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Thread: PotF Anthology

  1. #1
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    Default PotF Anthology



    This thread shall be used to showcase the best posts that have been entered in the POTF contest, sorted by single competitions (PotF1, PotF2, etc).
    Winning posts and runner up posts will be recorded here, as well as any other nominated post that the Committee will deem worth of being included!

    Last edited by Aexodus; May 13, 2019 at 06:01 AM.
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  2. #2
    Flinn's Avatar His Dudeness of TWC
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    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #1

    Winning Post - Dick Cheney
    Significance of Teutoburg Forest
    I’m just going to come out and say it, but Teutoburg Forest has got to be one of the most overemphasized battles in human history (right up there with Thermopylae). The popular myth of course, is that Germanic Tribes (led by Arminius) banded together and soundly defeated three Roman Legions (led by Quinctilius Varus) at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest -during the height of Roman power no less-, thus permanently ending Roman plans for the colonization of greater Germania.

    According to wikipedia, The Battle of Teutoburg Forest is comparable to Rome’s greatest defeat, “a turning point in world-history,” and one of the most decisive battles ever recorded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle...utoburg_Forest

    In reality however, the significance of Teutoburg Forest -including our interpretations of its aftermath and role in thwarting Rome’s expansion plans- must be balanced with the following questions:

    1. Did Arminius and the Germanic Tribes decisively turnback the Roman Army from Germania?
    2. Did the loss of three Roman Legions put an end to the supposed Roman conquest of Germania?
    3. And did the defeat at Teurtoburg lead to a decisive end of Roman dominance and influence over central Europe?


    Quick overview of the battle (though not essential for discussion):

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 


    Narrative: Arminius (a former auxiliary officer) betrayed the Romans and executed a perfectly -and meticulously- designed trap. Most tellingly, ambush and wooded terrain prevented the Roman army from forming organized lines, thus allowing the Germans to swarm in on isolated pockets of panicking legionnaires. Low visibility, climate, and rain also didn’t help. Many backup legions (who otherwise might have participated) were also tied down in the ongoing Illyricum revolts.

    In all, the 17th, 18th, and 19th legions (20,000 men total) were completely wiped out, Varus committed suicide, and a grief-stricken Augustus is said to have remarked; “Varus, give me back my legions!”


    #1 Did the Germanic Tribes (under Arminius) decisively defeat the Roman Army presence in Germania?

    Short answer: no.

    It’s easy to overstate the significance of Teutoburg Forrest because three whole legions were wiped out and never replaced. However, even with the massacre of 20,000 legionaries and temporary blow to army morale, the Roman military presence around Germania actually increased as a result of Teutoburg Forrest (up to 8 legions beginning with Tiberius) and incidentally led to the revenge campaigns of Germanicus Caesar, a true destroyer general and genocidal killer.


    Campaigns of Germanicus Julius Caesar

    The cruelty and depth of the Roman response should not be underestimated. In addition to capturing Arminius’s wife, enslaving the local population, and wiping out entire villages and farmland around the Lippe valley, Germanicus managed to goad Arminius into decisive battle, and defeat him at Weser River and the Agrivarian Wall. He even recaptured 2 of the 3 lost eagle standards form the 17th, 18th, and 19th legions. The totality of Rome’s revenge was thus complete, and what remained of Arminius extremely fickle coalition mostly fled across the Elbe. More important than regaining territory, Rome’s honor was restored, and in the years after Weser, Arminius himself would be disposed of by his own men, largely in attempt to appease the Romans.

    #2 Did the loss at Teutoburg put an end to the supposed Roman conquest of Germania?

    Again, this one is mostly false.

    While it’s true major military incursions into Germania ended with the recall of Germanicus (and would not be seen again until the Marcomannic Wars), it’s also true that Germanicus had mostly pacified Germania up to the Lippe and North Sea, it was thus up to Tiberius to decide what to do next.

    Rather than continue to push forward to the Elbe, Tiberius choose to withdraw. The reasons for this decision were possibly twofold:

    1. Fear of Germanicus's growing reputation in Rome and the possibility of being usurped.
    2. A cost vs. benefit decision that said the economic benefits of conquering Germania were not worth the effort.

    In the end, many historians agree that Tiberius made the right decision based on the second reason. Germania, unlike Gaul, had few urban centers and little to no roads and infrastructure -which were needed to establish a reliable tax base. The German economy (according to Caesar and Tacitus) was also not significantly devoted to trade and agriculture, but instead to animal husbandry, raiding, piracy, and plunder. The Germans -according to archaeological grave sites- also significantly lacked in quality iron production and were dependent on Roman imports. In all, -right or wrongly- the Germanic tribes were mostly seen as uncivilized barbarians by their Roman counterparts and separate from the iron-working Celts in Gaul. Assimilating them and establishing Rome rule in the empty forests of Germania then was not worth the effort and may been the historical calculus for all future Emperors going forward.

    #3 Did the defeat at Teurtorburg lead to a decisive end of Roman dominance and influence over central Europe?

    This one should also be seen as mostly false. The narrative is that Arminius was a unifier and liberator for the German people, yet even after he was disposed of by rival chieftains, the Germanic tribes went back to fighting among themselves, which they were accustomed to do and the Romans happily encouraged. In addition, the Romans would construct the Limes Germanicus, the largest series of frontier fortifications ever constructed (after only the Great Wall of China). The Romans would use the Limes and the Rhine/Danube legions (usually 1/3 of the Roman Army) to literally dominate all major affairs in Magna Germania, including trade, border control, migration, agriculture, war, and regional politics. For the next two hundred years the west bank of the Rhine (along with Gaul) would actually remain relatively safe from German migration and influence, which may have been the principle aim of conquering Germania and wiping out the Germanic Tribes had the Romans done so anyway.


    Runners up - Abdülmecid I and Lord Oda Nobunaga
    How did Italy lose against Ethiopia? First Italo-Ethiopian War
    The main issue was the Kingdom of Italy barely met the requirements of the elitist "Great Powers" club. Italy could have been stronger than Portugal or Bulgaria, but she could never hope to compete, in financial, industrial and military terms, with the likes of France, Germany or the United Kingdom. These weaknesses were clearly reflected upon the efficiency of her armed forces, from an extremely fragile system of logistics to sloppily trained soldiers and an amateurish officer corps, completely unable to instill a vigorous filling of solidarity inside the regiments and to launch fruitful strategic and tactical operations. Superficially, the Italian army may have seem superior to the Hapsburg navy in Lissa or the Ethiopian army in Adoua, but reality proved otherwise. Even in neighboring Libya, the Italians effectively controlled only the coastline inside the artillery range of their fleet, while the skeleton Ottoman garrison and the Libyan irregulars demonstrated their flexibility in Tobruk and Sciara Sciat. In 1935, fascist Italy benefited a lot from technological advancement, unlike her adversary, which is why the conquest of the country and the expulsion of its royal dynasty became much easier. Lethal gas, especially, was particularly effective, as it decimated the men, destroyed their morale and disrupted their formations. In that case, Italy piously copied the methods of the Spanish during their struggle against the Rif Republic in Morocco.

    Meanwhile, Ethiopia was an organised empire, with a long tradition of statehood, while also possessing a central authority (according to African standards), capable of mobilizing several institutions, in order to defeat various invaders. The Empire could deploy a numerous army, reinforced with modern weaponry and able to execute a demanding campaign and complex manoeuvres in the battlefield. Of course, it remained feeble, when compared to the possibilities of an industrialised power, while "feudalism" was far from being eradicated, but when all these factors are explained, as well as Oreste Baratieri's obvious mistake of dividing his forces, the disaster of Adua can be explained somewhat convincingly. In any case, the Ethiopian achievement should be recognized as great and remarkable, as, in contrast to Isandlwana, it involved a decisive victory of the entire European force and not the neutralisation of just a detachment.

    France has always had colonial ambitions... in Italy.
    Well, that's not correct, at least not for the relevant period. In fact, the opposite was true, as Italian nationalism was marked by a particularly aggressive spirit against France, despite the crucial role the Second Empire played at unifying the peninsula, contrary to the wishes of the Hapsburg monarchy, the Bourbon dynasty and the Papal domination. To be more specific, the Italians were furious (Tunisian bombshell) at the establishment of a French protectorate in Tunisia (which they bizarrely considered as Italy's "rightful territory), while some extremists (Garibaldi included) even advocated for the conquest of Corsica and Savoy. All this ideological "imperialism" was partially fueled by a remarkably jingoist press, whose influence on the electorate was so strong that it could determine foreign policy and the careers of ambitious politicians.

    Any particular reason France and Russia in particular would help someone fight against the Italians? Were the Italians unpopular during this period?
    Well, in addition to what I mentioned in my reply to Athanaric, Italy belonged to the Triple Alliance (together with Germany and Austria-Hungary), which was diplomatically hostile to the French-Russian alliance (the predecessor of the Entente in WWI). In what concerns East Africa, Russia's attitude was pure indifference (a small private colony named "New Moscow" had already been dismantled), but France certainly preferred an independent Ethiopia to an encirclement of the French dominion of Djibouti by the Italian colonies of Somaliland and Eritrea. However, that being said, I doubt global geopolitics played any significant role to the Ethiopian army being equipped by French and Russians. Such initiatives were very low priority, while their goals were generally defined as economic, opportunistic and comparatively short-term, namely the growth of the domestic arms industry, the increase of foreign political influence inside Ethiopia, the encouragement of investment and the opening of a new market for the industries of France and Russia. The consequent misfortune for Italy was essentially a coincidental byproduct (albeit not necessarily an unwelcome one), but it had nothing to do with the original objective.
    Hyksos Origins & Culture
    I am quite lost at the Sea People-Hyksos connection, but I don't want to strawman the fellow. Maybe there is something there? But I don't see it to be honest.

    As for the Sea People which raided the Levant in the 1200's and 1100's... A lot of people make the assumption that they were actually one group of people but I have no idea why. Think about it, if the Turks invade Anatolia and then the Mongols show up, are they actually one people? No, the logical assumption is just that there were a series of mass migrations. How do we know? Because in the time span that western Anatolia was being invaded there were also simultaneous incursions into Egypt and the Levant. Something that seems rather impossible, one group splitting off into multiple groups to raid everything. The easy explanation is that these were multiple groups from various origins.

    The message historians give is really jumbled and dare I say incorrect. For instance there is the claim that the Sea People caused the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. But that can't be true at all given that they only successfully invaded Ugarit and Cyprus, and allegedly were the forebears of the Philistines. The biggest claim given is that the Sea People supposedly destroyed the Hittite Empire that isn't supported other than through mere coincidence. For starters there are no records of "Sea People" invading Anatolia and destroying Hattusa (or even close to it). Second, the destruction of Hattusa better coincides with Assyrian military activities of the same period, as well as the revolt of the Kaska tribes of the Pontic regions and civil conflict between the Great King Suppiluliuma II and some of his subjects (particularly the king of Tarhuntassa, likely of the Hittite royal house, descended from Ulmi-Teshup). Not to mention the obvious fact that the Sea People... WERE SEA PEOPLE, so they could not have caused a Bronze Age collapse if they just raided the coasts (Hattusa is quite landlocked I'm afraid). There is also the fact that in the past two centuries the Hittite Empire had been rather unstable with civil war, foreign wars, famine, tribal incursions and plague (which killed two kings no less).

    Usually the evidence for the existence and activities of "the Sea People" is a bunch of occurrences which are then linked together by scholars. For instance the often cited Hittite records during the early 1200's which refer to the invasion of western Anatolia by a kingdom referred to as Ahhiyawa (usually taken to mean Achaeans). But that was during the previous century in which what we would assume was part of an Anatolian coalition (as it coincides with a large uprising in western Anatolia). The problem with drawing a connection between the Ahhiyawans and the Sea People is that the Ahhiyawans are never mentioned again after around 1260-1240. Another contemporary example is Ramesses II's defeat of the Sherden pirates in the Nile Delta at around the same time. The enemies are identified as Lykka (Lycians?) and Sherden (claimed to be Anatolian or Sardinian). As far as I know they are not referred to as Sea People. However in the reign of Ramesses III the "Sea People" are defeated at the Nile Delta, but here they are clearly identified as Sherden, Peleset, Tjekker, Teresh, Weshesh, Denyen etc. Moreover Ramesses III's inscriptions refers to them as an alliance, meaning that they are not one group.

    Clearly then the Sea People are not a single group with a single origin. Most likely many of these were tribes from Anatolia as their depiction and names are similar to Anatolians. The idea that they may have been Mycenaean Greeks is unsupported. It is possible that this was part of a domino effect from the Ahhiyawan activities a century earlier or due to larger ecological changes which connects the two. But on the whole there seems to only be a larger pattern of migrations within Anatolia (presumably in the Balkans as well with the Pelasgians). At some point they formed raiding fleets and armies with peoples like the Libyans and Amorites, as Ramesses III states. If there is a connection between say the people that destroyed Hatti and the Sea People then it is only in so far as Anatolian migrations and invaders, not some pirates or raiders which somehow destroyed a whole empire. In conclusion there were no "Sea People" which caused the Bronze Age collapse. There was actually a larger trend of migrations in Anatolia and the Balkans (maybe in the rest of Europe) caused either by ecological reasons and famine or other migrations which had similar causes. The Sea People attacked and raided the coasts from Cyprus and Cilicia as far as Egypt, but in terms of actual destruction they didn't cause that much. Whether they "conquered" (which has not been defined in this case; did they take these places or merely sack them) Ugarit, Cyprus, Ashkelon, Hazor, Carchemish (supposedly survived the attack), Kizzuwatna (Cilicia) and Arzawa (western Anatolia).

    I should note that the Egyptians claim "the lands were removed and scattered to the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, Alashiya on being cut off" (quoted from Trevor Bryce). However I would suggest that the translation be more carefully examined for potential errors or that the exact meaning be carefully observed. The statement there does not inherently imply that all those lands were destroyed by the Sea People, but mentions clearly that they were cut off, as in the Egyptians lost contact with these places. That in itself does not mean that the Sea People conquered Hatti, which sounds rather implausible. If the Egyptians do mean that these Sea People conquered Hatti, then consider that they are wrong. Unless by Sea People they are using this as a general term to mean Anatolians.
    Last edited by Flinn; May 10, 2019 at 09:03 AM.
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  3. #3
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    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #2

    Winning Post - Lord Oda Nobunaga
    Hyksos Origins & Culture
    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    Regarding the destruction of Hattusa, the archaeology isn't consistent with a foreign invasion. There were makeshift reinforcements made to its defenses, suggesting there was a sense of insecurity, the potential of an impending attack, but there is no evidence of a battle – no weapons, etc. There is no evidence of destruction in the lower city or in the residences of the upper city. Only temples, the palace, and the city gates were burned after having been meticulously emptied of all valuables. There is no evidence of destruction prior to the burning. A small percentage of the population remained in the city and in nearby settlements. There is no local disruption in the continuity of the Hittite material culture into the Iron Age. This is consistent in my opinion with the hypothesis Oda mentioned, that Suppiliumas II simply relocated the capital, probably to the southeast.

    With regards to Cyprus and Ahhiyawans
    I mentioned the Hittite naval campaign against Cyprus above. The record apparently indicates nothing which we would associate with the Sea People, unless Cypriots were part of the Sea People. Also relevant the fact that the people of Cyprus are not associated with the Mycenaeans or Cretans by either the Egyptians or the Hittites. The Hittites do not use the term "Ahhiyawan" in any context relating to Cyprus either. The only time they mention Ahhiyawa (whoever they are) is in the context of Anatolia... presumably in a dispute over the ownership of Millawanda. What is important is that the campaign takes place just prior to or at the start of the reign of Suppiluliumas II, allegedly the last Hittite ruler.

    However I am also inclined to think that the insertion of Millawanda by scholars into the Ahhiyawa narrative is wishful thinking on the part of scholars who want to connect Mycenaean finds in that area with the Ahhiyawans. The record is not clear about who the Ahhiyawans are nor what territory they inhabit, only a dispute with Wilusa and ultimately that the Ahhiyawans are allowed to claim Millawanda. But if Millawanda was controlled by the Mycenaeans it is rather awkward that the city is already ruled by a governor called Atpa. All we know about the land of Ahhiya is that they are to the west of the Astarpa and the Kastaraya Rivers (the boundary between Hatti and west Anatolia)... which doesn't give a lot of leeway in determining where this is (same with the location of Wilusa actually, though it is assumed that Wilusa is the Troad, or Tarusiyah as it is called by the Hittites... but why would they have two names for the same place?).

    About the Sea People and their raids
    Another thing worth mentioning. Carlos J. Moreu and others argue that the inscription of Ramesses III might have a slight spelling mistake or a mistranslation. When it mentions the places destroyed by the Sea People, supposedly, "Arzawa" (a region in Anatolia) is the place mentioned, where as others argue it is the city of Arvad (the Egyptians use "Yereth/Yeres"). Arvad being a coastal city in Amurru would be an easy target. Although Arzawa is also a region in western Anatolia so it isn't like that area was inaccessible to the Sea People. If anything it would have been ground zero for pillaging and raiding. Despite that I don't know about wars being fought in that area at the time, we should assume that generally Anatolia had a lot of conflicts as the Hittites mention not only massive coalitions against Hittite rule but also wars in which the Hittites intervened in favour of an ally. This generally being the pragmatic method by which the Hittites expanded their hegemony into Anatolia, but also explains how and why the Anatolians coalesced against Hittite hegemony, which they resented for the most part (as these coalitions, but also Hittite treaties, indicate). However, if Ramesses III actually means Arvad then this is probably further evidence that the Sea People did not invade Anatolia en masse and therefore it is extremely unlikely that they destroyed Hatti.

    Records discovered in Ugarit indicate that the Sea People actually invaded the Levant and attacked the region of Mukish (roughly Latakia and Lebanon, also where Ugarit is located). In these records they describe an invasion of the region and a battle being fought near Mount Amanus. Due to fragments it is not clear who the invaders were, nor the outcome of the campaign. One of these records being written on the orders of an Ewir-Sharruma, a military official in Ugarit: "and behold, the enemy who is in Mukish... to Mount Amanus... behold, the enemy is destroyed... the enemies oppress me, but I shall not leave my wife and children...". Another record discovered next to that one and is of an unknown author but which says "If the Hittites mount, I will send a message to you, and if they don't I will certainly send a message. My mother, don't be afraid...", implying that they are expecting Hittite reinforcements in Ugarit. The assumption is that this describes an invasion by the Sea People but it could be a civil war... or even an Egyptian invasion.

    The campaigns of Ramesses III in Amurru
    The element which is not considered is that of the Egyptians. Ramesses III's own inscriptions mention that he campaigned in Syria and took the city of Tunip (among others). Some of these depict him fighting Amorites but also Hittites. In another campaign Ramesses III also defeated the Sea People in a naval battle near Arvad, captured them and deported them to Canaan. What we can reconstruct is that the Hittites were hard pressed everywhere. Either the Sea People took some cities in Syria, and so Ramesses III campaigned against the Sea People there... but that does not appear to be the case as the Medinet Habu inscriptions do not depict the Sea People. Ramesses III opportunistically invaded Amurru, taking advantage of troubles in Anatolia. How the Ugarit records fit in to this is hard to say. Ramesses III does not appear to have fought the Hittite army in a pitched battle nor any mentions of the Hittite King but rather tribute and treaties with individual cities in Amurru. So either the Hittite Empire is bursting at the seams, so much so that Ramesses III is able to campaign in Amurru with impunity or Suppiluliumas II is busy fighting someone else.

    The collapse of the Hittite Empire
    Certainly there is a decent picture of the internal problems within the Hittite Empire. I don't see why we ought to assume that the Empire outright collapsed or that Suppiluliumas II was killed. It is just the assumption made due to there not being other records available to us. If anything Hattusa seems to have been abandoned gradually or destroyed afterwards. Perhaps some of the Hittite people migrated southwards, but most likely many of them remained and gradually turned into the Phrygians and Cappadocians, perhaps also with other migrants within Anatolia that settled in those areas.

    As I see it all of these internal conflicts within the nobility of Hatti, as well as revolts by the Anatolians, are the main culprit for the fall of the Hittite Empire. At some point around 1180 BC Suppiluliumas II moved his capital southwards. The records which we do have are merely the ones which survived or have been discovered as a result of this disorganized retreat. Abandoning Hattusa would not have been done lightly, but Hattusa was always in danger of being raided by the Kaska tribes. The precedent for both exists in the reign of Muwatallis. Muwatallis moved the capital from Hattusa south into western Cilicia, to the city of Tarhuntassa which he constructed. At the same time the north, which included Hattusa, was threatened by attacks from the Kaska tribes of the Pontic regions and so Muwatallis appointed his brother Hattusili as vassal king of Hakpish, in charge of the defense of the north and of Hattusa, and to pacify the Kaska peoples. To this end Hattusili was also given command over his own army, which later fought at Kadesh and no doubt included many veteran troops. Meanwhile Muwatallis had thoroughly relocated to Tarhuntassa, which would become a major city. But this would be undone by his son Mursili III and brother Hattusili III, since Hattusa was a center of cultural importance, this precedent by Muwatallis is actually rather strange. Suppiluliumas II (or his unknown successor) appears to have followed the precedent out of necessity. Perhaps the damage in Hattusa is consistent with an uprising by the populace (most likely a bread riot given the circumstances). Or perhaps it was a retreat followed by a scorched earth policy.

    As we know Suppiluliumas II defeated the vassal king Hartapu of Tarhuntassa and sacked the city. I doubt that he would have moved the capital back to Tarhuntassa, as he damaged the city but he would have moved it southwards where it was out of the reach of these invaders and rebels. Possibly somewhere within Hatti or perhaps east to Sharazzi Udne (Cappadocia) or to Kizzuwatna (Cilicia). What happened after that would just be a guess, but most likely central authority was gone by 1120 BC. The Empire being in the state that it was could not control the Anatolian vassals and so they easily asserted their independence. While gradually the Hittite lords would have asserted their own power as the Empire broke down into a series of city states. Most likely one of these Neo-Hittite city states was the final center of power for the Great King of Hatti. Hence it would not be surprising if one of these city states was ruled by a descendant of Suppiluliumas II centuries later.

    Some of the cities' rulers are attested to in records as having been descendants of the vassal kings from the Imperial/New Kingdom era. Such as Carchemish which was a Syrian city ruled by the Mitanni, conquered by Suppiluliumas I in the 1300's and which retained its Hittite ruler after the collapse. Kuzi-Teshub was the son of the vassal king Talmi-Teshub (contemporary of Suppiluliumas II) and was himself the descendant of Suppiluliumas I. For a time Carchemish was one of the most powerful Hittite states in Syria, indeed Kuzi-Teshub is recorded as having used the title "Great King". This supports my theory of a gradual erosion of central authority, the idea of a Hittite Empire and peoples did not suddenly disappear. Despite the invasion of Amurru by Ramesses III the Neo-Hittites had an overwhelming presence in Kizzuwatna and Amurru. Egypt reasserting its control over Amurru must not have lasted long after the reign of Ramesses III because immediately after these cities are independent. Somehow Hittite cultural and ethnic dominance over Amurru remained, however local cultures and religions also gained even more traction among the Hittites.

    By 1109 BC Tiglath Pileser I had received the submission of Neo-Hittite city states along the Euphrates which is sufficient proof that the Hittite Empire no longer existed as a political entity within the century. Hittites remained as a group until around 700 BC when they were conquered by Neo-Assyria and supplanted culturally in Amurru by the fusion of Aramean with the local culture. What happened to the Neo-Hittites remaining in Anatolia is unknown. How Phrygia or Cappadocia were formed in the first place and how the Kizzuwatna states became Cilician.

    The fact that Suppiluliumas II succeeded his brother Arnuwanda III after only an extremely short reign indicates that the Hittite Empire was predisposed to experience some internal troubles. Whether Arnuwanda III had not sired an heir, or perhaps he was killed, or maybe Suppiluliumas II capitalized on his unexpected demise by removing his brother's children. Given the clear Hittite records of both ethnic revolts, civil war, raids by the Sea People and in the Egyptian records of their invasion of Amurru the cause of the Empire's collapse seems clear. Famine, plague, constant wars and having to maintain such an empire in the topographical nightmare that was Anatolia, caused the Empire (or central authority rather) to have an extreme lack of resources and be overstretched. This perhaps could have been dealt with but simultaneously infighting by the Hittites directly led to the collapse. As such I am fairly sure that we can rule out the Sea People as the reason for the Empire's destruction and by extension as the reason for the poorly named "Bronze Age Collapse".

    Bronze Age Collapse with relation to Troy and Mycenae
    While there was indeed plenty of destruction at the end of the Bronze Age there was very little actual collapse. There was certainly much conflict in western Anatolia as well (whether by the Sea People or otherwise) which may clue us in as to the tale of the actual Trojan War, or at least give us an unrelated explanation for the destruction of Troy VII (Michael Wood believes Troy VIIb1 and VIIb2 were destroyed by war). I am adamant that the Trojan War was in fact multiple conflicts in western Anatolia, in which the Mycenaeans took part both as mercenaries (to the aforementioned Assuwa (Asia?) coalitions against the Hittites and their allies), as well as conquerors and raiders in their own right as the material remains in Miletos may indicate. Later on the Greeks wove together their own oral traditions into a single epic narrative which depicted themselves as the protagonists and their Asian allies as only minor collaborators (many elements within the Iliad are anachronistic). However the actual connection between the Sea People and the Mycenaeans is rather tenuous. Perhaps the Odyssey is a reference to these Sea People raids (interestingly Odysseus says that he raided Egypt, failed and served their king as a mercenary... cultural memory of the Sea People???) but to know for sure one would have to establish the connection between the Peleset, Tjekker, Denyen and Ekwash with the Mycenaeans.

    As for the collapse of Mycenaean civilization I am unsure what to make of it. Not really my area but from what I have been told the destruction at many of these sites is consistent with much of the destruction in Anatolia and the Levant at the time. There seems to have been very little attributed to warfare. What warfare is recorded only mentions fighting against a threat from the north. While some might enthusiastically claim this is evidence of a Pelasgian invasion, from what I have been told, the physical evidence more likely implies warfare between Greek states as the reason for destruction in places like Thebes, Tyrins and Mycenae, or maybe internal conflicts within these cities. The Pylos records mention naval attack but this cannot be attributed to the Sea People because it specifically says that the threat comes from the north rather than the east or south. For some reason scholars try to connect these events with the Sea People invasions but really it doesn't make much sense to ascribe all of this to pirates. Perhaps the collapse of Mycenaean civilization led to piracy but this is tenuous. Maybe the Ahhiyawans and their identity may provide an idea as to why these developments occurred (although the Madduwatta Letter which mentions Attarsiya "man of Ahhiya" as having an army of 100 chariots and invading Lycia and Cyprus, it is dated to the 1400's or 1300's and the Tawagalawa Letter which mentions Ahhiya and Millawanda are dated to the mid-1200's). No clue as to how all of this fits with the myths of Doric/Pelasgian invasions. To my knowledge there is actually an unspoken disagreement as to whether Mycenaean civilization collapsed at all. The actual collapse is with regards to historiography. There is a void in the understanding of Anatolia and Greece due to a lack of records, but that in itself might not even indicate any civilizational collapse.



    Runner Up Post Dante Von Hespburg
    Brexit - Time to scrap it and start again?
    Quote Originally Posted by Sharpe's Company View Post
    Anyone would think before 1973 the UK didn't have a farming industry and we didn't have any ports to facilitate trade.

    As clear as day on the Lord Bamford article, we have about 120 ports that can ease any congestion.
    60% of our trade comes in from outside the EU at the moment, so stop worrying your little heads.
    Food is going to become cheaper and if our farmers cannot compete, and yes they will, but if they can't, then that is their fault for running poor businesses.

    I actually agree with New Zealand, all subsidies ought to be removed and let the farmers get on with farming than having the taxpayer fund them to sit there and leave their fields empty. It is time for work.

    And please, just stop with your fear, fear, fear.
    We're sick of it.

    https://youtu.be/1j-Gb8Pk2Pk
    I've not yet understood why discussion is dismissed by either side as 'fear-mongering' it smacks of a rather weird and desperate stance that cannot abide open discussion.
    Lord Bamford has made the same mistake you have in the previous few posts- your taking tiny examples as evidence of broader trends when to analyse how international trade cycles work you need to do the opposite. Its not about Congestion at ports, but international politics and economics of scale. Is there currently enough out there to replace the loss in value of the EU's trade? Arguably not, particularly with China's growing grip on Africa and Asia (Who as of today for instance are being treated by the UK as a geopolitical rival).

    Also as i posted before this-
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/r...rade-m8025tqss

    There is a major stumbling block for the UK to get its envisioned WTO trade plans. If this is not resolved, their will be a real problem. You mention nothing yet of finance, nor addressing this. Nor have you addressed just how in a 'no deal' brexit you can make the UK competitive given its existing structural constraints, without lowering living standards and purchasing power (Which is already comparatively abysmal compared to other developed nations). To see how brexit would work you look at the domestic situation (Which is poor at the moment) and then apply that to the context we're talking about. Brexit can work, and a no-deal can be mitigated somewhat if the UK have bothered to prepare...at all either before activating article 50, or at least over the past 2 years. The fact is we haven't.

    Lets take a case-study though- how can British farmers stay competitive? And you imply you would let them die? I used to feel the same, but then you remember that agriculture and food production is considered a strategic industry, so before making decisions over this you need to assess is such a thing still relevant? Arguably in a world going into a protectionist phase again, its important to have something of a back-up, even if its not at all adequate. I agree UK farming though will need a major shake-up to have any remote chance of being competitive (The most obvious one is an increase in the size of cooperatives).

    But the main point. Your not actually providing any evidence that would allay the political and economic hurdles that the UK has imposed upon itself due to the short time limit. Your arguing that we're all discussing some kind of 'doom' scenario that's all about 'fear', and if that makes you fearful i apologize. But what actually we're doing is discussing the current constraints the UK faces, criticizing the lack of action to overcome them and offering what we all feel may be the best way forward. Simply doing as you've done here spouting random 'feel good' evidence like a company giving a raise or making a sweeping statement based on Lord Bamfords article (who also does not take into account real-term geopolitics or economics- back is essentially a 'back in my day' piece) isn't really constructive.

    It also is interesting though as the choice of language you use here has been exactly the same problem that the brexiteers have had- they have failed to create a stable sustainable majority post-referendum by merely falling back on 'fear mongering' accusations to all rival discussion, drumming up 'will of the people' (Which in the UK's political system is the weakest legitimizing factor you could rely on for long term policy, as again as discussed before, what happens 4 years down the line when Labour or the Conservatives offer rejoining the EU as part of their electoral manifesto? They politically can because no brexiteer bothered to create a clear consensus after they'd won the battle of the referendum). You are essentially here, still fighting that referendum perceiving us as needing to be either 'silenced' or 'convinced' of your argument, because of the lack of consensus building post-referendum. You don't need to- personally i find the whole process rather exciting politically and stand to gain a fair bit as a sleuth of academic jobs being readied for a post-brexit UK. But indeed, your stance is interesting here, as it also highlights just how constitutionally screwed the UK political sphere has become, and will remain for a decade or more due to the mess the government have made over the past 2 years of the process.

    An interesting point though- given that a no-deal brexit (As with remain) will have political repercussions (As any hit to the economy or living standards- from brexit, or indeed from the UK's current dire performance due to its structural issues, weakened by the misapplication of austerity that then could and will be spun as 'brexit' by the government will have an electoral consequence), what will you do when people demand at the next GE a more pro-EU approach, or indeed EU membership? As a no-deal scenario is the guaranteed way (due to lack of preparation) to undermine brexit as a valid policy. It essentially will make EU membership the new political football as they'll be electoral gains to be made from blaming the Conservatives for a no-deal brexit and any subsequent issues (much as the Conservatives successfully spun the financial crash as being Labour's fault- political masterstroke), it makes brexit unstable as a policy. At best again we'll be back and forth and polarized for a decade or so, at worst, we'll end up in a few years time rejoining the EU and being forced to accept the euro and lose our opt-outs and vetos (A truly dire scenario for us).

    So how will you Sharpe make a no-deal brexit politically sustainable over the next few years? How will you forge the consensus needed for it to stick and not become political football? And who do you see doing that? For instance if the Conservatives lose at the next GE (Which is a distinct possibility), do you expect Labour to stay 'brexited' (They may do, but only if Corbyn is still leader)? How do you see the Conservatives emerging from a 'no-deal' brexit as a still viable political force given the threats by Conservative 'soft brexiteers' and 'remainers' that they would resign the whip?

    As here's the big issue, the way brexit has been conducted has essentially ensured it will continue to be a major political issue, years after its 'done'.

    EDIT: Just so that i'm not accused of hypocrisy- and to further highlight my point about 'micro economics' being absolutely useless as a case for or against brexit:

    https://www.theguardian.com/business...sjUD9Yk6lDBDnk

    This is pro-remain, from a pro-remain paper- they are highlighting that Jaguar-Land Rover is axing 5000 jobs- due to the governments botched handling of brexit. However as i'm sure Sharpe's Company will be the first to point out (and correctly so), this is only one factor- Sales globally are down, we're again heading into a position of squeezed incomes both in the 'west' and now China is feeling it too. The developing world by the way are also heading for an economic crisis due to the their growth being fueled by easy access to cheap credit, both its sources- Europe and the US, and China- are both facing interest rate hikes and the potential generally for a recession (Hence why again a no-deal brexit in which we're expected to rely on the 'fastest growing' parts of the globe to pick up the significant EU slack is foolhardy and a pipe-dream at best given that China and the fastest growing economies (Brazil, Nigeria, India et al) are by all accounts heading into serious issues in the near future. Not a great strategy really if you want brexit to be 'sustainable'- hence why no deal is the worst option possible.

