• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • 100%. I know that the jury is out, academically speaking, on the actual effectiveness of the bombs, but it makes intuitive sense to me that they at least contributed to the Japanese decision to surrender unconditionally.

    In fact, up until the bombs were dropped, Japan was working with the Soviet Union to act as mediators in peace talks, so Japan could get a better deal. Of course, while the USSR entertained the diplomatic overtures from Japan, they were actually planning on declaring war, as they had promised at Yalta. But, I think it still contributes to my point that a civilian population that has been targeted by a besieging force must believe their only options are unconditional surrender or utter destruction (which, incidentally, is exactly the verbiage the US presented Japan in the Potsdam Declaration 10 days before the first bomb was dropped). If there is a plausible third option available (or believed to be available), then that’s what will be pursued.


  • No, it was not my intention to suggest that. I’m sure the Germans threw everything they could afford into the Battle of Britain.

    Though, I am most definitely not an expert in the field and should be treated as I am, a dude on the internet lol.

    However, even Germany in early WW2 (arguably at the height of their power) was unable to throw enough explosives into London to make that switch flip in the civilian population from “we shall fight them on the beaches” to “okay, in light of recent events, we are reevaluating our ‘Never Surrender’ policy…”.

    In fact, I might even suggest that the scale of bombing necessary to make it a viable tactic was impossible at that time, as the nuclear bomb hadn’t yet been invented. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can fact check this assertion, but I think the only time intentionally targeting civilians has successfully cowed a belligerent was when the US nuked Japan. And even then, it took two.


  • Also, to add to the other poster’s point, in a medieval siege, the defenders have every reason to believe the attackers will happily let every man, woman, and child behind the walls die gruesome deaths to starvatiom or disease. That’s why, when it came down to the wire, cities would submit.

    In modern times, cultivating a believable military posture of, “Surrender, or we will personally execute every last motherfucking one of you” is politically dicey. Look at the news stories coming out of Gaza about supplies running low thanks to Israeli interference. Right, wrong , or indifferent, the international community (as well as your domestic community, if those that disagree with these sorts of tactics are allowed to make their voices heard) tends to look down their noses at targeting noncombatants populations. So, due to these complications (which were largely absent or less impactful from warfare in the time of Genghis Khan) wholesale slaughter of civilian life isn’t really openly used. In fact, guidelines like “proportionality” are invented which dictate the level of response you can give certain provocations and what not.

    So, if you’re a modern day commander being tasked with taking an urban center, the closest way to approximate a medieval siege would be to absolutely carpet bomb everything. Make it known that you will happily let every single person in Moscow die, if not send them to the afterlife yourself. While you’re bombing the suburbs, you’ll also need to encirce the whole city to prevent supplies from being delivered, since you can’t guarantee every bomb will hit it’s target and need starvation to provide additional assurance to the population that, if they maintain their current course, they are doomed.

    Unfortunately, the world isn’t going to allow that, and you know it, so you commit to the level of bombing deemed acceptable by the world at large. At best, you wind up in a situation like London during the Blitz. Your bombing runs are effective, in that they disrupt the daily life of citizenry, and cause some infrastructure damage and loss of life. However, you’re never going to be allowed to scale up to the point where your victims feel they have no way out but to submit. There’s enough plausible deniability that, even when a bomb hits close to home (literally or figuratively), the victim is more pissed at the bomber than their government.



  • Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn’t quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let’s Play on YouTube that discusses the game’s development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I’d like Let’s Plays to be. Worth checking out if you’ve the time.


  • Right there with you buddy. I get the antipathy with which remakes are treated nowadays, but this isn’t yet another rehash of Spiderman or Batman. It’s been 70 years since the og film. A sizable chunk of the population will never watch it simply because of its age, either due to their bias against “old” movies or due to plain ignorance. I might even say most people fall into that camp.

    Plus, it’s not like there’s all that much that is sacrosanct about the original picture. In cultural memory, the og film is basically just the title, the suit design, and maybe the image of the creature holding a lady in his arms. As long as the remake hits those beats, it basically has free reign to go anywhere else in terms of story. Furthermore, new tech is going to allow for different approaches to filming, especially the underwater sequences, that should serve to make the movie actually frightening to a modern audience. The OG is an impressive technical achievement (I’m not sure how common underwater photography was at the time, but I can’t imagine it was a widespread practice), but I would not classify it as scary.

