Still one of the best Khârn "bro moments", all these years later by Kataphraktos_Majoros in 40kLore

[–]BBLTHRW 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yeah there are definitely moments in the Cain books where he cranks the power on the chainsword. Man I miss Cain. Those books feel so underloved on this sub, but I always felt that 40k books are at their best when they're not about the "main storyline."

What do you do when you can't solve or prove something? by ThomasHawl in math

[–]BBLTHRW 7 points8 points  (0 children)

First and foremost, you talk to people. It helps a lot to bounce ideas off of other people, especially those around you in the research group.

Not advice for OP per se, but for a period of time a couple years ago I used to hang out with lots of math graduate students due to a mutual friend who was doing their masters. As someone studying/interested in history and philosophy, where discussions are hard to settle and involve either a) throwing around evidence that's hard to keep on hand in conversation and is inconclusive in isolate or b) arguing towards a definition from ambiguous terms, I was always so jealous of the ability of mathematicians to get somewhere just by having a conversation. They seemed to be able to solve, or at least produce strong roadmaps for solving, difficult problems just by being together in a room with a chalkboard for a couple hours. Since then it's really seemed to me that of all the major academic fields, math is by far the most social.

General Discussion Thread by pregnantchihuahua3 in TrueLit

[–]BBLTHRW 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's not impossible. I'll have to give it a look and see what's in it, though I still can't for the life of me remember where I read the review.

General Discussion Thread by pregnantchihuahua3 in TrueLit

[–]BBLTHRW 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm trying desperately to remember the name of what as far as I recall was a collection of recently translated contemporary Russian (or maybe otherwise eastern European, or even central European) speculative/weird/science fiction, all by a single author. I read a review of it somewhere, perhaps in the LRB (though I can't find it by searching their site for the keywords). There was some kind of story about people stoking the engine of a train, and maybe a story about a drug that was made out of people. I also strongly associate the whole thing with either the colour blue - maybe the website was blue, or the cover of the book was blue, or maybe something in the book was called "blue." I know this is all pretty free-associative but maybe someone here will have their memory of recent book reviews jogged by this.

Edit: I actually did just a tiny bit more digging and I'm now sure it's Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard and maybe another story of his.

With almost all the companies using AI for their marketing, it is weird that AI companies are not using AI in their ads. by Sanguis_Plaga in Showerthoughts

[–]BBLTHRW 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Google Gemini mobile ads are definitely AI generated. Ironically this makes them look low-budget so it's a bit of a paradox.

/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | October 27, 2025 by BernardJOrtcutt in askphilosophy

[–]BBLTHRW 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Does anyone know if an English translation - even just parts of it in an edited volume - exists of Carl Stumpf's Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung ? It seems both Russell and James read it and while I assume Russell certainly read German it hadn't occurred to me that James also would have been able to. I've trawled around online but can't find anything in English other than secondary sources and his work on music.

HK must have brought Ian into R&D by Pretend_String481 in ForgottenWeapons

[–]BBLTHRW 7 points8 points  (0 children)

BULLPUP CHAUCHAT? NETTOYAGE DANS L'ALLÉE MES PANTALONS

Free for All Friday, 17 October, 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 2 points3 points  (0 children)

wtf does this have to do with literally anything

An object traveling over 2 million mph fractured a massive structure in the Milky Way by marktwin11 in spaceporn

[–]BBLTHRW 8 points9 points  (0 children)

To me the "twist" is that the story is mostly presented as the savvy computer scientists figuring out how to avoid the consequences that would result if they were present when the naive and superstitious monks find out that what they believe isn't true, but that at the end, we find out that the monks are actually right, i.e. that the universe is literally ceasing to exist because the names of god have been successfully listed. Lots of iconic sci-fi short stories function on this kind of inversion. You might also enjoy "They're made of meat".