    Anyway that tangent aside that we need to be aware of- this is why we can't rely on 'piecemeal' articles to make the sweeping case that 'remain is great' or 'no-deal is great' or whatever. It doesn't work. You need a broader analysis, otherwise we look silly by attributing everything (good or bad) to brexit without consideration of other factors.

    So again big picture is key- you can either stick your head in the sand, pretend that developing countries are not starting to struggle, or that Russia and co are not mucking around with the UK's WTO schedules, or that as a consumer state we wield far less power in a no-deal scenario that those who were selling to us, or that the UK government has not at all prepared properly for said no-deal scenario, or that UK manufacturing will somehow thrive in competition with the US without sacrificing already fragile disposable incomes and purchasing power through the erosion of worker protections, or that the UK doesn't already have a very weak and fragile economy that is over-reliant on services, low skilled jobs and finance or that the UK will not be in a desperate position in the face of a no deal brexit, signing away significant parts of the British state (NHS for instance) to foreign competition that will not have a direct political impact electorally later on (I.e. the Conservative party punished rightly, and Labour riding in who in this context would face exactly the same difficulties, but now having promised nationalization potentially make things even more difficult).

    Or...we could discuss these things, not stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and cry 'fear-mongering', but instead continue identifying the issues, how the government messed up in allowing them/not addressing them and what might be done ideally going forward. Something honestly everyone in this thread until now had done a sterling job, brexiteer, remainer or otherwise.

    EDIT EDIT:

    @All

    A more general thing, but also to Sharpe. It appears that a 'No deal brexit' will not be off the table potentially even if May tries to run the clock down:

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics...ng-brexit-deal

    Senior Labour and Conservative MPs are to ramp up efforts to block any possibility of a no-deal Brexit ahead of the vote on Theresa May’s deal, with a plan to mandate the prime minister to extend or cancel article 50 if the prospect of crashing out looms.
    Efforts were kickstarted on Thursday by a cross-party group of prominent MPs led by Yvette Cooper, who tabled a new amendment to the finance bill that would only allow a no-deal exit if MPs voted to proceed with one.
    So if this passes (which given parliaments arithmetic it probably will) then that's at least one thing we can all sleep easier on. However, while its appropriate for this to be 'off the table' given the lack of preparation that the Conservatives have given to a 'no deal', it is also an admittance of failure at how negotiations have proceeded, highlighting the governments incompetence, but also giving a signal to the EU that we cannot walk away (and literally we can't). They already knew this of course given how they've negotiated and maintained the upper hand relatively easily, but its not great politics to have it slapped around so openly.
    Under the patronage of Finlander, patron of Lugotorix & Lifthrasir & joerock22 & Socrates1984 & Kilo11 & Vladyvid & Dick Cheney & phazer & Jake Armitage & webba 84 of the Imperial House of Hader

  4. #4

    Default PotF Anthology

    PotF #3

    Winning Post - Cyclops
    Why was flanking so effective?
    Quote Originally Posted by Swaeft View Post
    ...
    Thank you for the long and detailed answer!
    No worries I'm mostly typing for the pleasure of seeing my own brain mashed on the screen, and very happy for you and others to correct me when I am wrong.

    Quote Originally Posted by Swaeft View Post
    ...As I said before, I'm not talking about the musket/guns era, but rather the sword and shield battles. I understand the morale shock in later engagements, but when you can clearly see your enemy coming you have time to prepare.
    The musket and gun era are relevant though as a lot of the work done is the same.

    Getting men onto a field to kill one another is no mean feat. You do it by bonding them socially, emotionally and militarily. Less centralized ("civilised") societies bring warriors to the field when each individual decides to come. Complex societies have conscription and other forms of coercion, material rewards, intangible rewards , religion and so on that allows masses to be mobilised and moved. Part of these systems is practicing in formation, and the line of battle is a very old and successful institution.

    The systems that bring men (and occasionally women) to fight makes them want to fight. if one army melts, doesn't turn up etc then obviously there's no battle. This can result in a lost war (not always) but the net result is warriors want to fight. So the leader's line em up and go.

    Getting units of men to obey once in battle is another hurdle. They better have practiced drill because battle is too stressful to make stuff up on the spot effectively. The drill tends to be "all face this way, when they get close stab them", because thats what works. Once a unti knows how to fight and wants top fight, the next trick is making them not fight the moment they see an enemy.

    Its a very well trained force that can march around not fighting and keep morale high enough to keep the army together. Hannibal did it, Fabius Cunctator did it. By the 18th century a lot of armies could do it, there was the third Silesian war where close to 10% of casualties were outside battle because the whole thing was a walkfest ("war of manouevre").

    On the actual battlefield units can rush at a hated foe, or refuse to move away from their neighboring units cause its dangerous out there man. Once in a melee (or later a firefiught) units tend to get bogged down and ignore orders to stop and withdraw: they face the nearest enemy and go at them and ignore the rest. Other units can get imaginative 'is that our cavalry in the rear, or is it the enemy? Holy ..."

    War is hard. Leaders try to keep their forces well positioned, not bogged down, one step ahead of the other guy. A flank attack (ie a part of your army attacking an army's wing, perhaps from an oblique, perpendicular or best of all rear angle) is a normal battle option. getting a force around a flank though exposes it, all other things being equal. By definition you detach a part of your force and send it off into the blue. It is at risk of being caught, perhaps by the enemies whole force if it is in turn out-manouevred.

    Fredrick the great overcame this problem by flanking with his entire force: he'd rapid march his boys to an oblique angle and approach his center against the opposition wing: still risky but he had a manouevre advantage and he exploited it. i think he was copying (in part) Alexander's superb (risky) battle plan from Gaugemela: here again the whole army rapid marched and approached on an oblique angle, disrupting the larger enemy line and throwing prior plans into some dissarray although the main attack was against the centre and the Makedonian line was doubled to protect the rear of the first line. Gaugemela was finished with a sharp cavalry charge at the centre, another Frederickan trick.

    That battle gives me cold sweats when I think about it. March the whole force diagonally, trust the weak second line to defend the rear of the incredibly short front line, "don't worry guys, I'll catch the enemy cavalry with the tribesmen we have hanging off our bridles of our massively ounumbered cavalry, then we'll dart back toward the centre (no way the elephants will have moved across to cover it by then) and i will personally kill the opposition king before the rest of you are trampled by the largest army anyone has yet assembled". He was a genius to make it work, did not attempt a flank attack or outflank (he did feint toward the flank though) and Darius' attempted double envelopment failed because he was too slow, didn't deal with the second line and couldn't blunt the Companion Cavalry charge before it reached his own position.

    At Austerlitz the Russians attempted a massive outflank, marching over half their force south to sweep up the French from the right to left. It was bold and well planned: Napoleon's right was weak, the Russian centre was protected by the Pratzen heights (which were thought to obscure sight of the move and to hinder any French spoiling attack) and they could smell victory. Sadly things went wrong.

    Davout had force marched all night and arrived to block the Russian left. French scouts spotted the Russians in marching columns heading south. Soult counterattacked across Pratzen heights (Napleon's infantry had developed uncanny speed and now high morale as well allowing rapid movement and return to formation beyond other army's capabilities at the time: the Russians had not seen this yet) and took the Russian regiments heading south in flank, scattering them piecemeal. French left held the Austrians at bay. The Russian move to outflank led to the near destruction of their force (the remnants were saved by repeated reckless charges by the guard cavalry led by the Emperor's brother) and the Austrians wisely bugged out to fight another day.

    Against a skilled nimble opponent a gamble like an outflank was possibly suicidal. In the right circumstances it could bag a smaller opponent with less loss of life. Art Agincourt the English line held (because of superb terrain choices by Henry V, and because the French knights only wanted to fight the English knights, and caused a pedestrian crush trying to all get at them while ignoring all other English, who beat them to death with hammers-true story) and the only serious threat was a tiny outflank attempt made against orders by a stray local noble.

    At Agincourt the French wanted a face to face battle because their superiority in chevaliers vs knights (which they considered the only important fighting element ) was colossal, at least ten to one. They wanted a knight vs knight battle because that satisfied honour. The English, more intent on surviving fought a battle we would recognise as more "military" in character: they aimed to defeat the attack with all arms playing a part. French tactics were to advance on foot, so their horses would not be shot from under them (cunning plan!), wear heavier armour to neutralise English archery (well it worked) but once on the field the French began falling over one another to get to the handful on English knights in the line.

    Soldiers do not always behave intelligently in battle. They are not trained too, they are trained to carry out a set of tactics, and how they do that is influenced by a dizzying array of other factors: education (the French infantry in the Napoleonic wars was more literate than other armies, and it showed), social position, specialcirumstances relating to pay, supply, the character of the commander etc etc.

    The variety of systems that get men to battle do not always prepare them to respond effectively to what really happens. The French in the Battles of the Frontiers in 1914, the British force at the Somme in 1916, the Romans at Cannae, all these seem stupid wastes but they were actually well thought out plans that seemed to their commanders would work.

    Sometimes an outflank works. Sometimes a stab at the flank works. Sometimes it does not.



    Runner Up Post - Gaidin & Coughdrop addict
    US Government Shutdown
    Quote Originally Posted by Pontifex Maximus View Post
    Trump owned the shutdown from the beginning, even since the initial televised WH meeting with Pelosi, Schumer, and the P and VP. I don't see this at all as being a blame game battle, Trump already owned it (even if he's trying to disclaim now.) What matters is if the American people care. The dems are at a severe back foot here because while Pelosi and Schumer claimed to be pro border security, the dems have proposed nothing to increase security in light of POTUS' remarks. Why hasn't a dem bill included additional funding for 2nd or 3rd tier immigration enforcement? I wrote a paper on this for law school which explored efficacy in immigration enforcement. At the time of my research, it actually favored non-border related enforcement. This involved employing more agents to work on cases of illegal immigrants that posed threats and deporting them. I think the landscape has changed since even 2015 in significant ways:

    1. Since Trump's election, key states and municipalities have severed relationships with the federal government with the establishment of sanctuary cities.

    2. This has rendered those previously effective strategies moot

    3. Now our best efforts lie in a border wall.
    I view border security and border wall as two separate issues. Border security can and must be done without a border wall largely and ironically due to one of the most bipartisan issues out there. Eminent Domain.

    Maps. Maps are good. Here are maps of federally owned land both in the country and on the border:



    One must ask the question on this map: why does the government own this much land in the western united states? Answer: because the land is largely useless and highly difficult to maintain. No private citizen wants the red highlighted land, and no state wants it. Back when this land became territory, the government really couldn't shove it off on people to save its life. So it still belongs to the Federal government. You dig deep down there are parts of it that just look awesome, so much of it has become National Parks and National Reserves as new technologies have been researched(say, oil drilling would've made certain nice looking lands useful). See next picture.



    This separates most if not all the relevant federal lands on the border into the agencies that maintain them. You see a lot of National Parks and National Wildlife Reserves. More importantly in New Mexico, Arizona, and California, you just see a lot of federal land on the border. They could just build that damn wall on the border in those states. Most of Texas's border is not owned by the Federal Government. And when you dig down into Texas's people, either via local commentary or via the GOP House Rep that represents the longest stretch of the border than any other representative in the house, THEY JUST OPPOSE THE WALL.

    https://www.star-telegram.com/news/s...152402734.html

    https://www.texastribune.org/2018/10...border-mexico/

    https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-...ps-wall-2019-1

    They will vote for Border Security. But seguing the concept of good border security into a wall is pure nonsense.

    What's really wrong with the wall? Nearly everything Trump rants about, from smuggling drugs to illegal aliens, mostly cross the border in ports of entry. Smuggled drugs come in through ports and have to be found through detection methods that Democrats are perfectly willing to spend 10 god damn billion dollars on. Illegal aliens, by the numbers, mostly come in legally and overstay their visas.

    This is not an argument you will win. This is only an argument you will only bluster on about how Trump wants a wall.

    That said, if Trump wants a wall, he'd better be ready to give a very nice quo in return for the quid. He has not yet. So screw him and the horse he rode in on. The most he gets is basic government reopening.
    The Putin - Trump Controversy: Here to Stay - Links between Trump and Russia are being officially investigated by the FBI
    Quote Originally Posted by Aexodus View Post
    Were theories of the MIC and deep state not already there before Trump, originated from CIA coups and political corruption?
    CIA coups and things like MKULTRA are true, but there is quite a distance between acknowledging past wrongdoing on behalf of the US government and assuming anyone who criticizes Trump is being ordered to do by Obama/Clinton/Soros.

    To put it another way, it's good to be a little suspicious of government. That's your job as a citizen, to keep your government honest. But some people are paranoid about government. There is a massive difference between the two. One is realizing the government is not always 100% honest and wanting to look deeper, the other is assuming the government is 100% dishonest all the time and then looking only for information that confirms your original hypothesis.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarkKnight View Post
    It's evolved over time, I imagine.

    The problem is that these morons (and good god there are even books!) are trying to say that any criticism of the Trump government must either be deepstate or treasonous in origin. Clintons are in on it, the Obamas are in on it, some people think the ENTIRE democratic party is in on it. And if you go further you find the Qultists believe that the deep state needs to be dismantled and everyone against the president thrown into camps, all for the simple fact that they oppose a constitutionally and morally questionable President. We are talking about nearly 70 million people, here. Trump himself has even retweeted 'shopped images of his opposition in prison, which stokes the fire even more.

    The ironic thing is that they are so deep into this that they don't see the actual investigation into a conspiracy that is turning up results. They don't see the several Trump associates being indicted and thrown into prison as maybe something is going on. They don't see the fact that Russians and Russian companies are being indicted as maybe something is going on. They don't see his behavior, the collapse of the executive branch, the alienation of our allies and the cozying up to our enemies as...MAYBE SOMETHING IS GOING ON.
    I mean jesus christ I have heard Republicans legitimately say they would rather have Putin playing puppetmaster to Trump than Clinton as president.

    Think about that...They would rather have our government compromised by a foreign power than have Clinton in charge.

    The Q/Deep State has warped their reality so much and Trump and Fox and everyone have stoked the fears so deep that they just cannot see anything beyond that.
    An author named Michael Barkun wrote what I think is a good description of the psychology of conspiracy theories. It certainly fits the whole Qanon/deep state thing:

    "The appeal of conspiracism is threefold. First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what others can’t. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing. Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents. Finally, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters’ deceptions."

    For point one Qanon is a way that some Trump supporters can rationalize the fact that none of their boogeymen are in jail. Go back and look at any right-wing page from election night 2016 and read the comments. Trump supporters were ecstatically assuring each other that Clinton, Obama, Soros, and anyone else they don't like would be jailed/executed within a week of the inauguration. But as time went on and no arrests were made they started to get confused. Surely with the mountains of evidence the right claimed exists for crimes including bribery, cannibalism, child rape, murder, and treason at least one or two indictments would have been issued? With all three branches of government under his control, why was Trump allowing the world's most despicable criminal masterminds to walk free?

    Around the time of the billionaire tax cut some of the smarter Trump voters started to realize the GOP and Trump had lied through their teeth to get into power and had no intention of doing anything beyond funneling money to the mega-rich. Others started to look around desperately for something, anything, to tell them that Trump hadn't really lied to them. The comforting lies of Qanon attracted these people like flies to honey.

    For point two, conservative media has spent nearly ten years now demonizing Obama and nearly thirty years demonizing Clinton, and the same amount of time demonizing whoever the latest 'other' happens to be. They regularly accuse anyone they don't like of the most ridiculous things and the conservative viewers, having long since lost the ability to think critically, accept what they are told without question. They truly believe they are in a war against evil, where evil is defined as "anytime something happens I don't like or when I don't get my way".

    For point three, people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to be at least a little narcissistic. They believe themselves so much smarter than everyone else that the possibility they are mistaken or being lied to is unthinkable. Surely with their genius they would easily see through it if anyone lied to them? It's much more emotionally satisfying to think they are part of a select group that sees through all the lies told by "the man", it appeals to their ego and allows them to look down upon the 'sheeple'.

  5. #5

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #4

    Winning Post - Dick Cheney & Lord Oda Nobunaga
    Who was Alexander's greatest teacher?
    “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.” –Alexander the Great

    Alexander is generally considered one of the most accomplished and influential military leaders of all-time, but when balancing the realm of his feats and accomplishments its clear he had a ton of help:



    Who then among Alexander's many contemporaries (rivals, mentors, or companions) deserves to be recognized alongside Alexander?

    Note: this is not a thread about who primarily deserves credit for Alexander's success (lady luck deserves first place for that) but rather who might have taught or influenced Alexander the most.

    Which person had the greatest impact on Alexander?




    Alcibiades being taught by Socrates

    Some nominations:

    Philip II - The most obvious choice. No other person can claim more credit for Alexander's generalship, education, military training, political upbringing, and art of war then Philip II of Macedon (creating an army and phalanx system that Alexander used to conqueror the known world -in this discussion- doesn't count). Philip was also the one who introduced Alexander to Aristotle at age 13, army life at age 16, made Alexander his regent (also age 16), and appointed Alexander a major command post at the Battle of Chaeronea (age 18). Philip again, was also the one who shared with Alexander the original battle plans for the conquest of Persia.

    If the criteria of a great teacher then is providing ample opportunities for the student to learn, participate, and observe, then Philip II wins first place. Where Philip falls short of course are the marriage disputes, jealousy, and "daddy issues," (at one point leading to Alexander's exile) and the fact that Philip's sudden assassination (both a curse and boon for Alexander) created loyalty issues with Philip's old guard. Alexander would struggle for their trust and support for much of his adult life (though the unending desire to escape his father's shadow and prove his worth time and again could also be used as an influence argument in Philip's favor).

    Olympias - The next obvious choice. Alexander, according to some historians, was spurred on by his mother. From his mother he gained a fiery and violent temper, as well as an inclination towards rage, privilege, and entitlement. It was Olympias after all who first whispered into Alexander's ear that he was divine and that he should be king over his petulant father. To Olympias's credit she also taught Alexander to disregard most material possessions (through Leonidas's mentorship and religious piety) and how to use back-channel manipulation for political gain. Nobody assisted Alexander's rise to the throne more than Olympias, though her unconfirmed role in Philip's assassination of course, does not count as influence in this discussion.

    Aristotle - One of the most brilliant minds who has ever lived and Alexander's teacher for three years. Would have taught philosophy, literature, rhetoric, geography, mathematics, geometry, and basic zoology; the equivalent of a privileged education in Greece. Beyond that however, it is highly speculative whether Alexander (a man of action) was really all that influenced by the great thinker.

    Achilles - Alexander's favorite superhero. To Achilles, Alexander owes his personality as well as his disregard for physical danger, his love of risk taking, single-combat, blood and battle, and life or death defying courage. Achilles influence on Alexander is all the more impressive considering (according to Arrian) that Alexander was not of a very impressive build and probably not that athletic. No doubt though, Alexander still deserves credit for being one of the most courageous (or insane) warrior kings to have ever lived.

    Darius III- Darius was Alexander's greatest rival who held the title "king of kings" and most commanding man in the world before Alexander. If you believe then that Alexander was motivated by glory (which his conquests and adoption of Darius's family, titles, and kingdom as his own seems to suggest) then Darius's mere existence had a huge impact on Alexander. It was Alexander after all, who desperately wanted to be Darius (king of kings), and hurriedly chased after him in every battle.

    Cyrus the Great - If you believe Alexander was a benevolent ruler (not sure if he was really a peacemaker in my opinion, but to each his own), then you may point to Cyrus the Great as having had the greatest impact on Alexander. Before great kings bowed at the tomb of Alexander, they bowed before the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the greatest conquer and nation builder the world had ever known. Alexander did of course visit the tomb of Cyrus the Great where some say his cultural fusion plans were an attempt to relive and outdo the other's legacy.

    Hephaestion - The most interesting pick and Alexander's closest friend. The only person Alexander may have considered an equal. At his death, Alexander insisted that Hephestion be worshiped as a god, where he also became manically depressed at his young friend's passing. Unfortunately however, most historical evidence shows that Hepahestion may have mostly lacked in any kind of obvious military skill or political talent. His role again seems to be more of a friend and companion than any kind of political adviser and second in command.

    The Oracle at Swia - Famously proclaimed and confirmed that Alexander was the Son of Zeus. Obviously had a huge impact on Alexander's life.

    Diogenes - The legendary stoic philosopher from Athens, and maybe the only person ever to b-slap Alexander philosophically and then live to tell about it. Legend has it that Alexander offered to Diogenes the entire world and as a gift anything he could possibly want, but to Diogenes' credit he appropriately told the boy king to go **** himself. Stunned by the philosopher's dignity and self worth, Alexander is quoted as saying he wishes he were more like Diogenes than anyone else who had ever lived. Alexander's constant whining and thin skin however, suggests that maybe Alexander never learned a thing from Diogenes.

    Demosthenes and The Resistance Party - Demosthenes and Greek detractors were a constant thorn in young Alexander's side. If you believe then that Alexander had thin skin to the extreme, then his struggle to win a good name in Athens -and prove he was Greek- was a huge motivating force in his life.

    The Army and General Staff - A point that is gaining more attention from historians and leadership experts. The argument is Alexander needed the army more than the army ever needed him (which could go either way; for example, what happens to the Macedonian army if Alexander dies in battle?) and the theory that his generals were constantly scheming to usurp him. In order then to maintain the army's loyalty and support, Alexander had to constantly lead by heroic selfless example. He had to constantly prove that he was the fittest and the bravest or somebody else from the Macedonian warrior culture would mutiny and take his place. Alexander therefore, was a slave to the ambitions of his generals and the moral needs of his army, constantly at war with both. In the end, Alexander pushed the army as far as it could go and may have exhausted himself in the process.

    No one - The maverick pick. Alexander was a historical outlier. An adolescent, angry, genocidal, war-mongering megalomaniac and momma's boy who should give all the credit in the world to his incredible good fortunate. No alcoholic drunk, reckless gambler, or psychopathic prince has ever benefited so much from outcome bias. His accomplishments were either borrowed from the works of others or works of luck. He is more myth than man, but as a boy king he listened and looked up to no one. He truly believed he was a god and could do no wrong. War and glory (to include imposing his will on others) were thus his playground and his true legacy is that of an ego-centric narcissistic monster given way too much power to play with.

    All the above - Another solid pick. Alexander is a complicated figure and it probably does no good to try and psycho analyze him. However, historians should still speculate whether somebody else without Alexander's unique tutelage and upbringing could also have conquered Persia. This is important when validating (or disproving) the Great Man Theory and its impact on history.

    Philip II, Antiperer and Antiperer's son, Cassander, bring this last point into debate.

    Discussion and Debate Community Thread
    We would have to define what Libertarian means in this case.

    There was certainly an element of private enterprise and free market economics. The idea being that people could engage with the market so long as the government could direct the government and their efforts. Of course this was not so much the original goal of Fascism as a Socialist concept. But because Hitler and Mussolini lacked the resources to implement a full Socialist system they chose to make concessions and engage with the market to acquire capital but regulated by the state.

    This would lead some to claim that Fascism was actually "State Capitalism" but that is to ignore the basic premise of Fascism and the complex system of Germany and Italy's economics. There was also a conflict among Leftists that Syndicalism was not true Socialism and was really just State Capitalism. But this is just an autistic semantic argument with no real importance in reality or pragmatic implementations. By that train of thought modern China as of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao isn't Communist. But I don't see why it can't be both Communist and Capitalist. The fact is that China only "reformed Communism" due to the fact that Mao's collectivization and command economy had failed. It is similar to Fascist, State Capitalist, other Socialist and Syndicalist models but in this case one which emerged entirely from Communism and the need to pursue practical policies rather than theories. This isn't much different from what Lenin or Stalin attempted later on either, once Marxist economic policies had failed. Just that Post-Reform China has taken these attempts to new extremes.

    It really wasn't Capitalist it was a form of Socialism which from necessity depended on private enterprise rather than total collectivism. Though unlike various forms of Marxism, Fascism had an emphasis on individual interests and private property. It is therefore curious that many claim that Fascism was influenced by Erich Ludendorff's Total State Principles. However this is to overestimate Ludendorff's intellectual contributions and to take the Total State out of context, both ideologically and historically. Ludendorff was writing in the aftermath of WW1 in which Germany's defeat was largely attributed to their inability to create a Total War economy. Ludendorff theorized that total control over the state would allow for the state to more easily seize production and resources for the purpose of waging war.

    However Germany did not have sufficient capital to implement these policies or win such a war. As such it was Hans von Seeckt who suggested that Germany acquire their capital through private enterprise. He also advocated for a professional army rather than a large army formed through conscription, which was the impetus for the Wehrmacht. Seeckt was more influential than Ludendorff. The only major changes which Hitler made were to expand the Wehrmacht and introduce conscription. In a way Seeckt was correct but largely incorrect. While his assessment that Germany did not have the means to form a Total War economy and that allowing war industrialists to build up the armed forces was more practical, he was ultimately incorrect. Relying on various corporations actually made German war production a mess. Without the central control of the state or standardized production the Germans were outproduced by the Soviets, who carried this out entirely through collectivist policies.

    If we have established that in spite of extreme collectivism, the Soviets actually had better production then why did the Germans not simply implement total collectivism?
    Well there are a lot of reasons. For starters the Germans simply did not have the resources nor the means to implement these policies. This easily explains why Hitler waited until 1942 to mobilize the state for Total War. They had immense shortages of fuel and raw materials, in order to maximize these resources they had to resort to diverting production towards synthetic materials and also rationing resources to take them out of the domestic market. Essentially this caused mass famine, which was also a problem in USSR and Britain but alleviated through lend lease. The Germans also had to pay these corporations through credit and the equivalent of warbonds, much like in America and Britain.

    Why did they have to pay to implement a war economy? Because by taking these resources to fuel the war economy it removed them from the domestic market and so they needed a way to exchange physical resources and produce, or else not have this in the economy at all. Credit was the only way to do it, they had nothing else. But unlike the USSR which collectivized their production, resources and labour they did not have easy access to private property. But yeah, the bottom line is that by not collectivizing the Germans actually made production a nightmare. They were not on the right track until 1942 when they implemented Total War and industrialists such as Albrecht Speer helped to develop the war economy. But the reason that this war economy failed was simply because the Germans lacked the resources to fuel it, unlike America and USSR.

    Why were Hitler and Mussolini unable to implement Socialist and Collectivist policies?
    Largely they lacked the industry or resources to do so. However this doesn't explain why they didn't try to do it sooner. The reason being that the Conservatives and Liberals in power were against it. For instance Hitler had to fight against his generals and policy makers, just to implement conscription in 1935. Ultimately Hitler was proven correct and Hans von Seeckt and his subordinates were wrong. On this technicality Ludendorff was correct. When it comes to economics and government Hitler had to appeal to the Conservatives and Liberals to come into power and to keep his power. This largely included the army which was controlled by Prussian aristocrats (likewise in Italy, the monarchist aristocracy). The radical elements of the Nazi party wanted to implement a revolution, purge the state and military and called out Hitler for conceding to the aristocracy and only implementing reforms. When they conspired to overthrow the state these were purged in the Night of the Long Knives. However it is fair to say that Roehm had a point. Had the Germans gone full Stalin and taken total control of the state they would have likely been able to implement more efficient policies, carried out production far better (not having to rely on various uncoordinated corporations), had a better war economy and as a caveat no attempts by the officers to blow up Hitler, nor officers like Canaris to give intel to the British. Quite likely the Germans would have performed better militarily as well, no old school Prussians attempting outdated maneuvers and tactics.




    Runner Up Post - sumskilz, Sukiyama, Genava, & Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ
    Discussion and Debate Community Thread
    I'd recommend that book Abdul linked to anyone interested in the topic - Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Only that particular chapter "The genomics of race and identity" is relevant to the Watson discussion. I'm fairly sure there are particular reasons Reich chooses Watson, Harpending, and Wade in particular to call out in that chapter, some of them probably personal. Wade because he's not a real scientist and his book on the genetics of race is mostly speculative crap. Harpending because he's dead, and as such, using him as an illustrative example doesn't hurt anyone's career, and Watson because he's a dick, and has (as I have heard) been a bit of dick to Reich himself on several occasions.

    If you want an alternative opinion by someone who knows what they're talking, here's Greg Cochran writing about that chapter, which he illustrates thusly:



    For Cochran, it's also probably personal. Harpending was a good friend of his and a close colleague. Cochran has himself been accused of racism for his scientific views. Although I would say, it may be like Watson as much a matter of style and looseness with words that draws the criticism from reasonable people. This will be apparent if you read the linked blog post. In contrast, John Hawks who has collaborated with both Cochran and Harpending and holds similar scientific views, has rarely received such criticism and is regularly invited to contribute to mainstream media articles, largely due to the fact that he knows how to speak carefully about nuanced and controversial issues.

    Neither my recommending Reich's book nor linking Cochran's commentary on it is meant to be taken as an endorsement of the entirety of either's views, but to inform regarding the internal politics of such criticism. I'd say that where the two agree, one can safely assume that to be fairly representative scientific consensus among those involved in the field. Watson has a tendency to talk stupid (as we say in my dialect), so throwing him to the wolves is a good way to protect the field from attracting an inquisition.

    The effect of "diversity and inclusion" policies: white working class British kids worst performing groups in education
    Quote Originally Posted by NorseThing View Post
    The irony is in how we generate statistics. It is no surprise that white males from working class parents are underrepresented in university classrooms. That is the particular demographic that probably perceives other viable options rather than college profession for career incomes. If you start out slower to learn to read than the girls and unlike the minorities are not getting the attention to read better, you start at an early age looking for other options than being a doctor or lawyer or whatever.

    Part of the problem today is not what this study covers, but that the working class steel worker or welder has lost relative ground to the educated profession over the past decade or so.

    This is from about one year ago, but it is still interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...nority/536103/

    No, it is not about the UK. No it is not specifically about working class white males, but it is pretty good at what this thread is speaking about.

    For example:
    This is a bad way to characterize labor dynamics in United States. The reality is, that "Coal Miner" vs "Liberal Elite" is a narrative that suits poor Whites in coal towns, but that's not really how the labor force is broken down. Real Median income is 32,000$. People who earn below that are pre-school and kindergarten teachers, cosmetics workers (like the stereotypical Vietnamese woman), casino workers, pet workers (like those guys you see at Petco or a local equivalent), janitors, non-union handymen, low-skill factory workers, salesmen, extraction industry (like the aforementioned miners), etc.

    Then there are people who make quite a bit of money, but are without college education, often above median wage. I'm talking about Unionized skilled labor like electricians, maintenance workers, mechanics, machinists, middle management, plumbers, technicians, entry level administrator assistants, police, etc.

    And by the way, those people, tend to earn just as much, in the vicinity of, or sometimes even more than the so-called "liberal elite". And who are the liberal elite really? They're not just computer science majors and marketing whizzes who earn 100k$+ in silicon valley. They aren't highly paid, tenured, college professors who work in UCs or Ivys. No, the "liberal elite" that so many whine about, are high school teachers, video and photo editors (many of whom work on below minimum wage during the beginnings of their career), interior designers, librarians, archivists, law workers, specialized or high-level government workers like forest rangers/data analysts, writers, linguists, and therapists.

    Both groups have decently high wages, but one group tends to vote for Trump, and the other tends to vote for Democrats. What's the difference? Education. So quite frankly, this isn't so much about the reality of an "oppressed" white male class, as it is about "feeling" oppressed. My father is an electrician who regularly notices racism and xenophobia among his co-workers. He frequently comments about how he can never be "in" with the management and the buddy groups that form in his workplace. He regularly comments about how his work ethic and labor is what earns him his spot, whereas many of his coworkers can slack off and get by due to being White and friendly. That's not an isolated coincidence. I've worked and I've seen how such industries operate and the dynamics of local relationships. There's a reason why White men dominate such workplaces. Mechanics, construction workers, and technicians... They form white-only cliques who regularly feel oppressed by even a hint of what they coin as "counter-racism". These people earn a good living, they're not oppressed in any way whatsoever. In fact, I rarely see immigrants among them, despite there being plenty of immigrants who would love to have those high-wages coupled with low educational requirement. Why? Lots of reasons, and racism plays a part.

    So no, I disagree with this narrative of "oppressed" and "left behind" white males. There are plenty of people who earn just as little as them, I was one of those people. This isn't anything but an excuse to be racist. You see, it's very easy to justify police brutality towards black people if black people are portrayed as criminals and gang bangers. The same goes for the "liberal elite" and "immigrants". It's real easy to blame them when you paint a narrative of how these college-educated folks are earning six-figures, and immigrants are taking all the McDonald jobs. Poor Johnny over here is merely earning 35$ per hour and gets unemployment benefits from his Union. Yeah, feeling real oppressed on his couch, drinking beer, watching his orange-headed idol telling how he will build a wall and have Mexico pay American Union workers to do it.

    CO2 Emissions per capita is unfair and misleading
    Quote Originally Posted by NosPortatArma View Post
    People bring up how the west has such high emissions per capita in order to guilt us, and saying we need to lower our living standards in order that others can raise theirs. But where is the sense of making per capita comparisons when the the population growth is radically different? Let's say we magically make every country have the same emission per capita. What happens next? poor muhammad in nigeria decides he needs to have five wives and ten kids with each wife even though he can't even feed them. Then he comes to me and tells me I have to cut my living standard even more because now he increased the number of nigerians, so their per capita emissions is lower. How is this fair? Unless I can influence how many kids muhammad gets to have, it's not fair that he can demand more resources.

