POTF 42 - Nominations

[Aexodus]

POTF is about recognising the very best posts, the best arguments and discourse in the D&D, and appropriately rewarding it.


You shall progressively earn these medals once you achieve enough wins, but first you must be nominated in threads such as this one. And it works like this.

Post of the Fortnight - Rules

-Each user can nominate up to 2 posts per round, and the only valid form of nomination is by quoting with a link as shown below the chosen post in the PotF thread designated for it.

Looking forward to getting this kicked off for real!

- Each 15 days there will be a new Nomination thread put up, and all the posts written during this period are considered eligible, if properly nominated. Exception are posts who are somewhat breaking the ToS; upon being acted by Moderation, they are always considered ineligible.


- Remember: It is possible to nominate up to 2 posts each round of the competition; it is also possible to change a nomination anytime before the actual round of nominations ends.


- There will be two competitions held every month, with a period for nominations followed by a period of voting. The submitted posts can be discussed in a dedicated space.


- Only posts that have not participated in a previous poll and that have been published in the current period of given time in any section of the D&D area may be nominated.


- The authors of the nominated post will be informed so they can withdraw the candidacy if that is their wish.


- The maximum number of participating posts in the final vote will be ten. If more than ten nominations are submitted, seconded nominations will take priority. After seconded nominations are considered, earliest nominations will take priority. If the number of posts submitted to the contest is less than ten, the organizing committee may nominate posts if it considers it appropriate.


-The members of the committee will never nominate a post belonging to one of them, but the rest of the users can nominate their posts (organizers posts), and vice versa.


-In the event of a tie, both posts will be awarded and both posters will receive rep and 1 competition point.


- Public or private messages asking for a vote for a candidate post are forbidden. Violators (and their posts) may not participate in the contest.


- People are expected to consider the quality and structure of the post itself, more than the content of the same. While it's certainly impossible to completely split the two aspects when making our own opinion on a post, it remains intended, as also explained in the Competition Commentary Thread, that commenting and discussing on the content rather than on the form/structure of the post is considered off-topic for the purpose of this competition. You are free to nominate and vote for whatever reason you want, but what happens in public has to strictly follow up with the competition rules.


A nominated post should:


1. Be focused and relevant to the topic(s) being discussed.
2. Demonstrate a well-developed, insightful and nuanced understanding of the topic(s) it is discussing.
3. Be logically coherent, well organized and communicate its points effectively.
4. Support its contentions with verifiable evidence, either in the form of links or references.
5. Not be deliberately vexatious to other users.
6. Not be composed of a copy/paste in its entirety.

Good luck everyone!

[Flinn]

"Popular" opinions - according to our AI social media overlords are concerned - are those which illicit the most responses and interaction, irrespective of what they say, or whether they are orthodox, previously underrepresented, suppressed or silenced. Much like how it's difficult to ignore a crying child or barking dog, opinions which are most likely to illicit the most responses are those which are inflammatory.

This relegates discourse such as you and I are having right now, within the context of social media, to the status of suppressed - not literally through censorship, but de-facto by limiting it's reach relative to that which engages the masses. I don't think there even needs to be a conspiracy behind social media management for there to be silencing of opinions, although what we are seeing with the reaction to Trump's mob this month, could be classed as a conspiracy (and by those who made it possible in the first place).

Provocative and/or simplistic material (much of it supplied by legacy media) attracting more attention than detailed information is an age-old problem which has inevitably materialized online. The climate of division encouraged by social media is not worse than the censorship proposed to curtail it.

The problem of free speech and polarization was discussed by Mill:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I acknowledge that the tendency of all opinions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, but is often heightened and exacerbated thereby; the truth which ought to have been, but was not, seen, being rejected all the more violently because proclaimed by persons regarded as opponents. But it is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood. And since there are few mental attributes more rare than that judicial faculty which can sit in intelligent judgment between two sides of a question, of which only one is represented by an advocate before it, truth has no chance but in proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated as to be listened to.

