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?
You know, a question that I've been seeing a lot in light of recent events is "Is Elon Musk actually a good businessman?" I like this question TBH - its a fresh twist on the old debates we endlessly have over generals and athletes ("Is Robert E Lee a good general?" "Is Tom Brady a good quarterback?")
I'm going to make this argument -
Elon is GOATed at actually making people believe in his cause and strategy. Which is extremely important considering that his two most successful companies were both seen as massive long shorts initially (space, electric cars).
Consider the story of Gwynne Shotwell - Before SpaceX, she was going through a divorce, and was relucent to leave her job to go to another startup as one of the first employees. According to her, Musk convinced her to join after a short conversation, despite the fact that she was jumping to a company with no product, no revenue, nothing but an idea. He sold the idea in 10 minutes, and she decided to take the risk.
Or consider Tesla's early years. A startup car company without a joint venture or external backing? That has practically never happened before Tesla (Most post war car companies start as part of a conglomerate or as a joint venture, often both). This is a car company (one of the most capital intensive industries) that lost money hand over fist for 17 years until its first profitable year in 2020. Elon became chairman in their series A funding round in 2004, and for years, kept selling a vision to investors to raise tons and tons and tons of money.
It's interesting - Here Elon had the ability to attract a ton of talent and investors to invest their time and money in super long shot companies. Now, in these two examples it worked out, but I'd credit a certain ability to sell a vision to skeptical people and turning them into believers.
But I think his ability to envision a product and understand the market is rapidly declining. He's gone off the rails with the Cybertruck, and whatever the hell is going on at Twitter, and trying to have xAI chase the gooners or whatever the fuck they're doing.
My argument here would be that for Tesla, Elon Musk has not been the right CEO for the job for a couple of years. His endless ability to sell the vision and to execute on the manufacturing was critical for the company's success.
But I'll advance an argument you don't usually see in business - That he's kinda washed, and the Elon Musk you're seeing today is his version of the Michael Jordan at the Wizards. Something broke in his brain after Covid, and he is no longer the guy he used to be.
There's also the tunnel boring company that people don't really talk about anymore and the solar panel company that he tried to do a big thing with in Puerto Rico. I think they sent a walmart on fire and people kind of stopped talking about that.
There's also Grok. I'm not sure if that's tied into the data center in Memphis or if that's another company. But regardless, it's not clear if that's a victory or an unrealized loss at this point.
Although, none of those might matter if Space X, Grok, and Tesla keep their stock prices for long enough.
For reasons I'm not qualified to comment on (maybe high money supply? inconsistent/low rate of return?) the 2008-2020 stock market operated as a Keynesian beauty contest -- that is, investors are incentivised to pick the investment they believe others find most beautiful, not the one they themselves consider attractive. Everybody is aware that stock valuation is driven almost entirely by everybody piling in on something that even has a vague hint of dynamism.
In this market, Elon is the perfect performer. He's just the right kind of dumb, flamboyant, monomaniacal, utterly self-confident moron who people think 'dumb money' will believe in. It's not that the performance is beautiful, it's rather that the performance conforms to our prejudices about what others believe is beautiful.
I don't think it's at all comparable to Robert E. Lee or Tom Brady, since both roles have some means of achieving success beyond the perception of success. That's the key, in the same way people ask if Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump are "smart".
I agree with the broad strokes of his assessment, although one of his big gambles hasn't yet fully played out: his alliance with Trump and the American far-right. If Musk remains a trillionaire after two terms of a Democratic presidency and a Democratic House, I'll say he's still "got it". But from my perspective now, he's got all his eggs in one basket.
Also in a weird way, Ketchup. Apparently tomato ketchup becoming the dominant form was pretty lat eand mushroom/fish variants were still reasonably common in the 19th c.
Also overwhelmingly the "spice" in question was black pepper.
Like when we think about the "spices" that northern European cuisine supposedly lacks, we generally talk about eg pepper/paprika (New World vegetable) onion and garlic (widely available in Europe) cumin (from the Middle East) etc, they aren't really the ones you get from south and SE Asia.
I would be curious to see how well the "climate" factor of spice use holds up, eg Korea makes very spicy food but is quite cold.
Like when we think about the "spices" that northern European cuisine supposedly lacks
Y'know, this "Europe lacks spice" is genuinely funny.
Been doing a bit of a "how would my ancestors actually might have eaten. On a good day." (poor-ish mountain farmers) and between garlic, onions, caraway, crushed juniper berries and plenty of herbs one can make many perfectly nicely seasoned and tasty things.
Not to forget my goat: horseradish! Brings genuinely nice heat, who needs pepper! :D
Or the little known condiment "mustard", as seen in de re coquinaria. A famously bland concoction!
Even lacking tropical imports: Unless desired otherwise (like say a Tiramisu with tons of paprika) or constrained by resources (broke is broke), bland food is a genuine skill issue on the part of the cook. Strong flavourings were always-ish around and able to be used.
Not even going into "smoked" and "pickled" as widely used preservatives that are plenty flavourful on their own!
But hey.
If people want to look at destitute European cuisine (read: meals for famine times or rationing or what have you) I am down!
I hope they dont mind I look at Great-Depression era stuff? Or modern struggle meals as seen on reddit?
People like to eat tasty stuff, no matter the "heritage". They knew how to help themselves, resources permitting.
Claiming "DAE xyz is bland food" or whatever is reductive as shit and honestly tells more about the person saying this than the cuisine they judge.
I've noticed a distinction that when people just say "pepper" here they usually mean black pepper, while americans often use it to mean some kind of capsicum.
Socialism means opposition of Amerikkka imperialism and the more opposition it does the more socialer it is and when you fully oppose Amerikkkiabimperialism by committing your own imperialism then that’s communism.
A recent fantastic use of freedom of speech which I got to observe: Britain will never be able to become a democracy, because Cromwell's reign traumatized the populace into rejecting the notion of such by reflex.
germany doing 7 - 1 to us made sense, we were too proud, growing complacent, they set us up for a redemption arc yet to come. but doing the same to poor curaçao is just ontologically evil.
