johnfabian
1yr ago
Of course, it's an older show...
New season coming out in a month
johnfabian
1yr ago
For comedies, The Office (original). Dramas, The Wire.
Honourable mentions: Deadwood, Party Down, Community, The Thick of It.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Appreciate your work.
johnfabian
1yr ago
an infamous hack, even among hack Hollywood writers
johnfabian
1yr ago
I wouldn't care so much if not for due to the decline of the rest of the internet; Reddit has become a useful and very valuable repository of knowledge and discussion by actual humans. Preserving the utility of the platform is actually fairly important to me for that reason. And the changes to API access and crackdown on third-party apps is worrying because of how awful the actual official Reddit user tools are. Topic search is bad and comment search is nonexistent; prior to the disabling of API access you had to use something like https://camas.unddit.com/ if you actually wanted to search for something specific. Moderation is often opaque and censorious, and third-party tools like reveddit or unddit allowed you to see the comments and actions the mods/admins didn't want you to see.
Reddit is an imperfect and often frustrating website, but it's also a customizeable one that functions as one of the last remaining places where large numbers of humans come together to have online, organic conversations. Changes like this threaten, without exaggeration, its usefulness to humanity.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Several of the ones I wanted to read appear to have been immediately deleted by their authors.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Just scanning Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler (which is what usually gets thrown around as the most "complete" English-language text) and there's no mention of it. Lots of talk about how Hitler was scared and disgusted by prostitution and how he (and other contemporaries) linked it in his mind with Judaism, but certainly nothing about an arrest for male prostitution. Kershaw generally dismisses sexual rumours about Hitler as "little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies."
johnfabian
1yr ago
Nazi concentration camps (what they called Konzentrationslager) were quite a bit different from what their contemporaries called "concentration camps." Those were effectively large prison camps for holding civilian populations, like Japanese internment in the US and Canada. Nazi Konzentrationslager on the other hand was a slave labour camp where you were worked to death. Death was the ultimate goal of your stay there. The only reason they aren't called "death camps" is because the Nazis also built Vernichtungslager where they killed people within hours of arrival.
johnfabian
1yr ago
If not for knowing how the subject brings out resident contrarians, I would be half inclined to think this is another rdrama experiment. I'm willing to indulge a bit then.
Only, I cannot fathom how anyone sees this when they look at Hitler. Here was a man who sincerely held the best interests of his People in his heart. He came of age in a time when his nation was — historical aggression notwithstanding — brutally, horrifically, oppressed. Countless of his countrymen, women and children, starved to death needlessly under spiteful, vindictive post-war Allied blockades. The economy was so saddled with reparation debt that rebuilding would take generations if it were ever possible at all. The people had no hope. Men and women who wanted families faced down a seemingly-insurmountable challenge in doing so. The risk of watching their babies die of starvation was all too real. And what chance had those children of decent lives even if they did survive to adulthood? They would end up de facto slaves, servants to the sneering foreigners who now controlled everything.
I think you're getting something here. I think you're a bit confused about some of the details - post-war Allied blockades starving Germans? But I think you're broadly correct that the hunger Germans experienced in the last year of the war was a very impactful historical trauma. I know how a similar hunger in '44-45 shaped the worldview of my grandfather. All questions of morality become mooted when you have a tangible sense of genuine food insecurity that most westerners can't even dream of. There have been a number of books written on exploring food insecurity as the driving cause of the mass violence in Eastern Europe from 1918-1945, (Black Earth by Timothy Snyder is one I've read), and I think it's a useful lens.
I would disagree that Hitler "held the best interests" of Germans at heart. He had a sort of egomaniacal view of Germans; they were great when they were bringing his visions to loftier heights, but when they proved unable to win the wars he started he was quite spiteful. He of course privately disparaged Christianity and various other traditional elements of German culture in private, but really I don't see how you can reconcile some unselfish love for the German people with his behaviour in 1944-45. He would've gladly condemned every last man, woman and child to oblivion for the failure to see through his designs.
(Also for the record the Soviets did not kill more people than the Nazis, let alone "so many more.")
Hitler seems to me, at heart, a very good father. If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate. The notorious Fourteen Words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — make the connection so explicit and unassailable that the Left dares not to look upon it.
Hitler was willing to send endless Germans to die in Russia for him. He was willing to very literally to throw the lives of young boys away so that he might live a few days more. He set Germany against the world in a crusade for his own vanity. You interpret his actions as being meant to save Germany, but no one more than him worked to bring about its destruction. It was his actions that literally split Germany in two. Hell, if not for the threat of the Soviets you hold as the real evil who knows how far the retribution might have gone; the Morgenthau Plan gives you an inkling of to what extremes the United States might have gone to to prevent the rise of another like him.
