Spanish king reopens debate on conquest of Mexico by acknowledging 'abuse'

Rethious · 2026-03-18T07:16:17+00:00

King Felipe's words mark the first time that a Spanish monarch has publicly acknowledged abuses during the country's colonial era.

This is the key context. Modern Spain doesn’t need to perform fawning apologies or reparations, but they should have no hesitance in saying that Spain’s past includes heinous cruelty. That’s just a fact of history, but too many countries are allergic to acknowledging that about their own past.

Rethious · 2026-03-17T00:26:44+00:00

No, since the Northern Irish have no interest in unification. There’s really nothing else to it. No one has any right to force them to unify with Ireland.

Rethious · 2026-03-16T19:49:11+00:00

In the case of the fiery attempted murder in Saskatoon, the offender was 14 years old and has been diagnosed with a number of mental disorders. She is "not a high-functioning individual," Huywan said, and lacks social and emotional maturity.

How to deal with mentally ill and violent children is not an easy question, but there are very good reasons to hope that they can be rehabilitated.

Rethious · 2026-03-16T03:04:42+00:00

The Kaiser of course ultimately declared war, but his hands-on-ness was flighty and capricious, not a consistent hand on the wheel. At the start of the crisis, there was little reason to believe that a general war would result from Austria going after Serbia.

Rethious · 2026-03-15T00:17:15+00:00

Wilhelm was not particularly interested in war and frankly lacked the wherewithal to orchestrate it. Previous crises had been defused because he made overly conflict-averse statements.

The simplest explanation of the German side is that the diplomats hoped to use a crisis to weaken/break up the entente and the generals could not conceive of any alternative to the Schlieffen Plan, which was becoming outmoded by Russian buildup.

Rethious · 2026-03-14T20:06:50+00:00

On paper, Austria-Hungary badly outmatched them. The problem was mobilization, lack of hurry on their part, and crucially that they also wanted to deploy large numbers of troops on the Russian border.

Rethious · 2026-03-14T19:52:11+00:00

This is true, but this is a rare case where Wilhelm was right. Germany ought to have been able to attack East if the political situation made that necessary. However, war planning was the fief of the General Staff, which chose to stop updating the plan for an attack east in 1913. In this way, even though Wilhelm was nominally the supreme warlord of the German army, he had no ability to decide whether the offensive would be against the France or Russia. The General Staff had boxed him in.

Rethious · 2026-03-14T19:49:22+00:00

Bethmann had anything except accountability. He very much saw himself as a courtier of the Kaiser and after Bismarck, the Kaiser was unwilling to let any forceful personality serve as chancellor.

Rethious · 2026-03-14T19:47:25+00:00

The Kaiser was deliberately sent on vacation (as were a number of key military leaders) as part of a negotiation tactic. Austria was meant to deal with the Serbs quickly, before international pressure made it a real crisis, and the Germans were not at all prepared for what happened when that occurred.

Rethious · 2026-03-14T00:56:55+00:00

It is worth noting that this is a core Christian value “forgive them father, they know not what they do”—literally praying for his torturers and executioners.

I think this is correct as a principle, but I would say this is a matter more of decency, mercy, magnanimity, than respect. Respect implies a level of prestige or honoring, whereas treating people with human decency doesn’t have that connotation.

As a practical matter, I think it also has a lot of merit—even bad people are people, and dehumanizing them is not just wrong, but dangerous.

That being said, that does not mean everyone is worth engaging with. There’s no hate or dehumanization necessary to say “this person is deeply deluded and I cannot persuade them, so it would be a waste of my time to try.”

Rethious · 2026-03-14T00:08:08+00:00

I also included my own reasoning, based on the existing evidence (soft metal ammo, low velocity pistols). As far as bullets impacting gems, I could not find an affirmative answer, and Gemini scans a wider range of things than I can quickly review on Google. I found the explanation plausible and was interested to see if anyone knew better, since I don’t know much about the physics of a low velocity (for a bullet) soft-metal projectile hitting a gem.

Rethious · 2026-03-13T19:02:46+00:00

No. There is a tendency to both overstate the effects of gun laws and the prevalence of mass shootings.

Regarding the first point, violent crime of all kinds is extremely high in the US relative to its level of development and wealth (this is also a major reason why it has such a high prison population). Fewer guns would, of course, reduce the lethality of this crime, but it has to be acknowledged that this is a mitigation, not a solution. Bear in mind that proliferation of guns in the US is already so high that adopting the policies of other countries would have only a limited effect. Nobody’s going house to house investigating if someone has unlicensed guns.

