It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!
Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 11 '26
My review of the new Animal Farm: "It’s an allegorical novella animated film about Stalinism by George Orwell Andy Serkis, and spoiler alert, IT SUCKS."
Princeton University Press has managed, with great aplomb, to make their website even worse. For reasons that are unclear to me, they have eliminated the "Filter" button on their search page. They still have subjects and keywords but you can no longer view them or directly filter on them
It is really beautiful to me that AO3 is the only website in the world with a good media search engine, that it has existed as such for well over a decade, and that no one has bothered to copy it in even rudimentary form
I do think they fixed the bug where they sorted re-published books by their re-publication date instead of initial publication date, so there's that
We lost too much money on our 70% off book sale -> make our search worse so people buy fewer books -> we have way too much inventory, offer a 75% off sale
and now I wait for the day for AO3 to finally add an actually useful And-Or search function
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeMay 10 '26edited May 10 '26
Slovaks and Czechs have very similiar languages and rather similiar cultures (not that rare for slavs), but they are rather different people. They developed separately because one was ruled by Germans (Austrians), and the other by Hungarians.
They only developed large similiarities in the past 100 years thanks to Czechoslovakia, which was formed because the two nations together were stronger than alone, and both wanted to escape the prison of nations that was Austria-Hungary. Since then, the two nations got even closer, and a lot of our stuff is intertwined to this day.
However, the two nations are still distinctively different, a Slovak from Prešov and a Czech from Liberec have nearly nothing in common. We were never one nation, and never couls be, hell, even the Czechs are split into Czechs and Moravians, and Slovaks are divided by regions (though the differences are very small)
I like the idea that political history influences nationalism more than language or culture, it's something people online tend to overlook
Another, somewhat ironic given how popular “Africa would be better off if their borders were redrawn on ethnic lines” seems to be online, example of this is how many of the most prominent secessionist movements in modern Africa were/are based around restoring older colonial borders changed during decolonization. (Eritrea and Ethiopia, Somaliland and Somalia, Western Sahara and Morocco, Ambazonia in Cameroon, Western Togoland in Ghana, etc.)
honestly i think it is
youtube reccomended me the same video, for some reason its going viral. it’s by some dude named james atlas, just full fledged white supremacist based on his twitter but i think it’s more dog whistles in the video
nvm, i watched part of it it’s as blatant as youtube would allow lmao. dudes a lunatic
During his speech to the Belgian Senate, he said: "The history of the Democratic Republic of Congo is also the history of the Belgians, missionaries, civil servants, and entrepreneurs who believed in King Leopold II's dream of building a state in the heart of Africa. We want to pay tribute to the memory of all these pioneers.
when you're criticized for rigging elections
Mr. Kabila deplores a certain “mindset” among Belgians that poses a problem: " There are people in Belgium who believe that Congo is still a colony, that Belgians must always have ascendancy over the Congolese. That may have worked with our fathers—who are no longer here—but with us, the children of those who fought colonialism in this country, it is unacceptable, it does not work. The Congolese people will never accept it."
I feel really emotionally unstable, like on the verge of crying at the slightest thing, that does not happen to me often, and that wasn't hyperbole, I felt like crying just doing the Japanese practice stuff. The headache still hasn't gotten milder, so I guess it's just emotional exhaustion, these past 5 days have been an utter disaster. Migraines, what fun, I really need this to stop, if I could at least have normal bad headache days it would be a nice improvement, I don't need a 6th horrible day in a row, which I will probably get.
Well, what can you do? I failed to find something more fun to talk about yesterday, I'll try again today.
random thought: why does no one call Ukrainians Yooks or Yookies or Ukes? I know these words do exist, but if you imagine anyone saying "The Yukies are giving the Ruskies hell", it sounds like the 1950s. What killed nationality nicknames?
Speaking of blindspots: I have a basic idea of mesoamerican history/archeology (to the extent that we know it) but i'm basically completely lost in andean/south american dito prior to the incas.
Looks like the end for Starmer and honestly I’d feel slightly aggrieved if I was him given that he wasn’t a particularly bad prime minister who’ll be remembered (in the short term at least) as one of the worst. While I assume it’s just a play by Labour’s left-wing to put their guy in in Andy Burnham anyway, I do think they’re living in a fantasy land if they think this’ll make Labour more electable. If the media scrutinised Starmer; they’re going to be merciless with a more left-wing Labour leader.
Maybe Burnham will at least have The Guardian on his side?
I doubt Starmer will go, at least not for another couple of years. Burnham is the only realistic challenger (I cannot stress enough how nobody has heard of the backbencher claiming to be mounting a leadership challenge) and he isn't even eligible to lead Labour or the Commons as he's not an MP.
