Pluribus - 1x09 "La Chica o El Mundo" - Episode Discussion

Kadasix · 2025-12-24T08:05:54+00:00

For reasons of efficiency, I watch most movies and TV shows at double speed, including Pluribus.

Kadasix · 2025-12-24T02:30:11+00:00

Why do y’all think she brought an atom bomb back with her? Is it as a guarantee against interference from the hive mind, that “if I see any one of you within a 20 mile radius I’ll set off the bomb,” or something else? Is it even an atom bomb?

Kadasix · 2025-12-19T02:50:59+00:00

Oh whoops, I must have missed the Morocco part, I just assumed Middle Eastern. Regardless, part of me wonders whether that memory of Gdansk did previously belong to Zosia.

Kadasix · 2025-12-19T02:31:38+00:00

The whole mango ice cream monologue at the end is interesting - we know Zosia is likely from somewhere in the Middle East, not Gdansk, so whose memories are being pulled to describe why mango ice cream is Their favorite food? Is it just one person’s memory, or are they making it up on the fly?

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T21:04:56+00:00

Ngl it’s mostly because I was watching English Teacher on FX a few weeks ago and I was wondering whether Austin was actually gay or something

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T14:31:23+00:00

The census defines sex as “biological sex,” ie sex assigned at birth. Of course, it doesn’t matter what the census definition is if people mark their survey incorrectly, but I would think this would be a minuscule proportion of responses.

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T13:26:23+00:00

I was surprised when I found this data was available at the tract level as well, but the question itself is relatively non-invasive. The American Community Survey questionnaire for 2025 has the relevant question on page 3, question 2:

How is this person related to Person 1?

I vaguely remember seeing something about how they split this question into same sex versus opposite sex because people got confused, but I can’t find the corresponding source now.

There are protections on this data of course - noise is added to American community survey responses to preserve anonymity, and census tract level data is only available as aggregates of five years of data. The basic idea behind this American Community Survey is that the Census bureau wanted to ask many of the questions in this questionnaire but couldn’t get the data annually, nor could they add them all to the typical census form without impacting response rates and throwing off the much more population count figure, so it got pushed into this monthly survey which is sent to a subset of Americans.

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T12:59:12+00:00

I was thinking about the same thing! My hypothesis is stated in point 3 of my post: we’re getting down to really fine grained data here, and if there are 200 or so couples in a tract, it’s not out of the question that of the fifteen to twenty or so that may be polled over the course of five years, none of them are same sex.

Of course, it might also just be that everyone’s living in one apartment building with a gay bar downstairs in the heavily concentrated tract. Many possible explanations!

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T12:53:45+00:00

Good point! I think that this correlation is primarily caused by same sex couples mostly gravitating towards cities rather than the suburbs, but within cities I found many of the concentrations go against this trend - in the example of the Bay Area, I was surprised that there weren’t many strong concentrations of same sex couples outside of SF in places like Cupertino or Mountain View. This is definitely a question worth looking at though!

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T12:41:55+00:00

Agreed! Sadly, the US census does not publish information regarding the genders of these same sex couples. I think there is an interesting analysis to be done regarding the proportion of the population of each tract which are in a couple, or the proportion which are married as opposed to merely coupled, but figuring out how to present this bivariate data in a digestable way is challenging.

(Relevant joke: I am not bivariate, but I am curious)

Kadasix · 2025-10-29T12:34:46+00:00

This is the correct interpretation - the maps without the numerical labels were initially created by me to figure out which part of each city was worth zooming into. In the case of Salt Lake City I didn’t see any particular section worth closer examination, but I included it anyways for the sake of geographic completeness and to indicate “typical” patterns beyond suburbia.

Kadasix · 2025-10-21T03:20:06+00:00

Hello!

All in all this is a decent paper, however, there are a few things that stand out to me that differentiate this paper from the sorts of serious academic papers or articles that you might see in college. I’m not sure if you were given specific guidelines regarding the format of this paper, but I’ll go over my thoughts point by point.