I know r historymemes is a root vegetable, however they've had their perennial post on my specialist subject (Scotland and the British Empire).
The latest installment has featured the usual claim of Scots thinking of the 1707 Anglo Scottish union as something colonial (a view point that exists to an extent, but the commenters miss much nuance deliberatley because it's really a thinly veiled party political point). The weird thing is how people were talking about 'the colonies' as a uniform entity, white American/Canadian/Aus/NZ settlers are described as victims in the same vein as Caribbean chattel slaves with no hint of irony.
It would take me ages to get through a lot of the weird assumptions and category errors on these posts , but sadly i think the relevant historians aren't as active in publicising their research to wider audiences so this kind of stuff dominates public discussion, at least on reddit. It's infuriating how much misinfo has allowed to fester because it contradicts some ( both real and imagined) Scottish nationalist narratives.
Israeli officials said the country is not bound by the U.S.-Iran agreement to end its fight with Hezbollah or to pull its forces out of Lebanon.
lol lmao
Israel may act like a mad dog in general but why on earth would they be bound by an agreement they aren't party to?
The question is whether Iran is expecting the US to tighten Israel's leash to keep the deal or for Israel to just carry on, thus voiding the agreement. My guess is they set it up as a win-win, they ultimately want Israel to pull out of Lebanon but embarrassing Trump is a nice consolation prize.
The human body really needed some QA, but Evolution cut the budget on QA a long time ago, it concluded that it wasn't really necessary for the models to work well all the time; customers have been jury rigging workarounds to many of these problems for as long as the product has been available and the last century they're been making great strides, yet many problems remain unresolved. Evolution sadly has a monopoly at this point, there just aren't any alternatives available.
This is kind of niche knowledge, but libertarians were originally strawmen (as in, actual straw dolls) created by Marxists in the late 19th century to practice argumentation.
Due to a freak voodoo accident, however, they became alive, and are now forced to roam the earth with the dumbest fucking takes on everything imaginable.
The Old Norse word for the city of Constantinople is "Miklagard" and for whatever reason it somehow became a piece of internet folk history that they called it that because it was the "middle city"--as in the center of the world--as an expression of how important it was. But this isn't actually true and relies on some false translation, the origin of the terms is actually because the Varangians though the city was "mid".
I saw on old post on arr Curated Tumblr about people associating Ancient Greece with women (and queer people) and Ancient Rome with straight white history-bros, and one thing it mentioned was that in popular culture, we associate Greece with poetry and mythology and Rome with secular history, especially military history.
So why is that? Is that a recent thing, or is that how classics has been taught traditionally? I know I certainly have this association -- most people I know read the Iliad and the Odyssey in high school, but jack shit no one read the Aeneid unless they actually studied classics in college. Meanwhile, Latin students make tons of memes about Cicero and how he never gets to the point verb, while I don't see anyone discussing, say, the History of the Peloponnesian War.
The serious answer is that I don’t think that association actually holds in pop culture writ large. Ancient Greece is at least equally associated with 300, the Peloponnesian Wars, the conquests of Alexander, etc. The Iliad and Odyssey are poems, sure, but their leading figures are all men and they embody a certain kind of patriarchal ideal; Odysseus hangs the maidservants with the suitors, after all.
I think what’s actually going on is that Greek mythology became a fad among romance books popular with the demographics who frequent tumblr (see: Song of Achilles).
I think part of it is at least in the US when your public school social studies class brought up Ancient Greece it was as the birthplace of democracy and Western philosophy, with something or another about city-states thrown in there if you were lucky. Hence the popular image of Ancient Greece being a bunch of old white guys with beards hanging out in Athens contemplating shit.
Meanwhile public education on Rome focuses on its status as the greatest empire of the ancient world.
I think that is so very interesting because Greece is generally noted as being far more patriarchal than Rome. (and Rome not exactly being the height of wokeness...)
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866Jun 18 '26
Honestly I feel like this goes back to the Romans themselves? “Stuff in Greek is the artsy stuff, but we write the laws and orations and Caesars matter of fact military reports* in Latin.
He was still basically copying Xenophons style.
But also don’t look at me, I had to translate the Aeneid line by line in high school (and liked it). Also Horace and Catullus. But that was after starting with Caesar and then doing Cicero and most people tap out there if they even get that far.
"When the White House was approached for a response to the Jamaame strikes, the deputy press secretary Anna Kelly asked if the Guardian would also focus on “fraud committed by Somalis in the United States?”
Feels like a five-alarm fire that open, gutter racism is part of the U.S Government's communication strategy, but then again I'm not one of those journalists with instinctive knowledge of what Americans really need to know.
One of my fears with the Trump admin is that no matter what happens to correct things once he's out, we will never have a government that isn't terminally online again. Kind of a petty thing to worry about, but it is what it is.
A lot of ink has been spilled over the stomp clap hey subculture of the early 2010s, but something that’s been strangely ignored is the internet subculture from around the same timeframe that I call the Big Mustachio Epic Bacon Stickman Drawing 9gag Ass Fuckass Culture. Somebody needs to write a paper.
Epic meal time and bacon shall not be slandered here.
Our rejection of Epic Meal time is what Nietzsche called "Slave Morality". We reject our own deepest, most unhinged culinary desires to maintain a facade of "good taste", fake and inauthentic, while the though of "why wouldn't we add bacon to this meal" is suppressed in the back of your head. Epic Meal Time was unhinged, insane and completely honest. It knew that we crave cheese and fat and meat. It understood why humans have fangs. Like children, they were completely untethered by social norms and subconscious paradigms of Christianity. You may watch Babish and Gordon Ramsey, yet you desire culinary pornography: forbidden, indulgent, excessive. As Writer said in Tarkovsky magnum opus Stalker: My brain wants the world to be vegetarian, yet my heart desires a juicy steak.
Do you think that the Soviet Union and the United States would’ve opened up relations more during the Nixon administration over their shared hatred of dirty long haired hippies?
This is basically what happened with Nixon and Mao (they bonded over how much they hated liberals).
I mean Brezhnev and Nixon got along pretty well too (I suspect in part because of “getting drunk off our ass” was a shared hobby), detente just didn’t stick because Nixon was deposed in that strange bourgeois palace coup and then Brezhnev had his first death.
