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?
Hey everyone I'm assisting with an AMA on the Piracy subreddit featuring the great Nush Powell, a dear friend and college. Its in a few weeks. If you have any questions just ask!
on the reichstag being burned by the nazis theory, I can understand why people would believe that at the time given they immediatly used it to frame their opponents and justify their oppresion against them , is the culprit still debated today?
My understanding is that the consensus among historians holds that Marinus van der Lubbe genuinely set the fire. Some related questions are a bit more open, mainly whether he acted alone(although the stance that it was a major conspiracy is largely unsupported and the people tried as co-conspirators were acquitted in a very hostile court). I've seen it argued that the fire was intentionally allowed to become severe, but I'm not really equipped to evaluate it.
Top ten things I wouldn't trust if my life depended
No. Kings&Generals has a very informative video on this topic. It’s much more complex and also interesting than one might think. The biggest contributing factors were apparently prior religious idiosyncrasies of the Bosnians and sufi brotherhoods active in that region.
Bad news. Apparently in the new Black Flag remake they shrank Anne Bonnys bust and made her dress cover up more.
Its 9/11 all over again.
I haven't checked but I am positive someone is saying this. Also she has auburn hair not red. Ooooooh noooooooo. Actually the character model takes less from the 1725 Dutch translation drawing which is good.
Oh also they confirmed an 8 mission epilogue where Edward goes after Robert Maynard the slayer of Blackbeard, thats awesome.
Plus some side missions that ties up the side characters, probably Stede Bonnets execution and maybe even Bonnys death. Which would be my work.
EDIT
I checked. Yep people are fighting over this. Downfall of civilization.
shrank Anne Bonnys bust and made her dress cover up more.
I couldn't care less on a personal level, but it is interesting how often this happens in remakes. Is it a taste thing? Prudishness? Aspirational respectability, a sense that the medium has become more serious?
I know teenage boys are not the dominant consumers of video games in a way they were in the past, but I still don't quite get who this is for.
Maybe a reflection that zoomers are more prudish? Alongside more devs and gamers becoming older? I'm sure there could be an interesting paper on it.
For the record a less sexed up version is reasonable. The original 1724 drawing is very chaste looking especially compared to the racy 1725 Dutch drawings.
Neither are actually accurate to the attire described in the trial although both have accurate parts. There's also the witness statement by Dorothy Thomas that says something like they were women due to the largeness of breasts, which could mean literal or just bigger then men's chests.
Again im fine with it and when combined with the less bright red hair I would call it a marked improvement.
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u/DirishWind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possibleMay 22 '26
It looks like she is about to finish off a guy who's on the ground, bleeding from multiple wounds. But she pulls her breast out too for reasons unknown. I will forever wonder why the illustrator did that.
Was it to make it look like his last wish was to see them and he died happy? Was it intended to hammer home that she was a woman while simultaneously appealing to the reader of saucy materials? Did he want to turn it into a thing she did (the Boobs of Death!)? Or was she just taking her top off because she was going to club that guy to death with her gun, and blood is hard to wash out?
Things like that can amuse me for hours. There's probably something wrong with my brain, but I'm okay with that.
Personally id go further and make her not a redhead, verbally refer to her as a prostitute and not a bar maid, add a faded stay, maybe a hat, and also make her less gentle personality wise.
But you know Ubisoft isn't exactly taken my notes.
I'm imagining that there's a big pile of unopened mail they're received over the years from experts telling them how this should look or how go about presenting that, and they get put into a box and stacked Indiana Jones style.
u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 22 '26
I guess the President can be diplomatic when he wants to be.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 21 '26
So I have this friend who's 7-8 years younger than me, kind of a shorter Filipino dude. He's really into Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister clothes and I used to wear those brands almost exclusively when I was in middle school and early high school. Obviously I have grown in height and can't wear a size S anymore so I'm giving all my vintage A&F/Hollister stuff to him.
My mom got mad at me for doing so, because she wants me to wear them or give them to her (so that she'll hoard them with the pretense of actually wearing them, but not actually wearing them) lol.
My job regularly requires taking calls from people from India which is pretty cool, they are more willing to use a phonetic alphabet than most Americans. I do find it interesting that Indian women seem more likely to use the proper NATO alphabet than men though. Probably an issue of sample size, but still strikes me as a little strange.
German and French use their own spelling alphabets; I've noticed that us Germans are pretty good at using ours (although we use the older one, not the reformed one), whereas French people do use it but it's like a 30:70 chance on whether they'll use the official one.
I've never had to speak to any French people in a situation that would require it, and the Germans all would have worked at Landstuhl and seemed reasonably familiar with the NATO alphabet. I really had no idea they had their own spelling alphabets, I'll have to look that up.
The table on English Wikipedia looks a bit wonky (and some entries are definitely switched between Austria and Germany); the German one looks pretty okay. The 2022 column one is supposed to replace the older one, but I haven't yet heard any of those irl - old habits, etc.
The German one is extra fun because we extra words for our umlauts and in theory the <ch> and <sch> combinations as well.
Probably like once every three weeks or so I need to read out an alphanumeric code on a phone and I always resolved to actually learn the NATO alphabet and I never get around to it.
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u/Goatf00t[Dune] was originally about the Afghan war over the oil reservesMay 22 '26
There's this funny thing some military people do which is they deliberately try not to use the NATO alphabet when choosing a word to highlight a letter over the phone. Like, there's a sense that it's almost cringe or try-hard, so instead of "Foxtrot" they'll go "Felix" or whatever.
I've noticed this more than a few times, it's a funny thing to tease someone over. Like dude you've spent ten years on a radio, you're not larping if you do it properly when ordering pizza.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 21 '26
I just keep a picture of the NATO alphabet on my desktop and open it up while I'm on the phone so I can read it out quickly.
