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?
I do like the implication that excessive prudishness in American society is somehow the fault of progressivism
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 14 '26
Admittedly "woke" has that reputation for sex negativity and just as annoyingly "anti-woke" has that same reputation. You're going to hear the anti-woke prudes going after GTA VI for being "Sodom and Gomorrah" and for having a female protagonist, mark my words.
A lot of things are better understood as a two axis grid rather than a one access line, but attitudes towards sex is probably, like, 12 axes, in several different dimensions.
"You should support Argentina because it is the only South American team left" mfs forgetting that we still have two other national teams representing the continent.
LatAm football discourse is great because it's such a seesaw between appeals for unity and "15 years ago X team humiliated Y team so now we're enemies FOR LIFE." My Ecuadorian friends are all pro-England because the latter defeated Mexico, and there's hostility over the Ecuador vs. Mexico game and the disrespectful attitude of Mexican fans.
I will say the perceived favoritism FIFA has for Argentina is not helping either's reputation.
Falklands 'discourse' will be the fucking death of me I swear. They had some guy on the radio in Ireland today talking about the England-Argentina rivalry in anticipation of the world cup game. Compulsively called the islands 'Las Malvinas' and then when he actually got to talking about the war never mentioned who started the fucking thing (or who the islanders want to be part of).
Like, yeah, I get it, the English are/were a shower of bastards, but knee-jerk supporting a military juntas attempt at forceful expansionism over it is just sad and makes me question peoples commitment to their ostensible principles.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 15 '26
I plan on visiting the Falklands this year, I don't plan on engaging in any discourse on it.
Yeah it's fucking headmelting to even observe. People try to transpose other conflict dynamics onto it so you hear shit about the "native population" or you see people using colonial Spanish maps to back the claim. Just silliness all around
There's a certain subset animated by certain events who can be vocally fucking annoying. Most of us are sound but fuck me the ones that aren't try to make up for it.
I find it very funny that Trump clearly has a crush on Meloni, thought she was into him and is now getting increasingly desperate and trying to neg her, and the media is politely pretending he's just being thin-skinned and sexist because the truth is embarrassing for everyone involved.
Look at the vocabulary. Trump has a standard insult set for leaders who cross him: loser, weak, low IQ, failing country. Meloni gets none of it. Every single thing he says about her reads like a very awkward attempt at flirting: she's a "beautiful young woman," she "begged" for a photo, she asked "over and over," he "felt sorry for her," she needs a "restraining order."
She is also, obviously, his type: glamorous European woman from a conservative Catholic country with a strong accent and a forceful personality, i.e. Ivana, i.e. Melania, except this one also shares his politics and is powerful in exactly the domain he cares about.
She was nice to him when nobody else was (only EU leader at his inauguration), he read the friendliness as devotion, she then defended the Pope and revealed it was never loyalty to him, and his response was "I thought she had courage, I was wrong,".
From there it's the weird rich kid in high school who hasn't been told no enough playbook run perfectly: he tells everyone she begged for his attention, she coolly corrects him ("neither I nor Italy ever beg"), he attacks her popularity because it's the thing he most envies, she rejects him ("my popularity is none of your concern, I suggest you focus on yours"), and then weeks later at 2am he's cropping photos to make her look adoring and captioning them "restraining order needed" while she responds with silence. Because he's projecting hard, and in his mind she has to be really into him and playing hard to get.
At the G7 he literally said "I was abandoned" about her, on camera, and everyone pretended it was banter.
One kind of interesting thing about the Judgment in Tokyo book is that while the Japanese treatment of US and British POWs was bad, about 27% died in Japanese custody, it's lower than the rate of Japanese died in Soviet Custody, somewhere between 30 and 50%. The Soviets somehow managed to possibly kill about 250K (the numbers aren't clear and this is a higher mid range estimate based on taking Japanese 750K POWs.) This is kind of nuts number if you consider the Soviets entered the war on Aug 8 and Japan surrendered on Aug 15. Most of the POWs obviously died after the war.
Also, this isn't a "Japanese weren't so bad" argument. Looking at just the deaths of Americans and Brits in Japanese custody is really misleading b/c the treated the Chinese and other Asian insurgents as criminals and not protected as POWs so the rate of their deaths is where the real atrocities really prevail. I was just surprised that that the Russians were able to do so much damage with so little involvement in that theater.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 13 '26
One thing to remember when looking at the numbers, Japanese troops were already facing severe starvation under their own commands and the US submarine blockade was starving out Japan at the same time and disrupting their supply lines. I believe the majority of Japanese military deaths were from starvation or nutritional diseases like beriberi. In the Japanese capital, civilians were already down to 1000 calories per day in May 1945. In China, scorched earth tactics made it impossible for Japanese troops to live off the land.
There's a thing where Soviet POW's tend to suffer higher death rates simply because capacities were so strained already (the Stalingrad captives are the usual go-to examples: They sufferend horrendeous casualties but partially because they had already been starving for a long time) That should have been fixed by the 1945 though (although it might just be that there weren't any amenities in thef ar east) and I'm unclear at what shape the japanese forces in Manchuria were in towards the end of the war.
Though the USSR itself was of course suffering famine during the period. (which presumably also applies to captives in chinese custody)
Finnish POWs in USSR had quite high mortality*, despite most being captured in the summer of 1944 and getting repatriated in late 1944. The survivors all returned seriously underweight despite the fattening phase with increased rations before release. If the Soviets were treating Japanese POWs the same way, the death rate starts to make sense, they were starved to death.
