gruseom

89 ms·

841.
by gruseom 13y ago
Science is the search for the best theory as such it's hard to rank something as better or worse than we don't know. Thus the default theory is "There is no relationship between X and Y". For the purposes of this discussion, that's a dist
842.
by gruseom 13y ago
Greenwald lives in Brazil and in any case is pretty unrepresentative of US journalists.
843.
by gruseom 13y ago
And yours is a complete mischaracterization of the work of Kirsch et al. It isn't my characterization so much as a paraphrase of various sources I've read/heard on this, including Kirsch himself. My understanding is that Kirsch and Sapirs
844.
by gruseom 13y ago
But the biological theory of mental illnesses is very far from established. We have no reliable way of identifying them and no understanding of their mechanism. Existing studies of the medications we use to treat them have been subjected to
845.
by gruseom 13y ago
That quote expresses Tolstoy's frustration not about the size of his novels but about the importance people attached to them. In his old age Tolstoy wanted people to focus on moral concerns, not artistic ones. For old Tolstoy, War and Peac
846.
by gruseom 13y ago
Author of War and Peace was very frustrated about size of that book I doubt that's true. I seem to recall that Tolstoy had his wife copy it 9 times by hand as he rewrote it. Also, "wall of text", meaning "something that might take an effo
847.
“I was a Nazi, and here’s why”(newyorker.com)
25 points by gruseom 13y ago|6 comments
848.
Fake shop fronts used to make towns seem neater for G8(rte.ie)
2 points by gruseom 13y ago|0 comments
849.
by gruseom 13y ago
"X? Is this serious?" typically signals sarcasm about X. I take it you didn't mean it that way. (Irrelevantly, I'm reminded of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziH9St7ajuw#t=39s )
850.
by gruseom 13y ago
"Is this serious?" is nonconstructive.
851.
by gruseom 13y ago
Yes, and the question is, how can you really separate these things out? But now that I think of it, there may be a way to actually test this. Did the Japanese leaders' private deliberations diverge significantly from their public statements
852.
by gruseom 13y ago
Sure, but that passage is about the political uses of the causal argument that happened to win (and that the OP thinks is incorrect). It makes no counterfactual claims. dspeyer's point is a good one if (but only if) the article actually doe
853.
by gruseom 13y ago
Thanks. It would be interesting to hear Ward's take on that; he must surely address it in the book the article was taken from. On the other hand, according to [1], Hirohito also cited the Soviet invasion when convening the council to discu
854.
by gruseom 13y ago
Yes, I know. And then he switched back to the OP as if the two were the same thing, when in fact they're entirely unrelated. That's the dictionary definition of a red herring.
855.
by gruseom 13y ago
This seems reasonable—thanks. Can you quote where the article actually claims those two things? I'm curious, and I don't disbelieve you, but I really don't want to have to go back and comb through the whole thing again :)
856.
by gruseom 13y ago
This is seriously misleading. The OP doesn't even mention William Lehey, let alone include a howler about him. And you accuse other people of red herrings! Surely if you had found even the tiniest flaw in the OP, you'd have shared it with u
857.
by gruseom 13y ago
One really has to be careful with this kind of reasoning. That Japan minimizes its war crimes (as other countries do) and engages in propaganda (as other countries do) does not render irrelevant what Japanese scholars have to say about how
858.
by gruseom 13y ago
Remember there were two bombs dropped. Japan didn't surrender after the 1st one. But they convened the council to discuss surrender before the second one. The timeline given by the article is: Hiroshima bombed Soviet declaration of
859.
by gruseom 13y ago
This is a good question. Let's make it more explicit: What do Japanese historians have to say about how and why Japan surrendered in 1945?
860.
by gruseom 13y ago
This comment is contentless. It doesn't address a single specific thing the article says. Instead it offers woolly generalities ("Japan was threatened on many fronts and made the best choice it could. That much is clear") and platitudes ("a
861.
by gruseom 13y ago
Thanks. But the first thread I ran across there could hardly be more supportive of the OP's argument: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u6qqo/there_h... If you can point me to counterarguments more specifically, I'll look at
862.
by gruseom 13y ago
History is evidence-based, but hardly a science, since it's uncontrollable and unrepeatable. The article itself is kind of worthless, since it is based on vague speculations What "vague speculations"? That doesn't sound like the article I
863.
by gruseom 13y ago
Different people read these things differently, of course, but it seems to me that the article's factual claims—for example, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't of such dramatic magnitude as we think, in context; or that there weren't many
864.
by gruseom 13y ago
Article writers don't come up with the headlines. In this case the headline does the author a bad disservice by making his piece seem simple-minded. It isn't. Its strongest parts come before he even gets to discussing the Soviet invasion. T
865.
by gruseom 13y ago
It's uncool to post a long comment on an article you didn't bother to read, let alone dismiss it with a slur about "revisionist history", whatever that is. The article is clearly a serious one, and since it challenges th
866.
by gruseom 13y ago
they try to argue an indefinite (Japan would have surrendered if we hadn't done this) against a definite (We bombed them and they surrendered immediately) No, the article is not arguing against a factual claim like that, but against a cau
867.
by gruseom 13y ago
If that were the reason, they would never have existed in the first place.
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by gruseom 13y ago
Yeah, that's a fair point. I also should probably not have used such charged language on HN to begin with. It never does any good.
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by gruseom 13y ago
Like waterboarding, but also not. Waterboarding was always obviously torture. No fair-minded person would ever have said that it wasn't; the suggestion is a joke. Thus the only people who had reason to say otherwise were ideologues, power-w
870.
by gruseom 13y ago
Solitary confinement is now so obviously a form of torture that it's surprising this is still controversial. Future generations will surely look on it the way we look on past barbarities.

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