However people do see iOS as a gaming market, and soon you can run those apps on a Mac (clearly limitations in interface might restrict it a little). Gaming has many segments. I play WOT on my Mac via Codeweavers emulation, and performance is 60FPS+ in my 2017 iMac in most cases, equivalent to a midrange PC. I am not sure how this will work on M1 however.
To be fair, those gaming markets are almost completely non-overlapping on a venn diagram, and it’s not just the interface (as in user input) that drives that. It’s the form factor. Handheld touchscreen games and many platform/PC games are just drastically different in the interaction models they employ/require, and slapping a touch screen on a MacBook isn’t going to change that meaningfully without many other significant form factor considerations.
This seems like such an exciting project. I live in Macon, GA and while I probably would never use it, I'd like more feedback from folks that do use it.
Did they deliver? Were there issues? Are there still issues? How much better has this made things for folks? Worse?
Yeah... love the video, but all things that are shiny aren't necessarily actually great. ;) I'm optimistic, but skeptical. .
Thirty years ago today and I was in Saudi Arabia getting ready to go to Iraq. It would be another 4 years before I started using my first computer and a year after that my first Linux OS.
Solaris 10 has been EOL since what this time last year? No more updates are going out to it. So if you are still running a Solaris 10 zone then you aren't able to patch it.
Tribblix is unlike Slackware - it uses AT&T SVR4 packaging with zap which is akin to yum on top, whereas Slackware used tape archives. Yes, tape archives for backing up to tape. That says it all.
No pardon - Slackware "packages" were .tar tape archives. The entire "OS" was hacked together out of parts, whereas Peter system engineers Tribblix. No pardon.
Just because "tar" happens to stand for "Tape ARchive" doesn't mean tarballs have anything to do with actual tape archives. It only means that the files are stored sequentially, which is a perfectly reasonable way to structure an archive.
If you want to criticize how Slackware does things, there are myriad better points you could've brought up, like:
- The installer being only minimally changed from that of Softlanding Linux System
- The installer still operating under the notion of "disk sets", from back when it was remotely feasible to install Slackware from floppies (which hasn't been the case in multiple decades now)
- The lack of dependency checking (though having been burned by dependency hell multiple times, I'd call this a "feature")
- The lack of PAM, if that matters to you (though the -current branch now includes it, so Slackware 15.0 probably will, too)
And yet, none of these things have prevented me from being happy and productive with Slackware, both at home and at work, on desktops and servers. It's what I'm running on the very laptop on which I'm typing this comment, on my main workstation / gaming rig at home, and previously on my servers (before I acquired a taste for OpenBSD and SmartOS).
Yes and no - as they lost the University crowd a while ago to Linux, you are pretty much on your own if you want to compile some third party code on Solaris, so while the OS is perfectly viable on a subset of hardware - it's not something you'd either want to install on a laptop or try and build and run random code from github.
I've actually enjoyed working from home for the most part over the past 5-6 months. My only main issue is that I tend to work MORE from home as you don't have the normal water cooler interruptions or group BS sessions about football or sports or... this or that. I'm hoping I don't ever have to go back to the office.
Worked from home for a few years in the old days but wasn't really disciplined to be very productive. Now I am.
Working from home since ~6.5 months => I liked it a lot at the beginning (I wore pants on one day since 1.March, otherwise shorts all the time until today) but now I wish that I could go back to the office: I really miss being able to talk from time to time with somebody "real", having lunch in the canteen, seeing something different than my own walls, etc... :P
just to clarify, what you desire is not specific to an office. you can have all of those things in a local community and many people who were remote before covid (including myself) were doing that.
I agree. Sit in your front yard and work from there if the weather is nice. You may find more people routinely walk by than you thought. Say hello. No need to drive to "your community". Especially now that more people are working from home.
Can you be more specific about what you mean by the local community? Are you striking up conversations with random people on the street, or are you volunteering, or some other such thing?
yes. having people around you to interact with does not require working in an office. people on the street. people at the dog park. people at the coffee shop. people bagging your groceries. people are everywhere (generalization , but if you browse HN you're probably not in an extreme rural area)
Whenever post-covid comes, if you WFH you can meet a local friend for lunch. Don't conflate covid-WFH and non-covid-WFH as a reason to dislike general WFH.
I wonder how skewed these discussions are on HackerNews. All the surveys from big companies show that an overwhelming percentage of people would love a mix of WFH and going to office in the future.
I really think HN is just super introverted or many were stuck in some toxic office culture.
I've always liked my coworkers in the various places I worked and being in their physical presence at work is a pro for me, not a liability.