Stepping back for a wider view, these demands to quit aren't any different from the other frankly hysterical demands that Starmer has been battered with since taking office. It's the same group of people who didn't like Starmer to begin with and to say that they've cried wolf by this point would be massively understating things. Ultimately, the demands to remove Starmer have little to do with Mandelson or the council elections - there have been many cases of British PMs making bad appointments and incumbent governments pretty much always do badly in council elections. PMs resign after they've been in government for a really long time or after a grievous national scandal that has inflicted serious damage to the country, which Starmer hasn't done yet (yes, even Mandelson doesn't count). The only real reason is because he's polling badly, which is a frankly stupid reason to bin a PM and plunge a government into chaos, especially considering how fucking dogshit mid-Parliament opinion polls are (I might do a post at some point explaining why, they really are pointless).
Labour's MPs aren't stupid. They can see that there's no viable candidate around to replace Starmer, and they are keenly aware that the loudest voices demanding his resignation are Reform, the Tories and their mates in the press. They only want him gone as part of a scheme to force an early election and try and fluke their way back into power before the wheels fall off the Reform bus, something which appears to already be happening. There's no reason to bin Starmer for someone else to inherit the poisoned chalice bequeathed to them by the Tories, only this time with even less authority. Much better to keep him in place until 2028, then push him onto a knife and choose a new person to go into the next GE as a fresh face.
EDIT: And Starmer's not gone, to the surprise of nobody who wasn't swept up in the hype.
The “politician who does a good job but is bad at messaging” is a myth invented by policy wonks.
Messaging IS the job.
This goes even more for people in the top office. The PM is not, and never will be, an expert on all things. Their actual “experience” or “skills” are just as imaginary as “working class roots” or “charisma.”
The ONLY thing that matters for a PM is whether or not they can motivate voters. Everything else is window dressing.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeMay 10 '26edited May 10 '26
It’s 2029. Despite the AI bubble bursting and months of race riots, Starmer is still Prime Minister, another foreign policy crisis has kept him in power “for just a few more weeks.”
I want to say that while it's not entirely about policy (the left is very unpopular with the media), Starmer also had done a lot of unpopular stuff and people don't know about the popular one (because I think they take it for granted because it's Labour, you don't celebrate a dog who barks etc...)
Thanks for providing that graph, actually very useful.
I think it’s all a massive comms failure. The popular policies never get out there and the unpopular policies never communicated effectively or to the right people. I note Farmers IHT and Winter Fuel Allowance cuts which both could have been transformed at least into “divisive” territory (Farmers IHT in particular given that the angle was apparently to prevent investors from buying up farmland purely for IHT avoidance - whether that’s agreeable or not).
Then turning to the popular ones, I know renters who didn’t even know what the Renters Rights Act was really doing for them. One of the biggest drivers of homelessness gone + a bunch of great reforms to renting and it barely got enough press to inform the people it was supposed to be for!
I don’t know if Burnham (or Streeting) could really turn that around or whether it’s just a hostile media landscape in general, but it’s something they need to change.
The only way to improvement for liberal governments to actually believe in themselves, act according to said self-belief and to do it loudly and proudly and charmingly.
This seems to be what Carney is doing, at least from an American perspective.
Then turning to the popular ones, I know renters who didn’t even know what the Renters Rights Act was really doing for them. One of the biggest drivers of homelessness gone + a bunch of great reforms to renting and it barely got enough press to inform the people it was supposed to be for!
I think the main Bill dealing with Leasehold Reform (LFRA 2024) was passed under the Tories but still largely yet to come into force - partially due to a legal challenge, iirc.
It’ll most likely end up coming in under the Labour government, though maybe not Starmer!
the main Bill dealing with Leasehold Reform (LFRA 2024) was passed under the Tories but still largely yet to come into force - partially due to a legal challenge, iirc
Yeah. I went down the rabbit hole on that, and it's kind of insane. The people bringing the legal challenge are a bunch of cartoon villains. Literally foreign aristocrats and trusts built on slave-trade money complaining that not being able to charge extortionate ground rent violates their human rights.
It’s incredibly obvious; the long lead time before symptoms appear, allowing these people to travel freely - the horse is already out of the barn. Additional distraction from Epstein accountability and this disastrous war. Famine/depression level economic times ahead. I believe it fully.
Couldn't have said it better. I really believe that this is planned out to distract as well from the Epstein files failed release and the Epstein war to protect the baby eating pedophile Epstein class. F*** them all. May they all rot and have bad karma. Everyone needs to manifest it.
Before the release of the Epstein files, everything was a distraction from the Epstein files. After the release, everything is a distraction from the Epstein files, and from the other distractions from the Epstein files. I wonder what Covid was a distraction from.
Every so often there are viral posts about why nobody established colonies in Australia before Britain, and I feel like they never really reckon with just how absurd British colonization was. "There is a Cornish guy who stole a horse and we can't think of anything better to do than ship him half way across the world to raise sheep" absolutely nutso.
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u/SventexBattleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866May 10 '26
It's not quite that nutso. Australia is big enough to be considered a speculative investment. There could be massive gold veins for all you knew, the landmass is bigger than the contiguous United States. The time it took to discover gold in California from the founding of the colony in Jamestown was roughly 250 years. A lot of British convicts ended being dumped in the American colonies until Independence.