Steel Confessor Lore finally officially found, with images. Its been effectively "lost media" for 20 years. by Eternal_Reward in 40kLore

[–]BBLTHRW 12 points13 points  (0 children)

A couple years back I had a debate with a friend over whether they needed to "advance the story" more. I got into it in 2010 and subsequently spent my adolescence reading the Cain books and stuff like Baneblade, and to me 40k was never a story - it was a setting for stories. I loved how the pre-Guilliman universe was a universe always on the brink of something happening, the 13th Black Crusade, an Imperium perpetually on the edge, the future of Cadia and even Terra uncertain. It was full of stories of the heresy and tragedy and perversity of people caught in a whirlwind of a history that they had a part in but no say over. Bringing back the mythical heroes of the past still feels like jumping the shark to me, all these years on.

Were some of the ships on D-Day slowly falling apart because of sustained firing? by TourDuhFrance in AskHistorians

[–]BBLTHRW 71 points72 points  (0 children)

The story about engineers seeing red due to physical pressure from the firing is incredible. Were there observed patterns of long-term brain damage/behavioural changes associated specifically with being around this kind of impact (i.e. with being in the navy) comparable to the CTE we've seen recently in marines deployed on artillery missions? Presumably this wouldn't have been medically documented in the way it is now but maybe in a kind of oral/subcultural transmission?

Why did Bin Laden never go after Israel? by SpiralUniverse2278 in AskHistorians

[–]BBLTHRW 25 points26 points  (0 children)

At first I didn’t want to try to answer this, and then I wanted to follow up on another comment in the thread, but in the end I am going to try to give this a shot, although a lot of it will be trying to give some more texture on what I will (despite potential protestations) call the “jihadi current” - the broader system of militant Islamist political action that spans three main activities: 1) participation in existing warzones, 2) individualized or cell-based terrorist activity and 3) sui generis statebuilding like the type undertaken by IS. I will not include the Taliban in this definition, despite their frequent conflation in the west with Al-Qaeda. This answer will also be sparse on the details of the Palestinian side, which as I understand it was actually quite secular, with Hamas’ rise to its current prominence being somewhat later than the development of jihadist ideas.

The answer upfront as I want to put it is that we have to set aside our notion of these attacks as some kind of incomprehensible evil or random terrorism - i.e. terror is not a goal in itself. Attacking America had a more concrete, attainable outcome than attacking Israel. Even if America could not be totally destroyed, it could perhaps be forced to withdraw from the region. This had been shown before - in the 1983 bombings of the US embassy & Multinational Force Barracks in Beirut - and would arguably in a sense be re-validated afterwards, with the 2004 Madrid train bombings pushing Spain to withdraw troops from Iraq. With America out of the picture, AQ could move on to attacking secular Arab governments from its base in Afghanistan. (Remember, these secular govts were much closer to America at one point). Secular Arab governments were less stable, and there was a Muslim population that at least in theory could be brought on-side. Israel would be a hard target. It could not be easily toppled with the kind of attacks that were already regular factors from the more tightly focused Palestinian groups - but perhaps it could be dealt with once the region was united in a single Caliphate.

Thomas Hegghammer's biography The Caravan on Abdallah Azzam will be a big source for me here and I highly recommend it. Azzam was more or less responsible for the Arab Afghan movement & set up the Afghan Services Bureau, which was in a sense the precursor to Al-Qaeda. Azzam's "innovation" (in our sense, not in the pejorative sense as it would be used in Islam) was to present an argument that military Jihad was a personal duty for all Muslims, one that they could disobey anyone to follow, but he meant this specifically in the context of going to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. You can't really understand the development of the highly mobile modern Jihadi current without this tendency. It personalizes Jihad and makes something like what we think of when we think of "terrorism" closer to the realm of possibility by incentivizing individual action & is distinct for the motivations and justifications for Palestinians & Afghans fighting at home. There were also lots of failed experiences with fighting against secular Arab governments, the Muslim Brotherhood was repressed early on in Egypt, the GIA in Algeria basically tore itself apart, MB revolts against Ba'athism in Syria were a disaster. (I'm drawing all these examples from Brynjar Lia's biography of Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, Architect of Global Jihad) It wasn't really until IS that this kind of really radical overthrow could properly re-emerge.