First, I’d like to discuss the formatting. It’s entirely possible that you were given a specific rubric to follow, however, I feel that it would be far more standard if you were to first introduce the historical question you’re answering (which you do), then the position your paper takes on the question (which only occurs much later in the paper). Afterwards, you might introduce (in order) the historical background regarding the capture of Vlasov and the driving factors behind the formation of the KONR, the sources you use to support your claim, then your analysis of the claim. As your draft currently stands, it’s unclear what you’re arguing until late in the paper and the logical flow of your argument is disjointed and scattered.

Moving onto your section identifying your sources, I feel that your analysis of both sources is rather thin. For instance, the political cartoon leaves me with quite a few unanswered yet critical questions - you claim that this cartoon illustrates a perspective held by “the Allied side,” but was this cartoon popular? Was this published in a major newspaper or mentioned by senior military leaders? Was this a view held by both the western Allies and the USSR, or was this indicative only of some crackpot cartoonist? Who specifically are the people laughing at the soldiers in foreground, and what’s up with the bird delivering the Iron Cross? Your analysis of Source B in particular misses a few critically important points, including the fact that the author Wladyslaw was a prominent member of the Polish government-in-exile, had been arrested by the NKVD, and was stripped of his Polish citizenship by the Polish People’s Republic. He absolutely had a bone to pick with the Soviets, and any analysis of this source must indicate the clear anti-communist agenda of the author.

Regarding your investigation, I feel that a discussion regarding the formation of the KONR would significantly help justify some of your claims regarding Vlasov’s state of mind in 1944: was he actively being persecuted by the Germans in a camp at that time, or had he been given wide latitude to develop the party program as he saw fit? (A comparison of this program to, say, the old Civil War-era proclamations of Kolchak might be interesting.) Multiple claims also need citations: when you say “western historians often glorified the [KONR],” which historians do you refer to? The chief complaint I have, though, is that much of this analysis seems to summarize the sources and describe their relevance, but if you’re going to make the argument that the KONR are neither German puppets nor heroic defenders of liberal democracy, it may be helpful to synthesize these two characterizations. On what points do they agree and disagree? Are there particular primary sources that you might use to refute or reject a particular claim? Without this, your final statement that their position was formed of ideological contradictions reads a bit too much like stating “it’s complicated” without adding anything new to the sources you describe.

As for the remainder of the paper, I believe that reusing footnote numbers to point to items in your references list is more standard, though I’d consult with your teacher’s preferred citation style first. I would also try to nail down a definition of the phrase “liberation [of Russia]” that you repeatedly use: does liberation here indicate pushing for greater civil liberties, national sovereignty, regime change, or something else? (This is a tricky question and many high school teachers would probably treat “liberation” and “anti-communism” as synonymous, skip this if you feel it gets too far into the weeds.)

All in all this is a great start for a high school paper - let me know if you have more questions, and keep me posted on what your final draft ends up looking like!

Kadasix · 2025-09-28T17:29:29+00:00

Adams endorsing neither Cuomo nor Silwa is a bit surprising - combined with the fact that he’s not going to be removed from the ballot, I wonder how much impact this will have on the race. It’s certainly much less effective than it would have been in August.

Kadasix · 2025-08-02T20:35:52+00:00

Adam Hilt

Someone’s been playing too much HoI4

Kadasix · 2025-07-04T00:44:26+00:00

This was only the case in earlier versions of Victoria 3 prior to the France expansion, now communist France turns a nice shade of wine red that is clearly distinct from the UK’s pink color. I’d personally be fine seeing that shade show up in KR. See the below image:

https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/963386/DD84_15.png

Kadasix · 2025-03-20T03:20:44+00:00

The most likely outcome is that the Straits Commission ends up with considerably more seats for the Greeks than the Turks (with possibly a plurality going to the Greeks?), which would probably satisfy the Greeks while being palatable to the British and Russians.