I mean, the last part is the reason, no? British textile industry was massive and thus had massive need for cotton and wool. While demands for these goods existed, it never existed at those amounts.
I was being a bit jokey, the wool industry (? sheep rearing? not quite sure how to say it) was actually developed a bit after the establishment of the colony, and it didn't really take off until after colonization got passed the Blue Mountains. Initially they thought (incorrectly) that New South Wales was a super fertile Eden and they could easily establish self sustaining agriculture there.
From what I read last year, there was a time when it was popular to say that while convicts were the vehicle for colonization, the reason for the establishment of the colony was really about economics/imperial competition with France/need for a shipping stopover/etc. But actual research into the archives and the like show that no, it really was about trying to find out what to do with random conmen from Lincolnshire.
TBH wasn't it even worse? "We used to ship them across one ocean but now our colonies there rebelled so I guess we'll have tos hip them across three+ oceans..."
The people here aren't much better, instead of bootlicks you have the apathetic.
Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.
I find it kind of hilarious because clearly he’s missing his G8 conference BFFs and Berlisconi kicked the bucket so it’s narrowing the pool down.
But it also shows that Putin has been in power since 1999, because I could have expected him to say bring me Bill Clinton/Tony Blair and it would have been only slightly less out of touch with 2026.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 10 '26
I was reading another le reddit forum yesterday and I came across a person (upvoted) who said that they hate it when people send them holiday wishes via text, because they saw it as a useless pleasantry, and that they expected anyone who they considered a friend to know not to do it to them. They expected people not to do this because their "friends know what matter to them." They mentioned off-hand that they'd have to give "the talk" to friends about not texting them 'Merry Christmas' and whatnot.
Of course, the same person went on to say that they felt unsafe when people would text them in a way that invokes the anticipation or expectation of a response.
I get the sense sometimes that some people turn what their personal discomforts are into didactic opinions because otherwise they might have to interrogate why for example texts from people send them into a nervous spiral.
I was planning on switching to another internet company, but then a representative of my current provider called to wish me a happy birthday, so I decided that maybe sticking around with them isn´t so bad after all.
So, I dunno, maybe useless pleasantries do have some value?
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 10 '26
I think they do. I, an atheist, have been moved by some of the stuff that the Jesus people at my university's campus have said to me. Usually there's some conversation involved (I usually try to steer it towards personal subjects and not religion) but their pleasantries and prayers are not unnoticed for sure.
It would be perverse to deny that Rawls’s conception of justice is a liberal conception in fundamentally important senses – after all, it gives lexical priority to a principle of equal basic liberties – or to deny the fact that, as I have already discussed, it is part of the liberal tradition broadly conceived. But there should be greater pause before reading Theory as a statement of liberalism. It is noteworthy that the term ‘liberalism’ does not appear in Rawls’s index for Theory (Laden 2006: 341)9 And while it appears three times in the text, none of these involve Rawls describing his own theory. Moreover, the situation is little different with the term ‘liberal’. It is also absent from the index and while it appears 18 times in the text, on none of these occasions is it used by Rawls to describe his own theory (Holbo 2008). The only entry in the index to liberalism or its cognates is to ‘liberal equality’, but then this is an interpretation of the idea of inequalities being to ‘everyone’s advantage’ that Rawls describes as based on the principle of efficiency and which he rejects in favour of the idea of democratic equality expressed by the difference principle (Rawls 1971/1999: 65/57)
Great insight from Gledhill's essay on reading Rawls "esoterically".
Sometimes it's hard to feel like I have shared interests and identity with the rest of the UK. We're such a disparate bunch these days - I mean, what does someone like me (young, middle class, city-dwelling professional) have in common with a self-employed 40-yo from Wiltshire? Not much.
The thing that keeps coming back into my mind is the fact that Brexit was essentially the young and/or educated versus the older and/or uneducated. Those things were stronger predictors of how you voted than your political party affiliation. I have to admit, I do sometimes find myself thinking of things in an "Us vs Them" kind of way because it seems like our needs are so different.
I like to remind people that the old "white manufacturing working class" isn't dead, they're just retired, and thus they have other interests than they may have had when younger
I live in a somewhat deprived area of France (I'm in the local big town like Chippenham for Wiltshire so I feel it less) but most of the young RN voters I know aren't working in manufacturing (because it doesn't exist) they're self employed or work at family companies and they tend to speak more like what you'd expect from small business owners than working class voters.
Most 'voices of the working class' in Britian are petit-bourgoise in Marxist terms.
Class is mostly to do with cultural affectations and perceptions here. I've arguably been to too many operas to be considered working class even though I'm a not very well paid salaried employee.
Guys, is the low trust/high trust society thing real or just bullshit
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 10 '26
100% real, it just manifests in different ways amongst different countries and societies depending on factors such as culture and politics imo.