    Idk, I just think this is an example of a “flawed” film getting a second chance with the benefit of modern filmmaking techniques, or the exact sort of project people always cite as an appropriate use of the remake format (as opposed to someone remaking a movie which holds up).

    I’m not holding my breath that this announcement will go anywhere, it seems like they e been trying to get a remake off the ground since the 80s, but while everything is speculative, I’d rather focus on the opportunities a remake offers than fixate on the myriad ways they could fuck it up.



  • I mean, the article states that the victim did suffer some symptoms, so I wouldn’t say they were totally unaffected. If the article is accurate, would it be possible that she was inhaling vapor from the spill? The victim is quoted as saying she had to be at that board for 5 hours, and the Wikipedia article indicates that the primary danger of elemental mercury is inhalation of vapor (it claims 80% absorption rate via respiration, as opposed to the 1% via direct contact). Unfortunately, I am pretty ignorant of chemistry, so I’ve no idea if my speculation is plausible. How much room temp mercury would need to be sitting in front of you before you felt the effects of the vapor. Or even if you would at all, since the CDC website says the vapor is more dense than air.

    Additionally, I noticed that one of the symptoms of mercury inhalation is cognitive impairment. Obviously this is more speculation, but perhaps the intent was not to kill, but rather to sabotage the victim’s play? After all, it seems like the perpetrator and the victim were rivals. Could be a Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding situation, just more classically Russian what with the use of poison rather than brute force.


  • For what it’s worth, having a lower retirement grade shouldn’t actually affect his pension at all, at least in so far as I understand it.

    Walz joined up in 1981, which was the year after the “High-36” retirement system was adopted. Under that system, the army looks at your career and plucks out the 36 months where you earned the most money. In the vast majority of cases, these are the final 3 years of your career. These are averaged out, and then multiplied by a percentage (2.5% per year of service, e.g. 20 years of service = 50%) to determine your monthly payment.

    All of which is to say that his pension calculations do take into account the time he was an E9, even if his paperwork and other privileges rflect the lower pay grade.

    Caveat: it’s been several years since I retired, and it’s a very complex process. I could be off base as it applies to Walz’s case specifically, but what I’ve described is generally true.




  • Keep up the good work!

    I overheard a conversation between two old guys at the Omaha VA discussing one of their relatives coming out as nonbinary. The sentiment was, in essence, “well, are they gay or what? Idk what these damn kids are doing anymore…” After some internal debate, I piped up and explained the sexuality and gender are two separate topics. To these guys’ credit, they seemed to take it in stride, if a little befuddled by it all. Considering the other options and prevailing opinions of many of the patients around here, I’ll take a couple of Vietnam vets’ bewildered acceptance of non-cisgendered people over ignorant hate seven days a week, and twice on Sunday.


  • So, with the ongoing enshittification of gestures broadly at everything I finally bit the bullet to purchase a 4k bluray player. I intend on resuming my collection of physical media. In service of that, and also because I wanted to put my new toy through its paces, I went to Criterions website and selected all the titles that I might like to have some day. Nearly $5000 of cart additions later, I realized that perhaps my eyes are a touch bigger than my pocketbook. However, I just want to take a moment to be thankful that Criterion exists and has 5 grand worth of movies that I would happily own if money were no object. Their efforts in the service of film are incredible and the model that so many new, boutique publishing brands have modeled themselves off of. Now, to secure my financial independence so I can afford all the movies I want…





  • I disagree with your assessment that far right and populist descriptors are opposites. Admittedly, there’s a degree of subjectivity in definitions here, but my understanding is that conventional scholarship has coalesced around a definition of Populism that is agnostic of the left/right spectrum.

    For example, this journal article from 2012 defines it as “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the ‘pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people”.

    If you care to read a little more, the authors break down their definition into it’s constituent pieces and provide context, but the important piece is that you can see how populism can come from both the left and the right.

    As examples, we can look at, say, the Occupy Wall Street movement from a while back. Very much spawned from left leaning ideology, but it’s defining feature was casting the “corrupt elite” (in this case, the fabulously wealthy) against the general people (i.e. the 99%). On the other side of the coin we can look at Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. The image he wants to cultivate is that of an outsider, someone not tainted by the corruption of the Washington elite. That resonates with a sunset of the population.

    Both of these movements have radically different goals and politics, but the framework of those arguments follows the same general template.

    I apologize for the US-centric examples, but that’s what I know. As consolation, the article I linked to is specifically a comparative study of European vs Latin American populism.