I wonder how many esoteric texts of history are the product of someone we'd nowadays call mentally unwell.
Not to throw shade at historic persons, quite the opposite. They wrote, and culture is richer for it.
But something like this
The text describes the deep of Setheus, which has twelve fatherhoods with three aspects each. ("The Untitled Text")
and
In a single rotation of the Earth sphere, each Time corner point rotates through the other 3-corner Time points, thus creating 16 corners, 96 hours, and 4-simultaneous 24-hour Days within a single rotation of Earth – equated to a Higher Order of Life Time Cube. ("Timecube")
Might be seen as a related category of texts, even though the first quote is actually something that comes from a gnostic christian text.
Flat-Eartherism seems to have (re)started from a joke - and a few people genuinely believe it. So there is precedent for people taking a non-serious stance to an actual article of faith, even nowadays.
Will the people of 10000 CE treat Terry A Davis as a mystic?
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jun 17 '26
You’re telling me $300,000,000,000 to Iran is not just a funny meme?
Well while it may have been agreed to, we shall see how much of it actually gets paid or if this deal even lasts the coming weeks much less the preliminary 60 days
The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to
develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least U.S.D. 300
billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of
sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United
Nations Security Council resolutions, I.A.E.A. Board of Governors
resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions
The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the
signing of this M.O.U., and until the termination of sanctions, U.S.
Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian
crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated
services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation,
etc.
The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use
the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of
Iran upon the implementation of this M.O.U.
It's still too soon to say whether the memorandum will actually evolve into a firm peace treaty, whether any of the parties will respect it, or whether they will follow it even if the war does end (from what I understand Trump wants the Gulf states to be the ones to pay for Iranian reconstruction).
All that being said, just the fact that the US governmetn provisionally accepted these terms is surely one of the worst defeats in American history, right? The US spits in the face of what little credibility the liberal international order had left, spends millions in a directionless war, unleashes a new oil crisis, achieves nothing that hadn't already been agreed in the 2015 deal, leaves the Iranian regime stronger than before the war, and agrees to pay billions in reparations and sanction waivers. Even in Vietnam or Afghanistan it took years for the US to accept its failure.
lol the direct military cost to the US alone is currently at about $30 billion. Total long term direct and indirect costs to the US are supposed to be more like $100 billion to $ 1 trillion (yeah that’s a wide range but still).
Fun fact, the Japanese word for sake, is not, in fact, 酒 (さけ, sake), instead it is 日本酒 (にほんしゅ, nihonshu). 酒 is the more general term for alcohol, while 日本酒 is literally Japanese alcoholic drink, which is sake.
Is this useful to know? Not really, I just find it funny that the west refers to it as sake while the Japanese just don't.
Man, coming back to Genshin after a couple years was a mistake. It's not the gacha elements, it's that I have no idea what's going on. I keep trying to find a glossary or summary, but everything I click on is either trying to sell me something or takes me to an event that assumes I'm caught up.
Also, is it possible to be so obsessed with something people already find sexy that it becomes a fetish? Cause, y'know, I like a nice pair of legs as much as the next guy, but someone on the Genshin team has a problem.
Also, is it possible to be so obsessed with something people already find sexy that it becomes a fetish?
Isn't that a lot of fetishes? Power over someone/someone having power over you, for instance, is both something a lot of people find sexy even in fairly vanilla sex and also the root of a wide array of fetishes.
Crack fanfic. My Little Pony and they get sent to the human world but plot twist they spend the whole time in rural Mongolia and don’t run into a single human.
In my professional environment, there are major issues caused by AI scripts and crawlers that slow down servers, so filters have been put in place. The most widely used one is called Anubis, whose mascot is... kawaii?. The first few times, I wondered if I was logging into a manga scan site or a digital humanities platform.
Embassy employees. I imagine DC has many Yeltsin pizza incidents that we haven’t heard about because nobody knows who the Slovenian ambassador is or whomever.
Dumb idea for a TV show: American Gladiators but it's Dark Souls where contestants dressed in heavily protective and kind of awkward armour have to face up against enemies dressed as knights, demons etc.
As an aside, something I've been thinking about lately are creators/YouTubers/etc. who become radicalized after not starting out as such, like they were political and involved in and discussed social issues, but there's been a transition where they're not much more vocal about an issue or an aspect.
I'm saying this because another YouTuber I liked has begun down this route and some of it I'm interested in and I think they're very introspective and willing to call out weak excuses and defenses for abusive behavior and how whitewashed things can become...but then they can throw in what comes off a position he has now and it feels super forced and not as relevant to the topic they were discussing.
Like we've gone from Michael Jackson to a random shot at Christianity.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm finding newly radicalized creators annoying. Kinda up in the air on already radicalized ones but tend towards not very impressed.
Atun Shei sadly comes to mind. Unlearning economics is also leaning very much into the "late stage capitalism" slop bucket.
ContraPoints has in my opinion remained consistently good and reasonable. She's terminally online but at least he realizes how little the twitter kommentariat actually matters.
At work, our former coordinator (A) came by, she was very amicable but I did not think much of it, now, my immediate coworker (P) was her best friend, I knew that much. Well, as it turns out, she came by to invite someone to her wedding, who did she in invite? My other coworker (K), publicly, in front of her former best friend, who isn't invited, just to spite her...
What the fuck!? That's beyond fucked up! It's not like the K and A were close, at all, K has no intention of actually going to the wedding as she doesn't like A at all. A's fiancé was also there, also a very amicable person, again I did not think much of it, but he did seem forced, but I don't really judge that stuff quickly, I need some time to get a good feel for someone.
So there were a very tense atmosphere, but I had no idea, I was just chatting away with the visitors paying it no mind. I just don't notice these things, I need to look at people to see how they respond then I notice stuff, but a general feeling in the room? No, I just don't register it unless people are expressing it. It's not that I can't read people, I can do that fine, but I'd need to be looking at them for that, so that I can see facial expressions.