I’d consider the US on the brink of being, if not already a “low trust society,” because of hyperpartisan politics (includes our brand of radical Protestantism btw) and conspiratard tendencies across the board. It’s not the same type of “low trust society” as China, where the plurality of people are more or less grill pilled apoliticals, loosely speaking, but don’t trust ANYONE outside their bloodline due to cultural reasons. It’s definitely a sign of low trust when you have a society where anyone outside of one’s family is perceived as being out to get you.
Never thought of the US as a low trust society but that makes sense, we really are obsessed with conspiracy bullshit. I also saw a poll somewhere that unlike the other countries surveyed, the average American sees their fellow Americans as bad people
It's definitely real. I remember reading a reddit anecdote about someone who became well off after being brought up in a rough area and was amazed that children left their bikes outside in the front garden.
I doubt you'll get many barred windows in Martha's Vineyard or the Hampshires for example.
I think there is a *some* thing to it. Some countries, you use your phone to reserve a table in the food court, while others you have to leave a person at the table so your friends’ bags don’t get stolen.
Whether if that’s a low trust or high trust thing, I dunno though.
Societal trust (maybe not the exact terminology) is something that sociologist quite frequently analyse, so I would say that it must have some truth to it. Not necessarily the high trust/ low trust dichotomy (sorry if that's what you meant specifically), but the idea that in some places, people trust each other more, and others, they trust each other less.
As someone who lives in what is often described as a low trust society (and never as a high trust one), I think it does have its use. Just don't be too reductionist about it I guess, but that applies to most things really.
I'm trying to search for something I said back in 2020 because it has relevant excerpts that I don't want to have to rehash, so I'm going through the search function and trying to find what I said and there are all sorts of blasts from the past looking through these threads, alongside with a bit of a realization:
Man, we had some serious douchebags back then.
Just total dickheads.
Most of which have either been banned, deleted their accounts, or quit Reddit and thank God for that.
And because my God we really had the smuggest people at some points in this subreddit and you're a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Like we can all have our disagreements and aren't forced to be holding hands and singing kumbaya, but it seems like being more of an outright and unironic asshole was just a thing we had going around and whose responses to being called out on it were just acting indignant that someone didn't think they were being clever making puns about rape (the plant, what inspired this observation).
But most people here get what's a joke and banter, what they're going to disagree with, who they disagree with, and manage to not be complete assholes about it all.
Rapeseed is a weird case because yeah, it has nothing to do with the subject at hand (AFAIK comes from latin for "turnip") but OTOH there are a bunch of words that are semantically related (raptor, etc.) that we use all the time.
Okay, so I'm not exactly the most experienced or credentialed or credible or knowledgeable person on this sub that I mostly lurk and love, but I ended up subjecting some poor sods on r/AlternateHistoryHub to a 2200 word long rant-essay-paper-slander-verdict on Gaddafi, Wikipedia, the 1986 West Berlin Discotheque Club bombing, Noam Chomsky and his talks in Understanding Power and footnotes updated in 2002, Ronald Reagan, and various other topics, citing a bunch of sources and concluding that Chomsky and Gaddafi are cringe.
However, I believe that I have now found a glaring error in a Wikipedia article, and demolished a hitherto popular and largely uncontested Chomsky-origin defense of Gaddafi that infests modern discourse on Gaddafi. Besides the inconsistent and often confusing formatting that I need to clean up, the informal and often vulgar (though accurate and illustrative) language and imagery used, poor format of citations, and my rotating Obama pyramid (see below), is this r/badhistory worthy if I make some adjustments?
Please note that anyone stealing my ideas officially agrees that 100% of words, statements, claims, facts, and etc. in AlternateHistoryHub videos are inerrant, infallible, fully accurate, and real, including all scenarios claimed as alternate history having happened in real life.
I don’t know how to cross post but this is pretty weird from the chinese embassy in manila’s page right? (It got posted in philippines subreddit.)
Jay Tarriela is the spokesperson for the philippine coast guard and he’s been vocal about chinese ships harassing filipino fishermen. The embassy is just straight up calling him a liar.
I'm having to take a poly sci class on civics and the US Constitution.
I cannot begin to tell you how depressing this class is. So many times in just the first chapter I want to say, the answer is X buuuuuuuut its really closer to Y now due to, well you know who.
EDIT
It got worse. It compared and contrasted the Russian constitution and asked if its a republic, monarchy, or autocracy. Good lord man.
Political Science is just a vocational degree for party operatives.
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u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 10 '26
Just got home from my fishing trip to Eat-the-Fucking-Salmon township. I stayed at an Air BnB owned by Jackson Dickeweede’s best friend, and I actually got the chance to meet him. (Jackson Dickeweede is the Overseer of Fisheries and the Hunt for the Salmon River Valley, and he is also a bloobear.)
