I mean, the Allied Control Council that effectively ran Germany immediately after World War II banned and pulled out of circulation massive amounts of literature that was either explicitly or was more indirectly associated with Nazi ideology. I'm only semi-flippant when I characterise that less as traditional censorship and more as the rest of the human race telling Germany to touch grass and read another book.

I don't even really see the individual posting these threats as the root of the problem. Every generation of people is going to have some people who are capable of learning to love doing the most heinous shit imaginable, especially if they're convinced that doing so will make them a heroic defender of "their" people. What turns 'ordinary men' into monsters is group dynamics and authority pushing them towards the conclusion that violence, even to people who are objectively not guilty of anything wrong, is the only answer.

So-called commentators and intellectuals on television and the Internet, who are never going to endorse blowing up a school or conducting a mass shooting, but will bang on day and night about children being in danger and that the "groomers" and "predators" need to be "stopped", I blame them far more than any one paranoid lone wolf with a gun.

Perhaps you need to rethink your reading goals. How about instead of having a goal that encourages you to read as quickly as possible, you give yourself a period of time when you can only read one book. Pick the book, look at the page count, divide by ten, and that is the number of days where you can read nothing else, but only that book. If you finish the book well before the deadline, you read it again, perhaps this time taking notes about the books contents and structure, and questions you have about what the author meant or overlooked. By the time you're finished you can be satisfied that you gave it all the time and attention it deserves, detached from any desire to compete with others on how many are dead, however superficially.

"Stop endangering the children, or I'm going to blow up a school library."

This is something Eric Cartman would think to do.

I can appreciate that there is no winning move in his situation against the British news media. He and Meghan could've gone into the Himalayas to live as goatherds, and the press would still have gone years and years about how terrible, awful people they are. Publishing a book at least pushes out your side of the story, and stops the conversation from getting monopolised.

Americans need to get interested in Byzantine history. There's a thousand years of intrafamilial infighting to learn about there, and they go one better over modern royals because they usually end with somebody's eyes getting gouged out or their balls cut off or something.

As a counterpoint, have you ever seen a Sacha Baron Cohen film? There are a lot of people out there who would take the most ridiculous man they ever met at face value so long as he has a funny accent and says he's from a country they don't know anything about.

Englishman: I say to you, goodsir, sometimes speaking to you is as futile as speaking to that wall.

Wall: May the Devil take all papists.

Englishman: ...

Or that story about a mother trying to send a pie to her son by telegraph. Because if a machine is able to send a letter instantly, why couldn't it send a parcel too?

Yeah, that's fair. "Redeem" is just one of those words you have to lock down a very specific and explained meaning if you're going to use it in an argument. Under the meaning that I use, I think it's defensible to consider Leopold the worse person, he did things that earn him the infamy of the world just because he wanted money and land over which he could rule as a true despot. Under your meaning, which admits that any positive qualities of either could be counted just to merely register against their evil, I don't know enough about Leopold as a person to measure against the slightly more that I know about Hitler as a person. I'm sure Leopold would have to have had something, maybe he liked playing with his grandchildren, or he washed his hands after going to the toilet, or maybe he was just charming and interesting in conversation (apparently Hitler, for all his regarded charisma on the speaker's podium, was usually kinda awkward and even dull if you had to talk to him, people who met him who weren't committed Nazis seemed to often find him disappointing next to his reputation).

Some native Africans were employed to act as the enforcement of this colonial rule. And I don't say that to shift blame onto those Africans, it was a terrible dilemma; do you A) want to break your back trying to make impossible quotas for rubber and see your children lose their hands when you fail, or do you B) want better pay and protection for your family by being the one doing the cutting? Unless you can be sure that nobody else will accept B and thus make such harsh colonial rule unenforceable, it is safer if you accept B. The manual labour of genocides is often carried out by members of the group that is being subjected to genocide; Cremations and burials in the camps of the Holocaust was usually done by camp prisoners themselves.

I would've defined "redeeming" as specifically not being a mere point in the good column, there has to be a relationship between it and the person's bad qualities. If you redeem a debt, you are paying it back, you are "making it good", it's not as if the debt you owe is redeemed if other people are also indebted to you.

If you want to see any quality in Hitler that could barely, arguably be categorized as "redeeming" in the light of his monstrous crimes, then it would be that he had a, very limited and specific, idea of "the German People" that he thought he was leading to a better future in a world he considered to be one of unending racial conflict. That's something at least, "As big as I am, the People is even bigger than me", we can agree that Hitler was wrong and also say that he subscribed to propositions that at least make it understandable why he'd consider himself a selfless hero. Leopold didn't even have that, he owned the Congo as his personal estate, legally the Belgian people and government had nothing to do with it, and he was under no obligation to enrich them or anybody else for it, it literally just existed only to make Leopold, already the constitutional monarch of a nation, even more rich and powerful.

