Yeah, I’ve never seen anybody else talking or complaining about yet. Very peculiar, and I haven’t got a clue what could be up with my phone specifically that could be causing that.

Does the site just straight up not work on mobile for anyone else? I can only sign in when using an adblock browser, I can’t filter posts or communities, search doesn’t work, and hitting next keeps me on the same page.

(if I recall correctly, wikipedia even has a page just for Tibetan torture methods)

Would you happen to have a link handy? A cursory google search yields nothing but the expected anti-Maoist trash

It’s always a head trip being reminded that the engines from Thomas the Tank Engine are all real

I might be going to see Santa Fe 3751 next month, and I’m so jazzed about it

Exactly, no accountability, no citation, no critical analysis, not even basic questions like “How in shit’s name would the MOD be able to derive anything like an accurate casualty projection in this situation.”

Like I get that articles like these aren’t meant for people who tend to actually think about what they’re reading, but goddamn, it’s just gossamer thin.

Adding to Ukraine’s woes are Russia’s huge advantage in manpower and its willingness to accept staggering losses in return for capturing small objectives

Do we even have reliable casualty numbers for the Russians (i.e. that don’t come from Ukrainian reports) or is this just the usual ‘Russians have no regard for human life and rely on human wave tactics’ trope

Edit:

The offensive has also come at a huge cost to Moscow, with an estimated 70,000 troops lost in two months, according to the U.K. Defense Ministry which posted the projection last month on X

That explains that I guess

Hirbawi is fantastic, I bought mine in the same pattern ages ago, and it comes with me on every desert camping trip I take (back when I wasn’t too lazy to do that)

Spec Ops: The Line, beyond being a pretty good game with a lot to say about the average gamer’s enjoyment of military shooter power fantasies, also introduced me to my favorite band, the Black Angels, and I’ll be forever grateful to it for that.

That screenshot is from IMFDB I’m guessing? I’m not saying this isn’t also a gamer thing, but those guys are a special kind of anal retentive.

You missed out on a lot (through no fault of your own, mind), he’s objectively one of the better romance options. He’s such a sweetheart when you get him to drop his egomaniacal archmage affectations.

Yeah, really the nicest thing you can say about Lawrence here is that, his genuine affection for the Arabs and their culture aside, his ego and his misguided desire to be a hero saw him used as a pawn by both Allenby and Faisal, and he winds up a broken man for it.

Which isn’t too far from how the real Lawrence viewed himself after the war. He’s very self-deprecating and pessimistic in the Seven Pillars, which was of course the primary basis for the movie script. The big difference though is that the real Lawrence knew about Sykes-Picot almost from the beginning, and was actively working to sabotage it for most of the campaign. That hardly excuses his arrogance in thinking he was able to play king maker and thwart two empires. Again, the best you can say about him is that he was a somewhat well-meaning, extremely capable, but ultimately misguided and foolish figure.

That may be an overly charitable interpretation, but in my years studying him, I’ve never gotten the impression that he was some scion of British imperialism. He was just a guy playing hero who dearly paid for it.

I don’t really have singular favorites of anything, but if you put a gun in my face and told me to name my favorite movie, it’d probably be Lawrence of Arabia.

It’s a pity that this movie gets mentioned whenever the concept of the white savior comes up, because it’s the one movie I could point to from this era that has anything like a deconstruction of that concept. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that it’s an anti-imperialist movie, but it’s definitely not pro-British empire by any means.

Edit: I completely forgot to mention, for any film nerds that live in southern California, who would like to see this movie in 70mm, look into American Cinematheque. They’re a nonprofit that operates three movie theaters in the LA area from the 20s and 30s. They show all sorts of classic movies, mostly on film, and sometimes host talks by stars, directors, and producers as part of screenings. They screen Lawrence in 70mm pretty regularly, and I can’t recommend that experience enough.

Imagine being so invested in your own make-believe auctoritas that you’re willing to traumatize a young girl falling asleep on a boring ass school field trip (something that has definitely never happened before and isn’t a trope in hundreds of cartoons)

Absolutely correct, but I don’t think she was talking about phone reps there, I think she directed that towards upper management types, who absolutely are wastes of space who rarely if ever do any actual work.

We really don’t need to be drawing this out any further than we already have

I’ve got a buddy who spent some time in southern Africa, and his Afrikaans impression always cracks me up. He says Afrikaaner men especially sound like angry vikings talking with mouthfuls of shit

Which, you know, grand, it’s about time these things were made less maddeningly frustrating. But this should be a footnote in a grand restructuring plan of…basically everything, at this point, or we die. That they’re pushing this as its own thing, and that this article suggests it as a compelling reason to vote Democrat lest the Republicans kill it in its crib, is beyond insane.

Trust me on this one, you really didn’t.

I suppose I’ll be obliged to do the same if libgen is kaput for good this time.