domain:anarchonomicon.com
cae_jones
13m ago
At this point, it's down to my friend calling me frequently to try and convince me to attend "The Awakening" (the $7500 retreat that takes the better part of a month and which was described as kinda like the workshop I went to, but even more so), while I'm trying to figure out what I can do to get her out. She is at least still doing unrelated things with her family, including some traveling soon, which is more non-cult activity than I witnessed when I was there.
Also, after consulting Chat GPT and Wikipedia, I think I need to start referring to it as "Large Group Attitude Transformation" instead of a cult, just in case lawyers get involved. This guy claims inspiration from Werner Erhard, whose ideological successors have been known to sue people for calling them cults. So I am legally encouraged to describe it as not a cult, just an emotionally exploitative money sink of a style that has been condemned by the American Psychological Association for their practices worsening mental health. (This back before the APA became politically captured and started producing therapists who act as money sinks and worsen mental health.)
So ... I would rather not spend $7.5k and request another couple weeks off work for more of that. But everything I've found suggests that being openly negative about it would be counterproductive, and providing a supportive alternative that is outside the group is the best option. The trouble is I'm too much of a coward to just say "Yeah, I'm not going. Can we still be friends?"
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
22m ago
I only really came to appreciate how many of the boxes on the diagnostic check list she ticked when I entered psych training.
Post check list? Uh, asking for a friend.
FWIW, the "nazi by association" rule has been strongly enforced by leftists and the leftist-dominated mainstream for a long time, has been weaponized, codified in rules and even law, has been a defining aspect of the German political landscape for generations (still being called the "Firewall" here). It's absolutely the water that most media swim in, classical as well as social, and the preferred weapon of SJWs and SJW-influenced useful idiots everywhere.
Anecdote: I used to discuss politics with my mother. Once, as she was mid-rant about the nazis ruining society, I told her that I had gotten to know an AfD voter and that they were an actual human being. Since then we never have spoken about politics again. Her way of eliding the issue that, by the rule of association and a failure to apply the rule correctly, I was now on the wrong side.
This isn't some new or poorly-observed phenomenon (just to be clear; I'm not implying that you see it that way), but a core doctrine of the left in the culture war.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
38m ago
Is there a reason the counterproductive effect of leptin in the obese isn't more common knowledge?
Many things about basic biology aren't common knowledge! I don't see a specific reason for why this isn't better known.
Is there research being done on "fixing" leptin behavior? Or is semaglutide basically that fix?
There's a single drug called metraleptin, which was once considered immensely promising for treating leptin resistance. Didn't work, failed miserably in trials.
It does, however, work excellently in a rare genetic condition called congenital leptin deficiency, and is occasionally used for lipodystrophy. The difference is that CLD patients lack leptin in the first place, which is giving them the recombinant version helps, whereas obese people have bodies that ignore leptin levels, regardless of how much more we can throw in.
GLP-1 drugs sidestep the whole problem by using an entirely different pathway (I did say I was simplifying! Keeping my head straight about how exactly Ozempic works gives me a headache)
I know some people have been able to stop being obese via surgeries like stomach constriction, but that sometimes it doesn't work and they still feel compelled to overeat. Is there a separate mechanism in action for people where reducing stomach size also reduces inability to feel satiety versus those where it doesn't help?
We don't really know how bariatric surgery works.
I'm not kidding here, we genuinely are rather unsure about the mechanism of action. Most of the commonly advanced suggestions were found to be wrong or inadequate at best.
If they are hungry no matter how much they eat, does "fake" eating offer any help? Eating extreme low calorie high fiber foods? Chewing gum? I know another poster already said drinking water didn't help him
Yes, these do help a little bit, but nowhere near as much as Ozempic does.
Hunger is surprisingly complicated, and has multiple mechanisms behind it.
The act of chewing and tasting sends signals to the brain that prepare the body for food (this is the "cephalic phase response"). This can satisfy the "oral fixation" component of hunger, the simple desire to be chewing on something.
The stomach wall contains mechanoreceptors that sense stretch. When you eat a large volume of food (like a huge salad or a bowl of broth), these receptors are activated, regardless of the calorie content. Trying to fill yourself with low calorie food is an approach known as "volumetrics", and it works okay.