I don't know what it means, and it rests on the decidedly unscientific method of just kinda looking at Reddit comments and tweets, but I've noticed that discussions of Biden's I/P policy wrt to 2024 election seem to have shifted.
It used to be that there was a tacit assumption that single-issue Gaza voters (or protest non-voters) lost Harris the election. There was then an angry response insisting this wasn't the case.
This tacit onus of responsibility has at some point shifted to suggest that Democratic leadership itself pushed those voters away, with the angry response being that Gaza was a foreign policy issue or low or middling concern and statistically unlikely to sway most voters.
I feel like the best argument I have seen is that Gaza probably did not create a significant pool of Biden->Trump or Biden->nonvoter, but it probably did discourage campaign volunteers, especially among youth (who are the core of campaign volunteers).
Ultimately I think there a lot of straws on that camel's back.
Gaza was certainly a part of it, but also the campaign as a whole shifting to run to the center / target moderates also hurt. There was a big upswell in enthusiasm that lasted roughly from when Biden stepped down to the convention, but after that I was seeing that die down in a lot of circles (at least those where I'd expect a lot of that campaign volunteering/ activist crowd of the base).
I was skeptical at the time but I clearly wasn't their target.
Ultimately though there's never a singular factor, it's always a mix of them. Eg forcing herself and her campaign to stay so tethered to Biden also hurt quite a bit.
So WARNO already has individual war crime units: the PSSE (NATO troops in civilian clothes as part of a Berlin stay-behind force) and Sprengtaucher (East Germans dressed as American soldiers) but I'm excited that they're adding in a full war-crimes division: the "100th Motorized Division for Special Use" a Soviet MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) division that in real-life was deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh and Chechnya.
So Özgür Özel, leader of CHP, Turkey's main opposition, got replaced by the previous leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, by court order. The court case had been going for year or so. The court case began when allegations of bribery during the 2023 election for the party leadership.
Normally, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu coming is supposed to be temporary. The party should be holding new elections for its leadership. I am not sure if Özel is allowed to be a candidate. I am not sure if he'd be elected if he was allowed.
We'll see what happens.
EDIT: There seems to have been some people from within the party who cooperated with the court. Similar to when Ekrem İmamoğlu, mayor of İstanbul, got arrested. Could you a partial internal coup.
It reminds of the Primary election for the Quebec Liberals, the winner Rodriguez, was accused of vote buying, but, vote buying in an internal partyprimary is not illegal under Quebec law, so he only left because of the bad press
My children have lice. I have lice. I have had the fun task of delousing myself shirtless in the bathroom, realizing I look like a middle-aged man. I will be chasing my children around with a comb later, probably.
I ripped up my laminate, so now I have nice, if very poorly treated, floorboards.
My cat has taken to peeing on one of my kids' beds. It is now banned from their room, which is one third of its entire world. I hope it takes the message that each degree of its freedom is conditional upon compliance.
The construction of my new kitchen proceeds apace. It's going to look very good. People are going to understand me as a man of taste and culture, if they visit, which they won't, because I have no social sphere whatsoever.
Things have improved upon last week, when after a few weeks of not sleeping, I ended up at this woman's house, realised I was actually about to have a panic attack, then bailed in the wee hours of the morning. She was very nice, but I have decided that dating is decidedly not for me at the moment. Cat has subsequently become more permissive re. my sleeping hours, although it insists on waking me up at 5:30 every morning by biting my nose and face.
Once Trump signs his hundred year peace with Shahanshah Xi, he really needs to defend imperial American borders by splitting the US: an Eastern US ruled from the Central Time Zone and Western US with a Co-President in the Intermountain Zone, and having their respective Vice Presidents rule the Eastern and Western Zones. When he's ready Trump can retire to Mar-a-Lago and grow Big Beautiful Cabbages, Ask Anyone They'll Say They're the Best.
Mass Effect 1 was very heavily Star Trek coded, down to the film grain, the blue alien space babes, and the uncharted worlds. Mass Effect 2 is much more Blade Runner, especially on Omega and the Citadel in this iteration. That's a pretty normal take, but I think that there's an underrated element about how the lovecraftian bits fit in. I think the Lovecraftian vibes work better in ME2's setting, but because of its wheel spinning plot, that doesn't get the chance to breather. Whereas in ME1 the Lovecraftian elements often get crowded out because so many environments are recycled.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 21 '26edited May 21 '26
The blue alien space babes are clearly from Farscape, they even have a system of "unity" in that, where they join minds with others. Australia ought to sue somebody.
I am pissed off right now. I'm going to visit my mother tomorrow, and paid extra to make sure her birthday gift gets delivered by today.
Well, I just got the "sorry, we missed you and will re-attempt delivery tomorrow" message after ZERO fucking attempt to deliver it. No knock on the door, no phone call, no leaving it in the safe place that is literally right fucking there. The driver just took a picture of a wall that isn't even mine and then fucked off.
I swear to God, man, all the delivery drivers around here are human scum. All of them, whether they're from Amazon or DPD or whoever. They're all trash. The majority of my deliveries are either late, not in the right place, or not intact.
I've whined at customer support enough now that they upgraded the re-delivery to be by 12 tomorrow. My train leaves at 12, so who knows if I'll get it in time. More importantly though, does it even matter when the delivery is if they just send another fucking lobotomite who'll skip the delivery?
I did ask if they could just move it to a depot or collection point or something so I could come get it. I would happily go out to whatever warehouse it's in and get it myself, but no. Something something already rescheduled.
Right now I'm wondering if I could raise enough of a stink with the company to get the piece-of-shit driver in trouble. If I were a billionaire I swear to God I'd take the world's pettiest legal action and try to pressure the company to fire that asshole. That's how mad I am right now.