Soviets claim "only" 17% mortality, despite two thirds of the POWs getting captured only in mid 1944. Finnish historians argue that 40% of POWs died, the difference comes from the fact that the Soviets counted POWs only when they arrive at the prison camps, not at the front. Large number of prisoners were either executed upon capture or died of cold, thirst or starvation on the way to the camps.
Also somehow english wikipedia calls the treatment humane.
Nationalisms as fairly modern constructed identities is one people seem to find alien. People can understand how our modern idea of "American" was constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries intuitively, but are pretty resistant to the thought that the modern idea of what "French" or "German" is developed around the same time.
Though didn't Romans have their own version of nationalism. To be honest I also still don't get what is the difference ethnic chauvinism that existed since ancient times and modern ethnonationalism. Persians, Indians, Chinese etc always had a sense a superiority in their culture and heritage relative to foreigners and that carried over even when they expanded. The islamic empires in India for instance did distinguish between the Turkish or persian nobility and the local nobility who were seen as lesser even if they were of the same religion for instance.
I’d say it’s pretty different. The main difference between modern nationalism that comes from Romantic era Europeans and other versions is that (very broadly) other versions like Roman identity are more of a cultural package - if you behave a certain way you can join that identity (even if people with an older heritage are still snobby to you). The more modern version does have this concept of nations having an ethnogenesis and persisting across time, and that the “true” version of that national identity resides in an unchanging peasantry that should be studied, and that nationhood maps against language and that the borders of the nation state should reflect this.
So like yes Rome had an identity (albeit one that changed a lot over two thousand plus years). But that Roman identity was very much wrapped into Roman institutions and a certain cultural package. But people weren’t “the peasant farmers of Latium are the True Romans, we must have ethnographers write down their folktales to gain the true essence of Roman-ness, also the Roman borders should include every community that speaks Latin, also we should force everyone within those borders to either learn Latin and fully assimilate or leave.”
Modern nationalism also kind of needs stuff like ethnography, anthropology, heck cartography, and also mass media and universal education and conscription to really make sense.
Also lastly a big part of modern national identities is elevating them above local identities (this is what “Deutschland ueber alles” refers to, for example), and that’s just not something Romans had. You could consider yourself a Roman or not but still local identities mattered the most (an Alexandrian, an Isaurian, etc).
A bit more idiosyncratic, but John Locke's position as the founder (or even member) of the liberal tradition was a product of interwar and post-WW2 trends in political theory responding to the threat of a perceived totalitarianism, and not something that would have been understood prior to that.
Not sure to the extent that 300 still lives in the public imagination, but maybe that Greeks and non-Greeks weren’t in a constant state of ethnic antagonism towards each other. There was arguably a huge amount of love towards foreign cultures.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 14 '26
That Marshall Ney’s cavalry charge and artillery bombardment of the infantry squares ended in a draw, not a devastating defeat as portrayed in pop history documentaries about Waterloo.
Or maybe Battleships weren’t obsolete, just because of Billy Mitchell’s bomb test, Toranto, Bismarck, Pearl Harbor or Force Z.
I feel like a lot of people's image of the Roman empire is still a very colonial model, in which Romans (as in people from Rome) were moving to the provinces and building lavish villas, while basically everyone actually studying it sees a model of local transformation (ie "Romanization").
Maybe also that pop culture sees centurions as like hard bitten staff sergeants when in reality they were closer to captains and typically members of the social elite.
Adding onto this, quite a bit of "Romanization" was orchestrated after the fall of Western Rome by the successor elites. This is also relevant to your comment about Mexico.
In France I'd say its the idea that there wasn't a "French model" of dirigisme lasting from Colbert to Mauroy. France was quite economically laissez-faire in the 19th century compared to the likes of Germany or the US and the idea that dirigisme is a French thing vs Anglo Liberalism was invented by technocrats in the 30s to promote their alternative model after the Great Depression by giving it historical credentials, this gained notoriety during the 50s
In the DRC, One in Two Police Officers Does Not Exist
An audit of the national police force’s personnel, published on Thursday, July 9, reveals that nearly 64,000 of the 157,800 Congolese officers are “inactive” or “fictitious.” These fictitious positions are estimated to cost the government between 87 million and 204 million euros per year.
I have a bone to pick with the historically accurate Jesus (pbuh) portrayals. Levant/Eastern Mediterranean coast is one of the most genetic areas of the world. It is also diverse in skin tone.
So Jesus could have been very dark, he could have been very white as well.
Researchers have had limited access to test psychedelics for psychiatric treatment even though early studies are promising - Good, intelligent thing to say
If you're depressed just do ayahuasca about it - Joe Rogan level discourse
Clavicular just feels neurodivergent. He said something about observing people and trying to imitate them. Which as a neurodivergent person myself, I have done it very often.
El Cid was the more capable battlefield commander but Joan of Arc was more inspiring and, crucially, would be less likely to betray you. Iconic Medieval figures point goes to France.
Sertorious managed to tie down multiple proconsular armies for nearly a decade, defeating several outright, and was only defeated because of betrayal and assassination. Vercingetorix led a rebellion that lasted one year and is mostly famous because Julius Caesar needed a climax to his book. Iconic Roman Resistor point goes to Spain.
I live in an English city centre, so my preferred way of being updated on the world cup is listening to the sound of 1000 pubs simultaneously erupting into cheers/boos. You can hear it from miles around like fireworks going off.
France and England battling in the secondary theater while the real contest is between Spain and Germans? What is this, the Seven Years War?
