xzar_monty

I agree that Atlas Shrugged is a poor book indeed but the writing is much, much better than what you see with Salvatore & co. They are not even in the same league, and I would argue that you don't even need to be erudite to recognize this. I think Ayn Rand's best book, by far, is The Fountainhead, but even that is marred by the faults she could never get rid of, i.e. presenting her heroes and villains in such black-and-white terms that they transform from believable characters into laughable caricatures, complete lack of humour, her rather strange penchant for conceptualizing close human relations in terms of subjugation and submission, etc. I think Stephen King was exactly right in saying that although she was a "wooden-prose" writer, her strength of conviction does make her interesting, at least to a degree. The same applies to someone like Theodore Dreiser. Salvatore, on the other hand, is just hopeless, even at the level of language. Salvatore makes writers like James Patterson and Mary Higgins Clark look decent, which is really saying something. I actually groaned when Salvatore described someone in the Icewind Dale Trilogy as "fascist". That's definitely a word you want to use in a fantasy setting, yep. Doesn't, like, exclusively allude to this real world of ours in the slightest, not even a bit.

It's essentially a double superlative. The word "loudest" already means the most loud, so to put "most" in front of it is unnecessary, almost tautological. It's like "the most best". You don't have to say that, just say "the best". The most best isn't any bester than the best. As for Shakespeare, his play Julius Caesar contains a very famous line "the most unkindest cut of all" which has the same double superlative, deliberately of course.

Indeed. Trump is a gift from heaven for Putin & co, and the extent to which he is in debt or something to Putin is of course debatable and unknown. In the link I presented above, the historian Timothy Snyder has some very interesting things to say about the ways in which Trump was and is the perfect, perfect thing for Putin. @Lexx, your "most loudest" (above) made me chuckle. It's sort of Shakespearean, although it was probably just a mistake.

But from all the available evidence we would have to conclude that they do care. After all, they support Ukraine more than anyone else in the world. What else could they do to demonstrate that they care? Economic and other considerations are there as well, but it would be quite wrong to conclude that economy is the only thing that matters -- and even if it were, that is currently demonstrated in a way that also supplies care to the Ukrainians. So it's much more complex that you try to make it sound.

Well, no, unless you only consider winning and losing in economic terms, which I find it hard to fathom you'd do. Russia, for instance, can very clearly win, and win big, by managing to break down Ukraine, and that would be much more meaningful than whatever the military companies are winning in monetary terms. I am strongly inclined to agree with Timothy Snyder (link above) that in a hundred years' time, the meaningful historical question will be that of whether Russia managed to bring Ukraine down or not -- American companies making money will be almost irrelevant in comparison. [I am reminded of the late David Foster Wallace pointing out that the average American person has, by the time he has reached the age of 20, been exposed to such an overabundance of commercial messages that it will take him enormous effort to recognize that considerations other than economic even exist; and many will indeed fail to do so.]

Quite a few of the political analysts I've read have also pointed out that anything that Russia could look upon as victory (or even anything other than a defeat) would both justify its original decision to attack and look like a devastating / humiliating loss for the entirety of "the West", whichever way you want to define it. The US, of course, has already demonstrated remarkable weakness in Syria by first defining a red line and then doing absolutely nothing when it was crossed, but a victory for Russia wouldn't only humiliate the US, it would humiliate the whole world-view of "the West". What the long-term consequences of that would be, no one can say, but they certainly wouldn't be very good.

Warfare is business, but it is not only business, nor even predominantly business, so your analysis is rather too simplistic. Which means there is no way the US can fight to the last Ukrainian (which I don't think you ever meant seriously, as the claim is so patently absurd).

This is extremely interesting. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the conflict.

Given the current legislation and general atmosphere in Russia, Putin may declare anything he wants as victory and carry on: there will be no repercussions on a general level. (But then, there almost never are in Russia -- heck, if only Russians were as prone to demonstrate as the French.) I even read one historian of Eastern Europe claim that were Putin to declare the Ukrainians as friends of Russia, Russian citizens would be seen carrying Ukrainian flags and declaring their love for Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Impossible to demonstrate, of course (as it won't happen), but doesn't sound too implausible. [And no, I am not suggesting that the Russians are a unique group in this regard.]