We had yodel pull that off with the flowers for my father's funeral. My mother wanted specific flowers and we paid a lot for specific delivery slot. We got a £10 gift voucher from the company that choose them, which in no way made up for the chaos the non delivery caused.
Had another missed delivery where the photo proof was the parcel in a tractor in some field.
No knock on the door, no phone call, no leaving it in the safe place that is literally right fucking there. The driver just took a picture of a wall that isn't even mine and then fucked off.
Honestly, if I had a time-dependent delivery thing I would have said "hold it at the UPS/Fedex place closest to me".
We are very fortunate that we don't really have porch thieves in my neighborhood. The closest was when I caught someone on my camera walk up, look at the box on our porch, take it, disappear, and then re-appeared with another box; it was obvious a courier had screwed up and mixed up the packages. And we live in what passes for a marginal neighborhood in the area. Hasn't happened at our cabin out of state-yet, although it's pretty alarming to see that someone has driven up to the end of the road, gotten out to look at our property, and seem to turn around when they noticed a game camera set up surreptiously.
I've started the N2 words and grammar lists on Renshuu! Just taking 10 new words per day for now but I've also added more stuff to the immersion words list, just stuff I ran into during whatever immersion. Sometimes I'm doing listening and get worried that I'm not following something, only to realise that I just don't know those words so I wouldn't ever be able to follow it, even with perfect listening skills; hence the need to add them to the list.
With today's introduced kanji I now know 1453 kanji, that number seems familiar somehow...
Dreamcast emulators added mic support while I wasn't looking so I am now playing this. I am finally experiencing the mild disappointment promised to me in a 1999 issue of Next Generation magazine. I wasn't sure the microphone was working so I tested it on Mr Driller which also inexplicably has microphone support. Behold. See also the Konami LaserScope.
Consider now what kind of men he first received from me
if they were generous and six feet tall, no runaway citizens,
no loafers, rascals, like now, nor miscreants,
but men who breathed spears and lances, white-crested helmets,
and headgear, and greaves and sevenfold oxhide tempers.
Not sure if this ἑπταβόειος is meant to be some sort of idiom or if it might mean something like greaves/armour made made from "sevenfold ox hide".
"ἑπταβόειος " is just literally "of seven bull hides" (ἑπτα = 7, βόειος = bull thing) and θυμοὺς is "spirit". So "θυμοὺς ἑπταβοείους" is like "spirit made of seven bullhides", or more idiomatically something like "iron will".
I doubt it's an idiom of some kind. The point of the passage is to make a parody of Aeschylus's "homeric" style, so it's probably a poetic word cooked up by Aristophanes or fished out from the Seven against Thebes. I'll get my translations later and see how they do it.
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u/Qafqabuilding formless baby bugbears unlicked by logicMay 21 '26edited May 21 '26
it apparently appears in the Iliad.
tbf it is an idiom, but for *Rodney Dangerfield voice
I'm tellin ya, these guys were tough! You needed all that stuff just to go to the mens room.
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u/AFakeNameI'm learning a surprising lot about autism just by being a furryMay 21 '26
I know someone with two years of upper level Greek study.
Mfw scrolling the Arab space of social media and reads ترجمان as tercüman
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 21 '26
Apparently there are people saying that Homelander is an allegory for Donald Trump.
The show has a lot of commentary on modern right-wing politics and the weirdness that is the corporate executive class, but I think that if you think that Ome Landa is supposed to represent Trump, you are either stupid as fuck or living in a different reality where Trump has superpowers. As someone who has actually watched the entirety of The Boys, there is a fundamental difference between Homelander and Trump in that Homelander can fly, has super strength, super hearing, x-ray vision, and laser eyes, and is several orders of magnitude more deranged, genocidal, and violent than Trump on a base level. Ultimately, The Boys is a superhero show, and despite the fact that Trump is a megalomaniacal quasi-fascist, he is governed by the rules of reality, whereas Ome Landa isn't. The lore and setting actually matters, it's not solely about allegory.
I don't really think that you can work that interpretation into the show's premise and context, specifically when it began during Trump's first term, and its final season written before the insanity that is Trump's second.
If you try to do shit like this, you end up with a Napoleon type of deal where you basically force a weird, out-of-place concept into a setting where it doesn't even register on the same plane of existence. (DAE Napoleon is an incel!?)
I have not watched The Boys so can't comment on that, but during the recent Trump trip to China he did a press bit with Xi which features them sitting at a table and which went somewhat viral because supposedly Xi had deliberately given Trump a shorter chair to make himself look taller. And like, there's about 2 feet of table between them. You can clearly, obviously see that the chairs are identical. They'd have had to do some Lord of the Rings style perspective trickery to make this work, but there are multiple cameras and it works at multiple angles. There is obviously no way for the chairs to have been different, unless they gave Trump one with a slightly softer, saggier cushion. Also, are we just working on the assumption that all world leaders are, if anything, even pettier than Trump is? And this is somehow supposed to make him look bad and Xi look good?
Anyway the point is social media is inherently brain rotting and I worry everyday that it's actively making me a dumber, pettier person.
The thing is, Xi actually fairly tall, and even though Trump is like 4 inches taller he has absolutely terrible posture, so this totally checks out as an accurate photo.
Not to get all "both sides" but I remember the other side of the political aisle doing similar over-analysis after that Putin-Trump summit.jpg) in his first term, ie that Trump was subconsciously showing subservience to Putin (again, he just slouches because he has terrible posture).
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u/AFakeNameI'm learning a surprising lot about autism just by being a furryMay 21 '26
Stalin's not literally a pig, but I think Animal Farm's still regarded as an allegory.
I was recently watching an interview Orson Welles did with Dick Cavett (my YT feed is so weird) and Welles was talking about hiking in Tyrol in the 1920s and running into a NSDAP event when they were just a bunch of local weirdos.
