5434a
3d ago
Started The Rise and Fall of the British Nation by David Edgerton.
I don't usually read history, I picked up this book on British 20th century political history in search of some reasons for why Britain has seemed to so consistently drop the ball since around 1960. It's doing a sterling job of putting me to sleep each night but I'm still in the early chapters dealing with the history of our political parties so that's probably par for the course.
5434a
4d ago
You're right, I immediately started thinking of the exceptions after posting. Thanks for linking to the proper terminology.
5434a
5d ago
an homage
Using "an" for any h word. I feel like I've woken up in a different universe. Saying "an", like in "an 'ot cup of tea", fine, but I frequently see it happening in professional writing now.
Homage is maybe the least objectionable one as people tend to French-ify the pronunciation anyway.
5434a
9d ago
I get that, I think the successful translation of the character names between languages is pretty essential to its success. But "Elonmus" is so specific and current and implicitly culture-warry. It takes you out of the story. Maybe it works better in German..?
5434a
10d ago
I didn't realise they were still making new Asterix books.
"Elonmus" goes to an orgy of rich people, how witty
I had a look on Wikipedia, it says the character is called Upwardlimobilus (I assume that's in the English version). Is "Elonmus" your own re-naming? It's hard to tell when apparently there is also a character called Nellia Furtado. Seems odd to put in these kinds of contemporary pop references.
5434a
10d ago
Finished What Not. Spoiler: The heroine followed her heart and the oiks rose up and bloodlessly unseated the Minister for Brains. Possibly the lowest jeopardy dystopia I've ever read.
Now reading a Christina Rosetti collection, mostly for Goblin Market but it's short enough that I might as well finish it. Recurring themes of nature and the perils of being a sensitive teenage woman (and not a man-stealing whore like that skank bitch Maude).
5434a
14d ago
Cat hair has a scent that scares rodents
I wonder if that's why visiting cats like to look inside our shed when it's open. It's the only place we've ever found mice, and it's the only place that is untomcatinated never inhabitated by cats, and so while the scent of cats might scare the mice perhaps it's the residual scent of mice that interests the cats.
We always used an old fashioned mousetrap - you know, the type where the boot kicks the marble onto the seesaw that flips the diver through the bathtub and triggers the basket to wiggle down the pole.
5434a
17d ago
The baggy wearers might look bad but they probably think they look good. Woke aesthetics was about looking bad on purpose, like the punks did, but unlike punks instead of revelling in condemnation it upped the ante by challenging and hectoring people to praise it.
5434a
17d ago
Finishing What Not.
I can see why it's less known than Brave New World. I don't want to sound sexist but it comes across as a noticeably feminine book. Lots of discussion of people, little discussion of ideas. For example the main character begins by spending the opening of the book judging people's outfits. Also it's written in a strange tone, very characteristic of its era, which is not so much wry as it is arch. It's neither outright snooty or genuinely humorous, just persistently self-satisfied.
There is a story that pivots on a government eugenics policy but the book seems more concerned with how that affects people's intimate relationships than with the broad effects on society. As it stands the major threads are whether the main character will follow her heart or her head, and whether a village's uppity yokels and their staid vicar will acquiesce to their liberal-minded and better dressed metropolitan visitors.
5434a
17d ago
Ymeshkout is, and I think Tracingwoodgrains is/was in law school, but neither have been active here for a long time.
5434a
19d ago
The feminists weren't right and Oscar Wilde only said the things he said because saying them made him sound clever.
I think a better model is that women find power desirable while conversely men find desire powerful.
5434a
24d ago
Finished the travel writer book. It was unable to resolve the contradictions of backpackers who want to find the "real" "untouched" locations and the reliance on guidebooks that serve only to funnel people down a well worn tourist trail. To his credit the author did demonstrate ample self-awareness and acknowledge the problem, and it was never the central thesis of the book. If anything it underlined that the guidebooks themselves are of questionable authority, relying on freelance writers like the author who, due to a tight deadline, demanding editors and a low budget resorted to taking advantage of quid pro quo while canvassing hotel and restaurant owners for their opinions on where to stay and where to eat.
