vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


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bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

while I like most of it so far, it also repeats completely bizarre folktales like they're fact -- which is not really a reassuring quality for a book about supposedly secret hidden histories of the US nuclear weapons program. case in point:

The United States also provided the Soviet Union with the means for delivering an atomic bomb. In 1944, three American B-29 bombers were forced to make emergency landings in Siberia after attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria. The planes were confiscated by the Soviets, and one of them, the General H. H. Arnold Special, was carefully disassembled. Each of its roughly 105,000 parts was measured, photographed, and reverse engineered. Within two years the Soviet Union had its first long-range bomber, the Tupolev-4. The plane was almost identical to the captured B-29; it even had a metal patch where the General Arnold had been repaired.

there are lots of apocryphal stories about how directly the Tu-4 was copied from the B-29 (https://aviationhumor.net/soviet-b-29-clone-the-tupolev-tu-4-with-a-very-small-unnecessary-hole/ contains another three) but unlike most of them I can't even find anything on the internet which actually cites a specific source for this one, merely "I heard somewhere that..."; the other 3 all appear to come from the book "The Liberators" by Viktor Suvorov, a Soviet defector who was one month old at the first flight of the Tu-4, but it doesn't mention the patch story


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in reply to @vogon's post:

classic suvorov-ism, really! dude was entirely too good at writing fiction masquerading as nonfiction - his books postulating that Operation Barbarossa was preemptive defense on part of Nazi Germany especially - propelled by a Cold War need for anti-soviet propaganda.

The -ism here is in the "behavior typical of" sense rather than the "political philosophy" sense. What I meant by that was that this kind of folksy anecdote with dubious sourcing appears quite often in literature by Viktor Suvorov. Apologies that this was unclear.

Thabks gor the explanation, but I was kinda looking for an explanation on Suvorov himself. Not familiar with guy, so i kinda wanted a general idea what his role was in this cold-war fiction biz. cant google it atm