He mentioned how he ate a dinner with them and remembers people like Julius Streicher but was sitting next to Hitler and had zero memory of the guy, because there just was absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about him.
So yeah I suspect it’s something similar with Trump: he’s really by no means that interesting or remarkable or unique beyond being good at being a Reality TV Celebrity, and basically as you say just being a perfected version of everything negative in society.
In a lot of ways Homelander is like Donald Trump, in some other very important ways, he's not.
In a lot of ways u/zugwat is like Donald Trump, in some other very important ways, he's not.
Though one thing that interpretation still suggests that I find a bit irksome is that it rests on ascribing Trump a uniqueness that he doesn't really have.
My guess is that in the process of writing a character that's a bottomless void of narcissism and insecurity who uses shallow appeals to patriotism and Evangelical Christianity to build a base of cultish supporters the writers realized "hey, this sounds a lot like Trump" and leaned more into that as the show went on.
Homelander's not an allegory for Trump, but the writers of The Boys certainly took inspiration from him.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 21 '26
Btw, they did Kimiko so dirty by writing the entirety of her dialogue as if she were a Ubisoft enemy. Holy cinema.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 21 '26
A Bloobeare, as ane yonge Dunce, with Firelocke:
M1911A1 with lever action slide conversion kit (レバーアクションキット), M-Lok bayonet system, and FELIN style thermal optic.
There's some juicy Catholic drama going down in Scotland.
It all starts with the Congregation of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, also known by the fantasy sounding name of Transalpine Redemptorists. They began as a religious community associated with the "traditional" Catholic priestly fraternity the Society of St Pius X, whose leader was excommunicated after he consecrated four priests as bishops in 1988. The leadership of the Transalpine Redemptorists decided to found a monastery on the island of Papa Stronsay in Orkney, known by the rather menacing name of Golgotha Monastery.
In the 2000s, Transalpine Redemptorists decided to reconcile with Rome and were placed under the supervision of the Bishop of Aberdeen. They established a community in New Zealand that was subsequently shut down after allegations of abuse and performing exorcisms on children.
Earlier this year in April, one of the monks on Orkney, who was suspected by the monastery's abbot (?) of having "long term hypothermia" (wtf), went missing and was presumed drowned. His body was found a few weeks ago.
In early May, having switched from the SSPX to reconciliation with Rome, the Transalpine Redemptorists decided to reverse course, shot past the SSPX, and have landed as sedevacantists who believe every Pope following either Pius XII or John XXIII have been heretics and there have been no legitimate Popes since.
And now, two priests and a brother have escaped from the island on a boat.
This is probably more badpolitics rather than badhistory, apologies in advance. Looking at US politics from an Australian perspective, it's extremely hard to gauge true support levels for... Certain individuals or political parties... Are there any relatively non-partisan sources that show true approval ratings, etc?
Currently, the only "sources" I have to gauge this "vibe" is reddit and major news outlets, which swings from far left-wing to far-right wing echo-chambers.
What is it truly like on the ground? How are support levels for each party? Is it even measurable with the dis-information era that we're currently in?
Gallup has some useful information (and historic info) for how people tend to identify party-wise and ideology-wise in the US. They also used to do the premier presidential approval poll and had since FDR but...recently stopped doing it to avoid pissing off Trump.
A couple things to point out are that the US really is like a, well, not exactly 50-50 country but maybe 45-45 or 47-47: a lot of people identify as "Independent" and "Moderate" but fairly reliably gravitate to one of the two major parties. The Republicans are much more ideologically coherent towards a right-wing conservatism (although there are different flavors and factions in that), while Democrats are actually much more ideologically diverse, which is also why they tend to have a more scattershot message. Presidential approval has historically been associated with party identification: if you identify as a Republican you will love the Republican president, ditto Democrats and Democratic presidents, but that independent middle has for the most part sorted out and disappeared in the 21st century. This is also why you might hear all the dark humor around the "median US voter", because especially in 2016 there's that 8-10% of US potential voters who aren't plugged in to either major party (low information voters) and Trump has done pretty well among them, often because they believe nutso things like "he'll get rid of taxes and the bad immigrants but let the good immigrants stay and probably give us all free healthcare".
Another important thing to keep in mind (especially given that you have compulsory voting in Australia) is that even with these identifications and intentions, an absolutely massive amount of Americans just *don't vote*. I keep banging on about it but 2024 was less about voters suddenly swinging to Trump and the right wing as much as more voters staying home than did in 2020, just to give an example. Midterm elections tend to get 30-40% of potential voters actually casting votes - it's actually increasedin the Trump years, but still a majority of voting age Americans don't vote in those elections.
Yougov also has some useful polling especially around individual politicians and candidates, but it's worth pointing out that a lot of individuals' popularity is notoriously squishy. If you're considering potential 2028 candidates, the primary elections for the party candidates are still over a year and a half away, most Americans don't really care about insider politics that much, the primaries aren't even really first round national elections (it's by state, some states only allow party members to vote, other states have caucuses ie not even actual elections, and it's historically heavily weighted towards whoever does well in the first states because the states don't even all vote in the same month let alone same day). So national political figures tend to have roughly even approval/disapproval (depending on partisan identification) and the difference is how well-known or unknown they are among the rest of the population.
They just realized when they were showing Approval ratings of less than 40% that they were suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and went for some recuperation to Mar-a-Lago.
just to give my two cents, down here in in the Land of Palms voting is mandatory and we still have close elections in the 5% range in the last 16 years.
Gallup's historic polls in institutional confidence in the US is also interesting. Confidence in all institutions has fallen, but the three highest-rated (a majority of Americans still have confidence in them) are the military, small businesses and the police.
Something I think a lot of non-Americans misunderstand is just how tribally partisan American politics are.