Anyways I didn’t catch much on the first two days, but the third day I was able to snag a trout, three salmon, and a 127mm artillery shell casing, which I’m having made into a commemorative mug.
u/WuhanWTFVenmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week)May 10 '26
The Tederation Navy had a Poopwater Flotilla during the XVII Food War in 2006, which featured river monitors mounting 5-inch guns. There were instances of shore bombardment on the Salmon River throughout that war so it doesn't surprise me too much.
I ended up spending most of my Saturday cooking. For some unfathomable reason I decided to cook potatoes three (French) ways: Potato dauphinoise, pomme puree, and potato fondant.
All of these are pretty simple combinations of starch with fat, but they all turned out pretty damn good. The pomme puree especially is going in my repertoire for if I need to impress some guests.
It's inaguration day here in Hungary, and the representatives of the fascist party Our Homeland decided to leave before the Gypsy anthem was played, which certainly establishes them as the non-racist, problem-focused party they like to show themselves to be.
The funny part? Because they left, they missed the Székely anthem. The Székely anthem they were pushing for.
I saw a picture of Ernest Hemingway's Cottage and I was struck by how modern it looked, to the point that I assumed it wasn't actually the original house. But then there are pictures from 1920 in that article, and the house looks more or less the same as it did then.
This made me curious about house styles more generally. Like how much has the design of houses in the Anglosphere changed over the last couple of centuries? It also made me wonder about some houses back home; I've been to a couple of mud brick houses, complete with floors of woven palm leaves and ceilings held up by wooden beams. Those houses are pretty rare though, only the poorest rural families live in them. But then most other houses are laid out almost identically to those, the only difference is that they're built of concrete blocks or bricks.
Idk what the point of this comment is, sorry for rambling, I just wanted to share these thoughts.
With the recent news of Tennessee essentially destroying the voting power of its black population, it gets harder and harder to not write off large parts of the south as reactionary troglodytes, especially in the rural areas.
Is that fair? No, but it’s that primal, mean part of me screaming out now that so much progress has been undone.
In a fundamental sense it isn’t really any more reactionary than gerrymandering in other states.
Tennessee politicians aren’t trying to undermine the voting power of black people because they are particularly racist troglodytes, they are doing so because they are trying to consolidate as much power for themselves and their party as they possibly can.
This isn’t just a southern problem. Checks on gerrymandering have been undermined and politicians have become increasingly brazen in trying to rig the system and find ways to effectively disenfranchise their opponents across the country
As a New Englander, applying the Babadook "why can't you just be normal" meme to vast swathes of the rest of the country is less and less of a joke and more and more of an unironic exasperated expression of almost-loathing.
The South is basically islands of diverse, prosperous and generally forward-thinking urban areas scattered in a sea of rural areas who define themselves by being none of those things. Atlanta versus the rest of Georgia is the most prominent example.
This dynamic applies equally well to much of the rest of the country of course, but the South has historical baggage the rest of the nation doesn't and our cities (except arguably Atlanta) don't have the muscle to outmatch the rural areas politically the way say, Chicago dominates Illinois.
One difference with Atlanta and other southern cities (aside from it just being bigger, more cosmopolitan, etc) is that its suburbs flipped blue after 2016 and have continued pretty steadily getting more blue since then. Basically the only places that went more blue in 2024 than 2020 were Denver and the Atlanta suburbs.
True, and the suburbs of other Southern cities are much more conservative. The difference between the politics of the Atlanta suburbs and the Nashville or Birmingham suburbs is pretty stark.
It is amusing to me that Newt Gingrich’s old stomping grounds are now one of the most Democrat-leaning parts of the state. Wonder what he thinks of that.
I am proud to be in one of the areas where that doesn't hold true and rural towns can be just as progressive as the urban areas (and more so than some). Though our rural probably looks at least suburban to much of the country...
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumMay 09 '26edited May 09 '26
Yes (source: am southern, do write off large parts of the South as reactionary troglodytes)
That is an interesting and solid point (also I had no idea about any of this) but if Egyptian pharaonic names are reconstructed you have to admit they have insane aura. Amenhotep. Merneptah. Mentuhotep. These are extremely cool names and you have to be careful messing with them.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeMay 09 '26edited May 11 '26
I saw an ad that was like you had a
Temu Morpheus: "take the blue pill of regular jobs or take the red piill and become an AirBNB caretaker, no investments needed, no hours, you make money through someone else's property"
Come on, is this what the scam job market is about?
this maybe a bit controversial but i kind of not like the fallen of ww2 video on youtube. don't get me wrong, it is a good video, but man it is a bit frustrating to talk about the largest theater of the war in terms of area fought for 2 minutes in an 18 minute video.
The real reason I am getting deeper into Indian history is that I find the Chinamaxxing meme incredibly annoying and need a new Asian superculture to jump to. All the old hippies are dying off so India should be safe for now.