Agreed. I’ve been lucky to work with great co-workers that I’m still friends with even after leaving. I think a mix of WFH plus going into the office 3 or 4
times per week would be ideal.
It's just about the perception of injustice. A privileged person facing minor injustices could completely have this mindset. In fact I've met many many people like this.
A journalist came up with this concept at the World Economic Forum, I think it was fractal poverty??, and it was this observation that from the poorest people in the world to the absolute richest there was this sense that they were excluded from and oppressed by someone more powerful. Absolutely anyone can feel this way.
Interesting observation. I feel it's all about baselines: To decide if you have a lot of something, you need to compare your allotment to some baseline. You'll feel like a victim if you're more mistreated than your baseline of choice. If zero -- that in the ideal world with no mistreatment -- you'll always feel put out. If it's the median amount of mistreatment, half will feel good half bad, etc. Interesting that humans seem to statistically select their baseline as that just better than their current state.
Exactly and it goes beyond victimhood as well. You'll have a group of people go through the same negative experience (e.g. almost dying from a natural disaster, being held as a POW and tortured) and what's interesting is you'll see a huge variation of the impact of those events.
Some people will come out of it relatively unscathed, while others will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.
No doubt their past experiences shaped their mindset and how they made sense of the negative experience.
It's just about the perception of injustice. A privileged person facing minor injustices could completely have this mindset. In fact I've met many many people like this.
Privileged people facing no injustice howl the loudest that they are the most oppressed. In fact, facing no justice either, getting away with every crime under the sun.
The research that the article talks about was careful to separate the _mindset_ of victimhood from the actual experience of being a victim of someone else's antisocial or even violent behavior. The two are not the same. One can experience prejudice, social bias, and outright physical violence without developing a permanent self-image as a victim. But we all know that one crazy friend or family member who thinks (and says) the world is against them yet never had a truly traumatic experience in their whole life.
But like, I also know people who talked about being wronged and then it eventually turned out they really have been wronged. And it took them quite a lot of effort to get made sorta kinda equal - had they been accepting and silent, none of that would happen.
If it can be made right, then yea but if not, then it's probably better to imagine you weren't wronged.
I have a personal experience with this. I suffered an injury that caused a permanent disability, but because I was also knocked out, I don't know what caused it. Maybe I was assaulted or maybe I had an accident. Should I feel wronged just in case it turns out to be an assault? No! I'm kind of lucky not knowing whether to blame someone else or myself! Maybe if I knew, that emotion of being wronged would motivate me to fight for justice and the perpetrator could get convicted but I'm comfortable assuming it was an accident. That's a lot better than fighting and losing.
In cases I have in mind, it looked futile until it did not.
In the situation you described, you don't know what happened. So a good guess of your feelings would be confusion, I see no reason to force "feeling lucky" or "blaming yourself" or "feeling wronged" or any other emotion you don't actually feel.
I don't understand this prescribing what people should feel and I think it does more harm then good. People do feel, they also think and the two interacts. It is much more important to understand what your feelings actually are and how they are influencing you, rather then analyse what theoretical person should feel or try to force yourself to feel the things you dont.
Though I agree it's not helpful to force your feelings directly. I do think that there are things we "should" feel and those are the things that give better outcomes to us. Sometimes emotions are telling us something true and important but are also harming our wellbeing and we'd be better off without them. If we're lucky enough to lack some harmful knowledge, then all the better.
>But we all know that one crazy friend or family member who thinks (and says) the world is against them yet never had a truly traumatic experience in their whole life.
Man that rubs me the wrong way. You've been in their shoes for every experience they've ever had and used your psychological authority to assess that none of those experiences were "truly traumatic?"
Maybe some of their mindset stems from constant dismissal.
"""It’s important to point out that the researchers do not equate experiencing trauma and victimization with possessing the victimhood mindset. They point out that a victimhood mindset can develop without experiencing severe trauma or victimization. Vice versa, experiencing severe trauma or victimization doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is going to develop a victimhood mindset.
"""
Victim ideology writ large (group level - ingroups and outgroups) is still victim ideology. It doesn't become more right at the group level, it stems from the same biases and thought patterns.
I agree that how one frames the questions can lead to drastically different scores.
If I'm thinking about this in terms of my workplace, I would probably score fairly high due to the typical corporate injustices that many workers endure. But if I think about this on a personal life basis or overall basis, then I would score pretty low.
FTA: "However, the researchers found that an anxious attachment style was a particularly strong antecedent of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood."
So what precedes an 'anxious attachment style'?