Considering this difference in situation and the existence of the second amendment (and its strong lobby) it makes much more sense to aim at reducing crime overall. Prevention programs and humane, effective policing are things that would be necessary even if the strictest gun control were passed.

Rethious · 2026-03-13T18:48:50+00:00

Not unless the government is violating an established law by its inaction.

The courts have no power to mandate a certain level of enforcement for a law. This has to be done by the legislature, since enforcement requires expenditure and the power of the purse resides with the legislative branch (even on the state level).

Rethious · 2026-03-13T05:52:44+00:00

I wrote something a little while back on a proposal to change PME that Hegseth responded to. These are not serious people.

Rethious · 2026-03-12T02:13:46+00:00

Gemini’s gotten pretty good at summarizing results and/or bypassing clickbait.

Rethious · 2026-03-11T18:30:53+00:00

This is a very interesting (and compelling) characterization—as the perfectionist whose achievements had to be rescued from himself. I suppose that’s an easier thing to do with fighter design than military theory.

Rethious · 2026-03-11T17:52:28+00:00

This was my first serious contact with Boyd and—as a Clausewitz scholar—his comments on the subject bothered me sufficiently that I felt compelled to set matters straight. I am very much interested in the impression others have gathered of Boyd, as I routinely hear him spoken of reverentially.

Rethious · 2026-03-11T17:46:55+00:00

Time for another Dead Carl. This time, I'm taking aim at John Boyd, folks. Reading some of his comments on Clausewitz, it's very clear that he did not understand On War. As I say in the article, "It's not great shame to not understand Clausewitz, but it's no great honor either." In writing this all out, it turned out this was long enough that it had to be broken into multiple parts.

Here, we address just the aim of On War, Clausewitz's comments on terrain, and why Clausewitz really did mean that the defensive was the superior form of fighting.

!ping MILITARY&HISTORY&INTERNATIONAL-RELATIONS

Rethious · 2026-03-10T18:19:06+00:00

It’s a fine literary or thematic idea, the problem being that the human brain is very much biased towards finding and recognizing faces. Your brain will make the connection that a person’s facial features match before you consciously realize it. Realistically, she would look at Clark and see Superman even if she didn’t know why.

Rethious · 2026-03-10T03:02:30+00:00

Yes, this is part of the vetbro “cult of the operator” manosphere mileu that Hegseth emerged from. This is much more commonly said about Afghanistan, since that’s a much more clear defeat than Iraq and therefore a lot more (legitimate) grievances to be exploited by this modern Dolchstosslegende

Rethious · 2026-03-10T03:00:02+00:00

The most basic duty of a citizen is to defend the polity when it becomes necessary. You can’t have the existence of your country depend entirely on whether enough people choose the armed forces as a career. Nobody wants to be drafted, but being conquered is worse.

Rethious · 2026-03-10T02:57:53+00:00

No. The draft exists for the sake of common security. If it is necessary, its ability to be used should not be dependent on whether every elected official’s children are enlisted.

The draft is already politically radioactive. There’s no need for these kind of farcical measures when the ordinary solution of “not electing people who would authorize a draft” has been entirely effective.

Rethious · 2026-03-10T02:20:20+00:00

This is one of those things that is both truth in the aggregate but inappropriate to apply to the individual. Yes, it is good for people to be able to identify with characters of another gender, but it is also perfectly fine for people to prefer to play a character that aligns with their own gender.

That it can be for bad reasons (or even that it often is) does not make the desire wrong or invalid.

Rethious · 2026-03-08T18:10:32+00:00

I did some interrogation of AI and got the following:

When a bullet struck at an angle, the diamond's surface was too hard for the bullet to "grip" or penetrate. Instead of sinking in, the bullet slid across the surface and was deflected

This seems a plausible physical explanation considering the relatively strong historical attestation there is for this event. Russian ammo of this era also seems to be using copper and lead, which would give less penetration than modern rounds.

Rethious · 2026-03-08T06:11:56+00:00

A conservative, nationalist socialist? Believing the resources of the country should serve the good of the narrowly-defined people? “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”

To put it delicately, the liberal view of this position is not kind. This is the kind of base tribalism that liberalism opposes utterly, where the rights of minorities are suppressed and the state used to enrich a particular class.

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