The grand irony is that you are projecting all these kindly, fatherly attributes on to Hitler as a contrast to your "degenerate" enemies in the present. Yes, those debased products of modernity whose faults you neatly list: childless, infertile, more caring to dogs than humans, emotionally unsuitable to raise a family, and not even respectful of borders! It was here especially that I was wondering whether this was one big prank, but because you didn't add that they were all short-tempered drug addicts convinced of their own intellectual superiority I figured you must be genuine.
johnfabian
1yr ago
My impression is that generally "the Holocaust" refers to the Nazi mass murder of Jews in general, with "Shoah" just being a Jewish term for the same.
When historians refer to the extermination camps exclusively they speak of "the Final Solution"; the period of mass executions prior to the establishment of the extermination camps I see frequently referred to as "the Holocaust/Shoah by bullets."
johnfabian
1yr ago
The "Holocaust" does not exclusively refer to Jews killed in concentration/extermination camps though. Roughly a similar number of Jews (~2.5 million) died in mass executions as were gassed to death. While it is true a relatively small number of non-Jews died within the camp system, if you wiped out the Holocaust from existence history's largest genocide would then be the German murder of Soviet POWs (roughly 3.3-3.5 million victims), and if you wiped out that it would be the German genocide of ethnic Poles (2-2.5 million victims)... either that or the genocide against non-Jewish Russians (which is difficult to get an exact bearing on in terms of numbers).
I've mentioned this before but Timothy Snyder provides a simple breakdown: when it comes to the mass murder of civilians in 20th century Europe, there are three prominent cases of roughly equal size: the Nazi murder of Jews, the Nazi murder of Slavs, and the Soviet murder of their own citizens. Whether or not you think the term "The Holocaust" should include both of the first two categories is a matter of debate. For the most part I think they are separate phenomenon and it is more useful for the term "Holocaust" to refer to exclusively Jewish victims.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Low stakes conspiracy theory: referees in the NHL (hockey) are instructed to deliberately make games more "competitive." They're not on the take or rigging it things for a certain team, but they are encouraged to keep things within distance, mainly by calling marginal penalties or not calling obvious penalties. You see it most obviously in the playoffs (it becomes near impossible to get a call for all but the most egregious infractions when approaching overtime), but it's present through the entire regular season as well. The strongest predictor of which team will get the next power play is who got the last power play.. Once your team is up a few goals, the power plays predictably disappear as well. The NHL uses various ways to enhance the "competitiveness" of the league which is one of its major selling points compared to other sports leagues, including a deliberately distortionary points system that ranks teams much closer together than it should. The only time an NHL ref has been suspended in recent history is when he accidentally said the quiet part out loud.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?
It's insurance against employee lawsuits for mistreatment. If Employee X complains about harassment of a sexual/racial/whatever nature from Employee Y, the company can say "well Employee Y went through mandatory sensitivity training for all these things. Obviously this is not a part of our corporate culture. We have no legal or moral responsibility for what happened."
There are true believers involved at various levels presumably, but it's a lot easier to be a true believer if your economic incentives align with it as well.
johnfabian
1yr ago
If you weren't aware, Reddit has disabled pushshift access. Reddit comments can no longer be archived or searched by external tools (after the date access was revoked).
johnfabian
1yr ago
if it takes seven coalitions to put you on St Helena you might've been pretty powerful
johnfabian
1yr ago
I went down to Florida a week ago to golf some. I was on the putting green before a round and overheard some boomers talking about the different guns they owned, and the conversation eventually shifted to the new Florida gun laws that allow permit-less CC (think someone joked "do you have a holster attachment on your bag?"). They were all dumbfounded as to why anyone would want someone with no firearms training to have guns on them in public, and couldn't understand the possible motives for passing such a bill.
The next day driving north I saw a random with a gun for the first time in my life on the interstate; two motorcyclists on a windy day (so their shirts were flapping up) with holsters on over their sweatpants (and no helmets).
johnfabian
1yr ago
time traveler who thought he was watching Charles II's coronation
johnfabian
1yr ago
I've wondered before whether the most "powerful" man in history was Napoleon; in the sense that he was the individual who had the most agency as both the ruler of a strong and rich country, and with effectively no internal institutions that were outside of his control/influence to oppose him.