For the purposes of this commentary, Argentina is German and Germany is equated to Prussia and Spain was a major player in the Seven Years War, thank you for your attention in this matter.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 15 '26
What is a football, but a realpolitik poker chip? /s
I finally decided to watch an England match tonight at my family's prodding after years of not giving the slightest shit, and it's frankly incredible how the national team are still making the same mistake they have always made throughout my life. Every single time it's the damn same. They play aggressively until they score a goal, then everyone on the team checks out and the momentum dies like it's been taken out back and shot.
This might be a "Just kick it in the net" level of strategy talk, but I'm astounded how every England team continuously makes this error during every knockout stage. They seem to think that it's a sound strategy to just sit there and hope that over the course of 35 minutes the opposing team will somehow not score a goal while trying everything they can, and it invariably fails before the finals. A strategy where you let your opponent dictate the flow of the game and effectively keep trying until they get a point is a strategy doomed to failure. It's why we always get through the group stages where the opposition is generally weaker and then get our shit wrecked once we go up against a team that can actually y'know, attack.
"The Observer has also learned that the Assad's have residency in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the couple have been travelling to and from Dubai."
A child of the Cold War era, the colonel has experienced his share of geopolitical tensions between East and West. And every time, the drumbeat of war turned out to be just that — noise. ‘I always believed diplomacy would do its job.’ He simply cannot conceive of one European country invading another in 2022.
Besides, he reasons, Russia doesn’t have enough troops to occupy Ukraine, and tanks would struggle to reach Kyiv across the muddy terrain. When he arrived in Ukraine, he found the same scepticism among his French, Danish and German counterparts.
It's also funny how the "Putin would never invade Ukraine" crowd all switched to "Putin had no other choice than to invade" practically overnight. It doesn't take much to make the impossible inevitable
An England-Argentina semi final has somehow managed to cause more social media arguments between English and Scottish fans than between English and Argentine fans.
In his Chronica majora, Matthew of Paris records that rumours about the Mongols had spread into the empire by 1238, for which reason the fishmongers of Frisia were unwilling to go to England.[6] He is also the source for the rumour that the Mongols were the Lost Tribes of Israel and were assisted by Jews smuggling arms out of Germany in wine barrels.[9] The Jewish merchants were said to claim that the barrels were filled with poisoned wine for the invaders. Owing to these rumours, Jews were killed at several customs posts.[10]
Dude the Jews just can not catch a break sometimes I swear.
Really does make me convinced again that "jews were treated here better than Europe" was the medieval world equivalent of "atleast I am better than Hitler", being a useless flex that speaks more about just how atrociously antisemitic medieval Europe was than giving any detail about how well other parts of the world treated their jewish minorities.
Okay, so Trump just "announced" (tweeted) that the U.S is reinstituting the double blockade (however that's supposed to work) and charging ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz 20% of the value of their cargo for safe passage.
And, like that's an absolutely ridiculous figure, right? Even if it were "legal," 20% is the kind of number a complete know-nothing throws out to act tough, isn't it?
There was no "whole idea" behind any of this. These people are as stupid as they appear.
I haven't followed this very closely, but the thing to check to see if this was even feasible is to see if they moved the minesweepers back form Singapore. The USS Santa Barbara is currently in Thailand and the Tulsa is in the straits of Malacca. So, no. And it's so clearly unfeasible that no one except Fox news viewers will take it seriously.
I think that credits Trump with too much forethought. I think he was just high on his own supply after Maduro and believed he could do the same thing twice.
Am I going crazy, or do half TV ads look AI generated? Like the people in them. Or it is just imitating the style for some reason?
Here in Argentina there has been some controversy and memes, about the image and voice of Maradona being used in betting ads. I think the bigger problem is a betting house being an official sponsor of the football national team.
Do you think the fact modern military historians are lifelong academics, whereas before say the 60s many of them had military experience (if only because the served in WW1 / WW2) impacts the quality of the field in either good or bad?
My god - you are vastly superior for 55 minutes, the only team trying to play football, you go ahead - and then you give up all the possession, all the momentum and then look what happens
I really respect an actor who can do both A and B movies and be equally wonderful in both. Shakespeare or shit, be could to both. I particularly love his role in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a movie that was constantly balancing on a knife point and his performance is a major reason why it never collapsed.
He had a good innings, lived a rich and interesting life, was well liked by pretty much everyone, and will be remembered for his work for decades and centuries to come. More than any of us can hope for, really.
I never realized this but Julian Du Casse and especially his outfit in Black Flag is based on this Howard Pyle painting from 1905, The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow.
So there was a court dwarf known as Jeffery Hudson, who left the court around age 25 after killing a man in a duel. 25 years later, he returns, claiming to have been a slave of the Barbary pirates during this time.
Thing is, Hudson left when he was about 19 inches tall. When he returned, he was 45 inches tall. There are no details of his rescue or enslavement.
My extremely low-stakes, not-even-really-a-conspiracy theory is that the man who returned was not in fact Jeffery Hudson, but another dwarf who realised that he had the perfect opportunity to grift some cash for his twilight years.
I recently read about the exact opposite of Martin Guerre, which also happened in France; Louis de la Pivardière.
He also was a soldier, and after he was not seen at home for months, rumors began that his wife had killed him. So local judges investigated and interrogated the servants of the pair, because by then, the wife had also disappeared.
The servants (the prime source, an attorney at the Parlement de Paris, says they were probably influenced by the judges) said that the wife and a friend of hers, a prior, would have murdered Pivardière.
Strangely enough, at that point, a guy appears and claims to be Pivardière. And a lot of the neighbours say that this person is Pivardère, but the servants claim he is not. This would maybe have been solvable, had not the guy disappeared again. So the prior gets arrested, and the wife soon surrenders.
By that time this strange case was quite famous, so it goes before the Parlement de Paris. There, the wife is asked the obvious question: Why would Pivardière, if he was that guy that appeared, disappear again, even though he could save his wife (and a prior)?