I surprised myself by starting a new game, and I must say that the mythic content on the Trickster path doesn't appear all that good. Heck, Azata was way better. Trickster is just silly, it's not funny.

This interview might be of interest to some: https://dossier.center/fso-en/

Jealousy stems from a terrible fear of being abandoned and leads to behaviour that is so awful that the person will indeed be abandoned. This is just one example of how people manage to engineer precisely that which they don't want to happen. I am reminded of a certain Mr. Putin whose plan was to ensure that no nations should join NATO anymore and who decided to act towards that end.

I don't know if these should be properly labelled as historical ironies, but they can be ugly and cringeworthy indeed. I mean, I'm sure I don't have to tell you anything about the extent to which it was the west that nourished radical Islam and all that, up to and including Bin Laden. I suppose a position of moral superiority can only be attributed to a country that has been so insignificant that it hasn't been able to participate in any truly atrocious actions -- but it would have, had it been able to. So. History is ugly. Here's a claim that I think is almost certainly true: Adolf Hitler's anti-semitism saved the world. If it hadn't been for that, the nazis would've had the bomb in 1942-1943 and that would have meant kaboom; just look at who were involved in the Manhattan Project and where they came from. (Interestingly, Einstein pointed this out already in the 1930s -- not the bomb thing but the fact that Hitler is doing himself an enormous disservice by forcing Jewish scientists into exile.)

Fair enough. Concerning the aid of the USSR in the apartheid question: How did the USSR help? Also, was it a significant player, especially in comparison to other foreign powers? Apologies for my ignorance on the question.

Ahem. What about South Africa, then?

An interesting demonstration of how Finns take the war in Ukraine very seriously: there was a general election on Sunday, and nearly all representatives who had demonstrated hesitation or unwillingness to join NATO lost their place. Definitely not surprising, in my view.

Btw, Russia went even further with its rhetoric on Friday, as the West is now seen as an "existential threat", according to Lavrov. The wording cannot be accidental, because it's directly related to Russia's nuclear doctrine. It's astonishing to hear this stuff because it's impossible to see how anyone is threatening Russia. https://www.euronews.com/2023/03/31/the-west-is-an-existential-threat-to-the-russia-says-sergei-lavrov

Maybe six or seven months ago there was a nice comparison of the time it has taken for FSB to find the "most likely" suspect in various cases. Whenever someone like Anna Politkovskaya is murdered, no suspect is generally found at all, whereas in cases more expedient to the FSB, the suspect (and nearly always the culprit) is found within 24-48 hours. I can't see how this could make anyone suspicious of the Russian system at all.

But then, on the other hand, April is the cruellest month, to quote T. S. Eliot.

Ryūichi Sakamoto. Popular music doesn't get much better than Forbidden Colours, his collaboration with David Sylvian.

An interesting tweet concerning non-combat related deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. As stated, alcohol consumption in Russia, and the position of alcohol in Russian culture, is really something else, as the saying goes: apparently, excessive alcohol consumption may explain about half of all premature deaths in Russia[*]. [*] https://web.archive.org/web/20100115082640/http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/alcohol-blamed-for-half-of-russias-premature-deaths-453197.html

Very good, thanks. Annoying to get one of them wrong. Anyway, it's one of my favorite military anecdotes, along with 1) the one where a general or someone says, "Don't worry, they can't hit anybody from that dist--" and is thereupon shot dead, and 2) the arriving naval captain who was killed by the cannons fired from the harbor to salute him.

There is a story concerning two warring Greek powers, probably Athens and Sparta. The Athenians send a messenger to the Spartans to say: "If we proceed to attack your city, it will be razed to the ground." The Spartans send a messenger back to say: "If."

I think the US also considers that while there's not much downside to continuing to support Ukraine, there would be plenty of downsides to stopping it, geopolitically speaking. Btw, I think it was Jared Diamond who pointed out that the US is essentially blessed when it comes to geography, climate, neighbours and many other factors such as that. Thus, the US has been able to develop particularly nicely (with plenty of help from warring Europe, no question) and does indeed have the without much risk to ourselves factor (as you put it) in many of the things it's able to do. Canada and Mexico are not going to attack, for instance. (So the fact that it continues to waste an incredible amount of resources by poor educational standards, lack of universal health care and all the rest of it is unbelievably foolish...)

Yeah, I think Canada and Poland are both slightly above the US in this.