“Journalist and best-selling author Sebastian Junger discusses his book, “War,” an account of his time with a US Army platoon on the battlefields of Afghanistan. For one year, in 2007–2008, Sebastian Junger accompanied 30 men–a single platoon–from the storied 2nd battalion of the US Army as they fought their way through a remote valley in eastern Afghanistan. Over the course of five trips, Junger was in more firefights than he could count, as men he knew were killed or wounded and he himself was almost killed. This lecture contains graphic language.”
Is there any evidence that someone involved in a competitive sport or game has a mental state substantially different from that of a soldier in combat?
Michael van der Riet: @Handle you sound like the guy who wiped me out so badly at chess dot com recently.
Handle: As their country could get half-annihilated in mere hours were Aswan to suddenly crumble, any Egyptian official should be very hesitant to say or do anything that tends to nudge attitudes about “blowing up dams” from “off limits” to “fair game according to your own espoused principles”. For years I’ve been reading that the next big water crisis will happen in Yemen, and it must be awfully hard these days for the Israelis to resist knocking out the...
McChuck: Educating girls (and, let’s face it, about half of boys) beyond 8th grade is individually rational but suicidal for civilization. The same applies to allowing women to vote.
Michael van der Riet: Asian student cheating and high SAT scores: In my late teens and early twenties, at the height of my athletic prime which was never close to prime, I could have crammed playing pool and golf and riding motocross, my three favorite physical endeavors, for a hundred hours a week and never got anywhere. A seed has to fall on fertile ground.
T. Beholder: The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany. In the modern terms, a placeholder. Much like British “monarchy”, but also useful as a ready fallback. Likewise, you don’t think Moscow is full of devoted Orthodox people, do you? It’s just something by and large decent (really ugly incidents are >30 years old). And as Russian proverb says, a holy place never sits empty. the famous misattributed G.K. Chesterton quote https://en.wikiquote....
Jim: George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. The implications of this are more interesting than any other part by a country mile.
Isegoria: And if anyone’s wondering, Hayao Miyazaki’s (feature) directorial debut, The Castle of Cagliostro, has roughly nothing to do with the quack of quacks.
McChuck: “Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.” — The Philosopher’s Song, M. Python
Michael van der Riet: If the enemy is in range, so are you. Ukraine came up with a brilliant new way of killing. Within twenty-four hours, the Russians were working on a copy. More Russians are getting killed, and so are more Ukrainians. This is a win how?
Handle: Cagliostro was Carlyle’s “Quack of Quacks”.
Isegoria: Lior Lefineder (@lefineder) found a source: Reported by Joseph Pelet de la Lozère, an administrator who served under Napoleon in his book: “Napoleon in Council, The Opinions Delivered by Bonaparte in the Council of State”
Isegoria: The smallpox vaccine was introduced to France in 1800, and Napoleon strongly endorsed it, so it seems plausible that he would refer to it.
Isegoria: I was delighted to see the quote footnoted — but it was not a citation, just an explanatory note: Joseph Balsamo, aka Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), had been a famous occultist and fraud, unmasked during his lifetime, so it was strange for Napoleon to dismiss the great rationalist and one of the founders of German idealism, Immanuel Kant, alongside such a notorious mountebank.
Alex S.: “Scatter mining is inefficient because it distributes a few mines over a large area.” Scatter mining have never been what he says it is. Okay, I see that has been written by a journalist…
Alex S.: Interesting that the word vaccine appears to be very recent at that time. If Napoleon really used used it. Does the book in its notes have the original French?
T. Beholder: Hence solutions like cope-caging a whole road. Jim says: If drones shall be mines, why shouldn’t drones be miners? They could also be minesweepers. Even for something less noticeable than dropped mines. First pass is a flyby with non-linearity detector. All electronics that isn’t shielded up the yingyang shows. After that, classics. Just hang good old pulse minesweeper sensor on a cable from some cheap quad-copter (since sweeping is slow and payload is very modest, performance requirements...
Jim: Thanks, Franklin. Redan, I considered that possibility, but the text gives no hint of it: “Egypt…will remain in the news…as it struggles to…feed[] 84 million people a day…and guard[] the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day.” “World’s entire trade” clearly suggests trade of oil and non-oil alike, and the later 2.5-percent figure of the world’s oil trade through the Suez Canal is given as a specific elaboration....
Related: Why Men Love War by William Broyles.
Also Junger, War in Afghanistan (47 min):
“Journalist and best-selling author Sebastian Junger discusses his book, “War,” an account of his time with a US Army platoon on the battlefields of Afghanistan. For one year, in 2007–2008, Sebastian Junger accompanied 30 men–a single platoon–from the storied 2nd battalion of the US Army as they fought their way through a remote valley in eastern Afghanistan. Over the course of five trips, Junger was in more firefights than he could count, as men he knew were killed or wounded and he himself was almost killed. This lecture contains graphic language.”
Is there any evidence that someone involved in a competitive sport or game has a mental state substantially different from that of a soldier in combat?