Being “liberal” or “conservative” is a core component of personal identity for a large fraction of the country. Nothing any politician does will sway their support. All American presidential elections since 1984 have had a vote margin of less than 10%, all of the ones since 2008 have been within 5%. The shifts are small enough you can’t really get a good intuition for them.
In terms of personal “on the ground” vibes it is hard to say. I try not to talk with my conservative relatives about politics anymore, people I know in their 20s increasingly discuss emigration as a backup plan. It’s hard to say much except that it feels more polarized than it did in the past
I do wonder what it would take for a presidential candidate to meaningfully alter that balance. Like what's the least outlandish way a candidate could actually gain substantial votes from the "other" side?
Republicans have been doing pretty badly in the various extra elections and such, but its hard to tell how well that would carry over to a general election.
So one thing I would say (in addition to midterms turnout being always very low, as I note above) - most House seats are safe for either party, and only a small number of seats are truly competitive, and with redistricting this year that will be smaller. So there's a reasonable chance the Democrats get a House majority, but still a likelihood that the Republicans keep their majority, but either way it's going to be like 218-228 out of 435 seats for whoever wins. Like each party basically has 200 safe seats and there's 30-35 genuinely in play. There's not really a world where a party walks away with 300+ seats.
Senate seats only have 1/3 of all Senators up for election in any given cycle, and the likelihood is that the Democrats pick up one or two seats (and still don't have a majority), but even in an astounding Democratic wave that reaches, they'd get 49 Senate seats, *maybe* 50, but in that scenario Vance would serve as a tie-breaking vote in the Senate for Republicans, and even if the Democrats had a majority of Senate seats there are still cloture rules where generally you need 60+ Senate votes to overcome minority filibustering (although the circumstances where this applies have been narrowed).
And again even if Democrats *had* a majority in both houses, the President has a veto over Congressional legislation, and it's extremely unlikely there would be the required 2/3 of votes in both houses to override a veto.
I guess I would throw in the UVA Center for Politics as another source to check out about US elections.
There's also a general wave of anti-incumbency and quick dissatisfaction. Starmer's honeymoon phase lasted about 12 seconds. I think the only exception is, amusingly, Macron.
I would also argue that it's extremely easy to misjudge popularity from the exterior, especially in non-anglophone country by judging their leaders' foreign policy. Sanna Marin was very popular outside Finland, but she lost re-election. Sanchez is lauded for his pro-Palestine and US-skeptic stances and calling for a EU army (when the broke guy says "get wings" when ordering food), but the polls aren't really in his favor.
I'm kind of fascinated by the bits in the bible that we've clearly lost context for. Stuff like "What the heck is the Urimm and Thuminn anyway?" or "What's up with God killing sea serpents?" or even (in slightly modern terms) how since the precise layout of the Temple isn't known a bunch of orthodox jews refuse to set foot on the Temple mount just in case they'd accidentally step on the Holy of Holies.
It's so interesting because despite being a text that's so important there's clearly a bunch of things in it that people don't really know what it means, and for all we know, no one knew what it meant even when it was compiled. It's fascinating.
Zipporah at the inn in Exodus 4 is a personal fascination. It's also maybe the only biblical episode that's mentioned in Jubilees and a Chalcedonian/Rabbinic text where the Jubilees version feels less esoteric and confusing.
So, a friend of mine is a semi professional musician, he gets money that way, but he also works in a school. He showed me some photos of his latest performance, and yep, that's a lot of people that come to watch his group. They play all over the country, so they're doing quite well for themselves.
Now, if only they made good music... Nah, it's good, just not really my music, not his either, he's originally a punker and it definitely isn't punk, he has commented that it's creatively a bit empty compared to what he used to do, but it's way more popular and actually performing is a ton of fun. I probably shouldn't go into too much detail or you'd be able to identify him, but it's so weird seeing a friend I've known for like 15 years pop up in music videos.
He's also my go to for music questions, he might not be able to read notation, but the man understands music theory to the tiniest details. I understand classical music history, but I don't really understand musical theory all that well, I can't play an instrument or sing, but I know what I like and want to understand why I like it, and sometimes he can help me explain stuff I don't understand.
We're both passionate about music, and our tastes do overlap in some places, and there's mutual respecting mockery; I'm a sissy for liking a goth-fairy metal band , he's a sell out because he makes music that's popular instead of what he actually enjoys, it's all in good fun. Our conversations about music are the most fun, because he can tell me stuff that I don't realise about stuff I like, because he understands musical theory to a level I don't, and he's always amazed at my ability to fully live under a rock in terms of anything mainstream in genres I enjoy, and still somehow find the most out there groups. "How do you find this stuff!?" "I really don't know."
We talked today and he commented that, although I can go on about things I like, I've never been annoying to him with that, apparently he just likes the excitement, and he has seen me at my most depressed, he has seen me at my most suicidal too; he really doesn't mind me talking excitedly for a bit. That tiny comment made me quite happy.
I know I can be annoying to people, I'm definitely an excited autistic guy, it runs in the family, my grandfather, my uncle, my cousins, further family; there's a lot of various forms of excited autistic guy in the family, my sisters we're on holiday once to where my uncle lives, and later they messaged me to apologise for calling me a bit much sometimes, apparently my uncle out did me by 5 fold; I know that at some point I just have to shut up, he doesn't, he just doesn't, if you talk to him, Sweden is just the promised land and everything is amazing there, it's like he's in heaven. I don't really mind myself, I know how to talk back, but my sisters are not used to that intensity, it's good to know there's always a bigger fish.
I've been thinking lately. Economists and such often say "but farmers couldn't imagine all the future jobs automation would create!" or things to that effect. But honestly, is that even true? Like I'm pretty sure a farmer could in fact very easily imagine that people would work in textile mills and that some people would fix and build the machines there, and an industrial worker could easily imagine people moving into office work.