I don't think just drinking water would work as well, because you'd need an uncomfortable amount to fill your stomach, and the body would quickly realize that it's just water, without calories. The ancestral environment definitely had water, and didn't have diet coke (citation hopefully not needed). If starving people tried to keep themselves content by going to a pond, it was probably weeded out quick.
If it wasn't clear in my original post, I'm a willpower skeptic, I think it's profoundly stupid to assume obesity is a willpower problem, even if I don't know how to imagine the experience of what it feels like to fight the urge to eat without using willpower as a proxy for the challenge
My apologies for giving you the impression that was targeted at you. It was meant entirely for the people who think the usage of Ozempic is some kind of moral failing, and they're not an imaginary strawman, at least not on Twitter. I don't seem to recall much in the way of pushback against Ozempic here, barring people who still have reservations about its safety profile (it's remarkably safe, we have evidence for that claim, and loads of it).
Clementine
58m ago
Thank you!
- Is there a reason the counterproductive effect of leptin in the obese isn't more common knowledge?
- Is there research being done on "fixing" leptin behavior? Or is semaglutide basically that fix?
- I know some people have been able to stop being obese via surgeries like stomach constriction, but that sometimes it doesn't work and they still feel compelled to overeat. Is there a separate mechanism in action for people where reducing stomach size also reduces inability to feel satiety versus those where it doesn't help?
- If they are hungry no matter how much they eat, does "fake" eating offer any help? Eating extreme low calorie high fiber foods? Chewing gum? I know another poster already said drinking water didn't help him.
(If it wasn't clear in my original post, I'm a willpower skeptic, I think it's profoundly stupid to assume obesity is a willpower problem, even if I don't know how to imagine the experience of what it feels like to fight the urge to eat without using willpower as a proxy for the challenge)
Well if you can't trust a man like Himmler regarding the necessity of burning Jewish bodies en masse, whom can you trust?
Can you trust the Soviet investigators who "investigated" Auschwitz? The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of that biology quack Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz investigation.
Can you trust the confession of someone that was extracted through physical torture, under duress with no access to legal representation and no access to documentary evidence? It's not about trust, it's about weighing the quality of the evidence against the nature of the claims being made. Himmler's denial is relevant because Himmler's explanation for the conditions on the Eastern Front aligns with an enormous body of documentary evidence, whereas the documentary evidence for gas chambers disguised as shower rooms performing executions of millions of people is completely nonexistent.
Does Hoss getting one thing wrong mean he got it all wrong? Does being tortured on the outset of his capture thereafter mean nothing he ever said could be taken as factual? Even if corroborated?
Hoess did not get "one thing wrong." He also claimed there were gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen, which is known not to be true. His confession also claimed 3 million people were killed in Auschwitz, a wildly inflated number that aligned with Soviet propaganda. He identified "Wolzek" as an extermination camp, but there is no "Wolzek" camp at all it doesn't exist. The lack of corroboration for these claims is what stands out. There's no documentary record or physical evidence to corroborate the claims of millions of people gassed in secret extermination facilities.
But more importantly, it's not that Hoess got "one thing wrong" it's that the sequence of events described are impossible.
Far as I can tell, Treblinka I was active in summer 1941 and Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was opened in 1942. The fact you seem totally ignorant of the difference between Treblinkas I and II would seemingly cast doubt on you actually having done your homework here. If you had, you'd presumably head some amateur like me off from pointing that out.
According to mainstream historiography, there were no gassings at all, ever, in Treblinka I, which was a penal/labor camp. Treblinka II, the alleged extermination camp, did not open until July 1942 and nobody was gassed at Treblinka before that date. As you pointed out, gassings in Auschwitz allegedly began in August 1941 and construction of the alleged "extermination camp" began shortly after that. So this confession claiming Hoess visited Treblinka in 1941 and observed gassings and therefore decided to use Zyklon B is not possible. It's not that a date was mixed up, it's that the sequence of events is not possible. The Treblinka Extermination camp did not exist in 1941, there were never any gas chambers at the Treblinka I penal camp.
So the easy explanation here is that when Hoss said "extermination camps" as of 1941, he meant "concentration camps primarily for labor that were also doing exterminations at the time"; not "camps/facilities that had been built explicitly for mass extermination." Those efficiency upgrades came in 1942. There's no contradiction.