On Liberty

The liberal establishment rejects this reasoning (ironic given Mill’s association with liberalism), instead preferring to use the existence of polarization as an excuse to protect and further its own hegemony. For instance, when von der Leyen laments that digital media has become a “danger to democracy”*, and claims that “in a world in which polarising opinions are most likely to be heard, it is a short step from perverse conspiracy theories to the death of police officers,” what she’s really denouncing is criticism of, and organization against, the prevailing political structures and ideologies in Europe.

*An absurd accusation coming from an obscenely powerful, unelected president of five-hundred million people.

Mainstream press blather aside, I can't disagree with any of this, as I also agree that social media organisations being our arbiters of free speech is problematic. They have created their own town squares and forced everyone into them (even people with no social media accounts exist within their spheres as uniquely identifiable non-registered users). But I can't see a solution to this situation that isn't either heavy on the legislation, or that somehow reclassifies social media in general as a public utility (with all the legal chaos that would ensue).

The point about the mainstream press is not “blather”. Misleading, false or conspiratorial content disseminated by CNN, The Washington Post or Fox News (all of which are shown preferential treatment by big tech) is typically more sophisticated and influential than Alex Jones’ rants. Shutting down independent/alternative creators simply restores old media’s monopoly on the national discourse without solving any of the issues relating to fake news or conspiracy theories.

The idea of violating one right (e.g., free association) to protect another (e.g., free speech) is dubious at best. There aren't multiple competing freedoms, but one coherent freedom; if you violate one part of it then you've violated the whole. Whatever one hopes to gain by criminalizing private discrimination, freedom is not it.

The purpose of the Civil Rights Act was to desegregate America racially; the idea behind protecting political speech would be to arrest the resegregation of America along partisan lines.

For example, federally subsidized colleges/universities should not be entitled to obstruct conservative groups on campus or facilitate the ideological monopolization of higher education. Nor should businesses be entitled to engage in employment discrimination based on participation in the democratic process (e.g. refusing to accommodate workers requesting time off to vote).

[Flinn]

No I would take the complete opposite position and argue that there was no evidence that Alexander was a non-heterosexual. Although he does come off as an asexual weirdo who would rather run around killing things than spend time with women, at least in his youth. We know that Alexander had a mistress in his youth which was acquired for him by Philip. During this time Alexander also tried to arrange a marriage between himself and the daughter of the ruler of Caria, which Philip ordered him to cancel. We also know that Alexander was critical of Philip's lifestyle, and in general seems to have been against debauchery whether it was drinking or gambling or whoring. Probably because he was turned into an incel tradcath by Aristotle. Aristotle for his part was also extremely against the vices of whoring and little boys. Alexander also took a mistress when he invaded the Persian Empire. Then later arranged a trad cath monogamous marriage between himself and Roxana of Sogdia. As well as monogamous marriages between his generals and Persian noble women, which they really disapproved of and probably fathered a few bastards during this time. Including having his friend Hephaestion marry one of Darius's daughters, in a clear attempt to set him up as a potential successor to his throne. Alexander also married two more of Darius's daughters, probably as a prestige and legitimacy move. During that time he only fathered two children.

The claims that Alexander was engaged in manly pederasty with Hephaestion and some of his other friends is only reported in later "gossip" sources. Alexander also couldn't have been poking Bagoas with his sarissa, as Oliver Stone claims, because Bagoas was a palace eunuch of Darius. Naturally no one trusts eunuchs so Darius ordered him to drink poison... before Alexander had even crossed into Asia. Whether Darius was diddling little boys I don't know. I also don't recall rearguard actions with Bagoas being listed among Darius's battles. Unless you mean the other Bagoas, who was also a eunuch, which supposedly "won a dancing contest" and Alexander kissed him because Bagoas demanded it, but this is only mentioned by Plutarch, and Bagoas himself by Quintus Curtius Rufus in passing, who are unreliable sources in general (don't get me started about Plutarch and the Late Republic historiography).