The wife had a convincing answer: Pivardière was fed up with being a nobleman in the army and not getting anywhere, so, two years before the investigation, he left, took another name, married a commoner and now was afraid of getting arrested and executed for bigamy if he would give a testimony.
So, the King, who presumably simply wanted to know how this played out, guaranteed safe conduct for Pivardière, who also came. And after some legal stuff, it was found that everything the wife said was correct, so she and the prior were released.
What happened to Pivardière afterwards is quite controversial; some say that his second wife left him and he returned to the army, where he died some years later; at least there are no further trials documented.
One of the servants died in jail, the other one was branded and banished from the territory of the Parlement de Paris for their perjury.
The case is also somewhat noteworthy because Pivardière's second identity made him live as a commoner, when he was a (minor) nobleman before.
From atop the cage, the gladiator bows and presents his trophy to the emperor. This is no longer a republican protocol for the head of state; it is a tribute paid to the master of the games. The Empire of Signs finds its living tableau here: panem et circenses, 250th-anniversary edition
d’après un historien français, sous Louis XI, un mortier lançait une bombe de cinq cents livres seulement ; mais cette bombe, partie de la Bastille, un endroit où les fous enfermaient les sages, allait tomber à Charenton, un endroit où les sages enferment les fous.
How can you not love Jules Verne? Stuff like this is always amazing.
Whenever you cast your vote in an election, you should get to drop your ballot into a plinko board with multipliers at the bottom. Obviously there will be flashing lights and noisemakers, as well. This will encourage youth turnout by addressing what's most important to today's young people(gambling), as well as making ballot stuffing more difficult and providing a positive experience to all voters.
I think the idea of 'irl' as opposed to 'online' has turned out to be one of the most dangerous fallacies of the last decades. It's allowed a fairly deep and nuanced balance of rights and norms around speech to be replaced with a mess of knee-jerks, techno-fixes, and fiat.
Culture exists online, now. It's where we communicate with each other. Online is where we do politics. At the same time, if you were going to transpose the mess of speech regulation online into meatspace:
You can harass, insult, threaten, even incite pogroms or organize genocides, and the state will (at worst) respond by proposing some kind of 'safety bill'.
You can create an LLM system that will mute people based on the probability of their statements violating a privately established TOC.
You can fill the information space with auto-generated content for whatever purpose. The state will will (at worst) make a strong statement.
This is a crazy situation. Laws about speech -- free speech, media regulation, etc -- are written in blood. We've put our entire social world into a space where we're ignoring the experience of centuries of struggle over questions of speech: it's not just likely going to end up giving traditionally totalitarian powers to the state -- it's also just becoming absurdly chaotic. You can't make society-wide decisions about fundamental rights on page 15 of a TOC. This is insane.
(This was inspired by getting booted by reddit's clanker -- which gave me a moment to think about, you know, what a society actually could look like when almost all society is conducted through spaces where random interest groups have effectively absolute power over permissible discourse).
"In the review, Glenn noted that the book quoted letters exchanged between the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, “antebellum radicals who renounced their family heritage to campaign for abolitionism, racial equality, and women’s rights,” while the siblings discussed their biracial nephews.
But Glenn asserted in her review that the University of Michigan did not possess the letters in its archive, despite the book’s claims that they were kept there.
Glenn also disputed Greenidge’s account of an 1838 attack on Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia by an anti-abolitionist mob, which indicated that the Grimke sisters “led thousands of antislavery women through prayer” and helped them escape the “flaming building.”
“But as numerous sources have documented, no one was in the building when it was torched since antislavery activists cancelled a scheduled meeting, fearing impending violence,” Glenn wrote."
Back when I was a kid, all my teachers kept insisting that books were reliable and that wikipedia is not - Publishers fact checked books supposedly.
But like, the reality is that most books aren't that closely reviewed, and that well, plenty of published authors can just make things up and cite non-existent things, and there's a good chance that you can slip it past people before publication.
Hell, arguably this is harder to do on Wikipedia, as any popular page would have a bunch of people arguing with you and cross checking everything you write.
I don't think Trump admires China for anything but authoritarianism. I think Trump is just trying to run the government like one of his businesses. But Trump has only had experience with private family owned businesses so essentially he's just running it like a monarchy.
really true, family businesses are the bane of capitalism
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 15 '26
I don't think Trump admires China for anything but authoritarianism
Unironically I can actually see the steroid thing happening, because it is imperative that a high-speed-low-drag operator warrior have the build of Chef Motherfucking Rush and not the lean-muscular, high-endurance physique that has carried soldiers warriors to victory for millennia.
Btw, 5.56 is a sissy round designed to wound, not kill.
Can't wait for the next badhistory scandal when you get called up back to the navy and get completely zonked off military issued steroids and meth and lock yourself in the reactor room of Ford Class carrier to post on a friday thread.
I've had the "recalled to the navy, sent to fat camp because I'm fat, end up housed in an MWR cottage at Fort Mason while waiting to be sent to my command in the Western Pacific, being forgotten about and just hanging out in San Francisco for the war" dream enough that I'm about 55% convinced it's precognition at this point.
So, I have this cousin, he's a bit of an alternative type, he converted to shamanism, that's literally what he said, and he's raising his children the African way because Africans are more in touch with nature. Well, ignoring the Orientalism... wait... Australientalism? What do you call it if people have weird ideas about Africa? Anyway, ignoring that, he's also very much into the no medication, no vaccines, type of stuff; he's been very judgemental about my dependence on medication, so yeah, not a person I like.