There is no claim anywhere by mainstream historians of any gassings in Treblinka I ever. The gassings are unanimously claimed to have started in July 1942. So the claim from Hoess's "confession" that he visited Treblinka in 1941 to observe gassings, and therefore decided to use Zyklon B for gassings at Auschwitz, is not a possible sequence of events.
But Yankel Wiernik's pamphlet on Treblinka had already been published by this point. So Hoess describing a visit to the Treblinka extermination camp, rather than being an independent account of the "Treblinka Extermination camp", was likely derived from Wiernik's work and intended to provide corroboration from a much more reliable witness than an anonymous escapee who wrote the pamphlet.
There is aerial photography showing evidence of the dismantled structures, and the allowed archelogy and ground radar has found evidence.
There have been no excavations of any mass graves on the site. The ground radar has not "found evidence", or any more evidence than the same ground radar evidence at Kamloops Indian Reserve found evidence for the mass graves of children. The ground radar results essentially disprove the narrative as there were no ground disturbances found consistent with the size, shape, or location of the graves allegedly used to bury 800,000 people.... before they were all supposedly unburied and cremated on open-air pyres over 120 days. It's an absurd story.
FtttG
1hr ago
It's not quite the same thing, but the article by Kevin Mims I linked above contains some fairly detailed statistical analysis of novelists whose novels get nominated for the National Book Awards. He argues that, contrary to the National Book Foundation's claims that its nominees are increasingly diverse, they've actually become less diverse over time, in the sense that the majority of nominees are people who studied English lit at undergraduate level before completing an MFA in creative writing - whereas many earlier winners and nominees for the award had no formal training in creative writing and in many cases no third-level education. It'd be interesting to see if this is also true of screenwriters.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
To be fair, my own brother, and most of my family, did strongly encourage me not to date her.
You're not the only one affected, and that's the point of the saying. What's impossible to recognize when you've been targeted, is fairly easy when you look at the situation from the outside
I personally also subscribe to something in my head I've termed the Total Media Hypothesis: as society progresses, but old media sticks around in easily accessible form, the best of the older media is still excellent quality capable of delivering enjoyment and increasingly competes with new offerings. Naturally, there will always be a place for newer media due to network effects and recency bias, but on the whole eventually new media will get squeezed asymptotically to almost exclusively fit into the maximum capacity of this recency segment in the long run, because the quality simply can't otherwise compete. As to what exactly this asymptotic number is, that's up for debate, and depends on media type, but I'd hazard a guess at about one quarter at most. Meaning, that in the next few decades, total new release movie and TV consumption will account for at most a quarter of all total media consumption in any given year.
We already see this happening with video games: the old games are, quite often, still pretty fun, and the graphics are decent enough in many cases. This limits opportunities for newcomers. It's also magnified by a segment of 'evergreen' games that have reached a critical community/fun/variety threshold such that they consume many hours and effectively never die, such as League of Legends and Counterstrike, and maybe even Minecraft. These suck up so many gamer hours that new (especially multiplayer) entrants struggle to get enough oxygen. Of course although many people like to rewatch movies, there isn't anything quite like the evergreen multiplayer games, but still, in terms of hours played current-year releases only account for like 10 to 15 percent ish of playtime (source). For books, it's more like one third of sales are new books, but that's sales; if we count reading library books which are mostly older books, and count only books not retail pricing value, that number surely drops significantly and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being a similar percentage. So maybe my asymptote guess is high and 15% is more realistic.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
My man, I dated a woman with BPD, who was arguably the love of my life. I was a doctor by that point, though I only really came to appreciate how many of the boxes on the diagnostic check list she ticked when I entered psych training. It can be very hard to tell when you start dating, including by the time you fall in love :(
Until that point, it's manic pixie dreamgirl paradise.
(To be fair, my own brother, and most of my family, did strongly encourage me not to date her. But that pussy game too strong for me, a man of the flesh.)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
This article in particular presents people who lost weight, noticed immediate massive benefits in their life they're desperate to keep, and yet still can't keep the weight from coming back. It is just the satiety setpoint being set so high it's torture for them to not eat to the point of overeating?
Yes.
