What they really want is for the UA to fully unleash things like HIMARS on civilian targets deep inside Russia, like they did in Donetsk not so long ago.
so basically yet again trying the approach of making people so upset with Putin not protecting them that they overthrow him? wasting ammo on civilians doesn't seem productive otherwise.
unless you/they're talking about hitting factories and such?
akin to a Trump guy trying to own us commies by showing us that the Washington Post didn't support Bernie Sanders
and if a media organization I do like turns anti-communist or Zionist, then fuck 'em. I have literally zero brand loyalty
The point I'm making isn't: what's Sisi's gonna do? He's very obviously going to get his tongue working very hard to get that burnt dogshit off the soles of Netanyahu's jackboots.
The point I'm making is: what is everybody else in the Egyptian state and military going to do. and we don't know yet, it's only been a couple hours
Would be interesting to see if this does indeed go anywhere. I have no idea if anything will happen, I'm just curious as to whether this was just an isolated accident or if the Egyptian military is getting steadily more pissed off at Sisi for failing to do anything. You can oppress an unorganized population all day and call it democracy, but when the military starts getting antsy then all bets are off
The Country of the Week is Chad!
Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to Chad.
If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:
spoiler
Check out the reading list. Nothing on Chad specifically yet, unfortunately.
Israel really just cannot help themselves, can they? They're magnetically drawn to their own destruction. They are begging on their hands and knees for the swift end of an apocalypse.
The Resistance's strategy is clear:
Israel has so far proved unable to meaningfully respond to any of this militarily. The Resistance knows that this is the case. They are aware that Israel will, in their rage and impotence, instead target civilians en masse in an attempt to buoy up morale inside their country.
The problem is that killing civilians:
a) doesn't solve a single problem for Israel. Bombing civilians is not even slightly productive for them. It doesn't even reduce civilian morale; survivors are more likely to join Hamas to resist Israel than turn against the people who are fighting the people bombing your children.
b) creates entirely new problems for Israel, because these bombings aren't obscure like in the past, but captured in videos and photos that then reach the rest of the world, prompting protestors to go out and take new action against Israel.
So they're stuck in this neverending cycle. They send a new batch of troops into Gaza. Those troops get killed and/or captured by Hamas. In revenge, Israel bombs civilians. This is captured and anti-Israel sentiment around the world escalates and BDS is strengthened. This weakens Israel further. To try and look stronger, they end a new batch of troops into Gaza. Repeat until collapse. So long as Zionism is and remains the dominant ideology in Israel, there is no way out of the death spiral. Tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry funneled into them has done nothing except kill more civilians. They're in a weaker place every single time that the US sends another package. Even the US admits that Hamas is still perfectly intact.
This is unbelievable. After 8 months of this, there hasn't been the slightest shift in strategy. They are the closest to collapse that they've been in their history, politicians and officials are threatening to leave the war-time government, the north is still depopulated of settlers and that's causing all sorts of societal mayhem, and they still aren't even attempting to get out of the death spiral. Even West-friendly global institutions are turning against them now. The Resistance really couldn't have asked for a less competent regime. You take the sense of military superiority and deterrence away from Israel on October 7th and it turns out that it was actually the singular load-bearing column of their entire society, and there's nothing else keeping it up.
I've got through a lot of note-taking methods tbh. Even as I went through my university course, it's something that I never really got the hang of and was satisfied by (part of it is that I was usually too busy with the workload to really do a deep dive and perfect any particular one).
I've tried doing it on paper (or devices you can handwrite on) because of all the scientifically-supported benefits it gives you in terms of concentration and memory and so on, and I don't doubt those benefits, but ease of access and searchability and connectivity are just way too important to be flipping through papers as soon as your notes reach a certain size.
So I do it via keyboard, usually on a device that isn't connected to the internet to avoid distractions (with the PDF or epub predownloaded, or the book next to me if I have it physically). There's a lot of note-taking apps out there and they each have their own benefits; I found that I dislike pure memorization/flashcard apps like Anki because I do actually just need a big place with my notes not all separated by flashcards.
I found that I dislike various pure Zettelkasten-y apps like Obsidian. A Zettelkasten, literally "second-brain" is kinda like a massive decentralized mind-map which focuses on connections between pieces of information rather than maintaining a strict set of notes, if you're unaware. I found that I actually quite liked having the ability to have a place for all my notes from a certain book to just read through and not scattered around (and a Zettelkasten is kinda explicitly about not memorizing stuff because, y'know, your second brain is meant to have the information and not the brain in your head, but I quite like just memorizing stuff so I can use it without referencing a giant mindmap).
Notion is pretty good and I still use it for a lot of things. It's a fairly basic app where you can take notes but that also has functionality for to-do lists and tables and so on.
I think I like RemNote the most. There's a lot of complicated stuff you can do with it, but at its heart, it's a notetaking app where you can generate flashcards inside the app and it'll do spaced repetition schedules automatically, which is nice because there's some things that I would like to flashcard but definitely far from everything. I also just like the structure of the thing, it's been good to encourage me to break away from agonizingly long paragraphs and instead break them up into bitesize pieces that are nonetheless connected together.
But at the end of the day, the app used isn't really what's important, because it's very easy to trick yourself into thinking you're being productive by messing with settings and doing youtube tutorials about XYZ or TOP TEN TRICKS FOR PRODUCTIVITY, etc.
