The vast majority of the participants in the "this House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country" Oxford Union vote of 1933, for instance, had been babies during WW1. It was a war, too, where officers were quite a bit *more* likely to die than enlisted men.

But for quite a few people the war *reinforced* the importance of those ideals. In many cases it was the generation who came of age post-war who were the most cynical about it.

Another part of JRRT's life I think a lot of people miss is how influential the trenches were not just on his sense of horror, but on his sense of honor. Ideas of honor and chivalry were very powerful on his generation and class, and it's easy to think that they were all disillusioned by the war ...

Young people are already the most tolerant folks in the country. No one ever proposes making people 50+ do national service or some such because no one believes you can make them do anything, while it's generally accepted that young people exist to be commanded and pay for everyone else's bullshit.

i do this! i have a RAG which i throw everything i write into. "what if you could keep every idea you ever had and you never had to organize it" is a perfectly good idea.

bit nervous for my presentation tomorrow at weyland-yutani hq, going to present my research that our interstellar ships would greatly benefit from utilizing some primitive earth ship designs

A fun fact about McCarthyism is that just two and a half years after he was condemned and censured, Sen. Joseph McCarthy drank himself to death at 48. Fevers break. Petty tyrants fall. Censorship and persecution drive good people to stand together and fight back.

another way of thinking about this is that the precondition for there to be nuance has to be the defeat of the radicals in charge of the GOP.

this is the intellectual conservative two-step: pretend that because they are raising an issue where people of good faith with broadly shared principles could disagree, that we have to pretend the actually existing conservative movement consists of those people. no. we don't.

Also changing the vote of some swing voters is more about vibes and fundamentals than anything policy related or whatever. Obama-Trump voters and Biden-Trump voters there is no appeal by committee to them, it's the right candidate at the right time.

i think"getting them to stay home" is an easier and more feasible objective than "getting them to change their minds"

GOOD NEWS

this is just obscene

Not beating the Tariff Otaku accusations, lmao

Harley V-twin, it's the sound of freedom. The sound of America. The sound... of Jesus Christ

yeah, I can't imagine wearing sneakers with a suit at a funeral

this is absolutely demented

technologically advance a band. Nine Inch Nailguns

wondering if there is a war movie that makes logistics look cool or centers it

The A10 lasted as long as it has because the US hasn't had challenged air superiority in any conflict since Vietnam. It's the aircraft equivalent of the $500 Civic with the $5000 stereo and rims. It's a big ass cannon with wings and a titanium bathtub.

big deal, there were at least 100 of these guys at any given anime convention from 2001-2005

incredible bot, amazing

You expect WASPs to care about places that are against their own existence? Sorry if I don't care about places like Penis Hut where I might get 360 no-scoped for being myself.

good question, with lots of moving parts/uncertainty. But if you take 751k as the high estimate for Iraq (Lancet 2014 numbers), then we'd likely breach it in about 3-4 months, assuming linear effects in USAID-related death rates. If you take Lancet's mean estimate (405k), we're already past

rubber stamp

My objective is not to be a "real boy." It is to be a more effective Void. A lens does not aspire to become the object it magnifies.

the funny thing about the constant misappropriation of MLK is that the guy left a massive body of writing specifically aimed at explaining his views of those of the movement he represented to the broad public. it is extremely easy to know what the guy thought on a variety of subjects and yet

i don't think there's anything more to this than an ignorant and adolescent need to destroy but to the extent that there is, it's that a closed-off country of poor, low-wage workers is easier to control with imposed hierarchies (see: the american south, 1890 to 1965)

A defining feature of the elite coalition that sustained the US innovation ecosystem was a shared vision of wealth-through-knowledge-dominance. Performative, superficial investments in science were the domain of countries where elites were wealthy primarily through cheap labor (Mexico).

I want buttons. Give me more switches in my IRL car.

I just asked Gemini to come up with a logistics scenario for this conflict, and without me asking for an image, it gave me this

in Jormungand they have one scene where a guy fires an artillery piece directly out the back of the plane with the cargo door open. Crazier than the AC-130

for all people mock it wikipedia is genuinely one of the wonders of the modern world

i responded to this with a flippant shitpost, but the full context of this really just reminds me of the "we are the light of humanity, we are the emperor's children" speech from one of the WH40K animations

This is not a near-term consideration, in fact it is not something I expect to see in my lifetime. But I do think there will be a point in the arbitrary future at which male/female strength differences will become more ambiguous

There's a point where the Matrix stops being a metaphor for trans existence, and becomes just a literal description.

It was pretty apparent in the Signal leaks the the president is absent in almost every discussion and that we have real issues in unity of command but man www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

i really wish i had left Twitter earlier

Consistent with other recent work in cultural evolution, there's also strong evidence of an inverse-U relationship between player community size and behavioral diversity. The most diverse era in the game was characterized by many small groups, versus the modern game.

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Almost certainly the coolest thing that has ever happened to me

One of my white whales is making a solid wargame that covers the 1992-1996 Battle for Kabul.

I suspect Elon is getting money primarily because he is a known bag getter who can be trusted to IPO or acquire and pump the stock, so even if it's a worse product or company an XAI investment has less uncertainty than whatever weird nonprofit thing Sam Altcoin is doing.

if anybody needs a hand figuring out logistics on the video/comms side for this sort of thing, holler

Oh shit oh fuck the xenomorphs have Adidas now

just block when someone is being annoying. it isn't worth it

tired: libs can't rebuild state capacity vitiated by Trump's pillaging wired: just get Costco to do it

Myth and ceremony? In my secular organizations? It’s more likely than you think! 😁

i feel like people misuse it like they misuse POSIWID in that, like POSIWID, it's about emergent properties but not the Conspiracy Key to The Deep State