The mechanism via which the body "hungers" is somewhat complex, but can be usefully simplified down to the action of ghrelin, a hormone produced in the stomach which makes you hungrier, and leptin, which does the opposite.
Surprisingly, obese people have more adipose tissue, which produces leptin. However, it ceases to have the usual satiety inducing effect, as the body becomes resistant to its action. The way this is perceived is the body interpreting the lack of signal for being full as a sign of starvation.
And starvation sucks. Other than disease, it's probably what's killed the most humans in all of history, and you can imagine that it's a very unpleasant state that the individual feels compelled to rectify. The easiest solution being to eat more, till the pain goes away.
They're also being struck with a double-whammy. In lean people, eating causes suppression of the levels of ghrelin, in obese people, it doesn't. So they feel less full, with the same amount of food, as compared to those at a healthy weight. Hence they feel compelled to not just eat, but eat excessive amounts for the sake of relief.
I can only reiterate that starving sucks, and the body will drive you crazy in order to avoid that feeling. It's too dumb to know or care that you are, objectively, perfectly well fed. Waterboarding feels just as bad as actual drowning despite the ~nil risk of death.
While doctors usually feel compelled to tell their patients to watch their weight and diet, this almost never actually works. I consider myself a pragmatic one, and advice that isn't actioned in practise is about as useless as advice that doesn't work at all. I was on the Ozempic hype-train well before it was cool.
My mother is very obese, and has been for over half her life now. She's diabetic, and has developed fatty liver with hepatic fibrosis. Her own commitments to working out and dieting never held. She's a doctor herself, so she knows, on an intellectual level, what the risks are. She's been driven to tears by the scolding she gets from my grandpa or my dad who genuinely care for her and want her to lose weight, and after gentle suggestions failed, were driven to tough love.
None of it worked. She loved to eat, and reducing her caloric intake was pure agony. For a long time, I was resigned to the seeming inevitability that she'd head into cirrhosis, and I'd have to steel myself up for a liver donation. It's a nasty, nasty surgery, nothing like giving away a kidney. It leaves a grossly disfiguring scar, leaving aside the significant risk of death during and after the procedure. I'd do it for my mom, because I do love her.
Eventually, when Ozempic, or oral formulations of semaglutide, became available in the Indian market, I badgered her into seeing her endocrinologist and getting it prescribed. Despite the initial nausea and diarrhea, she eventually adapted, and lost the lost weight she's ever managed, and kept it that way. Right now, my priority is hounding her into going to that gent again and getting that dose upped, it's well overdue.
Exhortations to exercise failed. Asking her to watch her portion size and not snack failed. Driving her to tears failed.
The pill didn't.
When people get on their high horse and claim that using drugs to solve your problems is a crutch, it takes everything I have to not tell them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pole. It saved my mom, fuck you. Nothing you have to offer, including your empty words, comes close.
To hell with willpower. A world where we can power through our problems with pills is a better one as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work. Telling people to use their will to get over depression or diabetes doesn't, and the same is true for obesity. Claiming the moral high ground and virtue signaling? Doesn't beat adding years of healthy lifespan.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
Seems like the guy is removing the wife from his and his kid's lives with the help of an aunty that is a lawyer.
Further to your point though, I believe that such reckless endangerment of her family should be a criminal offense. Horrible horrible betrayal. I feel sorry for the family.
If there's one area I would support a certain type of vigilantism, its where the safety of children is concerned. I don't have kids myself, but I'm surprised that fathers don't take matters into their own hands more often. I guess they're smart enough to know that they could lose custody themselves if they didn't let the justice system take care of things and then where would the kids be?
Clementine
2hr ago
I'm unaware of any mainstream historian or institution which disputes the matter, and you can easily google it and learn from whatever source you find credible
What am I supposed to Google? I tried medical care in concentration camps and got : https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/camp-hospitals/conditions-in-the-hospital/ and https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/medical-care-nazism-and-the-holocaust
As first results, neither of which corroborates your statement.
When I search for recreational facilities in concentration camps, I find this:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/654671/summary
And this
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/education/e-learning/podcast/sport-and-sportstpeople-/
If it's so easy to search and find please tell me what to search for.
erwgv3g34
2hr ago
That doesn't prove anything. It could just be that traditional foods have less of the orange soda, whatever it is, and if you made terrible tasting food with the secret ingredient everyone would still get fat.