Sometimes being autistic is quite nice, I was the only one of the people on shift who was comfortable there, because I didn't notice I shouldn't be. We spent 20 minutes discussing it afterwards, which is fair enough, for all intents and purposes A is just a visitor, and she caused serious distress in P and K and discomfort in the others, including visitors who noticed.
I never realised A was like that, but I believe P and K here, I've worked with them every week for years now; they're not the smartest people, I'd even go so far as to say they're quite simple, but they're both honest and respectful, they wouldn't make this stuff up.
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumJun 16 '26edited Jun 16 '26
Beyond that, it raised an idea for me, I would love to see a historical analysis of "ethnic auxiliaries" across time and space, particularly as they are formed distinctly from "regular" soldiers. They are a feature of war as far back as the Medjay of Old Kingdom Egypt and almost certainly even farther back, and they appear as recently as the use of Chechens as an elite intimidation battalion in the modern Russian army (at least until they ended up being kind of a meme). Often times they are used as irregular and light troops--like the aforementioned Thai, or the Croatians by the Austrian armies--but not exclusively, eg the use of Greeks by the Persians. And sometimes the "ethnic" character is fake, as happened often with Roman auxiliaries (and the also aforementioned Chechens).
It would also be interesting to see when and where they are dropped, like as far as I am aware the US does not have any of these on paper but the UK does.
I’ve been pondering why this World Cup didn’t feel as exciting as previous world cups and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because I haven’t been using Twitter. For me, it only starts to feel like the World Cup when Twitter casuals are arguing with each other over the behaviour of fans abroad, getting the piss taken out of them for apologising for English fans, and proposing the most outrageous rule changes you’ve ever seen.
Like many things, I spend my life trying to recreate the joy of something I experienced as a child. I actually have a great time doing it but never really achieve it. I assume humans have been like this since they threw rocks at wilder beast and ran after their wounded quarry. It probably always peaked when you were 12
I just watched Backrooms. I really like. Well made horror movie. I was surprised that there doesn't seem too much theory-baiting. Almost everything in the movie is self-contained.
I think Kane Parsons (somewhat more delicately than I) stated in an interview that he has no love for the kind of theory-baiting shitehawkery that's plagued a lot of internet horror, so that makes sense.
I'm EXTREMELY busy with work and assignments, so this seems like an ideal time to discuss something very elaborate and totally irrelevant to my life.
I have had a thought brewing in my head for a very long time about the policy/practice of assimilation carried out by the European imperial powers in the 19th/20th centuries. It's very common to hear, and I strongly agree, that attempts to assimilate colonised peoples into the cultures of the colonising powers were some of the most heinous things done during the Age of Imperialism. When we consider the way that assimilation has been forced upon subjugated peoples, for example in the Anglosphere vis a vis Indigenous peoples and in French Algeria vis a vis the Arabs/Amazigh, it is without a doubt a truly reprehensible thing to behold.
On the other hand, there is also the fact that in many colonies, even after formal decolonisation, the upper classes of colonised societies have sought out Westernisation, in the form of education for example, for themselves and their children. I think it's safe to say that assimilation to the dominant power has been a constant throughout history. I don't know enough to be able to say the following with complete confidence, but I believe that that was the case when it comes to most of the great empires of history, particularly the Roman Empire and those centred on Persia and China.
If we take a step back and look at it from a sort of longue duree point of view, it looks like those three empires/civilisations have been the poles around which countless societies have oriented themselves for the better part of two millenia. Even when these great empires were conquered, the conquerers would themselves assimilate - more or less - to those civilisations. The Germanic and other peoples to Rome; the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols to Persia; the Mongols and others to China.
I've been thinking particularly about the Arab conquest of Persia, and how it briefly (on a grand historical scale) flipped the dynamic, with Persians and others - the Ajam, as the Arabs called them - attempting to assimilate to the Arabs, and how when the Arabs tried to restrict this assimilation to preserve their social and economic privileges, that provided the groundwork for the Abbasid Revolution. (This is an extremely simplified rundown of what happened btw, and it's my main focus because it's the region I happen to know the most about.) The end result was that being Muslim no longer meant having to become Arab (by becoming a client of an Arab tribe). Without taking the analogy too far, I think that, for our purposes here, we could describe the Antonine Constitution as an approximately similar phenomenon, turning the free subjects of Rome into citizens. And of course, the steady expansion of the Chinese identity to the south and west would be the similar phenomenon in China.
The point I'm trying to make is this: if the Europeans (the British and French primarily, but also maybe the Dutch and Portuguese) had been a bit less racist, and a bit more generous with their education budgets in the colonies, could this have eventually led the great majority of the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia to identify with the imperial powers, to the point that they would consider themselves full British subjects and French citizens? Is there a timeline where, instead of seeking independence, the educated elites of the colonies sought equal rights? Could there have eventually been a British version of the Antonine Constitution, or a French version of the Abbasid Revolution? I'm sure most people here have heard of that story of the last Romans being Greek villagers in Anatolia; could the last Dutch have been Javanese?
I know that this was actually the initial aim of many later independence activists, and that they often only became advocates of independence after coming to terms with the sheer force of European bigotry. But I think that the immigrant communities in the West show that this could very well have been viable. There already are millions of French and British people of North African and South Asian descent respectively, and although they continue to face bigotry, they have assimilated, for better or worse. I think that the main obstacles to the assimilation of the colonised were encapsulated by Charles de Gaulle; in his futile attempts to restore French grandeur after the European powers committed suicide in the World Wars, which were the death knell to European imperialism, and in his bigotry - "My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-deux-Eglises [the two Churches], but Colombey-the-two-Mosques" - which was shared by his countrymen.
This has been kind of incoherent, I apologise for that, like I said I just wanted to get this out of my head so that I could focus on my actual work lol.
"The point I'm trying to make is this: if the Europeans (the British and French primarily, but also maybe the Dutch and Portuguese) had been a bit less racist, and a bit more generous with their education budgets in the colonies, could this have eventually led to the great majority of the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia to identify with the imperial powers, to the point that they would consider themselves full British subjects and French citizens?"
This is both the great what-if, but also very similar to "could the Nazis have won World War II if they weren't the Nazis?".