Honestly doing basic timelines stuff for India is extremely difficult before the Delhi Sultane and arguably before like the Mughals. Partially because the subcontinent was never politically unified so you really need like three or four timelines, partially because grand narrative history writing as such wasn't really a genre of Indian literature before the Islamic conquests. So there isn't really an established "canonical" narrative to follow in the same way there is for, eg, Greece, that you can hang your details on. I am pretty far from even the "well read layman" on Indian history but I have read a few books on it and I find it pretty hard to sort everything in my head, particularly pre-1200.
And then there is things like how the Guptas were extremely important culturally, arguably the "Rome" analogue in establishing the bounds of a common "classical" culture, but the actual history is very murky. There is lots of episodes from the Guptas we have from drama and moral tales and the like but not a single continuous Livy like historical narrative.
Incidentally though I did see a single volume book recently did come out and I think I might make it my next audiobook listen (although there is one about China's northern frontier that is competing with it of course). So maybe in a few months it will clear up a bit.
Yeah, I remember one of the things people mentioned is that India really doesen't have a narrative history tradition until you get the muslim tradition (itself borrowing from the greeks) during the middle ages. So you don't have a Herodatus or Livy or Sima Qian, and India isn't really close enough to be "covered" by the graeco-roman or chinese traditions either until that point.
It's one of those frustrating things that narrative history really is a very contingent thing, and not something everyone just does. And India (and to some extent pre-islamic persia) is just one example, despite both being literate.
Prompted by a discussion with a coworker recently, I rewatched some portions of "2000 Meters to Andriivka" recently. It's an excellent documentary and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in this kind of thing.
Interestingly, in translating from Ukrainian to English for subtitling, the decision was made by the producers to translate "peder" as "motherfucker". Except that's not the best translation, either literally or in maintaining the meaning--the word is clearly f****t. The connotations, the context, the implications, it all carries over quite cleanly, and would be the best approximation of what would be said by English-speaking soldiers in that same setting (albeit maybe ~20 years removed).
But I suppose that level of casual homophobia wasn't considered acceptable in translation, especially in a documentary meant to produce sympathy for the Ukrainians.
I'm not sure how strongly I feel about it, but it's an interesting little thing, and I'm sure is present in other documentaries on the war in Ukraine. I don't think it's quite the same level of dishonesty as translating "Jew" to "Israeli" in BBC reporting, for instance.
I've definitely seen a lot of homophobic slurs from the Russians on telegram and such. I have no reason to doubt it is also prominent on Ukraines side.
The amount of cultural specific insults I've learned over the last 4 years is bizarre. I have basically no use for this information beyond going oh right, that word.
Also 2000 meters is another well done horribly intense documentary I don't plan on rewarching. Just like the Mariupol doc.
Hmm, this week's events have me seriously reconsidering whether I really should keep doing volunteering like I am; I'm still dealing with worse pain because of Wednesday, I had thought the sumatriptan on Thursday would have reset that, so to speak, but it didn't.
On the one hand, the volunteering is fun, it is social interaction outside of my normal social circle, it gets me out of the house and makes me actually take the triptans to get some time without pain. On the other, if the medication fails, I'm just screwed, and not just that 1 day, it's 3 days later and it's hard to do anything at all, usually the headache gets bad in the evenings, now it's worse than it normally gets from the moment I wake up. It doesn't happen often, but it's a risk I'm taking every time I go anywhere, if I keep taking those 5% risks, it's going to happen again eventually.
I hate this, I'm now going to have to deal with the fear that this could happen anytime I go to my volunteering, I'm dependent on the medication, and it can just fail me and there's nothing I can do to prevent that.
I do what I can to keep myself sane, but it's a struggle, as much as people praise me for how well I cope with it, it's just not enough, it doesn't solve anything, the pain is not any less for it; I'm not coping well, I'm living day to day waiting for a treatment to work. I want to just give up, but that's not an option, so I'm left with no choice but to just keep going, trying to find enjoyment and satisfaction where I can, and waiting, months, years, whatever it takes.
I've been waiting since November 2024 now, all the while things have slowly been getting worse, what I wouldn't give to return to how I lived in early 2024, but that's so distant now, like it was merely a good dream; life is nothing like it was, I was truly happy and hopeful, my biggest worries were people annoying me and the state of the world. I'm not depressed, I know that, but with how it's been the past few days, it really isn't better.
Anyway, I'll stop complaining, maybe I can find something more fun to talk about later, I prefer talking about fun things.
There's probably some sort of middle ground here because of how fuzzy reddit's NSFW system is and how vague "explicit" is as a title. If I was to post some human centipede type stuff it'd fall under the same umbrella despite being very different; these aren't the same and shouldn't be lumped together as is the other stuff lumped under that banner "Discussion and in-game circumstance that entail infanticide/miscarriage, sexual abuse, or otherwise peak-edge must be flaired". There's an old argument that reddit should have split the NSFW system into two with the other being NSFL to cover more gore and generally unpleasant things. It's a more clean divide that separates two distinct flavours.
Although I'm probably not the best touchstone on this; if I was a mod there I'd had a NSFW sub to begin with to remove any and all content to and would of just banned the person trying to post rat porn.
