Fair enough, those are good points. In principle I agree with both of you. I just think that all of these factors are secondary to the right geographical and meteorological conditions. There are plenty of countries that have the capacity to invest, but don’t care about medals at the Winter Olympics because they don’t have a culture in winter sports because they don’t have proper winters.

I also think the example of Italy vs Spain was not ideally chosen to make the argument.

We’re splitting hairs here… infrastructure will obviously only be where good winter conditions are. If no one considers your conditions good for winter sports they won’t come/invest so there will be less infrastructure.

Also, if you’ve never seen real ice outside, you’re less likely to get really into hockey or skating or bobsledding.

You are correct that there are also factors like culture, heritage in winter sports, infrastructure, financial backing, etc. But those are all dependent on having good mountains and winters in the first place. Northern Italy has them, Spain not so much.

Edit: To make a better case for your argument you could have picked a Caucasus Nation. Azerbaijan have great mountains with lots of snow, but are way less successful because of lack in funding, infrastructure and a culture around winter sports.

Italy includes most of the southern alps and specifically Alto Adige with the Dolomites, which is one of the most popular regions for alpine sports, be it winter or summer. Most of the Italian athletes are from that region of Italy, not from Puglia or Sicily.

Spain has mostly the Pyrenees, which are lower, have less snow on average, no glaciers and worse infrastructure. Sierra Nevada is tiny in comparison to what the Italian alps ca offer, albeit it’s an option for glacial skiing.

Your example actually shows that the other poster was right.

Ah my bad, didn’t even know it was private. Now it should work.

That honestly sounds like a lot of very interesting stuff, thanks for the very thorough answer! I’m trying to stick to fiction, non fiction often feels too much like work to me haha. Used to be biiiig on fantasy and scify when I was young, like Lord of the Rings, Dune, Ender Series and Cosmere type stuff. Then I stopped reading for a while and afterwards I couldn’t really get into it again for some reason…

So since I started again I’ve been working my way through mostly classics. Last year I was mostly into naturalist/existentialist/psychological realist novels with a focus on Russian, German, French and a few American authors. So stuff like Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, but also lots of plays by people like Hauptmann and Ibsen. Greene I read mostly as a nice lighter distraction in between, but I’m happy that it started off this conversation. I definitely wanna broaden my horizons a bit this year to get some more international perspective, especially since last year I read quite a few colonial novels, but very few that were narrated by the colonised. Also trying to read some more women since that is a huge blind spot for me… if you want, check out my StoryGraph profile for more. I’m trying to be thorough on reviewing the stuff I read and I’d love to get a little more social on there since I know no one who uses it yet. Here’s the link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/flo1312

Maybe I’ll check it out one of these days then… since you said your tastes have changed, what are you into nowadays?

How’d you like Slaughterhouse Five? Been meaning to get to it.

I really wanted to like On the Road. The whole movement and characters are so cool and sympathetic to me, but somehow it had too little direction for me to really enjoy it. I know that’s sort of the point though…

Just finished reading „The Quiet American“ by Greene. I read it based on @adhd_traco@piefed.social suggestion. Thanks for that mate! I enjoyed it quite a bit. Although I thought Our man in Havanna was better, since it didn’t take itself as seriously. Any other ones you liked by Greene?

Right now I’m reading „The Crucible“ by Arthur Miller. Idk what to think yet, I only just started, but so far it seems quite good and unfortunately sort of on topic with all the tyranny going on in the world nowadays…

Edit: Just got done with the Crucible. I thought it was great. Definitely gonna try to catch the play some time soon. I probably liked it even more than „Death of a Salesman“ and I already loved that one. Next up: Probably either „The Nickelboys“ or „Berlin Alexanderplatz“.

Reading The Clown by Heinrich Böll.

Probably his most famous novel this book mostly criticises post war catholic/capitalist German society for it’s hypocrisy and not really denazifying. It’s good, but the main character, who loses his girlfriend to a catholic and is handling it pretty badly is quite the doomer at times. There is enough cynical humor, sarcasm and irony to not make it too dark to read, but depending on how the story ends it definitely could become pretty dark in the end. It also cuts very close to home with some issues, but that rather enhances the reading experience, despite being quite uncomfortable at times. At times it’s a bit hard to discern wether the author did something on purpose to give his protagonist some negative traits, or if he just believed that stuff himself (especially how women are treated is pretty bad) but I’m quite sure that I’ll be able to judge this better by the end of the book. Overall I’d recommend reading it, but it’s definitely an emotional downer.

Reading „Our Man in Havanna“ by Greene. It’s funny, in an interesting setting and I am really enjoying it. Has anybody read anything else by Greene?

Sounds a lot like absurdism which I’ve been into a lot this year. I read some Camus and really loved it (The myth of Sisyphos, The Stranger and The Plague).

And yeah, I agree with your description of Broicism. It’s more about being like Hemingway/John Wayne and suppressing your emotions than being at peace with things being out of your control.

Thanks for taking the time for such a thorough reply! I’ll have to read my copy of Meditations to see any further similarities and where both differentiate from each other.

What’s your favourite Dostoevsky then? Definitely agree on the trouble accessing Russian mores tho. Had the same issues with Heart of a dog and that’s even more recent…

Had a hard time getting into the brothers my first go around as well. It’s just soo fucking long and so rich that you really can pick apart any passage so I kinda got lost somewhere during a reading slump. Let us know how you liked it once you’re done!

Planning on reading this myself some time… since you say it’s relevant today, how would you say it compares to all the broicism that’s the main version of stoicism nowadays?

Just finished Mikhail Bulgakovs Heart of a Dog. I don’t really know what to think if this. It’s kinda great but also kinda hard to judge because of my lack of knowledge of the cultural and historical background. This makes the satirical elements a lot harder to understand. I liked it though. It has a lot of similarities with Frankenstein, Faust or the Physicists in the questions it asks, paired with commentary on the ideal soviet citizen. The story is about a scientist, who implants some organs of a lowlife human into a dog, which transforms the dog into a human. Chaos ensues. Overall I’d recommend it, it’s a short read.

Always feel conflicted blocking guys like this… I wanna keep seeing them so I can downvote, but they also are just fucking annoying and toxic.

That looks wild! I’ll have to see if I can get a copy somewhere. And from what I’m reading I also couldn’t really answer any of my questions, but in this case it sounds like that’s a good thing haha

That sound interesting, care to elaborate a bit? Do you like it? What genre is it? Any comparisons to something else?

Reading Germinal by Emile Zola right now. From time to time it gets a bit too dry and reads more like political theory than fiction, but overall I’m enjoying it a lot. Got about 100 pages left and it seems like it’ll end in tragedy, but that was to be expected from the start.

I love the way Zola describes things. The darkness, the cold, the mines that are more like man-eating beasts than mere workplaces, make you really feel the tragic plight of the workers there.

It is also quite depressing to me how many lines I can draw from what I’m reading to what I’m hearing in my own life. The fight hasn’t really changed and the arguments that I hear also haven’t.

Probably gonna finish it this week and not sure what’s next, but I can definitely recommend this to anyone interested in politics and social justice. It feels very realistic (who would have thought, it’s realist/naturalist literature after all) and makes for a great fictional adaptation of the often pretty dry political theory on communism and socialism at the time.

I’m OOTL, what did contrapoints do?