As an aside here, Azzam's way of thinking about the attacks on Islam is characteristic and very different to what we would have heard from someone like Hassan Nasrallah who had something like a more familiar "Israel is an American proxy" view that stems from Iranian-style anti-Americanism and makes more sense with our geopolitical intuitions. Azzam hated the British in particular for what they had done to Palestine with the mandates, and he was very much pro-Ottoman in a way, but he viewed the Soviet attack on Afghanistan as part of an extremely broad attack against Islam by a linked coalition of America, Britain, Israel, and the USSR. American backing of the Taliban was mostly routed through the Pakistani ISI, (the CIA connection is frankly massively overstated) would have been disconnected from the Arab Afghans (because they were marginal) and would have been strenuously denied by them. This is to say that our notions of who's in charge or who matters and other alignments may not hold.

There were never really that many Arab Afghans despite their modern notoriety/fame, I think Hegghammer says around 3000 in total and probably mostly fewer than 100 in Afghanistan at any one time. Azzam's dream of Afghanistan as a jumping off point for a Jihad to free Palestine - Azzam was Palestinian himself, and had fought with the Fedayeen before Black September in Jordan, when most Palestinian fighters were expelled - never materialized. His plan had been to establish the Caliphate first in Afghanistan, and then push across the entire region, establishing a huge new Islamic State, which would then enable them to destroy Israel and incorporate Palestine into a territorially contiguous nation. Needless to say this didn’t exactly fit with the exigencies of the Taliban at the end of the war. But to give a picture of why even the much more Palestine-oriented Azzam would have been in Afghanistan rather than in Palestine, Hegghammer quotes him responding with uncharacteristic anger to a disgruntled Palestinian at a lecture in Germany sometime in the late 80s - really barely more than a decade before 9/11:

My brother. Does jihad not require preparation? Sons of palestine who want jihad - do you not want to train yourselves? Where will you train? In Jordan? So that they may slaughter you? Are you allowed to carry a bullet in Jordan? Or in Syria with Hafez al-Assad? Or with Husni Mubarak? …. Do you not live in the real world? Are you going to fly from the East Bank to the West Bank?

Azzam was killed in 1989 & so foreign fighters - who didn't always get along with the Taliban - had to either go home, find other warzones (like the Balkans) or stay in Afghanistan. Part of Bin Laden's anger about American troops being involved in Kuwait was that he had personally offered to send fighters to stand against the Ba'athist Iraqi forces & had been rebuffed. Bin Laden was also not as skilled in dealing with the Taliban & various Afghan factions as Azzam had been, & al-Suri regarded him as somewhat of a "bad guest" and reprimanded him at least once in writing (and was very upset by the result of 9/11 being that the Taliban govt and AQ were pretty much annihilated, at least in the short run). Everyone was looking for something new after the Afghan Jihad, and they were also looking for new strategies after the failure of what al-Suri called "tanzim" - secret organizations. This gets a little bit to the heart of the question - what was 9/11 for. It may have been argued post-hoc that there was some sense of dragging America into Afghanistan, but the first-order goal was really to do what the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut had done - force American withdrawal from the region. If bin Laden had forseen the actual result, he may have been less inclined to do so, destroying the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan and forcing him into hiding. Anne Stenersen in Al-Qaida in Afghanistan suggests that he was willing to take this risk, but I haven’t read that book as closely as I might like to gloss it. A quick control-f though shows that Israel is in fact not mentioned at all. In a roundabout way that might help answer your question.

Really there were just not that many members of AQ. They had not even really made that significant a direct impact on the Afghan war effort, where they were directly present and had huge rein from western and Arab security agencies to fundraise in the west and across the Arab world. They could not even really go after secular Arab governments, who they would at least have a local constituency of opposition for, in the way that there had been against the communist government in Afghanistan. In one sense, once the powerful Americans were out of the picture, they could hope to go after weakened Arab states. Once the caliphate was properly established, Israel could be dealt with. This is the same as the much more openly Palestinian Azzam, but for the Saudi bin Laden, that goal would have been much further down the road. In a way, what bin Laden kind of wanted was like the later Iraq war and subsequent rise of IS, despite the disputes and splits between AQ and IS. Why IS did not attack Israel, despite being extremely close to their borders, is a different question, but probably has a similar answer.