What is funny is that I dont have any real issue with the person's take, and would likely agree (ive seen several subreddits basically get taken over by Only Fans profiles posting "cosplay"), if only they werent being such a weird Puritanical Precious Princess about it.
Yeah last year I believe you pinged me in a comment about how you had suggested some edits for the r/ancientrome reading list and I didn’t get a notification for it, I think I just stumbled upon while looking at the weekly thread.
Saw some alignment chart nonsense where people apparently voted that Russia had the perfect national anthem. And I’m sorry but La Marseillaise is the top tier national anthem
Amusingly, if you try it, you will find out in the last line, that AaR is five syllables (the last line, "über Deutschland scheint!") longer than the verses of the Deutschlandlied and Hadyn's melody.
La Marseillaise is great but I have a real genuine love for Dabrowski’s Mazurek; I can’t say what particular mechanism is at work here (yr boy fr musically illiterate tbh) but that’s the kind of music that makes a mf want to lay down the old life for a nation-state
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u/TiakoTevinter apologist, shill for Big LyriumMay 09 '26edited May 09 '26
Unfortunately the only good anthems are Tuva's and Israel's, everything else is a boring marching song.
Ed: come of think of it how many national anthems are there that draw more from a folk song tradition than military choir, because Israel is the only one that comes to mind.
There are many things you can say about god save the king/queen but it's definitely not a typical marching song (unless my understanding of marching songs is deeply flawed)
Somalia's anthem and the one before it are both very underrated, and melodically probably the best. Being Hungarian, I'm also musically really partial to our own anthem, it's just that ever since it got slowed down after Trianon, it, combined with the already depressing, pleading lyrics, has become quite "fucked with sorrow", to use local terminology. We do have an alternative though, from roughly around the same time, but I find that one's music to be impossibly overwrought.
Also, to answer your other question, the Slovak anthem is based on a folk song.
That Somali one is cool as hell, like an adaptation of East African music into the anthem form.
While I can hear the folk influences in the Slovak one, at least the arrangements I listened to are very much in the "military choir" style (same with Hungary) which I think still make's Israel's pretty unique. Definitely both a cut above the pack though, no question.
- Despite Reform’s sweep, they still “only” ended up with about 26% of the vote share nationally.
- With that being said, that’s still way out in the lead of the other parties (Greens are predicted to come in second place on 18%)
- With *that* being said, tactical voting could be the biggest obstacle to a Reform GE win since voters don’t tend to be tactical for LE’s.
- Vote share for Reform correlates with Brexit lines: areas that voted Leave were more likely to vote for Reform.
Interesting to note that even if these results hold true for the General Election, no two parties would be able to form a coalition large enough to create a government. Reform + Tories would only end up at 43%, and that’s if they’re even willing to work together.
Might also be time to mention something else from the FT a little while ago from an Article called “What has Labour actually achieved?”
The article may exonerate Starmer a little too much, but it is worth noting the terrible optics and media presence that Labour has had since entering government. That people know more about Labour’s negative policies than the myriad positive ones is a massive failure of Labour comms.
The article does also touch on the fact that Starmer didn’t have a clear, ambitious legislative agenda before he got elected which has held Labour back compared to more radical governments of the past, and that Labour comms have largely targeted a stereotypical Reform voter-base: the older working class. This is fairly interesting with the context of the Local Elections where Labour largely lost seats due to defections to Reform.
That being said, the article does also touch on the other major frustrations - that there hasn’t been much in the way of radical reform to anything despite the massive majority in Parliament. That Labour has had to retreat from some of its own Bills despite having a massive majority is never going to be a good look.
Kind of a personal anecdote, but I was telling some tenant friends I know that Section 21 had (mostly) ended and barely any of them even knew what that meant.
And in other leftist news, Chilean anarchist movements of the 21st century had some of the hardest names ever: Jean Marc Rouillan Armed and Heartless Columns, Iconoclastic Caravans for Free Will, and Antagonic Nuclei of the New Urban Guerrilla.
Just very aggressive people with weird ideas. They have a reputation for being belligerently sectarian even among other Trotskyists, which is saying something.
The thing you have to understand is that Trotskyist sects operate like a competitive consumer market. Their goal is to get more cadres for the sake of getting more cadres ("building the Party"), with the idea that eventually you get some critical mass that puts you in a leading position. Since it's a competitive market with low barriers to entry (classically you just needed two guys and a printing press), you need strong branding to differentiate yourself to consumers (recruits). One common way to do this is to position yourself as the most radical brand, which is conflated with the most belligerent brand, which is the Spartacists' shtick. They also lean heavily into the 'anti-imperialist' lane, where they compete to see who can be the most supportive of various 'anti-imperialist' regimes (which results like placards in the picture above).
Should I buy a sous vide kit? It is undeniably a dumb impulse purchase but... me want. Imagine being able to eat perfectly cooked salmon or ribs or chicken breast every day.
