got back from Spain. Selling off Muslim land to Christians as the Caliph would not look so good.
Control of Libya was so loose that other Europeans regularly felt direct with the local rulers. It would have functionally be selling a claim anyway.
I think theoretically Algeria and Tunisia where still Ottoman when occupied by France, so not much different situation.
Right, and the US even fought several wars against the locals in the early 19th Century but didn't go to War with the Ottomans.
Egypt had a much higher Muslim population, and it was de facto ruled by the British but de jure Ottoman. There might have been some way de facto selling Libya while it remained de jure Ottoman.
And for that matter, the Austrians occupied Bosnia starting in 1878 even while it remained a nominal Ottoman Vilayet.
That might work, if they kept the appearance of still having the regions.
Do you think Trump's going to actually attack Venezuela? I get he's not totally lucid, but if he wants the Nobel, that would be a bad move.
Trump's MO is to bluster and bluff to rile his base, manipulate the stock and crypto market, and force the Other to bend the knee.
I highly doubt this case is any different.
The issue is that, despite massing the largest force outside a South American nation this decade, Trump still hasn’t actually mustered enough soldiers for a real ground invasion of Venezuela.
My theory is either (1) Trump thinks looking tough on Venezuela is somehow good for him politically, despite the way it makes most Americans shit their pants at the thought of another pointless war, or (2) he is trying to engineer a “remember the Maine!” incident to justify a real invasion.
With the recent blockade, I am leaning more towards option 2.
Counterpoint: going full Kissinger has never stopped anyone from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize
I knew the story of Louis the Pious and his sons was a bit of a farce, but with the detail Oathbreakers goes into it, it's actually more of an absolute shitshow.
Good stuff. I mean, two of the sons rebelled against their eldest brother to save their father Louis who was only under the custody of their brother because of a rebellion that one of them started in the first place.
So, trump declared fentanyl a wmd. internet people seem to think this a pretext to attack venezuela, mexico or china, which would be terrifying. but the actual order that he signed seems more focused on allowing the us military to intervene in attacking domestic drug dealers. so hopefully (!), more domestic authoritarianism rather than a prelude to war
Feels much more like a Duterte-like move to attack and potentially kill political agitators under the guise of drug enforcement.
Republican presidents of the 21th century and seeing wmds where none exist. Name a more iconic duo.
Didn't he say we were living in a Golden Age yesterday? Getting mixed messages.
A golden age is when you have the military executing people in the streets and the more executions the more golden your age is
like the opening cut scene of the OG Fallout.
https://i.redd.it/2x9okum4hr7g1.gif
Well, he often has trouble with words, perhaps he meant to say "gilded" age, not "golden"
The Golden Age of Authoritarianism.
"Pot holes are just braille on the road for blind people. 16 bumps I take a left, then 2 bumps I'm home."
https://preview.redd.it/oati0w2fto7g1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6247345f1eaf3c86bf3f239fe86f270c90856467
A common piece of advice you often see on Reddit is - If you want to save money, go to ethnic markets. Well I am sick and tired of paying out of my ass for higher milk fat butter, and guess what I found at my local Russian store? Brest-Litovsk butter at 82.5%!
I mean, it smells good, it tastes decent, very good texture. Does it make me want to capitulate to the Kaiser? I'm not sure yet. But this shit is good, really good.
Can’t wait for Trianon branded Paprika
Hope you don't need guns any time soon
Isn't Brest-Litovsk not in Russia? To the point of being on the Polish border in Belarus?
The manufacturer is Belarusian, but I guess the store I found it in is typically presented as "Russian" or "Eastern European" - not enough Belarussians around here I guess?
"is typically presented as "Russian" or "Eastern European" - not enough Belarussians around here I guess"
Belarusian identity is itself very weird and self conscious and self contradictory and so it wouldn't surprise me that they intentionally went with "Russian".
With that said at least in North America a lot of the "Russian" markets I've been to basically have almost no actual Russian products, for all sorts of import-related reasons (even before 2022, heck even before 2014) and so it's often other post-Soviet/Eastern European/diaspora products.
I don't know where you live, but at least in Czech Republic there are many "Russian stores" (all renamed after the war with Ukraine started). They are not really stores with Russian products, but stores for Russians, so with products familiar to them. You can find products from all over the former Soviet Union, from Georgian wine to Latvian canned fish and Moldovan sweets.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3ma5dshixws2j
I don't know why it has taken me this long to realize this, but the reason Trump is gearing up war with Venezuela is because Venezuelan ex-oligarchs go to Mar a Lago and talk to him. That's why he is saying "the Maduro regime" stole our land, oil, and assets. They obviously didn't steal United States land but there are Venezuelan regional bosses who lost out with Chavismo and fled to Miami. Trump is senile and got confused.
