you may be getting lost in the weeds if you’re thinking about the fichtean ‘thesis antithesis’ thing. for an easy understanding it’s basically just the idea that nothing exists in a vacuum - things are always affected by something else. this just means looking at contradictions and context first, so the example you used of capitalist to feudal lord is an example of dialectics but its not necessarily limited to that sort of thing, more the understanding that things tend not to happen ‘just because’.

tensegrity is a pretty useful irl example imo of the role of contradiction in a lot of systems if you’re confused about that too.

iirc a lot of the board were ea people. anthropic is a good example of what oai would look like if they sutskever/board faction had won.

‘the ick’ seems to just mean ‘neurodivergent person did something neurodivergent’ when i see it used colloquially tbh

the US MIC has been jerking itself raw to ODS for 30 years now and they still think that high tech wunderwaffen are how peer wars are won because (?)

i literally never took notes throughout the entirety of my formal education process so whilst you probably shouldn’t do what i did it’s pretty possible to have postgrad qualifications without being a ‘good’ student. idk, i just couldn’t be bothered to write shit that seemed pretty self-evident from inference personally.

this is fucking hilarious, do people really not see how vapid and meaningless most of the slop generated by language models is? especially regarding any ‘advice’ applications XD

uh sweaty no minority could ever be against biden, only online white teenager tankies are against him.

im as cishet as they come, but does anyone else feel like we’re too sexualised? how are the gays ever going to accept us if we’re so hypersexualised? you know i just really feel like it’s pushing our movement backwards being so open about it

it was about nationalism and national identity. centring fascism and turning it into a parable about liberal democracy’s failings is a really bizarre editorialisation of what happened. what reason did citizens of the protectorate have to vote for joining france/continuing the mandate? fascist or not, that plebiscite was always going to end in a return to germany.

fwiw i agree with this, viewing great power competition as the default of inter-state relations is basically the closest to ‘imperialist realism’ if what ‘imperialist realism’ means is the assumption that states always do antagonistic/competitive actions to further hegemonic aims, which is more or less what people mean when they say ‘imperialism has always been a thing’.

GGST

the worst part is they could easily have just said it’s been a while since we last operated a battleship and the people who knew are gone so there’s a learning curve, and that would have been a plenty acceptable excuse.

telling a naval officer from the 30s we have 100000 ton nuclear powered capital ships and turning away blinking the tears off when they ask how big the main guns are

there’s a pretty reasonable moral angle here about the utilitarianism behind that argument if they’re not going to budge on the ‘nukes saved lives’ thing which is already a contentious assertion, if you want to think about that.

i’m not sure exactly how one is meant to quantify ‘lives saved’ or even be able to conclude that the nukes were a net ‘save’ in lives, and obviously part of that calculus is making a value judgement on the lives of american soldiers vs japanese civilians that should be pretty problematic if you examine that.

a lot of other people have stressed the historical reasons why the nukes were bad which are in my view closer to the truth, but again, if they won’t budge on that, then yea.

if they decide to push back on revisionist historical arguments they’re likely going to have a few of these arguments, since this subject has been covered at length:

1. The USSR wasn’t a credible threat to the Home Islands and didn’t have the capabilities to launch any major amphibious assaults. The RKKA occupied the Kurils, but they weren’t anywhere near capable of invading more well defended areas.

2. Alternatives to forcing a surrender with the bomb would have caused more deaths

3. Domestic pressure to end the War ASAP rather than intimidating the USSR was the main goal

4. The IJA was so dead-set on fighting only the nukes could have forced a conditional surrender without mass casualties in an invasion

note that 2. and 4. are speculative. relying on predicted consequences to vindicate an atrocity in the present feels like a form of moral escapism. you’re avoiding reckoning with the concrete reality and human toll of one’s actions by appealing to abstract hypotheticals, it’s very dubious morally and we have empirical evidence that the US armed forces didn’t fully buy point 4 either.

you can chalk it up to usual military dissent or whatever, but i think it’s worth noting that it’s the air force officers who were most in favour.

Nimitz, USN: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

MacArthur, US Army: “My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.”

Eisenhower, SHAEF: “I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Leahy, USN: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Curtis LeMay, USAAF: “I think it was a wise decision, and I’d do it again under similar circumstances.” and “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”

big proponents of the bombings other than LeMay were Marshall, who was pretty much the architect of western allied strategy and was certainly thinking of post-war soviet containment, manhattan project director leslie groves who needed to justify the whole venture, and generally the political/institutional side of this decision-making process. the air force had a vested interest in demonstrating the power of a-bombs, that would justify more funding to their end. obviously you can argue the opposite, that nimitz and leahy obviously would want to play up the effects of naval blockade and their absolute shattering of the IJN in 1944, but army staff holding that they were also liable to surrender is kind of the tiebreaker here, especially given a lot of the narrative around the atomic bombings is based on the speculation of how costly a home islands amphibious invasion would be.

i would personally speculate that either the comments from various officers saying they privately disliked the bombings were either covering their asses post-war or more damningly an example of groupthink in the american decision making process where they all assumed everybody else supported the a-bomb and therefore kept their dissent down. eisenhower was the only one other than leahy from this group that actually expressed their opposition, but this is kind of all a detour from the main point that: a) the military side of the decision making process probably understood better the likelihood of japanese capitulation b) the military side did not push nearly as hard for the a-bomb as the civilian side

it’s also not particularly important that the RKKA wasn’t capable of threatening amphibious operations since the significance of the USSR to Imperial Japan was as a neutral party to negotiate peace. you could also argue that the kwantung army was mostly underequipped, understaffed and undertrained at this point in the war but it’s excessively revisionist to claim that august storm wasn’t a significant degradation in the IJA’s ability to sustain and prosecute a land war.

i think the problematic moral implications of point 3 are clear enough.

war communism and the cheka, presumably

i feel like tensions about dating and romance have really begun boiling up the past few years in general. there was a short period a few years ago where i thought incel-ism was dying out as an identity, but these days it seems bigger than its ever been

i honestly dont know how men are getting so mad about the bear thing tbh. like how is your first thought when confronted with women expressing how unsafe rape culture makes them feel ‘but what about men’s feelings though’?/??

zuckerberg is desperate to be the machine learning leader, facebook has like the most or second most A100s purchased from NVIDIA and he seems really obsessed with the idea of LlaMa being a GPT competitor.

(i would wager oai’s huge first mover advantage is too big to surpass for the time being, ‘chatGPT’ is synonymous with LLMs for laymen even though the model running it is practically obsolete at this point)

saying the US ‘barely participated’ in WW2 is pretty egregious, just because the USSR did the majority of heavy lifting and very much could have won by itself doesn’t mean that’s what happened.

the majority of post-normandy heer formations deployed in the western front were the best equipped ones, the western front was denser than the eastern front and lend lease was large enough in scale to certainly have made a material difference. that doesn’t mean that the US won the war by itself, or that the american sacrifice was anything comparable, but this sort of revisionism comes off as pretty crankish tbh.