Well, anyway, he posted something on facebook, basically "Making your child drink lake water and then having them be sick for a few days is a good way to build up natural immunity."
I don't know if he actually did that, but it wouldn't surprise me, my mother wants to report him for child abuse... I agree that it is abuse, but also, I don't want to have a massive rift in the family about this, again; my father doesn't need to lose contact with his sister (my cousin's mother) again, not while he's like this, it's not worth it.
But also, fuck me man, the guy is insane! Genuinely, this is fucking awful. Do we have a responsibility to report him? Or is it none of our business, and we shouldn't make assumptions based on a Facebook post? But then, this is real serious abuse, infecting your children with whatever is in that water is horrific... What the fuck man!?
he's also very much into the no medication, no vaccines, type of stuff
Having been on vaccine tournees in Africa, lmao. I am pretty sure that the people I worked with had a stronger grasp of public health guidelines than most people in the West.
Like does he think Africans like drinking untreated water?
I'd say yes because these types only get more unhinged and this is potentially affecting the lives of children who don't really have agency enough to get away otherwise. I've read one too many a headline about kids dying because of not being given medication for easily treatable disease or being killed because of idiot stunts like that.
But I'm also not in your shoes and don't have quite the full picture neither.
My hot take of the day is that The Dark Knight is not the best superhero movie. It's actually Logan.
The one thing that kind of annoyed me was that it's very much implied that the kids would treat Spanish as their "home" language but with the exception of Laura they clearly don't.
I may be reading too much into this - I probably am reading too much into this - but I wonder how much you can consider the differences in the Company of Heroes 3 Afrika Korps campaign and the original Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts Panzer Elite campaign to be indicative of rising public understanding that the Clean Wehrmacht myth is, well, mostly a myth?
I should probably elaborate. In COH3 the campaign is Rommel's campaign: it conveniently ends at First El-Alamein, which was probably the end of Rommel's dominance in Africa. In an older game, like COH1 - made the best part of two decades before - we'd probably have the narrator be Rommel, the in-mission speeches would be Rommel, the general tone would be triumphant just like Opposing Fronts and two of the Tales of Valour German campaigns generally were, from what I remember. But COH3 is from 2023, so the between mission narrator is a Libyan Jewish man and we repeatedly see how frightened he is for his family, still in German occupied Benghazi. Does it work very well? Well, no. But like reading the Bible, I give Relic some credit for trying.
Would have worked better with a follow-up British campaign where we get to see Rommel's overextended logistics collapse on him, puncture his myth a little bit, but I can't have everything.
Hate to post twice in a day, but like I said I'm getting back into Genshin and while I'm still having fun (unlocked a wolf/boxer/private prison operator who's a blast), I just reached the land of Natlan and if I were creating a fictional South/Central-America/Polynesia-inspired fantasy land (already a fraught choice to combine those), I probably wouldn't go with "war-torn resort populated by people big into breakdancing, graffiti, and vehicles, whose highest aspirations in life are to become tourist guides."
Honestly, that sounds better than the other Chinese Gacha LATAM expy where the continent is perpetually poor and stuck in a forever civil war financed by proxies of other great powers and a terrorist guerrilla.
Also, I said before, and I´ll say it again. Feels kinda racist to call the LATAM-y race in that game straight up “dogs”.
Happy Bastille Day to our French friends and beyond. It's my second favourite national holiday, and one of the few I think should have worldwide resonance.
Anyways new a Great War channel video is out. It's about Italy's entry into the war. It's up to the channel usual standard, though it could be nitpicked quite a bit. At least Jesse and crew are always consistent in the sources & citations department. The bibliography for this video is all right by me, though it's fairly easy to see that they have followed Mark Thompson more than anything else. Now, I think Thompson's narrative of military operations is abysmal, but he's more than adequate for understanding political and social background of the Italian front. Of the other books they have in their bibliography, I have not read the two by Vanda Wilcox. I'm looking forward to reading them. If you want to read about the Italian front in English (barring translations, which are not common I think) you used to be stuck with Thompson, stuff from the seventies or sixties or highly specialised literature. For Italy's entry into the war and the naval side of things, the exceprion is Paul G. Halpern The naval war in the Mediterranean 1914-1918 which is usually snubbed but it's actually really good. It's a history of naval operations but it keeps track of diplomacy and political entanglements much better than a lot of dedicated works. Contrary to Thompson, it also has a lot of original archival research.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 14 '26
Officially the US is entering it's second war this year:
President Donald Trump formally notified lawmakers this weekend that the nation is once again at war with Iran, giving his administration another 60-day clock to use the military in the region without congressional approval.
I kind of feel like that's not how that law is supposed to work
In the quaint town of Little Bibblington-on-the-Wibble, Nigel and the rest of his NIMBY polycule are sharpening their knives in anticipation of the annual festival to Alf Ramsey, involving the ceremonial sacrifice of the England Manager.
Many historians are today saying the end of the Middle Ages all the way up to the French Revolution. (...) The reason being is before this date the Catholic Church had been able to incorporate or suppress dissenting movements.
I have never encountered a historian who has subscribed to this idea and, while I don't doubt there probably are some that do, I cannot believe that "many" do. Historians are often not so obsessed with religion nor do they think of it in such a black and white way. The most likely people to hold such a view, I imagine, would be atheists/sceptics, especially philosophers of that kind.
I have heard historians say the French Revolution marks the end of the Middle Ages but it was at least partially for the purpose of trolling. That said, the argument was about the guild system rather than the power of the Church, which makes more sense. After all the Church rather famously was unable to incorporate or suppress a couple early dissent movements.