This whole time I've been viewing this as a Marco Rubio neocon roll-back-the-pink-tide thing, but obviously it isn't that. That's much too coherent of a geopolitical strategy, it is far more likely that this comes from Trump gladhanding club members.
Hey let's not sleep on the "Venezuela is completely surrounded" part which makes it sound like an island, and that he might also be confusing Cuba and Venezuela.
I don’t think Trump is remotely a neocon, but I do think he has an affinity to gunboat diplomacy and old school imperialism of the ‘might makes right’ variety, so I don’t want to discount plain American chauvinism, I.e. Latin America is our traditional sphere of influence and so of course it’s “our” oil and “our” land. That seems to be how the admin is resolving the tension between the America First faction and the more hawkish faction, anyway.
I always presumed this is why tbf. That and the huge numbers of people leaving Venezuela itself because of how appallingly it’s run. Many, of course, to the United States.
Corporate lobbying don't oppose to Rubio's cold warrior mentality, they are complementary
I don't even think this is corporate lobbying, the language used here is more personal.
What the sigm-
Actually, I'm not even sure anymore per the Bubba email.
Wait what do you think "gladhanding" means
Jorkin
One of the comments suspects it may be referring to the 1976 oil nationalizations. Honestly your guess is as good as mine.
Disturbingly plausible.
I honestly feel like, for all that americans regularly overstate and outright fabricate things to hate about the PRC, the American narrative of the Cultural Revolution weirdly understates how bad the civil conflict was. You'll hear about historical sites and struggle sessions and executions for sure, and sometimes there'll be a nod to the spontaneity of violence, but in my experience people tend to portray the Red Guards as if they were a unified paramilitary organization under full government control. They present the Guards as a weapon of the state in simple terms, without getting into the general conflict with the PLA or between Red Guard groups, and often don't talk much about how the Guards were intentionally cultivated by Mao and his allies but not really under any central command. Also, even just the fact that they were largely high school and college students gets less attention than I would expect.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a government administered Red Guard organization would be cool and unproblematic, but I honestly find the reality more disturbing. Child soldiers killing each other with guns they stole from the army is the kind of lurid element that you'd think people would talk about more.
Anyway, this just gets back to my general belief that I would be better at holding other people's beliefs than they are.
I've listened to some Chinese historians (outside of the PRC) mention how a big part that somehow gets left out of the Western understanding of the Cultural Revolution is that the PLA finally moving and often pretty violently cracking down on the Red Guards units was far bloodier than anything the Guards did.
Anyway it's not my speciality but it does seem like a better narrative of the Cultural Revolution would be "Mao was in conflict with much of the rest of the senior Communist Party and encouraged child soldiers to form random paramilitary units and start a civil war against the party, which the PLA then violently defeated and established a quasi-military dictatorship with Mao in charge".
But part of why I think the Cultural Revolution gets a distorted narrative is that (much like with the Stalinist Purges) there's the uncomfortable fact that most of the targets of the lurid struggle sessions with the Guards were Communist Party Members, and also that the PRC itself has kind of a weird way of processing it, ie "it was a mistake and all the fault of the Gang of Four, now let's never speak of this again".
Usually the oversimplified pop history view is more grisly and weird for entertainment value, but yeah, the Cultural Revolution ended up going the other way. In my experience people seek to think it was the Red Guards (who are exactly the same as The Big Communism Government) just yelling at people a lot. Being real dicks.
“Pitched battles between rogue extremists and soldiers involving tanks” is way the hell more bizarre than the occasional struggle session but people don’t know about that sort of thing.
Ive found that many people fail to understand de centralised/base level/bottom up politics in general. Everything has to be a strict hierarchy and if it isn't they fail to understand. IMO this is only getting worse
TBH I think for a lot of Americans them being under a unified government command makes them worse than independent groups. There's an intense suspicion of the government on both the left and right wings that is, in my experience, a lot more pronounced and distinct than it is in many other Western countries.
I reckon it's because of the general lack of knowledge regarding the CR. Like I imagine most of the Americans who even are aware of the CR don't realize that Mao's faction was against the PRC government.