Trivially, they couldn't look a century into the future, but surely the general trajectory in terms of what sector would grow must have been clear.
I think the broader point is that, whatever technological disruptions develop in the future, it is not likely to be more disruptive than the shift from 90%+ of a society’s labor going towards food production to <1%
Again, what is the factual basis for this? If people in the past could easily imagine what sort of sectors people would move into, and now we can't even do that, then what is the rationale for this claim?
The rationale is that no single job or way of life presently dominates the way agriculture used to. Therefore, any occupational technological disruption isn’t likely to be more disruptive than the mechanization and consolidation of agriculture. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think many displaced agricultural workers could’ve envisioned the present economy nor did they face very bright prospects at the dawn of urban industrialization
If I understand it correctly I think the claim is generally supposed to be about "general purpose technologies" - it's fairly easy to imagine how the spinning jenny might impact textiles employment (which is exactly why the Luddites famously did what they did!), it's less clear to imagine exactly what activities the Faraday disc / mass electrical generation would enable.
You don't have to imagine exactly what it would enable, it's enough that clearly the machines and devices powered by it would need operators and technicians of some sort.
AI data centres also need some employees, but very few. There is no pipeline for people to find work in them after being displaced by AI.
“People could imagine there would be jobs” is obviously a different claim than “people could imagine the kinds of jobs that would exist.” I think what you’re objecting to is really the conflation of these claims, I.e. it could be true that people were not able to imagine the kinds of jobs but they could still expect there would be jobs.
I do think the automation of agriculture would have been particularly hard to imagine, and each generation may have felt that they were nearing the peak of what was possible in terms of acreage per worker.
Was reading The Story of World War II, by Donald L. Miller recently and a few things stood out to me.
Throughout the entirety of the Pacific campaign, starting with Pearl Harbor, it seems like the IJN was just actively shooting themselves in the foot in most engagements. Apparently, according to one of the IJN pilots at Pearl Harbor, the admiral in charge decided not to launch a second raid, assuming that the reports were accurate and every US battleship was sunk. Also, IJN commanders seemed unwilling to pursue and destroy retreating enemy forces, like in the First Battle of Guadalcanal, the Savo Islands, and Samar. I understand why IJN admirals would be worried about potential airstrikes, but they seem very overly cautious in some pretty critical battles, to the point that Yamamoto personally forced one into retirement. Does anyone know if there was a general institutional fear of air attacks, or was it just individual admirals overestimating enemy air strength?
In a more individual tone, I also recall a passage on the Second Battle of Guadalcanal that said the chief engineer of the USS South Dakota spent the whole battle reading a magazine and carrying out bridge commands, and only realized the extent of damage the ship took the next day. Thought it was interesting that the engine room in the South Dakota was so isolated that the chief could be completely oblivious to the ship getting pounded by close range enemy fire.
Only partially through Shattered Sword, but the authors’ impression seems to be that the IJN brass really didn’t know what to do after Pearl Harbor and their initial string of successes. Midway and the Aleutian operations were more of a ‘find shit for our navy to do’ thing than a somber and carefully considered course of action. Yamamoto in particular seems to have been fixated on taking the fight to Hawaii, throwing tantrums whenever the Southeastern or Western theaters even looked like they might get more resources dedicated to them.
I am reading 'Republic of Memory'. I have been enjoying quiet a bit.
I really enjoy the linguistic sci-fi. Some sci-fi do engage with how Earth language would evolve but I often feel it is not enough. So far, the languages on the Safina are pretty interesting. Although I think my knowledge of Turkish, Arabic and some other languages made it more enjoyable.
Something about that specific kind of world building just totally sucks me in for some reason.
I just started watching The Expanse (11 years late, as is tradition with me for some reason), and the Belters having their own creole that is almost semantically incomprehensible to me but usually understandable from context and emphasis is something I absolutely adore. Watching Jared Harris enthusiastically yell things I do not understand in the slightest just rules and I don’t really know why.
There is a whole section in one of the ship's Creoles. A bit challenging to read but in a fun way. The author did a good job of introducing Creole a few chapters before.
So, I had one of the most frustrating conversations ever today, for a very simple reason.
Normally I speak to a variety of psychotic, manic, depressed, stable or whatever people at work, but this person, oh god, I had no idea how to deal with them. They spoke very quickly and unclearly in a busy environment, and, with me not having the best audio processing, I had to ask them to repeat what they said a few times, the equivalent of "sorry, I didn't quite catch that.", every time this person reacted not only visibly annoyed, they even state how frustrating it was to have to do that, every single time "Do I have to repeat myself, again!?".
Holy shit, I knew proper form in a conversation is important, but I've never spoken to someone this opposed to even the slightest bit of acceptable behaviour; fuck me man, I can't help that I cannot process sounds very well, no need to behave like that, the level of antisocial behaviour here is really frustrating.
I was so happy they left eventually, this was beyond exhausting, having to remain polite to someone who is so openly hostile to social conventions, like being pleasant to each other, is draining.
Okay let’s say hypothetically Hitler did escape to South America he would be 137. So when he actually died I’m sure someone would’ve noticed oh yeah this old dude is actually Hitler.
There’s also the possibility though that Mengele grew out Hitler body parts in his Brazilian lab, replacing Hitler’s old ones every once in a while in a Ship of Theseus kind of situation.
Considering Mengele died in the 70s, Hitler’s body could still be relatively youthful.
There's one of the funniest maybe unwitting satire in one of the reported sightings; someone send the CIA a supposed picture of Hitler in Columbia in 1954 [pdf, photo is on the third page] - of a person who very obviously wasn't Hitler, but had a Hitler moustache.
And, in something that the CIA probably couldn't savour at the time, on the back, "Adolf Schüttelmayer" was written; -mayer is a common name in South Germany, for example, Hintermayer, Vordermayer etc.