ABigGuy4U
2hr ago
I am beginning to have doubts about Israel’s combat effectiveness in Gaza. People have been debating so hard about the moral aspects of the Gaza war that no one has been paying attention to how the war is actually going. And it does not look good for Israel. There have been two major security incidents in the past week causing a total of 12 IDF deaths and dozens of serious injuries. There are indications that the first incident may have been much worse than advertised with potentially as many as 50 deaths. Even assuming that official total is correct that isn’t good.
Israel is almost a full two years into the war and has leveled most of the buildings in Gaza and inflicted enough civilian casualties to seriously impact its standing in the United States and the world. The fact that Hamas still seems to have supplies, an intact organizational structure and the ability to carry out complex operations and ambushes implies that there has not been nearly as much degradation of capabilities as advertised. It also implies that much, or perhaps even most, of the tunnel infrastructure is intact, including the supply tunnels into Egypt.
I have long suspected that the Gaza War hasn’t been going well and I am increasingly convinced of that. I don’t think Israel has the manpower needed to fully occupy Gaza, clear the tunnels, or filter out militants from the civilian population. I think the air strikes that have so badly damaged Israel’s reputation have done little to degrade Hamas.
Like I have said about many other militaries in the past, I also think Israel is concealing its true casualty count. I cannot even find an official casualty count but the videos and individuals incident makes me think it could potentially be as high as 1200 dead and 10,000 wounded, not counting military casualties during the October 7 attacks.
I don’t imply any moral claims here, I am just giving my opinion on the current state of play.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
My dad was born into a peasant family in East Pakistan, better known today as Bangladesh, one of the youngest in 9 siblings. He had a loving family, with immensely strong kin bonds with his older siblings doing their best to look out for the rest, including after they were dispossesed and chased out of their homeland during a genocide.
These Russian peasants sound uniquely dysfunctional. I can assure you that that's probably not representative of child rearing and familial roles for most agricultural communities. I suppose I have to blame vodka for that, or the usual Slavic predisposition towards melancholy.
Browser
2hr ago
Appropos of nothing but would love to know the statistics for how overrepresented Trans individuals are in violent political crime. Considering how small a percentage of the population gotta be like 40-50x
I ran into the following tweet (xeet?) over on X:
https://x.com/DaveyJ_/status/1942962076101603809
my brother's wife has been messaging with hundreds of different inmates through a dozen different apps for the last 2 years. she's sent photos, tens of thousands of dollars, shares her location, tells them where her kids go to school, living an entire second life.
when she got caught, she threatened to un@live, so she's been in the hospital getting treated, but while she's been in there her phone has been going off nonstop.
prisoners and ex-prisoners telling my brother "who TF is this? that's my girl!"
telling him when they get out they're going to be the kids' new stepfather. one even purchased a plane ticket.
she was just at my house, sharing her location, and sending pictures of my daughter at the beach to incarcerated strangers on the internet.
of course my brother is crushed, and my family is horrified at this person's ability to lie to everyone, but the biggest shock is her willingness to put her children in danger.
who knows how many men believe they are going to be responsible for those boys when they get released. they'll have to look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
my sister in law was going to watch my daughter for a few days while we moved, and it was the same week on the plane ticket that this inmate sent my brother.
my heart breaks for my brother, and his kids, but my ability to trust anyone around my kid has severely been damaged.
I would feel bad for simply posting this as a naked link, so I guess I have to add on some half-baked analysis and commentary on top:
This is horrifying. Rarely, so you see examples of behavior that is clearly "legal", in the sense that there's no clear crime being committed, but with so much potential for harm to unwitting bystanders. I'm unfamiliar with the scope of child endangerment laws in the US, but I'd be surprised if they covered this or, even if they theoretically did so, whether they'd be enforced in that manner.
(I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that these laws typically require a prosecutor to prove that a guardian knowingly and willfully placed a child in a situation where their life or health was directly endangered. The behavior of the sister-in-law is profoundly reckless, but it falls into a legal gray area. A defense attorney would argue she had no intent to harm her children and that the danger was hypothetical and probabilistic, not immediate and direct. Proving a direct causal link between her online activities and a "clear and present danger" to the children would be incredibly difficult until, tragically, one of the inmates actually showed up and acted on his threats.)