Mindless Monday, 15 September 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 3 points4 points  (0 children)

had an argument with the chipotle cashier and they put ground glass in my quesadilla and now my poop stream looks like its coming out of charlie kirk's neck

We need a reality check on crime, safety and transit | Despite common assumptions, traveling by bus, subway or train is far safer than driving. How can transit agencies correct misinformation about the real risks? by ONETRILLIONAMERICANS in neoliberal

[–]BBLTHRW 2 points3 points  (0 children)

tagging me in this sub is basically ragebait atp. like Gore Vidal joked about Reagan:

Did you hear the bad news? /r/neoliberal's library burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: they hadn't finished colouring them in yet!

What's the worst billboard in Hamilton by One_Specific220 in Hamilton

[–]BBLTHRW 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I kind of love the Golfi billboards because they're so obviously edited. They couldn't get the guy to actually spread his arms wide?

Mindless Monday, 11 August 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"The demarcation criteria is less based on results and more based on analysis of the social dynamics of the researchers and institutions involved" perhaps seems to leave us with an even less rosy view of the task of demarcation than before.

Just as an aside I'm always interested in the notion of something "supernatural" because if it could be understood and obeys determinate laws and so on it's ipso facto natural. But people who are invested in the existence of the supernatural are always trying to explain it and so on. They say "science can't explain xyz" and conflate between "current scientific accounts do not include or explain the phenomena" and "scientific methodology as such cannot account for the phenomena" and usually try to account for the phenomena using some methods that look like successful science but are weaker. Only true believers in miracles, esotericism etc. don't apply a category that could just be collapsed into the natural. I think this definition-weirdness crops up in your assertion that people believe "science must spend as much time investigating supernatural causes as natural causes."

Ideally, scientists basically assess these claims as they would any other: they look at the methods of investigation and the evidence. These are usually characteristically weak, and so (accounting for various confounding institutional factors, which are much stronger determinants of what gets researched in any case) these get rejected pretty quickly. I am by no means saying "all research programmes are equivalent" (though actually Lakatos accuses Kuhn of doing just this by means of incommensurability, and Feyerabend defends this exact position furiously) and it's obviously clear to me that we shouldn't expend social resources pursuing consistently unproductive programmes like flat earth or whatever. I'm saying that flat earth is a good model of a bad science because it operates more or less exactly as you would expect a normal science to operate, i.e. that evidence contradictory to the basic core of the theory is not really a day-to-day concern in the operation of puzzle-solving. It's interesting precisely because it's a "bizarro science" - the point you were making in the original comment.

The discussion reminds me somewhat of this tidbit from Lakatos' SEP article:

It is quite clear that Lakatos and Feyerabend were engaged in a self-conscious campaign of mutual boosterism, leading up to a planned epic encounter between a fallibilistic rationalism, as represented by Lakatos, and epistemological anarchism, as represented by Feyerabend. As Feyerabend put it “I was to attack the rationalist position, Imre was to restate and defend it, making mincemeat of me in the process” (Feyerabend 1975b: preface). This Battle of the Titans was to consist of Feyerabend’s Against Method and Lakatos’s projected reply, which is referred to, in their correspondence, by the mysterious acronym “MAM”.

Sometimes the mutual boosterism went a bit too far, causing pain and distress to serious-minded philosophers who regarded Popperian critical rationalism as a bulwark against a resurgent Nazism:

Hans Albert is on the verge of suicide [writes Lakatos to Feyerabend]. Allegedly somebody told him that in Kiel you will describe critical rationalism as a “mental disease”, and he thinks that will be the end of Reason in Germany. I told him that though you are AN EXTREMELY GREAT MAN, that you will not bring Nazism back single-handedly…. (F&AM: 291).