As for Achilles, that is one of the more commonly cited examples. Although in all of my times in university I don't remember ever hearing specifically that Achilles had a male lover. Now the Greek myth courses in the classes departments were really long and they tried to drill all sorts of Greek concepts in our heads, like "hamartia" and so on. But I don't remember pederasty actually being mentioned. Other than the BBC Troy I can't say I've heard much about this at all. I mean aside from Achilles being a fictional character of course, so you can only really rely on the Illiad and how ever many versions of it there are.

[Abdülmecid I]

My comparison wasn’t an allusion, it was pretty straightforward. If you’re referring to the article, the reference to Paulsen was as an example of a huge short bet being vindicated, not of my comparison. Paulsen obviously wasn’t a retail investor, and neither is Ackerman. They’re hedge fund managers, betting against the market, not just against retail investors.

I didn't say your comparison was an allusion, I said your comparison alluded. There's a pretty big difference. I also wasn't referring to Paulsen, but I think the distinction between "retail investor" and a "hedge fund manager" is only in size. Imo, I really don't think that distinction as super important as you seemed to put an emphasis on Wall Street Speculators being screwed by short sellers. "Wall Street Speculators" are generally large, institutional investors who tend to inflate prices regardless of market conditions. Betting against the "market" as was the case for Scion Capital against the housing market in 2008, Ackman against the overall market in 2020, is as much a bet against "Wall Street Speculators" (who continue to inflate stock prices despite adverse market conditions), as it was against markets.

But if you want to really underline the point of retail investors doing so, then sure. I cannot recall any precise example like that.

No one suggested the SEC is going to go after Redditors for market manipulation. Reddit was and is the epicenter of people explicitly admitting to and encouraging transactions which create an artificial price or maintain an artificial price for a tradable security, the definition of market manipulation.

Spoiler for bad words: 

The "definition" of market manipulation can be stretched to include almost all manner of trading. This is why market manipulation is rarely pursued unless it is particularly egregious or obvious. A bunch of retail traders deciding to buy a security they see as undervalued and unfairly shorted wouldn't constitute market manipulation. Otherwise you may as well call this market manipulation.

That’s just a fact. So no bar. Whether that in fact broke laws is for the SEC to find out, but they’re unlikely to find anything concrete. Prosecution doesn’t have any bearing on what I said, however, so I don’t know why you would try to put the allegation of collusion on the same footing as the fact of market manipulation. The latter is known, the former, speculation.

Because collusion would probably be easier to prove than market manipulation. Though anything is possible, I'd be quite a bit more surprised to Redditors investigated than brokerages or hedge funds. Oh wait, they're already looking into both. Now whether this results to anything tangible is of course anyone's guess, but the fact that people are looking doesn't really surprise me.

A conflict of interest requires two conflicting interests whereby serving one may harm the other, not parties; two parties is a common example/situation.

Uh huh. So how would a plaintiff would sue himself due to an internal conflict of interest? Because you are right, you can certainly have an internal conflict of interest, but we aren't talking about metaphysics, we are talking about finance.

That’s not dependent on the likelihood that immediate and long term reputational and therefore financial damage would be equal to or greater than platforms’/hedge funds’ interest in minimizing the near term cost of covering short positions in a manner that would cause that reputational damage, and there’s no evidence of the alleged collusion or pressure exerted for your inferred conflict to be a comparable factor. WSB knows they’re “retards,” as they say, acting in bad faith. The latter is known, the former, speculation.

I don't see how r/WSB's "bad faith" is at all relevant to the subject matter at hand. People are allowed to make bad investments based on personal beliefs. If I invest into gold because I want to see the USD eventually die and try to convince others to do so, that's not illegal.

Moreover, you still haven't addressed the obvious clash in interest at brokerages like Robin Hood, who have an incentive to do an unethical favor for their hedge fund partners in order to maintain a good relationship with parties that make their business possible, at the expense of a userbase that will have a hard time mobilizing against them. That conflict of interest is very relevant, and makes unethical conduct not only possible, but likely. Hence, why, as referenced several times before and in this post, people are taking a look and want to see an investigation. These are not difficult dots to connect.