At the same time, is it a problem worth solving? How do you reconcile that question with my earlier claim?
Well, that's a matter of impact or scale. Laws have costs associated with them, be it from the difficult to quantify loss of freedom/chilling effect, enforcement costs, sheer legislative complexity, or what I'm more concerned about, unexpected knock-on effects/scope creep where a desperate attempt to define the problematic action results in too wide a scope for enforcement:
What if it turns out to affect single moms looking to date again? Their new partners are far more likely to abuse their kids, but should such women thus be arrested for putting their kids at risk? Should people be forbidden from writing letters to inmates, or falling in love with them, or sex with them?
Is it worth it to specifically criminalize such behavior?
Despite my abhorrence for it, I'm not sure it is. I think the fraction of people who would be stupid or insane enough to act this way is small enough that the majority of us can treat this like a horror story and ignore it.
Another way to illustrate my intuition here would be to consider being a doctor or legislator reading an account of some kind of ridiculously horrible disease. Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose). Absolutely terrible, and something no one should go through.
Yet, for how horrible it is, this hypothetical disease is also ridiculously rare. Imagining it happens to a person every ten years, and makes medical journals every time it happens because of how rare it is. I would expect that doctor, or that law maker, to both be horrified, but if they were rational individuals considering the greater good, I would strongly prefer that they focus on more mundane and common conditions, like a cure for heart disease. There are lower hanging fruit to grasp here.
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Sometimes it's worth considering the merits of informal resolution systems for settling such matters, even if they have other significant downsides. For example, how would this situation be handled in India?
(I'm not aware of a trend of Indian women being stupid enough to act this way, though I can hardly say with any authority that it's literally never happened)
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them. And if they weren't, they'd be even more sympathetic to the idea of their palms being greased. The most awful outcomes would become vanishingly unlikely.
As a wise mullah once said: "What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
This isn't necessarily an overall endorsement of such a legal framework, or societal mindset. I'm just pointing out that, occasionally, they tackle problems that an atomized, quasi-libertarian society like most of the West can't tackle. I'd still, personally, prefer to live in the latter. While it's too late for the gent in question, you can reliably avoid running into such problems in the first place by not sticking your dick in crazy. Alas, as someone who has committed that folly, it's an even bigger folly to expect people to stop...
FtSoA
3hr ago
Oh we don't have to start an econ flame war here. Usually, when someone unironically uses the phrase "socialist" they do mean some kind of actual Marxist. And while I believe you that you do not support totalitarianism, the problem is that, empirically, a "large degree of command economy" instituted under Marxist ideology turns into a totalitarian nightmare.
If it's the kinder gentler kind of non-Marxist socialism it just leads to economic stagnation. Not nearly as bad.
clo
3hr ago
+1 for Antz.
I think a Bug's Life is more cohesive as a movie, actually, but it's far, far less interesting and subversive. Some of it is unfortunately visuals; the character designs in Antz were just kind of less pleasant to look at than Pixar's approved and focustested shapes, and that kind of serves as a metaphor for the differences between the two movies.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3hr ago
I think it's emotionally healthy for people of any gender or political orientation to occasionally demonstrate and discuss an eminently human reaction. It's only an "irritant to mixed spaces" if done repeatedly in my opinion. I wouldn't call it some kind of nuclear bomb to the discussion or playing with online debate-board PTSD or 'something that can't be unsaid' or anything, if I'm understanding the thrust of your comment right.
FtSoA
3hr ago
Well if you can't trust a man like Himmler regarding the necessity of burning Jewish bodies en masse, whom can you trust? Just a public health intervention. Not a coverup. No sir.
"We did not want any wars with Russia." Wow, so true bestie. That's just what Hitler thought.
Hans Frank, the highest leader of the SS and Police in General Government denied knowledge, and his huge personal wartime diary contains no concrete reference to the extermination policy or extermination camps that were allegedly under the operation of his organization.
Ok but there's plenty of evidence of the German police and SS being involved in exterminations. "Wow the guy didn't write down war crimes in his journal, so that casts doubt on it" is not exactly a knock-down argument.
