FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
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User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4d ago
I think it’s mostly funny because it’s kind of what you expected, but not right. Subverted expectations is the foundation of a lot of humor. Like with the Hook Hand meme, if you’re familiar with the urban legend then you expect the ending (she opens the door and sees a hook hanging off the handle) and instead of getting that you get a jumble of nonsense that contains all the elements you expected but in an order that makes them semantically meaningless. That surprise is funny to me.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5d ago
Thanks, though the sad thing is I know I could have done better last year if I had more time: and then I went ahead and did it at the last minute again! This year I’m going to try to write next years entry now, maybe then I’ll learn.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5d ago
I didn’t think I’d make it, but I submitted my entry for the ACX book review contest.
I’m a terrible procrastinator. I have been planning to write my entry since the contest was announced several months ago, and I’ve been intending to enter since the last contest ended, but beyond putting together an outline I didn’t actually start writing until this last Monday, a week before the due date. Still, better last minute than never!
Anybody else enter this year? I don’t have much hope of being a finalist, but I’d like to improve on my performance last year (54th out of 145).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6d ago
Being out of order is what makes it funny. If the punchline was "the gas light gate keep girl boss" then it would be mildly funny, but rotating the word pairs so that they're exactly one off, and all in the same direction, makes it hilarious. Like "man door hand hook car door"
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6d ago
I love it!
I had thought that ADHD just means "you have a harder time focusing and getting work done"
There are some researchers who believe ADHD primarily involves a defect in emotional regulation, working memory, and time projection. Which adds up to having a harder time focusing and getting work done, but the emotional regulation part is doing a lot more than that. If you have ADHD, you may have less capacity to make yourself feel something different than you are currently feeling, or to blunt the edge of a strong emotion. That could explain the strong desire not to do any work.
EDIT: Also, to your main point, I do find it interesting that you have an aversion to taking your Adderal. If I'm off my Dexedrine then I'm miserable. Irritable, unproductive, lethargic...mostly irritable actually, I snap at people a lot more when I'm off my meds, which is usually ever weekend because I don't want to build up a tolerance.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14d ago
Actually, Christian observance in America reached a new high in the postwar era. The height of weekly church attendance in America was in the 1950s.
No atheists in foxholes indeed.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
17d ago
See though, that strikes me as much more probable than the university statement thing. That fits within my understanding of how the world works. American sports has a recent history of doing stupid stuff, and people freak out about criminals being killed by police all the time. When was the last time a statement from a university affected anything?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
17d ago
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
...a university putting out a statement that causes a chain reaction that leads to the President of the United States and a majority of Congress to change their position on providing military aid to Israel?
What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?
I don't see a world where the US decides to stop providing military aid to Israel within the next decade, let alone in time to have an effect on the current conflict. Even if literally all the universities put out statements saying that they should! In my experience a university statement on a hot button political issue has never come close to anything like that kind of impact.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
17d ago
My intuition is that people should not be allowed to turn public spaces into de facto designated areas, only de jure ones. And keeping people out of areas they have a right to be in because you disagree with their politics, or don't like the way they look, is harassment if anything is.
If we're concerned about confrontations then the protests themselves should be discouraged, because that's how confrontations begin.
Yes, obviously (assuming that harassment is a chargeable offence, which I don't think it is).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
17d ago
They're going to pull US military aid out of Israel...by protesting at Columbia?
Even if their protest is successful, how is Columbia University going to pull that off?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
17d ago
So you're saying that refusing to let students enter common areas that they have a right to be in is not harassment, but recording video in a public area (as is your right) is harassment?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
I find your comments intriguing, because I have the opposite reaction you describe. To me a well rendered painting or drawing of a landscape is often more attractive than an actual landscape. Or if not more attractive, more pleasing in a slightly different dimension. Have you ever felt a desire to be inside a picture: not literally, but to be in the place the picture is depicting? That the art is trying to communicate something higher and better than anything we can actually find our our normal existence? That the artist is taking what is beautiful and good about a landscape but crafting it in a way that no real landscape can match up to, throwing out the small bits of ugliness that is inherent in any landscape we can actually see and replacing it with the ideal? Because that's something like 70% of my aesthetic preferences. I want art to be more beautiful than life, more transcendent, more glorious and inspiring.
What do you see attractive about something like Miro painting? To me there's no real attraction at all. It does not show me anywhere I would want to go, any emotion I would want to feel, any state of being I would want to inhabit. I don't find it repulsive, but I don't see the point of it at all. What's the draw for you?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
21d ago
I was wondering why my avatar was suddenly an anemic 12 year old boy! Did not expect to find the explanation for that here at The Motte.
There's definitely a non-binary bent to it. I got three options of faces, one of them is boyish and the other two are feminine. I thought maybe trying a slightly bulkier body style would make me look less like a tween, but while my body bulked my head remained the same size, making me a microcephalic.
I don't think I've ever played a game before where I actively hate seeing my avatar's face.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
So, your claim is that the gas chamber at Dachau was not designed to execute humans, but merely to delouse. As proof of this you cite a source which claims the gas chamber at Dachau was designed to execute humans, but was never finished and so not used. This seems to support the fact you dispute, that this was a 'homicidal gas chamber' designed to execute people. This source makes me believe that perhaps the 7th Army's report was wrong about people being executed in the Dachau gas chamber, but does nothing to make me believe the ludicrous notion that it was designed for delousing. A delousing chamber labeled as a showering facility, with fake shower heads that lead nowhere. You know, to take the lice by surprise so they wouldn't be tipped off.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
I will believe the report of the 7th Army over your no sources cited whatsoever.
My mistake, when I said 'gas chamber' I meant 'homicidal gas chamber'. The camp had a 'gas chamber' but it was never used to kill anyone.
The Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment of the Seventh Army disagrees. Page 33 of the report:
"The internees who were brought to Camp Dachau for the sole purpose of being executed were in the most cases Jews and Russians. They were brought into the compound, lined up near the gas chambers, and were screened in a similar manner as internees who came to Dachau for imprisonment. Then they were marched to a room and told to undress...There were 15 shower faucets suspended from the ceiling from which gas was then released. There was one large chamber, capacity of which was 200, and five smaller gas chambers, capacity of each being 50. It took approximately 10 minutes for the execution. From the gas chamber, the door led to the Krematory to which the bodies were removed by internees who were selected for the job. The dead bodies were then placed in 5 furnaces, two to three bodies at a time."
So we have, on the one side, an SS document (which you haven't produced, though I have been so kind as to produce my source for your to examine) that says that the camp had a gas chamber but that it was never used to kill anyone. On the other hand you have a US report claiming that it was used to kill people, with photographic evidence, and the fact that the gas chamber is still there and can be seen today, and was clearly designed to administer poison gas for the purpose of killing people. Do you have any evidence that the execution device was never used to execute people? Something that would cause me to doubt the fine men in uniform of the 7th Army?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
You cite as evidence an SS document saying no gas chamber was ever built, I cite as evidence a US Army investigative report from 1945 that not only says "yup, there's gas chambers here, we saw them ourselves" but includes photographic evidence. Not based on the testimony of "hundred of Jews" but based on the testimony of American soldiers of the Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, Seventh Army, who were sent to the camp to investigate and report back. They have photos of the crematoria, the gas chamber buildings, and a detailed physical description of the gas chambers themselves.
I don't see how a single SS documents saying that no gas chamber was built at Dachau beats a comprehensive US report, with photographs, saying that there was a gas chamber there.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
Eye witness accounts will be more reliable than human remains in the case of trying to determine whether Carthaginians really sacrificed children, particularly for something that occurred so long ago in the historical record. That doesn't mean that eye witness accounts are the only kind of evidence, or can never be wrong, it's just a recognition of the fact that testimony gives us more specific and more reliable information than trying to interpret 2,000 year old bones in a hole in the desert. When physical evidence matches eye witness testimony it gives that testimony more credibility, but if you dig up Carthage and you can't find pits full of baby bones that means either the eye witness was not reliable, or that no physical evidence survived the passage of time, or evidence survived the passage of time and you haven't found it yet.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
I disagree. While you have to take the potential biases or other points of unreliability into account when dealing with eyewitness testimony, they are still more reliable for a historian than most other forms of evidence. All evidence has to be interpreted properly, whether it's eyewitness testimony or a pile of bones in the desert. Bones, for instance, can tell us many useful things: some of the injuries this human may have undergone, and whether they had a chance to heal or not, carbon dating information on provenance, gender, level of bone health, etc. If the historical question you are trying to answer is "How did Richard III die" then access to his bones may be very helpful indeed. But if the question is "What wars did Richard III wage, and against who, and why?" then written accounts will tell you far more, and far more reliably, then digging up bones will.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
29d ago
The word holocaust was not in use yet at the time he wrote that book.
While Eisenhower did not talk about it specifically in that book, he was aware of gas chambers and crematoria. In 1944 he received a report from Captain Yurka Galitzine on the Natzweiler concentration camp that specifically mentions mass executions (by firearm), experimental gas chambers, and crematoria.
Colonel William Quinn wrote a detailed report on Dachau that Eisenhower received in 1945 that described the gas chambers and crematoria in detail, with photographic evidence. The report also references a contemporaneous account, a diary of an internee who recorded his experiences.
The contemporaneous documented testimony and photographic evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
29d ago
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it.
You would be wrong to doubt it. Over 1.5 million died in the gulags, and over a twenty year period citizens were regularly snatched out of their beds, taken to the basement of the Lubyanka, and shot in the back of the head. At least 700,000 Russians were executed between 1936-1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.
Right now my process is to pick a book that I have already read that excites me in some way: a book I want to talk to people about. Almost always non-fiction, because then you have a lot of information from the book that you can summarize and interpret. It has to be a book I've already read and am very familiar with; the first time I tried entering the contest I picked a book I hadn't read yet that I was very interested in, and I ended up not finishing it by the time the deadline comes. No need to make it harder for yourself! Go with a known quantity.
Once I've picked the book I reread it, taking notes as I go. I put in bookmarks on places that have quotes I would like to put in the review, and as I go I have a document keeping track of all the ideas I get as I read: that it would be neat to talk about this, or about how this connects to that, etc. Just reading the book with the review in mind. I feel free to skim, it doesn't have to be a thorough reading. Just enough to get the juices going and find quotes. Once I have enough ideas written down to fill a report, I start writing.
First I outline, which is just taking the reading notes I made and then organizing them into a structure that makes sense. I always cut a lot of ideas out here, if they don't fit into the report very well. Ideally all the ideas should flow together and be cohesive, not random.
Then I write. That's the hard part for me, actually saying "this is the time I am going to write" and then doing that. But the writing itself isn't hard, I follow the outline and then either stick to it or diverge from it as the muse pulls me. I often find out halfway through writing it that it would be better to jettison sections of the outline, or add bits in that weren't planned. Just like re-reading the book gets the ideas flowing, writing the report also gets your mind making connections you didn't notice earlier.
Then ideally I would wait a couple days and then review and edit. This time I had to edit it the next day, which is not ideal: you want to forget what you wrote so when you read it you see what you actually wrote instead of what you remember writing. Ideally I'd do two or more editing passes like this. Then the deadline comes and you have to ship it.
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