That's why I stated that assumption, I admit that it's napkin maths.

Although I don't really think birth rates to be that widely distributed anymore. Most of Asia and the Middle East is down to similar levels as Europe and the Americas at around 2 births per woman, many of those countries spent the last 70 years bringing child mortality and the birth rate down (Bangladesh for example is precisely 2.00 births per woman). Sub-Saharan Africa's birth rate is higher, most of the population growth in the next century will be there, but right now Africa's share of the global population isn't that large at 1.2 billion.

My first thought would be a timer, programme it so you had to wait a minute before it could go off again. Or a nurse would have a key to switch the button on.

Either I've messed up my maths, or I should expect the Gong to go off every 11 minutes, assuming the 300,000-strong city had a perfectly proportional share of the 4-per-second birth rate of the entire globe.

This is part of the reason why it's a bad argument when someone accuses, say, a hollywood director, with a famous name and a big house in LA, of being hypocritical if they say something negative, either directly or in their work, about billionaires. Quintin Tarantino, who's on an extreme end in terms of success and wealth for Hollywood directors, has something like $120 million to his net worth, which means he's worth just below 1000x the median American of his age bracket (about $200,000) At the same time, Elon Musk at $144 billion is worth more than 1000 Tarantinos. If somebody thinks a person as wealthy or even a hundredth as wealthy as Tarantino is 'rich', that's fine, but they gotta see how one is just in a different magnitude to the other.

And the reason Kentucky stayed in the Union was because it at first declared itself to be neutral, and while Lincoln was ready to de facto respect this (even if he didn't exactly think that 'being neutral' was something Kentucky had a legal right to do), a Confederate general called Leonidas Polk just decided to invade the place, even though he had no orders to do so and the Confederate government had no reason to open up another new front for them to defend.

For being a rebellion supposedly to protect the authority of their state governments and their personal freedoms, Confederates seemed to have a very bad habit of just going along with what the new central government demands from its members and citizens, and that government in turn letting itself be wagged by random army officers who decided they were in charge of national strategy.

People before the war did actually expect that a war between great powers would be immensely bloody, which is part of why the majority of people wanted to avoid war if at all possible. They just assumed that it would also be short, a matter of a few months.The bloodbaths of August and September were basically what people were imagining would happen.

That was quite literally what happened, across most of Europe. Franz Ferdinand is shot on the 28th of June, and it's front-page news in Western Europe for maybe a day. Nobody seriously thinks that this could start a continent-wide war. For about four weeks, while a perfect storm of wrong assumptions and misunderstandings between diplomats and ministers gradually builds up to Russia's call for mobilisation on the 31st of July, France is busy talking about a completely different assassination, that of the newspaper editor Gaston Calmette by Henriette Caillaux, a socialite and wife of a former prime minister, who thought Calmette was going to publish intimate letters of theirs that were written while they were both married to other people.

France going from talking about that to hearing declarations of war and mobilising to meet the invading Germans happens in days, its complete whiplash for everyone in France. Imagine if in 1995 the US just abruptly went to war with Russia or something while in the middle of the OJ Simpson trial. Or put this another way; not many people in America were worrying about terrorist attacks or Islamic fundamentalism on the 10th of September of 2001.

That's unfortunately what war has been for most of human history, and still is in some parts of the world. Today in developed and democratic countries, soldiers are in most ways like any other kind of employee in the public sector; they get paid decently or even well and the state, which is answerable to civilians who care about human life even if it's on the 'other' side, has extensive power to punish them if they break the rules. In times like the Thirty Years War, you often even need to let your soldiers loot, rape, and pillage just to keep your army intact; that is how you're repaying them for risking their lives for your cause.

Mr. Worldwide.

Why not act like a criminal if your country won't treat you like a citizen?

I suppose the ladies were lucky the cannon hit his right leg and not his middle one.

I believe (probably wrong) that he's dressed as a Hussar, who had a bit of a reputation for being the Mr. Steal Your Girls of the Napoleonic Era. Mustaches were fashionable in Britain and France in the Victorian Era because of them; the original and best Hussars were from Eastern Europe, nations like Poland and Hungary, where men tended to grow mustaches if they could, and so when Western European armies added them to their cavalry forces they wanted to adopt their looks, and the image of the dashing and moustachioed cavalry officer bled into civilian life.

I had been aware that female companions (be they wives, sweethearts, or lets say more 'transactional' forms of relationships) of soldiers had been an immutable part of military life in this era and indeed almost every era before it since the dawn of warfare, but finding out the daughter of an aristocrat in Regency Britain had a battlefield amputation still honestly shocked me. It's the sort of thing where unless you specifically heard about cases like this, if you saw it portrayed in a film you would think "There's no way this was real.". Jane Austen could've had a character like her in one of her novels, and it'd be entirely authentic.