The UK has no federal government; a minister is a member of the Commons or the Lords chosen by the prime minister to run a government department. Robert Jenrick is Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Central government, federal government, whatever.

The purpose of the legislation is to protect monuments from puritan mobs and/or radical local officials who have no interest in debate. The legislation allegedly provides for "consultation with local communities". Jenrick said: "Local people should have the chance to be consulted whether a monument should stand or not. What has stood for generations should be considered thoughtfully, not removed on a whim or at the behest of a baying mob."

The people who actually pay for the statue’s maintenance “should have the chance to be consulted”? Why, how generous!

The Conservative central government decides that a Conservative minister in the central government knows best and giving him total veto over any city’s decision to remove one of their own monuments strikes me as a great example of someone having "no interest in a debate". The way you describe it, Jenrick and like-minded Conservatives are the real puritans.

What difference does private ownership make? Why are some statues memorialising and some aren’t?

Say it slowly: a privately-owned statue of Lenin. It’s funny, isn’t it?

Secondly, being privately owned means that the city is going to have a much harder time being able to legally take it down. The Lenin statue in Seattle weight about seven or eight tons, so mobs are going to have their work cut out for them to physically take it down too.

Thirdly, the fact that the statue was made on the other side of the Curtain and moved to Seattle just a few years after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gives it a new meaning: so much for the commies. When it was made, it was supposed to inspire awe and fear to residents living under an oppressive and seemingly invincible regime that represented the greatest opponent to the U.S. in history. It turned into a big American trinket less than a decade after it was made. It’s like a Che t-shirt made in a sweatshop in how it shows that capitalism is powerful enough to even defang the idea of communism. I think that there is an artistic message in how it got there.

Fourth, the Seattle Lenin statue is regularly decorated or vandalized by locals in so many ways. The most common ones are giving it clothes like a scarf or a silly hat, spray painting it, or painting the hands blood-red. That probably wouldn’t routinely happen if this statue was meant to respect Lenin or what he did.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/len...ont/593995414/
https://archive.seattletimes.com/arc...1&slug=2124030

That’s why I don’t think the Lenin statue in Seattle is a memorial. That’s also why there is an inherent difference between keeping a memento of some horrible bit of history and keeping a memento that honors or sympathizes with said history. Context matters.

[Lord Thesaurian]

“To execute this order - means to defend our lands, to save the Motherland, to exterminate and to conquer the hated enemy… I think it is necessary.”
—People's Commissar for Defense of the USSR: Joseph Stalin. July 28, 1942.


Red Army soldiers advancing at Stalingrad, 1942.

In the history of military orders, Order 227 stands as one of the most extreme and brutal orders ever given; not one step back! Such draconian orders of course, that outlaw cowardice and retreat in the face of a determined enemy, harken back to the Spartans at Thermopylae. But was Order 227 really necessary? And did such extreme and punitive orders make any sense at all?

On the face of it, Order 227, issued by the Stavka on July 28, 1942, set about to accomplish three things:

1) Unconditionally eliminate moods of retreat in the troops, and counter act any propaganda that the Soviet Union can and should retreat further east. [1]
2) Unconditionally remove and/or court martial any corps or army commanders who accepted troop withdrawals without an order from army headquarters. [1]
3) Unconditionally remove and/or court martial commanders and commissars of regiments and battalions who accepted unwarranted retreat of their troops without an authorized order from the corps or division commander. [1]

In order to outlaw retreat however, and enforce army discipline, it was deemed necessary to give the NKVD and Soviet secret police extraordinary powers, including the ability to arrest, capture, or shoot any fleeing or panicking troops. Any Soviet officer who disobeyed Order 227, by ordering an unauthorized retreat, could be executed on the spot. No court martial was necessary. NKVD penal battalions and blocking detachments were mandated along each Soviet front and were infamously featured at the Battle of Stalingrad. In that battle alone, some 13,500 Red Army soldiers may have been subject to executions (Overy & Beevor), through many Russian historians, and plenty of Western historians, not unjustifiably, have disputed this claim based on exaggerated accounts of Soviet brutality and their own review of Russian archives.