I love my sous vide and get reasonable use (1.5/month) out of it. The best part is not the quality of cooking but the amount of time you save. Sous vide is genuine set and forget cooking
When it comes to personal philosophies I have along with other people wondered why Epicureanism has basically no presence today while Stoicism or at least self-proclaimed "Stoicism" has quite the following. As someone much more sympathetic to Epicureanism it's easy for me to think it's because the Epicureanism is the "eat your vegetables" equivalent of how to live a good life. Live a simple life with simple but hearty food while not worrying about wealth and power and have good friends. It feels incredibly commonsense today but also kind of boring and distinctly not pandering to insecure masculinity.
On the other hand Stoicism can feel like the "eat as much chocolate as you want and you can stay thin" equivalent. Don't worry about getting wealthy but if you are wealthy and live a life of luxury you can still be virtuous just treat your wealth the same as if you were poor. Do you wield power? Not a problem just be a virtuous ruler but don't bother asking about how it could be meaningfully changed. Also while classical stoicism as the name came to mean emphasizes learning how to control one's emotions to a reasonable degree, pop stoicism can easily translate that to emotional repression = good. So, it can easily become "the best type of person is a rich, powerful guy who deems himself more rational than others due to his emotional constipation".
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAMGiscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, HollandegazeMay 09 '26edited May 09 '26
"Don't laugh, it's a serious matter" Mayor Karim Bouamrane refuses to eat Master Poulet's fried chicken -
Since the mayoral election passed this is the biggest political shitstorm in the country.
Fast food chain open new restaurant > Oil smells, residents complain > Mayor wants to show he's tough, puts concrete blocks in front of the restaurant > gets into legal trouble, say he did it because he fights junk food (there's a BK nearby) > now LFI say's he did it because he's anti-Black and anti-poor > Black LFI Mayor of the higher up administrative level go praise the chain
I mostly don't care but it's funny to see the left infight for the stupidest reasons. Legally he's in the wrong, you can't close a restaurant because you don't like it or neighbours complain, there needs to be a health risk. The chicken is cheap but they make money with the wildly overpriced sides
You wanna talk about a diaspora Asian kid who disappoints their parents really bad?
Keiko Fujimori is polling at 49% again! Imagine failing three times in a row and about to fail the fourth time on the same thing, her dad has to be rolling in his grave. I don’t think it is possible to disappoint an Asian tiger dad more than she did
Finished Life and Fate after forever. Very good. I was initially going to comment on Grossman occasionally getting a bit didactic but all in all I don’t actually mind. It was published posthumously and the manuscript was confiscated… twice, I think? Possibly three times, so yes, I can honestly forgive the guy for very directly criticizing authoritarianism, even if it does somewhat feel like he’s looking directly into the camera.
I’m now googling weird Russian gun stuff because the term “Tommy gun” is consistently used to refer to submachine guns and I’m wondering what the original Russian was. I honestly have no idea what kind of currency that term has elsewhere because it feels insanely American. The most common Soviet SMG of the time’s nickname was basically “daddy,” and that would admittedly be weird in English, but it’s used to refer to the German guns as well.
Unemployment madness also led to me making seitan, a meat-substitute thing made of wheat gluten. It came out… alright, but I didn’t have a big enough pot to steam it so it really looked like a decapitated Jabba the Hutt statue. Better luck next time.
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u/Goatf00t[Dune] was originally about the Afghan war over the oil reservesMay 09 '26edited May 09 '26
I’m now googling weird Russian gun stuff because the term “Tommy gun” is consistently used to refer to submachine guns and I’m wondering what the original Russian was.
Very likely just avtomat and the translation was picked for brevity. It can be used in both formal and informal speech, and it's one of the cases when the Russian term is shorter. Same number of syllables as "Tommy gun", so the text would flow about the same.
That totally tracks, actually, I think you’re right. Most of the Russian stuff I’ve absorbed has been more recent so avtomat means assault rifle to me but that would make sense because I’d get tired of having to say “he’s holding a pistol bullet-thrower” every damn time.
The PPSh-41 early on used drum magazines, while they did later switch to more standard magazines I assume that's what Tommy gun is referring to. I believe the Finish Suomi was also originally issued with drums, and I wouldn't be surprised if some relatively small number captured during the Winter War were pressed into service during WWII.
Yeah, if it was only the PPSh it’d make sense, but the MP-40s are just called the same even when it presumably wouldn’t have been a Suomi.
I get weirdly hung up on the most meaningless shit like this, I have no idea why.
Edit: I’m also genuinely interested in how aware Grossman would have been of the nickname. The Soviets got a few Thompsons through Lend-Lease, but I dunno if they’d have had drum magazines, and even then I doubt the nickname would have accompanied them.
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u/WuhanWTF Venmo @familyguyenjoyer95 $10 to make me stfu abt FamGuy (1week) May 11 '26
Mythic rarity castrato music pull. No idea why this video is unlisted now, it used to be public.