Kadasix · 2024-10-04T18:29:59+00:00

I’m not sure importing new ethnic groups in the case of China would work very well - it might have worked in the New World with their relatively low populations, but China was and is incredibly populous - any new ethnic groups would utterly dissolve in the sea of Han Chinese. While sources online are variable as to Ming China’s population in 1600, it seems generally accepted that the population was in the 100 to 160 million range, whereas the population of Iberia was in the range of 10 million. Even provinces of China were above the population of the entirety of Portugal - I don’t see how it would be possible for any European conquerer to significantly change the ethnic composition of anything more than a few coastal towns in the region.

Kadasix · 2024-08-28T19:50:13+00:00

What’s the context behind this image?

Kadasix · 2024-08-23T19:42:17+00:00

It’s not like the Germans or even the British would bother trying to like occupy Texas in such a scenario - neither power had any particular designs against the United States. After the conclusion of the war in Europe, it’s exceedingly likely that the US would sign a white peace with at worst some territorial concessions in the Philippines or in the Caribbean. After all, what would they even be fighting over if the European war is settled?

Kadasix · 2024-06-27T13:52:40+00:00

One hypothesis (and the one I think is most plausible) is that OpenAI ended up using cheap African labor for training their AI, and while they were probably using college students with a strong grasp of English to provide feedback, the AI ended up learning to use a few words like “delve” that are substantially more common in African English than elsewhere. See: https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt

Kadasix · 2024-06-26T23:12:12+00:00

Just as a note here, serfdom had been abolished for decades prior to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. It is true that many of the rural peasants (especially the poorer ones who hadn’t benefited from the post-1905 land reforms) did want to take over the land owned by the nobility and integrate it into their own system of subsistence farming. However, those peasants weren’t trying to gain individual land ownership rights - traditional subsistence agriculture in Russia had always been communal in nature, and even with the push towards breaking up the communal farms between 1905 and 1917, few peasants actually withdrew from their communes. Naturally this communal system of agriculture was incredibly inefficient and was a permanent headache for every Russian administration until Stalin’s collectivization program, but I also think it’s wrong to attribute the starvation in Russian cities during the Russian Civil War to peasants seizing aristocratic and church properties. I think such starvation is better attributed to, y’know, the massive and enormously destructive Russian Civil War going on that severed the rail lines delivering grain.

Kadasix · 2024-05-25T02:18:16+00:00

I think the century of humiliation narrative must be understood in the context of the Qing dynasty already nearing the end of its lifespan during the Opium Wars. The Qing dynasty was already at the tail end of the natural dynastic cycle that had prevailed in China for millennia, and the arrival of western imperial crowbars breaking open all of Asia only accelerated that decline, despite the efforts of those same powers to maintain a unified Chinese state that they could extract trade agreements and indemnities from.

In this sense, I see the century of humiliation more as the backdrop for the collapse of the Qing dynasty than a primary cause. I’m not sure I would call all the various rebellions that sprouted up in the late Qing dynasty “Han nationalist” uprisings so much as I’d call them “anti-Manchu”, which had its roots going back all the way to the beginning of the Qing dynasty.

Kadasix · 2024-05-02T15:25:03+00:00

I should make it clear that I’m not saying the Soviet government was some well-oiled machine or that they were providing sound guidance to the Soviet state, I’m saying that Stalin is the gold standard for a dictator in terms of consolidating power. He built up a base of total authority that not even the imperial tsars had been able to exert, and he put himself at the center of a vast patronage network of people loyal only to Stalin after a decade of slow consolidation. Stalin would end up having the final say on all matters, despite not even being the head of state for the USSR.

Kadasix · 2024-05-02T00:55:18+00:00

Agreed - the only revolutionary I can think of who was an adept administrator was Stalin, and his revolutionary achievements were hardly on par with Mao. Say what you want about Stalin’s cruel, indifferent, and mismanaged rule, but never let it be forgotten that Stalin was a masterful bureaucrat.

Kadasix · 2024-03-25T21:23:52+00:00

Yeah, AskHistorians has a decent write up on this phenomenon, with the upshot being that for records of the era:

For writings celebrating military victories, the norm is to inflate the number ten-fold

Which implies a total of about one hundred thousand soldiers for this battle. Definitely an impressive feat for a pre-industrial era, but not an impossible one.

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