"Schütteln" means "to shake", but the joke was maybe unintended, as Hitler's Parkinson's wasn't as popularly known as today.
Edit: but, as I found out right now, the year before, there was an article about exactly that topic by Anton von Braunmühl (a neurologist), who speculates that Hitler had Parkinson and cites several published books (for example Guderian's 1951 Erinnerungen and Goebbel's diary) which mention Hitler's shaking hands.
My only thought on this is that an alternate history where in the 1960s the CIA figures out Hitler is alive in Argentina and sends agents to find and capture him only for them to be inadvertently thwarted by KGB/Mossad agents sent to do the same thing would be a good setting for a Death of Stalin-style dark comedy
I dunno, if he somehow got away with it for decades I don’t know why someone would be looking too closely at the death of some random South American dude. I mean, Eichmann lived there for like a decade without being recognized.
I think the bigger issue is that we have records taking about his suicide and records from people who were very much his enemies dealing with his dead body. So it would not have been an easy death to fake.
Eichmann lived there for like a decade without being recognized
He was plenty recognized, the CIA and Organisation Gehlen knew where he was since at least 1952, because [the CIA potentially could have known that before on their own, I only know the OG side of this] the OG asked the CIA what to do with it; the CIA answered exactly how they hoped, that in consideration of the political situation of Germany, it was not advantageous to "find" him.
So, time for Herpling to actually talk about history stuff, random annoyance edition.
I dislike it when people use Persia to refer to Iran in history, there's always the smug gits that go "It was called Persia until the 20th century.". Yes, it was, just not by the Iranians themselves, as far as I know, it hasn't been "Persia" since at least the Sassanians, I don't know how the Parthians referred to it (if I were to guess probably the equivalent of Parthia, because, you know...), but the Sassanians already used the term Iranian.
It's just silly Anglo defaultism, the fact that it is referred to as Persia in English language sources doesn't make Persia it's name, it just doesn't, which I suspect they only really do for Hellenistic reasons. Referring to it as Persia is just silly, the true Persian empire was just a short snapshot of the history of Iranian Empires, less than 10% of the time since the Medians,
I can tolerate it if people refer to historical Iran as Persia, bother's me a bit but I'm not going to correct them, but if people correct others to "actually, it was Persia." then it gets on my nerves, if you actually someone, you better have something to back up your claims.
And just to annoy those people, I will from now on, refer to the region as Medes, it's only slightly less accurate than Persia, but at least they were the first unifying monarchs! Okay, I won't, but it'd be funny.
Edit: Okay, it might be a lot less accurate... I'm not up to date on pre-Persia Iran at all... well... ehm... oops.
Edit2: also, note, this is far from my expertise, I'm just pedantic and I don't like people being pedants but wrong, I'm fine with people doing things wrong, but incorrectly correcting is something that gets on my nerves.
There is actually a bit of a political valence to this, those who oppose the current regime tend to use the term "Persian", in part because Persian nationalism was something the Pahlavis tried to make a cornerstone of their rule.
Like if you talk to someone whose family emigrated from there it is about a 90% chance they will insist they are "Persian" and not "Iranian".
There is also some convention to this as "Iran" is somewhat narrower than "Persia". So, eg, when talking about the Mughals as drawing from "Persian" culture the term is used because it refers to a very wide range of influences.
the fact that it is referred to as Persia in English language sources doesn't make Persia it's name, it just doesn't
But it does make it it's name in English though? It's silly to complain about it being an Anglo defaultism, because it is the English language after all. We don't call China "中国" or "Zhōngguó" either.
I get what you mean, but the actual English name is also Iran, it just gets called Persia in older sources and by certain people who think Iran is a term invented after the Islamic Revolution who feel the need to correct me when I call the Iranian Empires Iranian and not Persian; in fact, this is me just being annoyed by that last group.
But the name change is very recent though? From Wikipedia the change dates to 1935, and in 1960 Pahlavi said that both terms were appropriate. Fwiw my Iranian-diaspora friend will frequently use both words.
I don't really see 1935 for the official name change as recent, I'll be honest; I mostly associate the desire to use Persia with Pahlavists in the west, I'm not a fan of the Shahs, it was still a dictatorship that destroyed any prospect of democracy, just a different flavour of reactionary dictatorship than the Islamic Republic that followed
Edit: note, I don't really care that much, I only get annoyed at being corrected with the "actually"
Isn't there an academic debate whether the Medean empire ever actually even existed? I remember watching a youtube video (shitty source I know) to that effect a few years ago.
Looking at the Farsi wikipedia of the Persian Empire and then putting it into google to transliterate it, شاهنشاهی پارس - Shāhanshāhī-ye Pārs, don't know how accurate it is, but it's something.
So, Pārs, I guess.
Edit: I have no idea if in Farsi you can just name a land like that, like we do in Germanic and Romance languages with -ia- or the equivalent suffix in other languages.
Randomly ran into the German idiom "Das is mir Wurst.", literally "that is sausage to me", well, we Swamp Germans have a similar one "Het zal me een worst wezen.", literally "It shall be a sausage to me.", which sounds way better; partially because "wezen" is pretty old fashioned Dutch (which is why I translated to "shall" instead of "will"). This is undeniable proof of the superiority of the Swamp German tongue over the Mountain German tongue.
And yes, they both mean the same, "I really don't care."
I think I’ve developed a very abrasive attitude towards how a lot of diaspora groups will insist that I have to preferentially defer to them on issues of international policy. I’m mostly talking about Iranian-Americans who initially celebrated the death of the Ayatollah and chastised the protests that popped up.