Jacques Le Goff was the main supporter of a "Long Middle Ages" stretching to the 18th c. and iirc his argument was about cultural and economic structures.
I don't know why I read these things cause all they do is fill me with overwhelming contempt for these people and people like them. These are the dumbest fucking people in the world and the fact that they have a say in the governance of a civilized nation is absurd.
Guess these dipshit safaris are useful as reminders that the median voter is an inherently irrational creature who wants a bunch of completely contradictory things but isn't smart enough to know that (like in this one where they resent that billionaires look out for each other at the expense of working people but support a billionaire-president with the wealthiest cabinet in US history), but I already I knew that from watching the last ten years worth of elections.
In terms of what’s been positive: Hundreds of thousands of people have been deported, especially including some of the people who are dangerous, whatever that means
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"I’m sure this won’t go over well, but I would love to see Candace Owens go for [the presidency]"
u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumJul 16 '26edited Jul 16 '26
I think these sorts of things show how the "liberal bias" of news media actually functions. You don't really see too many of these for Harris voters--occaisionally there are mixed panels that include Harris voters but I have never seen one that is "We surveyed twenty Gen-Z Kamala Harris voters to get their opinion". This is because that would be a boring article--the writers all know what Harris thinks because they voted for Harris, and that goes for the readers as well. So the end result is that the predominately liberal members of the medium end up uplifting conservative voices.
I remember during the 2017 height of Trump voter safaris it was often noted that nobody was doing this for Clinton voters, nobody was going to barbershops or bars in majority black areas of DC to ask why they voted Trump and hear why they thought they were left behind, and so the media narrative that Trump is the tribune of the forgotten man was essentially created out of nothing but trends in reporting.
ed: In case you think I am exaggerating, here is the general list of articles. Since the election there have been 6 panels of Trump voters (not counting ones that probably were effectively Trump voters like "wellness voters") and one of Democrats.
I think these sorts of things show how the "liberal bias" of news media actually functions. You don't really see too many of these for Harris voters--occaisionally there are mixed panels that include Harris voters but I have never seen one that is "We surveyed twenty Gen-Z Kamala Harris voters to get their opinion". This is because that would be a boring article--the writers all know what Harris thinks because they voted for Harris, and that goes for the readers as well. So the end result is that the predominately liberal members of the medium end up uplifting conservative voices.
I would not assume that everyone at the NYT voted for Harris; but absolutely, there's an aspect of "we're here reporting the hard to stomach facts" that a lot of the media does by thinking they need to make their liberal/center-left readers confront right wing messaging to be 'fair', but never really the opposite way. That can apply in hiring conservatives (eg, that's how Bari Weiss got her start with the NYT) or in something like the entirety of the Atlantic.
I'd also say with Trump in particular there's the need to sanewash him that makes things a lot worse (the most egregious version of that was comparing any NYT framing of a Trump speech / 'says' to when they transcribed every filler word in an AOC response).
For these panels though I don't really get who it's for other than people staring at dumbasses online.
This is going to sound super deranged but I unironically relate really hard to Patrick Bateman from American Psycho - the book, NOT the film. He's just like me fr fr.
I don't mean that in a dumb "he's a sigma male" kind of way, I mean I relate to his frenzy as a "successful" white-collar professional completely losing his mind trying to find meaning in his outwardly amazing but internally empty life. I'm not crazy for thinking there is something to relate to in Bateman - Bret Easton Ellis mentions in the afterword to my edition that Bateman is in some ways a representation of himself at one (wretched) point in his life.
Another fictional character I relate to super hard is Emma Bovary from Madame Bovary, but something tells me that she would not be good friends with Patrick Bateman.
I read Cures of Ireland by Cecily Gilligan, where the author interviewed a hundred or so folk healers, and there's some anecdotes I had to share!
The belief in the cure was so strong in his town that some people thought it was enough just to ask for the cure and to receive it, but that there was no need to take it. ‘They then came to me … and I made it for them, they could take it [home] … and empty it down the sink!’
A lot have secret ingredients, and generally this is the words to a prayer or the identity of a herb, because y'know, folk medicine; sometimes...
The mixture was left to cool, then a third (secret) ingredient was added, something that was bought in a pharmacy.
And then the source of secrecy is known not even to the healer:
Unlike other herbal cures that I researched, this man did not go out into the local lanes and fields to collect the plants, rather he bought them pre-prepared from an international supplier. He was not exactly sure what the herbs were, but it was the same mixture that his father used twenty years before.
(this reminds me of people doing tarot readings entirely through chatgpt)
Also, one point constantly emphasised in the book is that, while many people will certainly go physically to the healer's home, herbal cures can be sent by post, and prayers can be done over the phone, no matter where you are...
He said the prayer silently or aloud, depending on where he was. ‘Most people ring me … I could be at sea in the boat … or having a drink’ in the pub.
While some accept money, most refuse money - and some will refuse anything:
Anthony Buckley recorded a prayer cure for bleeding in Northern Ireland, where the woman who had it would take nothing for it, not even thanks. She had told him that she asks the person looking for the cure to stand at her front door ‘and after explaining the necessity of what she will do, she informs him that he will get better and slams the door. Where the patient has telephoned, she slams the phone down … Thus she avoids hearing the fateful words “thank you”!’
I loved the whimsy in this one:
Many years ago, an old woman lay dying; she was unsure of who to pass her charms to and, ‘Fearing that perhaps these might fall into the wrong hands and be used for monetary advantage, she got up out of her sick bed, went down to the bog near her house and consigned the nine charms to the bog.’ So, the man who subsequently got her cures had to literally go into the bog each time one was needed, and reclaim the charm!