Ignoring however the unconfirmed death tolls and thousands of Soviet soldiers who were in fact forced into penal units, was police enforcement of Red Army units really necessary? And did a no retreat order, so widespread and harsh in its possible punishment, especially to Soviet officers, make any sense at all?

The date of Order 227 of course is extremely important if arguing from a point of military necessity. By July 1942, Case Blue was in full swing, and the main objective of the Wehrmacht (and Army Group South) at this point was to capture the Baku oil fields. The loss of Baku would mean the loss of 80% of the Soviet Union’s oil and fuel production. In the previous year alone, the USSR had lost hundreds of miles of land -containing some 40% of its population- as well as much of its agricultural base, coal, iron, and aluminum stores located in the Ukraine and elsewhere. As a result of the German invasion, some 1500 large factories were relocated to Central Asia, along with some 16 million people. To stop the Nazi advance, the Red Army had even resorted, in some areas, to scorch earth tactics. And through it was completely necessary to trade space for time, and even practical to do so, what Order 227 thus sought to achieve, according to proponents, was to connect commanders on the ground with the domestic situation occurring in the back. If the Soviet Union’s oil production was to be protected, along with several other key economic sectors, like the Persian corridor, there could be no more retreat. To reverse course, and widen the narrow visions and strategies of his army commanders, Stalin thus took it upon himself to order a harsh order of no retreat.

It should be noted however, that Order 227 did not come without obvious risk. The Kiev encirclement had in fact come about partially because of Stavka’s refusal to abandon Kiev and what remained of the Stalin line. In addition, Order 227 was also a possible propaganda victory for German propagandists intent on painting a hopeless situation for the occupied territories and a communist system on the verge of collapse. As a result of this last concern, Order 227 would be read to Red Army units, it would not be published in Soviet newspapers or broadcast from Soviet radio stations. Finally, as some historians correctly note, perhaps the most damaging charge of all, was that Order 227 had the potential to lead to another reckless purge of Soviet manpower and high-ranking officers. Such a purge, were it to happen again, at a time when the German army was still deep within Soviet territory, and within striking distance of the Baku oil fields, would be both reckless and potentially disastrous. And though Russian historians and military writers are quick to point out that no solid Soviet front had yet been established to stop Army Group South, and wouldn’t be until Stalingrad, the huge disparity of available resources, manpower, and production in 1942, between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, meant that no retreat orders were again reckless and probably unnecessary. And though perhaps unfair, and inappropriate as some counter arguments go, history does show that by July 1942 Hitler had already forfeited any realistic means to defeat the Soviet Union by declaring war on the United States.

Oddly enough however, even with the entry of the United States and the beginning of Lend-Lease, perhaps the best arguments for Order 227 come from hindsight itself. While close to half a million soldiers did serve in penal battalions, NKVD and inhouse blocking detachments never had the capacity or the resources to threaten a serious purge of Soviet soldiers or Red Army officers. It was however, smart and militarily correct to turn Stalingrad and the whole southern front in the Soviet Union into a Nazi-Soviet bloodbath and an ideological campaign of military attrition. Would Pavlov's house, Rattenkreig, and the encirclement of Paulus’s Sixth Army have been possible had the Soviet 62nd Army not have been motivated to fight to the last man? And though history is full of respite examples of no retreat orders going badly wrong, such as at Kiev and Hitler’s own insistence on defending Stalingrad, the decision to hold a bridgehead across the Volga, and commit to drawn out urban combat, gave Zhukov and the Red Army the time and space it needed to assemble an overwhelming reserve force that would crush the flanks of Army Group B. In fact, the street by street, room by room, house by house fighting at Stalingrad lasted longer than the entire French campaign. History arguably knows of no greater example of stubborn resistance, courage, and downright determination against a determined foe, than the average Soviet soldier’s performance at Stalingrad.