As for the strategy while taking notes, there's also a ton of them out there which boast wild success. Again, I don't think any of them are wrong necessarily, but there's a lot of them that feel either needlessly complicated/require a lot of extra thought ("oh gee, what do I colour-code this? is this categorized as a fact, an idea, a concept, or commentary in my elaborate classification highlighting system?") when you should just be thinking about the book and its contents, or they feel like they're designed for specific subjects; what works for literature analysis won't work for medical school, which won't work for mathematics, etc.
I think the best way I've found is to simply read through the book and try and summarize what the author is saying in your own words and add examples. There's really only three guidelines I'd go for:
Keep your paragraphs relatively short to keep your notes in relatively bitesize chunks of information and explanation
If you're ever just typing things in from the book verbatim for more than a couple sentences at a time, you've probably lost focus - you might need to take a break for like 5-10 minutes or check you actually understand and aren't just pretending to understand so you can get through the book faster. It's fine to repeat decent stretches because there's only a few concise ways of saying something, but make sure to break it up by at least changing a word or re-ordering a paragraph to make sure your brain is still actually doing stuff.
If you don't understand something, then don't just repeat it verbatim in your notes because you'll just confuse yourself later. This is where a lack of internet connection can be a real pain, so maybe keep it on if you're dealing with something dense and confusing
Sometimes putting things in your own words is actually longer and less concise but uses less complicated jargon so it's actually easier to understand overall. There's usually a lot of extraneous/unhelpful information or padding that can be removed though, so my edited notes are very often like a quarter/third of the size of the actual book, maximum.
You can edit them from there after you've read the chapter/book. Often, you'll find that the author goes back over ground already covered just to remind you, and you might not catch this while going through it (especially if it takes you a week or two to get through it). Other times, you'll find that information you wrote down just wasn't that relevant. Obviously we aren't studying for a test here, there's no chance it'll be on the "exam", so delete parts at your own discretion.
I think even if you go for more exotic notetaking things, it's better to just get raw sentences down and then go back over the notes afterwards with the colours and referencing and tags and such.
The whole process takes a lot longer than just reading the book without making notes - a frustratingly long time, even - but it means that you'll never have to read it again in your life, if done right, and you'll memorize much more of it (especially if using flashcards in addition), so it's much more efficient and time-saving over a, say, 30 year timespan.
seeing the "works in theory, not in practice" argument in the year of our lord 2024 after being in my cosy Hexbear+literature bubble is like being a quantum physicist writing groundbreaking papers on chromodynamics and only talking to his colleagues about the latest theories and developments and then walking down the street and hearing a guy explaining to his friend that he thinks the world is made of fire, air, earth, and water
Getting back into reading after a hiatus of a couple months. What tends to happen is that I pick up a book, read half of it, realize that I'm getting confused, decide to read something more politically/economically fundamental to provide a better foundation, and repeat for like 5 books in a row.
it's like
"blahblahblah, this British politician in 1827 did this... oh god I think I lost the plot like 50 pages ago, I need to have a better overview of the British Empire"
"okay, here's a book on the British Empire that's more general... blahblahblah, they did this policy. oh fuck I just realized that the economics of the policy they're discussing in a big blind spot for me. I need to go find a book which deals with that."
"okay, here's a book on economic policy... blahblahblah, this is how trade duties and tariffs work. shit, I just realized that I'm unsure how this actually all fits together in a Marxist framework, I need to go find a book which deals with that."
etc, and then once I get to the bottom of that process, I work my way back up
luckily I take notes so I don't have to reread what I've already read for the most part
it would probably be more productive to get all the foundational stuff done first. like, you know, books tend to gloss over parts by being like "over the 1900s and 1910s, X party rose to power, and then..." as they're working with a larger narrative and then I think you're meant to fill in the very large gap in understanding by reading a book about precisely how they came to power, and so on. but the large foundational stuff also necessarily tends to be more abstract and dense in theory so it's hard to get through it.
The young Jens soon found his feet as he tackled the art of expressing himself. As a pupil at his Rudolf Steiner school he took part in a youthful performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. He joined the DNA, a party which had been founded in 1887, when he was 14 and at university, where he took a course in economics, he refined his political skills not least in street demonstrations during which stones were thrown at a Western embassy.
The lesson here is obvious: if you're a leftist, never take economics courses. And it's probably not a bad idea to avoid A Midsummer's Night Dream just in case
It does feel like the strikes being timed after major anti-Israel events (e.g. the ICC ruling, the ICJ ruling, etc) is meant to evoke an abuser-esque feeling of "Look at what you made me do."
But it feels like it goes even further than that; it feels like: "You ruling against us is the thing that killed those refugees. You killed those people, not us. If you hadn't ruled against us, those children would still be alive. Those deaths are on your head." It's a very psychopathic strategy, but I don't think it really works because Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that they're willing to do these kinds of bombings and massacres for basically no reason whatsoever, so it's not really scaring anybody out of acting against Israel, it just pisses people off even more and generates even more anti-Israel sentiment and even more Hamas fighters. Israel would have had to have shown literally a nanogram of restraint up to this point for the atrocity propaganda (in the literal sense of the words) to be effective as it would have been this terrifying, new development.
And of course, it's not a sustainable strategy anyway because killing civilians just generates more fighters with nothing left to lose. Studying how these kinds of wars reveals that mass civilian murders just doesn't function as a strategy even if you're completely heartless and willing to go there. There's a reason why almost every country which the Europeans previously used these strategies on (concentration camps, cutting off limbs for slight infractions, etc) is now independent and aren't still enslaved under their rule, and it's not because of the grand gestures and speeches of Woodrow fucking Wilson.