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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3954 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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https://samkriss.substack.com/p/live-from-the-hate-march

It was Armistice Day last weekend. One hundred and five years ago, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the First World War ended. They’re very pretty, all those upright ones. A good piece of trivia for schoolchildren to learn. But the armistice was actually signed at 5 am that morning, and to get that nice symmetrical figure the war had to keep going for six more pointless hours. The Germans had asked for hostilities to end immediately; they were refused. So shortly afterwards, an American unit tried to cross the Meuse under heavy fire. British artillery corps, reasoning that it would be more expensive to lug their shells home than to simply fire them all now, spent those last six hours unleashing one last hellish barrage up and down the German lines. French soldiers stormed occupied villages, and many of them died. Nearly three thousand men died on the 11th of November, considerably more than on any average day on the Western Front. Most of their graves say that they fell on the 10th instead. Better that than the indignity of dying for no reason, for no objective, for nobody’s advantage, to change nothing, in a war that was already over but still kept on churning, kept chewing through its victims, simply because war is what there was, and it needs no other justification than that. Those six hours were war in its purest form: no politics, just total sourceless hostility. The moment was coming when the people in the other trenches would simply get up and walk home, and to fire a shot at them would be murder—but right up until that moment, you could still get your sport or pleasure from pinching out a stranger’s life. Perform the rites of the White God. There were generals who wanted their last chance at glory; soldiers too. The last man to die was one Private Henry Gunther, an American. A few months previously, he’d been knocked down from sergeant for complaining about conditions on the front; he wanted to get his pips back, and he didn’t have long. Alone, he charged a German machine-gun nest with his bayonet. At first, the gunners tried to shoo him away. But he kept running at them, so in the very last minute of the war they shot him dead. Afterwards, his rank was posthumously restored and his corpse was issued a citation for gallantry in action, along with the Distinguished Service Cross. Maybe the worst thing about war is that sometimes, you really can get exactly what you want.

Mostly it's just great writing, but it doesn't belong in the main thread because I have nothing to add (edit: also, now that i've actually read the rest, it doesn't belong in the main thread anyway, and I don't agree at all, but it's insanely good writing). It almost seemed too grimly poetic to actually be mostly true - that was, initially, going to be my Small Scale Question, or maybe "is it misleading somehow" - but it checks out to like 2 minutes of research.

So, uh, genuine small scale question: If someone wants to post something here that doesn't quite fit into one of the themed threads, but where they can't muster a full toplevel post, where does/should it go? Are we missing a whole class of posts like that?

(The rest of the article is more directly CW about palestine protests, and also quickly devolves into lurid hallucinations)

It's idiotic because it's wrong. An armistice is a cessation of hostilities, that's all. The Armistice was not a permanent peace - it was initially only for a month and was extended multiple times when peace negotiations took too long. But then Sam Kriss was never one to let facts get in the way of a good story.

I think the point is that it was an obvious prelude to peace, and further fighting forseeably ended up accomplishing no military objectives whatsoever, which strongly implies pointless deaths that could've been easily averted.

Would that have been obvious to the men on the ground?

Attrition of the enemy was then, a valuable military objective, just as it is today in Ukraine. Would the Ukrainians really miss an opportunity to reduce the number of enemies?

From what I vaguely know and from skimming the wikipedia article, I'd guess that it was obvious to men on the ground, but not certain. So some fighting did happen because they wanted to push forward in case the war restarted, but it was obvious that wasn't the most likely outcome. Even granting that point, one can still blame the leaders, who had the option to pause earlier but chose not to. And it's not just my position that this wasn't necessary:

After the war, there was a deep shame that so many soldiers died on the final day of the war, especially in the hours after the treaty had been signed but had not yet taken effect. In the United States, Congress opened an investigation to find out why and if blame should be placed on the leaders of the American Expeditionary Forces, including John Pershing.[41] In France, many graves of French soldiers who died on 11 November were backdated to 10 November.[38]

and also quickly devolves into lurid hallucinations

I started reading it, and stopped when I got to that point. The basic idea seems to be sneering (in an extremely florid and ornate fashion) at people who have even the slightest amount of sympathy for the Israelis, which, okay, fine I guess, but it's not terribly interesting to read.

I disagree with enough of the content I've read that I've fully separated my appreciation of a joke/piece of writing/etc's technical merits from my appreciation of its accuracy. Also, it's quite fun, and very informative, to try and see if you can inhabit the mindset that produced stuff that's that wrong. This also (but less so) extends to other writing styles.

I get you, I can laugh at a joke even if I don't agree with the message underpinning it. E.g.:

Where does a mansplainer get his water?

From a well, actually...

I like some of the things Kriss has written, but this one just seemed a bit rambling, laboured and dull. I stopped reading for that reason, not because I disagreed with it.

This is a good spot. But yeah I loved this piece, it was quite entertaining.

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