"When a child feels safe, seen, and soothed by their parent in a consistent way, they are able to form a secure attachment to that parent. However, when a parent is available and attuned at times and insensitive or intrusive at others, the child is more likely to experience an anxious ambivalent attachment pattern"[1]
I think it's a reasonable assessment that the-unnamed did experience a form of trauma growing up...and now we as a society are dealing with the consequences of putting someone like that into power. I wonder if maybe those who elect these kinds of people relate to them on that fundamental level. Food for thought.
Nazi also complained that Jews are making themselves victims while they supposedly are not. And they also liked to frame themselves as strong manly man whose will and power will win over all obstacles. The primary identification was not victim, it was strongman.
"Nazi also complained that Jews are making themselves victims while they supposedly are not."
Sure, they can say that, but they would be lying. How were Jews not victims when millions of them were being murdered by Nazis?
I don't remember Nazis being locked up in ghettoes, concentration camps, or death camps by Jews in WW2.
The Nazis were clearly the aggressors, and their attempts to paint themselves as the victims were transparent lies.
It's truly sad that this still needs to be pointed out to some people.
"The primary identification [of the Nazis] was not victim, it was strongman."
It was both. They wanted to have it both ways, so they can pretend to be defending themselves and Germany when they attacked. And they wanted all of Germany to run to them for protection against the Jewish and Communist boogeyman. Tragically, their strategy worked.
And it was they, not the Jews, who were doing the attacking.
"We can play the nazi game both ways."
To you it may seem like a game, but the sorts of lies you're repeating have resulted in the deaths of millions of people, and may do so again. This is no game.
What actually happened after complaining that Jews make themselves victims does not make my statement false. Nazi did in fact complained about that and did felt Jews are making themselves victims.
Also the genocide mostly happened by the second half of the WWII, the rhetoric conflicts were mostly before war.
> The Nazis were clearly the aggressors, and their attempts to paint themselves as the victims were transparent lies.
Plenty of them actually did believed what they said. They did lied a lot, but they also did believed in a lot of they said.
> To you it may seem like a game, but the sorts of lies you're repeating have resulted in the deaths of millions of people, and may do so again. This is no game.
Not a single word that I wrote was a lie. I did reacted to parent who framed Nazi as primary making themselves into victims. I don't think that framing was the primary appeal. The parent was trying to use Nazi analogy to discount contemporary people/movements parent dislike, contemporary people who are not Nazi.
> Much of this is paralleled in contemporary politics, and the powerful continue to create myths that they are the victims of the powerless, while in fact themselves committing violence against the latter.
The stab in the back myth was not invented by Nazi either, although they believed it and were motivated by it. The stab in the back myth existed before Nazi, it came to existence right by end of WWI. It was widespread.
Also, nazi were not the first anti semitic group in Germany.
> they could feel more justified in using violence against their enemies, and so they could acquire more power to "protect" themselves
Answering this just for fun. Nazi did not thought like that, this is projecting our values on the past. Nazi believed, strongly believed that "might is right" and the "survival of the fittest". They did believed that victory power has right to do as it pleases. They also believed that violence is manly man thing. They had pretty clear ideas on masculinity.
They did felt justified to use violence solely on these grounds - not just against Jews but against whole range of groups.
> so they can pretend to be defending themselves and Germany when they attacked
Nazi primary argument for war in East was expansion - they claimed to need a living space. That was the justification toward Germans. The Germany was not overpopulated, but nazi did believed it is and that it needs more space. The expand the imperium policy was not invented by nazi either, but was part of German politics long before.
The communist threat was factor. But living space, alias Lebensraum was the policy and reason for expansion according to historians such as Richard Evans.
The comunist threat would not require the sort of policies they had in conquered teritories. They did actually had settlers and actually moved population.
That wasn't to say they didn't do Lebensraum[1], that was to say the way they justified[2] their actions to themselves can be heard, in certain circles, even today.
((Primary source) argument), not (primary (source argument)), sorry.
[1] For comparison, Custer's initial move at Greasy Grass was to threaten women and children. Some of the men in his command were in the US because they had emigrated from the reactionary aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. God is an iron.
[2] is man a rational animal, or a rationalising animal?
One of the giveaways of totalitarian logic is that their enemies are simultaneously both inferior and an existential threat to their superiors. (Agreed, the small-c communist threat would not have required Nazi policies. The large-C Communist threat was something I think Goebbels might have claimed existed so long as a single spark of Communism existed to re-ignite that totalitarian untermensch-driven "revolution.")