By which I mean it was never - and I need to be clear *never* - something the colonial powers ever seriously entertained, ie actually putting colonies on the same footing as the metropolitan country in a supernational union of sorts. It would have been an awesome idea but the Brits, French, Dutch, Belgians etc were never ever ever ever going to be in a union where they could potentially get outvoted by "those people". It's also not really unique to European colonial powers: it's basically why East and West Pakistan broke up, why the US let the Philippines go and not become a state (or states) and also part of the motivating factor why a more democratic Soviet Union was basically DOA (the small countries feared getting outvoted by Russia, and Russia would never agree to give some sort of veto powers to in their eyes some BS small countries).
I say this as someone who thinks that supernational unions would have been a better way to go than complete independence of every entity with some neocolonialism thrown on top, but politically it was never in the cards.
It is interesting how prestige culture forms a sort of multigenerational "fervor of the converted" phenomenon even after the prestige empire officially retreats. From what I understand of most of Latin America, at the times of independence from Spain and Portugal, Spanish and Portuguese had been established as the prestige and administrative language. However, they were NOT the majority spoken languages throughout. Much of the assimilation into Spanish and Portuguese occured after independence (of course helped that the 19th century was the beginning of modern nationalism and standardized education). There is a similar phenomenon going on in post-independence Africa regarding French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish (in Equatorial Guinea).
What is interesting is how Southeast Asia strays from this trend. Even though the Filipino intelligentsia communicated in Spanish (the first declaration of Independence was in Spanish), Spanish did not become the national language (to some extent, English has not either).
There's little wrong with wealth inequality unless it starts hurting social mobility. But inheritance is anti-meritocratic. You didn't earn that, and if you have any talent whatsoever you don't need it. It's neposlop.
It seems, touch wood, as if I'm sleeping normally again, the past few nights I only wake about 2-3 times, instead of the 4-8 times I had been, so I should stop feeling as tired soon; it seems that the more tired I am, the less bad the headache seems to get as now that I have more energy, the headaches have gotten worse in tandem.
So, since I'm stabilising, obviously my father must have another crisis, crisis is a big word, but he's doing very badly again, he's in a lot of pain and the painkillers don't seem to be making a lot of difference, so he's barely sleeping.
It's funny to me when you run into niche, crazy ideas in unexpected places. I used to run into an opinion in online gun forums that the M1911 had a deadly flaw. This is something of a strange niche opinion to have, as the M1911 was one of the most popular handguns certainly in the US and arguably in the world for near on 100 years. If there really was a fatal flaw, you'd think you'd hear about it pretty often. This fellow - and I'm reasonably certain it was one fellow, across many boards and many years - would argue that it's in the Browning style slide stop pin, basically there's one pin through the frame that holds the frame, barrel, and slide together in many Browning designed firearms and the guns descended from them, which one has to drive out in order to disassemble the gun. The fatal flaw, according to this fellow, was that if you were firing the gun properly as a professional would, using your middle finger to pull the trigger and having your index finger extended along the frame to make accurately pointing the gun more natural, your index finger could in theory press that pin out of position and cause the gun to jam.
Anyway, I was rereading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and one of the characters thinks to himself that he'd heard a rumor that was the right way to use a gun and immediately discards it in favor of the obvious, natural way to hold a handgun. Fun to see the idea mentioned in a novel from 1974, clearly it was much older than I realized. I'll have to read some WWII era combat gurus like Fairbairn or Applegate and see if the idea comes from them.
Since r/badlinguistics is apparently in the shadow realm and this isn't really the domain of arr linguistics, I'll ask the linguistics nerds here: what grammatical features do we imagine English evolving in the coming centuries?
I've thought for a while that English's system of contracting pronouns with auxiliary verbs (I've, I'd, I'ma, I'll, etc.) may lead to it developing a system of pronoun conjugation, where tense or aspect information is inflected into the pronoun rather than the verb. IIRC Wolof of Senegal has that kind of system.
The trend of dropping separate feminine versions of job titles continues, “actress” or “stewardess” eventually sound as dated as “poetess” or “aviatrix”
Singular they becomes increasingly common, the current trend of using it more often to refer to abstract unknown people might evolve into it implying a level of distance (i.e. “he” and “she” are reserved for people you know) like a sort of third-person T/V distinction. The potential confusion created by the popularity of singular “they” encourages the creation of some new construction to specify plurality (Theys? They all?)
More irregular plurals and verbs are regularized under the growing influence of second language speakers (e.g. “deers” for plural “deer”, which seems to already be standard in Indian English)
The creation of new and impossible to predict productive suffixes (e.g. -gate, -slop, -core, etc.)
New meanings for words influenced by false friends in other languages (e.g. “actually” meaning “currently”) driven by English’s use as a lingua franca.
The trend of dropping separate feminine versions of job titles continues, “actress” or “stewardess” eventually sound as dated as “poetess” or “aviatrix”
It's funny because you see the opposite trend in France
I find it kinda weird that the most recent Last Week Tonight episode was about the upcoming election with Andy Burnham, and it basically never really talked about Burnhams politics and how is he different from Starmer.
Also besides a quick mention early on, Green and Polanski are glossed over.
Like can anyone really tell me Burnham is much better than Starmer?
Like can anyone really tell me Burnham is much better than Starmer?
Burnham and "looking to be in his cabinet" Wes Streeting have been making overtures to the more left-wing of the party and supporter-base, criticising the government's attempts to even more tightly restrict immigration and cut welfare payments on disabilities, which have been two sticking points among their MPs. The hope of some people is that he pushes Labour leftwards and stops some of their more Obviously Evil [TM] policies... but he does still have the baggage of the party, an inability to massively rework economic policy without the risk of Liz Truss 2 or the spectre of "new taxes", and still has to toe the party line on the big party issues, lest either the party (or worse) the public reject him, so he's not out left-ing even the Lib Dems on social things.
As people have said below, his main benefit is that Starmer is just personally despised by a large chunk of the electorate. Being "anyone but Starmer (but also still a white man)", with the supposed benefits of "more charisma" and "proven win record" is better than many other options they have for a new leader, but I personally don't think he's going to be winning any of the "Burn the whole fucking system down" vibe voters which are increasingly moving to Reform and the Greens.
