From what I’ve read, most modern scholars agree it was likely a sperm whale. The Roman records about how it sank ships, and descriptions of the body after it washed ashore (before being butchered and consumed by the locals), support the idea.

This video is a good breakdown of it: https://youtu.be/K9rZ9OFQEgw?si=7rF8KuHKQfMi-Joc

I’m not surprised. I’ve seen a few green politics opinions here that seem idealistic or moralistic to me.

There’s a liberal trend in green politics here in the US that hates nuclear energy, also. They tend to justify the view by only ever bringing up the dangers of nuclear power, and arguments about nuclear waste (ignoring the fact we keep getting better in both these areas). I’m willing to bet the German greens hold the same views.

Don’t forget all the stuff surrounding Chechnya. Claims that the Chechens were poor conscripts who were more likely to defect, or that story about the Chechen general whose plane was destroyed. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were posting Islamophobic stuff like how they were greasing bullets in lard, and libs in those forums told them they shouldn’t post about it because it was bad for optics.

They can propagandize all they want and scratch their heads at why reality never lines up with what they’re taught. The contradictions will eventually break the West, one way or another.

I think that was a plot point in a Batman comic, wasn’t it? Where Superman intervenes in the Cold War for Reagan and nearly destroyed the world?

Lmao, yes. Bonus points if there’s a multiverse crossover and the “real” Superman is viscerally disgusted by this parody version.

Even funnier if he’s still a true believer in the US even as he’s uncovering more and more shit. Finds out cops are working with white supremacists to silence black protesters? Well, the issue is just a few bad apples, not the whole system. Exposes Lex Luthor’s bribery of courts and politicians to cover up his death squads killing protesting overseas workers? That’s just one rich guy, not indicative of capitalism at all. Discovers the CIA running a drug ring to experiment new mind control drugs? Surely it’s just rogue agents and not the whole CIA.

Top it off by him finding out, point-blank, that the CIA is trying to kill him for exposing the corruption and lies of the US, and Clark still not understanding that the US is the problem. Have Waller herself be the antagonist, getting frustrated trying to get it through his head that he’s upholding a system totally opposed to his overly idealistic vision, but Clark just can’t grasp it.

When I took a Modern Middle East class, I remember something about a king (I wanna say it was the Saudi king?) discussing the Israel situation with FDR. The story went something like FDR explaining they wanted to make an ethnic homeland for Jewish people because of what the Nazis had done, and the king was sympathetic but points out “Why not give them land seized from the Germans if the Germans were responsible? Why take land from Arabs who had nothing to do with it?” Allegedly, FDR admitted it was a good point and promised to discuss it later, but died before he could, and Truman just went ahead and supported Israel.

We also read a letter a Jewish person from the region had written around the time of Israel’s creation where he pleaded with the West not to force the creation of the state by stealing Arab land, pointing out they had a peaceful relationship within Palestinian Muslims and that stealing land to make an ethno-state would just agitate the region and make them hostile to the people Europeans were claiming to protect. He asked why it wasn’t possible to just create a Jewish homeland in the US if it was so important and the US cared so much, especially since the US had so much land. I think he also mentioned the fact most of the Jewish people being sent to Palestine to found Israel were European first, and there was a cultural and linguistic rift between them and the Jewish people actually already living there.

That class was the only instance in the US I’ve ever heard these points of view. Not counting online communist spaces.

He hasn’t. He knows he can get away with any amount of Nazi support just by spouting some liberal bullshit line about democracy and redirecting the people’s animosity towards Russians, which everyone in the West seems to be indoctrinated into hating without a single critical thought.

I have considered that’s part of it, that the revisionism is related to it. Makes me wonder if we’ll quit admitting the Vietnam War was a bad thing as soon as that exits living memory… kinda scary to know when I’m dead, the bad shit we did will be erased from history books to trick future generations.

I’m just giving examples the libs use. Like I said, they ignore the details.

I still can’t tell if my countrymen were always this indoctrinated and I just notice it more as an adult, or if I actually did watch things reach that point in real time. I swear it wasn’t this bad a decade ago, but I was barely an adult then.

Surprising absolutely no one here. We all knew they’d blame it on Russia, just like we know most libs will happily oblige.

It really is. They all seem to be drinking the Koolaid from the same source, too, because I’ve met a wide variety of people who identify all over the political spectrum, yet when it comes to the USSR or China, they repeat the same talking points and insults almost verbatim. Which, again, is telling, because they hold a variety of nuanced and varied opinions on literally any other economic system or government. They just seem to agree on communism being evil, or at least corrupted by evil gubermints.

Still, libs don’t seem to care about fascists unless they punch first. At least here in the US, they only view the Nazis and Japanese negatively, and even then only barely. To them all that matters is who punched first (from their perspective) and who killed more people (from their metrics). On some level, they recognize Nazi’s racism as exceptionally awful, but when they believe everybody has committed genocides in the tens of millions, it dilutes it horribly.

My Philosophy of Race professor once mentioned “soft denialism”, not about this specifically, but the concept of diluting and undermining the severity of a crime against humanity by arguing that everyone is guilty of something similar.

In the state I teach in, our textbooks make communism out as the greatest failure and evil in the world. A token “6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust” is given, but the history of most of the world goes into more detail about how many millions the alleged idiocy of Mao or the apparent power hungry brutality of Stalin caused. Which is really telling because they take every opportunity to mention when communism allegedly did something bad or failed in a region, but never go into as much depth or detail about any other similar events in history. It’s only junior high level geography, but the main focus of all the world history seems to be on how bad socialism is. Every other economic system, war, and historical event is briefly covered in a whitewashed way, but socialism and communism are repeatedly paraded around as evil. This is all the world history they’ll get until high school, which will likely have a similar focus.

I’ve noticed that from when I was in school to now, a decade later, that they’ve really pushed a “communists were the worse evil all along” narrative. My students, who know very little about the world, know to hate and fear Russia, China, and North Korea, but have never heard of fascism and barely know about Nazis except as edgy jokes.

As a citizen of the US, I feel a very similar pain and sympathize with you, my comrade to the north.

Poland and Finland, though there’s more nuance there than libs care to observe. For example, ignoring the fact the territory they took from Poland was Ukrainian territory Poland was, uh, “making Polish”. And obviously the Finns wound up joining the Nazis. They also seem to think Ukraine spontaneously fought the Soviets and just happened to get Nazi support later.

They exist in a vacuum where they think the bulk of the Axis powers and allies that fought Russians were somehow wholesome victims who had no choice but to fight for Nazis. But, paradoxically, the USSR can’t be forgiven for the Nonaggression Pact (even though the West signed NAPs first and financed much of the Nazi war machine, sometimes even during the war). Liberals have the attention span and object permanence of a wet noodle.

This kinda feels like when people say China will collapse any day now. Like, I know the West is unstable and unsustainable, but if there’s a collapse, I suspect even that could just be used for the capitalists as easily as for socialism…

I can relate. I’m looking into magic (more the secular occult kind) because my gf is pagan, and this New Age stuff has been an underlying culture in my family and friend group. The community is very liberal where it isn’t overtly fascist.

Thankfully there’s plenty of Leftist (if not exactly communist) pagans and magicians out there. You just kinda gotta fish for them.