(Another giveaway is lack of humour: I don't know of any famous totalitarian comedy, especially any that have used self-deprecating humour, but I'd love to be proven wrong on this point. Some regimes even banned humour:
Two judges meet on the way to their chambers. One is chuckling and wiping tears from his eyes. The other asks, "what just happened?"
"Oy, I just heard the most hilarious Stalin joke ever. But I'm afraid I simply can't tell it to you: I just sent the last person who repeated it to Magadan.")
Here is the thing: German nazi would not claim to "protect The West" because they never claimed to be for the west in general. They were always for German race and for Germany.
The West is the cause of contemporary far right wing. But for Germans during WWII, the even the West was at max temporary ally meant to be conquered later. The "in certain circles, even today" is more of "especially today when the non-Germans adapted most of ideology to what their consider their race". Same with race. German racism did not put white race on the top, that is contemporary cause. Nazi put German race on the top.
Hitler himself was talking and writing about Lebensraum publicly.
Also, nazi used Communist and Jew interchangeable, so you gotta be careful when parsing what they mean. And the Germany had Communist party that did tried smaller revolution soon after WWI, so you also have to distinguish between when they talk about internal and external threats.
Not sure what the poem you linked is supposed to have to do with this argument.
Sometime I should compare the transcript[1] with Goebbels' recorded speech[2].
> "Die europäischen Mächte stehen hier vor ihrer entscheidenden Lebensfrage. Das Abendland ist in Gefahr. Ob ihre Regierungen und ihre Intelligenzschichten das einsehen wollen oder nicht, ist dabei gänzlich unerheblich."
> "Eine zweitausendjährige Aufbauarbeit der abendländischen Menschheit ist in Gefahr."
> "Die neutralen europäischen Staaten besitzen weder das Potential noch die militärischen Machtmittel noch die geistige Einstellung ihrer Völker, um dem Bolschewismus auch nur den geringsten Widerstand entgegenzusetzen."
> "Die Welt hat also nicht die Wahl zwischen einem in seine alte Zersplitterung zurückfallenden und einem unter der Achsenführung sich neu ordnenden Europa, sondern nur die zwischen einem unter dem militärischen Schutz der Achse stehenden und einem bolschewistischen Europa."
The poem was supposed to indicate that, just as Nazis viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races" (with theirs, coincidentally, on top, no matter what the protectees thought of the matter), Yevtushenko sees no reason to stand with antisemites, no matter that they may approve of his own ancestry.
If pigs tell dogs the sheep are inferior to dogs, should the dogs keep the sheep in line, or should they reflect on how pigs probably view dogs?
("alternately arrogant and servile" is another tell for totalitarians. Free people neither boss around nor suck up.)
> Nazis viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races"
Nazi viewed their struggle was for German race. Not for all superior races. That is part you want to have there, but they were pretty clear on the long term plan. It was not coincidentally and there were literally no actual protectees. Not per nazi view and not per occupied country people view.
Yevtushenko is Russian. Per nazi plan Slavic people were meant to be used as slaves, prevented breeding and being eliminated in the long term plan.
That was literally what living space on the East plan was.
> If pigs tell dogs the sheep are inferior to dogs, should the dogs keep the sheep in line, or should they reflect on how pigs probably view dogs?
Who is supposed to be dogs, sheeps and pigs here? I just can not map concrete groups onto this one.
> just as Nazis viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races"
This is not true. The nazi did not viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races". They did not perceived themselves benevolent. Nor as protecting.
Nazi value system interpreted being benevolent as weakness. And weak were meant to be eliminated and only strong were meant to survive.
We agree that the Nazi plan was intended only to benefit (a subset of) themselves.
We also agree that Nazis intended to treat slavs as prior empires had treated their Worthy Oriental Gentlemen (wogs, in the vernacular).
I'd like to make the distinction on the first point that they marketed[1] their intentions differently. I should have said "sold" instead of "viewed", sorry. And my "benevolently" had not been meant to be taken in a positive light. (If someone tells you they are benevolent, keep a hand on your wallet.)
To me it is clear that Goebbels said that the Nazis must protect 2'000 years of Western Civilisation from the Communists (who, you correctly note, were severely conflated with jews in that speech), and that not only was everyone who was not For Them implicitly Against Them, but that it didn't matter anyway, because they were totes going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection[2].
Would it help if I translate the parts I left in german into english? (I hadn't because I think the original translation pretty much got it right, but will try if you'd like fresh phrasing.)
As to sheep, dogs, and pigs, they're from Animal Farm[3], repurposed to fit one of PG's recent essays[4]:
Concrete groups:
pigs - animals who seizing power for animals from humans.