    This is unfair as it punishes responsible countries and encourages irresponsible countries. This can be generalised to other per capita comparisions with other resources. Point is that much of the third world's problems are due to their own irresponsibility. If you cointinue to breed like rabbits even though you know you're dirt poor, you deserve to stay in poverty. Look at China, they realised this and did the smart thing, limiting their growth, and now they grow richer. A better thing would be to, by some fair method, give each country a fixed % of resources, which does not vary by population. that's not going to happen of course, but it'd be a lot fairer than per capita

    Moved to the Academy, as it's not a current political event. ~Abdülmecid I
    2000 publication from IPCC: Summary for Policymakers - Emissions Scenarios: A Special Report of IPCC Working Group III


    Science 2018: Global warming policy: Is population left out in the cold?
    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6403/650
    http://demographic-challenge.com/fil...cience-361.pdf

    Science 2014: No way to stop human population growth?
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/...ulation-growth

    Science 1991: Environmentalists: Ban the (Population) Bomb
    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/252/5010/1247

    World Bank: Population, Poverty, and Climate Change
    http://documents.worldbank.org/curat...df/WPS6631.pdf

    2006 human population density:
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_density_map.PNG

    Demography is not forgotten. It is simply very hard to solve anything related to this issue because it happens in poor countries. But if demography is a part of the problem, it is not a part of the solution anymore. There is no way we can divide the actual human population in half for the next decades and the issue of climate change is pressing. We are late on this matter. Moreover, it is very difficult to ask anything to poor countries with bad institutions and governments when we are not even able to attain our own goals in the reduction of CO2 emissions while having better situations. Maybe we should first prove that we can respect our promises before to interfere in the policy of poor countries. But you are right, in the end the size of the human population will be important.

    Why was Germany and Japan stopped from doing evil but not America?
    The answer is similar, while not explicitly given by anyone in the previous thread you've posted, is American power.

    Germany, Japan, Italy and all of their allies combined didn't have much, or any, advantage when it came to natural resources compared to the US, they did have circa 100 million people more and that's about it. Meanwhile, their targets besides the US, included the British Empire, Soviet Union and the Chinese, among many others.

    The resources and the population of the British Empire was far greater than of the Axis powers combined, SU, on the other had almost as many people as the the Axis. It would have been a tough fight, as evidenced by Soviet casualties, but add the US into the fray and the Axis chances of victory, which were at 1st December 1941 somewhat unrealistic, become nigh impossible.

    Also there is a difference in pursuing, in my opinion at least, an ineffective, never ending interventionist foreign policy, with considerable undesired civilian casualties, and deliberately targeting civilians with biological weapons, which the Japanese did, or in Germany's case, implementing special plans to exterminate Slavs by starvation, slave labor, deportation to special reservations, or outright extermination, in order to create a "living space", and secure more arable land and natural resources.

    Also there was the extermination not driven by economic factors, but out of a purely ideological belief that some peoples, such as the Jews and Romanis, who were considered innately inferior deserved it.

    I'm not sure how many unarmed civilians did the US kill since achieving independence, however I think that the Axis powers achieved all those casualties in the span of less than a decade, where as the US needed more than 200 years.

    In short, very oversimplified way, disregarding whose more evil, Germany and Co. were stopped because they weren't strong enough, whereas the US has no equal, and if the whole World would band together to destroy it which would only be possible if nuclear weapons didn't exist, it would still be difficult to cross the oceans to invade it, especially if Canada and Central America were to be occupied by the US.

    Quote Originally Posted by Just answer the question View Post
    Is the world really that afraid?
    I'm quite certain that the majority of the World doesn't really care, as long as the US doesn't bomb them they're fine with it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Just answer the question View Post
    Is the US really that powerful?
    Yes.

    Quote Originally Posted by Just answer the question View Post
    If the world destroyed America, would that really create more problems than solve it?
    We won't be able to find that out in the near future, due to mutually assured destruction. Perhaps one day, when there's a distant colony on one of the Jupiter's or Saturn's moons, Humanity will no longer fear of Earth being annihilated and then we'll see what happens... outside Earth of course, no one will want to live in that America-Free Planet.

  6. #6

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF # 5

    Winning Post - sumskilz, Cyclops, and cfmonkey45
    Carthage's Constitution: how did it evolve from monarchy to mixed oligarchic/democratic republic? Was it influenced by Greek models? Did it influence Rome?
    Regarding the question of whether it influenced Rome, here's an article on that topic on your favorite website. Seems pretty well sourced.

    Unfortunately we really only have one body of Iron Age Canaanite literature which might be useful for understanding cultural attitudes toward kingship etc.

    Suffet is a Latin interpretation of the Punic word špṭ (plural špṭm), which is not unlike the biblical Hebrew špṭ (plural špṭm). The P is pronounced as an F when it occurs in the middle of a word. The pronunciation was probably something like shofet (plural shoftim), O pronounced like the letter name O, and i like the letter name E.

    In the Book of Judges, we have a collection of stories about various tribal leaders and folk heroes, the word "judges" is the way shoftim has traditionally been translated because it comes from a verb that means "to judge". The collection of probably well known stories at the time looks to be arranged in order to create a particular ideological/theological narrative. The stories are book-ended as follows...

    From the prologue:

    Then Yahweh raised up shoftim, who delivered them [the Israelites] out of the hands of those who plundered them. Yet they would not listen to their shoftim but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshiped them. They quickly turned from the ways of their ancestors, who had been obedient to Yahweh’s commands. Whenever Yahweh raised up a shofet for them, he was with the shofet and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the shofet lived; for Yahweh was moved to pity by their groaning under those who oppressed and harassed them.

    The entire collection ends with:

    In those days Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

    It's not clear whether that last line is the work of the redactor or re-purposed to his own meaning.

    Now from the Book of Samuel:

    Samuel told all the words of Yahweh to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This will be the ways of the king who will rule over: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and to be his horsemen, and they will run before his chariots. Some he will appoint commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. He will take your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will be his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but Yahweh will not answer you in that day.”

    But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”


    So how relevant this material is to attitudes in Carthage isn't really clear, it might be something like using literature from 17th Century Scotland to understand cultural attitudes in 18th Century colonial America, but beggars can't be choosers I guess. In any case, there is definitely a recurring theme of shoftim good, kings bad, at least in the eyes of the prophets, as depicted by the scribes.

    EDIT: Contrary to the prologue of Judges which refers to issues of religious orthodoxy, looking at the stories themselves one could conclude that a shofet traditionally derives his power from his deeds and the people's willingness to follow him. Which seems parallel to the more formalized Carthaginian institution.

    Lying Liberal Media, episode 1: the kid with the MAGA hat and the native American
    Quote Originally Posted by Caduet View Post
    even if you buy the holocaust narrative wholesale, you do realize israeli infiltration of western media was occurring well before the holocaust? By the 1930s, israelis owned 80% of all major Hollywood studios. what a coincidence.
    Its a result of people with no property rights not being involved in farming/aristocracy in Europe, so they get involved in entertainment, banking etc. Its not a conspiracy, its a result of harsh social engineering by anti-semites. In Israel many Jews are farmers, apparently that's a conspiracy too? Not sure what a Jews could do that an anti-Semite would not see as suspicious.

    Quote Originally Posted by Caduet View Post
    what even is "antisemitic media" and why would it have anything to do with why israeli-controlled western media is such garbage? The idea that the saudis or anyone else have more clout than the israelis is beyond laughable. I don't see all major presidential candidates being forced to give grovelling speeches in their middle of their campaigns to the Saudi's lobby like they do at the AIPAC convention. I don't see us plunging the middle east into chaos and slaughter on the urging of the Episcopalians or Irish agents. Speaking of Kennedy and AIPAC, did you know that despite clearly being a foreign influence, AIPAC has not had to register under the Foreign Agent's Registration Act? The last serious attempt to do so was by the Kennedy administration in 1963. Kennedy had his brains splattered all over a limo later that year and since then no politician has tried to rein in AIPAC. what a coincidence.
    No president every handled a glowing ball in Jerusalem, or tweeted about declaring war on Qatar at Israel's behest. US presidents have forced through peace deals in Ireland that favoured the Republic, and there are many other examples of important ethnic and political factions who command the president's obedience. Israel serve US interests more than the reverse, and the idea the most powerful country on earth is somehow tricked and led by the nose by a little state that did not exist for the first century and a half of the US' existence is laughable.

    Hitler peddled these lies to get into power, and his stupid lies led to his country being cut into pieces by a Georgian atheist, an English Protestant snob, an even snobbier US Dutchman and an ultra Catholic Frenchman. Apparently all controlled by Jews though. Seriously, this garbage halfwit nonsense is almost funny when you consider it, but then you remember the anti-Semitic scum were the ones who directly caused all that murder and rape.

    Quote Originally Posted by Caduet View Post
    Pathetic attempt at whataboutism aside, there are far more Irish Americans and people of Irish descent in America than israelis. Their presence is hardly disproportionate the ways israelis are, particularly in media, academia and the judiciary.
    Its apposite though because idiot anti-Semitism lumps all Jews together in a seamless lump, in the way that joke lumps Protestant and Catholic Irish together. You can cobble together any number of insane conspiracy theories and if you switch your brain off they start to look reasonable. The world is complicated, anti-Semitism is childishly simple to the point of being mentally retarded.

    Basic Economics: In Defense of Neoliberalism
    In Defense of Neoliberalism

    Index
    Volume 1 - Introduction and Origins
    Introduction
    The Origins of Neoliberalism
    The 2008 Crisis, The False Dilemma Over Capitalism and The "Rise" in Wealth Inequality
    Fed Policy and Wealth Inequality
    Volume 2 - The Failures of Populism (WIP)
    Populism, Trump's Trade War, and Dairy Farmers
    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Proposed 70% Income Tax
    Elizabeth Warren's Wealth Tax
    Volume 3 - Policy Proposals (WIP)
    Reforming International Trade Agreements
    Environmentalism and the "Green New Deal"
    Reforming the Welfare




    Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the ensuing Great Recession, there has been a rise of populist rhetoric on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum denouncing the perceived "Wealth and Income Inequality" in the United States. Within this debate, various documents, graphs, and statistics are produced--often with no context or opposing opinions--that are then used to create a sudden urgency for "radical" policy changes that would create a more "fair" system. Often times, these narratives rely on dubious historical narratives. For the left, this includes such things as romanticization of the New Deal Coalition, Left-leaning autocracies, the Nordic Model, and a complete misunderstanding of Marxism, while also encouraging a demonization of "Reaganomics" and the supposed "Tax Cuts for the Rich"/"Trickle Down Economics", the entire financial sector, and, on occasion, Capitalism in general. Often, these debates conflate terms, such as Democratic Socialism with Social Democracy, Corporatism with Capitalism, and Neoliberalism with Neocolonialism. For the Right, there is a similar fetish for isolationism, nativism, autarky, racialism, and authoritarian populism, with basically no comprehension of the history of any of these policies in action, and with disastrous consequences.

    Since I've found that very few of these ideas actually permeate the echo chambers of the blogosphere (twittersphere?) in general (and TWC in particular), I figured that I would start a regular schedule of posts to dissect issues that I think are important and open them up for debate. This is partly because I would like to compile all of the more technical analyses I come into contact with, as well as to stop clogging up the various Discord channels I frequent with random, unhinged rants.


    Starting in 2010, there was an increased interest among the left across North America and Europe with a perception of "Wealth and Income" Inequality. Between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, far leftist politics had fallen completely out of favor. Marxism, and its various splintering factions, had been thoroughly discredited firstly with the increasingly obvious failures of Communism within the Eastern Bloc. Within the West, the Center-Left had been dominated by Keynesian thought since the Great Depression. This included nationalization of key industries in the West, with Public Utilities in the United States, nationalized industries in the United Kingdom, and the Dirigisme system of Degaulism in France. Many of these states encouraged high marginal tax rates and expansive social networks. Additionally, most industries were tightly regulated, mimicking war-time production and price controls that became popular among policy planners following the Second World War. Less known, but perhaps far more influential, the United States strongly emphasized an international monetary standard based on gold known as the Bretton Woods Agreement, which pegged many European currencies to both the Gold Standard and the US Dollar. While John Maynard Keynes certainly was a major influence on many variations of these economic policies, he repeatedly criticized the increasing growth of this type of control. However, his untimely and premature death limited his impact, and influence in Keynesian economics began to be overshadowed by various permutations on Keynesianism.

    By the time of the late 1970s, many of these post-War policies had begun to break down for various reasons. For example, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo caused a supply shock to cascade across the West, which in turn caused asymmetric price inflation. Price controls created significant gas shortages that affected wages and induced inflation. Part of this was also the result of an expansionary monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. At that time, microfoundations were uncommon and economists relied upon highly aggregated data to effectively eye-ball the economy and make sweeping economic decisions based upon them. The discovery of the Philips Curve in 1967, which implied that with higher levels of inflation you could get lower levels of unemployment, convinced some policy makers at the United States Federal Reserve that easy money could permanently resolve inflation. Both of these factors led to the stagflation of the late 1970s, which completely plagued Western European economies with malaise, and near completely discredited classic Keynesian Economics. Now, this is somewhat unfair to Keynesianism, since they did possess models that could account for this, and John Maynard Keynes did warn against this. However, the popular and political impression was that this was a breakdown of government intervention in general and Keynesianism in particular. This rapidly became replaced by Neoclassical Economics, which emphasized microfoundations, empiricism, and a hybrid form of Post-Keynesian Analysis that borrowed heavily from Monetarism. This is exemplified with the Chicago School in general and Milton Friedman in particular. His magnum opus, A Monetary History of the United States (1867-1960) with Anna J. Schwartz, earned him the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics, as he conclusively proved that the Great Depression was a result of a massive contraction in the Money Supply (M2) caused by the Federal Reserve. This has effectively become the standard accepted interpretation of the Great Depression and the New Deal.

    Friedman's ascendance drove new life into Classical Liberalism, and it swept across the United States with Reagan, the United Kingdom with Margaret Thatcher, in Australia with "economic rationalism", Chinese Style Market Reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and, quite controversially, in Chile under Augusto Pinochet and the "Chicago Boys." The wild success of these programs cemented Reagan's extreme popularity (he won the largest electoral landslide in United States history in 1984, and his successor, George H.W. Bush was elected in another landslide in 1988), and signaled the spread of Neoliberalism throughout the Developed and Developing World. Since this is a particularly U.S. Focused analysis, I will take time to define what I mean by "Reaganomics":

    1. Tight Money Supply to Reduce Inflation
    2. Reducing the Tax Code to cut Marginal Tax Rates and raise Effective Tax Rates
    3. Reduce Government Expenditure
    4. Reduce Government Regulation
    5. Increase Trade through Bi-lateral and Multi-lateral Trade Agreements


    In the first aspect, Reaganomics was a resounding success in curbing inflation. Inflation fell from a peak of 13% in 1980 to about 4% in 1984. This lowered prices across the board for consumers, and led to a sharp increase in wealth of the middle class.

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 



    In the next aspect, Reagan cut tax rates across the board. This part requires some explanation, as there is a concrete difference in the statutory tax rate, which is the tax rate required by the authorities, and the effective tax rate, which is the actual tax rate paid. Since WWII, according to Hauser's Law, tax rates have averaged 19.5%, regardless of any major tax cut or tax increase. Taxation as a percentage of GDP was higher in 1981 following Reagan's tax cuts, when the top marginal tax rate was reduced from 70% to 50%, than it was in the 1950s when it was at 96%. In fact, only a handful of people (sometimes literally a handful, and as low as eight people) paid the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s. Regardless, despite the statutory rate of 96%, the effective tax rate hovered at around 42%. Today, the top marginal tax rate (which includes nearly 4% of the population), is at 36%, a mere 6 percentage point difference.


    Similar gains were made in both trade relations and elimination of government regulations. Today, deregulation has lost its luster, and is often associated with a slashing of consumer and environmental protections. In the 1980s, this was not the case. Instead, there were various government entities that tightly controlled various industries. One example is the Interstate Commerce Commission (which has since been abolished), which auctioned licenses to truckers for carrying goods across state lines. Effectively, they would do this with contract rights, which could be bought and sold by third parties as a security. This was a ludicrous system that legally prohibited interstate commerce for quite literally no reason. It also set maximum prices on interstate travel by railroad, and (according to Friedman) is the main culprit behind the collapse of the U.S. rail industry in favor of the more carbon intensive automobile industry. Similar aspects of deregulation include the break-up of AT&T, which was a government sanctioned private monopoly that owned and operated at its peak over 85% of all telephone, wireless, and telecommunications stations. The break-up of the AT&T system led to the creation of virtually all modern Telecommunications companies from Comcast, to AT&T (formerly Southern Pacific Bell), Verizon, and others. Since then, the government has allowed these companies to form local monopolies and re-merge into massive conglomerates.

    The rise of NAFTA, which was negotiated under George H.W. Bush and signed under Bill Clinton (after campaigning against it), represents the high point of Reaganomics. The erasure of transnational tariffs, import quotas, and trade frictions is largely seen (along with the rise of the internet) as the source of the 1990s economic boom which Bill Clinton took credit for. This resulted in massive economic development in Mexico and the United States, and has created trillions in new economic growth. The unfortunate consequence of this is that regions that formerly made up the industrial and manufacturing belt have been neglected and those industries have faced increasing global pressure. This is a complicated phenomenon and I will discuss this much later.

    Finally, in terms of Government expenditure, the Reagan administration fell noticeably short, and represented one of the largest expansions in the Federal Deficit since World War 2. However, in both absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP, this is trivial compared to later presidents such as Bush, Obama, and, now, Trump (who is responsible for the largest of all time).

    Ultimately, Reaganomics, and the ensuing Neoliberal economic movement was a resounding success, and has been credited with lifting literally billions out of poverty, and dramatically increasing the wealth and productivity of the entire planet. It was so thoroughly effective, that the various Leftist opposition movements were forced to incorporate Neoliberal policies into their platforms. This resulted in New Labour in the United Kingdom---exemplified by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the United Kingdom, and the New Democrats--exemplified by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, int the United States.


    Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cascade of revolutions against the various leftist nations of the Warsaw Pact, policy makers across the West became confident (perhaps overconfident) in the efficacy and superiority of Neoliberalism as practiced. This is exemplified by the Washington Consensus, a ten-point program that was designed by policy-makers as a one-size fits all approach to modernizing developing economies. Within the international realm, international relations increasingly became monopolized by the United States under the guise of Neoconservativism and Internationalism. This is exemplified by Francis Fukuyama's triumphalist work The End of History and The Last Man, which argued that humanity had reached the final point of its socio-cultural and economic evolution by developing into relatively free democracies, loosely bound by international organizations that regulated trade relations and policy decisions, with economies based around international capitalism as currently practiced. This led directly to vast continental trade agreements and frameworks, such as the Eurozone, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the other proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

    However, ultimately, all good things must come to an end. In 2008, there was a massive financial crisis in the United States, which was mirrored by a similar financial crisis in Europe. Both of these involved complex crises that arose from market failures and government failures in regulating various financial innovations that arose in the late 1990s and early 2000s in what has come to be termed the Shadow Banking Sector. What this basically is are industries that have sidestepped the tightly regulated Financial Services Sector in several countries (but particularly the United States and United Kingdom, as the two largest centers of international finance). Money Creation, the process by which Central Banks and Private Depository institutions create credit for the entire economy, is considered to be an essential part (in fact, perhaps the most important part) of any modern economy according to virtually all modern economic theories. Recall that Milton Friedman definitively proved that the contraction in the Money Supply was responsible for the Great Depression--as well as partly responsible for the Stagflation of the 1970s. In short, banks need credit. Since credit creation in the normal banking sector is tightly regulated in the United States, this requires the financial services sector to lean on largely unregulated sectors for money creation.

    These sectors typically create complex financial instruments by securitizing traditional and non-traditional assets.

    Example: A major company (let's say General Electric) needs to take out a loan to pay its hundreds of thousands of employees. Traditional bank loans are not enough to finance this, so it turns to a financial market to sell short-term corporate bonds that will mature in 270 days. Since this is a well known company, with a well known credit score, this will be considered a safe investment. However, to hedge against the risk of default, its bonds are cut up and mixed in amongst various different short-term corporate bonds into what are known as tranches. One tranche may be made up of, say, 10% General Electric bonds, and maybe 9 other 10% fractions of other company bonds. This forms a Asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP). ABCP are insured against default against other types of hard assets, typically Real Estate, but more specifically Mortgage Backed Securities. How this insurance works, is that if the value of one asset type decreases, you can "swap" it for another using a derivative contract. Additionally, you can purchase Option contracts to purchase or sell others at a later date as a hedge against depreciation.

    Where this becomes relevant is that the 2008 Financial Crisis started with the Subprime Mortgage industry. There were various factors that went into play in this event. At various points, mortgage lenders were encouraged to lend risky mortgages to individuals with little means of being able to repay them. Additionally, all of these mortgages were required to be securitized by two Federal Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are oddities in U.S. History, in that you have quasi-government agencies having effective monopolies over key areas of the financial services sector. They are structured like Corporations, but all of their stock is held by the United States Congress, and their corporate leadership is selected by hand by the U.S. Congress. Both of these Federal Agencies were complicit, along with several investment banks, in the vast expansion of MBS that were improperly valued. Many of these mortgages were pegged to the Federal Funds Rate (which increased rapidly between 2004 and 2007), and this caused a systemic collapse within the financial services sector. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as privileged GSEs, were able to invest massively in MBS well beyond what private institutions would be allowed to do. Both GSEs were responsible for investing in approximately $4.5 trillion of MBS, which later proved to be toxic. This required both of these agencies to be nationalized and bailed out by the Federal Government in 2008.

    At the height of the Financial Crisis in 2008, several major investment and commercial banks were forced into bankruptcy. Because traditional channels of credit creation remained highly regulated, many of these banks relied on unregulated or quasi-regulated financial instruments in the Shadow Banking industry. While not all of these were bad (ABCPs being a prime example of a stable asset class), the interlocking Credit Default Swaps and other insurance instruments created an interdependence among sound financial instruments (such as ABCPs) and toxic financial instruments (such as Subprime MBSs). Additionally, the Financial Crisis induced a market panic, which depressed the prices of safe assets more than necessary. This helped cause a chain reaction that led to a market collapse. Now, as a Libertarian and Neoliberal, I would like to point out that at multiple key points the 1) Federal Reserve's interest rate policy, 2) the actions of Government Sanctioned Monopolies (GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), 3) explicit government initiatives, such as subsidies for Low Income Families, and 4) over regulation of traditional credit channels, were all major government actions that significantly contributed to the 2008 Financial Crisis.

    In addition to this, the solutions to the 2008 Financial Crisis also involved explicit government actions which exacerbated many key problems within the system. Firstly, the U.S. Treasury under Hank Paulson pursued a policy of Capital Injections into the major financial institutions to prevent their failure. This involved the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. This involved buying up the toxic assets at market rate to subsidize the banks, which then owed money (with interest) to the U.S. Treasury. This raises interesting questions as to whether or not this was really a Neoliberal solution to the Crisis. Definitively, several colleagues of Milton Friedman (who died in 2006), criticized the act as Price Maintainance rather than Liquidity Injections. In other words, rather than help the market as a whole, they just helped the largest banks, who participated in the crisis in the first place. Secondly, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who was well aware of Milton Friedman's thesis, sought to explicitly to avoid another Great Depression, and had the Federal Reserve engage in Open Market operations to increase liquidity in the financial system.

    Ultimately, both of these policies stopped a Second Great Depression, and could be described as successes. However, both of these policies had the effect of the government effectively taking vast sums of moneys (billions in the form of TARP, and trillions in the form of QE) and redistributing it to largely wealthy institutions. So, in one sense, Neoliberalism has succeeded. But in another sense, government intervention still places a very significant role, and is exacerbating existing crises. Do note, however, at no point would an alternative system make sense. Given that we already have government monopolies in the form of GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they made literally no difference in outcome (in fact, one could argue that they disproportionately made things worse). Additionally, at no point would anyone seriously consider taxation policies as being the culprit. It is neither here nor there. Likewise, trade policies are equally not to blame. And yet, these are the culprits that both the Left and Right fictitiously create, and then, in turn, create nonsensical policies to "solve."


    At first glance, wealth inequality appears to be rising. Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, popular sentiment towards Neoliberalism has shifted significantly. On the Left, Capitalism is viewed as a destructive force. Writers like Naomi Klein argued that the Iraq War and the ensuing War on Terror exists solely as a Neoliberal/Neocolonial War to steal the oil wealth of other nations. On the Right, the existing system is viewed to value Jupiterian elites, such as Bankers, International Financiers (muh George Soros), and institutions (such as the IMF, UN, or World Bank), as either out of touch at best, or conspiratorially aligned at worst for financial exploitation at the expense of culture and patriotism.

    While wealth inequality has risen slightly, it's size is essentially overblown. Various members of the Anti-Capitalist left tend to cite increasing levels of the Gini Coefficient as examples of why American Capitalism (which they term just capitalism in general) is morally wrong, and then project this backwards to blame Reagan (something, something, Iran-Contra). From the Congressional Budget Office, raw Gini numbers suggest at first glance that inequality has risen significantly. Unfortunately for Leftists, once you control for Taxation and After Tax Transfers, the Gini Coefficient drops precipitously to 0.43, up slightly from 0.38 in the late 1970s. The OECD averages around 0.35, however, many of these countries are small (like Denmark, or Sweden), and are not major centers of global financial activity, so this can skew the numbers significantly. Likewise, in the case of countries like Sweden, many of their main industries (like IKEA) may be headquartered for tax purposes in other European Countries, which skews their wealth statistics.


    Additionally, gains to the highest quintile (the top 20% of Americans, or roughly those that own $500,000 or more in wealth) appear to be significantly higher than the rest of America, except when you control for taxation and wealth transfers (source: CBO).


    On top of this, many leftists tend to conflate U.S. Wealth inquality, with Global Wealth inequality. U.S. Wealth inequality suggests that top 0.1%, who own about $1.9 Trillion of U.S. National Wealth, own more than the lower 49%. However, in 2015, total U.S. Wealth was estimated to be about $90 trillion, indicating that the top 0.1% only owned approximately 2.1% of all wealth in the United States. What actually is this wealth? Well, about 70% of it is single family homes, valued on average at $500,000. The remaining 30% of it are stocks and bonds, the majority of which are owned by mutual funds and pension funds. About 90% of the wealth in the United States is owned by people making between $50,000 to $400,000 each year. Effectively, this is the Middle Class.

    In terms of Global Statistics, they argue that the top 1% own as much as the bottom 50%. However, this is a bit of sleight of hand. Over 50% of the global wealth is owned by the Developed World (North America and Europe). To be in the Global top 1%, you basically need to own anywhere from $500,000 to $1,000,000. In the United States, this can be fulfilled by earning $50,000 per year, and owning a single family home valued at $500,000, along with a comparable 401(k) or savings account. Once this reality is exposed, the argument for wealth redistribution, and the crisis of capitalism, laughably implodes.

    http://money.visualcapitalist.com/wo...lization-2017/

    Like many myths, wealth inequality has a kernel of truth to it. During the Financial Crisis, a significant amount of middle class wealth was destroyed in the form of housing valuation, mortgages, and financial wealth. In response, the Federal Reserve acted by injecting trillions of dollars of liquidity into the Bond Market through the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Since the average American (neither you, nor I) has direct access to the bond market, this had the effect of replacing the destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth within the middle class, with trillions of dollars of wealth to the extreme upper echelons of the financial sector. Because FOMC actions to inject money in the system rely on buying up bonds, this has the effect of lowering interest rates on Treasury Notes. This in turn forces investors out of the Bond Market (where it is unprofitable), towards alternative markets, such as the stock market and the real estate market. Both of these have witnessed historic increases in valuation, far surpassing what normal markets would permit.

    For real estate, it has already exceeded peak pricing by 20% in nearly every market. For the stock market, according to the Buffet Indicator (Total Stock Market Cap divided by Gross National Product), the stock market is overvalued by 36%. Since nearly 60% of the wealth of the top 0.1% is composed of stocks and bonds, this overvaluation has effectively led to a 36% increase in value (far outstripping any wage gains over the same time). However, since this is an artificial inflation due to a highly unique Monetary Policy, it fails many of the Leftist critiques of this phenomenon as being unique, or necessary to either Capitalism in general, or Neoliberalism in particular.

    Most importantly, as the Federal Reserve works to tighten interest rates, stock prices are expected to continue to fall and contract.

    To Be Continued



    Runner Up Post - Barry Goldwater, Acco, & Sukiyama
    The No Good Very Bad Week of Gov. Ralph Northam
    Much has already been said about Ralph Northam's atrocious conduct, whether it be his advocacy for infanticide or his racist med-school yearbook photo where he either wore blackface or a Klan hood or his incredibly cringeworthy press conference in response to said photo - where he not only failed to convincingly persuade any viewer with half a brain that he was not in fact either of the guys in said photo shortly after admitting to being one of the two pictured & apologizing for it, but incredibly admitted to having worn blackface before and that he was indeed nicknamed 'Coonman'; went on a tangent to describe how to best apply blackface to oneself using shoe polish like only someone who's done this enough times to be a pro could; and almost moonwalked until his wife, clearly the brains of their relationship, reminded him that that would be inappropriate (to say the least) - so instead of going over all that again, I'll just say that as a Virginian, these past few days have embarrassed my state more than having Corey Stewart as our Senator would have. And that if anyone actually believes the multiple lines of bull Northam's trying to sell now, I've got a dozen bridges in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

    Compounding the embarrassment, Northam had spent the entirety of the 2017 gubernatorial campaign trying to paint his opponent, Ed Gillespie - who, it should be noted, was an establishment Republican rather than the alt-right option (that would be the aforementioned Corey Stewart, an unapologetic birther, neo-Confederate and Pizzagater) - as some sort of demonic white nationalist, even running an ad suggesting his supporters as the kind of people who'd try to run over children. That garbage was laughable to begin with coming from a man who refused to shake his black opponent's hand back in 2013, but now that we know he goes by the moniker 'Coonman' & loves dressing in blackface, Klan hoods or both? It's downright hilarious. And by hilarious I mean memorably so, because I hope Virginia remembers and delivers the Democrats a landslide defeat if they dare pull this outrageously hypocritical race-baiting tripe ever again.
    And yes, as some of the above posters have referenced, as if this storm couldn't get any worse, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax now faces allegations of sexual assault. The man who would have replaced Northam if he had a sufficient sense of shame to resign and who was already preparing to take over his boss's seat when the photo leaked, only to be sorely disappointed when Northam insisted he'd stay has been accused by Vanessa Tyson, a professor at Scripps College, of sexually assaulting her in a Boston hotel during the 2004 Democratic National Convention and has retained the same legal team that represented Christine Blasey Ford. He denies raping her, maintaining that they had sex but it was consensual, and has insinuated that Northam's crew revved this case up to get at him (conversely, given how ready he was to take over the Executive Mansion, I'd say there's a non-zero chance that he in turn may have leaked the yearbook photo to accelerate the succession, not that it particularly matters now). So even if Northam does resign tomorrow, all that will accomplish is replacing the hypocritical racist currently sitting in the Executive Mansion with someone who's under suspicion of being a hypocritical sex offender.

    It tickles me pink that the Washington Post took care to actually look into the story and then decide not to run it because of a lack of corroboration, which in no way stopped them from going all-out against Kavanaugh previously (or any number of other cases, including Gillespie's), and that the same voices that were calling for the Covington kids to be doxxed, hounded or butchered with a sadistic fervor and imagination to match any NKVD interrogator have been utterly silent or at best tepidly called for resignations (followed with no action) in both of these cases - certainly, there's been no push among the Virginia Dems to impeach either. Nevermind that, respectively, the accusation against Fairfax has a specified time and place (unlike the less substantial accusations against Kavanaugh) and Northam's photo was taken when he was in his 20s and not under any duress, unlike the Covington MAGA teenager. The irony here is so sharp that an emo could slit their wrists with it.

    Now, for some good news. Elections for both houses of our General Assembly are due this November, and the Democrats have helpfully decided to implode nine months early. All the Republicans have to do is bring up the yearbook photo, the infanticidal statement, the sex abuse allegations and the raging hypocrisy of the Governor, Lieutenant Governor and their party whenever people start to forget. I know I'll be doing my part to keep the memories alive and help run these sanctimonious, race-baiting, two-faced clowns out of office when the time comes. Nevertheless: I share OP's belief that Northam (and now also Fairfax) should not resign for two reasons, firstly because age-old embarrassing yearbook photos from when we were young and stupid shouldn't destroy our lives & because the presumption of innocence still exists (though the Democrats certainly don't seem to believe either of these things as of late, Northam and Fairfax themselves among the least of all), but secondly so that they'll linger long enough to weigh the Democrats down even further in the November elections and make a sweeping GOP victory there & in 2021 that much more likely. No doubt the Virginia GOP has made similar political calculations already, on top of having deduced that although Northam & Fairfax's conduct was decidedly less than stellar, they aren't breaking the state constitution and thus meeting the threshold for impeachment either. This entire week has been nothing short of an utter disgrace and the Virginia Democrats have comprehensively demonstrated that they are in dire need of a stiff rebuke at the hands of the voters.

    Macedonia approves constitutional amendment to change country's name to Republic of North Macedonia
    Quote Originally Posted by Alastor View Post
    And I don't know if Greece has time on its side or whatever. But Greeks do. Even before nations as we know them came to be, this ethnic group has lived in that area and has retained its links to the past. What is the base of your argument anyway? That continuity doesn't exist and is only artificial?
    Speaking about ethnic "continuity" in the Balkans is a risky proposition and you should be careful playing this game. I always like to use the example of Pella, which was the capital of ancient Macedonia but today is just a normal village/town in Greek Macedonia. If you only look at 350 BC and now, you might assume this village has been Greek since time immemorial. That's the Greek nationalist interpretation, at least. However, around 100 years ago, Pella was called Postol and was a thoroughly Slavic village. Actually, one of the first Slavic Macedonian nationalists (Krste Misirkov) was born in this village. Pella hasn't really produced any other important people besides Alexander the Great, Philip II .... and a founding Slavic Macedonian nationalist.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yayattasa View Post
    Apart from Paeonia, Dardania and Other Bulgaria, in Yugoslavia the area was briefly known as Vardaska (Vardaria, 1929-41), referring to the Upper Vardar river basin. Do North Macedonians hold a grudge against that name due to Serbian irredentism? Because in my opinion that name distance them from Other Bulgars, Greeks, and Illyrians, and could help cement their own identity.
    From 1929 to 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia imposed geographic names on all of its territory. There was no Serbia, no Macedonia, no Bosnia, etc. Instead, there was Vardarska, Moravska, Dunavska, Drinska, Vrbaska, etc. Not a single one of these names is endearing or eternal to anyone in the Balkans. They were artificial by design, intended to lessen the significance of ethnicity. Nobody in Macedonia will embrace "Vardarska" just as nobody in Croatia will embrace "Savska."