johnfabian
1yr ago
The triple crises of 1793 seemed to be the tipping point - the simultaneous worsening of the wars against external enemies, the counter-revolutionary insurrection in the Vendée, and the federalist revolts in the provinces. These all put great pressure on the Revolution and at the same time confirmed all the deepest paranoias of the revolutionary élite: there was a grand conspiracy of royalists, priests, and double-faced revolutionaries. Up until that point all the invective thrown around between various political factions had more or less come to nothing: the great surge of denunciations in 1791 and 1792 and resulted in effectively almost no arrests or serious consequences for those accused except a general sense of fear and intimidation. When the Girondins and Jacobins would casually accuse each other of treason this did not manifest in any attempt to hold them to account; even during the September Massacres when various elements of the Paris Commune issued warrants of arrest for Girondin leaders they were not carried out. It was ultimately the mob that stormed the legislature on June 2 1793 and forced the first factional arrests, and even then the detained Girondin leaders were treated very well by their captors (who supposedly considered them arch-traitors). It was only after the further worsening of the various crises as well as assassinations of several prominent Montagnards (particularly Jean-Paul Marat's killing by a Girondin woman, the circumstances of which again suggested a vast conspiracy) that really kicked off the state-led internal violence. August and September 1793 were the key periods of escalation there as the State mobilized the entire population for the war effort, a phase of Total War directed both internally and externally.
johnfabian
1yr ago
The September massacres were spontaneous and the French government had no part in planning it (though the Parisian government did). It fit more in the pattern of this kind of spontaneous violence that the élites would then affirm as "regrettably necessary."
johnfabian
1yr ago
Emotions were always "high" among the larger mass of people; the poster below referenced the "Great Fear" which was a mass paranoia following the storming of the Bastille as an example. This kind of paranoia around "ordinary" property crime was very common around that time; France had experienced a series of bad harvests, inflation, and general privation leading up to and during the early years of the Revolution. There was a persistent economic desperation among the peasantry and urban poor that helped fuel more radical elements.
Among the revolutionary élites who were generally of the well-off middle class, Tackett argues it was the completely unexpected success and then rapid reforms of the Revolution that caused this sudden emotional heightening. It's hard to imagine for myself what it would've been like to live through if you had been born into a world that seemed fixed and unchangeable, and all of a sudden in a matter of months you had been able to mold it to your (very recently arrived at) worldview. There are quotes from various figures in that period of 89-90 (that Tackett constantly references as the "spirit of '89") of this general sense of euphoria and utopianism.
johnfabian
1yr ago
The book has a really well thought out world that it hints at but doesn't directly tell you about. When I first read LOTR, I was fascinated by these little glimpses of a larger world that the plot exists in (e.g. mentions of Fëanor), and it made me positively hungry to learn more. Which of course was by design - years later I read a bit where Tolkien talked about how he showed a bit of scenery on the horizon, so to speak, to make the reader curious what's over there and want to learn more. But this makes the book really interesting to me.
It is really something that blew my mind as a 9 year old; there are all these references in the text to some greater shared culture that the reader is not a part of. It makes it really feel like an alien world, that their touchstones are something unknown and unknowable to us. It's very much a contrast to other mediocre sci-fi/fantasy which often does a poor job of creating that second world, such that their cultural memory and way of speaking is still very much that of a person living in modern-day North America or Europe. You know, like when a character in the year 48032 speaks of "the 20th century band The Beatles". And it's just cooler when the text doesn't trip over itself to keep its reader in the know. 9 year old me thought it was really cool that the battering ram Grond was named after the "Hammer of the Underworld", but it was even more awesome that Tolkien then made no attempt to explain what that meant.
(Of course this was all largely accidental: Tolkien meant for The Silmarillion to be published alongside The Lord of the Rings so that all these unexplained references would be filled in by the accompanying backstories. But I think it ended up working great as it turned out)
johnfabian
1yr ago
As an unabashed and unrepentant Tolkien superfan, I will say that Fellowship takes off significantly once they get to Bree. If you're not there yet, definitely hold on.
What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?
It's a phenomenal tale told with beautiful prose. But really the core of the appeal of fantasy is of being transported to another place; to escape the dull, superficial reality we live in for a world that is suffused with magical unreality. Part of why Tolkien sits at the apex of the genre is that The Lord of the Rings depicts a world much grander than our own, shrunken and withered. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past when we greater than we are now. I think that people very keenly feel some loss of wonder and grandeur in the world, whether that loss be cultural, intellectual, environmental, and Lord of the Rings laments that loss in a very evocative way.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I'm reading The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution and I'll probably end up writing about it. Very fascinating history book in that it gives rather scant attention to the narrative history of the revolution (it kind of assumes you know the story) in order to focus mostly on the emotions of people during the Revolution. It's something I've idly thought might be an interesting approach before so to find it in the library and see it actually work is cool.
What makes the Czechoslovakia situation even worse in hindsight is that there was a good chance the Heer was going to launch a coup against Hitler if the western allies hadn't backed down. Not that anyone knew this at the time.
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