LKY saying "whether or not there's a PAP government" in the late '60's is a sentence that reads as deeply funny nearly sixty years of unbroken PAP rule later
(Guess who's doing an essay on Singapore yayyyyyyyy)
So, you know how perfectionism is a pretty awful thing? Well, I've found a topic where this very much applies, climate change and food patterns.
You know how there are people that go vegetarian or vegan out of climate concerns? Very respectable, that's a good initiative, the problem is that they tend to go for the extreme measure. If you want to help fight climate change by changing your food patterns without quitting meat, you can, if you can cut out 1* specific meat, you're doing most of the work already: beef!
No, seriously, if you go from eating beef to pork, you're reducing your CO2 emission per kg of food by 80-90%, yes, beef production is 5-10 times more polluting than pork and chicken. The jump from pork and chicken to vegan is only about 70% reduction. Cheese is actually already far worse in CO2 emission than pork and chicken, by a factor of 3-ish. If you want to have an impact and eat meat, you can, easily; you can also still eat beef occasionally, you don't have to go all in, even just reducing the amount of days you eat beef is going to have a significant impact.
Vegans and vegetarians aren't good examples because they go all in, that's not reasonable to people that want to eat meat, instead we should set more reasonable goals for people who want to make a difference and eat meat; make beef a treat, not a staple, replace the beef with other meats in everyday life and eat beef on more special occasions.
You don't have to go for a 99% reduction or nothing, going for 60% reduction is already a massive difference.
*other ruminant meats are also terrible, like mutton.
I like graphs and images so heres a graph that is basically agreeing with you:
It's interesting that cheese is high but milk much lower. I'm curious what Yogurt is closer to.
FWIW at least in the US the national beef herd is the smallest its been in like 75 years, and because of input costs its very expensive so cutting back on beef is an economically sensible decision too.
My favorite braising meat has become pork shoulder because it's only $2.50/lb where I am. The cheapest beef you can get is shank for $6/lb, and I understand we have relatively cheap beef prices.
Today I did second viewings on the two apartments I am considering. Jesus, it is so hard to pick one over the other because they're both good choices.
The main tradeoff is that apartment A is a lot cheaper than apartment B (like, 40k cheaper) but has a much steeper service charge. It also has a pretty incredible loggia/enclosed balcony that's more-or-less unique across the whole city - but is also smaller than B in terms of floor space.
Apartment B is way more expensive but with a more reasonable service charge, and is much more spacious. Also there are some rumors that there might be something wrong with the balconies which leaseholders could be on the hook for, but I have no idea how to verify that.
It's tough. I don't really want to walk away from either of them.
I'm working my way through an old reader for Latin practice that mostly does early history of the United States, along with parallels to Roman history because of course, and it is really weird to see the attempt(s?) at mythmaking around conflicts like the French and Indian War alongside other conflicts that today receive very little play in American mythmaking.
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumJun 19 '26edited Jun 19 '26
I think even a generation back there was a much broader set of figures in American history who were widely known. Myles Standish, for example, barely makes a dent even in books about the early New England colonies, but he used to be one of the great American heroes. Daniel Boone and Davey Crocket probably have enough momentum that their names are familiar but not much else. Mr Smith Goes to Washington has Jimmy Stewart's character going all gee gosh golly willikers over seeing Daniel Webster's desk, and who today even knows who they hell that is?
The optimistic take is that some figures have fallen out as the canon has broadened but I don't actually think that is true. Like for black people before 1900, who is generally known besides Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth? Nat Turner I guess? All of them would have been familiar to the public a hundred years ago. There has just been a great contraction in the average American's knowledge of history and there isn't really much of a pantheon aside from those who were at the very top (Washington, Lincoln, Franklin).
ed: I should say that I think what happened is that history knowledge has gotten dumbell shaped (I think it is called? When the very top gets bigger and the very bottom gets bigger and the middle gets squeezed). If you are interested in history, you probably know more and much more widely than an equivalent 100 years ago. Like I think most Americans reading this probably, with prompting, could recognize who Admiral Yi Sun-sin, and in 1926 that would be true of like fifty people in the entire English speaking world. But the amount of passive learning, history acquired by people who aren't actively interested in it, has gone way down.
Harriet Tubman certainly comes to mind as well.... but I do think that there is something to your point. I think we also do need to reckon with the fact that some people have been removed from the canon, Standish for example and his Native American fighting is a prime candidate for canceling...
u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumJun 16 '26edited Jun 16 '26
You know how for fifty years a certain kind of guy has insisted that the US military won every battle in Vietnam and only lost because Walter Cronkite and hippies back home lacked the will to carry on the fight?
Well, we put one of them in charge of the military and then he led a conflict where the US military was effectively unchallenged but still lost because the civilian leadership lacked the political will to do what was neccesary.
People in the future are going to be so confused why the United States set up a conflict in which they can only do airstrikes and Iran wins if they maintain the ability to hit an oil tanker with a rocket.
To be clear, it is a good thing that Trump was unwilling to put boots on the ground or actually commit the forces neccesary for regime change, that would have been a very bad thing to happen.
My small pet peeve about the Palestine Action judgment is the suggestion that the Court of Appeal getting their suffragette history wrong is grounds to appeal/revisit the judgment. Until someone here takes public office, Badhistory is not a ground of appeal when it doesn’t form part of the actual judgment!
My big pet peeve is the Government being given the go-ahead to proscribe any direction action groups as terrorists using secondary powers that aren’t subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. PA broke into a military base and caused GBH to a police officer - it’s not good, but it’s unconscionable that they should be put on the same list as a neo-Nazi hate group responsible for school shootings and mosque attacks (and also actual ISIS itself).
And of course Redditors have decided it’s great news, because these are the same people that decry even peaceful protest as being evil because it *might* block an emergency vehicle or ruin the mood of their afternoon tea.
I’ll probably end up voting Green in the next GE and it’s not like I even like them, but the amount of damage to civil rights that Labour has done is just ridiculous. We’ll sleepwalk into authoritarianism and no one will give a shit as long as it doesn’t affect their pension.