    Quote Originally Posted by Harley_Quinn View Post
    Bulgaria has a history of trying to annex the region of North Macedonia.
    Northern Macedonia was occupied by Bulgaria twice during the 20th century. Bulgaria could never quite understand why their Macedonian 'brothers' didn't accept them.

    Basic Economics: In Defense of Neoliberalism
    Quote Originally Posted by cfmonkey45 View Post
    So basically, I don't disagree with the NYT article. In fact, I feel it supports my argument. If I could distill it in a sentence, my contention is that the narrative is that the top 1% has its wealth, or "surplus" wealth, at the expense of the 99%. That is the contention of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its echoes in the nascent Progressive movement. Additionally, there is this contention that wealth ownership is marble cake. There's a few people at the top who own all of the wealth. In reality, its more of a marble cake, with large swathes of the middle class being participants as investors, homeowners, sole proprietors, small business and medium business owners.
    I'm not saying you're necessarily in disagreement here. Actually, you're on point on many things, including the breakdown of the top 1% and the top 10%. The most egregious mistake here really is in lumping in 50-400$k income brackets together. Once you're past 100k$ income you're in the top 20% and no longer part of the "middle class" at all. It is also a fact that the vast majority of wealth is concentrated towards the top. That's not really an issue in and of itself, but the increasing shift towards the top, and the current breakdown of wealth, is.

    I doubt you will find a significant number of people who will outright say, or even privately think, that millionaires are evil or shouldn't be millionaires. We all want to be wealthy and hardly anyone begrudges the hard work somebody puts in to become one. The issue is, when the wealthiest Americans get the biggest tax breaks. Now granted, most people don't even pay a lot of taxes, but why should the rich get even more money? You could spend that money on the bottom of the society instead, provide them with healthcare, education, and other opportunities. There's a lot you can do to help out the bottom 80% Americans. The bottom 80% Americans don't need less tax burden, they need more direct assistance. So why is the deficit being spent on the top section of society who is already well off? The answer is "trickle-down". Now I know that's not an actual policy or anything, I am a graduate of Econ myself, but it's the "de-facto" fiscal police of the last 30 years.

    Debt is growing because interest rates are low. This was a MAJOR cause in the Subprime Mortgage crisis as well. We will likely have another crisis because of QE and because we can't learn from our mistakes.
    That's not why I brought it up. I bring up debt to illustrate that the majority of debt, which fuels growth and the pockets of corporate America, impacts the bottom 80% of society much more than the top 20%. I had to take out loans and grants for my college education. I had to. I didn't have a choice, otherwise I wouldn't go to college. I would've much appreciated a free college education, rather than a tax cut for the rich.

    Let me reemphasize this more clearly: if you do not understand the root causes, then you basically have no idea what the correct solution is. I am well aware of their proposed solutions, but I am saying that since they do not understand the core causes, these solutions will fall flat on their asses.
    Not particularly. The 2008 crisis is already done. There's no "crisis" to solve. The populists aren't talking about solving a crisis or anything, they simply want a more equitable distribution of wealth and income in America. Which I think is a perfectly fair argument.





    Ok, so, this is the nuanced portion of my argument. Let me spell this out more directly.

    Now, who is to blame? Is it the Alternative Banking Industry? Is it Traditional Banks? Is it the Fed, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Is it Congress? Is it President Bush? Is it the Federal Reserve?

    It's these "congressmen" who were bought by the banks. In reality, there was a significant improvisation, with flawed theories, and flawed government policies that caused this crisis. Rather than engage in either conspiracy theories, or populism, I'm interested in understanding the causes and developing solutions based on that.
    Okay, I'm going to snip this part, because you're explaining things to me I already know. I've debated comprehensively about the 2008 crisis and I don't peddle conspiracy theories. In fact, I rather agree with the mainstream argument spelled out in this report. The Populists aren't arguing about the financial crisis. Their main rhetoric is about the current distribution of income and wealth in America. Which quite frankly, is piss poor and stacked way towards the top.


    The top 1% pay over 39% of all tax receipts to the Federal government, despite making 20.65% of all income. If this is too low, what is the ideal number?
    There is no ideal number, but currently Americans live in debt, paycheck to paycheck, and lack many critical services that other countries have. To fix and fund these inequities we need to get the money from somewhere, namely those who can afford it the most, which will have to be the top 20%.

    Also, how


    You should include this picture instead.



    And don't forget sales taxes, which fund most local and state governments, with notable exceptions of course. However, the sales tax is a highly regressive tax and the people who pay it the most is the average american, not the top 1%.

    Tbh, I haven't finished fleshing out my arguments, hence why I had several links bookmarked sketching out what I want to talk about. The biggest issue I have with politics is that we are focusing on the wrong issues. We are focusing on taxation, not spending.
    Don't feel like I'm attacking you. I have some issues with our post, but it's overall very good and something I mostly agree with. I also agree, we need to approach government budgets holistically, spending and taxation. Both matter.

  7. #7

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #6

    Winning Post - Aexodus
    If you're a White Man the Democratic Party of America doesn't want you
    Quote Originally Posted by Sukiyama View Post
    I'm not sure about just how "radical" these candidates are. If we are talking specifically about Bernie, I can only go by the results of the primaries. Here's NYT reporting.

    Florida was 141-73 in favor of Clinton, Georgia 73-29 Clinton, Alabama 44-9 Clinton. However, Missouri 36-35 Clinton, New Mexico 18-16 Clinton, Arizona 42-33 Clinton, Kansas 10-23 Sanders, Oklahoma 17-21 Sanders, Indiana 39-44 Sanders. I'm not saying Sanders won a lot, but I wouldn't right off radicals completely.

    Is it though? Right now people are spamming Internationalist, Globalist, and Neoliberal around. Not Socialist.

    The question is, will they vote as long as it's a D. I'm pretty sure many people will vote D just to prevent Trump from getting re-elected.

    GND is better than the massive Trump tax cut. I'm pretty sure it'll never get past it. The good thing about GND is that even if some sections are passed, that's already a good thing. Well, depending on which sections. Some GND policies are simply pipe dreams with no grounding in reality. Cutting out fossil fuels is impossible for starters.
    http://www.people-press.org/2019/01/...cal-directions




    https://news.gallup.com/poll/245462/democrats-favor-moderate-party-gop-conservative.aspx



    Right now most Democrats want their party to become more moderate, and most Republicans want their party to become more Conservative. Gallup and Pew both found similar results showing around 54% of Dems want more moderate candidates, while 58% of Republicans want more Conservative candidates. This tells me for over a decade, voters have wanted a rightward shift in politics. Why? My guess is because things have moved so left in the past decade, especially on social issues.

    Far-left candidates did poorly in the Democratic primaries


    The Democrats shift left can be seen here, this is what is motivating the desire for moderate policies. If you have radical leftists as candidates, a number of center left moderates will feel alienated, and will in fact likely feel that a Conservative is closer to them, such as Trump. The blue collar vote for Trump exemplifies this best.

    The Democrats are undoubtedly moving further and further left and extreme, especially with regards to racial identitarianism. I am much more worried about left wingers (socialists mostly) imposing racist policies than I am about right wingers (fascists mostly). It’s going to backfire.

    The backing of the GND for example, by high profile Democrats is a gift to the Right. In addition the recent abortion stances and Acts around abortion validate the worst far right conspiracies about the Dems and late term abortion. America doesn’t seem to want these policies and attitudes.

    The centre can hold

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/247016/...ls-states.aspx


    Take this gallup poll that showed there are far more Red states than blue ones. This is going to be of massive importance in 2020. With Dem candidates embracing far left rhetoric and identitarianism, many many moderates and others will feel better represented by Trump and Republicans. There are even Occupy Wall Street supporters who are now MAGA Trump supporters. Moving left is a huge mistake by the Democrats and they’re going to suffer for it.

    Quote Originally Posted by The spartan View Post
    Maybe you should read a history book rather than spout political propaganda?
    There is no doubt that LBJ passed the 1964 Act as a political ploy, among other affirmative policies.

    Son, when I appoint a n****r to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a n****r



    Runner Up Post - Sukiyama, Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ, & I_Damian
    Deteriorating Situation in Venezuela
    Quote Originally Posted by Vanoi View Post
    America didn't kick off the crisis. This was a crisis in the making that climaxed when Guaido decided to just declare himself Interim President. You can honestly blame the opposition for actually starting this whole thing. But like i said this was a crisis in the making.
    You're right, I did phrase this wrong. What I meant to say was, Guaido declared himself President and is instantly recognized by United States and many, if not most, other countries. United States recognizing Guaido is a huge escalation of the conflict in my eyes. Symbolically, at the very least. I also think that this was yet another geopolitical blunder by us.

    Helping refugees is only a temporary solution. China and Russia would not abandon Venezuela nor the Cubans no matter how bad the Americans made them look. And those countries are all Maduro needs.
    I disagree. I think indefinitely helping South America with the refugee crisis is the first and the very least, that United States can do. I don't know how much you know about the history of South America, but we've essentially strong armed the majority of that continent into toeing a certain line. If we want real allies, instead of sycophants, than we need to start repairing the damage we've caused over the last century. Mexico, a country we have very good relations with, is our ally out of fear of necessity. Compare that relationship to our relationship with Canada, a country that genuinely sees us as an ally and friend.

    Our stance on Venezuela and Cuba makes us look like the world's biggest ing hypocrites. We should've approached the situation carefully and with grace. Instead, we engage in these hardline antics like it's the Cold War. What's next? We start preparing for a low-scale intervention if the Guaido opposition starts an open rebellion? And believe me, I think it could really come down to that. While Maduro enjoys a lot of support in the military and still has a sizable loyalist chunk among the people, there are many people who are sick and tired of his regime and will likely fight for a better life if they think it's the only option they have left. What then? Are we going to bomb Maduro? Are we going to supply arms? Are we going to demand Maduro steps down?

    America has never been shy about supporting authoritarians and military governments in the past. If our mandate is avoiding violence, we need to drastically change our policy regarding South America. My suggesting, is to negotiate Russian and Chinese debts in order to broker a power-sharing agreement with Maduro. As in, we will help with Russian and Chinese debts, in exchange for Maduro enacting reforms in the country, and agreeing to step down after his current term. There are a lot of things America can do in order to get the result we want. And if we really want to dominate South America, we have to win their "hearts and minds".

    Of course this'll never happen. This is the same kind of foreign policy that hails Plan Colombia as a resounding success.

    Though my views on this differ i do agree that aggravating the situation isn't a good idea.
    It is incredibly irresponsible and ineffective. This is the opposite of Monroe Doctrine.

    The Size of Ancient Armies
    Quote Originally Posted by conon394 View Post
    So some guy did not talk more or less all the Athenians into making themselves impoverished refugees at the mercy of Sparta (a state not exactly in love with them) and throwing the dice on winning a risk navy fight where they were outnumbered? That seems a tad total.
    Without modern mobilization techniques, communication lanes and road networks, I'd find a relatively homogeneous city-state, alongside its nearby countryside population, to be more reactive and able to fully utilize its resources, as opposed to a far-flung heterogeneous empire which would need to assemble its distant subjects in another part of their empire and empire materialize them on the opposite part.

    Quote Originally Posted by conon394 View Post
    Was their some other invasion on tap I missed?
    While I'm not aware of any powerful nomadic confederations poised to assault the Achaemenids in the East and capable of capturing cities such as Baktra, we do know of various nomadic tribes launching raids in the Upper Satrapies, and perfectly capable looting villages and small towns. In addition to those external threats, up until 19th Century, hill-dwelling tribes would sometimes descend to the valleys to loot and pillage across many parts of Afro-Eurasia, and the Achamenid Empire was full of such tribes.

    For instance I suggest reading about one such tribe, the Uxians, whom Alexander fought, not on the behalf of the Achaemenids, but because they tried to extort Alexander in a similar manner they did the Persians, despite living deep in nominal Achaemenid territory.

    Quote Originally Posted by conon394 View Post
    Maybe true maybe not really depends on which boss they thought would be better and how bad the pillaging would be. But Darius did have the cash on had to fill palms and belay worry for the moment over the prospect of gain.
    Most of the Achaemenid subjects were neither Iranian nor Zoroastrian and those who were and were in high positions weren't all selfless and loyal people, Mazaeus, a Persian, simply allowed Alexander to take heavily fortified city of Babylon, while Bessus did what he did. Various tribal kings living in difficultly accessible areas weren't impressed enough with Achaemenid power to even pay them taxes, sometimes they preferred to actually tax them. And by taxing I mean robbing.

    Quote Originally Posted by conon394 View Post
    The think is Alexander was the near and clear present danger and he had yet to show his supposed cultural clemency. He started the war based on a nominal revenge crusade.
    Speaking of Darius' regard or understanding of Alexander's true intentions, I think it would be good to mention that he didn't lend much support to his Satraps in Anatolia, and in relation to that how numbers Alexander faced began to increase after he'd already conquer most of Anatolia.

    Quote Originally Posted by conon394 View Post
    Again I not arguing the fantastic numbers. Just the range of possibly should not be constrained by the minimal normal possibility give the dire state Darius faced and the resources he had.
    Mustering a Million men, if its true, is a quite an achievement, one that even the great Roman Empire didn't manage.

    Which is why it's interesting to compare the numbers, as well as few other factors, between the Roman and Achaemenid Empires.

    - Roman Army at its peak had 450K troops, according to Cassius Dio in the Battle of Lugdunum in 197, 300K were deployed, modern estimates range from 110K to 150K. This battle was a part of a civil war between Severus and Albinus and thus all the troops were Roman.

    -Size of Achaemenid Army at its peak is unknown, however according to Herodotus they were capable deploying up to 2.65M during the Second Invasion of Greece, modern estimates range from 200K to 500K. we don't know if Persian had mobilized all of their available troops for this endeavor, however I personally suspect they haven't left their satrapies under-garrisoned and in my opinion they would have to do so in order to muster such massive numbers. In addition to that it took them several years to bring troops to Sardis and from there continue towards Greece.

    After glorious days of Darius I and Xerxes I, the Achaemenid troops seems to have dwindled to "mere" 1M according to ancient sources, still better than the pathetic Romans with "puny" 450K and this is a relatively certain number.

    When discussing the plausibility of numbers, one needs to talk of population.

    The Roman Empire usually had 50-60 Million people, under Trajan around 70M Million, Achaemenid Empire 17-35 Million people. From this every 4th is an adult male. I can't stress enough that I'm being quite generous here because until the 19th Century couples usually had more than two children.

    Romans had 450K troops out of, 50M, I'll use the lower estimate here which brings us to 12.5M adult males, that means that nearly every 28th adult male was a soldier, if we take that the Achaemenids had 1M troops out of, I'll use the highest population estimate of 35M which brings us to 8.75M adult males, that means that nearly every 9th adult male was a soldier.

    Even when skewing the numbers in favor of the Achaemenids, by several factors, such as population number and breakdown, deployment - 1M were at a single battle, while Roman 450K never were, which would mean that the Achaemenids would need to extract an even greater number than 1M because, as I've said previously, someone needs to man the garrisons, such ability to mobilize every 9th male not withstanding serious economic and political consequences, would require a tremendous logistical and organizational effort and their deployment would be severely hampered by the state of Achaemenid geographic constraints.

    Now onto actual battles.

    Until Granicus in 334 it appears that Darius didn't consider Alexander as a massive threat that would require the maximum mobilization of his troops which can be seen from the fact that Alexander's numbers at Granicus were merely matched, a single year later 600K troops are at Issus and 2 years after 400K more. In short, by ancient sources at Granicus Alexander faces 40K, at Issus 600K, at Gaugamela 1M, by modern estimates it's Granicus 40K, Issus 108K, Gaugamela 120K.

    Maybe modern estimates are two low and losing battles when having 2.7:1 and 2.5:1 advantage against a not just superior, but brilliant tactician, isn't that much of failure when you're a decent commander, however losing when having 15:1 and 21:1 advantage is beyond spectacular failure, even if one's an inferior commander. If we halve the numbers and get 7.5:1 and 10.6:1 advantage the failure is still spectacular.

    Why did Darius even fight at Gaugamela when seeing how bad he was at Issus, when defeated at Gaugamela why did he even flee eastwards, at that time the Iranian Plateau was still far less populated and poorer than Mesopotamia and he lost a 1M troops, it's highly unlikely he'd be able to find another 1M, and let's face it how bad he is he'd need at least 2M, to get that decent 42:1 advantage.

    It all boils down to whether or not Alexander's victories were impressive enough unless he was outnumbered at least 4:1, personally I'd say yes. If the numbers are true, Darius was either mentally impaired, or it was true what so many ancients believed, Alexander was divine. Lastly, ther's something special about the Achaemenids because no other state deployed such numbers on the battlefield apart from the Chinese during the Warring States, if we are to believe their ancient sources, and If I'm not mistaken, even they didn't have a 1M on the battlefield.

    I thought Britain was under sharia law?
    Quote Originally Posted by PointOfViewGun View Post
    Though, given that overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims, as in virtually all of them, out there do not drive buses into crowds show us that I'm in no need of anything.
    This is totally irrelevant. Throughout history evil has never needed an overwhelming majority, or even a small majority, to flourish. All it has ever needed is a handful of the right men and women in the right positions and bad things happen. The overwhelming majority of people who are good either go along with it or ignore it and they do this for various reasons. They do it because they're scared it'll happen to them if they speak out. They do it because they have no other option. They do it because they think "Meh, I don't agree with it, but I'm sure they have our long-term best interests at heart and eventually it will stop when they reach their goals".

    I did some very in-depth studies into the Belzec death camp (I even visited it). I became fascinated with the Commandant of that camp - a man named Christian Wirth. He's probably one of the most evil and psychotic men to have ever existed, though you'll never know he exists because other evil men like Mengele get all the attention. Wirth was the right man in the right job. I found that even among the SS who worked at Belzec, many disagreed with what was happening there. Some committed suicide, some desperately tried to be transferred to frontline combat (which they preferred to working in a death camp, even though frontline combat carried an infinitely higher risk to their own lives), and some were executed on the orders of Wirth. Ultimately they all did their job of supervising the industrialized mass murder of innocent civilians at a rate of 6,000-10,000 per day. In this case they did it out of pure fear of Wirth, the ruthless commandant.

    In Russia during the 20s and 30s tens of millions of citizens of the USSR were shot, worked to death in gulags or starved to death. The men orchestrating this terror... some of them would have been psychopaths who enjoyed it, some of them would have been ideological Communist fanatics who saw it as a duty... I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them disagreed with it but did it anyway out of fear of Stalin. The culture of pure terror and fear that Stalin created in the USSR is absolutely incomprehensible to us comfortable westerners who were born and have lived in modern times. It is absolutely impossible for us to understand how bad it was. In those days, if you were conscripted into the army and your orders were to drive to a certain town, round up 50 specific people and shoot them for being "unreliable to the regime", you did it... even if your own parents were among the 50 names on the list. You did it because if you didn't do it you'd be number 51 on the list.

    Same goes for China after the Communist revolution, Cambodia and other places at other times. All throughout history we've seen atrocious things like this occur, and every single time the regimes doing the atrocious things have never needed the support of a majority of their people. All they've needed is a handful of the right people in the right positions and a culture of fear and terror. That's all it takes.

    So don't argue that we have nothing to fear because it's only a "handful" of Muslims who drive buses into crowds and rape tens of thousands of underage infidel girls, because thousands of years of history consistently renders your argument invalid.

    Same goes for the far right, which is growing in popularity all over the western world because our governments are allowing these terrorists and religious zealots to grow and grow in number, and covering up mass, decades-long rapes of young girls and other atrocious things. These far right types are never going to be a majority in the west, not after what happened in the 30's and 40's - people know that it will lead to bad things. But guess what? They're never going to need that majority. All they're ever going to need is a handful of the right people in the right position and Europe will be set back 100 years.

  8. #8

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #7

    Winning Post - sumskilz
    Israel elections April 2019
    [Contentbox]
    Quote Originally Posted by Ludicus View Post
    The president of Israel knows Hebrew. And no, he isn't talking about the settlements.
    As I said, Rivlin is quite clearly referring to community settlements in that quote. Section 7b of the Nation-State Law is even specifically referenced.

    This is exactly what you posted:

    are we willing to support discrimination and exclusion of men and women based on their ethnic origin? this clause (7b) would essentially allow any community to establish residential communities that exclude Sephardic Jews, ultra-Orthodox people, Druze, LGBT people. Is that what the Zionist vision means?
    However, section 7b was removed from the text before it passed, as you can see: https://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/...ationState.pdf

    Quote Originally Posted by Ludicus View Post
    In a religious state, everything is religious...as the Haaretz put it, .n Israel, Charlie Hebdo would not have even had the right to exist
    ...and don't blame the British.
    Speaking of incoherent. Are you claiming that the law against religious incitement doesn't date to the British Mandate? Are you claiming that said law is somehow responsible for a private entity firing an employee over drawing a cartoon unrelated to religion or religious figures?

    Quote Originally Posted by Ludicus View Post
    According to Kretzmer, the racist nation-state law is an insult to the Arab "citizens" of Israel.
    Okay, so your point is that some guy has an opinion. Many Israelis have the same opinion, and most Arabs did see it as insulting. The law was meant to be divisive, but as a bit of political theater it wasn't directed at Arab citizens, it was meant to divide the supposedly true Zionist politicians from those politicians who are allegedly only Zionist in name. The Arab parties were completely irrelevant in this decision, since they refuse to sit in a coalition with any Zionist party, they are politically irrelevant.

    The reason Netanyahu brought it up now, and made a social media scene in a very Trump-like maneuver, is the same reason. His party is trying paint Gantz and Lapid as not true Zionists, but leftists in disguise in order to discredit them.

    You can see this clearly in Miri Regev's response to Rotem Sela over the issue:

    “Rotem, we have no problem with the Arabs,” she wrote on Facebook. “We have in our party many Arab, Druze and Christian members. We have a problem with the hypocrisy and the masquerade ball of Lapid and Gantz, who are trying with all their might to hide from the public the fact that they’re left-wing, and are dressing up as centrists.” Regev added that Matsliah “didn’t stop me because it’s the truth. It’s either Bibi or Tibi.”
    Anyway, seems like you're getting distraught about a situation you have no control over, rather than trying acquire a deeper understanding of the context.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ludicus View Post
    Simply put, the law declares that the state is only the state of its Jewish residents.
    This is the misunderstanding I tried to explain to you. It doesn't refer to individual rights. It refers to the self-determination of national identities within the state. I think you would still disagree with it even if you understood it and still consider it discriminatory, but that's neither here nor there to me. I consider the law to have been pointless from a legal standpoint.

    The first time I filled out a visa application to enter Israel, I was confused that the English/Hebrew form asked me to fill in my "nationality" (אזרחי) and then in the very next box asked for my "nationality" (לאומי). The first is nationality in more of a sense of citizenship, the second is nationality in the sense of deep community ties and culture. Even knowing this, I still didn't know what to put for the second box, because it doesn't exactly make sense in English, and I'm not either American or Jewish, or even Jewish vs non-Jewish. The form also asked for "religion", so a person could put Jewish as their religion, independent of whether or not they put Jewish as their "nationality". Israeli is not a "nationality" in the sense it is being used in the nation-state law. It is uncontroversial among Israeli citizens that the state contains members of multiple "nations". These "nations" are also not exactly synonymous with "ethnicities" in Hebrew either, before someone gets that notion. Sephardi is an ethnicity, Jewish is a "nationality". Naturally this concept is foreign to assimilated Jews in Western countries, who mostly see their nationality and citizenship as synonymous.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aexodus View Post
    Netanyahu has really gone too far here, he sounds like a racial nationalist.
    Israel has the complication of multiple indigenous "nations" in one state which makes things different, but as an example of how this is conceived of in Hebrew: What nationalities other than English do you think England is the nation-state of? Picking an example... Do Pakistanis in England have the right to self-determination since they are a different nationality? Do Pakistanis have the right to have English symbols removed from all government buildings, forms, and currency because such symbols are not inclusive of their separate Pakistani identity? The solution in England has been to try to make a civil English identity independent of other identities, but in Israel, neither the bulk of majority nor the minorities wish to create a civil Israeli identity independent of their community identities. In fact, a good portion of the minorities would be violently opposed to such an effort. What they want is an equal claim to the state by their own "nation". So the question arises, is Israel also a nation-state of the Arab people? Most Israeli Jews say no.



    Runner Up Post - Abdulmecid I
    The double standards of progressives in the West
    I am not sure how many useful conclusions we can extract from the reference to a couple of unlinked incidents. Even the most innocent child can observe that politics are marked by partiality, hypocrisy and insincerity. Perhaps a flawlessly designed scientific research can shed some light on this phenomenon, by examining wider social trends, but the controversies mentioned in the original post certainly do not suffice for anything more valuable than arbitrary generalisations. My social media are flooded by Islamists, who simultaneously criticise Israel and American warhawks for their hostility against Arabs and then complain why neither of them invades Syria and ethnically cleanse the country's religious minorities. Not to mention the innumerable conservatives who mock the leftists for being sentitive snowflakes and then get immediately triggered, when the protagonist role of a blockbuster is given to a female or when a Democrat populist dares to endorse the most moderate parts of the social-democratic doctrine. And yet, singling out Sunni extremist and the right-wing for being exceptionally insincere would seem very unfair and biased to me.

    Moreover, I have my reservations about the examples you used, alhoon. For instance, your own source admits that there are two stories about the destroyed cement cross in the island of Lesbos. The first one (about the cross being erected in the honour of whoever lost his life swimming there) seems rather weird and is not supported by any other source I looked for. The only English-speaking article I managed to detect was published by Breitbart (surprise, surprise), whose original source leaves no doubt about what really happened*. Namely, ultra-nationalist groups exploited the tensions created by the presence of a great number of refugees to call for some sort of beach Apartheid, where the local swimmers would not mix with "brown and black subhumans". As a result, the cross was constructed at night and illegally, in order to provoke the immigrants, which explains why it was promptly destroyed by activists who disagreed with its reactionary and reactionary message.
    *The fact that the cross-controversy is probably a product of fake-news makes me also skeptical about the halal story, given that the Middle East Forum is a conservative think tank, generously paid to propagate a certain agenda.

    Therefore, given the truth about the event, I can easily reverse your conclusions and blame the conservatives for inconsistency. Given that the cement cross was erected without building permit in private or public land (with probably negative repercussions to the natural landscape and environment), protesting its demolition means that there is zero respect for the "holy right of property" for the sake of religious intolerance, so we could assume that "conservatives" are deeply hypocritical and it is quite a surprise why the public has not already shifted to voting the much more sincere and honest "progressives". Of course, I'm being ironical, but I think it is obvious how easily fragile argumentation like this can be distorted. After all, to be frank, in a country where the Constitution openly confirms the privileged position of Orthodox Christianity, at the expense of secularism, while blasphemy laws are still enforced, Christianity is not justified to complain about harsh treatment. In general, I would say that, thanks to the victory of Donald Trump, there is now more anecdotal evidence of "conservative" lack of credibility than the opposite, since the current administration is inevitably undermined by the contradictions between its rosy promises and actual reality: From the President's dubious stance on the Electoral College to its most dedicated fandom bashing Hillary Clinton as a warmonger and a Saudi puppet and fruitlessly trying to defend their Messiah's crystal ball dance and numerous bombing attacks against the sovereign Syrian Republic. Quite the spectacle, but as I underlined previously, focusing on a specific side of the political spectrum is usually indicative of bias and is unsupported by the necessary data.

  9. #9

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #8

    Winning Post - Abdulmecid I
    Causes of the Greek Revolution



    Introduction
    Yesterday,it was the "official" (albeit inaccurate) anniversary of the 1821 Greek Independence War, which eventually resulted into the creation of the modern nation-state of Greece, so I think that the date of 25th March, marking (not coincidentally) the Feast of the Annunciation, can serve as a useful stimulus to often a generally not particularly famous event of the Ottoman history. Generally speaking,affairs like these receive a disproportionate amount of attention by the interested parties, but unfortunately the professionalism of their interpretations is often undermined by a specific agenda, which does not necessarily concern the interests of the noble science of historiography. Inevitably, the Greek Revolution has not been an exception to the rule, which leads to the propagation of several myths or half-truths, which may serve the national narrative of Greece or Turkey, but do not correspond to historical reality. The question of the causes and pretexts of the uprising has been particularly affected by this tendency, which leads to bizarre explanations involving emotional hyperboles ("400 years slavery"), Soros-like conspiracy theories ("meddling of nefarious, foreign powers") or complete absurdities ("Devşirme",the practice of forcefully recruiting children and teenagers to the Janissary corps, which had been abolished more than one century before the events). In any case, before investigating further the subject, we firstly need to determine the nature of the Greek Revolution.


    Myths
    The most common claim is that it was a massive,ethnic uprising, where an entire nation, infuriated after years of tyranny rose against the foreign despot. Of course, it is obvious that the aforementioned approach is clearly influenced, in a remarkably anachronistic manner, from the perspective of the narrative of the nation-state. It offers said nation-state legitimacy, prestige, a solid justification for its precarious existence and an acceptable excuse for its failures. Secondly, there is the doubtlessly more fringe "leftist" theory of the affair being nothing less than a popular, proletarian revolution,where desperate peasants and sailors attempted to overthrow the establishment and install a juster society, where wealth and the means to produce it would be redistributed in an equal way. Elements of both ideas hold some truth, but, at least in what concerns its initial conception, the Greek Independence War was the embodiment ofa bourgeois nationalist revolution. Wealthy merchants were responsible for the initial financing, political leadership, ideological preparation and sparking of the revolt, while other segments of the society either joined later, pressed by the current circumstances, or played a relatively secondary role. Peasants largely remained cautious, because the instability threatened their prosperity, while in Eastern Europe, the vast majority of the population continued to identify itself on religious terms. After all, Christian Albanians(usually known as Arbanites), like the inhabitants of the island of Hydra or the brigands of Souli, were instrumental for the victory of the uprising, despite generally not being capable of even speaking Greek. The notion of national identity was widespread among the commercial elites, especially those living in central Europe, and the pupils of privately funded (by the previously mentioned merchants)schools, but it never succeeded in being endorsed by anything more than a small minority before late 19th century.



    Tiers état
    The powerful class of Orthodox Christian merchants was firstly formed in the middle 17th century, when the constant naval warfare between the Ottoman Navy and a Catholic coalition steadily receded. Trade with Europe grew, especially thanks to the efforts of Izmir-based French merchants, while many Greek shipowners played the role of the middle-man, although their activities were not necessarily legal (the lines between state-sponsored commerce, smuggling and piracy were rather blurred). The Seven Years War and the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca also favoured the fortunes of the Greek traders, but the Napoleonic wars were of utmost importance. Due to the British blockade, the French were removed from the equation, which allowed the Greek "pirates" to take their place with enormous net profits. However, following the Congress of Vienna, harmony was restored and the Greeks lost their monopoly in central Mediterranean.As a result, 2nd-class merchants and shipowners watched their profits decline, which inevitably led to radicalisation. The increased unemployment of sailors also explains why the sailors of Hydra forced the wealthiest shipowners to join the uprising, despite being reasonably afraid of their fleet being destroyed during the hostilities. In conclusion, the urban elites, expatriated or not,aimed at establishing a modern centralised and liberal state, where international trade would prosper, unhindered by tolls, arbitrary political power and a fragile right to private ownership. That being said, despite their undeniably crucial role their contribution was not sufficient for the success of the revolt.





    Noblesse
    In the mainland, inside the Christian community, political power was exercised by the local elite (kodjabashis, basically town notables),whose wealth was based primarily on agrarian estates and a small but vigorous number of craft workshops. They usually maintained cordial relations with their Muslim colleagues and Ottoman officials, but they could not enjoy the same power as the latter, while the local industry was somewhat harmed by the damaging consequences of the Serbian insurgency. That sort of "aristocracy" was also linked to the klephts and armatoi. The former were essentially brigands, while the latter were government-organised local militias tasked to eliminate banditry. Unsurprisingly, the demarcation lines between those two forces were not particularly clear, with many armatoloi joining the klephts and the opposite. These two groups, the armed militias and the rural elite, joined the uprising, providing the necessary military capital and political control, although sometimes their loyalty was far from guaranteed. They generally aspired to usurp the political power of the beys and confiscate the estates of the Muslim magnates. This means that their vision, an independent and yet fragmented Greece, ruled by provincial warlords,was in direct contradiction with the goals of the first group. Meanwhile, klephts and armatoloi alike did not particularly admire the measures taken by the reformist sultans Selim III and Mahmoud II, whose ambition involved the establishment of a modern regular armyand police force, which would render the services of armatoloi redundant and the activities of the klephts extremely lethal.



