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Harold and George Destroy the World

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Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#211

Post by nkurz »

randallsquared wrote: post #66

The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration [1], and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary [2]. The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because th…

> The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration, and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary

Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:

The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.

https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/02/philadelphia-mint-c...

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#212

Post by sorokod »

jimkleiber wrote: post #182
sorokod wrote: post #111

The US Department of War does not take full advantage of its name. Declaring a war has real legal and political consequences which presumably are not appealing to the current US administration. https://www.war.gov/Spotlights/Operation-Epic-Fury/

I had no idea they actually changed the domain name. Reminds me of Musk wanting it to be X because it sounded tougher. Something about trying to appear tough seems to make me think those people are less tough. I'm sure there's some famous paradox in that.

Changing the domain name and similar letterhead style shenanigans are risk free and good enough for public relations.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#214

Post by brabel »

dbspin wrote: post #187
afavour wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven’t, though. In the decades that followed World War 2, creation of the UN etc, the number of people dying in warfare and civilian death due to war dropped dramatically. No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.

They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have…

I asked ChatGPT to compute the rate of total deaths (civilians + military) since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Here's what it came up with:

    Period.     Approx average deaths from war
    1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
    1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
    1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
    1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year
I know AI is not 100% reliable but it searched on many sources to compute that. I checked some of them and the conclusion is in line with them.

Here's the "bottomline":

> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.

TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#215

Post by ljf »

afavour wrote: post #172
SoftTalker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The millions of deaths are still happening, they just aren't our boys so we were all cool with it.

They haven’t, though. In the decades that followed World War 2, creation of the UN etc, the number of people dying in warfare and civilian death due to war dropped dramatically. No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.

https://ourworldindata.org/conflict-deaths-breakdown - certainly has been in the millions - maybe lower in the 'Western world' but countless of the dead in wars across the world in ww2, have been civilians.

For example 3 to 5 million were killed in the 2nd Congo war of 1998-2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#217

Post by rayiner »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #115
rayiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801... . The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military. IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.n…

IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class, with members of the same ethnic group scoring higher over the decades as that ethnic group as a whole becomes wealthier.

Exactly the opposite is true. Adoption studies have been used to isolate the effect of SES itself, and the contribution of that factor is low: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (“Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01… Heritability was estimated to be 0.42.”).

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#218

Post by carveat6 »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #138
randallsquared wrote: post #66

The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration [1], and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary [2]. The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because th…

Starting the war with Iran was definitely a pretty stupid decision, even at this point of it. In a couple of years it will look like the beginning of the end for the US hegemony.

This war is like going to the dentist for a root canal. No one likes it, OTOH none of neighboring countries want a second "north Korea" as their neighbor. Time will tell.

Re: Harold and George Destroy the World

#220

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

eudamoniac wrote: post #174
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #60

At the risk of sounding very old:in partial response to the nonsense starting around the 2015/2016 era I decided it was a good time to start mining the cultural vault and catch up on classic movies and books (especially) that I’d always been meaning to get around to, and kind of immersed myself in it more and more over time. Lots of older science fiction, fantasy, and just random movies I’d heard of but never got aro…

Exactly my sentiment. Someone else ITT mentioned Everything Everywhere as a thought provoking, good movie. Does anyone actually believe that movie will be discussed in ten years? Because I know The Godfather still will be. Cultural media output is absolutely in decline, and I think only someone not well-read could think otherwise about literature, and likewise for other media. It's not now a situation of cream having…

The Hugo and Nebula awards in particular are shocking in what they nominate and elevate to winning. There’s no possible way these are the best sci fi/fantasy books being written every year. They’re not just bad, they’re laughably bad in every dimension. It’s incredible to witness.
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