(aggressive unconventionals / Nazi leadership)
Somehow the benefits from this change of power don't extend much beyond pigs. At the end of the book, the pigs and the neighbouring human farmers get along just fine.
dogs - herd sheep on behalf of pigs.
(aggressive conventionals / blackshirts, SS)
Compare recent US police use of the "sheepdog metaphor", which I believe dates back at least to the conflict in Korea. Dogs get the pigs' table scraps, so they think themselves better than the sheep, who don't.
sheep - those who happily repeat all the domestic propaganda produced by the pigs
(passive conventionals / NSDAP rank and file, general populace)
The existence of many potential leaders with authoritarian tendencies is not necessarily a social problem. The existence of many followers with authoritarian tendencies, is.
Does the distinction between how the plan was intended by the leaders and how it was sold to the followers make more sense now?
[1] I doubt the Sportpalastrede was intended to be external propaganda: it was domestic propaganda to motivate "Total War". So maybe ordinary NSDAP members (the sheep) really bought into a "They are sick, and We are the cure" line even though the Nazi leadership (the pigs) and the SS (the dogs) knew it was, finally, all about whose knee was to be on whose neck.
[3] a book taught in the anglophone world as having been about Stalin, but it also maps to other targets. Considering that was written by an anglophone author for an anglophone audience, we should not be too surprised when we can find many parallels in the anglophone experience. (Goldstein's book in 1984 goes so far as to claim that Animal Farm is how things always work. For as much as I've read of Durant's Story of Civilization, Goldstein seems to be correct.)
> Goebbels said that the Nazis must protect 2'000 years of Western Civilisation from the Communists
See, from all I read about Nazism, whatever short quote in one propaganda speech was, Nazism was not concerned with Western Civilisation at all. As far as Nazism was concerned, there was German civilization. Not western, German. French are something different. British are something different. Americans are something different.
The western civilization concern is contemporary white supremacist concern.
> they were totes going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection
They were to conquer rest of west. That was appeal of Nazism.
> The existence of many potential leaders with authoritarian tendencies is not necessarily a social problem. The existence of many followers with authoritarian tendencies, is.
Meh. That argument takes responsibility away from those in power, away from those who seek power and places it on ambiguous faceless mass. It also ignores social systems those people operated in. It also ignores actual motivations for why people supported or did not supported movements.
Paul Graham is not exactly historian nor sociologist. Forcing his theories on history wont make you understand what happened - it will make you reject actual history and replace it by own imagination. You will come in with preconceived idea about who is who psychologically based on which group is sympathetic in hindsight, from the point of view of our values.
Paul Graham also makes up child psychology, but that does not matter much.
I'll happily stipulate we can leave PG to the side :-)
(just hope you don't mind if I make small attempts at making HN a little more of a garden and a little less of a stream:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337759 )
If you could point me to other speeches laying out the Nazi domestic story differently, I'd appreciate it. I picked the Sportpalastrede because (a) it was what we'd read in school, (b) it comes at a critical point, after Rokossovsky had cut off the Nazis from middle eastern oil, and just before the Nazis go explicitly totalitarian, and (c) even though they'd basically lost momentum, the Nazis would go on to be even more cruel to even more people for a few years more. I don't believe that Max Mustermann would have given the consent of the governed[1] in 1933 for "we're going to conquer everyone and kill millions of undesirables", but "we're going to support our traditions, defend the church, and create a brilliant future for our children", despite being a different end approached by the same means, was probably a much easier sale.
"...going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection." was intended to be read exactly as "conquer rest of west". Sorry, often I fail to realise most people are not as cynical as I.
So, moving on to where I believe we differ:
> "takes responsibility away from those in power, away from those who seek power and places it on ambiguous faceless mass"
is exactly the point I'm arguing. I would say the implosion of the USSR is encouraging, because it shows us that people not in power can change the behaviour of those in power, when they are willing to say together, "you know, this system, it doesn't actually promote the ideals we were all taught to believe in."
(Yes, it likely helped immensely that Gorbi himself also seems to have believed in his childhood picture of what socialism was supposed to have been. Also, in the case of both of us[2], we belong to this mass despite being neither ambiguous nor faceless.)
I think asking people in power (especially people who sought power for its own sake) to be responsible is to ignore those thousands of years of history Goebbels claimed to be preserving. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846415
Can you suggest a better method for avoiding self-interested leaders than the hypnopaedic suggestions of Brave New World or the arbitrariness of sortition?
(Go back a few hundred years, and one can find plenty of people willing to argue that monarchy is superior to democracy, as the identification of the monarch with the state means that the monarch is more likely to act with long term interests in mind. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184621 )
Anyway, where we seem to differ is where best to address the problem of potential totalitarianism: with the many, or with the few? I believe it very difficult with the former, and impossible[3] with the latter.