    Clergé
    Thirdly,we should also mention the views of the Greeks well-integrated into the administrative and ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire. The majority of them were conservative and opposed any radical agitation. Especially the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople adamantly insisted on criticizing the revolutionary ideas, which sapped the Patriarch's privilege position inside the religious mosaic of the empire, while they also threatened to increase the prominence of national identity, in the education and the society, at the expense of religious affiliation and the prestige and communal power of the clergy. On the other hand, several priests,especially low-ranked ones, collaborated with the rebels, but without any significant role. Last and least, the most romantic ones dreamed of a reformed Ottoman Empire (or maybe of a restored Byzantine monarchy), where the Turkish dynasty and Islam would be replaced by a Hellenic family and the Orthodox Church. However, their views did not influence the events, presumably because of how surrealistic they were.





    Causes and factors
    From the above, I think it is clear that we cannot overestimate the importance of the cooperation between the merchants, the kodjabashisand the militias/bandits, despite their conflict of interests. The"bourgeoisie" composed the majority of the members of Philiki Etaireia (from the 911 members whose job we are aware of, 445 were merchants, 117 doctors, lawyers, students etc., 78 officers, 85 priests, 25 shipowners, 10 clerks, 7 craftsmen and only 8 farmers), a carbonari-like secret organisation, which planned the uprising. They also financed the military effort,determined and improved its ideological tools and established a very useful contact with the European courts and public opinion. Without the foreign loans and the military intervention of France, Great Britain and of course Russia (which even invaded the Ottoman Empire and almost reached the outskirts of the capital), the revolution would not have succeeded. Meanwhile, the merchant fleet of the shipowners harassed the Ottoman Navy and pretty much ruined the logistics of the armies ordered to suppress the insurgency. However,without the intervention of the rural elites and the armed units, the conspiring merchants, doctors, students and etc. would lack any local influence and army, while their efforts would continuously face either apathy or outright animosity. For example, the rebellion in Moldavia and Wallachia was easily crushed by the imperial army,because Υpsilantis, the Greek commander, quarreled and eventually executed Tudor Vladimirescu, his erstwhile ally and a Wallachian peasant rebel. Rather unsurprisingly, the Pandour militia previously led by Vladimirescu had no problem watching the Ottomans smashing the small insurgency of Greeks in the region.



    Of course, many other factors helped the rebellion to survive enough, inorder to gather foreign assistance from the European monarchies,which considered Greece as a weaker and therefore more reliable and easily controlled ally in the Aegean Sea than the Sublime Porte. The mountainous terrain was excellent for the guerilla tactics of the Greek rebels, while the Ottoman Army and Navy were found in a remarkably terrible situation (perhaps even the worst in the entire Ottoman history), because the Janissary corps had declined into total inefficiency, while the Nizâm-ı Cedîd was not yet establishedor strong enough to participate in serious military expeditions.Meanwhile, the 1821-1823 war against Qajar Persia distracted theOttomans from the front in the Morea, but the most decisive factor proved to be Ali Pasha of Ioannina, a practically autonomous Ottoman governor. He's generally considered as the epitome of the Ayan phenomenon, local dynasts usurping political power from the feeble central authorities. He controlled Epirus and quickly clashed with the reforming policies of Mahmoud II. He was eventually defeated and executed by the imperial army, but in the meantime, he ensured thatno serious reinforcements would arrive in the Peloponnese, during the crucial first years.



    Epilogue
    Inthe end, who benefited the most from the Greek Revolution? It is generally considered that the urban elites were the true victors, as their "progressive" vision eventually prevailed, as the Eyalet of Morea gradually evolved into the modern kingdom of Greece.They succeeded in manipulating the kodjabashis and the shipowners,through the threat of violence and the misleading promise of Russian help (which only materialised in the final years of the conflict, in the beginning, every monarchy was reflexively skeptical towards any revolutionary movement, even if its leaders openly rejected the message and secularism of the French Revolution). The kodjabashis disappeared, while the merchant fleet was immensely damage by the constant warfare. However, in my opinion, the truth is a bit more complicated: In the long term, the desires of the enlightened merchants may have been realised, but in its first steps, Greece was a highly fragmented state, where local warlords, especially in Mani,near Sparta, exercised effective control, in spite of the protests of the almost nonexistent regular army. Governors were murdered,insurgencies broke out in a regular manner, obscurantist monks called for a reactionary repetition of the Vendée, and the flagship of the Hellenic fleet was burned, together with another frigate, in an act of open dispute against the authority of the government. Meanwhile,most kodjabashis managed to maintain their power or adjusted to thenew circumstances. They integrated into the new power system, by assuming the role of court officials near the Bavarian ruler Otto I,Senators, parliamentary representatives, army and navy officers or even ministers, thus guaranteeing that the political and financial power of the Greek kingdom would continue to be shared and monopolised between a small oligarchy, composed of former Ottoman officials, rural notables and urban elites that studied in European universities.



    To summarise, I would argue that the image of the Hellenic Kingdom of the 1830's reflected the balance of power between the primary forces behind the uprising, who had also orchestrated the course of the rebellion and the internal structure of its successor: warlords,shipowners, middle-to-upper bourgeoisie and kodjabashis. The quality of life of the peasants and sailors probably considerably improved neither in the short nor in the long term, while the mukhtars, the Ottoman officials, the Jewish communities and the Muslim peasantry were the real losers.



    Runner Up Post - Sukiyama
    Health care situation in US?
    Well, that's rich lol. I thought you were the guy who knows how to interprete everything as an economical process. So if everyone would just be the hell rich… the world, no sorry, the USA would be a better place. Cheezes farkin crust, are you somehow self-aware when you produce pointless truisms like that?
    They don't need to be rich. They need to be "richer" and have better financial security. A simple way to isolate people from medical emergencies would be to have a payroll tax that automatically deducted a percentage of people's paychecks into a health saving account. A very unfortunate part of the population is in the "coverage gap" where they are too "rich" to be covered by Medicaid and too poor to qualify for healthcare subsidies. That needs to be fixed, but there are many people, young individuals for example, who simply refuse to grab insurance or to budget their incomes properly.

    @Suki, A lot of people literally don't have the salary to do any better. A lot of people don't have the medical health to legally drive and so have to live in a region 3 times as expensive than one they could drive from. "Stop living paycheck to paycheck" is a complicated question to answer here.
    I'm aware that a lot of people have no other choice than to live from paycheck to paycheck. I sympathize with those people, but there are a ton of people who simply live that way because they either don't know any better, or refuse to. I'll point you to record car sales in America and the rising number of 60-72 month car loans. Both are indicative of people buying cars they can't really afford. That's middle-class folks living beyond their means, the same demographic that often complains about high healthcare premiums. Household debt is rising, student debt is at a record. When we talk about household budgets, these are all things we need to tackle. Part of it is the government, the other part of it is people making better choices. I think both sides of the equation need to be really looked at.

    That's why I think some Republican favored legislation, like Health Savings Accounts, should really be considered. At the same time, ACA's individual mandate was another really important part of the puzzle. The government should provide better options and regulate the market, but citizens need to be forced to buy into it as well. Otherwise none of this is ever going to work.

  10. #10

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #9

    Winning Post - Dick Cheney
    Is there a difference between strategy and tactics?
    Was wondering if it might be possible to come up with valid definitions -or at least some better examples- for strategy and tactics. We often hear that strategy and tactics are not interchangeable, yet there are many instances in strategic planning -including historical instances- where they often appear to overlap.

    Some definitions & perspectives:

    Layman’s definitions (1):

    • Strategy defines your long-term goals and how you’re planning to achieve them. In other words, your strategy gives you the path you need toward achieving your organization’s mission.
    • Tactics are much more concrete and are often oriented toward smaller steps and a shorter time frame along the way. They involve best practices, specific plans, resources, etc. They’re also called “initiatives.”

    Example: How to get to X on a map



    Commentary:
    Upon intense scrutiny, layman’s definitions really don’t help us distinguish strategy from tactics. Big picture view, macro goals, and long term principles and plans found in strategy are still means to an end, and do not exactly distinguish themselves from the micro principles found in tactics. Both strategy and tactics take place in the realm of time, space, and planning, both involve specific developments, resources, and arrangements of tools towards a common goal, and neither one can claim to be any more or less important than the other. While it is true – when using the above definitions- that tactics are often considered subordinate to strategy (because strategy claims to be the goal, and tactics a method), it is hardly true to say that best practices and so called “initiatives” are radically different than the steps and execution styles strategy proposes to achieve an organization’s goals. The result then are cases where tactics can be substituted for strategy, and vice versa, or it could also be that strategy and tactics are just synonyms for one another.


    DoD definitions and military view(2):

    Strategy — A prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives. (JP 3-0)

    Tactics — The employment and ordered arrangement of forces in relation to each other. See also procedures; techniques. (CJCSM 5120.01)

    “Strategy is defined as the art of planning and directing overall military operations as opposed to tactics - the control of armies in battle.” – USAF, Presentation on Making Strategy.

    Commentary:
    A problem with the military definition -and view- is that the arrangement of forces is still an instrument of national power. Techniques and procedures of military forces are also not radically different than a set of ideas found in strategy, including doctrine. However, the DoD definition, to its credit, does try to separate tactics from strategy with command and control, whereas strategy would perhaps be more about operational art and creative policy, rather than the direct control and science of units in the field. Tactics then is not concerned with goals or objectives, or even planning as far as operations and resources go, rather it is strictly the movement and positioning of units in battle. To the DoD’s credit, modern military theory also usually divides war into strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The confusion, and overlap happens when strategy describes the specific movements and arrangements of units during operations planning. However, these plans (while also correctly conceived as means) are an envisioned end state, where as tactics, being in real-time, are not imaginary ends in themselves.


    Opinions from Strategic Thinkers:

    Strategy: “The art of waging war upon a map” – Jomini
    Strategy: “the employment of battles to gain the end of war” – Clausewitz
    Strategy: “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy” – Liddell Hart
    Strategy: “the art of making use of time and space” – Napoleon
    Strategy = (Ends + Ways + Means) – Army War College
    “Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy.” - George Patton
    “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu

    1)https://www.clearpointstrategy.com/s...s-tactics/amp/
    2)https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Docum...dictionary.pdf



    Runner Up Post - Cyclops
    Is there a difference between strategy and tactics?
    A worthwhile discussion.

    Further to OP's definitions the OED says (i have picked out the relevant entries):

    Strategy:

    1. The office or command of a strategos

    and

    4.a
    The art or practice of planning or directing the larger movements or long-term objectives of a battle, military campaign, etc. Often distinguished from tactics, considered as the art of directing forces engaged in action or in the immediate presence of the enemy.


    Tactics:

    1.The art or science of deploying military or naval forces in order of battle, and of performing warlike evolutions and manœuvres.

    The etymology for both is classical Greek, with strategy meaning "general's (or top level military leader's) work" and tactics meaning "putting things in order". The meanings do shade into one another but its still a reasonable distinction to be made between "macro" and micro", as well as "comprehensive" vs "applied".

    I think we can all keep using these terms usefully: its even useful to distinguish further (I like the terms "Grand Strategy" (the overall military posture and planning) vs "Strategy" (the specific plan of campaign for a war), and "Grand Tactics" (the overall ordering of a battle) vs "Tactics" (the ordering of individuals, units and subsets of an army within a battle).

    So we can discuss Alexander III's quite insane Grand Strategy ("Conquer. Everything.") along with his sound strategy ("take the land route though Asia Minor and carefully befriend Persian satraps on the way so the Phoenician fleet can't cut supply line until we take Phoencia to remove the threat to the homeland, then reduce the Persians one province at a time, to force a decisive battle where the Persian Shah-in-Shah can be personally defeated"-10/10 would murder Parmenion again).

    We can discuss Wellington's Grand tactics and Tactics at Waterloo (let's not talk about his strategic showing in 1815, its embarrassing), with his GT being "hold...steady...hold...steady..." and his tactics being a wonderful dance juggling squares, lines and skirmishers, mixing frail and robust regiments and balancing his generally solid infantry with his harebrained cavalry and precisely sited arty.

    We an meaningfully discuss the tension between Hitler's truly insane Grand Strategy (and pretty dodgy strategy) and the Wehrmacht's quite awesome tactical showing (and how the latter made up for the many failings of the former).

    The terms have different derivations and different applications and while there is overlap, the "heart" of each word is located in a different sphere. Strategy is more about high level planing, tactics is more about applied training.

  11. #11

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #10

    Winning Post - sumskilz
    Far right hate speech. What should be done?
    Quote Originally Posted by Ludicus View Post
    Seventy years after the establishment of the state of Israel, Israel has achieved many goals of the Zionist movement, but the plan to become a state "like any other" has not been fulfilled. If the Jews were the archetypical "other" in history, ironically, Israel-which so much wanted to avoid the stamp of otherness-has become the Jew among the nations...

    The flag of Israel is a religious symbol.
    The claim: Israel never became "like any other" nation, and remains "the Jew among nations". In support of this, it is pointed out that Israel has a religious symbol on its flag.

    However, one third of countries, including the majority of European countries, have a religious symbol on their flag:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 


    An alternative hypothesis is that Israel isn't different from other nations, or at least wouldn't be if people worldwide weren't so prone to treating it differently. For example, acting as if having a religious symbol on the flag is unique or repeatedly using completely unrelated threads as platforms to forward arguments about Israel's supposed uniqueness, to allege uniquely nefarious pro-Israel activity by American Jewish groups, to forward the erroneous view that Jews are somehow different than other Americans in their having hyphenated identities, and to cite Neo-Nazi websites and open Nazi sympathizers to support such views.

    Side note, the Star of David wasn't widely used as a Jewish symbol prior to the Nineteenth Century. It came into wider use in Europe when it was adopted by assimilationist Jews in order to be visually more like Christianity, so that synagogues would look just like churches but use a different symbol. The Reform movement went as far as calling synagogues "temples" in order to disassociate themselves with Jerusalem. This was meant to as means to try to protect Jews from the dual loyalty charge since the center of their religious life would be in their home country (never mind that Jerusalem is also important to Christians). The original Zionists who were not religious adopted it as a Jewish national symbol in 1897. The religious use and the Zionist use were actually based on competing worldviews. The assimilationist view was that Jews could protect themselves from antisemitism by making Judaism strictly a religion, so that the they would be German or Polish or whatever in every way except religion. The Reform movement also stopped using Hebrew in its liturgy (despite Catholics still using Latin). In contrast, the Zionists believed Jews would always be seen as the other by some and thus would always be in danger without a safe haven of their own. This was before the Holocaust of course. Obviously none of the Reform movement's assimilation saved them. Anyone ethnically Jewish was killed regardless of how assimilated they were and regardless of their religion or lack thereof. Today the Star of David is considered a Jewish symbol in both a religious and non-religious sense. Historically, it was considered a magic protective symbol used by Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Middle East, like the ḥāmsa.



    Runner Up Post - Dante Von Hespburg
    Political Correctness is Reducing Academic Freedom at Cambridge - Noah Carl Sacked
    Just watched the full i-player interview (Cheers Aexodus for drawing me to that)... Firstly the spokesperson admits they haven't actually read their work, and admits it might even be 'good', but he signed the letter to sack Dr Carl anyway because he feels he's associated with islamophobia and 'racist' based soley on the citations that Dr Carl used...and also because he's been published in 'far right' journals...though he's never read the actual content (and Professors like David McLean, who is about as Conservative as you can get in economics, even arguing quite convincingly that Western Imperialism and the global world economy has 0 responsibility for informal empire, nor the collapse of Qing China, Latin America's troubles or The Shogunate's collapse, has published articles in Marxist Journals. Academics publish wherever they can, and tend to seek out audiences who would disagree to test how their articles hold up.

    The spokesman defending the decision to sign a letter that sacked this guy...is in a complete mess. It seems to almost be 'i don't like what this guy MIGHT stand for'.

    To be slightly flippant, I've written essays about the nature of certain groups of the modern alt-right... i've naturally cited interviews and papers done by them, my work is as an academics should be 'attempting' to be as impartial as possible (You can never truly be impartial, but you recognize that limitation and try your best to be). With that in mind, people can i'm sure walk away from reading that work and say 'ahh these alt-right guys aren't so bad', or 'they have a point'. So now apparently that is in danger, likewise Dr Carl has written many publications that are 'respectable' (Which i agree with the commentators, Universities are not meant to be 'respectable' they are meant to ask questions that most people are uncomfortable with- Its why Academics play such a vital role in highlighting the lies told by modern political parties), but apparently one strain of research... that actually is valid regardless as research, is enough for him to be mobbed by.... i don't know what? Academics and students who have lost perspective and want to essentially destroy academic research in a fundamental way.

    What's more worrying is a key reason seems to be that he was only 'targeted' because he achieved a fellowship at Cambridge (because that is a 'prestigious platform'). So other universities conducting equally controversial research seem not to have been targeted. The reason Cambridge is so 'prestigious' is because they like most other British Universities allow academic freedom (one of the points of tenure indeed- we'll fund, whatever you want to do), so its a weird paradox that they A) caved in, and B) this is the reason

    I genuinely despair, this will come back if it continues, to bite us on the arse in a big way. I mean god damn basic tenants, you do not research with a 'goal' in mind (if you do, that's poor academia), you have a rough idea of the area you want to look into, and the research then can take you into very weird and wonderful places that contribute to knowledge in ways no one could ever have envisaged (To use a personal example, my 'big project' started as questioning the nature of Neo-imperialism from Suez, but has now developed into a full blown geopolitical analysis and spatial history of the Antarctic, its massive relevance to global politics currently begs for such a historic backing). So to 'cut it off' because they dislike the person... is the height of stupidity. Let his work be ripped to shreds in the peer review and public process, sure. Due to the Research Excellence Framework, he may indeed then lose his job- but that is how actual academia is supposed to function. Even the best academics have had their Dunkirk's (Niall Ferguson's life is essentially one long one Though i'm thoroughly with him on the latest Applied History drive), but sacking for 'political views'... its insulting.

    I mean literally, we know for instance that male students from Asian backgrounds, even from a lower economic standing-point generally perform better than White males from indeed a better economic position. There are a huge number of reasons for this, one indeed that is based on genetics (and arguments against it that are equally important). But the only reason this debate is happening is because an academic somewhere researched it. It has relevance to the British economy, education structures, the rise of populism, social cohesion, the benefits of multiculturalism, the issues created by multiculturalism- its incredibly useful.

    But using the logic of these academics and students who got Dr Carl fired, because it can be seen as being racist, has links to eugenics etc, this entire discussion should never have seen the light of day. Its ridiculous.

    Quote Originally Posted by mongrel View Post
    If he beleives in eugenic quackery, he can't be that bright.


    https://www.newstatesman.com/politic...nics-seriously

    In this country employers are free to dismiss staff, if they have reason to do so. Holding on to unsuitable people just to appease a handful of political commentators is politically correctness redefined. I'm sure Noah's replacement will do an excellent job.
    I think Eugenics is a difficult issue. Current work on Climate change has actually put eugenics back on the table (under several different names- and indeed Eugenics in modern academia should be removed from its Imperial and Nazi connotations, because it's a tool to which political emphasis was added. I'm not defending Eugenics, but it did directly contribute to the rise of the European Welfare state, so cutting down research because of its connotations to Eugenics can have some very bad consequences for other areas). The reason its back on the table is because of the rise of 'gene-splicing' (see China recently with that controversy), issues in a post-antibiotic world (because their worryingly losing effectiveness rather faster than some thought) that might have their solution in genetic engineering (also based on Eugenics) and also population vs resources (And this is incredibly controversial indeed but in terms of preventing children from ever having physical or mental disabilities prior to birth, because some predict society will not be able to shoulder the cost- the other 'Eugenics' alternative of course is what Sweden did until the 1970s- mandated abortion for children with disabilities- so its an important area for academics to be able to look into- and a huge part of that indeed is it'll allow us to argue along ethical lines, expose academics who favour Eugenics for political/racist means and make sure their work is thoroughly discredited (if its indeed not worthy).

    By driving Eugenics underground, because its not as if academics who 'believe' in its elements will stop, it undermines 'professional academics' by having such a polarizing split, it also means there is no debate or dialogue and that academics who research Eugenics, because they are going under the academia radar, cannot be subjected to peer review and debated and analysed properly, so no ethical framework can ever really come about, until its too late and it becomes a 'political' issue as one party or another picks up their work, and then immediately that work is protected, because good luck trying to get through as a 'professional academic' to those who unquestioningly believe what Populists are advocating.

    So i do appreciate peoples quite rightly natural reactions to Eugenics, but this is exactly why it should have a place and stay within academia, and not be driven underground, so their peers can essentially keep a check on what is going on and why. Scientists, Economics, Historians, Sociologists etc, all feed into each other (its why i laugh at people who believe that 'science isn't a 'real' degree, or sociology isn't a 'real' degree- they are all connected and all parts are necessary to create a fully functioning society and peer review process. For instance without Sociologists, There would potentially be no framework for the debates around gene-splicing in terms of societal impact, which would be stupid for social cohesion and sustainability) and essentially create a 'finished piece' of knowledge together, that then is properly packaged for use in human society (or indeed not for use).
    Last edited by Love Mountain; December 15, 2019 at 05:22 PM.

  12. #12

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #11

    Winning Post - Katsumoto
    The Putin - Trump Controversy: here to Stay - Links between Trump and Russia are being officially investigated by the FBI
    The fact that obstruction of justice doesn't need an underlying crime for it to be obstruction is such a basic concept that it doesn't even warrant addressing. You can obstruct justice to hide embarassing information for example. In regards to collusion, this is the summary that continues to ring true:

    To me, the salient facts from this section are the following:

    *> Trump was willing to do business with and seek favors from the Russian state even as it was attacking the country for whose presidency he was running—and he was willing to lie about doing so.
    > His campaign’s senior leadership was eager to benefit from that country’s efforts to dish dirt on his opponent and was willing to meet with people it knew to represent that country in order to receive such information.
    > Multiple campaign staff and advisers engaged in conduct in relation to that country that legitimately gave rise to counterintelligence scrutiny.
    > Multiple campaign staff and advisers lied to investigators about their dealings with Russian officials or intermediaries to such officials in a fashion that gave rise to criminal charges or other actions.

    I don’t know the right word for this pattern of conduct. It’s not “collusion,” though it may involve some measure of collusion. It’s not “coordination” or “conspiracy.” But in Clinton, Democrats, and liberals, the Trump campaign saw a sufficiently irreconcilable enemy that it looked at Vladimir Putin and saw a partner. To my mind, anyway, that’s the story Mueller told in this section. It may not be a crime, but it is a very deep betrayal.
    https://www.lawfareblog.com/notes-mu...o%20Volume%20I



    Runner Up Post - Roma_Victrix
    Cleopatra's endgame: what did she really hope to accomplish with Mark Antony?
    I agree completely about the hesitations of Rome to add new territories to its empire, but I still believe that Cleopatra had no choice. The problem was that the circumstances had gradually changed every since the Marian reforms were implemented. As ambitious generals gained more power over their professional armies, the foreign policy of Rome evolved accordingly, even despite the objections of the Senate. Military commanders now enjoyed more freedom and were often allowed to pursue a more personal policy, not hesitating to casually provoke conflicts with neutral neighbors and annex new territories. The reasons for this shift of policy are exactly what you described above: As the Senators were afraid of the possibility of a governor accumulating too many resources, so were the generals motivated to expand their sphere of influence, by installing obedientl governors to recently conquered regions, by stabilising the throne of now completely dependent client-kings and by positioning friendly tyrants to nominally autonomous cities. Not to mention the fact that loot and military glory guaranteed the loyalty of their troops in times of need. All these assets would come very handy, when a civil war broke out and the Roman general attempted to usurp the ultimate power.

    Now, to come back to the subject, a series of semi-successful imperialist strongmen, from Marius and Sulla to Crassus, Pompey and Ceasar had indicated to Cleopatra that the good, old times of senatorial conservatism were over. Whoever emerged as the final victor from the second Triumvirate, Octavian, Mark Anthony, Lepidus or even Sextus "Pirate" Pompey, the days of an independent Lagid dynasty were few. Neutrality was frankly not an option, because it would have saved the kingdom, according to the most optimistic scenario, as long as the Roman Empire remained fragmented. Once the Empire was reunited (an inevitable result, in my opinion), the new dictator/emperor/Augustus would hardly hesitate to invade the wealthy Nile valley. It would have been an easy campaign, which would reinforce his prestige, restore the finances of the state and provide him with a precious basis of support for his fragile and precarious position as the "absolute monarch" of the empire. Cleopatra was obliged to join one of the two camps, in order to have a chance to save her royal career. Unluckily enough for her, she bet on the wrong horse.[/QUOTE]

    Do you think Cleopatra fully understood the intricacies of what was going on in Roman politics and generals gradually amassing more power since Marius and Sulla, at the expense of or despite the Senate? She certainly knew that Sulla was the power broker who brought her father's predecessor Ptolemy XI to the throne in Egypt by marriage to Berenice III. With the Romans installing her father twice to the throne without showing a huge interest in taking over the country, I don't think she would have figured they wanted direct rule. Well, at least not until it became clear that she and Antony were to fight a colossal war against Octavian, pitting two halves of the Roman world against each other.

    When Cleopatra was still alive I don't think it was quite clear to her and to every other client ruler that Rome would eventually gobble up their territories and transform them into fully controlled provinces. Right next door to her was Herod's kingdom of Judea and it was decades after Cleopatra's death that Herod's triad of successor kingdoms were fully taken over by the Romans. While the Romans took over the Kingdom of Numidia by 40 BC, they left others alone, like the Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace, which lasted as a client state until 46 AD.

    Rome didn't really have some master plan when it came to expansion. Like the historian Klaus Bringmann (2002) says, it just kind of lurched from crisis to crisis, reacting to them instead of acting proactively, with big exceptions during the late Republic, of course, like Caesar's ambitious campaign in Gaul that used any little excuse and diplomatic faux pas to take over new territories. Sulla's war against Pontus and then Pompey's conquests of Anatolia and the Levant in the eastern Mediterranean would be another example, but even Sulla was reacting to the Asian Vespers and hostility against Romans and Roman allies by Mithridates. Rome had previously been extremely reluctant to take over new territories directly, case in point, the Kingdom of Macedonia, which the Romans tried to break apart into three different allied republics, but once the pretender Andriscus raised a revolt, it became clear that a directly controlled province was necessary.

    To be honest, if Cleopatra had just stayed quiet after Ptolemy XIII was killed and acted like an aloof monarch who didn't care about politics, how could Octavian have toppled her along with her son and heir Caesarion, who was his true target as an heir to Caesar? Cleopatra VII was a legitimately recognized client ruler. While Octavian held an enormous amount of power as one of Rome's triumvirs, he didn't yet possess the full absolute power and hadn't yet usurped nearly all meaningful constitutional powers, not until he became Augustus in 27 BC, three years after he conquered Egypt. Even his proposed war against Antony met with stiff resistance until he couched it in terms that a foreign queen, Cleopatra, was illegally funding the military operations of a private citizen without holding office.

    Quote Originally Posted by Diocle View Post
    Perhaps Cleopatra was hoping in getting a sister of Julian blood for Caesarion (Ptolemaĩos Philopátor Philométor Kaĩsar), to marry him and save her bloodless dynastic line ..
    Heh! That would be a very Ptolemaic move on her part. Bring on the incest!

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    Have to agree. I think local instability was a threat too: when Rome broke up Makedonia they caused chaos for the Southern Balkans as the bulwark against Thrakian and Gallic incursions was removed, and they were forced to create a (heavily militarised) province within a decade. Romans like provinces with easily conquerable tribes to farm VPs for the cursus honorum: Egypt was unfamiliar terrain: it had a theocratic economy with an alien elite planted on a sullen peasantry, hardly suitable for aspiring magistrates to cut their teeth.
    That's another excellent point and another reason why the Romans were more interested in receiving many economic benefits of linking itself to Egypt without actually having the headache of ruling it directly. To be honest, her kingdom was the only one that fell during Octavian's war against Antony. Even client kingdoms that sided with Antony at first but switched over to Octavian's side were spared, including that of Herod (Octavian was apparently very impressed with his speech and sense of loyalty that he let him keep his kingdom). If Cleopatra had kept herself distant from all of this and never bothered to build a relationship with Antony but sided with Antony as soon as the war started, there could have even been a chance that Octavian would have been lenient with her like he was with Herod!

    That's why I think she made the wrong decision to hitch her fortunes on Antony, who was admittedly a storied veteran commander under Caesar, but simply too much of a gamble.

    As a Ptolemaic princess she was playing the Game of Throne with the usual stakes: I think she had no quiet retirement option. Her options were to bang the warlords or not bang the warlords: she gave herself a better chance to keep her throne and even influence affairs if she was close to Caesar and Anthony.

    She may even have podded Anthony to something like the excesses Augustan propaganda insists. Obviously it was mostly crap but Rome was inclining to monarchy already and within two generations would see heritable monarchy established. Maybe Cleopatra just punted early and as we know on the wrong horse. The Hellenised Romans found the Hellenistic East intoxicating, a victorious Anthony may have been the agent for a Hellenised West and a less divided Empire.
    I think Cleopatra simply let her success in nabbing Caesar, the most powerful Roman general up until that point, and having a child with him go to her head, especially since Caesar largely ignored his official wife. Cleopatra literally thought she could have Caesarion named as his heir when she was living in Italy at Caesar's villa at the time of his assassination. Octavian being named the official heir was the reason she eventually fled Italy with Caesarion back to Egypt where the distance was obviously safer (the longer she stayed in Italy, the worse it made her look to the Roman people as a meddler in their affairs, and it would have given Octavian the excuse he needed to end her and her son's life then and there).

    If Cleopatra were a bit less ambitious, I think she and her son would have lived much longer lives but would have been rather irrelevant or marginal in terms of Roman historiography, and certainly not popular or noteworthy enough to warrant a play by William Shakespeare.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Oda Nobunaga View Post
    I don't think there was one. The claims that Cleopatra was planning on manipulating Antony to take over Rome or whatever sounds completely made up. Octavian needed it to be true so that he could declare war on Cleopatra and thereby erode Antony's power base. Since he could not directly try to fight Antony as Antony was still too popular and had the support of the Republican faction. The Donations of Alexandria being cited as an example for debauchery but making client kings is hardly a case for this kind of corruption. Not at all different from what Caesar or Pompey would have done. Cleopatra was very much a Roman client.

    Antony was so under prepared for any conflict that he had to demobilize his legions of old veterans and recruit locally from Roman and Greek colonies, as well as native easterners. Something practically unheard of at the time. While Cleopatra's fleet was formidable Antony also had to pass emergency legislation in order to take ownership of the resources (so for example groves from temples) to expand his fleet and take additional measures to recruit laborers and ship crews. Antony was so much at a disadvantage that he tried to avoid a pitched battle.
    Yes, I think it was clever but rather transparent propaganda on Octavian's part to blow up the threat of Cleopatra beyond measure, as the eminent historian Ronald Syme argued (although he likewise downplayed her importance too much, I think). Cleopatra certainly had the funds to keep Antony afloat, her greatest asset being, well, her enormous assets ...and big...tracks of land (to quote Monty Python). The Latin poets during the reign of Augustus were sometimes sympathetic to her, showing that Augustus had not completely destroyed her image and that there were still a variety of opinions, but they generally painted a rather ridiculous picture of her as being an exotic sorceress who bewitched Antony with witchcraft and planned on toppling good honest Roman gods with animal headed ones, "furries" basically.

    You know, Anubis, Horus, and the like.

    Basically the Romans didn't want the furries and otherkin to take over.

    Those are great points about Antony desperately trying to even the odds with Octavian in terms of armed forces. Also, Antony's fleet at Actium in 31 BC might have been larger, but his crews were largely inexperienced compared to Octavian's naval fleet of veteran marines and professional sailors. In comparison Antony acquired a lot of arguably unreliable ones from merchant ships.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    You're saying a Western ruler made up false claims about an Eastern ruler preparing an attack and used it as justification to start a war?

    Octavian brought the furry animal-headed Egyptian terrorists to justice.
    Last edited by Love Mountain; December 15, 2019 at 05:22 PM.

  13. #13

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #12

    Winning Post - Dick Cheney, Cyclops, & Abdulmecid I
    Kulturkampf: Bismarck vs Papal Infallibility
    Brilliant, cautious, calculating, and pragmatic, these are just some of the words that only begin to describe the political genius of Otto Von Bismarck. If politics were ever a game of chess, then Bismarck was always eight moves ahead of everybody else. He is the main architect of German unification (successfully defeating Austrian influence through Realpolitik), and the mastermind behind three quick and successful wars with Denmark, France, and Austria. In each case, he skillfully used diplomacy and manipulation to ensure that Prussia exited the war with more allies than it had previously. Yet, he was not above compromising and using reconciliation and treaties as a tool for political power, often allowing his defeated opponents to align with him for mutual benefit. In each case, Bismarck’s genius was in isolating his enemies. Knowing when to deal and when to fold.


    The Iron Chancellor


    After uniting the German states under Prussian rule, one major obstacle remained that threaten Prussia’s version of German nationalism, Pope Pius IX and the Catholic Church.


    An opponent unlike any other, the Pope’s powers had traditionally been far reaching. Able to claim legitimacy and independence of any state government (the closest thing to a sovereign multi-national body), Bismarck’s primarily concern was that Germany’s Catholic population and clergy would be more loyal to the Church in Rome than to the state. This of course was very problematic when Roman Catholics in Germany numbered 15 million (36.5% of the population) and the fact that they were disproportionately located in Polish communities, areas of the Reich that did not speak German and often clashed violently with Prussian settlers. Those Poles of course, who weren’t Catholic, also tended to be social democrats, whereas working in communal mines and farming villages differed significantly with both Prussian landowners (who valued private estates) and Progressive bureaucrats who valued free-trade. Combine these cultural differences (the Polish Question) with the fact that Prussia’s constitution had traditionally respected and guaranteed special autonomy and freedoms to Roman Catholics (including state funding for catholic schools and a private council of bishops who could meet and petition the government) and you have the makings of ruin for national identity. 60% of Germany’s population was Protestant, its true, and they also had similar constitutional privileges to their Catholic counterparts, yet Protestants and Lutherans were not nearly as global, multinational, or political (with a sovereign figure) as the Catholic Church. Of major concern, and a slap to German nationalists, was the fact that a non-German Pope still appointed non German Bishops, who in turn ran the schools, ran the charities, ran the hospitals, handled marriages, spoke foreign languages, lived in separate communities, published newspapers, and ran most parishes, in many cases with constitutional protection and state backing – including legitimacy and authority that came from God. A reckoning and war between Church and State was coming.