Now reading What Not. From the blurb: "Rose Macaulay’s speculative novel of post-First World War eugenics and newspaper manipulation that anticipated Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by 14 years."
5434a
25d ago
I suppose at the limit it's possible that something could resemble something else so closely that it would be reasonable to share the label. But, like men who pretend to be women, the limit that delineates between the source and the imitation remains and can be revealed should it be necessary. If those hypothetical people call themselves Nazis you can point out that they'll never be real Nazis until they fail, lose, kill themselves, are executed, live in exile, see the ruins of their nation carved up between Russia and America and their political movement become lawfully systematically repressed and used as the popular byword for evil for the next 80+ years.
Personally I think Neo-Nazi would be a more accurate label, "if". It encompasses both the important similarities and the critical difference. People are reluctant to use it though I think because instead of conjuring the threat of global military conflict it instead summons the idea of low class skinheads beating up isolated immigrants, which is bad in itself but also suggests a degree of impotence and unpopularity. There are simply far bigger contemporary problems than Neo-Nazis. The average inner city drug gang is a bigger problem.
I'm no expert on historic Nazi psycho-sociology but I imagine the dynamism and authenticity of the movement played some role in its appeal. That is, not being a throwback to a previous failed movement from a foreign culture. It's more than something they can believe in, it was something/someone that reciprocated and believed in them. Post WW1 Germans looking to a living German for leadership of the German nation is more coherent than post WW2 non-Germans looking to a dead failed German for leadership of a non-German nation. For anyone living post 1945 it's not possible to sincerely heil Hitler. He's dead! A dead loser and an abject fucking failure, and yet to give him his dues he made it his own, he didn't try to call himself Genghis Khan or march around saluting the Sun King or some such.
5434a
26d ago
It's too late. The Nazi label has been stretched from warmongering fascistic Jew-killing Fuhrer worshippers to anonymous posters on the internet making the okay sign. It's too late to roll it back to "does all the things the Nazis did" after so many decades of "does none of the things the Nazis did".
If I tell you my teacher at school was a Nazi what do you think it means? Bear in mind I was in school at a time before the WW2 generation were all retired. What kind of person was my teacher? A good teacher who was maligned by immature students? A poor teacher who was over-eager to use harsh punishments to maintain classroom discipline? Or an unremarkable teacher approaching retirement with a distinctly German accent, a stiff way of walking suggesting lasting physical trauma, and would shudder whenever a heavy book was slammed on a desk?
If people want to corral their opponents into internment camps that's not a Nazi problem, it's a political oppression problem. That's a serious enough problem when it's stated plainly, it doesn't need to borrow from anyone else's historical political oppression to point it out.
That's what many of the posters here are implying: If they had to choose between someone who makes crass and ill-judged comments in a chatroom, or someone with a meaningful degree of social power who uses the politically correct language to cast them as irredeemable threats to social stability and a barrier to progress on account of their majority identity markers, they'd choose the chatroom troll.
5434a
26d ago
I was wondering if it was just me. I updated Windows and Firefox a couple of days ago and have been battling a bunch of weird browser behaviour since.
5434a
28d ago
Nazi = bad.
Nazi apologia = bad.
Nazi apologist =/= Nazi.
The problem with applying the label of Nazi to connote badness is that the charge is so easy to reject on account of the labelled not actually being an actual Nazi (I assume SS isn't a WW2 veteran living in a German care home). It's intellectually lazy. Nazi apologia is bad on its own merits, it doesn't need the laziest boo-light in the world to fortify any criticisms.
Hyperbole and false equivalence are a cancer on discourse, and getting away from that cancer is why I came to TheMotte.
["But isn't 'laziest boo-light in the world' also hyperbole?". No, because I can't think of a lazier one other than maybe "eww, you're smelly".]
5434a
28d ago
Ever looked at The Listener crossword in The Times? It makes a cryptic look like a child's word search.