How do you see it?
[1] compare Linebarger's Psychological Warfare, in the context of hot war, not peaceful political process:
"the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz."
I would argue by overall books like Third Reich Trillogy from Richard J. Evans. Or by Hitlers biography by Ian Kershaw. Or the book on Wehrmacht. Arguing by speeches is futile, because that way you can prove Nazi both Communists and anti-communists. As people gladly do, to get back at contemporary enemies. Cherry picking from sentences from hours long speeches is easy especially since they tended to be more of emotional experiences then rational ones.
As for "west" framing, consider that French were traditional enemies of Germany. They even occupied portion of Germany (Ruhr in 1923) between wars, which added quite a lot of strength to Nazi. Germany fought in WWI against other western countries, lost, it was formative experience for majority of Nazi leadership. Germans were very resentful about loosing that war.
> just before the Nazis go explicitly totalitarian
I would argue that this was part of ideology from the very early stages. Not from very early begining, but quite soon.
> I don't believe that Max Mustermann would have given the consent of the governed[1] in 1933
Max Mustermann is fictional person. 1933 is when Nazi took full power, physically destroyed possible opposition and question of consent became moot.
> for "we're going to conquer everyone and kill millions of undesirables",
In 1933, nazi did not knew they will accomplish genocide yet. They knew Jews are the enemy, but they did not knew what they will do with them yet. All of that came later.
> Anyway, where we seem to differ is where best to address the problem of potential totalitarianism: with the many, or with the few? I believe it very difficult with the former, and impossible[3] with the latter.
I did not talked about this at all. I argued about what did actually happened in the past, not about what should have. I think that this question is not much meaningful, precisely because it is motivated by overly simplified reading of history and because such dilemma does not exist in practice.
In retrospect, having whole generation of young man turn grow as soldiers in a wold war, celebrating militarism, interpreting their violence as patriotism all breads next round of violence.
Thanks for the book references. It will take me a while to track them down (may even need to "поиск"). Kershaw looks especially interesting. I have been reading Zweig, Weil, and a book by someone whose name I no longer recall (that I had thought had been a source for Der Untergang but is not listed in the latter's WP page) which I suspect may have been slightly self-serving. (also: Arendt and Lewis as references in the wider context)
However, as I said before, I am less interested in what the actual intentions were and more interested in how they were sold (cf. Linebarger). So emotional experiences are just fine — I don't believe rational arguments have ever had much to do with human politics[1]. And I prefer speeches because they are primary sources of propaganda[2]. It seems we'll have to agree to disagree, here.
We do agree on the german resent of france[3]. (Ironically, the author of the Hassgesang gegen England would first get scapegoated (by the equally patriotic but less extreme) in 1918, and then fail to be rehabilitated in the early thirties: because he was jewish.) However, in the context of 1943, it was fine to defend the Abendland, because most of it which was not neutral was, like france, under military occupation, client government, or both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany#/media/File:World...
We also agree that the nazi ideology was implicitly totalitarian from the beginning. Consider Triumph des Willens[4]. However, 13 January 1943 was when the implicit and foreign became explicit and domestic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war#Germany
Yes, Max Mustermann is the teutonic "citoyen lambda" or "John Doe". Maybe I am too optimistic[5], but the question of consent[6] is never moot. No matter that anglophones love to paint their enemy du jour as iconified by a single person[7], Hitler wasn't about to personally beat up everyone who badmouthed the Reich, it took large numbers of people who believed in him to make his system work. See my previous Linebarger quote, about the point when no one would take orders from Mr. Davis, or consider the point in 1991 when no one would take orders from Comrade Yanayev.
We also agree that the Nazis got worse and worse as time went on. I'm interested in the shape of that slope. Some slopes are slippery ("We are the greatest people in the greatest country and it doesn't matter what we do to accomplish the greater good"), others not so slippery ("If you start disrespecting property rights by abolishing slavery, you'll end up with communism"). My guess is that, like coke dealers who partake of their own goods, the judgement of people who wind up believing their own propaganda is less than optimal.
Again, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the purpose of transferring bones from one graveyard to another. I am interested in history more for the purpose of making predictions about the present (which does not mean I don't appreciate getting corrected on my understanding of it! Having poor probabilities leads to poor betting...) and less for its own sake. Figuring out how to avoid repeating history would be most excellent, but at the moment I am cynical enough to believe that "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it." In any case, having gotten that off my chest, I'm happy to limit myself to the historical detail of 1919-1945.