    Bismarck vs. Pope Pius IX - Kulturkampf (1871-1879)


    It’s unclear who fired first, historians like to say that the Vatican’s official proclamation of Papal Infallibility in 1870 was a direct attack against Liberalism. The decree proclaimed the Pope’s authority over Christian dogma to be binding and infallible, completely immune to the possibility of error, a ridiculous moral assertion, yet godly if ever put into practice. Bismarck’s obvious fears were the loss of state power to papal decrees and any chance of regulating the Church with any kind of tangible authority (an infallible Pope would also lead to infallible ministers). Yet, historians should note that Pope Pius IX was playing a weak hand, having lost temporal power the same year to the kingdom of Italy, and not too many Europeans or Catholics were willing to restore the Papal States. Ultramontanism (including Papal Infallibility) was thus the Vatican’s way of adapting the Pope’s authority for the future – it no longer needed a physical kingdom for legitimacy because the Pope’s authority came from God, and his actual subjects were the spiritual followers of Christ. In this sense, the Church was adapting itself to the times, a strictly religious role and spiritual kingdom without borders. Yet secularism was on the rise, along with scientific literacy and liberalism, and Papal Infallibility (now codified for the first time) was not a popular proposal with philosophical and intellectual thinkers, including many Catholics who believed Papal Infallibility -along with the recent Syllabus of Errors- went too far. It is not inconceivable then, that Bismarck and his coalition saw an opportunity.


    Bismarck’s overall goal again, was to separate church from state and protect German national identity (albeit with Prussian preferences), and his first step was to exercise state authority over education and religious/government appointments. To do this though, he would need to isolate Germany’s new Centre Party – a coalition of German Catholics and German minorities. Though not large enough to take on Liberals, Conservative, or Protestant factions, it was still a force (and legislative annoyance) that needed to be dealt with.


    Under the guise of “equality” and “equal protection of the laws,” Kulturkampf began with the creation of the Ministry of Culture (a fusion of separate Catholic and Protestant education wings) to oversee the future regulation and state inspection of all public and private schools – including Catholic ones. The next law immediately enacted was the Pulpit Law, a controversial new law that could in theory imprison Catholic priests and clergymen who voiced poltical opionions before a crowd or national assembly. Bismarck’s strategy then, and justification, was the classic secularist argument for the separation of Church and State, - the Church (Bismarck argued) had no right to interfere with or dictate state politics. Yet, unlike the American model (and German constitution), the German parliament was also clearly enacting laws that interfered with the free governance of religion. Bismarck countered however, with the claim that the German Centre Party was monopolized by Rome, and its interests were a clear obstacle to individual freedom and a healthy separation of Church and State. Winning arguments it appeared for both liberal secularists, conservatives, and anti-Catholic factions. Bismarck, it seemed, would win by isolating his opponents once again.

    Bismarck on the purpose of the Kulturkampf, Speech in the Prussian House of Lords, March 10th 1873
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

    :https://www.zum.de/psm/imperialismus/bismarck3e.php

    "The question we currently deal with, in my opinion, is falsely described, and the perspective by which we look at it, is a wrong one, if one regards it as a confessional one. It is mainly a political one; it is not about the struggle, as our Catholic fellow citizens are told, of a Protestant dynasty against the Catholic church, it is not a struggle between believers and unbelievers, it is the age-old struggle between kingship and priesthood, a power struggle as old as mankind, older than the appearance on earth of our saviour, the power struggle Agamemnon fought with his seers in Aulis, the power struggle which shaped the German history in the Middle Ages, leading to the desintegration of the German Empire, in the form of the conflict between emperors and popes, and which resulted in the execution of the last descendant of the illustrious Swabian dynasty by the axe of a French conqueror, a French conqueror alied with the pope.


    This power struggle is subject to the same conditions as any other struggle; it is a misinterpretation of the question with the object to impress people without judgment, if it is described as a matter of oppression of the church. It is a matter of defense of the state, of a delimitation, inhowhar priesthood and inhowfar royal rule shall reach, this delimitation has to be found in a way that the state can continue to exist. Because in this world the state claims both authority and priority."




    What Bismarck did not anticipate however, was a wave of cultural resentment that centered in Prussia.

    Though Bismarck’s initial goal was to regulate Church influence -as it pertained to politics-, it was not to defeat or extinguish Catholicism itself. A pragmatic, but impossible goal given the prejudices of his coalition. Prussians despised Catholic Poles and considered them Reichsfeinde (enemies of the Reich). Polish migrations to the Ruhr area were also viewed with deep cultural suspicion, and evidence of a nationalist takeover. Meanwhile, liberal secularists saw state inspections of all Prussian schools as a way to finally outlaw religion in the classroom, the ultimate triumph of progress over tradition. Additionally, conservative leaders, along with Protestant allies, jumped at the chance to declare a culture war on Catholics, pushing for even more measures of Germanization and an end to cultural and racial impurities. Even Bismarck, who so often separated policy from ideology, betrayed his ideological leanings when he suggested European leaders ought to help select the next Pope, and that the Polish question would only be settled through violence or deportation. The end result was an uncontrollable wave of anti-Catholic sentiment, and a series of new laws and policies that were aimed at controlling and dissembling the Catholic Church in Prussia.


    Beginning in 1872, Prussia’s Parliament (separate from the Reichstag) passed the School Supervision Act, which formally removed Catholic curriculums and clergy from Prussian schools. And on the national side, Bismarck expelled the Jesuits from Germany when Pope Pius IX refused to recognize Germany’s ambassador (a Cardinal who had opposed Papal Infallibility) or temper public support for Germany’s Centre Party. Prussia’s constitution was also amended to accommodate the new laws, and many Catholic ministers were removed from office. Finally, amid obvious protesting from German Catholics and Catholic Bishops, formal diplomatic relations between Germany and Rome were suspended. The culture war was on.


    The crisis reached a fever pitch however with the appointment of Adalbert Falk to the Ministry of Education. For his part, Adalbert Falk attempted to place strict government control over religious training and ecclesiastical appointments, eventually leading to the controversial May Laws in 1873. These laws -while intending to disrupt the Pope’s connections to German seminaries- gave the government far reaching powers to regulate and select Priests. Priests who refused to submit themselves to special state exams and disciplinary courts faced fines, imprisonment, and exile. In addition, new legislation was passed that allowed state incentives for German citizens to leave Catholic orders, and in 1874 a new state law was passed that allowed civil marriages for the first time.


    “WE WILL NOT GO TO CANOSSA!”

    -Otto Von Bismarck, 1872. Inferred from Canossa speech to Reichstag

    Catholic opposition to Kulturkampf and the May Laws of course was immense. Nearly all German bishops, clergy and laymen rejected the legality of the new laws, with the Pope himself publically decrying them. Nearly 1,800 Priests were imprisoned, and a third of all monasteries and churches in Prussia were closed due to vacancies. Though there were instances of violence, many Catholics chose to leave the country, others sought more passive forms of resistance. Those that stayed sought and hosted mass and Sunday schools in their homes, others setup underground charities to support and fund non-government priests. For their part, Catholic Bishops issued formal letters of dissent and the number of Catholic newspapers -both public and underground- grew. The Centre Party also nearly doubled in size – both in the Reichstag and Prussian Parliament, and its leader, Ludwig Windthorst, became a popular hero for German minorities.


    The one exception to an otherwise peaceful opposition was the attempted assassination of Otto Von Bismarck. While the perpetrator clearly acted alone, its aftermath gave security officials political cover to confiscate church property in the event Catholics did not comply with state mandates, though other retaliatory measures included the confiscation of Catholic newspapers and the extradition of Catholic bishops.


    In all, Kulturkampf had the opposite effect of what Bismarck had intended. Rather then push Catholics towards the state, many felt unjustly persecuted, which made their participation in the Centre Party essential. Living under a police state -including threats of extradition and constant supervision- also forced Prussian Catholics to rely more on each other and their communities, both for spiritual care and protection. Of particular embarrassment to non-Catholic Liberals -who otherwise supported Kulturkampf- was the house arrest of several elderly bishops and archbishops, many in their 70s and 80s. Many ties between Rome and German Catholics were also strengthened.


    By 1878, Bismarck’s coalition was finally showing its weakness. Liberals could no longer support Kulturkampf if it did not advance individual freedom. An all-powerful authoritarian government -which could fine, imprison, and extricate citizens who voiced political dissent- also ran contrary to liberal ideas. Protestants themselves were also growing wary of state intervention in public schools; the loss of religious teaching, and religious ministers, made them feel as if Germany and Prussia were becoming a heathen state. Even Junkers and Conservatives -members of Bismarck’s own political class- resented the loss of Christian traditions, including Christian marriages. Most alarming to Bismarck however, was the rise of a Socialist Movement, which took Kulturkampf as an opportunity to attack all religions. Seeing the writing the on the wall -including the Centre Party which was growing stronger- Bismarck took it upon himself to personally resolve the culture war.


    Bismarck’s opportunity came with the death of Pope Pius IX and coronation of Pope Leo III in 1879. In this event, Bismarck acted brilliantly. He entered direct negotiations with Pope Leo III, sidestepping the Reichstag, but also the Centre Party. During negotiations he was able to receive concessions, which included papal support for a civil registry of German clerics, in return for a slow process of repealing the Kulturkampf laws. Bismarck also restored diplomatic relations and supported the Pope in international affairs, including a Spanish territorial dispute, which allowed the Pope to abstain on Bismarck’s domestic agenda, such as public education and military spending. But by pardoning bishops, restoring diplomatic relations, and supporting the Pope on international affairs, Bismarck was awarded the Supreme Order of Christ, becoming the first Protestant to ever receive an award for Catholic chivalry. For his part, and arguably weak hand, Pope Leo III gained a powerful ally in Germany on a continent that was becoming ever more hostile to theology and Catholic tradition. Yet, by waiting for the death of Pope Pius IX, Bismarck was able to substitute his feud with Catholic ideology with Pope Pius’s personality, a brilliant safe facing measure that helped make political reconciliation possible – including an alliance with the Centre Party against the socialists. Germany’s relations with Austria were also secured through the Dual Alliance, an unlikely event if Prussian Protestants had been allowed to dominate German politics. In short however, by securing political interests, not yielding to the Centre Party, and showcasing remarkable restraint, Bismarck also showed that Germany would bow to no power but its own.

    Did the Romans know there were other lands such as in China, Russia, India, Mongolia, Southern Africa, etc?
    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    Yeah, except the first Indo-European expansions. The Yamnaya Culture had developed from two constituent populations but were a pretty homogeneous blend of the two by the time they expanded across the steppe. They developed pastoralism and lactase persistence, which meant they could support a population density many times greater than the hunter-gathers whose territory they were expanding into. The lactase persistence is key, because it meant others couldn't just emulate their means of subsistence and be as successful at it. Which is probably part of the reason why all steppe cultures after the fact had some ancestry from that original expansion.
    Is their a less pronounced carbohydrate digestion enzyme/gut flora/tolerance issue with the Mesopotamian/Anatolian farmer wave? I imagine the "barrier" to eating a cereal diet for HGs is lower as it were, but still something. The experience for naive Austra;lian Aboriginal populations is poor dental and digestive health, not just from sugar and alcohol but even from flour.

    Makes me think when I share my porridge with Cyclops Jnr every morning what I'm really doing is celebrating twin genocide-by-replacement events. "The oats represent the Borging of Mesolithic Europeans, the milk is for the Yamnaya rapist-warriors, and the salt is the tears of their victims. We add honey at the end because screw the bees, right?"

    The latest anti-liberal rant thread (get your daily dose here)
    Don't you know, calling a spade a spade is now a taboo, according to reactionary political correctness. This is why the the term "alt-right" was invented as a convenient euphemism, before being also tainted by the violent acts of its fandom. In any case, saying that racist activists are misrepresenting the situation in South Africa in order to promote their bigotry is a mere statement of fact, while Basil's ignoring evidence under the pretext of lack of impartiality is the easiest and most common logical fallacy.
    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPerson2000 View Post
    Yet the the paper on Genocide Watch clearly says that although it was on stage 5.
    To be precise, it's not on stage five, but simply fulfills three criteria, classification (no. 1), symbolisation (no. 2) and polarisation (no. 5). In comparison, Basil's narrative about the threat of liberal vermins match not only the aforementioned categories, but also dehumanisation (no. 3), so, in a rather ironic twist, Basil's view on "liberals" is slightly more genocidal than the situation white farmers face in South Africa. Moreover, that's the second time Basil's own source directly contradicts his claims, which is why I expect both Daily Fail and Genocide Watch soon being labelled as the puppets of cosmopolital Bolshevism.
    Quote Originally Posted by Basil II the B.S View Post
    You claim SAF is not a model for liberals.... yet immediatelly get defensive about it?
    Presenting evidence can hardly be described as getting defensive. If someone argued that Casa Pound's membership is literally composed of tortoises, I would still dismiss this accusation, without of course defending them or endorsing their ideas. Arguing to discover the truth is the oldest form of debating, before right-wing post-modernism wrecked our moral standards about bad-faith partisanship. Meanwhile, instead of actually challenging the data I cited, you chose to quickly reject them by questioning their credibility. So, how about leaving the "ad hominem" attacks aside for a bit and concentrate on disproving all these facts about white genocide being nonexistent in South Africa, white farmers actually being underrepresented in murders and crime actually being higher than in the Apartheid.
    Last edited by Love Mountain; December 15, 2019 at 05:21 PM.

  14. #14

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #13

    Winning Post - sumskilz
    To my surprise, I just learn today a Jew can discriminate another Jew racially in Israel
    You cannot measure "jewish DNA". What that even means? Can you expain it to me? I understand white DNA or black DNA but Jewish DNA? I guess you promote the idea that Jews are gods chosen people and this is proved by their DNA? Sorry i am dumb and i dont get it[/QUOTE]

    What can be measured is common ancestry back to a relatively small population of individuals who lived in the Levant during the Iron Age. This ancestry constitutes about 50% of the genome of the average Polish or Irish Jew (to use your example). Whereas the average ethnically Polish or Irish person doesn't have any of this ancestry. Although it's not uncommon for a Polish or Irish person to have a very small percentage of this ancestry, say 1 or 2%, indicating they have some Jewish ancestors within the last several hundred years who presumably converted to Christianity. Most Jewish diaspora populations have about 50% ancestry from the original Levantine Jewish population, although it's higher in Iraqi Jews. This is because most diaspora populations were founded mostly by Jewish males and local women, whereas the Iraqi Jewish population was established by forcibly relocated populations from Israel and Judah during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods.

    In addition, the non-Levantine ancestry of a Polish or Irish Jew is rarely more than a couple percentage points Northern European, it is usually close to 50% Southern European (so unlikely to be from ethnically Polish or Irish people). This is not surprising because uniparental markers indicate that all European Jews are descended from a very small number of individuals. The male lineages are for the most part identical to the male lineages of other Jewish diaspora groups. This can be traced accurately because the Y-chromosome is passed down from father to son usually unchanged. The occasional mutation is rare enough that giant family trees can be constructed going back thousands of years. The same is true for mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to child usually unchanged. So we know for example, that 60% of Ashkenazi Jews are the direct maternal descendants of just four women. We know that the majority of all Jewish Kohenim males in almost all diaspora groups descend from just a few men who lived about 3,000 years ago.

    Counter to your unsupported assertion earlier that a Polish and Irish Jew have nothing in common except being white, they in fact have so much in common that they are at least as similar to each other as an Irish person is to his/her Irish fourth cousin and at least similar to each other as a Polish person is to his/her fourth cousin. This is because only about 350 individuals have contributed to the Ashkenazi gene pool. When Ashkenazi Jews get their DNA tested by commercial testing companies, these companies literally identify every other Ashkenazi Jew in their database as a close relative. This is because such systems are calibrated for typical customers rather than those from traditionally endogamous enthoreligious groups.



    Runner Up Post - Lord Oda Nobunaga and Dick Cheney
    What if D day had failed
    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    Fair enough and my perception of Rundstedt is very likely coloured by his first two campaigns. Not sure about him "following a script" though, the so called Manstein plan was prepared on Runstedt's orders as a reaction to Fall Gelb. of course everyone claimed responsibility for the plan after it had succeeded and I accept the argument that German tactical capability plus French morale problems may have meant the original plan (if it had ot fallen into WAllied hands) might have worked too.
    Rundstedt approved of Mansteins suggestions. But the actual war plan was largely put together on OKW's initiative and by the OKH and its officers as the workers. Largely the decision to carry out an Ardennes attack and to draw the plans which are based on Manstein's suggestions was due to a series of war games which were organized. The German team won by a landslide and then every officer supported it. But the final plan was based on the Manstein Plan. I guess this speaks favorably of Rundstedt for recognizing that the original plans were insufficient. Rundstedt's real credit goes towards carrying out the final plan but it is worth considering that when the operations were actually carried out, French deployments prevented the Allies from actually doing anything about it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    I do think Runstedt's classic Prussian (OK he was a Saxon by Prussian style) leadership allowed the feisty subordinates in Guderian Rommel etc to burst through and, disobeying orders, exploit around the rear of the WAllied forces.

    I am assuming you are referring to the events after Sedan had already fallen? If I recall Rundstedt actually ordered all Panzer units to halt (and this is also around the events of Dunkirk). The plan was to take Sedan and move up the rivers towards the coast. I don't think Rundstedt was in support of their later actions, which were insubordinate. Rommel and Guderian are often glorified in the historiography but in my opinion it can be debated how necessary their independent actions really were.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    In 1941 Rundstedt methodically tackled the enormous cmcetration of Soviet forces in Ukraine, driving them back and setting them up for the horrifying kesselschlact at Kiev ( albeit aided by Guderians fateful wheel to the right. Yes Stalins orders crippled the Soviets but it was Hitler's orders that drove the Werhmacht beyond sensible and fensible positions for the crippling Winter counterattack. I thought Runstedt's Barabarossa campaign was textbook and thorough, which annoyed Hitler who was expecting unrealistic results.

    [edit] Just a comment about my PoV, I've tried a few table top games (Columbia, TK and TK2, bunch of others) so i definitely have a western bias. The Eastern Front is a nightmare to represent and to conduct. My particular perception is the narrow front south of the Pripyet marshes where Rundstedt faced the largest concentration of armoured and mechanised forces in the world in 1941 is a very tough nut to crack. Yes Stalin's stupid "no aggro" orders mean there's a rapid push back in the first month but it develops into relatively open country with a terrible supply net for the Germans and a great supply net (into the huge hub at Kiev) for the Soviets. The advances into Ukraine may not have occurred at the same pace as the northern blitz but it faced more opposition in greater depth.
    ah, If you mean operationally then sure. Rundstedt did well enough at Kiev but in large part the success was due to orders issued from above. At the time Rundstedt was asking for immediate reinforcements and support. Something which Hitler was willing to do, but which went against the desires of people like Guderian, von Bock etc. Yet later Rundstedt seems to have joined the "attack Moscow" clique. In his memoires he also claims to have supported and strongly urged an attack on Moscow. His later performance on the Don was by no means exceptional. Was he correct about not being able to take Rostov? Yeah maybe. But I think above all his removal was actually about Hitler's desire to remove the more traditional Wehrmacht "Prussians" after the debacle of Operation Typhoon. Despite Rundstedt's nay saying the campaign in the Don was necessary and this is demonstrated by Stalin's fervent defense of the region simultaneous to Typhoon.

    Minor side note but I always found it interesting that Rundstedt was given command of the main attack in 1939 and 1940 but in 1941 he was given the secondary Army Group South and von Bock was given the main thrust instead of playing support.

    How important was Thermopylae?
    For starters, no Thermopylae did not change the world, the Greeks did not win, freedom and democracy were not preserved, and the Persian invasion was not significantly halted. In truth, Athens still burned and the Spartans did not die alone.

    Now that these popular myths are out of the way, how important was Thermopylae?



    Militarily, Thermopylae was a well-planned battle that maximized the advantages of holding narrow terrain. A narrow pass meant that Xerxes could not deploy his entire army around the Greek phalanx. Thermopylae’s location also helped force the naval battle at Artemisium, which for obvious reasons, threaten the resupply and longevity of Xerxes army in the field if successful.

    In short, Thermopylae did make sense as a holding action if the intent was to win the navy battle at Artemisium. As a delaying action, general engagement, or even a last stand (as popular histories go) not so much. In fact, given the performance of the Phocians at guarding the pass around Thermopylae, the battle could even be described as a blunder. No one should have been surprised -least of all Leonidas- that the Persians would try to find a way around Thermopylae after having failed with frontal assaults. Not appointing quality sentries to guard such a critical juncture then is hard to excuse.

    Having said that, Thermopylae arguably did provide some shock value. The greatest land army ever seen -in the presence of Xerxes himself- was stopped for three days. However, its not clear exactly -as its been argued intelligently on these forums before- how many Persians died at Thermopylae (only Herodotus says 20,000). No matter the blow to Persian morale (or loss of troops), it was not enough to dent the Persian advance, and probably still not as significant as the death of a spartan king or the sack of Athens.

    In short conclusion, I’d argue Thermopylae was mostly insignificant. The entire war was still left to be determined. And more than decisiveness, the battle of Thermopylae should be defined more by mistakes and opportunities lost then any kind of earth-shattering turning point for either side.

    Go tell the Spartans, oh stranger passing by, that Thermopylae, more or less, was something just to pass by.

  15. #15

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #14

    Winning Post - Kiritias
    The Myth of Orwellian Network Propaganda
    The argument of Orwellian propaganda depicting news coming from the alleged Left Media is a statement often dropped during the D&D threads, but to my knowledge a statement that hasn’t been tackled head on yet. So, hold on because this is going to be a bumpy ride. A lot of you will not like this thread but this is a discussion that we need to have at some point, debating the roots of what is now known as ‘alternative facts’ and what that means for our societies. Everyone is of course welcome in this thread and the more debate we can have, the better for all of us. I would please request that, since this is a sensitive subject for many people, you will debate with an open head.

    To begin with, how did Orwell came to be co-opted so many years after his death by the right-wing crusaders, bringing back his final warnings as an accusation to what the right-wingers consider ‘leftist propaganda’ and ‘thought policing’? The story begins with Orwell’s condemnation of the Soviet Unions’ actions in Barcelona in 1936…

    The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwell’s months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the country’s civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.

    Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia—and that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfare—he was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his life—but he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. “History stopped in 1936,” he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. “History stopped,” Lynskey writes, “and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.”

    Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th century—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boy—and their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskey’s account of the novel’s afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwell’s main target wasn’t just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.” But every work of art escapes the artist’s control—the more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.
    Of course Orwell meant with his condemnation more than to paint a picture of communism as the woe of all freedoms but taken with Orwell’s satirical novel The Animal Farm alone, the picture can be skewed to favor the right-wing narrative. In fact, he stated very clearly that

    If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
    What does that mean? According to this article, Orwell’s position was more in line with the war-time UK’s voluntary self-censorship than the condemnation to communism that we generally believe it meant

    The “discomfort” of intellectual honesty, Orwell writes, meant that even during wartime, with the Ministry of Information’s often ham-fisted attempts at press censorship, “the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.” Self-censorship came down to matters of decorum, Orwell argues—or as we would put it today, “civility.” Obedience to “an orthodoxy” meant that while “it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other… it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness," not by government agents, but by a critical backlash aimed at preserving a sense of “normalcy” at all costs.

    At stake for Orwell is no less than the fundamental liberal principle of free speech, in defense of which he invokes the famous quote from Voltaire as well as Rosa Luxembourg’s definition of freedom as “freedom for the other fellow.” “Liberty of speech and of the press,” he writes, does not demand “absolute liberty”—though he stops short of defining its limits. But it does demand the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, even such truths as are, perhaps, politically inexpedient or detrimental to the prospects of a lucrative career. “If liberty means anything at all,” Orwell concludes, "it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
    But what makes something Orwellian? In the book 1984, Winston writes in his diary that

    Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four.
    Which means the ability of an individual to challenge any state imposed narrative that comes in conflict with their fundamental experiences of life. Simply put

    So too, in the real world, when state leaders and spokespersons can invent crimes and massacres, denounce the media for departing even slightly from the official party line, and entirely dismiss scientific findings, citizens have to decide whether they will likewise engage in doublethink-- if they will learn the “newspeak” and concede that two plus two is whatever they're told it is.
    Which brings me to this very important article published in 2014. I’ll quote its abstract below

    This article offers an academic critique of new media culture, as viewed comparatively with George Orwell's "1984." The author makes the argument that a number of plot elements of "1984" are reflected within contemporary Western societies. The assertion is made that these parallels have developed as a consequence of new media technologies. An over-arching position is taken that real-world governments have utilised new media technologies in ways that make themselves comparable to Orwell's fictional "Big Brother". The author begins by describing the socio-political landscape at the time Orwell wrote the novel. The next section addresses recent examples of ways in which government agencies have used new media technologies as a surveillance tool. The author posits that the US government uses new media technology as a propaganda tool. Through use of new media, the USA attempts to limit the ability of people to reject its narratives. In the final section, the author details the ways in which new media technologies are contributing to the destruction of language and knowledge. The author's concluding argument is that the negative effects of new media technology can only be ameliorated through critical thought.
    I would like to see how you feel about the argument of liberal orwellian networks right about now so I’m going to stop my argumentation here momentarily. Please give your two cents before we begin.

    Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14



    Runner Up Post - sumskilz
    The Historicity of the Biblical Texts 1000-586 BCE
    Quote Originally Posted by Common Soldier View Post
    Contrary to what you have repeatedly claimed, Finkelstein has not disprove the previous chronology, not is dead as you assert. The dating available to us is not precise enough to rule out either Finkelsteins's or the mre traditional fhrnology.
    From the perspective of mainstream archaeology, it is dead without a doubt. This is every original academic publication relevant to the debate. You will not find a single one arguing in favor of the conventional chronology since 2005 when Mazar introduced his first iteration of the modified conventional chronology.

    On the other hand:

    ABSTRACT: Nearly a decade ago, a different chronology than the conventional absolute chronology for the early Iron Age in Israel was suggested. The new, lower chronology “transfers” Iron Age I and Iron Age IIA contexts in Israel, traditionally dated to the 11th and 10th centuries BCE, to the 10th and 9th centuries, respectively. Thus, it places the Iron I|IIA transition at about 920–900 BCE. This alternative chronology carries important implications for Israelite history, historiography, and Bible research, as well as for the chronologies of other regions around the Mediterranean. Relevant radiocarbon data sets published to date, which were measured at different sites by different laboratories, were claimed to be incompatible. Therefore, the question of agreement between laboratories and dating methods needs to be addressed at the outset of any study attempting to resolve such a tight chronological dilemma. This paper addresses results pertaining to this issue as part of a comprehensive attempt to date the early Iron Age in Israel based on many sites, employing different measuring techniques in 2 laboratories. The intercomparison results demonstrate that: a) the agreement between the 2 laboratories is well within the standard in the 14C community and that no bias can be detected in either laboratory; and b) calculating the Iron I|IIa transition in 3 different ways (twice independently by the measurements obtained at the 2 labs and then by combining the dates of both) indicates that the lower chronology is the preferable one.
    Dating the Iron Age I/II Transition in Israel: First Intercomparison Results

    That is even lower than what Finkelstein proposed. Taking just this one line of the mutually supporting streams of data, explain how one reasonably arrives at a date of 1000 BCE for the Iron I/II transition:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    Quote Originally Posted by Common Soldier View Post
    And Finkelstein has denied there was A King David in any meaningful sense. If he has now been willing to admit there was, is that potential archeological find with a reference to the House of David might make that position untenable, so he is simply hedging his bet if he find proves genuine.
    I don't know for certain what you mean by "meaningful sense", but this claim doesn't make sense. Finkelstein's The Archaeology of the United Monarchy: an Alternative View was published in 1996. Both parts of the Tel Dan Stele had been found by 1994, Finkelstein was well aware of it at the time.

    This is exactly what he said in that first paper:

    Needless to say, all this has nothing to do with the question of the historicity of the United Monarchy. The kingdom of David and Solomon could have been a chiefdom, or an early state, in a stage of territorial expansion, but with no monumental construction and advanced administration. Examples of such a historical polity are abundant, for instance the early phase of the history of the Ottoman Turks. They can also be found in the history of Palestine, for example in the large territorial entity of Shechem of the Amarna period.
    Quote Originally Posted by Common Soldier View Post
    Finkelstein only acknowledged the Omrides because he has no choice, since there is solid archeological evidence for their existence, and he can't push the dates for the structures found any later than he has. Finkelstein would be denying the exist of Ahab and the other Israelite and Judean king's if he could, but unfortunately actual archeological evidence doesn't allow him to. In the 19th century, predecessors of Finkelstein were saying that all of the history in the Bible was completely a myth, and that none of the kids of Israel and Judea in the Bible existed. They only retreated from that stance when actual archeology showed them to be wrong. Theirs and Finkelstein assumption unless there is positive archeological evidence, then what ver the Bible said must be unhistorifsl. Only if there is solid archeology that prevents them from denying that something was unhistorical will they acknowledge that it was. Finkelstein would be denying the biblical account of the Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem if rhe Assyrian accounts hadn't been found corroborating the biblical ones.
    I'm not sure where you get all this insight into Finkelstein's motivations and modus operandi. I've known him since 2013. I literally learned field archaeology from him, and I don't recognize your characterization. His arguments aren't based on lack of positive archaeological evidence alone, but negative archaeological evidence as well. That is there are things you would expect to see if an empire was ruled from Jerusalem that can't be found when you look for them. You would also expect that there would at least be some sign of Judahite material culture at the copper mines in Timna, yet it appears to have been an entirely Edomite operation. None of that means David and Solomon didn't exist, but it does suggest their stories have been exaggerated.

    Quote Originally Posted by Common Soldier View Post
    The accuracy of such details as the Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem ans Hezekiah's building of a water tunnel implies that who ever wrote those accounts had to have some kind of historical records available to them.
    As I said in my previous post, the Book of Kings relies on the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Israel and the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah. It is not surprising that whatever elaborations the author(s) engaged in would be more accurate the closer they are to the time it was written.[/QUOTE]

  16. #16

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #15

    Winning Post - Roma_Victrix
    Is Spain basically Vietnam?
    ...In terms of hellish, endless, resource-draining guerrilla warfare, that is.
    Napoleon Bonaparte once called the Peninsular War his "Spanish ulcer".

    PROLOGUE: Yep, probably Vietnam
    The Archaic Greeks who settled the eastern shores of Spain didn't bother to quell the interior too far beyond their major poleis such as Emporion, but they probably would have run into lots of headaches doing so. Let's take a look at a long list of reasons why invading and attempting to occupy Spain is a royal pain in the rear. It's honestly comparable to the situation the ancient and medieval Chinese often faced when attempting to conquer and hold northern Vietnam from the 2nd century BC onward, plus their failed attempts to take the Kingdom of Champa in southern Vietnam, or the colonial French and Cold War era Americans who came long after them.

    For a quick summary of the Chinese domination of Vietnam, the Qin Chinese military officer Zhao Tuo established his own Kingdom of Nanyue (Nam Viet) in 214 BC over parts of southern China and northern Vietnam. China's Emperor Wu of Western Han conquered this vassal kingdom in 111 BC, but all was not well. The grueling guerrilla warfare there against the Chinese all started with the rebellion of the Trưng Sisters from 40 to 43 AD during the Eastern Han dynasty. This was followed by several rebellions over the next millennia that established native dynasties like the Early Ly (conquered by China's Sui dynasty in 602 AD) and finally the Ngo dynasty that managed to defeat the Southern Han Chinese at the Battle of Bach Dang in 938 AD. The Vietnamese won their independence! Or so they thought... The Chinese would be back for round four of their attempt to dominate Vietnam with the Ming conquest of the Ho dynasty in 1406, but true to character, the Vietnamese would use guerrilla tactics to drive out Ming dynasty Chinese troops by 1427, leading to the formation of the Later Le dynasty.

    Perhaps the Chinese learned their lesson from the previous four rounds when they decided to keep it brief in the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, taking a few cities in the north in a punitive expedition before withdrawing and declaring victory in defense of their ally Cambodia (which Vietnam was then occupying). The French were certainly determined to hold onto Vietnam despite the natives' successful use of guerrilla warfare, which the Americans would soon discover in the Vietnam War, but for the sake or brevity I'm just going to assume you know about all of that already. Now, on to the Iberian Peninsula we go!

    CARTHAGINIANS, ROMANS, CELTIBERIANS, AND LUSITANIANS:
    Okay, really starting to look like Vietnam, you guys

    * The Carthaginians expanded their control over large parts of the Iberian peninsula under Hamilcar Barca, the father of the famous Hannibal. However, Hamilcar died in 228 BC fighting the Vettoni tribes, drowning in a river perhaps after an ambush by a false friend and erstwhile ally of the Oretani tribe. That would be somewhat of a harbinger of things to come.

    * In the Second Punic War (218 - 201 BC), Carthaginian troops and authorities were chased out of Spain by victorious Romans such as Publius Cornelius Scipio, later Scipio Africanus. However, the Roman Republic would have a hell of a time trying to hold let alone conquer the rest of the peninsula. The Celtiberian Wars (181 - 151 BC) were incredibly brutal and the natives terrorized the Romans with hit-and-run tactics. Meanwhile, the Lusitanians in what is now southern Spain and Portugal were led by a famous guerrilla leader Viriathus, who defied Roman rule in Hispania Ulterior. He was only felled after being betrayed and murdered by a few so-called companions in 139 BC.