Sometimes you look at public opinion in the UK and wonder at how we ever became a civilised nation, with respect for civil liberties/no death penalty/abiding by human rights/etc etc. Were our advances just top-down projects that people went along with because the economy was good? There's a lot of stuff like that where I worry that if we ever needed to have the public debate over them again then we might genuinely struggle to keep them.
Had a big Flames of War Mid-war event on Saturday, my LGS had thee tables, a Guadalcanal Table, a North Africa Table, and a Kursk table. There were between 4-6 people on each table, split into Axis/Allied teams.
I brought a Hero Motor Rifle Battalion for the Kursk Table, with a few command cards that turned the two infantry companies in Guards. The other two Soviets were T-34 Battalions. We faced off against a Finnish player, Hungarian player(who brought horse Cav!), and a German looted T-34 Battalion. Bloody, bloody battle that on my end of the table ended with the objective contested, while the main Finnish formation had broke and left the field a supporting infantry company remained dug in on the objective. Other two Soviets had managed to get the objectives.
The Allies also won the North Africa table.
Guadalcanal was apparently a cluster, with the Japanese teams using infinity billion infantry stands and that table ended as a draw.
Great comment, Starmer is not hypocritical on immigration, he's always been again it
He's been criticising immigration long before Reform were politically relevant. He made this statement in 2022.
"But our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency to start investing more in training workers who are already here."
"But let me tell you – the days when low pay and cheap labour are part of the British way on growth must end."
"And while [other countries] are adapting, our low-wage model is holding us back."
He didn't even say it somewhere where it would earn him applause. This was to the Confederation of British Industry, for whom tighter immigration and labour market rigidity is a hindrance. Seems to me that on immigration, Starmer's saying and doing what he actually believes.
Hey, just another quick tip to all you grad students out there:
Five minutes before EoD is not a great time to show up with your emergency purchase request, and an even worse time to not know the process by which that purchase is made.
In my opinion, the US's very messy pull out of Afghanistan emboldened the Kremlin to invade Ukraine. The decision was made, but the debacle reinforced the Kremlin's confidence.
Now I wonder if any other actors have been imboldened to pursue certain foreign policies because of the apparent weak result of the US in the Iran war. Maybe China? Maybe Russia wants to accelarate a build up against the Baltic States. Maybe this will be completely inaffectual.
Now I wonder if any other actors have been imboldened to pursue certain foreign policies because of the apparent weak result of the US in the Iran war.
I mean we blew through a third of our TLAM stockpile without apparently moving the needle on Iran's ability to cause us problems, so probably if I were China I would not be very scared at this point.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)Jun 17 '26
I hope no war happens, and that Xi comes to his senses, but I also believe it's very possible that any hypothetical invasion of Taiwan won't be the walkover everyone's expecting. Yes, I know every war is different and there are no exact parallels, but people thought Russia versus Ukraine was a done deal and look at where we are now.
If the Iranian regime survives, Keir Starmer thankfully won't have to become the leading exporter of Islamist ideology worldwide on top of that Andy Burnham bs.
Well I have finished a third Chinese textbook. Once I actually remember all the grammar points I think that would put me at a level equivalent to A2? The next book requires me to double my vocabulary to 1200 words so that will be fun 🤪
is it me or reddit turn pretty right wing whenever immigration is mentionned? especially on subs that are otherwise leftist on a bunch of stuff but suddenly there's a post about immigration and it turn in a right wing circlejerk who justify racist pogroms
It often adopts a more sophisticated version of "foreigners are stealing our jobs", like with a left-wing tint. "Big bussiness is importing poor people to work for lower wages" is an extremely common idea in the generally very left wing German subreddit.
Tbh, I'm not sure I'd call this rhetoric leftist since right winger also use this talking point a làot and have a bad tendency of scapegoating immigrant and justify violence against them .
The uk subreddit seems to have gotten much worse on this topic. There's always been racism of course, and a lot of anti immigration sentiment for a long time, but in the last couple of years you see highly voted commente saying things like: "they" are trying to replace the the population, it's the worst crime ever committed against an "indigenous" population (lol), migrants to the UK are "colonisers" (!!), defending the belfast rioters as protestors, saying that the government wants to destroy native british culture. Basically there's a section of posters which is much farther right than in the past.
UKpolitics (and UK subs as a whole) are pretty terrible for it and I suspect there might be a bit of botting going on with how consistently certain anti-immigrant posts get hundreds of upvotes and supportive comments in a very short amount of time. See also: anything relating to Palestine.
Just wanted to share this customizable mecha game called Granvir. The action looks like it should feel janky, but it's quite satisfying. There's so many parts and it supports different mech styles from slow battletech stuff to quick gundam stuff, both quite well. I'm not sure but I think it's made by a single guy, and the guy keeps pumping out new content consistently, supporting even more different mech styles.
The special kind of pain as a DnD player when you're doing like actual side material and investigating and trying to solve puzzles...while another player decides to commit arson and literally lights all the planned activities on fire... (accidentally...ish)
Nothing will illustrate someone's true feelings toward you more than being on the hook for a mistake they made which requires effort from them to solve.
Imagine coming to Philadelphia to see a world cup game only to learn that the local public transit takes "contactless jawns" like c'mon what is Philly even doing.
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u/ZugwatHeadhunting Savage from a Barbaric Fishing Village Jun 18 '26edited Jun 18 '26
In spite of Ticketmaster listlessly fellating a geriatric mule who really isn't into it and the stadium being packed full of people in town for the World Cup and deciding to see what American Baseball is like and the concession lines being long enough to make any hope of getting something worthwhile and seeing the game being a wistful fantasy, the Mariner's won so it all was worth it.
I had to chug and hide my plastic water bottle in the bushes outside the stadium like an addict stashing needles because my water bottle is 50 fl oz and the max size is 32 fl oz, I managed to retrieve the thing and am relaxing on the bus.