I tried to find an example but I can only find pictures of finished puzzles without the clues. Looks like there are some follow-alongs on YouTube.
Finished Nancy McWilliams Psychoanalytic Diagosis. Interesting and understandable for a layman. Provided me with a good deal of clarification to the terminology, the development and the current practice of psychoanalysis, which in turn reveals that the way that terminology is used in the public sphere is even worse than I already suspected.
Now starting Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. I found this after reading a comment at Reddit that described the 2010s as "the golden age of travelling". That struck me as wrong, I'm not keen on travelling but I would imagine the golden age of travelling to be somewhere around the time that the Lonely Planet books were being written, and maybe the first generation of travellers who were inspired by those books, ie. before everyone went to the same places via the same routes to do the same things with the same people who'd all got the same ideas from the same books (at this point even I've heard about Khao San Road and I've never entertained any thoughts of going there). People used to drive or even hitchhike across the continents to reach Aghanistan and Nepal where they would meet and interact with Afghanis and Nepalese. Then they'd travel back with a van stuffed full of trade goods (and contraband). Now they stack discounts they heard about online to get a cheap flight direct to BackpackerVille and come back with credit card debt, and still call it "travelling" when it seems to me more like a hipster variety of basic tourism. That got me looking into the history of the Lonely Planets books and I came across DTWGTH. The blurb for the book bills it as a behind-the-scenes expose of the production of the kind of travel writing that contributed to the Loney Planet series, albeit it was written in 2007.
5434a
1mo ago
Right, I hadn't considered how old the xb360 is. My last console was a PS1, after that I tuned out of the console scene entirely and largely out of PC gaming too until I picked this up around 2017. And my wifi dongle benefits from over a decade of improvements to wifi tech in an era when almost everything including the kitchen sink gained wifi, so not a fair comparison. Makes sense.
That's reassuring about the new fuse. I did match the original spec (250mA) despite some commenters on the fix-it page I was following suggesting using a higher rating. Better safe albeit with another blown fuse than sorry with a fried receiver.
5434a
1mo ago
Appreciate your sharing some details of the manufacturing trade-offs. It's more the size of the thing that baffles me, although it did make it much easier to work on. Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle? Anyone who needs the extension could use an extension lead.
I'd also be interested in any speculation for why the fuse failed. As you say I had left it plugged in when I wasn't using it (I don't anymore), and even though I now have 9 extra spare fuses on hand I'd prefer to avoid any need to repeat that type of soldering. Other than loose connections I've never had any other USB devices fail whether they're high draw like charging a battery or low draw like a USB stick, or a wired controller.
5434a
1mo ago
I have a Microsoft wireless Xbox360 controller I bought to use with emulators on my PC. I very rarely game so it sat around for a couple of years, and when I came to use it again the dongle was dead. The giant dongle. The giant dongle with the ~2m wire (why?!). I have a wifi dongle that is barely larger than the USB port it plugs into and that can handle bi-directional network speed data transmitted to the other end of the house, but a receiver for what amounts to little more than single key presses sent from the chair towards the screen has to be the size of a 240V wall plug for some reason.
Anyway after a little reading around I prised open the giant dongle's case and replaced the microscopic fuse component (why use such a small component when there's so much space?) and restored it to working order. Apparently this is a common fault. Imagine how many people have resorted to just binning it and buying another. Probably not many at the price they charge, the size they make it, and the frequency with which it breaks.
5434a
1mo ago
Naming it Really Simple Syndication was a disaster by emphasising publishing instead of consuming. Meanwhile semi-nonsense names like Digg, Tumblr and D.e.Lic....iO.u..s ate its lunch.
If they'd just named it Really Simple Subscription instead...
Malformed pop therapy terminology.
I've got mental health = I've got mental health problems
My child is neurodiverse = My child is not neurotypical
It gives me anxiety = It makes me feel anxious
He's anxious-avoidant = Either I'm anxious, or he's avoidant, or both
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