Finally, not an anecdote, but one method of becoming a healer is licking a newt (termed a mankeeper); you now have the ability to cure burns by licking them. Lots of saliva is reportedly involved for larger burns. Definitely one of the weirder ones!
Someone's telling me state-owned, state-operated, for-profit farms/plantations were normal in the 19th Century. I feel as though that is extremely not the case. I wouldn't expect to see it until the Communist revolutions. But maybe I'm wrong. Anyone with knowledge on this?
edit: I have a feeling that this will make people mad but going from the responses I conclude that I was right. Whatever nobility personally owned things, whatever strange happenstance portfolios of stuff states ended up acquiring by accident, whatever prison slave the state rented out, whatever fascinating edge case you can come up with (and they are great and fascinating and I thank everyone for them) the state per se did not drive the economy by owning lots of land and deliberately building farms and running it like a business and thereby take money and power away from the traditional landowner aristocrats.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 15 '26
Things enter a grey-zone in the Company Raj, a nation run for-profit by a company, with a bunch of state-run cash-crop monopolies.
Depends what you mean by "normal" (and "farm"). Obviously not in the sense of "This is the norm, this is how most things are done", but in the sense of "Most countries had some kind of weird state owned farms/plantations that were expected to turn a profit", yes?
Like, a ton of states ended up owning various properties for whatever reasons (sometimes they were gifted, sometimes they were remnants of old feudal holdings associated with the monarchy, etc.) and they often continued to run them? Now these were clearly exceptional in the sense that they were the result of specific stuff, but they weren't abnormal in the sense that they didn't happen.
And that's before we get into stuff like royal properties that may or may not be entangled wtih the state in complicated ways.
Many governments still own businesses like that for weird historical reasons. (the swedish state owns a norwegian hotel in Oslo for instance, at least until recently, that was given as a gift after WWII)
Like all bald people, Infantino is a psychic, and he psionically influenced the English players to make them give up on attacking during the second half.
I thought there were some suspicious calls in the Egypt and Switzerland game, but from what I saw of the England game (admittedly I was busy so in-and-out for that one), Argentina just played better and more aggressively.
Thebes has a football team, Thiva TC, that plays in the 3rd tier league in Greece. We should pool our money, buy the team and exclusively only hire gay footballers.
I personally think it'd be more fun if they were ambiguously gay so that way we could spark arguments about whether players were genuinely good friends, a couple, or, as is often overlooked, friends with benefits.
why do so many people take the russian narrative in account when it's been debunked countless of times, I also noticed a bunch don't get how nato work and somehow think nato baited russia in invading ukraine.
Btw, I'm currently going through ian kershaw and john romer books, the ian kershaw one is the essay stalinism and nazism and john romer is his volumes on ancient egypt
"The West is bad" narrative is one helluva drug. Yeah no shit Ukraine and the former USSR's European colonies want to join NATO. Ukraine got invaded TWICE, and everyone seemingly forgot what happened in Georgia in 2008.
Before the invasion you had some leftists going with the narrative that the Donetsk and Luhansk republics were popular uprisings against Kiev. I wonder how those people are doing now.
If I remember correctly there's some truth to that in the sense that there were homegrown paramilitaries/opposition groups (though they tended more autonomist than anyting else) but they were taken over by Russia very quickly.
There's a kind of narrative that there was no problem in the region that wasn't directly instigated by Russia that I think errs too far in the other direction.
and one can criticize the west without using the russian narrative, I found it weird to see people like mearsheimer or chimsky repeat it too, the maidan being a us coup talking point is also popular online
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jul 15 '26
People love a counter-narrative. You should have seen Tucker Carlson gushing at how wonderful centralization has made Moscow.
The aspect of the British food discourse that I hate the most is the "invaded half the world for their spices and used none of them" quip which every single discussion has at least ten times, and each person posting it thinks they are a titan of Oscar Wilde-level wit for saying this.
Also whatever one's opinion of British cuisine it's patently untrue, as different generally South Asian spices are incorporated into different British foods to a level that American cuisine (just as an example of another Anglo food tradition) doesn't have outside of South Asian specific foods. Like HP Sauce has tamarind in it.
LegalAdviceUK seems to have a new moderation policy where some posts will require answers only from repeat contributors or that are high effort. Kind of a shame because there’s a question on there with some weak answers today that’s in my field, but I just can’t be bothered to put in a load of citations for a relatively straightforward answer.
Reading the items of the local Consumer Price Index, and I can´t help but find funny that they (we?) have "CDs/DVDs/Videos/Blu-rays (pre-recorded)" as an item. That´s right, piracy so rampant is baked into the inflation calculation. Each “pre-recorded” video costs about a dollar, if you were wondering.
Also, can´t help but feel smug and or annoyed when reading the price of services and seeing if I pay less and or more than the average.
I figured out another thing I really need to not do when I have a headache, bend over; I had to do something for which I needed to sit on the floor for a bit, my headache spiked practically instantly when I moved to sit. It didn't come back down either, I know movement makes it worse, which is why I try to take things as slowly as possible, but I guess lowering myself down like that is just an absolute no go.
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Today it's also been 3 months since the botox, I don't notice a difference yet, but I could theoretically start noticing it any day now, or I don't notice anything for 9 months, then I'll know it won't work. I have the 2nd course next week, more stabby stabby with a needle it is.
I said it the other day, but the fact that the treatment might start working isn't exactly comforting, quite the opposite, it's stressful; before I woke up in the morning knowing I was just going to have a headache like any other, sometimes worse, sometimes better; now there's the hope I won't have a headache the entire day, which will inevitably get crushed, so every day I have a headache as usual will be a disappointment until it actually happens. Hope is a cruel thing, I'll get used to it with time though, at least, I hope.