> interpreting their violence as patriotism
Very well put. Even fools learn from experience[9]. The wise attempt to learn from someone else's experience.
[1] note that even the ancient greeks distinguished rhetoric from logic. I would also be willing to bet that NSDAP speeches were pro-communist exactly between 1939 and 1941, and anti-communist outside those dates. The convenient thing about Two Minutes Hates is that the $OTHER is always variable.
[2] not having an internet and explicit social graph, the Nazis had to make do with radio and loudspeaker truck.
in which Hitler plays the victim card hard. (but neglects to mention that the program for lifting the german Volk up involves putting others two meters under. Generalplan Ost would appear seven years later.)
[4] US fervour for the first Iraq war reminded me of nothing so much as Triumph des Willens. They treated going to war as if they were rooting for a basketball championship. (Der weiße Rausch, on the other hand, is not half bad.)
[6] Whose consent is another interesting question. In 1984, proles, like animals, are free. The Inner Party only needs to fear, and hence control, the Outer Party, roughly 13% of the population. (Luckily for them, Airstrip One has a long tradition of middle class norm self-enforcement. Even we today ask why we would need watch cameras in villages, because spiessig grandmothers keep themselves busy minding everyone elses' business.)
[7] Hitler, of course, would have agreed with the single-leader-principle. But he also, earlier, had agreed with the communists that no matter which one of them controlled the future, centrists such as the social democrats would have no place in it. In any case, here I'm thinking of "The Pope" or "Bonaparte", etc. (Come to think of it, this fear of a united continent may even be logical: if the continent is not full of balanced powers playing, from the english viewpoint, "let's you and him fight", they might turn their military spend from armies to a navy, which would be a direct threat to Oceania's ability to waive rules by ruling waves.)
[9] Körner notes in one of his books that the UK and US, having fought a war to destroy german and japanese militarism forever, then complained bitterly when the germans and japanese refused to join the Iraq adventure.
Edit: I think a point where we've been talking past each other is on the question of the many vs. the few. I agree that the few were responsible[a], not the many. I just happen to believe that if one wants to avoid a repetition, it is much easier (though still more difficult than many countries care to do, as it involves education) to keep the many from following genocidal totalitarians than it is to expect the few (of whom some would be genocidal totalitarians given the opportunity) to avoid climbing the greasy pole.
[a] Responsibility is a key reason that to be recognised as a Party to a Conflict, a group exercising the ultima ratio regum has to have a command structure. Lack of command would make it very difficult to know who ought to be sent to the ICC.
You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above):
>Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title.
I started programming X10 in June 1986. Here's my first X10 program, a pie menu test application (I was calling them "theta menus" then):
After that I modified the X10 "uwm" window manager to support pie menus, and integrated it with FORTH so I could interactivally program and extend the window manager in FORTH, and use it to implement and perform an experiment comparing pie menus with linear menus.
Then I moved on from X10 to NeWS (and from FORTH to PostScript), because NeWS was so much better than X10 or X11, and supported round windows and non-terrible graphics.
At Sun in 1991 I helped write an X-Windows ICCCM X11 window manager in PostScript so NeWS could manage X-Windows, which supported non-rectangular tabbed window frames, pie menus in round windows, multiple displays, multiple rooms, scrolling virtual desktops (with an iconic map that let you scroll your view around), and many other nice features that other X window managers couldn't do at the time. Plus it was faster and more efficient than any X window manager because it actually ran in the window server instead of running in a separate process and communicating over the network, so it was able to immediately synchronously handle events, provide feedback, draw rubber-band lines in the overlay, pop up and track menus immediately, perfectly support quick mouse-ahead gestures, move and resize windows instantly, all without context switching or network traffic or grabbing the server or freezing event distribution or lagging behind or missing any events, instead of being asynchronous and laggy and flakey and dropping events like all other outboard networked X11 window managers do by design. (This was extremely important when running on a slow diskless Sun 3/50 paging over the network.) The idea of running something as crucial and interactive as the window manager in a separate process using an asynchronous protocol is quite insane, inefficient, wasteful, and flakey, but that's how X was designed to be.
In 1992 I made a pie menu window manager called "piewm" based on "tvtwm", and I also ported SimCity to X11, using TCL/Tk, redesigning it to be a multi player networked game, and encountering and solving all kinds of problems trying to make X11 play a game, support multiple users, do fast shared memory graphical animation, mix sounds with a network audio mixer, and support different types of screens and devices (both black and white and color). Those experiences were what motivated me to write the Unix-Haters Handbook chapter on the X-Windows Disaster, and compare my experiences with NeWS and X-Windows.