    * The Numantine War (143 - 133 BC) was again another bloody insurrection against Roman rule in Hispania Citerior, but after the people of the city of Numantia committed mass suicide to avoid slaughter or enslavement after a long siege, the peninsula was rather quiet for several decades...until the Sertorian War (80 - 72 BC). The Roman statesman Quintus Sertorius carried out a civil war against his political rival Sulla and became famous for his guerrilla tactics, relying on fellow Romans as well as Iberian natives to continue the fight. Much like Viriathus, he was largely unbeatable in the field and only taken down when assassinated by Marcus Perperna Vento, who in turn was defeated by Pompey the Great.

    * A few decades after the dictatorship of Sulla came that of Julius Caesar, when Roman Hispania became the last of several staging grounds for a civil war against him after he crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. Caesar dealt with Optimates in North Africa at the Battle of Thapsus in 46 BC, but he would still have to face Titus Labienus, one of his famous officers in Gaul, and Gnaeus Pompeius, son of Pompey the Great, who were leading the insurrection against him in Spain. At The Battle of Munda in 45 BC Caesar finally defeated their forces and returned to Rome in triumph.

    * It's important to note that the Romans didn't even control all of Spain at this point, either. It wasn't until the reign of Augustus (27 BC - 14 AD) that a large northern chunk of the Iberian peninsula was finally militarily subdued and slowly assimilated into Roman culture. This occurred only after marshaling together a conquering force of eight legions and auxiliaries in the decade-long Cantabrian Wars (29 - 19 BC), and afterwards two Roman legions had to be permanently stationed there to ensure the peace. This mountainous northern region that was home to the Celtic Cantabri and Astures tribes will become relevant later as we enter the Middle Ages.

    SUEBI, VISIGOTHS, EASTERN ROMANS/BYZANTINES, BASQUES, ARABS/MOORS, FRANKS, AND A FOOLISH CRUSADE AGAINST ARAGON:
    Okay, is Spain located somewhere in Southeast Asia, like next to Vietnam?

    * The Visigoths, foederati allies of the Romans in late antiquity, fought the Suebi for control of the Iberian peninsula. Under their king Euric the Visigoths also defeated the Romans at the Battle of Arles in 471 AD. Euric, previously considered a Roman legate, was recognized as an independent king by Western Emperor Julius Nepos in 475 AD, just a year before the Fall of the Western Roman Empire.

    * In his civil war against king Agila I beginning in 549, the Visigothic usurper Athanagild invited the Eastern Romans (Byzantines) under Justinian I the Great to assist him. Unsurprisingly, Justinian's reinforcements took over much of southern Spain and planned to stay there, doing so for the next several decades but ultimately unable to maintain their toehold for very long (what a surprise). Meanwhile, in 585 the Visigoths under Athanagild's brother Liuvigild conquered the Kingdom of the Suebi in Portugal and led campaigns against the rebellious Basques up north in the Pyrenees. The Basques were a non-Indo European people who would remain a perennial problem for various generations of Spanish authorities into the modern age.

    * The Umayyad Caliphate conquered the Visigothic Kingdom of Spain in 711, introducing Arab Islamic rule for the first time and leading to things like the Mozarabic Romance language spoken by Christians under Muslim rulers. However, the Arabs/Berbers/Moors made the mistake of trying to focus on Frankish Gaul instead of dealing with the last remnants of rebellious Christian forces gathering in that rocky region of the north we talked about earlier. In 718, the Visigothic nobleman Pelagius of Asturias founded the defiant Christian Kingdom of Asturias in that precise region where Augustus had finally squashed the Cantabri and Astures centuries before. Almost from the very onset of Islamic rule, the Spanish Reconquista had begun.

    * The Franks under Charles Martel defeated the Umayyad governor of al-Andalus, al-Ghafiqi, at the Battle of Tours in 732, while his successor Pepin the Short secured Septimania and Aquitaine in southern Gaul. This allowed the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (crowned emperor of Romans by the pope in 800 AD and founder of the Carolingian Empire) to move his forces south of the Pyrenees to establish the March of Barcelona, or the Marca Hispanica, in 795. The regions of Catalonia and Aragon were subdued, with the county of Barcelona being completely taken by 801. Charlemagne also developed a political, religious, and military alliance with Alfonso II of Asturias in their attacks on the Moors of Andalusia, now under the Umayyad Emirate of Cordoba established by Abd al-Rahman I in 756 after the fall of the Umayyads to the Abbasid Caliphate.

    * After Al-Hakam I scored a victory for the Emirate of Cordoba at Pancorbo in 816, defeating the pro-Frankish forces of Asturias, the wily Basque freedom fighter Íñigo Arista of Pamplona saw his chance to rise and became the first King of Pamplona, allying with the Banu Qasi dynasty of Muladi Muslim rulers along the Ebro river. They defeated the Carolingian Franks at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 824, the same place where they had once defeated Charlemagne in 778, and secured an independent Kingdom of Pamplona in the process.

    * I could go into lengthy detail about the Reconquista slogging match between Asturias' Christian successors Leon and Castile against the Emirate of Cordoba, the Almoravid dynasty, the Almohad Caliphate, the Taifa kingdoms and Emirate of Granada, with complicated figures along the way like the 11th-century warrior El Cid who fought for both Muslim and Christian rulers, but I think you get the point, this post is getting way too long, and we need to cover Napoleon, goddamn it.

    * Before that, however, I will mention the Aragonese Crusade (1284 - 1285) called by Pope Martin IV against Peter III of Aragon, part of the larger War of the Sicilian Vespers. The pope guaranteed Philip III of France that his son Charles, Count of Valois, would be bestowed with the Aragonese throne, but this would not come to pass, even as Philip took Girona and Charles was crowned there without an official crown of Aragon. The French naval fleet was wrecked at the Battle of Les Formigues by the Aragonese admiral Roger of Lauria and the French army suffered dysentery, which I would love to link to invaders of Vietnam suffering from malaria, but not the same thing. The French king died of dysentery just after reentering French territory, but his withdrawing troops traveling behind him were destroyed at the Battle of the Col de Panissars. On that note, the treacherous mountain range of the Pyrenees are basically the jungles of Vietnam, aren't they? Eventually, by 1291 the pope acquiesced, relinquished claims to Aragon as a fief, and acknowledged Peter's successor Alfonso III of Aragon as rightful ruler of his kingdom in the Treaty of Tarascon.

    * Again, this post is already absurdly long, so I'm going to ignore conflicts like the War of the Spanish Succession, assume you know enough, and jump right into the Napoleonic period, which I know Oda Nobunaga (the 16th-century Japanese ghost turned Venezuelan Jew who haunts these forums) is going to criticize and I actually would like to see his input and comparison to Vietnam.

    NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, HIS DOTING BROTHER JOSEPH BONAPARTE, AND THE DREADFUL PENINSULAR WAR
    So, should we rename Vietnam as Spain or España as Vietnam? Maybe a unified country called Vietespañam?


    * FINALLY! The part that I know all of you have been waiting for. By the love of Jesús H. Cristo de Nazaret, where do we begin with this cluster? If Vietnam is where the presidencies of Johnson and Nixon went to die, I guess the same could be said for Napoleon Bonaparte in Spain (or Russia, take your pick). More importantly, the Peninsular War (1808 - 1814) was a conflict that truly defined guerrilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics that would be mirrored by Spanish rebels against Franco more than a century later. Woe unto the French messengers or soldiers who became captives of the ragtag bandits/militias/guerrilla fighters of Spain, because oftentimes they didn't stay captives for very long and were just tortured to death instead. The French returned the favor with their own brutal methods of suppression (encapsulated by that famous painting The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya). The French got to practice plenty of that before facing guerrillas in French Indo-China!

    * To quickly summarize the beginning of the conflict, France and Spain were allies, they invaded Portugal together in 1807, but France turned on Spain, toppled their monarchy under Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1808 and replaced it with the rule of Joseph Bonaparte ("José I of Spain"), the older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte who had already been made King of Naples and Sicily (replaced by Joachim Murat). At least half of all Spaniards did not accept his monarchy and many would die fighting to restore the Spanish monarchy, while others would be temporarily forced or persuaded to acknowledge him as their king following fleeting victories pushing French control south into Andalusia. This threatened British Gibraltar, held since the 1704 Anglo-Dutch capture on behalf of the Habsburgs during the War of the Spanish Succession and the British were already keen on defending their centuries-long ally of Portugal if not stabbing Napoleon in his Achilles heel in southwestern Europe.

    * In 1810 André Masséna, the French champion against Naples and Austria, was able to score decisive victories in Spain such as the erstwhile capture of Almeida. However, in Portugal he ran into a brick wall, or literally one of forts and trenches, with the Lines of Torres Vedras constructed outside Lisbon by the Portuguese under their British supervisor Sir Richard Fletcher, 1st Baronet. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington eventually bested this Prince of Essling, who fled with starving troops after failing to penetrate this immense barrier and lost all of his previous gains. This earned him the ire of Napoleon, who would never again allow him to take up command of French forces.

    * Masséna's reputation would hardly be the last one to die a horrible death in the Peninsular War, as various Spanish generals were humiliated by the French and their government in exile, the Cortes of Cádiz, remained under siege while the French held Madrid. However, the French failure to take Portugal or to dislodge the British meant a stalemate would last for years on the Iberian peninsula, with the French never quite being able to secure all of Spain. To make matters worse for Napoleon during his disastrous retreat from Russia in 1812, Wellington's forces, including British and British-trained Portuguese regulars, pushed deep into Spain, retaking Salamanca and Madrid. French Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jourdan was decisively defeated by Wellington and his British, Portuguese, and Spanish troops at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813.

    * Remember those Pyrenees we talked about? Well goddamn it, much like the army of the French king Philip III during the Aragonese Crusade centuries before, in the early winter of 1814 Napoleon's Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult had to fight his way through a hail of bullets and harassment by the Brits/Portuguese/Spanish as he tried to withdraw back to France via this most treacherous of mountain ranges. Broken, tattered, lacking resources, suffering from exhaustion and starvation, the French troops finally made it back home. The French are gluttons for punishment, though, so they'd search for more of that in Vietnam more than a century later, followed by the Americans who were convinced that they would always be the punishers, not the punishees.

    FERDINAND VII OF SPAIN, THE CARLIST CIVIL WARS, FRANCO AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
    Just when you thought I was done, huh? The colonists in French Indo-China/Vietnam could relate to this one.


    * Remember Ferdinand VII of Spain above, the guy who got rekt and toppled by Napoleon? Well, he was restored to power as an absolute monarch, pleasing his right wing royalists by renouncing the liberal constitution of 1812 that angered the leftists, but was forced in 1820 by a revolt led by Rafael del Riego to accept the liberal constitution. This was again reversed in 1823 thanks to the intervention of the Congress of Vienna, allowing him to clamp down on the free press and liberal elements until his death in 1833, after which another civil war broke out, the First Carlist War (1833 - 1840). In that conflict, Infante Carlos, Count of Molina ("Carlos V"), the contender for continuing absolute monarchy, was pitted against Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, the regent over the young Isabella II of Spain, who the Carlists didn't like because she had a vagina.

    * Just to make things even screwier, in comes Portugal, France, and the UK to sway the conflict in favor of the liberal side led by the regent Maria, not just sending her supplies but actually dispatching volunteers and then regular troops to confront the Carlist forces in Spain. Apparently the Carlists were a bitter bunch who just didn't take no for an answer, as evidenced by the sad, meager Second Carlist War (1846–1849) limited to Catalonia that attempted to put Infante Carlos, Count of Montemolin ("Carlos VI") on the throne and the far more serious Third Carlist War (1872–1876).

    * While Amadeo I of Spain was still on the throne following the abdication of Isabella II in 1868, the Spanish elections of 1872 led to violence against Carlist candidates, leading Carlos, Duke of Madrid ("Carlos VII") to declare his rival kingship and start of a new civil war in favor of Legitimism and Catholicism as usual. Naturally, the Basque country that we mentioned earlier served as the breeding grounds for this uprising and rival state to form (of course). In the ensuing chaos, Amadeo I abdicated and in 1873 the First Spanish Republic was formed. However, a year later the Republic was overthrown as Alfonso XII was placed on the throne in a Bourbon monarchical restoration. By 1876 his rival "Carlos VII" was driven into exile in France and the Basque charters (fueros) were abolished, which the Basques obviously did not like.

    * Oh boy, talk about a bunch of horrific precedents for Francisco Franco Bahamonde. Franco would rule Spain as its caudillo dictator from 1936 to 1975, during and after the brutal Spanish Civil War that lasted into 1939. The latter conflict pitted the Republicans (and communists) supported by the Soviet Union against the Nationalists of Franco supported by Nazi Germany and Portugal's dictator Salazar, ending the Second Spanish Republic and leading to the personal rule of Franco. I guess by that point guerrilla warfare was just imprinted into the Spanish (and Portuguese) DNA, or perhaps it was always that way, going back to the Celtiberians and Lusitanians. Persecutions and extrajudicial killings were carried out by both sides, but of course the greatest purge came from Franco after he took control. The remaining Spanish leftists were driven into exile in France, conveniently steamrolled by Nazi Germany a year later! Some people just can't catch a break.



    Runner Up Post - Kiritias & Alwyn
    The Myth of Orwellian Network Propaganda
    Quote Originally Posted by Aexodus View Post
    Really? So a law against criticising the government in speech would not be censorship? What would it be then? I don’t agree with the German definition of censorship. Maybe it’s a language thing, where you guys have a different concept of it. I definitely don’t know of censorship being limited to just stopping the publication of or editing something.

    English wiki page:


    German wiki page:


    I think there’s definitely different conceptions of what censorship is in English and German. It seems that in the anglosphere, censorship in our definition of the word can certainly kick in after anything is said or published. Whereas the German idea of censorship seems to see it as limited to directly controlling information. I fear this conception of the subject leaves Germany vulnerable to arguments in favour of censorship, even if “Zensur” is illegal. Look at the skengdo rappers that were imprisoned for their music post factum, or the infamous Nazi pug debacle. The Guardian even categorises both those articles in its “censorship” section devoted to freedom of speech related stories.



    Do you mean that censorship can only be done by the state?
    Okay, after research the laws for censorship in Germany falls under two categories: according to (a) Strafgesetzbuch section 86a, the public denial of the Holocaust, the use of Nazi imagery (except for educational purposes) as well as communist images or symbols since the KPD is also banned alongside the Nazi party, or generally propagangizing the nazis or the communists. (B) Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors) under which certain publications can be censored (in the sense they cannot be exhibited publicly to be purchased) and other sub categories that violate personal rights of German citizens, such as publishing private (aka nude) photos. So far, so good I trust. Because I can't really see something so outlandish that would make Germany an 'authoritarian trash' state. Unless you have a problem with t he Germans not allowing Nazi or communist imagery and propaganda.

    England, lets talk England. The United Kingdom has its own way of dealing with freedom of speech as you can see here. Now, it can be argued that the laws in place are more archaic in their understanding, but still the rights are there albeit needing a different justification that what you demand them to have. In regards to the points you raise: The drill rappers you note were classified as a 'gang' by the Metropolitan police because of their general activities which they allegedly brag about in their songs. So, that may be a reason for them getting arrested. Of course alleged gang activity and making music are two completely different issues. The fact is the metropolitan police used the songs themselves to point out the group is bragging on illegal activities that 410 allegedly committed. In any case, there's more than a simple violation of freedom of speech going on in this case.

    On the issue of the Nazi pug, Meechan was fined because in his videos he's giving the command for the pug to raise its paw with some very, very offensive stuff. Whether Meechan himself thought he was being hilarious at the point is not here nor there; the fact is that by uploading it to YouTube he was trying to tap in a current trend that makes the nazis 'funny' (you must have seen the memes), in order to make himself more known. And it worked, because after he caused the controversy and refused to pay his fine for this self-marketing stunt, he received donations through crowdfunding and went into politics with UKIP - hardly a victim of suppression of free speech, I'd say.

    On to the Heathen

    1. You say he explained it, I say he excused it. There's no convincing you if you don't want to see the other side.
    2. Look above on what these violations are. Again, both these countries score higher than the United States in all freedom indexes. So, saying another country isn't free because you compare it to a, largely imaginary [here, here, here, here], view on the freedom of the United States is plainly wrong. Also, three cases in two countries with more than 150 million people between them isn't a symptom of social repression; surely, if they were as authoritarian as you claim, we'd hear way more cases. More close to hundreds, or even tens of hundreds - not countable by hand, though.
    3. Once again, the private posts you make on Facebook and Twitter do not generate profit for their shareholders. In fact, if the two platforms become infested with hate speech and other stuff, this will directly damage their profit because more moderate people may decide to stay away; you see an ideological crusade against free speech where there's simply a business plan for sustainable growth and user retention. And once again, there's the ToS; If you break it, you get demonetized, or get your posts pulled down.
    4. There's no country in the world that doesn't restrict aspects of their citizens' rights in some way, shape or form. It's all part of the social contract in living in a society. You saying that some countries restrict rights and other don't shows how much misinformed you are on what the legal statures in the US really contain [here]. My suggestion is go open the legal statures and see what the terms you throw here really mean. Or check the links I've given you above. But this argument is based uncomfortably on fantasy; freedom of speech just doesn't work the same you think it does.

    Free Speech in the UK
    I missed this at the time.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    Considering your wording there, I take it that you are not a Muslim? …Furthermore, I notice the problematic circumstance we have here due to the fact that you are a kafir/infidel - and your friends are supposed “Muslims” anyhow. An actual Muslim could not be friends with you - since Islam does not permit that - and basically “reward” those that ignore this with hellfire… See sura 3:28, 5.51, 5:80. Meaning that these guys are not actual Muslims if they are also your friends. In which case they are hardly representative for actual Muslims at any level, or in regards to what goes for Islam for that matter. If anything, it would rather disqualify them for such a task…
    You're defining Muslims as bogeymen and claiming that any Muslim who doesn't fit this image isn't a real Muslim.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    That said, many supposed “Muslims“ whenever discussing Islam in public discourse have a habit of being hopelessly biased, irrational, and dishonest. We can hardly expect Muslims (in general) to be rational, neutral and sober in regards to Islam - they will not be - usually it is very emotional for them, and anything they say must be treated accordingly. There are lots of clips of this at Youtube, check it out at your discretion.
    The Muslims I know are rational and sober in relation to Islam. They're not "neutral", nor would I expect anyone to be, if they're discussing their own beliefs. You seem to dismiss any Muslim expressing reasonable views as "biased, irrational and dishonest", so you don't have to accept the fact that many Muslims don't fit the bogeyman image.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    Furthermore, many “Muslims” don’t really seem to know much about Islam to begin with (just like your friends here), they are essentially ignorant of it and its actual practices and many doctrines. They simply rely on the opinions of local (or preferred) “scholars” but not the actual source-material that do make up Islam. This of course, worsen things as these “scholars” typically only convey things that they deem suitable and not much else. As a result many “Muslims” understanding of Islam tend to be skewed and insufficient (or worse). One should always keep these things in mind whenever public discourse about Islam is initiated.
    You claim to know more about Islam than Muslims. The Muslims I know don't interpret Islamic writings in the same way that Islamic extremists - and you - do. The "actual practices and doctrines" of Muslims are what actual Muslims do and believe.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    No one has ever doubted that Islam can be interpreted in more ways then one… I have never suggested otherwise, anywhere...
    You said that:

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    What I have argued is that Islam is incompatible with western culture and society at large - due to the fact that it have its own set of principles, ideas and priorities. And these stand in conflict with the established cornerstones of western civilization, its philosophy, culture and values - stuff like freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion etc.
    You didn't say that the views of 'Islamic extremists' are incompatible with freedom of expression, you said that 'Islam' is incompatible. I said that, for the Muslims I know, this isn't true.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    Nope, not true… I define Islam according to how I understand the written source-material that actually make up Islam (the quran and the hadiths). I define Islam, on the terms of Islam - the written source material as such - not what any propagandist, advocate or supposed authority-scholar tells me to think of it. As in, I let Islam, speak for itself. You and others really should do too…
    I define Islam according to what Muslims tell me they believe, not the interpretations of old texts which extremists - and you - prefer. When Muslims tell me what they believe, I listen and don't try to tell them that I know better than them about what their faith means. You could do this too.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    Furthermore, there are no "Islamic extremists" within the framework of Islam - not really. Much in the same way there have never been any “Nazi extremists” for instance. It is the movement as such that is extreme.
    The Muslims I know oppose extremism and many Muslim organisations condemn terrorism by Islamic extremists.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    It is Islamic doctrine and principles that is inherently and repeatedly extreme - and the devout (the “extremists”) are merely trying to follow these to their best ability. I seriously doubt that they would ever correspond to the skewed, tailored and dishonest concept of "Muslim" that have been sold to us in the west. The “moderate Muslim” is merely a heretic, and “moderate Islam” is just (a watered down) heresy - a construct that has little to do with actual Islam as conveyed in the sources that makes up Islam as we know it (the quran and sahih bukari, basically).
    It sounds like you agree with Islamic extremists that Islam should be defined according to their views, not the beliefs of moderate Muslims. You seem determined to insist that the bogeyman is the real Muslim.

    Quote Originally Posted by Axalon View Post
    One last thing… There is only one movement that are consistently and repeatedly attacking the freedoms we have established in Europe (and the west) today. And "freedom of speech" is at the very heart of this repeated assault - and the aggressor is consistently spelled "Islam". Again, and again and again. Not Christianity, not Hinduism, not Sikhism, not Judaism, not Buddhism, not Shintoism, not Daoism, not Atheism but Islam… And only Islam. In light of this reality, I find the notion that supposed "Muslims" - as professed and explicit servants of Islam - would somehow also support something like "freedom of speech" as totally ludicrous. After all, they are the ones who are obsessively and obstinately trying to regulate and dismantle it - again, and again and again... You can not (repeatedly) eat the cake, and still have it at the same time. You can't have it both ways - one excludes the other...
    I'm not trying to have it both ways. The Muslims I know support freedom of speech, they don't agree with you that extremists get to define the 'real Islam'. You claim to let Islam speak for itself but you dismiss the actions and beliefs of ordinary Muslims. Threats to freedom of speech don't come from "Islam and only Islam" (or more accurately from Islamic extremists), they come from various sources.

  17. #17

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #16

    Winning Post - sumskilz
    Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively
    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    On a serious note I hadn't realised the caste were so clearly gene-defined. I was taught the caste system was more fluid prior to the British regularisation to the point it was (exaggeratedly) declared almost the invention of John Company.
    Yeah, I think that theory falls into that category of ideas that were emotionally appealing to scholars like the view that Neolithic technology was spread primarily via cultural diffusion rather than extermination and replacement. Post WWII, a lot of scholarship was trending toward a view of prehistory that was more optimistic regarding human nature. It was seen as a corrective to simplistic thinking, and of course there was for obvious reasons a desire to undermine anything that could be used to promote Social Darwinist type ideology. So in some cases, new evidence has shown that the corrective was in fact an extreme over-corrective. The reality was in between in these cases, but factually turned out to be closer to the early Twentieth Century view than the late Twentieth Century view. Which is not to say that the arguments didn't seem plausible based on the knowledge at the time. All this appears to have broken the brains of sociocultural anthropologists who now live in an antipostivist world of make-believe, while physical anthropogists have become biocultural anthropologists fusing the work of old school sociocultural anthropologists with the evolutionary perspectives and hard sciences of their own field.

    The genetic evidence for the caste system is pretty clear. It looks like the caste system was well established by about 2,000 years ago and by 1,500 years ago it became so fixed that India's population structure was basically frozen in time at that point due to endogamy. Castes vary in their degree of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian ancestry. The higher the caste, the more ANI, the lower the caste, the more ASI. ANI is basically a 50/50 mix of Yamnaya and Neolithic Iranian Farmers. ASI is basically a 75/25 mix of South Asian Hunter Gatherers and Neolithic Iranian Farmers. Indo-European male haplogroups range from 25% in the northwest to 14% in the south, whereas they range from 50% in the highest castes to near 0% in the lowest castes. Within India, genetic ancestry tends to have a greater correlation with caste than with language group or geography (though all factors correlate to some degree).

    Here are a few important papers:

    A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

    Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India

    Reconstructing Indian Population History

    EDIT: Looking at these radiocarbon dates, probably best to consider 800 and 1800 to be ±130 years. The individuals within each time-frame aren't necessarily contemporaneous.



    Runner Up Post - conon394
    I present to you, Macedonia (ancient kingdom) on Wikipedia, my present project
    @Roma_Victrix

    Sorry a much delayed response to #68 (two years yes I type I character a day...)

    In defense for the delay I am trapped now in SE Idaho where the libraries are a travesty, and my wife moved to the USDA from University and Fed's do not take kindly to spousal free-riding of e-research access so it's been a chore to answer you with diligence. Anyway.

    Okay. I can't really argue for or against that since I don't know much about the subject. Do you at least have a source that provides a counterargument? That's something I could use in the article. Our own private musings about it, however, are not permissible over at Wiki, because that is tantamount to "original research", a cardinal sin in their guidebook. We're only really supposed to report what secondary sources say on the matter, although we have a good amount of license when it comes to constructing an article, using a variety of sources to piece together a narrative. I'm also able to be judicious about what goes in or out of an article, so if you have a source that convinces me otherwise, I'll gladly remove this statement as giving too much weight to one particular historian versus the consensus of others.
    Finding a consensus in numismatics is tricky, claiming one is more likely than not to provoke acrimony. In retrospect what I typed a while ago is I think was sort of too broad and not really focused on what caught my eye. It was this that I notated have only recently been able to put my finger on what I felt was off with the source.

    “The Macedonians were also the first to issue different coins for internal and external circulation.”

    I can see you are following Kremydi in the Brill Companion closely – fair enough. I however really don't think the assertion made by the author can stand. It looks to me to be an attempt to attribute novelty and innovation to Macedonia that does not exist.

    The full chapter is online (*) here is a extended quote:

    The Macedonians had practised a sophisticated manipulation of coinage
    since the fifth century. They struck according to the Attic system of a drachm
    subdivided into six obols, as can be proven by the legends ΔΙΟΒ and
    TPIH—abbreviations of the Greek words diobolon and trihemiobolion
    on fractions of Alexander I and Perdiccas II;lh at the same time however,
    they created denominations that could be exchangeable with local currencies.
    The octadrachms of Alexander I weighed ca. 29 g, the same as the
    octadrachms of Abdera,17 and corresponded to the triple staters of the
    local "oriental" standard which was based on a stater of 9.82 g divided into
    trite, hekte and hemiekta; this was the dominant denominational system
    of the mints around Pangaion.'8 The heavy octadrachms of Alexander, just
    like the large denominations of other northern Greek mints, were exported
    to the East and have been found in hoards from western Asia Minor, Jordan
    and Egypt."' The Macedonian tetradrachm, of just over 13 g, was on a
    local standard which was possibly created to facilitate the exchange
    between silver and electrum.-" The adaptation of Macedonian coinage to
    different standards used by Thracians, Athenians, and northern colonies,
    reflects, on a monetary level, the complex environment in which this ethnos
    was destined to survive and develop.


    Silver coins of a smaller denomination, the tetrobols, were used for payments
    of wages. In the fifth century the Macedonian state issued two
    types of tetrobols: light tetrobols with a horse on the reverse and heavier
    tetrobols with a cavalryman on the same side. These two series circulated
    in different areas: the light ones are found within Macedonia proper,
    whereas heavy ones have been found at Olynthos and on the upper banks
    of the Axios river, in Paeonia. Both areas were beyond the borders of the
    Macedonian state in the period under consideration. The practise is clear:
    lighter coins were accepted for transactions within the borders of the
    kingdom, whereas heavier coins were used for payments abroad."1 The
    application of a double standard—clearly made to provide maximum
    benefit from coining—was a Macedonian innovation, initiated at an early
    date. The distinction between coins intended for internal circulation from
    those intended for export can also be traced in the use of numismatic
    legends. Like most fifth-century coinages, especially in the north, Macedonian
    coins bore no legends. The exceptions were the octadrachms, traded
    in the east, and the rare octobols, issued in order to facilitate exchanges
    with Athens. They show that legends were added when they were necessary
    for the acceptance of the coins in distant regions. The distinction
    between coins for internal and external circulation originated in Macedonia
    and from there spread to the rest of the Greek world during the Hellenistic
    period. This sophisticated approach shows an elaborate monetary
    system at an early date. Recent finds further reveal the widespread use of
    minuscule silver fractions, such as obols, hemiobols or trihemiobols; their
    use points to an economy with a high level of monetization in everyday
    transactions.


    I first though thid was was an attempt to suggest the Ptolemy system of coinage . That is projecting a known system back in history. That would be incorrect, but I this the error is larger. The author is deliberately vague in using light and heavy. They are the conventional terms used in the literature but as used above suggest simply a difference in weight, not the reality that the light coins are also not good silver, but adulterated with copper in a significant but rather randomly in variable ways (Kraay pg 20-22 [1]). The nominal conclusion is real and rather uncontroversial - the King's of Macedonia used adulterated silver for internal use and generally nobody accepted such away from Macedonia (well perhaps money changers at a hefty cost). The problem is that the ideal does not is not innovate just rather shady and an expression Gresham's Law. But even if it was deliberate policy just implemented haphazardly, Macedonia sill would not be an innovator, but a but a follower and a second rate one at that. Particuallry given the high variability in the adulterating and lacking other evidence for such a system a very conscious and formally regulated like the Ptolemaic one (inscriptions, text of laws, comments in histories etc).

    To be pedantic one can point out that Electrum currency was notational by its very nature and with the limited accuracy of non destructive assays of the day. Thus in effect the general innovation would seem to be that of Lydia or Ionia. That is an overvalued coin (by metal weight) circulating only were the law made it valuable (or trade patterns allowed a used based on trust).

    More to the point the Billion currency of Lesbian Koinon predates the Macedonian 'Free Horse' adulterated coins by at minimum 60 years (up to over 100 on consideration not likely that would probably require the early date for electrum that is out of fashion right now).

    https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/...codigo=2449627

    Updated and translated here:

    https://www.academia.edu/6913591/A_contribution_to_the_study_of_the_Archaic_billon_coinage_of_Lesbos

    The coinage meets the criteria asserted by Kremydi it circulated only on Lesbos and possessions elsewhere of it member polis. It is not hoarded externally) or used in any export or trade system. Critically in my view is that the Lesbian coinage is a consistent token composition. Copper of close 60% and a lead of ~3-4% and Silver only around 35%. Nobody could mistake it for hard silver (there is more variation in the early series of issues). That is the issue with the 'Free Horse' Macedonian currency. In some cases it does contain some 25% copper or is just plated (Kraay pg 20) and is thus and obvious overvalued locally. At other times the adulteration is less, 5-15% which suggests to me not me innovation but stiffing hoi polloi as much as you could when you could or had to or wanted to.

    Realistically if any place in the 5th century BC deserves a not for innovation it Lesbos. Simultaneously Mytilene had a production union with Phokaia to produce electrum hektais, the Lesbian Koinon was producing billion currency for internal use and the two leading polis also had standard silver coinage runs as well.

    Lazzarini's work is over 5 years earlier than the Brill companion, and has been reviewed in English [2] in an easily available survey of numismatics . The existence of and general dating of the Lesbsian coinage is over century old. Historian miss things but at the end of the day I can't help but see bias in Kremydi. Consider this and the tone here:

    The introduction of bronze issues that replaced the more expensive
    and impractical silver fractions was another important monetary innovation
    of Archelaus which was apparently very successful.”

    Again innovation? No. Macedonia is only following the Western Greeks, and Sikyon (Warren pg 11-12 [3]) Yes Macedonia replaced its bad silver but again that innovation was 5 decades earlier in the West by Greeks. A fair judge might rather say Archelaus abandoned his adulterated silver and followed the Western Greeks (and realistically nearby Greek cities in the Chalcidice area) in the trend of using bronze. Also sure tiny silver fractions might be hard to use, but you can find hoards of Athenian silver fractions – why because they were practically pure silver and was worth hoarding. I don't think you will find hoards of 5th century Macedonian bronze very often.

    ---


    edit: I think also for Alexander's minting till his death and the activity of the Successors, Price's "The Coinage in Name of Alexander the Great and Philip Arrhidaeus Vol. 1" pg 7ff, is a better link than the n 335. It more complete and concise and it lacks the surrounding bits of Meadows adding odd unsupported notions about Alex's monitary policy. Yep Alex the only guy to think of the ideal of using coins as mass communication (but its a childish ideal anyway so I don't know if he mean's it as a compliment or not).



    (*) Link is here at not sure if it stable but is free and available with a facebook or Google registration.
    https://helios-eie.ekt.gr/EIE/bitstr...mydi_11_01.pdf

    [1]The Composition of Greek Silver Coins: analysis by neutron activation CM Kraay - 1962 - Ashmolean Museum (pg 20-22)

    [2]International Numismatic Commission A SURVEY OF NUMISMATIC RESEARCH
    2002-2007
    General Editors
    MICHEL AMANDRY, DONAL BATESON

    https://www.inc-cin.org/assets/pdf/survey-text.pdf

    [3]WARREN, J.A.W. "Sikyon: A Case-Study in the Adoption of Coinage by a Polis in the Fifth Century BC." The Numismatic Chronicle (1966-) 169 (2009): 1-13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42678602.

  18. #18

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #17

    Winning Post - Common Soldier, sumskilz, & Genava
    Zheng He Treasure Ships actual size?
    While you may find it almost universally said that Zheng He Treasure Ship's were extremely large, some 450 ft by 180 ft or so, there are a number of problems with these very large dimensions.


