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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 4h

I believe the actual LM denialism pertained to Trnopolje rather than Omarska, but both were notorious Serb nationalist concentration camps in the Bosnian War, covered by ITN(the below famous image came from Trnopolje). LM ran a series of articles saying essentially, that it had all been faked.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 4h

Always amused to be reminded of the three very different Michael Manns.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 6h

The THVC Trilogy: I - The Larva Daylights II - The Man in the Cocoon III - Fly Hard

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 6h

Faraway Tree or Wishing Chair could probably get 20x 30 min episodes, though that's a bit of a cheat admittedly as they're more collections of related short stories.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 7h

I think you'll find you're actually a Pluviôse baby 🇫🇷

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It's a particularly odd choice of example given that Chauvin, unlike many murdering cops, actually *was* prosecuted and imprisoned.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Book manuscript first draft finished! (pending some adjustments I've noted to myself to go back to, and all the cutting I need to do to stay within my word limit)

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

No-one knew who truly raised the ancient megalithic structures known as the spomenici in the Before Times, but according to local legend they were carved by a certain "Tito the Builder".

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Who also insisted that his claimed annual income of $250,000 was average (it actually put him in the richest 2% of Americans).

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Everyone remember "Joe the Plumber", that guy who was actually called Sam and wasn't a plumber?

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Do I want to know the context for this?

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The Last Kingdom imo did a pretty good job at portraying this: Alfred the Great is a deeply pious man who aggressively and sincerely promotes Christianity even when threatened with death, but he's also a sex pest who sleeps with anything that moves. And he's fully conscious of that contradiction.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Sure, but that requires us to find some raw resource in space not just at the level of oil but orders of magnitude more valuable than oil, to offset the huge costs of maintaining shipping and transport links to anything beyond the moon.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Yeah, Antarctica is basically my ceiling assumption for what's likely to happen with space colonisation. I can see it being plausible that one day there might be permanent research stations on the Moon staffed by a few thousand people. Nothing beyond that seems likely ever.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I remember a case centred around a university rugby team a few years ago, and there certainly are some pretty toxic uni sports team cultures, but there are still some important differences, namely that UK uni sports teams typically don't have their own buildings, and rely on the SU for cash more.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Western diplomats talking about Greeks in 2026: Greece is an integral part of Western Civilization Western diplomats talking about Greeks in the 19th Century: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern...

en.wikipedia.org

Eastern question - Wikipedia

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

It's quite amusingly fascinating how the Chinese Communists let Puyi basically hang around as Just Some Guy living a fairly unexceptional life.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Yeah, especially as it was done in such an embarrassed and shoddy way, like the Bolsheviks almost didn't want to admit they'd done it. There were those who wanted to copy the Jacobins w/ Louis XVI - have a big public show trial and execution of Nicholas. That would've made a lot more sense.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Oh, for sure, the pogroms and racism tend not to make it into media portrayals at all!

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

His reaction when told about it seems to have been basically "Well, it's sad and unfortunate that we had to do this, but we had no choice".

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

In reality, the Tsar was fully aware that the protest was going to be happening, and gave the orders for the troops to be there. Sure, he almost certainly didn't directly order shootings, but it's what he would've done and there's no real indication he disapproved or disagreed with the decision.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Take this depiction of his reaction to Bloody Sunday. Sure, it doesn't paint Nicholas positively, but it still gives an excessive impression of his level of disconnection from the massacre and his horrified reaction to it.

youtube.com

Bloody Sunday | Nicholas and Alexandra

YouTube video by LIST Analysis

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Yeah, Cold War anti-Communist overcorrection really went too far. The standard media depiction of Nicholas II is of a poor hapless idiot in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, I mean, he *was* a hapless idiot. But he was a monstrous hapless idiot.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Sure, Arabic and Hebrew do have a shared linguistic geneaology, that we've retained the word "Semitic" for out of ease of understanding. But that doesn't make it an identity that anyone seriously thought of themselves as, any more than there is an "Atlantic-Congo" identity.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Literally the whole concept of "Semites" as a thing is a product of early modern European Christian society synthesising two of its favourite awful things: Biblical literalism, and "scientific" racism.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The whole concept of "Semitic peoples" was a European Christian colonial one. No Arab ever considered themselves to have some pan-"Semitic" identity shared with Amharas, Aramaeans, Jews, Maltese, etc. And, ofc, it was coined by people who never met any "Semites" except Jews anyway.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

When Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats interact in contexts where they aren't being blasted at by nationalists 24/7 about why they shouldn't, they generally get along fine. There's no great biological or cultural divide preventing them getting along, it's that some people politically don't want them to.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Yup, "ethnic division where no one gets along" is precisely the line the ethnonationalists have been trying to sell right from the start.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Quite bluntly, they want to exclude gay people from society and don't want to exclude divorcees.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Indeed, them being much more numerous is precisely why. Too many elite conservative men are themselves divorcees to seriously oppose it (pointedly for Alito - Clarence Thomas is a remarried divorcee).

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Indeed, it's notable that you never see comparable cases of businesses refusing to provide wedding services to remarrying straight divorcees, even though they're substantially more numerous than marrying gay couples.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Though different electoral system where people could vote for all the presidency members rather than just one!

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah, that's what I fear. I'd been thinking of the 1930s Spain comparison, but there isn't the same capacity for war that there was in Spain.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Genuinely marvelling at how objectively shit the RS opposition did in this election. I know Dodik was still around and campaigning, but this was still their chance to take advantage of him being barred from the ballot, and they've done absolutely nothing with it.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

3) Draško Stanivuković: Sold out and spent years dancing around letting other people run so he could wait for his perfect chance to oust the SNSD, for... what? RS opposition still just as inept, their best shot was last year and Draško wimped out. Get in the bin.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Follow-up on this. 3 people who should probably quit BiH politics after last night (but won't): 1) Bakir Izetbegović: Second successive loss to Bećirović, despite low turnout and a credible centre-left Croat candidate to pull SDP votes away. 2) Fahrudin Radončić: Lmao. You're clearly past it, man

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Random thought: with Alex Scott now having made his debut for England last week, is this the first case of there having been England men's and women's team players with the exact same name?

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I'd actually say the best possibility for Sanchez would actually be a narrow PP-Vox majority which initially secures a coalition or agreement but then collapses within 6-12 months.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If a guy is voting for a fascist because he's been duped and confused about what he actually wants, then banning the fascist is actually doing him a favour.

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Alex Says Stuff @alexsaysstuff.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Also, it frankly doesn't really make a difference to me, except at the very minor level of personal judgement of people I'll likely never meet anyway. At the political level, my prescriptions are the same regardless of how many fash voters are actively malicious or how many are dupes.

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