>The "piewm" X11 window manager with pie menus. When I was a research programmer at CMU, faced with using X11, I realized that I needed pie menus to help me move my windows around, so I went shopping around for a reasonable window manager, and since there weren't any, I choose the least unreasonable one at the time, "tvtwm", and hacked it up with an updated version of the old X10 "uwm" pie menus, and called it "piewm". The source code is available here: piewm.tar.Z.
>The TCL/Tk pie menu widget. I accidentally ported the HyperLook version of SimCity to X11, making it multi player in the process, using the TCL/Tk toolkit, which was the only X11 toolkit that didn't suck. I needed some fancy looking graphical pie menus, so I made a TCL/Tk pie menu widget, whose window shape could be shrink-wrapped around iconic labels. The source code is available here: tkpie.tar.gz. I recorded an X11 SimCity demo, showing pie menus in action. SimCity for X11 won a "best product of 1992" award from Unix World!
Here's how fun it is trying to draw the SimCity map efficiently with X-Windows: if only a few pixels have changed (which is a very common case), instead of sending the entire image, it sorted the changed pixels by color, then used XDrawPoints to draw each batch of different colored pixels that changed. Changing colors is expensive, so if you changed colors for every dot it would be very slow, but X-Windows lets you draw a bunch of dots at any position in the same color efficiently, so SimCity finds the pixels that changed, and if there are few enough of them, it sorts them by color, then goes through setting each color and drawing every pixel that changed to that color with XDrawPoints. If more than max_pix (256) changed, it just sends the whole image. Yes, that was the most efficient way to do it if the server didn't support shared memory or was across the network on a different host, since the X protocol and graphics API is so awkward and inefficient. And even if you have the shared memory extension in your server, X still requires that you ALSO write code to support the case of no shared memory, since it still needs to be able to run over the network. Decades later when I updated the code to support different bit depths than an 8 bit color palette, computers and networks were astronomically faster, and the code was too tricky for its own good, and SimCity on the OLPC was usually running locally with shared memory anyway, so I punted, commented out that code, and just sent the image every time.
/*
* Sending the whole image is 108108 bytes.
* Sending points is 4.4 bytes per point.
* One image is as big as 24570 points.
* But we have to sort these dang things.
*/
#define MAX_PIX 256
int max_pix = MAX_PIX;
[...]
/* TODO: Fix this. I disabled this incremental drawing code for now since it seems to be buggy. */
/* Sort the changed pixels by their color */
qsort(pix, different, sizeof (struct Pix), (int (*)())CompareColor);
/* Draw the points of each color that have changed */
points = (XPoint *)malloc(sizeof (XPoint) * different);
last = 0; pts = 0;
for (i = 0; i <= different; i++) {
if ((i == different) ||
(pix[i].color != pix[last].color)) {
XSetForeground(view->x->dpy, view->x->gc, pix[last].color);
XDrawPoints(view->x->dpy, view->pixmap, view->x->gc,
points, pts, CoordModeOrigin);
if (i == different)
break;
pts = 0;
last = i;
}
points[pts].x = pix[i].x;
points[pts].y = pix[i].y;
pts++;
}
free(points);
The map editor "DrawOverlay" code also has a lot of fun hairy optimizations to draw fast over the network, and it measure how long it takes in different situation and uses the most efficient technique (drawing the lines every time, or caching them in an offscreen pixmap overlay):
When I was timing and optimizing SimCity to make it run as fast as possible on X-Windows, I noticed that when you ran it super-duper flat-out fast, skipping screen updates to run the simulator in a tight loop, a huge amount of time was wasted simply redrawing the date field, since it changed so many times per screen refresh. So I implemented a special custom TCL/Tk widget just for displaying the date, which only lazily updates occasionally at a fixed frequency, and knows how to draw the text in an offscreen pixmap and "fake blur" the parts of the date that are changing quickly by overprinting the letters and digits in gray (you can't easily blur or blend text in X-Windows with an 8 bit color mapped display, so I did the next best thing that was possible and efficient, and it got the point across that time was moving very fast, without slowing the computer down or making it unresponsive).
> To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title.
This seems to imply that the correct name is "X-Windows" without the hyphen and plural, i.e. "X Window", but that's just as wrong (and much uglier) - the actual name of the window system is "X".
As a getting-names-right and things-making-sense fanatic, I'm more annoyed by "X Window" than "X-Windows".
Maybe that was the point, though....? Meta-trolling by getting people who wanted to use the correct name to apply the reverse transformation and incorrectly call it "X Window"? :)