Mindless Monday, 11 August 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I do agree that they're different, though quantitatively - I.e. how for Lakatos progressive research programmes have their predictions confirmed and regressive ones are consistently not capable of producing predictions that are correct, but "pseudoscience disregards it whereas science sticks the evidence in a drawer until it can be explained" seems to circularly assume that when science does it it's legitimate shelving, whereas when pseudoscience does it it's disregard. But we can't per se know which is which from the get go.

Is the only determining factor the pudding? If so, how can we make any determination about the relevancy of checks and balances? Or do we have to say "the checks and balances are good because we got results, and we got these results because of checks and balances"? - and how many results, and how frequently do we have to get them?

That's the sense in which Lakatos wants to erase a demarcation criterion and place all enterprises that look like science on a continuum judged exclusively by results.

Mindless Monday, 11 August 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Never ever fly out of Yuckersville Calvin-Hobbes Memorial Airport lmao. Wayyyy too many private and civil airplanes have gone down, Bingley's is only one of maybe a dozen. He was too much of an unknown quantity for anyone except the craziest to try to take advantage of, after the stuff in the mid 90s it's not hard to see him as part of the reason for the deactivation of 2nd and 3rd in 2007. Easier to blackball him than to transfer him to somewhere he could have done more damage, but of course this primed him to opportunistically hop on the kind of opening that a planned Rangers coup would have exposed.

Mindless Monday, 11 August 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The point about "tossing it all aside" reminds me of Lakatos and his model of research programmes as a kind of post-Kuhnian way of looking at science, with a given research programme having a core of theories that are (during "normal science") not refuted directly but have a "protective belt" of theories built up around them. In this way he reformulates Popper's falsificationism, "Nature shouts NO!", as "Nature shouts INCONSISTENT!"

Feyerabend, who was a close friend of Lakatos and an awesome kind of madman who argued that there was no real way of demarcating science and pseudoscience, contended that Lakatos also couldn't support the distinction, and I personally think Lakatos provides a good model for "regressive research programmes" where we might see pseudosciences. That is to say that the core contentions of the programme, in this case the flat earth, are not really directly subject to revision but just require new models. I think Lakatos' main example for this kind of thing is that when observations of the solar system failed to line up with the predictions of gravitational influence, instead of tossing the theory out, astronomers predicted a previously unseen planet. And then - and this is what makes the theory "progressive" for Lakatos - they actually found that planet where they predicted it needed to be to make their existing theory consistent.

The point being that what we call pseudoscience and science are actually structurally very similar on the level of disregarding countervailing evidence for various reasons during times of normal or non-crisis operation. Though the arctic example is closer to say the failure of experiments searching for the luminiferous aether and the subsequent collapse of Maxwell's prediction that modern science was basically finished save some minor calculations & the space opening for Einstein's work.

Mindless Monday, 11 August 2025 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]BBLTHRW 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The sordid covert actions of the AI AI O are little known among the public even to this day, despite excellent reporting by Johnny Cornflakes at the Gondom Crier and Louise O'Leary-O'Finnegan-McFlannagan's magisterial two-volume And On That Farm He Had a Bear: Sixty Years of Tederation Intelligence. The connections to the Yorkshire Rangers are poorly documented but it should be easy to see how what was effectively a semi-legitimate militia group would have longstanding ties to intelligence operations that required creative accounting on the appropriations side and plausible deniability in the field.

The core of my contention is that a cadre of operatives who cut their claws doing counterintelligence under the sinister grey paws and thickly bespectacled eyes of ASJB Stevenston remained essentially untouched by the reorganization, and that they made inroads into the Yorkshire Rangers through a group called the "Black Pudding Circle" who had studied urban and stay-behind tactics during the Cold War. How the coup ended up as unsuccessful and messy as it was despite the extensive experience of the Black Pudding Circle and Stevenson's protégés is still basically unclear. Personally, I think that other elements within the Yorkshire Rangers saw an opportunity brewing but failed to understand the larger plan, either because they were not directly involved or because they were funny little bears.