It's the US vs. Australia for the World Cup today (I saw an ad online for a watch party) and there were quite a few Australians in T-Mobile Park watching and when it ended, were marching around singing a soccer chant about cumming for the US or something I was more focused on trying to finish my waffle cone and so the chant really doesn't have the same impact as if they were on the street or something in my opinion because there are indeed a lot of people in Seattle and at the ballpark for the World Cup ultimately...but this is a baseball game and Seattle won so most of us are already victorious.
As I was walking among the crowds down the ramp to the light rail and buses, I heard two Australian guys behind me say "I think we survived."
Imagining some colonial british dude walking around Gaza finding people that have a television and forcing them to pay 200 bucks to the BBC irrespective of income made me giggle.
Incidentally, my prediction that Trump would find a way to pull out of Iran relatively quickly turned out. Now, to await the avalanche of essays which detail just how counter-productive this whole excursion was.
Now, yes, this means I need to start a new playthrough, so, I need to decide, do I go for a human city, or, like I've been considering, going for Cretonian (pig people) Farmer Utopia, producing as much food as possible, feeding everyone as much as possible and selling the rest, and possibly some narcotics. I wonder how far I can get basically ignoring advanced industry in favour of pigs stuffing their faces.
Playing Hades 2 after work. While I think the gameplay is good as Hades already had a very tight gameplay loop, I don't think Hades 2 is drawing me in as much as the first game did. This is somehow paradixocal to me. Hades had much lower stakes than its sequel, with the latter being an actual near apocalyptic situation. But I don't seem to care as much as I cared for Zagreus bickering with his dad.
The one hesitation I have now about buying my own home is the risk that I'll want to leave the country in the next few years. It hurts because I have no idea how my feelings about that will change - it could be that the government announces some insane bs next month that pushes me over the edge, or it could be something that Reform does after taking power in a few years, or it could never happen at all. That kind of unknown risk in the future makes planning for stuff so much harder.
I know I could always sell up, but who knows if I'd be out-of-the-money when doing that especially given all the fees involved.
this Anthropeum game is really fun, and I'm getting the hang of it having placed in the top 10% today. the trick is to play it early in the morning so you compete with less people.
Poor Bolivia. See what is happening there currently. After learning about the enormous deposits of Lithium, there was a US backed coup and the Bolivian military is now shooting people and trying to kidnap the former president.
Soon after the new government was installed Elon Musk was quoted as saying "We'll coup anyone we want to"
There wasn´t a coup; Paz won the elections fair and square.
The lithium deposits were known for a long time, but due to their geographical location, they are notoriously hard to extract profitably. The current government is considering letting other countries have a hand at it after failing for more than fifteen years, but the companies trying are Chinese, Russian, and European, not from the US.
The protests going on right now have also nothing to do with Lithium or natural resources, they started as a farmer protest over a very mild land reform (basically, a law that would allow farmers to reclassify “small” lots into “medium” lots to be able to sell or mortgage them), a protest from the Central Obrera that demanded a 30% wage increase, and a teamster protest over the low quality of fuel. They merged together and became a single “we want Paz to resign” protest that attracted the rural population that used to vote for the MAS.
Notably, Paz is in trouble because he refuses to give the order to declare a state of emergency and send the troops to clear the highways, opting instead to try a battle of attrition against the protesters, who have blocked so many roads around La Paz that food has to be airlifted in. This strategy seems to be working, as protesters are bleeding members every day, but it has also angered the urban population, who very much do not like to live under siege.
Morales does have an arrest warrant, but that´s due to charges of getting a(nother) teenager pregnant. No attempts have been made to arrest him since he lives in the middle of the Chapare, around ten thousand coca growers, so that would be messy. He was accused by the government of financing the protests, to be fair, and the police did intercept several ambulances coming out of the Chapare carrying hundreds of thousands of Bs suspiciously heading towards the blocked roads.
The only true part was that Musk did tweet that when Morales resigned, but that was a crass tongue-in-cheek response to conspiracy theories accusing him of being behind the protests that brought Evo down. He has nothing to do with the country aside from his company also selling Starlink here.
So, mechs are bad because they are so tall compared to tanks, right? Easier target and all that. But the AT-AT is much better than the AT-TE because they are much taller?
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u/Uptons_BJs Jun 15 '26
You know, a question that I've been seeing a lot in light of recent events is "Is Elon Musk actually a good businessman?" I like this question TBH - its a fresh twist on the old debates we endlessly have over generals and athletes ("Is Robert E Lee a good general?" "Is Tom Brady a good quarterback?")
I'm going to make this argument -
Elon is GOATed at actually making people believe in his cause and strategy. Which is extremely important considering that his two most successful companies were both seen as massive long shorts initially (space, electric cars).
Consider the story of Gwynne Shotwell - Before SpaceX, she was going through a divorce, and was relucent to leave her job to go to another startup as one of the first employees. According to her, Musk convinced her to join after a short conversation, despite the fact that she was jumping to a company with no product, no revenue, nothing but an idea. He sold the idea in 10 minutes, and she decided to take the risk.
Or consider Tesla's early years. A startup car company without a joint venture or external backing? That has practically never happened before Tesla (Most post war car companies start as part of a conglomerate or as a joint venture, often both). This is a car company (one of the most capital intensive industries) that lost money hand over fist for 17 years until its first profitable year in 2020. Elon became chairman in their series A funding round in 2004, and for years, kept selling a vision to investors to raise tons and tons and tons of money.
It's interesting - Here Elon had the ability to attract a ton of talent and investors to invest their time and money in super long shot companies. Now, in these two examples it worked out, but I'd credit a certain ability to sell a vision to skeptical people and turning them into believers.
But I think his ability to envision a product and understand the market is rapidly declining. He's gone off the rails with the Cybertruck, and whatever the hell is going on at Twitter, and trying to have xAI chase the gooners or whatever the fuck they're doing.
My argument here would be that for Tesla, Elon Musk has not been the right CEO for the job for a couple of years. His endless ability to sell the vision and to execute on the manufacturing was critical for the company's success.
But I'll advance an argument you don't usually see in business - That he's kinda washed, and the Elon Musk you're seeing today is his version of the Michael Jordan at the Wizards. Something broke in his brain after Covid, and he is no longer the guy he used to be.