Born too late to build battleships | Born too early to build space battleships | Born just in time to shitpost about battleships on the internet
Joined December 2020
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6" (152mm) and 5" (127mm) shell casings litter the forward deck of the Cleveland class light cruiser USS Miami (CL-89) on 7 September 1944. Miami was bombarding Peleliu, and this photo was taken during a pause in the bombardment.
Two bits of interesting trivia with this photo:
How were the shell casings ejected?
For both the 6" and 5" guns on the Cleveland class, the shell casings were ejected through ports at the rear of the turret/mount. These empty cases could actually be tossed for quite a distance, posing a risk for any crew who happened to be on deck under the guns.
On certain warships, this often meant erecting netting over positions where the crew would be stationed. The netting erected over the 20mm positions in the photo is there to catch any ejected brass casings.
What happened to all of the spent brass?
This is a very common question that I am asked quite often. The short answer is it depends.
In the Atlantic, United States warships were expected to collect the brass afterwards for reuse.
In the Pacific, the Brass was to be collected if practical. If it was not practical, the brass was to be tossed overboard.
This policy was due to warships in the Atlantic typically being in closer proximity to ports where the brass could be turned in. In the Pacific, warships would be operating far away from port, often for extended periods. It would make less sense to collect and hold onto the brass for any length of time, especially when ships were typically expending more spent brass than they could store.
Obviously this claim is wrong, catastrophically so, and there's a huge volume of research exhaustively demonstrating that it's wrong. But even if you believed it was true, why would it matter? Is it easier to re-socialize every boy in America than just publish books they'll like?
The gender binary is made up. Not “on these things.” Just in general. It’s a social construct. Completely made up concept. You aren’t born liking different things because you’re a boy. Your interests are a direct result of your socialization and upbringing.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Sex differences in interests and toy preferences emerge early in infancy and parallel patterns in nonhuman primates, indicating biological factors alongside socialization. Meta-analyses document large consistent differences in things- versus people-oriented interests.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC25…
frontiersin.org/journals/psych…
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Browning M1917 and M1919 machineguns along with M1 Garand rifles fired from the hip at the Unit Jungle Training Center in Hawaii circa 1944
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British destroyers HMS Fame and HMS Havelock providing close fire support as French forces land at Bjerkvik in Norway during the Battles of Narvik in May 1940
My childless aunt is a publisher. She is insanely gifted. We were looking at the YA shelf together years ago and I asked her what it would cost to publish something like "Have Space Suit-Will Travel" today. I will never forget her answer…
"We can't, we don't know how to do it."
Young boys are being discouraged from getting into reading—and it’s because more books are missing one key element, @sophiah_n reports: theatlantic.com/culture/2026…
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An NPS thesis in June 2026 reveals and analyzes various problems with the M10 Booker program. Written by Army acquisition officers and supported by test reports from the US Army OTC, it is well worth reading. This post provides a brief summary of the key findings.
Remember, likes are private. If you see two of your mutuals fighting on the timeline, it is your DUTY to go down the thread and hit like on every single one of their posts, whether you agree or not. Iron sharpens iron!
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British FV601 Saladin pre-production model traveling at speed on a test track circa early 1957
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We learned a couple of big lessons on Tuesday:
1) Republican policies are popular even if Republicans weren't.
2) White men are a huge voting block that are not being spoken to.
How to use that?
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Important chart from Axios: Democrats aggressively avoided talking about ICE and immigration during the general election. It was a way to rile up primary voters and that was it.
Immigration wasn't talked about this cycle, and among voters who said it was critical to their vote, Republicans won easily.
Republicans using yesterday's disaster to push amnesty are deliberately avoiding the real causes of defeat to surrender to the left on one of the party's only strengths.
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Any talk of “ICE hype edits losing the election” is a twitter-siloed misread of the media normal people consume and care about. They irritated leftists on here, and that’s about the extent of it. The truth is that the GOP hasn’t adapted to the slopcannon era of shortform political content, not that it’s gone too far. The DNC did adapt, and it won. Right now, 90% of the things Dems and normies believe about “politics” are just not true, in a way that has never been the case before. Epstein eating babies with Trump, etc. Only a few years ago, the “piss tape” and “Russiagate” took intense national media coverage to develop as mass psychoses, and even then only really weathered discreditation among low-info olds. Now, the vast majority of things you hear from “apolitical normies” are some sort of schizophrenic lie derived from a momentary partisan event 6 months ago — something you, reader, forgot about a week after it happened because you mostly consume news on here.
The GOP lost among its base because of the war, gas prices, bad PR, take your pick. But if we’re talking about media strategy, it lost swing normies that it won in ‘24 because it has consistently failed to adapt to the meta of Lindsay Clancy-style TikTok parallel-reality construction. Funnily enough, this media environment — the total death of “legacy media” and “trusted experts,” supplanted by a decentralized online hive — is the exact thing many on the Right have wished for for many years. It happened… now what? As of now, nothing: hysteria is a commodity you can buy, but Republicans aren’t investing. They seemed to have missed the part of epistemic collapse where the “validity” of ideas is totally meaningless, replaced only by their ability to gain attention as a directional signal.
Trump wins nationally because he is a gravity well for media attention, a unique talent; but the GOP without him as the candidate is totally excluded from the infostream, seemingly by their own choice. Everybody laughed at the DNC buying catamites like Harry Sisson back in 2023, but that’s just part of the game now — botfarming new stock characters into the popular mind in order to run participatory ARG-style media events designed solely to drive turnout. These things don’t happen by accident, they cost money and require learned acumen.
Obviously this is only one small part of the electoral environment, but it’s one that very few people seem to be talking about. Epstein hysteria, the Cornell 7, Nolan Wells, etc. probably drove Dem enthusiasm in as big a way as Iran drove GOP unenthusiasm, and it’s an angle where the GOP seems uninterested in competing.
An election happened, so now everybody has to give their take on What It Means. I don't have much to say, but I do want to add one thing:
If an analysis uses "independents" or "swing voters" or any other term for people voting across party lines, you can discount it as retarded.
Electoral "swing" isn't persuading "independents" who previously voted for other side to switch. That functionally never happens. Both sides have demographics that are "low propensity" voters. Swing happens when one does better or worse than previous at getting them to the polls.