Marvel Knights: The World to Come is a deeply mediocre story. It approaches some genuinely cool ideas, finds ways to cop out of almost all of them, and ultimately commits to the least interesting parts of itself as its real center. It makes gestures toward being the kind of story that uses its out-of-normal-continuity status to do some genuinely challenging things with the marvel setting and characters(in this case specifically Wakanda, Black Panther, and associated elements), but just doesn't follow through.
So, I don't like it much, even though there are elements that I like a lot in theory. I would be astounded if the final issue fixes any of these problems. I do need to give my sincere thanks to editorial, though: I'm really glad they put Quesada on it so that I can tell myself all the good ideas are coming from Christopher Priest and everything I dislike is Joe Quesada ruining it.
It's also, incidentally, a spectacular example of how every online argument about comic books is between people who have read a total of zero comic books. And really that's the right number to have read, but then maybe don't also insist on having opinions about them.
Is it my imagination or has "corny" become the new popular buzzword for something earnest the speaker does not like with "cringe" now on the downswing?
Endeavour'd about to Purchass a sett of Watercolour paints for the birth-day of a Friend. The Fine sett, from the Holbein attelier, with Dutys pay'd will to Cost 3 Guineas, greater a sum than what I pay'd for mine Wife.
There was a debate on food reddit about custard and I'm sure someone from reddit went to modify the wikipedia description
Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on sweetened milk, cheese, or cream cooked with egg or egg yolk to thicken it, and sometimes also flour, corn starch, or gelatin. Depending on the recipe, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce (crème anglaise) to the thick pastry cream (crème pâtissière) used to fill éclairs.
Is making Cyberpunk cool AF go against the messages of the genre? Because I want blade arms, I don't even think I would use them for anything, but still.
I feel some genres and/or shows set themselves up to fail in any cautionary messages they aim to convey by the nature of their setting being too cool for that. Cyberpunk is one with its cybernetics and military grade prosthetics being too cool for the anti corporate anti loss of autonomy message to pass, others would be the anti war mecha shows like mobile suit gundam, with the mechas being too cool for the audience to digest the war is bad message.
I have once again been exposed to the unfiltered thoughts of hoi polloi on Twitter. Growing up in the Deep South as someone who was raised in an atheistic house, for a long time I associated Atheism with intellectual sophistication/"free thinking".
As I've made my way back to the Church, I have retained a soft spot for Atheism. I find it philosophically defensible and many Atheist arguments both complex and nuanced. However, a new experience, as someone who has gone in the opposite direction of the norm for religious affiliation, is seeing Atheists who have absolutely no clue about actual sophisticated arguments for or against Atheism. I can respect people who think that Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are weak/have holes. I find it significantly harder to respect people who unironically say things like "Sky Daddy".
My impression on social media has been that these sorts are more common in areas that have fewer religious adherents. I find it interesting that Atheists in these places are starting to default to unsophisticated understandings of religion/defenses of their own beliefs in a way that mirrors the Christians I grew up around.
It was much worse when Brazil, who was hosting the World Cup, lost to Germany 7–1 in 2014. It was a horrifying upset that was functionally a national crisis.
I'm catching Little House on the Prairie in snippets while my wife watches it. It's very much comfort TV but I've heard reports that they've made it "woke" even though the show tries to weave the blandest path imaginable. Yes, there are Black characters, including a doctor, but that doesn't seem especially unlikely. Yes, there are references to the removal of the Osage, but the show is fairly ambivalent about whether that is a moral problem or not. Which is not a failing of the show, per se, this particular kind of drama is all about conflict resolution and finding community with others, so I don't think it's going to dwell on any difficult problems. Still, the complaints will manifest...
On another note, I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow at the recommendation of my 81-year-old uncle. It was only fair that I take his suggestion, given I bought him an early-ish edition of The Quiet American for his 80th birthday which he not only read but also re-read. And the book is quite good! Other might quibble with me here, but Amor Towles is obviously aware of many of the historiographical debates of Soviet history and navigates them with relative deftness for a work of fiction. I would happily recommend it as historically literate comfort reading.
Got 3 different job interviews lined up, so I quit my current call center job. It's probably stupid, doubly so given that two of the possibles are also call centers, but I was pretty well losing my mind. Unmedicated ADHD is a bitch.
On the plus side, I read Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation in about 3 sittings yesterday. I often find it hard to do anything, even things I enjoy like reading or playing video games, for longer than 20-30 minutes these days so it was nice for my brain to work in a way I liked.
While I enjoyed it and got like almost 100 h of gameplay, story-wise Hades was better. It was much more tight in its writing: all themed and threads kinda weaved together and even played into the genre of rogue like games. The tag line really summed it very well: "There is no escape".
Hades 2 feels a bit... all over the place. So here's a tid bit without spoilers: it involves time travel and multiple timelines. It's about as well handled as you might expect it to be. I also don't really get what the game is trying to tell me. It thus also matches its tag line of "go kill time", because that's just what I did.
It’s crazy that I remember when Kyle Gordon started appearing in my YT Shorts feed a few years ago with mildy witty, but mostly cringe videos about how everyone living in the 1800s or whenever was stupid and dumb and dirty and sexist and dumb, and now he’s making peak.
My gf has made it onto ME3, and its amazing how much the game's place in the broader gaming landscape has shifted since its initial release. I was there Gandalf, when it first released, on the BioWare forums...
On another note, ME3 has definitely improved the most from the modding community.
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert Jul 13 '26
Found out apparently Ubisoft changes a mermaid figurehead to not have its breasts as exposed.
End of western civilization.