491–500 of 600 posts
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Interesting the way that you group "not very smart" and "girlfriendless" with "delivery rider" as if being a gig worker makes you some kind of undesirable loser. Nice casual elitism.
If a job can be done by a starship robot then it's not much of a job then is it? In the short term it's more productive and admirable than being unemployed but in the long run it won't be much different.
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I'm with you in the abstract, but where I live there's toxic culture around sports that made it unpalatable for me as a kid. Back then what turned me off was belligerent parents on the sidelines yelling at the children, but the symptoms actually go way beyond that one little thing. (Conflating excellence with dominance is another example.)
The future might robot competitions: compete with zero-ego robot beings, the robot is always kind.
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I don't understand why that's toxic. Striving, struggle, and violence are critical for any living thing to survive. Short of reaching post-scarcity, this can't change. If we define toxic as harmful, then violence is the opposite. It's the only reason we have civilization.
Cooperation, not violence, is the reason for civilization.
> So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.
- “The Haj” by Leon Uris
Perhaps applies to other cultures as well. After all, the Western world is now struggling against Russia and tries to define “us versus them” through this struggle.
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IDK if I'd call that an "omission." There was a political system, and Hitler came to power within it. France still has a political norm of banding together to defeat populist far right parties, and an electoral system that lends to it. The fact remains that Fascism, Hitler, and Nazism was popular and that was key to achieving power . This is essay is about that. Why, despite promising burdens and hardship, was Fascis…
> For example, I think this gives us clues about Russian communism's decline (also in the West, ideologically) after Stalin. The decline only started well after that, even after the 1968 Prague Spring debacle. Only a few of the faithful in the west were put off by it. I'd put it at late 1970s, maybe really sinking in with Poland's Solidarnosc turmoil around 1980.
This is somehow relflecyed in Solidarity’s initial mission of fighting for „socialism with human face”.
> Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice This fact has been the downfall of every utopian ideology, and ignoring creates a vacuum that fascist regimes readily fill. I wonder what…
> I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure. Any government that will satisfy my need of adventure and struggle in colonising the solar system and exploiting the endless amounts of resources it has and harnessing the virtually unlimited energy of our star will have my vote. But people prefer tribal adventures and…
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Yes, although in The Road to Wigan Pier you really see how socially conservative Orwell was. His complaints about socialists weren't just that many of them were well-off people out of touch with the real problems of the working class (in which he had a point), but also that some of them were vegetarians, some birth-control advocates, some didn't drink alcohol or smoke, and (although Orwell says this indirectly) some…
Isn't the working class almost always more socially conservative than the middle and upper classes? It's certainly true of our time. AFAICT his analysis still rings true.
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Yes, although in The Road to Wigan Pier you really see how socially conservative Orwell was. His complaints about socialists weren't just that many of them were well-off people out of touch with the real problems of the working class (in which he had a point), but also that some of them were vegetarians, some birth-control advocates, some didn't drink alcohol or smoke, and (although Orwell says this indirectly) some…
Isn't the working class almost always more socially conservative than the middle and upper classes? It's certainly true of our time. AFAICT his analysis still rings true.
Indeed, if you add in the (more impoverished) rural classes, your thesis would still be stronger, for these are socially conservative by virtue of not being as educated or sophisticated as the urbanites.
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Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion. The hard-fought draw was just hard enough. By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all appearances preparatory to its own invasion. That is why its cities were almost undefended when the German tanks rolled past them, cutting their supply lines.
> Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion. What a weird take! In what possible way is the stopping of the enemies goals interpreted as anything except a win? That's like saying "X tried to invade Y, but Y threw than back. So it was a draw" > By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all a…
Much of the history of the war has had to be rewritten since Soviet records became available in the '90s. That has not penetrated far even yet.
"No Simple Victory" by Norman Davies goes some way in that direction. Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.
Russian mobile forces massed at the border needs explanation if not preparatory for invasion.
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> Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion. What a weird take! In what possible way is the stopping of the enemies goals interpreted as anything except a win? That's like saying "X tried to invade Y, but Y threw than back. So it was a draw" > By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all a…
England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized. Much of the history of the war has had to be rewritten since Soviet records became available in the '90s. That has no…
England was already beaten bloody before the Battle of Britain.
> Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized
I think it's very widely recognized that England had been at the limit, but by the end of the Battle of Britain they had proven they could obtain resupply from the US and Germany couldn't stop enough convoys.
> Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to
No one is arguing Britain won the war then, just that specific battle.
> Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.
I think most people who've read about the war in Europe would acknowledge this - at least between 1941 and 1944.
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1984 is a particularly shallow book. It borders on being so simplistic as to cater to a teen equivalent crowd intellectually. It'd be deep for a 12 year old reading it for the first time, maybe. It's a cartoonish dystopia, laughably absurd in structure; although it gets his points across, which is obviously important. Orwell paints the kind of fantasy dystopia one might envision if one knew absolutely nothing about t…
This is what's so good about hacker news, morons that enjoyed the book can learn how deficient their minds are at grasping complex ideas in comparison to intellectual heavyweights such as yourself.