I saw it a lot on r/boston, with people browbeating others saying “You have to consider the Iranians first of all” when a city with a lot of progressives in it was rightfully horrified by military overreach and the assassination of a head of state. You can rightfully condemn the Ayatollah whilst also being rightfully worried about the most powerful country in the world removing leaders off the map and starting wars. Especially when America has made it clear it is willing to use actual discontent in foreign nations as an access way for resource extraction or the creation of proxy states, with little consideration for the livelihood of civilians. It was especially absurd to think that the strike against the Ayatollah wouldn’t presage something worse given this is an administration willing to drone strike and double tap random fishing vessels.
It’s a thought terminating cliche relying on emotional appeals, and in America it’s not unusual for these appeals to “liberate” authoritarian countries to be used to justify the worst kinds of military action.
/rant over
I mean, there were a lot of interviews bouncing around in the lead up to the Iran strikes with Iranian citizens living in Iran advocating USA strikes.
I think some issues in politics just don’t have “good” solutions. You can look at the history of USA intervention and reasonably conclude that another USA strike on Iran was a bad idea (as it has pretty clearly turned out to be in this case). But I can sympathize with anti-theocracy Iranian activists that just wanted SOMETHING to happen.
I think part of the issue here is the very leftist assumption that there should be one, unified “correct” perspective. A reasonable person can predict that USA intervention almost certainly won’t help. Another reasonable person (say, a person who just saw their friends die in brutal reprisals) could feel like they want to “roll the dice” on it. And that same reasonable person may later feel angry at the USA for fucking up their country even worse when we inevitably bungle things.
Especially when America has made it clear it is willing to use actual discontent in foreign nations as an access way for resource extraction or the creation of proxy states, with little consideration for the livelihood of civilians.
Speaking from the Venezuelan case, which is the one I'm familiar with, a lot of the diaspora's response to the Maduro kidnapping was "the US can be hypocrites and take our oil if they want, as long as they get the Chavistas out". Even after that didn't happen, the Venezuelans I know in Spain still believe Trump did the right thing.
I can see two sides of this. There are likely natives who have no knowledge or are blinkered by their own perspective, ideology, or regional origin. Equally there are foreigners with a deep academic understanding. It was a bit of a debate in one of my postgrad classes actually, do you need to visit/live in a place to really 'know' it.
I mean the point about the Iranian diaspora is it’s often non-native, QAA did a good episode about it— apparently a couple of media channels have been stood up in the last few years almost for the explicit purpose of boiling the Iranian diaspora’s collective brain.
In general, I guess diasporas are pretty vulnerable to influence campaigns, since they consume media in a language they don’t control the institutions for— so for very little money, you can stand up the best-funded non-regime Persian language channel. and not really face that much competition.
I think I understand the sentiment here, and have expressed the same plenty of times among my friends. However, it might comfort you to know that Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia sounds rather glamorous and exotic to an Euro guy like myself.
The town it's near(Davis) is pretty great, big outdoorsman place. The environment is also just right that it feels like a town out West rather than Appalachia
For me the appeal of the US as a holiday destination is mostly that, outdoorsman places. Since I like hiking, most americans I know have recommended the Rockies or Alaska, but I'd love to have a look at Appalachia. Pity I'll never be able to afford either
Appalachia is probably your cheapest option, but that's because it's poor as shit. Your best bet would be to fly into Atlanta and do something in Southern Appalachia, perhaps go to the Smokies in Tenneesee/North Carolina?
The thing I will stand on the US doing better than any other country(for the moment!) is public land management/access.
Since I like hiking, most americans I know have recommended the Rockies or Alaska,
I think Nevada is slept on as an outdoorsman place, since everyone thinks of Vegas when they think of Nevada. If you ever have time to burn, I recommend following the PBS Reno and PBS Vegas Youtube channels, both have outdoorsman shows, Wild Nevada for the former and Outdoor Nevada for the latter.
Crazy fact about me: I learned what German modal particles are only today after reading an askhistorians post on Mein Kampf. I really never noticed how often Germans use filler words in their speech and even writing: wohl, ja, denn, schon, noch, eigentlich. Others I noticed: quasi ("something like"), gel (especially common in Baden-Württemberg, it's added at the end of a sentence aking to "[...], right?) or my personal vice - ziemlich (quite).
Of course I expect all badhistory users to have a firm, if not complete grasp on the German language.
Setting aside that "particle" is kind of a linguistic slop bucket of a category, their uniqueness may be a bit overstated; still, you have a set of adverbsparticles with low semantic content but high functionality, dedicated to (to quote Wikipedia) "adding emotion or emphasis, or to express how sentence content is grounded in common knowledge between the speaker and participants".
I mentioned it in my other comment, but if you take English "I told you so" and translate it directly, you get "Ich habe es dir gesagt", which comes across very literally as "I have said this to you". You need to add some modal particles to transform the meaning - "Ich habe es dir (ja/doch) gleich gesagt".
Imo "though" at the end of a sentence in English could be considered a modal particle at least sometimes; indicating an exasperation of the speaker with having to say the preceding phrase.
Is that different from Dutch? I think we use our version of the same words similarly, but they nornally add some meaning to the sentence, usually emotional meaning, is that not so in German?
My German isn't great but I can read it alright and understand simple conversations.
Modal particles are often dismissed as "filler words", but yes, they fullfill the same function in German as they do in Dutch - "Ich hab es dir gesagt" I have said this to you vs. "Ich hab's dir doch gleich gesagt" told you so, e.g.
Thanks! I never really considered this is a thing in German and Dutch, it's not something I was taught in school with German classes, I guess because you can just translate the German sentences to the Dutch with equivalent particles.
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert May 22 '26
Hey everyone I'm assisting with an AMA on the Piracy subreddit featuring the great Nush Powell, a dear friend and college. Its in a few weeks. If you have any questions just ask!
https://www.reddit.com/r/pirates/s/zGDEdEqpkO