    1. First off, contemporary and near contemporary documents to Zheng He voyages do not give these excessively large dimension for the Treasure Ships, and the first evidence for these large dimensions come from a fantasy work of fiction, Luo Maodeng’s 羅懋登 novel about ZhengHe’s exploits, Sanbao taijian Xiyang ji 三寶太監西洋記, published in 1597, more than 150 years after Zheng He's voyages. The non fiction works that give these dimensions are even further removed from the time of Zheng He's voyages, a fact by itself which makes these dimensions suspect.


    As Dr. Sally Church says in her "Zheng He: An Investigation into the Plausibility of 450-FT Treasure Ships", page 6:


    If the novel was the source, whether directly or indirectly, we must examinewhat it says about Zheng He’s ships. It contains much that belongs to the realmof the fantastic, and many events are overblown and exaggerated. The charactersoften rely on magic or supernatural help, in both design and construction of theships. In chapter 15, when the emperor consults the elder Jin Bifeng 金碧峰 foradvice on carrying out the expeditions, the elder shows him various divine manuals that tell him the route they should follow, the countries they should visit, thepersonnel that will be needed to man the ships, and the types of ship that will berequired. http://contacthistory.com/wp-content...nta_serica.pdf

    Such a work does not inspire confidence as to the reliability of what it reports.


    2. Second, nautical engineer experts have challenged the engineering feasibility of these dimensions.


    At a conference entitled “Venture Toward the Seas” held in Twinsies in a bit to in September2001,1 Xin Yuan’ou, shipbuilding engineer and professor of the history of science at Shanghai Jiaotong University, presented a paper entitled “Guanyu Zheng Hebaochuan chidu de jishu fenxi” 關於鄭和寶船尺度的技術分析 (A Technical Analysis of the Size of Zheng He’s Ships).2 In this paper he argued that ZhengHe’s ships could not have been as large as recorded in the official Ming history (Ming shi 明史). According to that work, the ships constructed for Zheng He’s maritime expeditions were 44 zhang 丈 long and 18 zhang wide, equivalent to 447 ft by 183 ft (138.4 m by 56 m).3 A ship this size would have been roughly 1.4 times the size of an American football field,4 and approximately the same size as the USS Minnesota (456 ft long by 78 ft 10 in wide), a steel battleship launched in 1905 and later used in the First World War.5 In arguing against this size, Xin was motivated in part by an immediate, practical concern... "Zheng He: An Investigation into the Plausibility of 450-Ft Treasure Ships" pg 2



    3. The size of the ship yard basis where it is thought the Treasure Ships were built do not support these large dimensions given. While the docks were long enough, they were not wide enough.


    This size contrasts sharply with the size of the gigantic treasure ships described in some of the Chinese sources, which were supposedly 44 by 18 zhang(丈). These dimensions work out to approximately 137 m (450 ft) long and 56 m (183 ft) wide. If theyhad been this size, Basin 6 would certainly have been long enough. In fact, three ships of this size could have fit along the 421 m length. However, the basin would not have been wide enough to accommodate even one of these ships. The width of the basin was only 41 m (134.48 ft), while the beam of the ships was supposedly 56 m (183.68 ft).
    .
    .
    .
    Allowing for an overhang of the bow and stern, as well as some space between the ships, the basin might then have been divided into 3 or 4 separate sections each 50–68 m (165–225 ft) long. This way of looking at the site would tally with the view that the largest ships were probably less than 75 m (250 ft) long.They may of course have been even smaller http://www.shipwreckasia.org/wp-cont...s/Chapter3.pdf

    4. While we do not have contemporary documents giving the length and width of Zheng He's Treasure Ships, we do have other dimensions of the Treasure Ships from contemporary sources indicating much smaller ships.


    There are only 2 brief and incomplete descriptions of treasure ships written before 1490; the Jin Hai stele inscription erected prior to 1420 commenting on the employment of 2000-liao and 1500-liao vessels, and Kong Jen’s ‘Records of Foreign Countries in the Western Ocean’ date to 1435.......the meaning of the word liao is the subject of an ongoing debate between Barker (2005; 1989), Sleeswyk (1996), Chalmers (2005) and most recently Church (2005b). Su (2005: 212) has estimated that a 2000-liao vessel would have the carrying capacity of approximately 140 tons and a displacement of about 300 tons. Although these dimensions represent a large vessel, it certainly would not have been extraordinary.
    https://www.academia.edu/4632863/Chi...e_Ming_Dynasty

    There was also a Ming Dynasty tomb of Hong Bao, who was an official in Zheng He's fleet, that references ship sizes of 5,000 liao. Based on Su's estimate for the 2,000 liao ship, this would work out to 750 tons displacement. While this is large, it is not exceptionally large for the time.


    Dr. Sally Church suggest the liao might be 500 lbs, which would give a size of 1,250 tons. While that would indeed among the very largest ships of that time, it was would not have been [/FONT]unprecedented in size. The Grace Dieu built by Henry V around the same time was about 1400 tons, and unlike the Treasure Ships, we actually have found its remains. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/...s/0/steps/8007. The Roman grain ship the Isis is given to be around 1200 tons, and later Spanish Manila Galleons could be 2000 lbs. The HMS Victory was around 2,142 tons burthen or 3500 tons displacement.


    So, given all the evidence, I think we can discount the alleged size of Zheng He ships. The actual Treasure Ship size would have been much smaller than the 30,000 tons given in the following link https://www.thoughtco.com/zheng-hes-...e-ships-195235.


    Also, the oft made comparison between Zheng He ships and that of Columbus ships are off based. Columbus largest ship, the Santa Maria, was not a particular large European ship for the time, Columbus wanted small ships since he was merely exploring the feasibility of a proposed route for future exploration, and a small ship can explore areas where large ships cannot go. The Venetian Senate felt compelled to limit the size of their galleys in 1440 to 200 tons.
    the Senate complained that the galleys werebeing built with capacities as high as 500 or 600 milliaria (260 to 300 tons), resulting ina large, unwieldy vessel.230 A 1440 law capped the merchant galleys at 400 to 440milliaria (200 to 220 tons) below deck
    http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bit...pdf?sequence=2

    Note, the advantage of the Venetian galley over cogs and Mediterranean round ships were in their greater manueverability, so making them too large defeated their very advantage. European cogs and round ships did not have such a limitation, and as the Grace Dieu showed, could be made much larger.


    These ships carried primarilyluxury goods and traveled long distances. Great galleys could carry between 140-200tons below deck, plus have room for over 200 men, of whom at least 20 were archersemployed to protect the vessel.79 There were around 170 oarsmen who were alsoexpected to defend the vessel if attacked. In comparison to the Mediterranean roundships and the cogs from northern Europe, merchant galleys were more maneuverable andsafer................Between the more crewmembers to pay, the license of a regulated voyage, and time spent waiting in ports aftertrade was completed, and longer voyages overall, merchant galleys were more expensiveto operate than were round ships. http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bit...pdf?sequence=2

    5. A 11 m rudder post is often cited as evidence for the very large Zheng He ships. However, Chinese ships typically had very large rudders for the ship size compared to European ships. In a contemporary description of the 19th century Chinese Keying, of about 800 tons, it describes the rudder as having 24 feet (7 m) in the water when fully lowered, and the rudder would have to be extended further than this just to reach the deck that it was steered on. 11 m certainly would not represent a ship vastly greater than the Keying as Zheng He's Treasure Ships would have to be. If fact, adding in the extra length required to reach the deck the rudder was steered at, the Keying rudder might have been 11 m overall. The 800 tons of the Keying would agree with some estimates for the size of the 5,000 liao ship listed on Hon Bao's tomb.


    Close by these is the most astonishing part of the vessel, theenormous RUDDER, not hung with pintles and gudgeons,the vessel having no stern post, but suspended to two windlasses by three large ropes made of cane and hemp: oneround a Windlass on the next deck, and two round a windlass on the upper deck of all, so that it can be raised orlowered according to the depth of the water in which thevessel sails. When the rudder is lowered to its full extentfor going to sea, it draws about twenty-four feet, beingtwelve feet more than the draught of the vessel ..http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b35929352.pdf

    So, in summary, while Zheng He's ships were large for the time, they do not seem to be exceptionally so.

    Social inequality already in Bronze Age Households in Central Europe (Bavaria, Lechfeld)
    When I first starting working with Tel Aviv University, I was told that they were particularity interested in working with more people who had a background in anthropology. Some comments in the quoted article suggest to me Universität München may want to do the same. Particularly this:


    Surprisingly, however, these only included the male lineages. The female descendants apparently left the farms where they reached adulthood. The mothers of the sons, on the other hand, were all women who had moved in from afar.
    There is nothing surprising about it. This is the social structure of more than 70% of cultures in the modern ethnographic record. It was even more prevalent in prehistory, and appears to have been the social structure of all pre-human hominins and our closest relatives, such as Neanderthals. It is likewise the social structure of chimpanzees. Bonobos deviate from this, but then they do tend to be be deviants in general.


    Social inequality exists in all human societies, including hunter-gatherers. It is not an invention of Bronze Age or even the Neolithic. However, the degree of disparity and the degree to which it may be observable in the archaeological record correlates with certain social and technological developments. In a hunter-gatherer society, there is simply a limit to how much wealth and prestige one can acquire. People lived in small semi-nomadic groups (roaming within a territory), so one couldn't own more than could be carried, and there simply wasn't much to be owned that others couldn't just make for themselves. With herding and agriculture it became possible to acquire significantly more relative wealth, but this wasn't nearly so pronounced until the advent of occupational specialization enabled by food surpluses, because then you had a class of artisans engaged the production of material goods.


    Though to be fair, my critique may only be applicable to whoever wrote the press release. I assume Philipp Stockhammer knows what's up, and while not at all surprising to me, the research is quite interesting.

    Is it Game Over on the climate front?
    Quote Originally Posted by The spartan View Post
    @Efail


    On topic question: what is your view on the IPCC reports and findings?

    By the way, it is an interesting topic. I wonder what experience people here had with the IPCC reports. A lot of people have an opinion on those reports without any clues about how the IPCC works and without any reading of those reports.


    Comprehensive assessment reports are always divided in 4 parts with three working groups. The first group works on the scientific synthesis. The second on the consequences of climate change. The third on the possible solutions and the different scenarios. Contrary to the common believes, the working groups are not centralized authorities controlling the synthesis to serve a political agenda. The experts authors doing the synthesis are actually still working in their respective institutions and are not paid by the IPCC for this. There is an agreement with the universities and other scientific institutions, they are accepting that some of their experts are taking time to review and write the synthesis on their work time.


    A list of the authors and review editors can be found here for the AR5 report: https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/ar5_...rs_updated.pdf
    Note: It does not include the contributing authors and the expert reviewers.


    In the end, the Assessment Reports always look like this:


    AR4 Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis
    AR4 Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
    AR4 Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change
    AR4 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report




    AR5 Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis
    AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
    AR5 Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change
    AR5 Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report




    Each reports are very long and not suited to be read entirely in an one-shot process. However, they are splitted in different chapters, far more accessible. For example, the AR4 report The Physical Science Basis is splitted between these chapters:


    1. Historical Overview of Climate Change Science
    2. Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and Radiative Forcing
    3. Observations: Atmospheric Surface and Climate Change
    4. Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground
    5. Observations: Ocean Climate Change and Sea Level
    6. Palaeoclimate
    7. Coupling Between Changes in the Climate System and Biogeochemistry
    8. Climate Models and their Evaluation
    9. Understanding and Attributing Climate Change
    10. Global Climate Projections
    11. Regional Climate Projections


    To those assessment reports, there are special reports on very specific topics:
    2019. The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate
    2019. Climate Change and Land
    2018. Global Warming of 1.5°C
    2012. Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation
    2011. Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation
    2005. Safeguarding the Ozone Layer and the Global Climate System
    2005. Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage

  19. #19

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #18

    Winning Post - HackneyedScribe
    Was China really that far ahead of everyone else in the past?
    No, I don't. The slaves had to eat, and since they had no money, it had to be provided for them. I don't need to proved that the Scythian police needed air, or water to drink either. If you know of any slaves who were forced to buy their own food and clothing. I would you to provide that information..[/QUOTE]


    If slaves have no money then their "wage" is equivalent to just their upkeep. If you think slave masters provide for their slaves more than what slaves earn for their masters, I would like you to provide that information.


    Was the money paid directly to the slave or to the person who owned the slave? Doesn't all the property of a slave belong to the owner? Ifnthd money was paid to the owner, ornrhr slave turned over all money to the owner, then the owner would have to provide the food and clothing for the slave. If thr Mone was given directly to the slave, then yes, perhaps the cost of food and clothing was taken from the slaves wages

    If money was given to the slave owner: Slave workers earn nothing but their upkeep
    If slave masters take money from their slaves: Slave upkeep comes from the money they originally earned anyways


    Either way it doesn't make slaves earn more money than what's shown on paper.
    If you want to apply thr logic, then it applies to all ships, not just Roman ships. Dismmis the claims fornrhe Roman ships, we equally can dismiss claims for the Song and Ming ships as well.

    That's your logic, don't you already do that? As I said for the third time, I'm not using my logic. In fact I'm using yours and applying it to Roman shipping rather than Chinese ones.


    We do have Romans ships that were 400 tons, and I.said, we don't need to provide an example fornevery shipping run they sailed. The logic says there were no large ships from the early Ming, and the largest Song ship we have evidence for is a mere 300 tons, so we can't ships any larger actually existed in Song and Ming China.

    It sounds like you want to discard the practice of solely using archaeological evidence to prove the existence of large ships. In which case Simaqian recorded that Tower ships were over 10 zhang high.


    是时越欲与汉用船战逐,乃大修昆明池,列观环之。治楼船,高十余丈,旗帜加其上,甚壮
    Yue and Han were using ships for combat, Kunming Lake was greatly repaired.... Tower ships were built, over 10 zhang high, when a banner is added on top, then they are very magnificent.
    As a matter of fact, some analysis of the contemporary evidence does indicate that Zheng He treasure ships were only 300 tons, consistent with the Chinese shipwreck remains we have found (Nanhai No. 1 shipwreck). Contemporary records mention 2000 Liao ships. Which works out 300 tons depending on the value you assign to the Liao. The Madrague de Giens supports the existence of 300 tons ships mentioned in the Roman written records. And the Lake Nemi and Caligula Giant ships do support the existence od 1400 tons ships like the Isis mentioned in the written refords. The hulls of the Lake Nemi ships were lined with lead, which served no purpose in fresh water, indicating the 60 meter hulls were adapted from sea going vessels of that size.
    Contemporary evidence shows that Zheng He's Treasure ships were 5000 liao in size (1250 tons), not 300 tons, as you should well know considering you participated here: https://historum.com/threads/can-any...1#post-3104735


    Sally K Church:
    A ship of about 200-250 ft would make much more sense than the 450 ft one. Such a ship would be large enough to transport the required number of people and amount of supplies and treasures. Although this was the maximum size of wooden ships in the West, this is not the reason why we should accept it as an optimum size. Gong Zhen’s evidence is perhaps the soundest – his statement that there were 200-300 men on the ships. This number of men could not have man- aged a ship of 20,000 tons, but would have been quite adept at handling ships of a smaller size, such as the Razee Corvette, a Ship-of-the-Line manned by 205- 220 men, or the Fifth Rate (46-gun) ship with a complement of 280-300 men.The Razee Corvette was 145 ft long, and 38.5 ft in the beam with a burden of 944 tons and a displacement of 1,280 tons. The Fifth Rate was over 150 ft long and 40 ft in the beam with a capacity of 1,063 tons burden and a displacement of 2,154 tons.132 Ships that are too large also have certain disadvantages, foremost among which is a loss of maneuverability. This lesson was learned by the Spanish Armada


    She didn't have the evidence from Hong Bao's tomb which was excavated after her article. The tomb gives the first primary source evidence which says that Zheng He had 5000 liao ships, which is equivalent to 1250 tons burthen and 2000 tons displacement. This coroborrates with Sally K.'s estimation using Gong Zheng's quote that the ships were crewed by 200-300 men, from which she concludes that a ship of 300 crewmen would be the size of a fifth rate ship (1063 tons burthen, 2154 tons displacement, 150 feet in length). Still very large for the time period.



    Runner Up Post - saxdude
    Bolivia president resigns. Danger of civil war ahead
    The straight facts of the matter is that Evo's goverment was the superior goverment, seeing increases in economic prosperity, self determination, racial equality and education. What is also a fact is that instead of grooming a successor, Evo took on a paternalistic role in Bolivia when he could have easily renounced the presidency while keeping his party in office, choosing instead to commit unneccesary fraud and shooting himself as well as the rest of Bolivia, in the foot. That or you know... do something to actually support his continued power in the region.
    What is also a *fact* is that whatever legitimacy the anti-fraud movement had is being lost, as religious right wing fundamentalists and facists begin to take control and polarize the people with evangelist and racial retoric, such as those pronounced by the now Constitutional President Jeanine Añez.

    In the coming weeks we will see how things develop, but it seems quite likely things are moving towards a worse place, as a legitimate protest turns into a coup.
    An extra factoid is that HH has the worst takes, as per us'.

    I trust those people in this thread opposing imperialism and foreign intervention and upholding the rights of the indigenous population will act the same way regarding Europe...
    Pray tell what european country has an even remotely similar situation going on within it's borders?

  20. #20

    Default Re: PotF Anthology

    PotF #19

    Winning Post - Dick Cheney
    Was Hannibal perfect at Zama?

    “Had you not defeated me, I would have placed myself greater than Alexander.”
    -Hannibal Barca to Scipio Africanus





    Hannibal Barca is unquestionably one of the great battlefield tacticians of all-time. Though he probably should have found a way to besiege Rome after 16 years in Italy, his wins at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae against a mighty and numerically superior opponent shows evidence of military genius. His victory at Cannae, in particular, is still described today as a tactical masterpiece, and “the perfect battle of annihilation,” both for its foresight and incredible destructiveness. There can be no doubt that the total annihilation of 8 Roman legions -after a perfectly planned encirclement- places Hannibal high among the great captains in military history.




    Which only begs the question then, what happened at Zama?




    Not counting the strategic picture, most historians will say that Hannibal lost this battle because Massanissa, and at least 6,000 Numidian cavalry, had switched sides. In fact, Polybius tells us that the battle was evenly matched until Massanissa’s cavalry returned in the “nick of time” to overtake Hannibal’s third line. And, in his judgement of Hannibal’s generalship, Polybius reckons that Hannibal -even without cavalry- did everything he could, and that all great generals are right to mistrust fortune.




    However, given the power of hindsight, and some imagination, we are able to question Hannibal’s generalship at Zama and offer alternatives.




    Battle of Zama, 202 B.C.

















    Alternative & Mistake: Use of Terrain.




    Though its clear by the time of the Battle of Zama -especially after the Battle of the Great Plains- that Carthage had lost control of most Northern Africa, the failure to use local terrain and town centers to greater advantage is inexcusable. At Zama, Hannibal needed to pick his ground much better then he did. No question he was pushed into an early engagement with Scipio, who was ransacking Carthaginian cities, but the failure to use any terrain at all, was uncharacteristically unlike Hannibal, and can be proven to have potentially cost him.




    Most sources agree that Hannibal came to Scipio, and despite knowing the exact makeup of Scipio’s army and location -if Polybius’s spy stories are to be believed- there’s no evidence that Hannibal ever considered using terrain or offering any kind of battle that could have negated cavalry, maneuver, or decisive battle. In fact, Polybius writes that Scipio’s forces were conveniently encamped near a water source while Hannibal’s were not. There’s no chance then that Hannibal’s position would be sustainable, which makes it hard believe that his battle plan had seriously considered fighting defensively or using cliffs and hillsides to hide or cover his flanks.




    Despite not knowing exactly where Zama occurred, Hannibal was encamped on a hillside, so there is still some possibility that something else was available other than open plains. Carthage was also only 5 days march from Zama, the option to redeploy and refit, or make a fortified stand somewhere else, looks to be available. However, whether these assumptions are accurate or not is irrelevant, was is relevant -and perfectly accurate- is that order of battle is primary determined in part by terrain. If you want Zama to turn out differently, you must fix the terrain.




    Alternative: Conclave Trap




    If Hannibal’s battle plan was to break up the Roman lines enough for his elite third line to finish the job, then Hannibal third line should have been deployed in an open crescent. A third line deployed in this way -and hidden from view- would have given Hannibal a chance to envelope the Roman army as it surged forward to defeat his weaker troops. While this is a ploy that mirrors Cannae, the difference this time is to take advantage of superior numbers. If Scipio falsely bases the length of his own lines from what’s in front of him -Carthaginian Mercenaries and Citizen Levies- then there’s a chance that Hannibal could expand his third line outwards to envelope the advancing legionaries. In fact, during the actual battle, Scipio needed to form a single line to match the length of Hannibal’s third line, which suggests its numbers were significant and possibly greater than Scipio's own lines. Whether Hannibal had enough men -and confidence- to try envelopment and a sophisticated trap like this is hard to tell. Some historians believe it was Hannibal this time who was afraid of envelopment, given Scipio’s record at Ilipa, the lack of Carthaginian cavalry, the open terrain, and the deployment of three separate lines (a novelty for Hannibal). The very fact that Hannibal kept his third line in reserve for so long offers more questions then answers. However, if Hannibal truly outnumbered Scipio (50,000 vs. 35,000 high estimate), then envelopment with an enlarged battle line seems like a possible alternative.




    Conclave Trap:








    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 














    Mistake: Pawn-Sacrifice

    No one doubts that elephants were always going to be a pawn sacrifice. Their poor reliability meant they were good for nothing other than to charge. Though we can wonder if they would have been better placed on the wings of Hannibal’s line, its rather doubtful we can find a better tactical alternative. In fact, given the horror and damage they did to Hannibal’s own men, its thinkable that they shouldn’t have been used at all.




    That said, Hannibal did essentially use his first two lines as cannon fodder. The plan -which is coherent- was to have the mercenary line, elephants, and his second line of Carthaginian levies, to charge the Roman lines and break up their organization enough to where his elite third line could come in and clean house. While the plan did play into Roman strengths -especially towards frontal assaults-, it was simple to execute, and allowed Hannibal’s third line to act as a bulwark against retreat. Hannibal’s first two lines were of questionable quality, and placing his veterans in the rear made sure they would fight, but to say that half the army (and first two lines) should have been forlorn, and not supported at any point in the battle, is hard to excuse.




    Polybius tells us that Hannibal’s veterans stood still as his first two lines engaged with Scipio’s. And despite modest gains, they did not deploy. And when the situation became dire, and his first two lines ended up wavering and retreating into each other, they again did not deploy. Finally, and most crucially, when Scipio was forced to form a single line, which was tough to do because of so many dead bodies, Hannibal’s third line was too far out to prevent this from happening or seize any initiative. Allowing so many fortunate breaks in the battle then, appears to be a questionable mistake, and could have been prevented with adequate support for all lines in Hannibal’s formation.




    Alternative: Neutralize Roman Cavalry




    I’m not buying yet that Scipio’s army was of significantly greater quality than Hannibal’s. The core of Scipio’s army at Zama was just two legions, made up mostly disgraced remnants from Cannae. In addition, Roman cavalry was the usual crap, and his new Numidian allies were still of unproven loyalty. Hannibal, meanwhile, probably had 12,000 veterans from Italy along with some Macedonians and his own Numidian cavalry. In fact, the difference in cavalry at Zama was probably only 6,000 (Scipio) to 4,000 (Hannibal). And despite this “huge difference maker” (which Alexander would laugh at), Hannibal still fought Scipio to a standstill until he was finally surrounded.




    If Hannibal needed to neutralize Roman cavalry to win at Zama, then a change of tactics is to make this a priority. 4,000 vs 6,000 horses does not seem insurmountable, especially with infantry support. Yet, alls were told is that the Carthaginian Cavalry took flight after a brief skirmish, or that Hannibal had purposely planned to lure the Roman cavalry away. We can speculate that Hannibal truly feared becoming encircled -which was one of many possible reasons for a third line- but another option is assigning actual infantry and skirmishers to deal with the cavalry arm. Whatever the correct counter here may be, the simplest way to win the battle of Zama is to neutralize the Roman cavalry.


    Runner Up Post - Alwyn
    Is there anything left of The Left?
    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    National Socialism was not a form of conservatism. The fact that both conservatism and National Socialism can be placed on the political right does not mean that they belong to the same school of thought. This is one of the many reasons why the l/r dichotomy (or spectrum as DaVinci would have it) is a fundamentally unreliable way of thinking about history and politics.
    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    National Socialism was not a form of conservatism. The fact that both conservatism and National Socialism can be placed on the political right does not mean that they belong to the same school of thought. This is one of the many reasons why the l/r dichotomy (or spectrum as DaVinci would have it) is a fundamentally unreliable way of thinking about history and politics.



    We agree that Nazism isn't mainstream conservatism. It’s fascism - extreme right, not conservative.




    Previously, you presented a diagram showing how you see the political spectrum, from revolutionism to monarchism:

















    The Cambridge English Dictionary defines monarchism as:




    a person who supports the system of having a king or queen



    Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Belgium are monarchies. European monarchies remain monarchies under left-wing and right-wing governments. If your diagram was accurate, they'd all be extreme right, which would be absurd.




    The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines revolutionism as:
    revolutionary acts or practices: revolutionary doctrines or principles : advocacy of such doctrines or principles



    However, revolutions can be from the right or the left, or not particularly aligned to either. A military coup by right-wing officers is a kind of revolution, it isn't an act of the extreme left. The American Revolution was fought for independence from Britain, it wasn't based on extreme-left politics.




    As I see it, the political spectrum runs from Communism to fascism (I use the German terms Social Democrats and Christian Democrats for the centrist views, since we’re talking about Germany):

















    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    Communism is an expression of socialism. This is not a disputable point. The references you made to "mainstream socialism" are not relevant because no one is arguing that National Socialism followed, or is representative of, the parliamentary/democratic branch of socialism. On the contrary, the claim has been that it belongs to the revolutionary branch of the ideology.



    You argued that the Nazis were socialist, I argued that they weren't. You then argued that they followed revolutionary Marxism, the extreme left. I'm arguing that Nazism is fascism, the extreme right.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    The NSDAP's adoption of the Leninist approach to union centralization isn't being presented as evidence that the Nazi Party was communist: it is being used to show that the absence of independent unions does not prove an absence of socialsm.



    Both Communists (extreme left) and fascists (extreme right) didn't allow independent trade unions. I showed that there’s a strong historical association between independent trade unions and socialism. I also showed that the Nazis operated a capitalist, not a Communist system.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    Your intent was to show that since National Socialism did not belong to your interpretation of "ordinary" socialism, it could not be considered as socialist at all. That line of reasoning has been rebuked.



    I showed that the Nazis, through the banning of free trade unions and persecution of trade union members, behaved in a way which conflicts with the idea that they were mainstream socialists. You claimed that they expressed "revolutionary Marxism", I showed that they ran a "basically capitalist" economy - not a Communist one. They weren't mainstream socialists or Communists - and we agree that they weren't mainstream conservatives. That leaves the possibility of the extreme right. They were committed to ethnic nationalism, which is consistent with the view that they were extreme right.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    Your mistake is in assuming that the sale of industrial assets, usually to party loyalists or apologists, put those assets outside of the state's control and within the bounds of the free market. VSt. (United Steel), for instance, donated to the Nazi Party prior to the 1933 takeover and was a key supplier of materials and ordinance during the war. The idea that Hitler's "privatization" schemes followed a Reaganite philosophy of limited government free market expansionism is simply false.



    It’s normal for a private company to sell goods to the government or to donate to a political party. That doesn't change the fact that the Nazi government privatised enterprises which had been state-run, in the post-Great Depression period when such enterprises were routinely state-run. Of course, the Nazis didn't follow a Reaganite philosophy, Ronald Reagan was a student and then a radio announcer in this period, his brand of conservatism appeared decades later. If not Reagan's philosophy, whose thinking might have influenced the Nazis? In the 1920s, before the Nazis engaged in their privatisation programme, another European government privatised a series of state-run enterprises - the National Fascist Party government in Italy.




    Privatization was an important policy in Italy in 1922-1925. The Fascist government was alone in transferring State ownership and services to private firms in the 1920s; no other country in the world would engage in such a policy until Nazi Germany did so between 1934 and 1937. - Germa Bel, From Public to Private: Privatization in 1920s Italy



    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    For Nazism to have resembled extreme conservatism, it would have had to have looked like a form of Bismarckian monarchism - which it most certainly did not.



    You are implying that I said that the Nazis represented "extreme conservatism". I said that they're extreme right, not extreme conservative.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    To reiterate: the fact that both Nazism and extreme-conservatism belong to the far-right does not mean that both belong to the same school of thought.



    Thank you, we agree that Nazism belongs to the far right. We also agree that Nazism isn't the same thing as being on the conservative end of mainstream conservatism. Being a Nazis is diffeerent from being a conservative Republican in the United States, for example, just as being a Communist is different from being on the left of the Democrats. With its ethnic nationalism, Nazism is beyond what’s normal for conservatives.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    No one has argued that mobilisation is tantamount to communism. As I stated in my previous reply, Churchill's temporary appropriation of the Empire's market economy for war purposes is not the same as the NSDAP's general appropriation of German society to promote the Nazi revolution. Unlike the English and Americans, the NSDAP were committed collectivists who prioritized group-based solutions and interests over those of the individual.



    It doesn’t need to be “the same”. I’ve shown that the Nazis ran their economy in a "basically capitalist" way, similar to that of the Western allies.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    This is not a question of left and right: it is a question of whether the NSDAP were socialists.



    That's a contradiction: socialism corresponds to left wing politics.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    Framing the Second World War as just another aristocratic/imperialist land grab is a mistake. The land and resources which the NSDAP aimed to acquire were not meant to be transferred from one elite to another. The party's economic intentions can be summarized in this way: (1) to reunite the German nation into a single polity; (2) to redistribute eastern lands from Slavic natives to German settlers; (3) to invest the great wealth and assets of Europe into the greater German community with a mind to elevating the German people; (4) to eradicate the so-called "degeneracy" of both international consumerism and international communism; (5) to break free of the external constraints of the international community (autarky) by ensuring the Reich's access to vital strategic resources and arable land.



    I didn't say that the Second World War was "just another aristocratic/imperialist land grab", I said that it wasn't a "revolutionary Marxist" project. It had some similarities to imperialist land grabs (I'm not saying that they’re the same). The leaders of European colonising powers wanted to unite their peoples behind them, redistribute land from natives to European settlers and invest the “wealth and assets” of the Americas and Africa, India and Australia into their communities with a view to elevating the wealth of their peoples. We agree that the Nazis wanted to end international communism. I'm not sure what you mean by “international consumerism”; if you mean that they wanted Germany to be self-sufficient, we agree on that.








    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    1. The idea of "class" is not, and has never been, limited to financial/employment status: racialism and in-group cooperation has been heart of social categorization (aka class) dating back to the Israelites' enslavement in Egypt. The NSDAP applied Aryan race theory within a revolutionary Marxist framework to create German National Socialism.







    We agree that class isn't limited to financial or employment status and that racism is linked to poverty. Race (or racialism) isn’t “aka” class, this is hand-waving. Class isn’t race, socialist redistribution of wealth isn’t an Aryan state. Carrying a sign saying “Bread and Roses” or doing trade union work isn’t chanting “Blood and Soil” or carrying out the industrialised murder of minorities. The Nazis operated a “basically capitalist” society, not a “revolutionary Marxist” one.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    2. Socialism cannot be reduced down to milquetoast statements about "wanting decent treatment for workers"; influential social reformers existed in conservative, liberal and independent organizations (and governments) long before labor movements acquired parliamentary representation. Characterizing great 19th century social reformers like Shaftesbury, Wilberforce, Peel, Lincoln, Alexander II Romanov and Bismarck (all of whom belonged to conservative and/or Christian movements) as "socialists" would be inappropriate.



    It's true that there were individual reformers, some motivated by Christianity, before socialist political parties became contenders for government. I haven't characterised the social reformers you listed as socialists, I argued that socialism emerged from opposition to the exploitation of workers and with strong links to the trade union movement.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    An economic model planned around, and reliant upon, the idea of an Alexandrian scale conquest which demanded the mobilization of the entire society and insisted on the annihilation/enslavement of entire ethnic groups is not what I would describe as "capitalist".



    If you're arguing that the Nazis weren't mainstream conservatives, we agree. Most capitalist societies don’t try to kill or enslave entire ethnic groups, there’s nothing in capitalism which requires this. I’m not suggesting that their capitalism was the cause of their mass murder – that was their authoritarian ethnic nationalism. The Nazis ran a capitalist economy and tried to annihilate/ enslave entire ethnic groups, so they’re not mutually exclusive.




    Quote Originally Posted by ep1c_fail View Post
    The ideas of collectivism, redistribution and class warfare (that is racial class) were fundamental aspects of National Socialist theory. We know this because, as I have explained, they sought and fought an all encompassing, revolutionary war on the basis of these ideas.



    Their ‘collectivism’ was the collectivism of a modern country which wanted to win a world war. The use of collectivism doesn't show that a group are revolutionary Marxists:




    Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in such movements as socialism, communism, and fascism - Encyclopedia Britannica,



    Their ‘redistribution’ was similar to that of other imperialist European countries - they redistributed land and wealth from other countries to their own. This wasn’t similar to the redistribution through taxation and public spending which people on the left advocate.




    Their ethnic nationalism was based on race, Communism is based on class.




    You have presented a political spectrum which doesn't work well, as it leads to absurd results, such as classifying constitutional monarchies as extreme right. You have presented the Nazis as socialists when they persecuted socialists, and as "revolutionary Marxists" when they ran a "basically capitalist" economy, following in the example of the fascist government in Italy by privatising state-run enterprises.




    Despite our disagreements, it's encouraging to see that we agree on some points, in particular that "Nazism [belongs] to the far-right".

    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

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