Does Hoss getting one thing wrong mean he got it all wrong? Does being tortured on the outset of his capture thereafter mean nothing he ever said could be taken as factual? Even if corroborated?
I have been constantly associated with the administration of concentration camps since 1934, serving at Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in Sachsenhausen from 1938 to May 1, 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=2
Let's look at your assertion here:
For example, Höss's confession said he decided to organizing the gassing procedure at Auschwitz in the way they did because he personally visited Treblinka in the summer of 1941 and observed the extermination process there. But Treblinka was not open until a year later. So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
Looks like this is the quote you take issue with:
The "final solution" of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the general government three other extermination camps; BELZEK, TREBLINKA AND WALZEK. These camps were under the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized Prussic Acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323382?objectPanel=transcription&objectPage=3
Far as I can tell, Treblinka I was active in summer 1941 and Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was opened in 1942. The fact you seem totally ignorant of the difference between Treblinkas I and II would seemingly cast doubt on you actually having done your homework here. If you had, you'd presumably head some amateur like me off from pointing that out.
Auschwitz I was active in 1940 and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the extermination camp, came online in March 1942. However, executions by gas were happening well before the specialized extermination camps were built. The first Zyklon B gassings happened in August 1941, and the construction of Auschwitz II began the next month.
So the easy explanation here is that when Hoss said "extermination camps" as of 1941, he meant "concentration camps primarily for labor that were also doing exterminations at the time"; not "camps/facilities that had been built explicitly for mass extermination." Those efficiency upgrades came in 1942. There's no contradiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp#Gassings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#:~:text=Construction%20of%20Auschwitz%20II%20began,were%20killed%20during%20medical%20experiments.
Also, it's funny to argue there's not a lot of great evidence for Treblinka II when like the whole point was killing off potential witnesses, the extermination camp was dismantled in October 1943, there was literally a coverup, and then the Soviets didn't exactly do a lot of historical preservation. That the guards were not likely to confess decades after the fact is not remotely surprising. Stangl did admit to the murders though, right? There is aerial photography showing evidence of the dismantled structures, and the allowed archelogy and ground radar has found evidence. The main witnesses for the prosecution were Poles who worked at or observed the railways. Later, declassified British intel of the German Transport Authority backed the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
So not only did this not happen- it could not have happened, there's no explanation at all for why this claim would appear in his confession other than it being planted by interrogators.
Well I just disproved that assertion in short order. There's a very natural explanation, that you and your kind are misinterpreting the labels the man used and conflating the early phases of experimentation and low levels of execution with the later mass scale ones.
After all this, I have to ask, are the Revisionists just incapable of basic historical research? I had higher expectations, honestly. I'm used to debating QAnon types.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3hr ago
This comment and that of @Clementine is basically exactly the Parable of the Polygons IRL, where you can mathematically model how self-segregation happens naturally to some extent under certain conditions. Of course it's natural to expect someone who is a super-minority to not like it there! So no individual is even necessarily at fault. What the math says is one potential "fix" for companies and other organizations with this challenge is simply to insist on some minimum diversity level as a requirement. Well, okay, more specifically it says that individuals should refuse to accept jobs in low-diversity organizations, but I think you can still offer some organizational help for that. I actually quite like that framing personally. Maybe rather than aggressive DEI targeting perfect equity in all things, it's a 'good enough' lower goal for DEI to both penalize over-uniformity as well as reward under-representation, and only to a point. That's not DEI as we currently understand it, but I think it reaches some level of social good as well as maintaining some level of fairness.
I also like it because it's empowering in a certain sense, and applicable to majority-members. It says we should seek out diversity, which I think is as a general rule correct and economically validated to be successful and net-positive return even if a lot of the implementation and rhetoric around it went "too far" and lost sight of some things. It's empowering to the individual who can help prevent segregation in a pretty direct way, even if you're a majority class (locally or globally, it cuts both ways).
DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for BPD:
A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) or the following:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5) ✅
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealisation and devaluation ✅
Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending ✅, sex ✅, substance abuse ✅, reckless driving, binge eating) (Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5)
Recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days) ✅
Chronic feelings of emptiness Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g. frequent displays of temper ✅, constant anger ✅, recurrent physical fights)
Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms
More options
Context Copy link