Just speaking as a partial Chinese-American, I think precious few Americans know even basic details about the Chinese Civil War (I think the number could be well below 5%), or could even name the Red Guards. Not even Henry Kissinger knew much about the PRC, right up until he flew to China to negotiate.
Not like much changed afterward either...
As someone who used to be interested in Marxist theories, an issue I have with the “modes of production” analysis of history is that they (particularly more orthodox Marxists) imply these modes are totally separate when the lines between them are often very fuzzy. In my opinion it’s more descriptive to refer to “industrial society” than to Capitalism, since many aspects Marxists consider core to capitalism aside from industry have coexisted in “feudal” societies, and many aspects of “feudal” societies have coexisted in non-industrialized capitalist societies.
That’s not to say that I disagree with materialist interpretations of history. I just find it more useful to focus on the more concrete aspects of change (like industrialization, for example) than on something more nebulous like the “mode of production”.
I might also be getting pedantic and misinterpreting things, haha. I created this account for gaming stuff, I’m not sure why I’m posting theories of history here now.
To elaborate more on what I mean, for the “capitalist mode of production” the clear point of divergence is the Industrial Revolution. However, pre-industrial “agrarian capitalism” and “merchant capitalism” are often hard to disentangle from “feudalism” (in the Marxist sense), and drawing a line between them and the Industrial Revolution can be fuzzy.
Again, this might just be me being a pedant.
I don't think too many Marxists would disagree with you there. The model is generally an evolutionary one, with innovations spreading from particular historical places and moments rather than the new society appearing fully formed one day. The whole dialectics thing and whatnot, contradictions and such.
As someone who got deep into the weeds on some of the Marxist “transition to capitalism” literature I’d push back on this. Of course Marxists think modes of production are the products of change over time, but the differences between these modes are still absolutely central. For an orthodox Marxist historian the distinction between “feudalism” and “agrarian capitalism” is, in some sense, more fundamental than the distinction between agrarian capitalism and industrial capitalism. And I agree with u/Yevy-Nesra that this is problematic for various reasons.
Ah, I getcha, I misunderstood what Yevy-Nesra was arguing in the first post.
Yes, my comment was inspired by reading many Marxist transition debates, particularly earlier debates about whether early 1900s Central America was feudal or agrarian capitalist. To me, at that point “is it an industrial or pre-industrial society” becomes a more useful dichotomy than “is it feudal or agrarian capitalist”.
That was my conclusion too. Of course if you pull at that thread - that modes of production/social property relations/etc are not the most important thing about a given economy or a society - the whole framework sort of unravels.
Based on the decision making processes I've observed playing Arma Reforger Actual Guerilla Mode, my best option is going to be turning in all of my friends before any of these idiots gets me killed because they shot someone after "seeing an opportunity."
Kind of wish they called the Switch 2 the Super Switch
They could add a baseball game similar to Wii Sports called the Switch-hitter.
Should have called it Switch One!
Supposedly a lot of the casual buyers of the Wii did not understand that the Wii U was a new console. They wanted to be very, very clear with the Switch 2.
Well, yes, advertising only the screen in controller only when the previous console was known for wacky controllers was an strategy, along with ensuring the actual console could be mistaken for a digital converter box.
It's called the Switch 2 because when you see it, you switch 2 a better system
Would've been a slam dunk. Fingers crossed for the next one, I guess?
Tryna cram Kanji for my final tomorrow using the Ringotan app. It’s really anal about stroke order.
Stroke this, stroke that, why don’t you stroke my
yeah I use so-called Kanji Recognizer. picky af
How I feel when I answer "What's the Count of Monte Christ about?" with "Revenge."
https://preview.redd.it/eom7yumhdn7g1.png?width=204&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf2d3b59d90088deb5dfd1692eafc25debe49a43
Rich Incels
I see no problem here.
Would you prefer "The Sandwich?"
https://preview.redd.it/zcs778hsmn7g1.png?width=225&format=png&auto=webp&s=e65ed57a6e638ed25c5b4e89875f3ca7ef413f4e
I'd prefer the Bandelier Sandwich to the Monte Cristo Sandwich
https://imgur.com/a/bandolier-burger-jbSmXyT
I'd kill several members of the Trump administration for that sandwich
Could you say that a little closer to my lapel, please?
bruh
I’m not allowed to talk about a British judge roflstomping Scalia, and you come out with this?!
Where is the justice!!!
KIA, NO!
🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