If the Battle of Stalingrad was in fact the turning point of World War II, and if one needs to make the case that Hitler had badly underestimated the Soviet Union, then Order 227 by itself could be seen as justified. As historians who favor the order are quick to note, “it was an extraordinary order, brought about by totally unique circumstances, for a totally unique system and government.” In this sense then, Order 227, and its infamous slogan of “not a step back,” was just another patriotic extension of the Great Patriotic War, an order that if perhaps militarily senseless and barbaric, would reaffirm to the Red Army and the average soldier that the war was not at all lost, and that Stalin and the Soviet Union were invincible. Only the greatest soldiers in history have the capacity to the fight to the last man, and this expectation, to stand and fight, should not be lost on the Red Army or its generals. As Order 227 correctly notes, the German army was waging a deliberate campaign of extermination, using similarly cruel tactics against the Soviet people, and now, now was the time to put a stop to it. However, what the German soldier lacked, according to Stalin, was a “higher purpose.” To defend the Motherland, and renew faith and discipline in the Red Army, one only needed to make the message loud and clear. There would be no more retreat and no more cowards. To surrender more ground would be an illegal betrayal to the Soviet Union. As the author of Order 227 correctly predicted; all Soviet soldiers would fight to their death or die where they stood.

[1] Author’s summary of Order 227. Full Text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Trans...ce_of_the_USSR

Thanks to Patrick Wyman's excellent Tides of History podcast, I've become fascinated by that hazy Neolithic period that might be responsible for some older myths. Locally, Indigenous Australians have stories of specific mountains exploding in fire, these mountains have been revealed more recently as being dead volcanoes that haven't erupted for between 10 and 20,000 years. The folk stories are very specific about which mountains exploded. Folk memories can last for surprisingly long periods of time under certain circumstances - even if the events that caused them are long lost and the context of the story has been upended.

What we have in stories of Atlantis or Hyperborea are more likely the result of fantasy storytelling by literate Bronze Age societies. Events such as floods are commonplace around the world. Even within the last few decades and centuries there have been flood events that have upended towns and cities and rendered land unliveable. It isn't such a stretch to see ancient stories written to include what for them would have been even less predictable and more shocking natural disasters. Particularly when you take into account the greater impacts of time and distance to worldviews in pre-industrial and Bronze Age societies. A flood that engulfed a small city 200 miles away from a Bronze Age writer, and 50 years before, would seem far more distant to them than something that happened in the 1960s, 4 hours drive away is for us - it would seem like another age.

To confuse events, as I inferred in my opening paragraph, as well as explaining events that were relatively recent to them, there is the possibility that Bronze Age writers were expanding on earlier folk stores and folk memories that are now lost to us. Bronze Age writers are a lot closer to the period referenced above at the end of the last glacial and the early Neolithic than we are. They were writing down stories of possible historic events in a way that is explainable within their terms of reference and world view. A Bronze Age Greek fisherman who drags up farming tools from under the Black Sea might rightly think that there must have been land there which sunk in some great disaster. Combine this with folk stories of floods from earlier times and earlier actual historic events and you have an easy setting for stories of Atlantis.

The landscape of much of the coastal world did change at the end of the last glacial period and the dawn of the Neolithic. Lands that were settled by people did end up under the sea - Doggerland is one place that has been mentioned, the Black Sea, Beringia, the Timor Sea and Sundaland are others which had extensive populations of people who were relatively settled and culturally diverse. They weren't grand cities in the Classical context, but they did have villages and community. It's unlikely that they lost their lands in great flood events, but rather gradual changes over several generations that would have left cultural impacts and lifestyle changes even without loss of life. And it's likely that these early Neolithic populations were culturally and maybe even genetically ancestral to some of the early non-literate proto-civilisations in places like the Ukraine and Anatolia, and this during the time preceding the establishment of larger more complex settlements.

So yeah, Atlantis is fantasy. No matter how many coincidentally straight rocks are fished up from under the sea. But that doesn't make the stories any less interesting.